What will be news at RSA Conference 2015?

In the months following RSA Conference 2013, Executive Chairman Art Coviello saw his company’s name trashed through allegations that a secret deal was made with the NSA that allowed snooping on data, banners unfurled on the Moscone Center during the opening of this year's event and speakers withdraw from this year's event.

We asked Coviello what he thought next year's opening keynote address would be about.

"Even before the Snowden revelations, these issues of cyber-weapons and the Internet of Things and the expansion of the attack surface were increasingly on my mind as a worry. So, I'm not surprised, irrespective of the Snowden revelations that I gave the speech I gave this year".

Coviello told us that he used this year's keynote as an opportunity to "address the issue around RSA so that people had perspective".

"People confuse RSA the algorithm – which is ubiquitous around the world - with RSA the company whose technology to deploy the encryption algorithm is yea big" he added, indicating that this is no longer a huge part of RSA's commercial business.

For his keynote speech in 2015, Coviello thought that three topics would be close to the top of the agenda; virtualisation and security, the four principles he described in this year's keynote and identity management.

While this year's speech was heavily focussed on a response to events, Coviello said that he expected his 2015 address to be "more of a technical speech".

"Next year, I would guess that I would be, there might be more of a talk around software defined networks and using virtualisation technology to secure itself. I gave a similar speech four years ago that, thanks to my researchers and technical researchers, has turned out to be somewhat prophetic. As opposed to virtualised infrastructure being a concentration of risk, using virtual infrastructure to secure itself may indeed be a source of solution to a number of our security infrastructure problems," he said.

A significant part of RSA's strategy is on the use of big data analytics. Coviello sees virtualised technology as a lynchpin of this strategy.

"What if, by policy, every time you created a virtual instance that a security control automatically goes with it? What if, because of the way traffic goes across a virtual environment and the way virtual machines are developed you can get more application information of user information that you can analyse and correlate for potential anomalies in user behaviour of in the use of the application or the flow of data," he said.

Judging by the number of vendors on the expo floor with an interest in identity management, it's no surprise that Coviello sees this as an important area to focus on.

"Identity management, which I touched on in the speech – we need a new model for that," he added.