[cs615asa] [CS615] Meetup Notes from Interop Digital

Aaron Jin ajin1 at stevens.edu
Wed May 5 01:32:20 EDT 2021


For my meetup, I attended the Interop Digital event on April 29, which was
primarily centered around the future of cybersecurity and its changing role
in IT as the world adapts to going remote at a very fast pace.

== SUMMARY ==
Interop Digital hosted several panels, tech talks, and a keynote throughout
the afternoon, and ranged from conversations about the future of
authentication to implementing better security into various aspects of
application development, be it DevOps or enterprise-grade applications.

== RELATES TO CLASS ==
This meetup related to the course by primarily focusing on how systems
administrators and security administrators should and could handle the new
threats and challenges that they will face as corporations transition their
systems into the local and remote clouds for remote work that was
jumpstarted by the pandemic.

-- KEYNOTE --
The keynote was held by the Chief Trust Office at SAP, Elena Kvochko, and
was titled "Baking Cybersecurity into Enterprise IT". She covered the
guiding principles of a general policy structure for an organization and a
set of general resiliency guiding principles through her slides. Her speech
described the collaboration between security policies and the industry, and
the importance of defining policies and trust with everyone involved in the
industry in order to "enable better communications" and provide
opportunities and access to trusted entities and stakeholders.

-- PANEL --
The panel I chose to attend due to how vague the keynote ended up being was
Network Security for 2021 and Beyond. Four professionals, including the
Cisco Cloud Security Product Marketing Director, discussed various topics,
including:
- Key challenges they encountered while operating during COVID19
- Their thoughts on the acceleration of the adoption of SASE
- Recommendations on how to handle the newer network security threats that
are rising in popularity

This talk ended up being a lot more meaningful, as several of the panelists
had their own stories about attacks they defended against and held
discussions amongst each other.

Their recommendations for handling risks were particularly substantive as
they recommended dividing policy perspectives by their purpose, and taking
inventory of all assets in a network, and keep track of which are legacy
and need to be brought up to snuff.

== WHY I CHOSE IT ==
The focus of the event, the fact that the event was free, and the
sponsors/speakers presenting at the event were the biggest reasons why I
chose Interop over others that were being held at the same time.

== WHAT I LEARNED/TAKEAWAYS ==
I learned about SASE, how difficult it can be to implement modern solutions
like SASE, and how a network turning to the cloud and remote makes
management more difficult and easier at the same time. It was interesting
to listen in on the discussions on network security between experts in
cybersecurity, but the ideas presented were very broad and didn't go too
far into lower-level concepts. The tech talks that I sometimes witnessed
were more advertisements and guides on how to utilize the tools being
presented rather than cover how or why the network benefits from having the
tool over forgoing it. I'd recommend this event for the sake that it was
free and the panels are at most 30 minutes, but not for much else.
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