RSA Hosts Security Summit in Saudi Arabia Event Highlights the Need for Securing Businessesfrom Ever Evolving Risks and Threats in the Age of the ‘Third Platform’

RSA, The Security Division of EMC today announced the opening of the RSA Security Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a one day security conference aimed at helping organizations address evolving, complex and sensitive security challenges. The Summit, held at the Four Seasons Hotel brought together an audience of senior security professionals from the IT industry, including Chief Security Officers, Compliance and Risk Managers, CIOs, and IT Directors to highlightthe emerging trends in the space of cyber security and shed light on how organizations can help build an element of ‘trust’ in their IT organizations and the need to ramp up theirteam’s ability to face the unknown threats and ensure data protection and mitigation of the risk of an attack.

The adoption of third platform technologies such as cloud computing, Big Data, social networking and mobile devices to help enterprises achieve their IT and business transformation goals depends on entirely on a foundation of trust and the organization’s ability to secure their cloud environment ensuring that data is protected no matter where, how and what device it may be accessed from.  The rapid evolution of the IT industry in turn introduces organizations to a whole new host of advancedrisks and persistent threats that are far more complex, destructive and frequent in volume than ever known.

Set against this backdrop, the RSA Summit opened with a keynote by Dave Martin, CISSP, Vice President and Chief Security Officer EMC Corporation, to highlight the need for organizations to redefine security by adopting an intelligence-driven security approach in order to secure their most sensitive information and networks and mitigate risks in the age of IT’s “third platform”.

The summit featured presentations from senior RSA executives and security experts which highlighted the need to harness Big Data Analytics to leverage the benefits of a transformational security monitoring and investigative solution. The subject follows from a recent survey[1] conducted by EMC found that 73% of respondents in Saudi Arabia agree that Big Data technology will prove vital in identifying and protecting against cyber-attacks while only 72% of respondents were confident of their ability to fully recover all their data should they have need to.

RSA Summit sponsors included Matco, ComputerLinksand Redington who all took the opportunity to discuss their solutions with attendees in the networking area of the summit.The RSA Security Summit KSA 2014 is part of a series of EMEA summits with planned additional stops in Qatar and UAE. Theseevents are designed to provide RSA customers and partnerswith an opportunity to gain insight into the latest developments in the field of cyber security and showcase the company’s host of innovations to help enterprises protect their information, networks and users from sophisticated internal and external threats in addition to helping meet the ever increasing demands from governance, risk and compliance within industries such as banking and finance, healthcare, telecom and government in addition to many others.