Black Hat: Rocking the Status Quo for Data Security

We just wrapped up an amazing week at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas. As the first Black Hat conference we’ve attended since releasing the Bedrock Security platform to the public earlier this year, it was exciting to introduce it to this audience of cybersecurity leaders.

Highlights of Partner, Customer, and Press Engagement at BlackHat:

Greylock’s CXO Event: Over 160 security leaders gathered at a private event in Allegiant Stadium. We engaged with leaders across various verticals, discussing challenges like data discovery, classification, access and data security for LLM/Generative AI training use cases.

Bedrock’s Booth: In our inaugural BlackHat presence, we donned our red rocking Nike Air (AI Reasoning) shoes and our first t-shirt ("No Rules"), welcoming hundreds of security professionals. We shared our perspectives and demonstrated our technology to address critical data security challenges.

Customer and Prospect Meetings: At our business suite in the Delano hotel, we hosted partners, customers, and prospects from morning to night, diving deep into their data discovery and data security needs.

Partner Events: As we continue to grow, we met with security partners like Armature and Guidepoint to develop data security solutions for their customers.

Press Engagement: The media showed keen interest in our approach to using AI to enhance the speed, scale, and accuracy of data security. A highlight was my interview with John Furrier on theCube.

Insights

Across all of our interactions at the show, we noted a few interesting trends:

• Accurate data classification remains a key challenge.  This is despite using the existing crop of tools as the growth of data due to cloud and GenAI use cases has made this an acute problem, impacting business use of data and GenAI adoption.

• Lack of visibility into data location, access, movement, and content is a growing liability because of how they  expand a business’ data surface area across heterogeneous environments.  Companies are concerned with minimizing data exposure where possible to reduce data and its access as it is stored, copied, and shared.

• Deploying guardrails for GenAI training data remains a challenge.  Discovering, classifying, and controlling what data gets used for which LLM use cases takes more resources and time using legacy approaches.

• Ransomware techniques are changing in the cloud and extortion is on the rise.  Adversaries have shifted to exfiltrating sensitive data from weakly protected environments to later extort the victim businesses into payment. Security teams face a difficult reality of enabling the business to be productive with data while also managing the risk of letting that data move into lower environments where they don’t have visibility.

Bedrock’s Point of View at the Show

Through these meetings, events, and media interviews, Bedrock’s team was focused on the challenge of protecting data, but traditionally there’s been no way to put data at the center of security. Most tools aim to secure users, networks, servers, a roundabout way to prevent access to sensitive data.

Two key challenges have prevented organizations from putting data at the center of their security efforts. First, organizations have been challenged by the cost required to stay up to date with the scale of discovery for today’s enterprise data stores. Second, organizations have struggled to understand what’s in their ever-changing and growing data so they know what must be protected.

Bedrock’s key advancements include our ability to discover data at scale, meaning we can scan the nooks and crannies to find all your data automatically, including data in databases, object stores, file systems, and document repositories. Once we find it, Bedrock’s AI excels at figuring out what’s in those vast and diverse data stores, so you can prioritize your efforts to protect sensitive data, including regulated customer data and intellectual property.

Overall, it was incredibly exciting to be at Black Hat representing a company that is revolutionizing how organizations can make data safer and thus easier to use, for everyone. I can’t wait for next year.

Learn more about Bedrock’s perspective on data security with our introductory whitepaper or contact us at protectdata@bedrock.security for a demo.