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It’s been a week since my last meetings at RSA and I’m already thinking about travel plans and agendas for Infosec Europe and Black Hat.  Before closing the book on RSA 2016 however, I have a few final thoughts about the industry and cybersecurity professional community. 1.       It’s time to go beyond product categorization.  The technology industry has product categorization down to a science – we organize around products, budget for products, and make purchasing decisions on each individual product category.  Heck, my friends at Gartner and NSS Labs have built lucrative businesses around testing products and rating products via magic quadrants.  Now I get that human beings need guidelines to help them define things but our obsession with product categorization has become counterproductive.  Why?  Because products interoperate to form solutions, and solutions can help us achieve actual goals and objectives.  For example, vendors like Cisco, Fidelis, FireEye, Hexis Cyber Solutions,Symantec, and Trend Micro offer solutions designed for interoperability between endpoint and network security.  If we only evaluate, test, purchase, or deploy one of the components of these solutions however, we lose a lot of the intrinsic solution value.  Yeah, we’ve always looked at technologies like this way but we are only creating obstacles for ourselves if we continue to do so. 2.       Technology underpinnings aren’t nearly as important as outcomes.  On a similar note, the cybersecurity industry continues to be disturbingly compulsive about technology feature/functionality.  You couldn’t walk 10 feet at the Moscone Center without someone telling you about artificial intelligence, machine learning, or threat intelligence.  The technology buzz reminded me of my early career experiences at DEC world and that was in the 1980s!  Note to cybersecurity technology vendors:  CISOs care about mitigating risks, protecting assets, and responding to cyber-attacks.  In other words, they careabout outcomes and are not nearly as concerned

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