The Business of Trust: What Steel Patriot Partners Is Watching at RSAC 2026

What Does a Business-First Approach to Cybersecurity Actually Look Like?

At Steel Patriot Partners, the answer is baked into how they introduce themselves. Business owners first. Engineers second. Compliance professionals third. It sounds simple, but in an industry that has spent years leading with frameworks, certifications, and threat intelligence, it represents a genuine reorientation of priorities.

Michael Parisi, Chief Growth Officer at Steel Patriot Partners, makes this point explicitly in a pre-event Brand Spotlight conversation with Marco Ciappelli and Sean Martin of ITSPmagazine ahead of RSAC Conference 2026. Everything the firm does — from its GRC services to its federal compliance engineering and its partner ecosystem — is filtered through a single question: what does this mean for the business? Not for the compliance checklist. Not for the security team's workload. For the business.

It's a distinction that sounds semantic until you realize how many cybersecurity conversations still start from the wrong end of the problem.

Why Do Senior Executives Still Show Up to RSAC — Even When They Don't Want To?

Ask almost any senior security or technology executive whether they're going to RSA Conference and you'll get the same response: an eye roll, a sigh, and then a yes. Parisi noticed this pattern at a healthcare conference he attended the week before recording this conversation. Nearly everyone he ran into — CISOs, CIOs, engineers — gave him the same non-answer when asked if they'd be in San Francisco. They'd be there. They were already tired thinking about it. But they were going.

Why? Because people show up. The conference, for all its noise, remains one of the few places where the right people are in one place at the same time. The conversations that matter — the ones about what's actually working, who you actually trust, what's really happening behind the vendor pitches — those conversations happen in the margins. At the St. Regis at ten in the evening. In the corridor between Moscone buildings. In the garden when someone has stepped away to breathe.

That's where Parisi plans to spend most of his time at RSAC 2026. Not on the show floor. In the in-between spaces where trust gets built and real information gets exchanged.

What Is the 'Fog of Truth' and Why Is It Making Vendor Trust So Hard Right Now?

One of the sharpest observations in this conversation comes when Parisi describes what he calls the fog of truth — a step beyond the fog of war and fog of more that he and his colleagues have discussed in previous conversations. The problem isn't just that there's too much noise in the cybersecurity market. It's that business and security leaders genuinely can no longer determine which vendors are being straight with them.

The result is that conversations at RSAC 2026 will increasingly be peer-to-peer intelligence exchanges. Who tried what in a proof-of-concept and found it actually worked? What individual at which company should you talk to directly — not sales, not a demo, but the person who actually solved the problem? Parisi positions Steel Patriot Partners as exactly the kind of trusted intermediary that makes those connections. If something isn't in their swim lane, they'll tell you — and they'll hand you to someone who can help.

How Are AI Disruption and Institutional Knowledge Becoming a Leadership Crisis?

For the first fifteen minutes of the conversation, no one mentions AI. Parisi notes it himself — probably a record at any cybersecurity event in 2025 or 2026. But when he does bring it up, it's not to talk about threat vectors or automation. It's to talk about people.

The organizations that concern him most aren't the ones trying to figure out how to deploy AI. They're the ones where employees who have spent years building institutional knowledge in federal cybersecurity, compliance, and engineering are now quietly questioning their own futures. The leaders having the most impact are the ones engaged in honest conversations — not panic and not dismissal, but something in between. The train is coming, Parisi says, but that doesn't mean everyone on the platform needs to run.

At RSAC 2026, he expects this to be one of the defining undercurrents of the executive conversations happening away from the booths and the keynotes.

Is 'Good Enough' Security Making a Quiet Comeback Against AI-Native Platforms?

There's another question Parisi expects to hear frequently at RSAC this year: is what I have actually good enough? The established names — the CrowdStrikes, the Palo Alto Networks, the CyberArks — haven't AI-washed everything. That used to feel like a weakness. Increasingly, it looks like a feature. Tried-and-true solutions that organizations have validated, that have real track records, that don't require a leap of faith — those are starting to look attractive again when the alternative is betting on platforms that no one in the organization has actually stress-tested at scale.

Parisi sees this as a natural correction. The cart got out in front of the horse. Smart organizations are pulling back and asking whether their current stack actually serves the business before they chase the next thing. It's a question Steel Patriot Partners is well-positioned to help them answer — from a business perspective first, and a compliance or engineering perspective second.