Cybersecurity Trends and Futurum Research at Security Field Day 13 – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Tom Hollingsworth, event Lead for Security at Tech Field Day, and here are my takeaways from Security Field Day 13. Hi everyone. We just finished up a great security focused event in Silicon Valley Security Field day 13, and I thought it was an interesting look at all of the different parts of security and how they all come together to help protect users and data from nefarious actors, but also from simple user error.

There are so many things going on in the world today that we have to be careful of. It's kind of the same situation that we run into where we can no longer just lock our doors at night and hope that nothing bad happens. We have to take more proactive measures to ensure that things that are important to us are staying safe and in the IT space with the complex nature of the way that security is happening in today's world, we have to be even more vigilant with all of the things that we are using and at Security Field Day, we got to learn a lot about how traditional approaches to security are also embracing newer technologies such as AI and data protection to ensure that should the worst come to pass.

We have solutions and roadmaps to get back up and running, but also to prevent it from happening in the first. The first takeaway that I have is that supply chain security has become paramount for larger companies. We got a great presentation from Dell Technologies talking about integrating security controls at every part of the supply chain, whether it is user-focused, endpoint devices, infrastructure in the middle, or the data being stored.

It is absolutely critical that we maintain security at all points along that path. And one of the things that I think needs to be highlighted more is the critical role that endpoint devices play in that supply chain security pathway. Most of the devices that we have purchased and are using over the past few years come with some kind of trusted platform chip.

Whether it is secure enclave inside of a mobile device or a tablet or the actual TPM chip inside of a laptop. The ability for those devices to authenticate our user IDs through multifactor authentication is very important to the way that we access data. When you look at all of the things that are being built on that platform such as Secure Access Services, edge sass E or Zero Trust Network Architecture, ZTNA, being able to securely and confidently state that the user on the other end of that chain is who they say they are, kind of is the linchpin for everything.

And so being able to integrate supply chain security from beginning to end is super, super valuable. When you look at the way that Dell Technologies has been integrating security together, not only their own, but by working with partners who offer those security solutions, you can see that they have a holistic view of what's going on and they understand the challenges of bringing together those disparate pieces in order to make them into a true security platform that is integrated into the products from their genesis. My next big takeaway comes from the realm of data protection.

You may recall that data protection is a category of products that has evolved over the years from simple backup to disaster recovery and now into data protection, and the reasoning behind it is actually very simple. Most of the disasters that we need to recover from are in fact malware and ransomware infections. Companies like Veeam at Security Field Day went a long way to helping us understand why it's important to continuously innovate in this space, to understand the challenges that are being faced.

Yes, if this was something as simple as the way that we used to do backups where we copied the data to a tape and we stored it in a safe somewhere to keep it protected from fires or theft, there wouldn't really be a need to innovate. After all. As we all know, tape really isn't dead.

However, when you think about things like entropy detection to figure out when your data is being encrypted so that you know when you've been hit by a ransomware attack almost immediately, or things like immutable copies where we know for a fact that this snapshot at this point in time is immutable and it's something that we can roll back to in order to create recovery point objectives that ensure our businesses stay in business. It's very important to understand the evolving nature of this threat landscape. I would argue and have argued many times with people in the backup and recovery space that data protection has become very tightly integrated into the security aspect of modern it.

It sometimes feels weird to figure out where tools like this should fit. Are they data center? Are they server focused?

Could they even be cloud? My argument is that these are security tools. The method that they're delivered focuses very much on servers, but when you look at the way that the data is being stored and the way that the data needs to be protected, I would argue that security is the most important aspect of where data protection fits.

My last big takeaway comes courtesy of the future room group who had an amazing presentation during the event about cybersecurity trends in 2025. Fernando Montenegro, a friend of mine, did an amazing job of outlining four key pillars in their research that are shaping trends in 2025 and beyond. Of course, we have to talk about the pervasive influence of AI expanding and increasingly complex attack surfaces, significant moves towards security platforms, not just point solutions and the evolution of data protection into broader resilience strategies.

I think that these pillars are going to have a huge impact on the way that we address security. AI, of course, is a topic that's gonna have significant impacts on the way that we do things. AI models are ingesting huge amounts of data and if we don't understand how to keep that data safe from people who might look to jailbreak models and be able to expose information that they shouldn't have access to, it is really gonna have a a chilling effect on the adoption of ai.

If I can't verify that my data is being secured, then I'm not gonna wanna use that AI algorithm because I don't want to take those risks risks. And of course, the increasingly complex attack surface. As our users begin to use more and more advanced services, advanced applications, the ways that people are becoming creative in getting to our users are only increasing.

It may have been a few years ago that the idea of a persistent root kit or secure boot violation, uh, gave security teams nightmares, but now when we look at the way that the attackers are simply going around those, it should give people pause and we need to develop ways to reduce those attack services, but also to continue to educate our users. And one way that we can do that is by publishing great research like the future room group does that can educate our users and our security professionals about the attacks that they're seeing, but also the mitigations that are available in the market to address them. My final thoughts from Security Fuel Day is that security is an ever evolving landscape.

If you wanna make sure that you are gonna have a job well into the future, jump into security because you're gonna be learning new things for the longest time possible because no matter what we develop to protect ourselves from what people are trying to do, there's always going to to be a new attack. There's always gonna be a new control. There's always gonna be a need to adopt new policies to protect everyone, and I think that the best way that you can learn about what those policies and controls and attacks are is to tune into our regular security field day presentations.

I want make a special call out to some of our new delegates from this event. As mentioned, Fernando Montenegro from the Future and Group delivered a great presentation, but I also want to call out a Andre Oliver and I wanna talk about Ulu Meyer. They did a great job at this event.

They were very interactive. They loved asking questions and being a part of the security field at community and we're very happy to have them. I also wanna say a special thank you to each and every one of the people in the community who participated, who asked questions, who made comments not only on the LinkedIn stream, but also on social media.

Uh, you guys are the reason why this event is so vibrant and so important to the rest of the IT community. What you have to say and your perspectives on what we do cannot be matched anywhere else in it. If you wanna learn more about Security Field Day, please make sure that you check out the Security Field Day event page where you can watch all of the videos that were recorded during this event.

You can also check out all of the great coverage that we have seen and will see from our delegates and from community members who are excited to talk more about the event. Thank you very much for watching this episode of Tech Field Day takeaways on the Tech Field Day plus YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, please make sure that you subscribe like this video and share your thoughts on Security Field Day in the comments.

We'd love to hear what you have to say. Make sure that you're following Tech Field Day on all of our social media channels, whether they are X and Twitter, blue Sky, mask it on and more to continuously keep up to date on our evolving surface. When it comes to Field Day, you can watch all of the presentation videos, not only from Security Field Day, but from All Tech Field Day events at the Tech Field Day website and on the Tech Field Day YouTube channel.

Thank you very much for tuning in for Security Field Day. Stay safe out there and we'll see you next time.