Forcepoint CEO Manny Rivelo onstage at RSA Conference. Image courtesy of RSA Conference, copyright RSA Conference.

SAN FRANCISCO – Technological advances in recent decades have allowed us to live out our days in a constant state of digital connection, from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep again. But all of this advancement and growth, is unstoppable and "comes with a great cost," Forcepoint CEO Manny Rivelo said during his keynote address at RSA Conference.

The most expensive consequence is the business of cybercrime, which is projected to cost organizations $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

"If you compare this to a GDP, it will be the third-largest economy in the world behind the U.S. and China. So it is good business to have. It is not going away," Rivelo said

The other cost of increasing technological growth is the cybersecurity industry's massive talent shortage. "There are 3.5 million jobs and growing, requesting security professionals every single day," he explained.

On top of that, the security community has become a bowl of "alphabet soup" full of three- and four-letter acronyms like XDR, SBOM, MDR, SASE, ZTNA, etc., that most people struggle to conceptualize, which isn't helping any of the aforementioned issues.

"The world has become just way, way too complex," Rivelo said. "We need to fix this."

The answer to this complexity, he said, lies in rearchitecting around the principle of zero trust.

"If you think about the architectures of the past, these perimeter-based, rigid architectures which used to work, [they] no longer work. The users aren't in the office as often as they used to be, and the applications are out there, so we hairpin the traffic back," Rivelo explained.

But this is typically done with implicit security and usually creates a poor user experience. "It just has to change — and has to change at a fast pace," he urged.

With the analyst community and the broader industry coming together in a rare effort to "gel around the new architecture or new way of driving your business," there couldn't be a better time to start thinking differently, Rivelo said.

"If you haven't adopted [zero trust] yet, it is a great solution for some of the attacks that are happening today," he added. It works by separating the user, the location, and the device from the application and data, creating a zone that only allows a connection to take place through explicit trust.

The fundamental principle of zero trust is to never trust and always verify. This creates a perimeter-less environment, Rivelo explained. "Your architecture needs to take this into consideration," he added.

Another major difference in rearchitecting around zero trust is "moving the stack of equipment that you have, services at the edge of your network, and shipping them to the cloud" through secure access service edge (SASE) frameworks.

Adopting zero trust architectures and its overarching principle is necessary and inevitable, Rivelo said.

"We have to be able to take this technology and change the product base. We have to adopt [zero trust] or we will be left behind because the innovation that is driving the digital economy, and what our organizations are doing and we are doing personally requires change," he concluded.