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Opening Keynote Presentation by Tom Burns, SVP, Dell EMC Networking and Solutions Continual Innovation Through Continual Reinvention The second day opened with a keynote speech from DellEMC’s head of networking, Tom Burns. He talked about how enterprises are undertaking a digital transformation, prompting continual innovation from the IT industry. For him, the future means machine learning, AI, billions of connected devices, robotics, IoT, it all means heavy disruption. As a proof point, he said Microsoft says 15% of its AzureStack traffic is IoT-related. The IT transformation means infrastructure needs to run both traditional and cloud-ready apps, while workforce transformation sees multiple devices per individual, and in future the office won’t Read more

The first day opened with a keynote from Prof. David Cheriton, of Stanford University. Also an entrepreneur and investor, he started by describing his investment history. He said he’s been lucky. Among his investments is Apstra, where he is chief scientist. Why Apstra? It’s helps customer the cost of running networks. “I couldn’t go to my care home without doing something about the problem of the cost of running enterprise networks,” he said. He said his criteria for investment are to: seek opportunities that add technical value to the world not be ruled by time to market look for a great team put eggs in small number of baskets and Read more

By Alan Zeichick Location-as-a-Service (LaaS) isn’t a new concept. There are times when you simply want to know where a physical object is hiding. Perhaps it’s your car keys. Perhaps it’s a misrouted suitcase, an overnight package, a shipping pallet, a stolen cargo container, or Police Car #54. Where are you? For the first use case, lost car keys, there’s Tile, a battery-powered gadget that works within the 30-meter radius of a Bluetooth signal. For the other cases, there are several providers, but arguably the most interesting is PoLTE, a startup based near Dallas. I spent a lot of time talking to the company’s CEO, Ed Chao, at the recent Read more

By Alan Zeichick and Mark Fox The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) understands the threat posted by bad apples on the Internet: Long-standing threats are evolving as nation-states, terrorists, individual criminals, transnational criminal organizations, and other malicious actors move their activities into the digital world. Enabling the delivery of essential services—such as electricity, finance, transportation, water, and health care—through cyberspace also introduces new vulnerabilities and opens the door to potentially catastrophic consequences from cyber incidents. The growing number of Internet-connected devices and reliance on global supply chains further complicates the national and international risk picture.” That’s part of the introduction to the long-awaited Cybersecurity Strategy report, released by the Read more

By Alan Zeichick and Mark Fox The deadline for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming up fast. Says the European Union: “Enforcement date: 25 May 2018 – at which time those organizations in non-compliance may face heavy fines.” Bad news: Companies aren’t ready. Neither are regulators. Remember that the GDPR doesn’t only apply to European entities, says the regulation. “The GDPR not only applies to organisations located within the EU but it will also apply to organisations located outside of the EU if they offer goods or services to, or monitor the behaviour of, EU data subjects. It applies to all companies processing and holding the Read more

By Alan Zeichick and Mark Fox Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3. Security analysts. Incident responders. Hunters. The industry tends to toss those terms around when describing the cybersecurity specialists that staff a Security Operations Center (SOC). What exactly do they mean? And how standardized are those descriptions? The short answer is that the job tiers are fairly common across SOCs, but it’s by no means a standard. A job posting I found at an employment site, for example, describes: Security Operations Center Technician, Tier 1: The Tier 1 Security Operations Center Analyst will act as the first responder to account/system attacks to determine threat vectors and then provide initial Read more