Tech Interviews

Data is the lifeblood of today's enterprise. Making sure we secure it properly is critical to modern business. We cannot afford data to leave our control in any way that puts our sensitive and important information at risk. In a world of increased data focussed regulations where data, privacy and trust are so critical in our business relationships, the impact of a data breach can be significant. How do we address this challenge? How do we empower our use of data and keep it secure and under our control? That is the subject of this Tech Interviews Episode with my guest Justin Bortnick of Digital Guardian. Justin is a long-time data security practitioner and uses that experience to help simplify the often-complex issues that come with data security. I take this opportunity to learn from Justin’s experience and build an understanding of modern data loss prevention techniques and how technology from industry leaders like Digital Guardian can help you to effectively enable your data security strategy. Join u

In our last show, we talked about the idea of cyber fit and cyber protection and how, as our demands and the threats to our data change, so must our approach to security and protection. We continue that theme this week as we look at the changing world in which we operate and how that is driving the need to think not only about protection but also resilience, digital resilience. Joining me this week is Edwin Weijdema a global technologist at Veeam. This idea of resilience is key when it comes to security, while much of the security discussion is focussed on prevention, and rightly so, it is important to realise that even the best-laid plans cannot always stop a cyber security incident. When that happens, what is the plan? The way we operate as businesses, our reliance on technology in all walks of life, as well as the ever-evolving cyber threat, have all changed the way we need to look at our security plans and it's crucial that we also know not only how to protect ourselves, but handle it when the worst ha

Cyber Security continues to be top of the list of IT challenges most enterprises face. While our businesses continue to evolve in how we use technology, how we work, and how we consume data, so the threat continues to evolve. In the face of this challenge we need to think carefully about how we deliver our security strategy, these modern threats need a modern approach. Earlier this year, I was asked to present at an event hosted by Acronis, this event focussed on taking a new approach to security. The contents of that day stuck with me and I wanted to share with you some of the information from that event. To help me to do that is one of my co-presenters Acronis’s Candid Wuest. Join us as we discuss. • What is Cyber Fit and Cyber Protection? • No single technology will protect you from everything • The holistic approach • Enjoy the SAPAS • Security is complex, but its management shouldn’t be • Having a security business continuity plan • Some tips for getting cyber fit • A little more about the Acronis

Tech Interviews has come out of semi-retirement for a short series of shows looking at another range of Enterprise IT topics. First up, is an old familiar subject of the evolving world of storage, specifically object storage. Why is object storage increasingly becoming part of the everyday enterprise data platform conversation? Is it better suited to modern ways of working, that need data portability at scale? Does it fit better with our modern application development processes, such as containers? To find out I am joined on this episode by field CTO and co-founder of Scality Brad King. Join us as we discuss • What is object Storage • Why object and not just block and file? • Is it time for more object in the enterprise? • The value of metadata • The object use cases • About Scality • Artesca bringing object to the smaller use case The case for object storage as a primary platform for your data continues to grow and there are some use cases it meets extremely well. Although it may not be right every time

The demands on business IT continue to evolve rapidly, we need our technology to respond to change, to be deployed quickly, provide scale and flexibility. This is changing the way applications are developing with approaches such as low/no-code and serverless becoming increasingly common. On this week's Tech Interviews we look at these new development approaches and ask what does low-code and serverless mean for you and your enterprise? Joining me to discuss this is Mike Williams, founder, and CTO at BuildLab. We discuss. Trends driving change. What is low code and serverless? Don't get hung up on how, focus on the what It isn't for everyone How do you define the right route for you? What makes a good project? This is not a silver bullet BuildLab, building more with less. I found this a really useful introduction to a technology and approach that is becoming more commonplace. I like Mike's approach, using these technologies to allow the focus to be on outcomes while appreciating that this doesn't work for

When you talk to any business today and ask them about their top strategic IT goals using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help the business be “better” is often right at the top. It is not a surprise, is it? But not all in the AI garden is necessarily rosy, there are still many, including some high-profile, incidents of major AI/ML projects going bad, with millions of $’s spent for little or no return. Why is that? What does it mean for AI in the enterprise now and in the future? That is what we explore on this week’s podcast as I am joined by Slater Victoroff CTO at indico. He shares thoughts on the current state of intelligence in the enterprise, sharing thoughts on how to avoid project failure, the importance of quality data, how to avoid the data “charlatan” as well as providing some top tips on getting your AI investment right. Join us as we chat about. • AI is not the answer to everything, but it is great at some things. • AI adoption is immature. • Not an android more a bionic arm.

