Highlights from the CSA Summit at Cyberweek

By Moshe Ferber, Chairman, Cloud Security Alliance, Israel and Damir Savanovic, Senior Innovation Analyst, Cloud Security Alliance

The city of Tel Aviv is crowded throughout the year with a buzzing cybersecurity ecosystem, but in the last week of June, this ecosystem comes to boil when Tel Aviv University hosts their annual Cyberweek conference – one of the largest cybersecurity conferences in the world with over 9,000 visitors from over 80 different countries.

In this wonderful habitat of cybersecurity innovation, the Cloud Security Alliance conducted its first Tel Aviv Summit at Cyberweek. During the week, CSA held a special CCSK training and a full day of lectures discussing the current state and future of cloud computing.

One of Cyberweek’s main attractions is the fact that Cyberweek organizers managed to make the conference attractive to many different audiences: the military, government & private sector all find something of interest at the various events. Whether they are decision makers or technology geeks, there is something for everyone. The same diversification was also obvious at the CSA Summit itself – decision makers were enjoying lectures such as...

• The opening keynote by Damir Savanovic from CSA – who gave two excellent talks on cloud certifications and the future of Blockchain in the cloud
• ABN AMRO CISO advisor - Olaf Streutker elaborating on the cloud octagon model, an innovative model that challenges enterprises to investigate risk from perspective other than that of the cloud service provider. (The Octagon Model white paper was released the same day by CSA Financial Services working group)
• Yuval Segev - from the Israeli National Cyber Directorate explaining the INCD model for supply chain risk management (cloud adoption puts a heavy burden on supply chain evaluation)
• Dr. Nicola Sfondrini sharing on CSA Italy success in assisting the Italian government on the successful cloud adoption journey.

For summit delegates who are more interested in technology innovation –

• Eitan Satmary from the WIX security team talked about managing web security for millions of users environments while Boris Giterman from Dell EMC detailed their project for creating cloud trustworthiness in cooperation with the EU.
• Attendees interested in the vibrant innovation scene in Israel and the role of startups in them – were able to enjoy a brilliant lecture from Ofer Smadari - Founder of Luminate (acquired by Symantec) about the journey from an idea about SDP (software-defined perimeter) to acquisition by one of the world’s largest companies.
• Ivan Robles from CSA Spain shared an interesting view on how to perform audit & forensics in the cloud, while Ian Evans from OneTrust shared valuable advice on how to overcome today’s most common security & privacy challenges.
• The closing keynote was delivered by Tim Rains from AWS, weighing in on the myths & opportunities of cloud security.

If you weren't able to attend or would like a refresher, you can view the CSA Summit presentations on Youtube here.

2019 was the first time that a CSA Summit was held as part of the Tel Aviv Cyberweek, but we are sure that the combination of an excellent venue, vast variety of topics and the attractive audience of Cyberweek, are a recipe for making this event a regular at Cyberweek!