Keeping Pace: The Gartner Catalyst Conference

“Exponential rates of change are shaking the foundations of IT,” said Paul Debeasi, Research Vice President for Gartner. Gartner predicts there will be five times the amount of mobile device growth by 2017 and the number of sensors will reach 25 billion by 2020. As the acceleration of IT continues to set the pace, security must do its best to keep up.

That’s what brought hundreds of IT professionals to the Gartner Catalyst Conference in San Diego, CA. Gartner Catalyst provides technical professionals with practical solutions and actionable advice through a variety of sessions focused on cloud, mobile, IoT, security and more. Here are the key takeaways and insights from the conference.

Key trends and insights

Resilience is the goal for digital business

Ramon Krikken, Research Vice President for Gartner, delivered a revealing presentation on Establishing Security and Identity as a Digital Business Foundation. Krikken’s session delivered the key considerations when attempting to build growth and flexibility in a risk-appropriate way in a digital business environment.

• The opportunity to connect people with people, people with machines, machines with machines, etc. is increasing. Safety and privacy must be considered more than ever before in the digital business arena.
• Resilience is the goal for digital business. We must be able to create systems that are not only resilient against attacks but ensure that when something does happen, there are ways of detecting and responding to it.
• The three keys to building resistance are: understanding cyberattacks, adopting adaptive protection, and designing architecture foundations.
• There’s still a defense centric thinking in the approach to security; we need a more complete view of cyberattacks. When it comes to cyberattacks, focus on the how instead of the who and why.
• We often don’t know what the business applications are, what the IT underpinnings are going to be, and how the attacks take place. If we begin to understand how a cyberattack happens, we can take away some level of uncertainty.
• Predict, prevent, detect, respond—don’t pick one over the other. Your security strategy won’t be effective if you throw out one of those principles.
• There are three areas of IT evolution: craftsmanship, industrialization and digitalization. We are now in the digitalization age, at the edge of innovation. The business demand is also in the digitalization era while security capability continues to lag behind.
• You can bridge this demand-capability gap by strengthening basic security and identity hygiene, adjusting expectations and adapting controls to scale and flexibility, and adopting innovative patterns/innovating yourself.

Predict, prevent, detect, respond

More, more, more

More users, more devices, more sensors, more applications. Analysts and attendees alike both emphasized during the week that the environment in which we do business is constantly expanding. From a security perspective this means more devices to identify and a larger attack surface to protect against potential threats. Tenable products like SecurityCenter Continuous View™ provide a comprehensive view so organizations can identify all of the new endpoints connecting to their network. Others like Nessus® Agents reduce the attack surface by gaining visibility into systems that are off-limits or challenging for vulnerability assessments. As the speed of IT continues to set the pace, look to Tenable to ensure you don’t fall behind the pack.

Thanks to Chris Petty, Tenable Analyst Relations and Public Affairs Coordinator, who also attended the conference and shared his experience here.