The last 12 months or so have seen the biggest shift in working practices in many generations, the restrictions imposed around the world because of COVID has forced us all to look at the way we operate as both businesses and people. A key part of our ability to survive the last 12 months was, of course, technology, collaboration tools particularly have had a significant role to play, allowing us to easily communicate with each other and our customers, to share information and data, to meet up in daily online meetings to ensure we still had some level of “face to face” communications. Without those tools, the challenges of day-to-day operations would have been much harder. Collaboration technology of course is not something that businesses just consume, there are vendors who build the tools that have allowed so many of us to adapt during this time of massive change. What has the last 12 months looked like for them? What have they learned? What does that mean for us and the future of work moving forward? Jo

"Transformation" is a phrase we hear a lot, in fact, it almost feels like everyone in the world has some kind of transformation project going on. In reality, over the last 12 months or so, we all have, we have changed the way we operate as businesses and as people. But what does it mean to go through a transformation as a business? What is transformation? How do we do it well? That's the question I ask this week with my guest Chris Gherardini. Chris is founder of Turnkey Technologies a US-based consultancy business, focussed on helping companies deliver business transformation projects. Chris started Turnkey 27 years ago after cutting his technology teeth in an accountancy practice, so comes to this conversation with a lot of experience. Join us as we discuss. The four pillars of transformation. What drives change? Seeing transformation as an opportunity. Things to avoid in your approach. The importance of vision. It is a cultural thing. Top tips for getting transformation right. We are all constantly

Data is everywhere and part of every strategic business conversation how do we use it better? How do get more value from it? How do we truly make it a business asset? The answers to those questions are driving a whole new way of thinking in the way we deliver IT services to a business. New workflows, new development architectures and exploiting technology shifts to try to break the shackles that traditional infrastructure often enforces on how we can use data to meet our business needs. This has led to a steady evolution, virtualisation, cloud and architectures such as serverless which allows us to run our code and services independent of any underlying platform. What if we could achieve that same flexibility for our data? If your business could use its data without restriction what would that allow you to do? That was the thesis of a blog post that I read recently from David Flynn the CEO of my guest Doug Fallstrom’s company Hammerspace and is the topic for this weeks show. Join us as we discuss. • Why w

The IT landscape is changing extremely quickly as we embrace new ways of working, new technologies, adopt the cloud and have ever more distributed workforces, all demanding increased access to our services and data. These changes are being embraced by modern business as they see technology as a way of driving improved outcomes and new opportunities. However, one thing that often does not change in our business is networking, not only the technology behind it but more importantly the processes we have in place to operationally support our enterprises rapidly changing demands. What then, do we need to change, why and how? That’s what I chat about with this week’s guest Andrew Wertkin, Andrew is the Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCat a company specialising in the management, control and automation of DNS, DHCP and IP address management or DDI (an acronym of acronyms), join us as we look at how the network has changed, how not changing our operational approach is inhibiting us and how to plan for better network m

More effective data analytics is part of most organisations plans, we see the ability to extract useful information that helps us make better business decisions as a crucial part of digital transformation into a more data-driven enterprise. However, perhaps it is not as easy as it sounds, many enterprises have had cause to re-evaluate their shift after their analytics projects failed to deliver the value they had hoped for, but why? This week’s podcast was inspired by a whitepaper I was sent, produced by Analytics company Aginity, the paper was entitled “Forget about AI and ML” which, while a provocative title, offered some interesting insights as it discusses how delivering an analytics project is about much more than technology and has much wider requirements from culture, to who we involve, to how we ensure we have the appropriate data to operate with. This is a topic that intrigues me, so joining me to discuss this in more detail is CEO of Aginity, Rick Hall, he has worked in the data analytics industry

As the world of technology and data continues to evolve, so must the solutions that we use to build our enterprise technology stacks, which of course means new versions of products and services from our leading vendors. At the end of February 2021 Cloud Data Management specialists Veeam released Version 11 of their highly successful availability suite. But what does that mean for those of us who deliver, manage and maintain enterprise infrastructure? Because while the world we operate in continues to evolve are vendors listening to the challenges that their customers have? Understanding evolving trends and how they are likely to impact both them and their customers? In this episode, I'm joined by Veeam Senior Global Technologists and regular Tech Interviews contributors, Michael Cade and Anthony Spiteri, as I put those questions to them as we explore some of the key announcements from Veeam's V11 launch. We discuss what was behind some of those design decisions and how are these developments helping to solv

Networks are at the very heart of the way business operates in the modern world, with so much of what we do driven digitally the need for us to connect our devices with our applications and data is central to almost everything the enterprise does to function. For something so central to our operations it’s interesting how little we think about it, networks are like a utility, you turn on the tap water comes out, you flick a switch electricity flows, you hook up your device you expect to get connected and in many enterprises, we are as confident of our network as we are any other utility. But should we be? How sure are we that our networks are as robust and resilient as the modern enterprise requires? Is that confidence misplaced? That is something I’ve been considering recently after been sent the latest Network Field Report from network management specialists Auvik. Joining me on this week’s podcast is Steve Petryschuk a Network management expert at Auvik to discuss what they discovered in their survey, h

