Last week, I attended Check Point Experience 2014 (CPX2014) in Washington, D.C. Here are some quick highlights from the conference:

• There were around 1400 attendees, up from 650 a mere two years ago.
• Security people cannot properly capitalize VMware either.
• They also use ‘on-premise’ and make people twitch.
• There is some conflation between orchestration and automation, and even confusion on what constitutes one or the other.
• Foreign language translations can be fun! This isn’t a slight against the speakers (I certainly cannot speak their language!), I just think it’s healthy to laugh about these things, especially when the correct word is obvious and the meaning stays intact. If we weren’t always so uptight about things…

There were two more significant lessons I learned at CPX 2014, however.

The first is that Checkpoint has a lot of products that make up what they are calling Software Defined Protection. It’s a neat idea, though some of the products are not GA and hence not usable at this time, leaving the definition somewhat nebulous as far as real world examples go. However, it does define enforcement, control, and management layers (planes) and lays out products that work at each layer, plus pending integration with other tools and standards (a VMware-compatible virtual firewall, REST APIs, etc). Taken together, SDP has the potential to affect design and implementation with an end result not just of increasing security policies, but shortening the gap between malware creation and prevention.
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