March rundown: RSAC warnings and Arm's AGI CPU

In March the clocks change, Spring begins to show its face, and many companies enter their next financial quarter. But in cybersecurity, no such rays of sunshine are to be found.

In the past week, speakers from across the cybersecurity industry came together at RSAC Conference to warn about the latest threats facing businesses. Some warned that just as AI agents are becoming an opportunity for leaders, they’re also becoming a potential threat vector.

Also this month, Arm has unveiled its first in-house chip, the Arm AGI CPU. What does it mean, and is this a win for UK tech?

In this episode Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to unpack some of the biggest news items from throughout March.

Highlights

"AI was obviously a big talking point at the at the conference this week, it seems cyber security professionals have their work cut out for them. At the very least, there's an opportunity here for cyber professionals to lead AI adoption globally. That was the key takeaway from the opening keynote by Hugh Thompson, RSAC executive chairman. There's a lot to be said about the fact that cyber professionals are now doing a lot of firefighting."

"You can't even give these entities training. They may be behaving in a way that is similar to how a human would behave, but you can't give something that doesn't have human intellect training, which I guess makes them potentially even more dangerous."

"It's kind of a move away from the IP-first approach that Arm has taken for all this time. But also it's not moving Arm into direct competition in the GPU market which, as we know, as we've covered, is heavily saturated, particularly by the likes of Nvidia and AMD, but also Intel at a data center level,"

Footnotes

• Safe AI adoption rests on cybersecurity professionals, says RSAC chairman
• Enterprises need to think of agents as ‘digital co-workers’ – and that means implementing the same security safeguards
• Observability will be key to agentic AI safety, says Microsoft Security exec
• The key risks security teams face in 2026
• Tenable co-CEO Stephen Vintz says enterprises need to get serious about tackling the AI “responsibility gap”
• Systems are deterministic, people are probabilistic – AI is both, and that's a headache for cyber teams

Subscribe 

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Join us on LinkedIn