Resilience Is the Future of Cybersecurity & More from RSAC 2026 – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Tom Hollingsworth, event lead here at Tech Field Day, and here are my takeaways from Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC 2026. Hi, everyone. We just finished up with Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC 2026, and it was a wonderful outing for our first time at one of the landmark security conferences in the community.

There were a lot of people in San Francisco that were talking about all things related to AI and security and many other topics, and we had a wonderful opportunity to sit down with three companies and talk about things that were on their mind when it comes to the world of cybersecurity and data protection. And I wanted to take a few minutes to give you my takeaways from the event from having those great conversations. My first takeaway from the event is about the importance of data security posture management, or DSPM.

This is a new idea in data security that allows you to classify data under certain conditions or with certain tags and then treat it in certain ways. And I know that sounds pretty pedestrian. Oh, we can verify that data is what it says it is, and then we can make sure that we deal with it a certain way.

But when you think about all of the important things that we have to do with data as we secure it, it's very important that we get that job right. Think about all of the data that you have going through your systems now, whether it's structured or unstructured, whether it is contained on edge devices or in centralized file servers, and think about how critical it would be if the wrong data was accidentally destroyed or leaked or exposed in some way. And that's why the DSPM capabilities included in a product like Veeam's solution is so important, because it provides an ability for holistic protection across the board.

When you have DSPM running and it can automatically classify data as it is stored and as it is retrieved, it ensures that that data is protected from exposure, whether intentionally by attackers or unintentionally through uploading it to an AI platform or some other accident. And DSPM allows for critical auditing of those data usages so that you can see that only the people who had access were able to reach that data and what they did with it when that occurred. This comes because Veeam has made some recent acquisitions, and that has added to their ability to create a holistic platform that allows you to do all of these things from one location and prevents any changes or complications from having multiple systems interacting that weren't designed to do that.

My second big takeaway from Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC 2026 was the importance of immutability. We hear this a lot in modern attack and defense scenarios, that one of the primary targets that attackers go after as soon as they gain access to your systems is your backup data. After all, if you have a good backup, you're less likely to pay them.

But if the first thing they take out is your lifeline, then you might be willing to negotiate. And for a company like Object First that has specialized in out-of-the-box immutability, this is a huge win for organizations that need to have the kind of stability that one would count on to recover from a cyberattack. Their platforms are secure by design.

Their solutions have the kinds of protections that you need to get up and running immediately out of the box to prevent data from being destroyed. And their solution is very technical and very elegant when it comes to what I would consider to be the way to do it as an engineer. They use certain flags inside the file system that prevent writing and deleting.

To me, that says that they've really thought through this. And now that they are a part of Veeam, this immutability becomes a part of the larger Veeam story, and we were very excited to be able to hear about what made Object First so valuable to a company like Veeam and share that with the rest of the community to make them start thinking about the importance of having an immutable backup solution. The third big takeaway that I have from Tech Field Day Extra at RSAC 2026 is about resilience.

We hear the term a lot, but what does it really mean? It means that your system can stay running no matter what might happen. That is critical for modern infrastructure.

If you think about all of the times that we have been inconvenienced because a service went down that we relied on, or worse yet, a large portion of a cloud provider went offline because of a failed update. Imagine if that was your business that that occurred to. Imagine how difficult it would be for you to recover from that, especially if you don't work at the scale of a cloud provider.

That could be the end of what you do, and that is something that keeps CISOs awake at night. They need to be sure that incidents that happen are not going to take their systems offline, and resilience is the key message from Commvault. In fact, their terminology they use for it, resilience operations or ResOps, is something that's really starting to catch on in the community.

One of the big takeaways that I loved from that conversation was about identity security, things like threat scanning and doing credential monitoring on the dark web to ensure thatYour users aren't being used as a vector to get in and cause the system to go down, to be attacked, to be compromised in any way. I think it's just one of those pieces in the wider Commvault platform that helps everybody understand that they're in this for the long haul, and resilience is not a series of point solutions. It's a unified piece that allows you to address all of the parts of data protection that you need to work on in order to ensure that you don't suffer any downtime incidents.

This event was a whirlwind because RSAC is always a fun time where you get to meet interesting people and learn about what's on the cutting edge of all kinds of cybersecurity. And there were a lot of vendors on the show floor. I wish that I would've had time to meet with all of them.

Perhaps I need to spend an entire week just walking around next time. But we were very happy to hear from Object First for the very first time at this event, and we're now excited to see what they're going to be capable of as a part of Veeam. We had a great group of delegates that joined us for this event, some familiar faces to the people out there in the land of Tech Field Day.

com and check out their profiles as well as any coverage that you'll be seeing from the event, because there are a lot of excited people out there that want to share all the things that they learned. Thank you very much for watching this episode of the "Tech Field Day Takeaway" series on the Tech Field Day Plus YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, please make sure that you leave a like, you subscribe, and share your thoughts in the comments.

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