02/27/2013 -Security industry professionals have made tremendous headway in developing and improving secure technologies over the past few decades. Creating more sophisticated methods of authentication, combating malware and spam, and battling the threat of cybercrime head-on are just a few of the advancements in the industry lauded by Scott Charney, corporate vice president of trustworthy computing at Microsoft. He spoke on Tuesday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, California.

While security professionals are forced to constantly evaluate the failures and challenges facing the industry, Charney made the case for optimism in the world of secure information technology. He cited increasing market demand for security as a cultural indicator of industry success.

“One of the big challenges is getting social, political, economic, and IT alignment,” said Charney. “When you see markets starting to demand secure development you’ve reached an inflection point, and the result will be more secure technology.”

In addition to a ubiquitous demand for more secure development, Charney said the industry has made advancement in three other key areas: trusted hardware, more robust IDs, and new delivery models for big data.

“More and more you see companies and individuals embracing cloud services. It’s a different delivery model for software and it provides those who make software available with additional checkpoints to make sure the security levels of the software we’ve distributed is where you want it to be,” noted Charney.

However, the Microsoft executive did concede that operational security still requires significant improvement as threats become increasingly sophisticated. “We all know we need better operational security. We are moving from a world where we can just do prevention and response to a world where we have to do prevention, detection, containment, and response,” he said. “This is the start of a process that sets us up for the future. It can be tedious and it can be difficult but it is necessary.”

Charney concluded that, overall, the work of security industry professionals will lead to the creation and improvement of more advanced solutions in the future. “I am optimistic that with the people in this room…we can fundamentally move to a more secure world,” he said.