Podcast: RSA abuzz over data orchestration and blockchain

At this year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, key issues for storage and compliance around the event were the use of orchestration to manage data through its lifecycle, blockchain as a tool for maintaining the integrity of data, and, with its impending arrival, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In this podcast, Mathieu Gorge, CEO of Vigitrust, talks about the uses of orchestration, and some new suppliers emerging, to help with managing data, plus the role of blockchain in data storage and compliance.

Antony Adshead: What were the key issues at RSA 2018?

Mathieu Gorge: RSA took place last week, between Monday 16 April and Friday 20 April 2018, in San Francisco.

As with every year, it was extremely well attended. One difference though, was that the last day, which is normally very quiet, was very well-attended, so there’s a lot of interest in security and compliance.

There were some great keynotes and speakers, with particular focus on new initiatives by governments and industry associations, not just in the US, but worldwide, as a result of the advance of GDPR.

It was also interesting to see that some of the guest speakers, including Monica Lewinsky, were talking about privacy and bullying online, which led to very interesting discussions around ways to manage your life on the internet and ways to manage information stored about you, whether you store it yourself or whether it’s stored by a third party, especially where there’s transfer of data.

From the tech perspective, and regulatory trends, GDPR was mentioned all the time because it is less than a month away, but it is worth noting that a number of analysts, including IDC, said we should have talked about GDPR a lot more last year. What’s happening now is that everybody is talking about the impact of GDPR moving forward.

The second trend was the idea of cloud orchestration and data orchestration, but I’ll cover that in more detail later.

Finally, it was all about blockchain. Can blockchain help us manage data, manage how we acquire data, store data, and get access back to our data?

Adshead: What were the key trends with regard to storage and compliance at RSA 2018?

Gorge: So, if I can go back to the concept of orchestration, there was a lot of talk about data orchestration, cloud orchestration, and nearly every third vendor on the show floor has something around orchestration.

It was interesting to see some new vendors in the market, including Empow, a new solution from the east coast of the US. Their solution allows you to manage datasets, apply AI [artificial intelligence] technology to manage the lifecycle of the datasets, classify the data and then orchestrate the responses from a business and operational perspective, which then allows a team within a SOC, or operations centre, to take corrective action.

This is a trend that we saw with other vendors. The whole idea being around being able to use the data noise, which is also a new term, to manage data storage and classify the data.

So, classification of data was very big at RSA. Another vendor was Savint, which specialised in ID governance in the cloud to help manage data.

On balance though, while orchestration is the new buzz term, and tagging the data from a data subject mapping perspective within GDPR. So, data subject mapping is something that seems to be driving a lot of the new vendors within the data area and within storage.

Again, what we’ve found as a common theme within all the vendors is the idea of using blockchain to follow data throughout its lifecycle, whether using a private or public ledger, and really focusing on the integrity of data managed by the blockchain.

All in all, some good new stuff. I think we’re going to see orchestration a lot more throughout 2018, and my guess is that in 2019 there will be a lot more about using blockchain to manage data storage and answer some regulatory requirements.