The 2019 RSA Conference offers an opportunity to learn about new concepts across all aspects of cybersecurity. One such area is "data gravity," which will be the topic of a session featuring Microsoft's Diana Kelley and Sian John.

"At a high level, data is going to function similar to the physical laws of gravity, so the more data that you get, the more it's going to draw data to itself, but most importantly it's going to draw services and apps to it too," Kelley explains in an interview with Information Security Media Group. "This has really deep meaning in the cloud space, because what are we creating in the cloud? We're creating these massive balls of data gravity."

In their joint presentation at the RSA Conference, Kelley and John will focus on what data gravity means for security operations centers.

"We're getting now in the security world with cloud to that same big data problem we had in the wider IT world, and it's possibly one of the reasons why people are having challenges with building SOCs because of the fact that they need to stitch together these areas of data gravity to gain insights and understand what's going on," John says.

In this interview (see audio link below photo), Kelley and John discuss:

Data gravity and the hybrid cloud; Hot topics at this year's RSA Conference, including blockchain, applied crypto, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence and machine learning; The emerging focus on identity as a core component in a zero trust cybersecurity model.

Kelley is the cybersecurity field CTO at Microsoft and a cybersecurity architect, practitioner, executive adviser and author. She leverages her more than 25 years of cyber risk and security experience to provide advice and guidance to CSOs, CIOs and CISOs.

John is chief security adviser for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the cybersecurity solutions group at Microsoft. She has worked in cybersecurity since 1997. Previously, she worked with the British Houses of Parliament, Ubizen and Symantec. She was awarded an MBE in the Queen's New Year's Honor's List for 2018 for services to cybersecurity.