Technology Now · Hewlett Packard Enterprise

What’s going on at the RSA Conference?

May 1, 2025·22 min·2 clips

John Green explains why AI hype at RSA makes it tough to distinguish genuine security advances from empty promises.

Technology Now, a weekly podcast from Hewlett Packard Enterprise hosted by Michael Bird and Aubrey Lovell, dedicates this episode to the RSA Conference, one of the world’s largest annual cybersecurity gatherings held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The RSA acronym traces to its founders Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adelman, and the conference has been running for over 30 years. With the hosts unable to attend in person, HPE CTO of Security Jay Tilson reports live from the floor. Tilson’s first interview is with John Green, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Security Officer at HPE Aruba Networking, who identifies AI as the overwhelming theme of the conference—both as a new class of risk and as a marketing label slapped on legacy products. Green urges organizations to ask what their vendor’s AI actually does that it couldn’t do before, to separate genuine capability from buzzword adoption. On the threat side, Green describes the modern cyberattack landscape as dominated by opportunistic bots constantly scanning the internet for exploitable vulnerabilities, alongside highly targeted campaigns against specific organizations. Ransomware is singled out as the biggest enterprise threat, with Green characterizing the ransomware ecosystem as a fully professionalized criminal industry complete with customer service and affiliate networks. The conversation turns to zero trust security architecture, the shift from perimeter defenses to identity-based access controls, and the challenge of securing distributed cloud workloads. Additional interviews from the conference floor cover AI-driven threat detection, the growing importance of supply chain security after high-profile software compromise attacks, and the tension between security and user friction. Tilson also discusses HPE’s own security products and how the company is integrating AI into network monitoring. The episode closes with a look at what attendees are most excited and most worried about for the year ahead in cybersecurity. The tone is informative and accessible, aimed at business and technology decision-makers rather than deep technical practitioners. The episode suits listeners responsible for organizational risk, IT infrastructure, or technology strategy who want a high-level view of where enterprise security is heading.

As heard by us

A brisk RSA conference tour that keeps security talk practical.

The episode uses RSA Conference to frame cyber security as an organizational problem, not just a technical one. It traces why the topic matters, where threats surface, and how security thinking is shifting, moving from ransomware and nation-state attacks to legacy VPNs,…

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