What would attract nearly 10,000 security professionals across 100+ countries to take time from a busy life in cyber defense? Palo Alto Networks Ignite — a three-day event, November 15-18, 2021 — brought together customers, executives, technologists, security experts, threat researchers and policy makers.
This year's event kicked off with a fireside chat between our CEO, Nikesh Arora, and Jen Easterly, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The two leaders discussed collaboration between government and private sector, investing in the future of cybersecurity, and what that means in terms of people and technology.
Palo Alto Networks founder and CTO, Nir Zuk, then took the stage to provide a zero BS outlook into Zero Trust, detailing the emerging concept of the Zero Trust Enterprise. He noted that by embracing the Zero Trust Enterprise, organizations should strive to eliminate all implicit trust, and then he provided a framework for how to do that. Nir’s talk has been called out by cybersecurity industry press for bringing clarity to zero trust.
In one of the most anticipated keynote sessions of the event, Chief Product Officer, Lee Klarich, highlighted new Palo Alto Networks product innovations. Lee unveiled our new next-generation CASB, designed to fully secure the adoption of SaaS applications, including the most popular collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Confluence. Lee also announced Prisma Cloud 3.0, the industry’s most complete cloud-native application protection platform, designed to secure the full application lifecycle. With Prisma Cloud 3.0, customers can now shift security left to improve their organizations' entire cloud security posture from development through runtime.
A consistent hit with cybersecurity audiences, Wendi Whitmore, Senior Vice President of Unit 42, analyzed the impact of a year filled with some of the most complex cyber attacks the world has seen to date. Wendi unveiled how they are shaping up Unit 42 services to help our industry get ready for this evolving threat landscape and how they plan to double down on their cloud breach response services after observing a 188% uptick in cloud cases over the last three years.
Ignite also featured dozens of sessions focused on practicing security, ranging from technology management to the skill required to deal with the Board of Directors. Some highlights include:
- Prisma Cloud: The Future of Cloud Security
- Simplify Zero Trust with Easy-to-Deploy User Identity and Authentication
- A Framework for Proactively Building Trust with the Board
- How do I Protect my Attack Surface?
- Why Digital Experience Management is the Secret Sauce for SASE
- Anatomy of a Cyber Attack
- Okyo Garde: Securing the Enterprise by Securing Work-from-Home
- Enable a Hybrid Future of Work with SASE
- Implementing Your Next-Generation CASB
- The New Way to Secure Cloud Native Applications with DevSecOps
- Microsegmentation in the Cloud Era
- Never Trust Always Verify! Implement Zero Trust for IoT devices in 30 minutes
We are also grateful to many of our customers who shared their best practices, observations and innovations. Here’s a sample of some Palo Alto Networks customer presentations:
- Goldman Sachs, “Building a Cloud Security Program Based on the NIST CSF”
- Levi Strauss, “Cloudy with the Chance of a Misconfiguration”
- AT&T, “How AT&T Found New Ways to Serve Enterprise Customers with 5G Security”
- QuickTrip Corporation, “Three Steps to a Successful XDR Deployment For 15,000 Endpoints”
- GM Financial, “Who's Bad? Automating Analysis with WildFire API”
And there was more. If you ever wanted to find out what electric vehicle technologies will hit the road in 5-10 years, tune into the fireside chat between myself and Sylvain Filippi, Managing Director of Envision Racing Formula E Team, to hear our discussion on the impact of Formula E on the future of mobility and on climate change.
Ignite '21 is now available on demand through December 20th. Give yourself the gift of high-quality cybersecurity content this month. To access the event, you can sign up for Ignite '21 on demand.
Happy Holidays!