Arguably the world’s largest and most important Cybersecurity show is just around the corner. With over 30,000 attendees and over 500 highly specialized security specific exhibitors, it is the show which the industry benchmarks itself.

So what can we expect as consumers, vendors and media/analysts within the cybersecurity industry.

1. The Privacy vs Security debate will be in full force. With government agencies and law enforcement looking for IT vendors to somehow give these agencies under court order access to encrypted data or build in security back doors into their products. The Apple/FBI debate will be the cornerstone debate for years to come.
   

   Expect a lot of debate on this sensitive and precedent setting subject.

2. Data Governance – National (or blocks like the EU) governments are demanding data sovereignty be enforced. Creating strict guidelines and procedures for ensuring sensitive data is held and proceeded under restrictions, normally bound by borders. But with sensitive data being generated globally (I previously used credit card transactions as an example), but required to be processed and analyzed in numerous regions poses a problem. Data lives everywhere and nowhere. How do we globally manage data that gets created everywhere?
   

   Expect the requirements for data governance and the associated challenges to be very pronounced and public at RSA

3. IoT, IoT, IoT. 28 billion devices, sensor and meters will be pumping data all over the globe. Some critically important like utilities, medical devices, ATMs and airplanes sensors, some less so like parking meters. How do we manage, process and secure all that data. The concern is ‘new’ or emerging industries like IoT create disparate, untested and disconnected solutions often causing more confusion than benefit.
   

   Expected numerous ‘revolutionary’ IoT security strategies and new startups to be announced at RSA.

4. Consolidation – I recently sat through a key note, where the ‘customer’ explained that when they consolidated the various departmental security groups into one corporate wide department, they had more security tools than they had personnel. Even in the cybersecurity category of encryption, where we develop products, silos of key management and encryption are pervasive. Integration and consolidated to create a complete security stack will be very relevant in the next 12 months.
   

   Expect numerous acquisition and vendor integration announcements at RSA.

5. Cognitive Computing (an unmatched disruption/evolution that will affect every industry) – With large financial institutions process, a billion plus security events, human interaction is limited. Cognitive computing can process huge amounts of data and collaborate with the human experts in solving the fundamental issues:
   1. What human behavior actions or anomalies are security threats?
   2. How do we automatically and intuitively respond to make it near impossible for the bad guys to get in?
   3. How do we analyze the data and behaviors to determine when the bad guys are in a need to be removed/blocked.

   Expect some very early and very significant product and/or strategic initiatives around the use of Cognitive Computing to Cybersecurity.

For more information on Cybersecurity and data security solutions, please visit us at booth 527 at the 2016 RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.