Yesterday wifey and I attended the annual RSA Conference in SF. There are generally 30K attendees daily. It's a big deal.
"The RSA Conference 2025 is a prominent cybersecurity event, taking place in San Francisco from April 28 to May 1, 2025. It's a gathering for industry professionals to share insights, discuss trends, and explore solutions to address the evolving cybersecurity landscape."
Certainly not the first time, but this year focused on the challenges surrounding Artificial Intelligence; an AI model is an encapsulated object with potentially lots of secrets, etc.
We attended 3 keynotes in the 6,000 seat Moscone West Main Conference Room.
The first was the networking giant Cisco and Splunk, a leading cybersecurity company that is now a Cisco company. They spoke of the good old days, where we protected the presentation layer, the application layer and the database layer. Well today it's a new ballgame with AI. All endpoints need to be considered compromised. You have to assume threats are not just stopped outdside the network; they may live inside the network. The game of 20 questions may prove to be AI dangerous. The positive is, AI will handle 90% of the security needs leaving the 10% really hard stuff to the pros.
The second was all about gamers; hardly my cup of tea. But I was wrong. The CEO of Varonas, a Cloud Security company, told us gamers are great at things like strategy, are creative, work well in teams and can be leaders. Hire the gamer! Security is only the most important thing and there is a huge shortage of qualified talent. I never play computer games but his talk was very insightful; I learned a lot.
The third speaker was Earvin "Magic" Johnson, entrepreneur extraordinaire. He spoke of his later basketball days when he went to Laker owner Jerry Buss and asked for his help becoming a businessman, post basketball. Johnson is all about goals and going for it.
Magic told us to get out our phones and type in "S W O T".
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to assess an organization's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. He advised us to apply SWOT to ourselves.
Identifying weaknesses and working on them allows us to get better.
Magic told us the importance of threats; his threat was Celtic's great Larry Bird. "Larry Bird made me a better basketball player and I hope I made him better."
There was so much more. Magic spent as much time walking through the thousands of spectators as he did on stage.
One thing struck me; Mr. Buss taught Magic the criticality of Brand; "Never damage the Brand". I couldn't help to thing about a certain CEO who seems to have damaged his company's brand. Not good.
We had a great lunch down the street at Fang. You may have seen the Food Network series, House of Fang. Cathy and her father Peter are always willing to talk for a bit even thought the place is always packed. Highly recommended and let Peter order for you.
A beautiful day in Downtown!
"The RSA Conference 2025 is a prominent cybersecurity event, taking place in San Francisco from April 28 to May 1, 2025. It's a gathering for industry professionals to share insights, discuss trends, and explore solutions to address the evolving cybersecurity landscape."
Certainly not the first time, but this year focused on the challenges surrounding Artificial Intelligence; an AI model is an encapsulated object with potentially lots of secrets, etc.
We attended 3 keynotes in the 6,000 seat Moscone West Main Conference Room.
The first was the networking giant Cisco and Splunk, a leading cybersecurity company that is now a Cisco company. They spoke of the good old days, where we protected the presentation layer, the application layer and the database layer. Well today it's a new ballgame with AI. All endpoints need to be considered compromised. You have to assume threats are not just stopped outdside the network; they may live inside the network. The game of 20 questions may prove to be AI dangerous. The positive is, AI will handle 90% of the security needs leaving the 10% really hard stuff to the pros.
The second was all about gamers; hardly my cup of tea. But I was wrong. The CEO of Varonas, a Cloud Security company, told us gamers are great at things like strategy, are creative, work well in teams and can be leaders. Hire the gamer! Security is only the most important thing and there is a huge shortage of qualified talent. I never play computer games but his talk was very insightful; I learned a lot.
The third speaker was Earvin "Magic" Johnson, entrepreneur extraordinaire. He spoke of his later basketball days when he went to Laker owner Jerry Buss and asked for his help becoming a businessman, post basketball. Johnson is all about goals and going for it.
Magic told us to get out our phones and type in "S W O T".
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to assess an organization's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. He advised us to apply SWOT to ourselves.
Identifying weaknesses and working on them allows us to get better.
Magic told us the importance of threats; his threat was Celtic's great Larry Bird. "Larry Bird made me a better basketball player and I hope I made him better."
There was so much more. Magic spent as much time walking through the thousands of spectators as he did on stage.
One thing struck me; Mr. Buss taught Magic the criticality of Brand; "Never damage the Brand". I couldn't help to thing about a certain CEO who seems to have damaged his company's brand. Not good.
We had a great lunch down the street at Fang. You may have seen the Food Network series, House of Fang. Cathy and her father Peter are always willing to talk for a bit even thought the place is always packed. Highly recommended and let Peter order for you.
A beautiful day in Downtown!
Last edited:
