Jason Buffington .com

The Official Cybersecurity Summit is one of my favorite single-stage conference series, especially this year with four Data Protection vendors showing on the expo floor – with special kudos to Rubrik and Commvault for some really interesting discussions on Cyber Resilience and more.

video transcript

Cybersecurity Summit came to Dallas last week, with several hundred CISOs and Information Security professionals in one room. It was really cool to see four different backup vendors all on the Expo floor and having cyber resilience conversations with the attendees.  Technically, Veeam was not on the expo floor, but they were brought up a few times on main stage, usually framed around “Once the bad actor had breached the Veeam server, then they …” which was interesting to listen to.

The Cybersecurity Summit is one of my favorite single-stage conferences, because they have a rich flow of 10 and 20 minute sessions, mostly given by leaders and implementers just like those in the audience, that file through – along with a few vendor speakers. And since the general session room is next door to a well laid-out expo hall, the coming and going is easy.

Had a great conversation with Rubrik, which as expected had folks in their booth throughout the day. Rubrik was among the first major data protection vendors to pivot the narrative from data protection to cyber-resilience; so that wasn’t surprising. What was interesting was to listen to the conversations around AI rollback. In 2026, those are the two conversations that everyone wants to have right? Cyber resilience and where does AI fit in. In this case, Rubrik already boasts intelligence for determining safe recovery points, but listening to them have front line conversations with decision makers on how they protect AI – and not JUST cybersecurity discussions — that was intriguing. Rubrik also had a solid session on main stage to a CISO audience.

Commvault actually had the most traffic, and not just because they had better swag. Commvault has been talking about a persona they call ResOps … like SecOps, DevOps, etc. And while I’m not personally bought in that that resonates with buyers’ self-defined identities, I really like the idea that resilience has to be foundational and not bolted on. And the more that I talked with the Commvault architect, the more interesting that that change of mindset that the roles responsible for your org’s resilience framework (vision and strategy) the rest of IT is built upon started to stick with me, even if the name doesn’t.  Also, gotta give a shout to the Commvault booth staff, who really were outgoing and proactively engaging with passers by – and that isn’t as common as it ought to be on expo floors.

My point being – it was great to see so many data protection vendors not only having presence and relevance at a cybersecurity exclusive event, but also having unique perspectives that brought insights to the attendees and differentiation even among industry leaders.