RSA Conference Party

Podcast Episode 93: Talking GDPR with Cisco’s Chief Privacy Officer and RSA 2018 Recap

This episode of The Security Ledger Podcast (#93) was sponsored by Keysight Technologiesa leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Check them out at Keysight.com.

In this episode: with the May 25th go-live date of the EU General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) just around the corner, we talk with Cisco Chief Privacy Officer Michelle Dennedy about her expectations for the May 25th deadline and what lies beyond it. Also: with the 2018 RSA Conference now in the history books, we invited Steve McGregory, the Senior Director of Application and Threat Intelligence at Ixia in to talk about his big takeaways from the show. Steve also weighs in on one of the big trends this year: machine learning. 

GDPR’s New Era: a Conversation with Cisco’s Chief Privacy Officer

In a little more than a month the EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation – or GDPR – will take effect. Ahead of that much anticipated event, companies of all stripes are updating their privacy policies and their internal controls to secure customer and employee data.

Michelle Dennedy Cisco
Michelle Dennedy is the Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco Systems.

Among other big changes that GDPR will prompt is giving a much higher profile to the Chief Privacy Officer, a previously obscure role, mostly limited to very large firms, that is poised to become much more common and widespread.

To understand a bit more about the work of Chief Privacy Officers and about the other likely effects of GDPR on the way companies operate, we met up with Michelle Dennedy, the Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco Systems on the sidelines of the RSA Conference last week. In a wide ranging interview, Michelle talked about how the new EU regulations will change our business culture. GDPR, she said, marks the beginning of a new era in which “data is looked at with the same level of scrutiny and care and risk as anti trust violations and food safety.”

I started our conversation by asking Michelle what’s on her to-do list and how she’s getting ready for GDPR. Check out our full talk in this week’s podcast.

RSA Conference Party
The 2018 RSA Conference took place last week in San Francisco. Machine learning and AI were big themes. (Image courtesy of RSA Conference.)

RSA 2018 recap: making sense of the trends

The 2018 RSA Conference took place last week in San Francisco. Security Ledger was at the show and we were busy.

Steve McGregory Ixia
Steve McGregory is the Senior Director of Application and Threat Intelligence at Ixia, part of Keysight. (Image courtesy of Keysight.)

As the information security industry’s biggest conference, RSA is always a reliable bellwether for what’s hot and happening in cyber security. But while “cyber” is a word that’s on everyone’s tongue right now, the message out of the RSA show was, to use the words of our special guest this week “murky.” Steve McGregory is the Senior Director of Application and Threat Intelligence at Ixia, a division of Keysight. He presented at last week’s RSA Conference in a session entitled “Network Visibility and AI: You’re Our Only Hope!

We invited Steve in to our studio to talk about his impressions of the show and to weigh in on one of the big trends this year: machine learning and artificial intelligence. Despite the hype, Steve argues that an absence of quality network data may be limiting the usefulness of machine learning to aid in security incident response.

Check out our full conversation on this week’s podcast.