Wrapping up Cyber Expo Ireland 2019

Wrapping up Cyber Expo Ireland 2019

Living in this information age is not easy! Our levels of digital dependence are increasing daily and we now rely so heavily on the Internet in daily life – everything from shopping to accessing our bank account to controlling our home electronics (for the more tech savvy of us!) that the constant topic of cybercrime front and centre of the headlines can be enough to make people panic.

And this is just the consumer … now multiply the impact of cybercrime for our businesses!

Cloud, IoT, AI technologies all mean that the stakes are rising and with the cost of a breach evermore debilitating, Government departments and Organisations of ALL sizes are having to rethink their Cyber Strategy. According to a recent PWC report, 49% of Irish Companies have suffered an economic crime or fraud since 2016, so the problem is real, and the time to act is now!

This was the theme the 3rd Irish Cyber Data and Compliance Expo – Cyber Expo Ireland which took place at the Irish Management Institute (IMI), Dublin on Tuesday 26th November. This year saw a complimentary addition to the Expo with a Cyber Conference Ireland element - expert thought leadership sessions detailing current trends across the industry, with implementation advice and guidance covering the  ‘How of Cyber Security’ – putting ideas into practice.

This year’s response has been phenomenal. We had a vision to design an event that would bring together a security ecosystem; inform and educate, and I believe the event has reinforced that vision. We are all being forced to up our game across the entire threat lifecycle - prevention, detection, response – but sometimes it’s hard to know where to focus our energies and budgets. Gartner predicts that over $75 billion will be spent worldwide on infrastructure protection and security services in 2019 – but different businesses will have different pressures. For some it will be technical, for others it will be people. We hope that our new conference addition to this year’s Expo has given some people some answers or at least food for thought.

Cyber Conference Ireland incorporated world-class thought leadership from experts across 7 dedicated Streams:

Identity & Rights Management | Malware | Messaging | Reputation, Compliance & Regulation | Analytics | Gateway & Network Protection | Application Security. Each Stream was chaired and facilitated by recognised Cyber Experts who managed the session and facilitated the Panel discussions.

The first Stream of the morning sessions - Identity & Rights Management, probably one of the most challenging areas of security with Organisations transitioning to cloud services and mobile devices to cut costs and boost productivity, was led by founder and managing director of IAM Experts, Anthony Mornet. The session covered topics such as information security policies, target operating models, assessing risk for access management, Implementing IT Controls and business education & awareness.

The Malware Stream, chaired by Alex Burnham, Director IT Audit and Security at Mazars, covered presentations on Securing Mobility, The rise of targeted Cyber-attacks to SMBs and MSPs, Taking a joined up approach to the latest threats – ransomware, not dead, just sneakier and a LIVE ransomware attack from Bullwall which always engages the audience!

The final Stream of the morning sessions - Analytics and Management Stream discussed the evolution from Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) to meet the need for greater security across business; more context and more insights and was expertly chaired by Paul Hearns, Head of Content, Mediateam.  With the enormous volume of events generated by cloud usage – an average of 2 billion transactions each month at the average enterprise – it’s key that a cloud threat protection solution should not add to this noise, so alert fatigue and practical solutions were high on the agenda in this session!

Kicking off the 4 afternoon sessions were: Dr Vivienne Mee, Founder, VM Group, chairing the Messaging Stream, where the topics discussed included: Office 365 – Is it watertight and is it fast becoming an inaccessible silo for business-critical data? Demystifying DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance), How to actually prevent email data breaches, and Securing email in an ever-evolving threat landscape.

Dave Feenan, Innovation Programmes Manager, Skillnet, chaired the ‘Reputation, Compliance & Regulation’ Stream where the topics discussed included: Protecting corporate data against unauthorised change; Workplace Behaviour- Building effective human firewalls; Benefits of a good lifecycle management plan- QWAC /PSD2; The Phishing Kill Chain – Reducing the impact of an attack; and Trusted User Identity in a Digital Environment.

Angela Madden, MD, Rits chaired the Gateway & Network Protection Stream with discussions centered around current trends preventing unsecured traffic from entering your internal network; protecting your business by protecting your employees/users from accessing and being infected by malicious Web traffic, websites and virus/malware, while also ensuring the implementation and compliance of your organisation's regulatory policy.

And to conclude the conference speakers, as Application Security becomes increasingly an area for Cyber security concern, there was a very popular session led by Paul Farrington, CTO of Veracode – ‘The State of Software Security and what it means for you’.

Finally, last but not least of the mentions – the exhibitors themselves – the Expo featured 25 Vendors on the day - demonstrating world class security solutions; Agari, Altaro, Appixoft, Ascertia, Bitdefender, Bluedog, Bullwall, Censornet, Clearcrypt, CoSoSys, Cyber Risk Aware, Cyglass, Egress, Entrust Datacard, Exo5, Fraudwatch, N-Cipher, OKTA, Keeper Security, Lookout, Security Scorecard, Sophos, Threatmark, Veracode and Webroot; Plus 11 Value Added Resellers, all with local presence and expertise to advise and deploy Cyber Strategies; Actionpoint, CommsSec, Ergo, Future Range, Intuity, ITMS, Leaf, NSSL, Paradyn, Qualcom and Unity.

The Security expertise in the one location for the one day was exceptional and epitomises what the Cyber Expo is all about – bringing security technology together to solve collective challenges within the Ecosystem.

Renaissance remans a trusted partner to the Irish Resellers and their customers, with over 30 years’ experience and expertise. They are continually introducing new, cutting edge and industry leading Data Security and Compliance solutions into the Irish market and have helped introduce, in excess of 40 new security solutions over the past 5 years. Renaissance has built its reputation in the Irish market place, by offering excellent pre/post sales service to its extensive network base, and by an ongoing desire to bring added value to its customers. This Expo, and now Conference has extended that value.

We will continually engage with business and technical leaders across Ireland to ensure the Expo/Conference covers the key topics and challenges organisations are facing on a daily basis.  Our goal now is to start planning for next year to ensure the structure and content remains ‘on-point’. We will take a little breather now but get things moving again in January to plan and execute an even bigger and better Cyber Expo Ireland for 2020.

Michael

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