Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA 2023 to Delve Into Lessons Learned as Cloud Becomes Leading Platform for Mission-Critical Business Systems

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining standards, certifications, and best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, announced that registration has opened for the CSA Summit 2023: Mission Critical (San Francisco, April 24) held in conjunction with the RSA Conference. Tima Soni, Chief and Head of the Valencia office of the United Nations International Computing Centre’s (UNICC) Cybersecurity division, and New York State’s Chief Cyber Officer Colin Ahern will share their wealth of expertise in two keynote addresses. The event will also feature a special keynote from a global financial services leader detailing how coordination with cloud providers is fundamental to being mission critical in the cloud.

“Being mission critical in the cloud compels organizations to thoughtfully develop strategies composed of vetted best practices. It also means having a strong understanding of the latest technologies and knowing when to employ them to obtain security ROI and leverage over adversaries. It is in this spirit that the CSA Summit will go from AI to Zero Trust, and many topics in between. We look forward to releasing the first industry whitepaper about ChatGPT that addresses responsible enterprise adoption of the technology and how cybersecurity professionals can use it today,” said Jim Reavis, co-founder and CEO, Cloud Security Alliance.

The CSA Summit 2023: Mission Critical will examine the lessons learned from cloud becoming the primary IT and will provide attendees with a roadmap to the future. The event will explore the themes of resilience, compliance, and how to leverage benefits of such state-of-the-art solutions as Zero Trust, Confidential Computing, and more. It will feature a special presentation “AI and the Future of Security” by Holly Stewart, Director, Messaging and Web Security Research, Microsoft.

Attendees will hear from government, enterprise, and cybersecurity industry thought leaders through such sessions as:

• Building a Resilient and Agile Cybersecurity Team. Panelists: Candy Alexander, CISO and Cyber Risk Practice lead, NeuEon, Inc.; Rick Doten, Vice President, CISO/Healthcare Enterprises and International, Centene Corp.; Kris Rides, President/Americas, Via Resource; Scott Scheppers, Chief Experience Officer, AT&T Cybersecurity. This panel on cybersecurity hiring will explore the challenges and strategies for recruiting and retaining skilled cloud security professionals in today’s highly competitive job market. The discussion will cover topics such as the impact of the recent layoffs on the market, diversity and inclusion in cybersecurity hiring, and the importance of ongoing training and development for cybersecurity teams.
• Unleash the Full Power of Secure Digital Transformation with Zero Trust. Speaker: Jay Chaudhry, CEO, Chairman, and Founder, Zscaler. Learn how zero trust architecture secures users, workloads, and IoT/OT devices by addressing critical security shortcomings of legacy network architecture. This session covers key steps in a phased Zero Trust transformation journey, as well as advice for winning the support of organizational leadership.
• Cloud Security Is Broken, but It Doesn’t Have to Be. Speaker: Merav Bahat, CEO, Dazz. Attendees of this session will learn about modernizing cloud risk discovery and remediation to reduce risk windows from weeks to hours, improving the partnership between security and development teams.
• Cloudy with a Chance of Ransomware. Speaker: Corey Smith, Senior Director/Solution Architecture and Global Center of Excellence, Qualys. This session will walk attendees through how attackers attempt to use ransomware in their cloud environments. Attendees will learn a few of the common ways ransomware gets onto and propagates in the cloud, and learn about the multi-faceted approach that is required for preventing ransomware in the cloud.
• Championing Zero Trust for Resiliency. Speakers: Stacey Halota, Vice President, Information Security and Privacy, Graham Holdings; Jason Garbis, Principal and Founder, Numberline Security; Robert LaMagna-Reiter, Vice President, Information Security & Compliance/CISO, hudl; Carlos W. Moran, Jr., Chief Information Security Officer, Toppan Merrill. This session will examine how CISOs of organizations that have or are pursuing a Zero Trust strategy helped management and other internal stakeholders understand the positive impacts to cybersecurity operations, their continuing digital transformations, and their companies’ futures, as well as share tactics to getting much-needed support and the buy-in to actually execute and progress Zero Trust.
• Cloud Security in the Quantum Era: Getting ready for Y2Q. Speaker: TBD. The Cloud Security Alliance has been a pioneer in promoting awareness of the quantum threat. As such, this presentation will provide a brief overview of the quantum computer and quantum threat, before delving into possible solutions, some based on new algorithms known as quantum-resistant algorithms. These algorithms can be complemented with quantum solutions, which utilize the same peculiar properties of the quantum world to thwart the quantum computer threat. Together, they will be part of a new quantum-safe infrastructure, which will recover and even improve cloud security.
• The Perfect Storm: Preparing Today for the Future State of Cloud Security. Speakers: Jeff Farinich, Senior Vice President/Technology and CISO, New American Funding; and Tina Thorstenson, Vice President/Industry Business Unit and Executive Strategist, CrowdStrike. In this session, attendees will walk away with insights into cloud attack vectors and adversary techniques from the latest CrowdStrike Global Threat Report and the impact to their business. Learn best practices for modern cloud security strategies to defend multi-cloud environments and discover how New American Funding secured their environment and transformed its cloud environment to accelerate business.
• Cloud Security Context That Makes Cents. Speakers: Rick Bosworth, Director/Product Marketing, SentinelOne; Ravi Ithal, Co-Founder and CTO, Normalyze; Jack Naglieri, Founder and CEO, Panther; Chris Pedigo, Global Field CTO, Lacework; John Yeoh, Global Vice President/Research, Cloud Security Alliance. Panelists will discuss the challenges businesses face with visibility and no context, as well as how context, observability, and security strategies are helping organizations be successful in the cloud.
• Attacker Mindset in the Cloud. Speaker: Taylor Bianchi, Senior Offensive Security Researcher, Uptycs. Organizations can meet compliance/regulatory responsibilities in the cloud, but still be susceptible to a threat actor escalating privileges, exfiltrating data, and targeting your company for ransomware. Threat actors today have become cloud experts. Their TTPs are evolving quicker than most want to believe. Attendees will learn to start thinking like threat actors and mimic the detection of their attack behavior.

Those interested in furthering their cloud security expertise are encouraged to register for the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK) Plus training (April 23-24).

Space is limited – those interested in attending must first register for an RSAC pass and apply the code “52ECLOUDSXP” at the top of the conference pass selection page on RSA’s registration site. This pass will provide access to attend the CSA Summit.