Ignite ’18 Conference: Partnering to Power Enterprise Security

Security professionals arrived in droves at Anaheim Convention Centre, California on May 21 to attend the Palo Alto Networks Ignite ’18 USA. Filling the air with energy and excitement, the four-day conference, which closed on May 24, kicked off with the Ignite 5k fun run for security professionals. And, they sure were thrilled to leave their laptops to put on their running shoes.

The highlights were undoubtedly the keynotes by President and CEO Mark McLaughlin, Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich and co-founder and CTO Nir Zuk.

Other notable speakers included Keren Alazari, the ethical hacker.

The busy morning set the tone for the rest of the day with sessions on network security, endpoint security and cloud security having professionals interact on all implications of security for businesses.

Some Not-to-be Missed Insights

Experts sharing insights, hands-on demos, and opportunities for the attendees to strengthen their security posture created an ambience of knowledge exchange not seen before. In addition, there were more than 30 ‘developer partners’ who showcased apps for the company’s Application Framework at the Innovation Sandbox.

These apps, which tackle everything from security operations to IoT, helps enterprises:

• Deal with a security incident as easily as browsing through an app store. Organizations can find and rapidly deploy a suite of apps to address their specific needs.
• Smarten their current infrastructure even more with the addition of every new app.
• Build and make available their apps for the Application Framework quickly and easily.

From the partners, Silverfort’s threat-based multifactor authentication for cloud and corporate networks presented its step-up agentless authentication capabilities aligned to real-time security alerts that decreases false positive alerts. Silverfort allows for auditing of all authentication and access activity, including AI-based risk assessment.

Technologies like Microsoft Graph Security API and Palo Alto Networks Application Framework, which can now collaborate with each other, presented their capabilities. There was also a demo of a Microsoft PowerBI solution that can access information from both Microsoft Graph Security API and Palo Alto Networks Application Framework.

Day 3 saw increased footfalls at the various booths, including Beacon where attendees could chat with SMEs. Cyber Range, which also wrapped up the fourth day of the conference, is a hands-on training for cybersecurity professionals to hone their skills to defend against threats in a simulated environment.

While Ignite ’18 may have come to a close, there’s lots more from Palo Alto Networks that information security professionals can look forward to, especially as the event makes its foray into Europe at RAI Amsterdam, Netherlands from October 8 to 10, and then Federal Ignite ’18 from October 22 to 23 in Washington, DC. In 2019, Ignite ’19 will come to Austin, Texas in June.