Don`t Believe the RSA Hype

It’s inevitable. When RSA rolls around each year, the security hype machine kicks into gear and starts spinning out unrealistic promises and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to either excite or scare buyers into new security projects.

To arm our readers against all the baloney, Baseline spoke with several analysts to find out which technologies they expect to be most overhyped at the show.

Their predictions should give IT managers and executives a head start in sorting out what’s new, what’s vaporware and what’s the same old stuff dressed in new marketing messages.

Here they are:

1. Virtualization Software
From the largest data centers to the smallest server closets, virtualization is sweeping the IT world by storm this year, and security marketers would be remiss if they were to pass up the opportunity to prey on security fears lurking around virtual machines.

“You are going to hear a lot of vendors talking about virtualization security at RSA,” says Mike Rothman of Security Incite. “You are going to hear a lot of vendors talk about the different ways to assess the vulnerability of virtualized machines or issues with the hypervisor. That is going to be the No. 1 overhyped thing at RSA.”

This will be the case even though there won’t be many pure-play virtualization security vendors at the show, says Diana Kelley of Security Curve. Instead, many security vendors will try to spin their existing products to market toward those with virtualized environments.

“I think you’re going to hear a lot about virtualization although there aren’t a lot of companies that are making standalone security products,” Kelley says. “So there are stories, but there aren’t a lot of products. [Besides,]there are some changes from VMware to enable  hooking into the hypervisor that really could make it pretty easy to apply security to virtualization.”