It has been a long time since we were able to meet customers in person. It felt good to be able to discuss ideas and conversations than on a virtual environment might not have happened. While we were excited with meeting new people and talking about the latest security trends, we were still cautious about our health and safety. While setting up, we were talking to the surrounding booths and the common first few sentences that would be brought up were what cautions you were taking to protect yourself from COVID and if you needed something such as hand sanitizers or masks.
COVID did not only change the way we behaved in conferences, it also changed how we behave in the corporate security world, here are the top themes we heard in Black Hat 2021:
Before COVID, most corporate users logged in from a secured and monitored network, where all devices were managed and monitored by the organization. With the move to work from home, the devices are now on “hostile” networks, where the organization has no visibility or control on the other devices. Creating a huge attack vector that is hard to mitigate, the rise of endpoint monitoring and management was felt in the conference. Hand in hand with that, we had many people interested in EZSSH and EZGIT to extend conditional access to SSH and GitHub enforcing the use of corporate devices for these critical tasks.
The change to a new network model also accelerated the adoption of Zero Trust design. With engineers managing infrastructure from remote locations, the old model of relying on network security alone is no longer sufficient, creating the need to enhance the identity perimeter of their infrastructure.
Cloud is no longer a buzzword being thrown around where companies might put a small project to test it out. Companies are now moving their critical applications to the cloud and are looking to secure them without any vendor lock in. While cloud providers are offering great cloud-based tools that make managing cloud resources easy and secure, companies need tools that can span more than one cloud and centralize the protection of all their assets.
After an exciting week of Blackhat and Defcon (check out our CloudWatcher announcement on Defcon) we loved to hear the gratefulness from our existing customers and the excitement from future Keytos products users. Now we are more energized than ever to go back home and keep creating new and exciting security tools that will make the world a more secure place!