The entire way we look at delivering IT in the enterprise is changing, the environment we operate in, the operational expectation of our business, how we interact with customers, the speed with which we can react to change are all demanding new ways of architecting and operating our IT systems. Of course, this has led to rapid innovations across enterprise technology from the adoption of the cloud, the way we deliver applications (Kubernetes for example) through to the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to a point where all of these are now common conversations around the technologist's table. The innovations have led to new views of how we see operations as increasingly we adopt DevOps, SecOps, DataOps and of course AIOps. The risk of course with this kind of shift is hype, getting wrapped up with the excitement but finding our changes never really delivered value. How do we avoid that trap and ensure if we are going to use more intelligence and analytics in our opera

Compliance is a serious discussion point in most organisations, as the use of our information has become an increasingly everyday part of the way we operate our lives, ensuring organisations take care of it appropriately is critical to the privacy and security of our "digital selves". However much of the compliance technology organisations rely on is based on understanding our digital footprint, to ensure the person making the transaction is authorised to be doing it and that transaction is legal and correct. That's great when the use of technology is commonplace, but what when it isn't, how do you examine a digital footprint when there isn't one? On this week’s show, I am joined by Shubhradeep Nandi, co-founder at PiChain Labs a company looking at how they can use leading-edge technology trends to start to deal with the global problem of reducing fraudulent transactions in a world where technology is not always easily accessible and digital footprints are harder to identify. We discuss. Fintech and Regte

It is 2021 and Tech Interviews is back with new shows looking at all aspects of enterprise IT. For this first show of the year, we do what all good podcasts like to do and take a look ahead to 2021 and what we expect to see in the technology space. The topic of our look ahead this week is the storage industry, as I catch up with some of my fellow delegates from a recent industry event we attended, Storage Field Day 21. What of Storage Field Day 21? What did it have to offer? What were the key themes? And what did it tell us about current storage industry trends? That is the topic of this first show of the year as I join up with three of my fellow delegates to hear what they thought and their key “takeaways” from the event. I am joined by Barry Coombs, Jason Collier and Max Mortillaro to discuss the key moments from another excellent Storage Field Day Event and hopefully apply some context to what we heard. Thanks for listening. Full show notes are here :- https://wp.me/p4IvtA-1Pt

2020 has been one heck of a year, for all kinds of reasons, many of them of course less than positive. The world has been turned on its head, with lots of the things we took for granted as our “normal” behaviour no longer allowed or drastically changed. 2020 has also put a strain on the global community in unprecedented ways, straining healthcare, education, and business. The technology industry has been at the forefront of much of the global response, not just in business, but across all areas of life tools like Zoom and Teams moved from corporate apps to an everyday part of people’s lives, a way to do business, yes, but also a way to stay in touch, have get-togethers, quizzes and of course of ways of carrying on education from the youngest to those studying for advanced qualifications. However, this move to a more technologically driven world, also highlighted real disparity while for many they have plentiful access to technology and are tech literate, for swathes of the population that is not true. It w

As our technology stack continues to evolve and the demands on our IT systems grow, we need to become increasingly smarter with the way we deliver it. Increasingly we want all elements of our technology infrastructure to be software-driven, we want intelligence about performance so we can use it to drive and automate change. However, one area that is often not considered is the area of networking. Networking is at the very heart of modern infrastructure but often we still see very traditional approaches to how it is designed and deployed. Why is that and how do we change it? That is the topic of this week’s show as I catch up with Rich Martin, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at intelligent network automation specialists Intential. Join us as we discuss. • The networking bottleneck in IT automation. • Why can’t we “spin-up” networking? • How do we modernise when there a lack of strategy, skills and tools? • The COVID effect. • The problems with a traditional approach. • The cloud networking quandary! •

As we have covered many times on this podcast, data is a core asset for modern enterprises, how we gather it and use it is amongst the hottest topics for enterprise IT decision-makers. Of course, along with that comes how we protect and secure that data, making sure we do not lose it for technical, commercial and regulatory reasons is vital. However, there is one area of data, that in my experience gets far less consideration and that is erasure. There is always a lifecycle when it comes to data, it is created, it is used and then when it has served its production purpose there is the question of “what do we do with it now?”. That is the subject of this weeks show as I’m joined by Paul Katzoff, CEO of WhiteCanyon Software a company specialising in the secure erasure of data. Paul brings a great perspective to understanding the challenge and the things you need to consider when you include erasure as part of your data strategy. Join us as we discuss. • While erasure is not new the challenge continues to ev

Security is a constant challenge for organisations big or small whether it is the security of our systems, network or data the problem continues to get more complex. Our complexity doesn’t stop there as increasingly more enterprises look to embrace Internet of things (IoT) projects our challenge grows significantly. But why, why does IoT present such a peculiar challenge? This is an interesting question and a major security challenge. On this week’s show, I’m joined by AgilePQ CEO Paul Clayson as we discuss both the IoT problem as well as some of those approaches to addressing it, including the innovative and elegant approach Paul’s company is taking. An approach not only looking at solving the IoT issues of today but also is looking ahead to how they can use the same approach to help crack one of the security industries biggest conundrums, quantum computing. Join us as we go all quantum and discuss. • The IoT security challenge. • The inadequacy of today’s approaches. • Is the IoT security risk real? • W