Best of LinkedIn: ICT & Tech Insights CW 13/ 14

00:00:00: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about ICT and tech insights from CW-XIII & XIV.

00:00:09: Frennes supports ICT enterprises in the form of delivering precise ICT market and pricing intelligence that analyst subscriptions and existing databases cannot provide – you can find more info.

00:00:22: So welcome to the deep dive everyone.

00:00:25: We were skipping The Usual Pleasantries today because we have a lot of ground to cover.

00:00:28: our mission is To basically cut right through the noise at the last two weeks on LinkedIn and analyze the top ICT and tech trends that you actually need to care about.

00:00:38: yeah, And i think right off the bat if you've been reading the discourse lately You probably noticed That the tone has fundamentally shifted.

00:00:44: We're really no longer just talking about pure blue sky innovation anymore.

00:00:47: Right, it's gotten a lot more grounded Exactly!

00:00:49: It is all about execution under pressure right now.

00:00:51: things like resilience compliance and having a truly scalable architecture Those aren't just IT headaches anymore.

00:00:58: they are the new competitive differentiators.

00:01:01: Yeah, and we're gonna move through a few really critical clusters of insights today to unpack that.

00:01:06: We'll look at the shift from being a cost center to a strategic investment.

00:01:12: resilience as a literal system requirement The heavy hand-of regulation AI moving deep into core operations And finally...the hidden infrastructure constraints powering

00:01:22: all this.

00:01:23: Is it a heavy lineup?

00:01:24: But..it all connects perfectly.

00:01:26: It really does.

00:01:27: Okay let's unpack this first theme The transition from cost center to strategic investment.

00:01:33: Because there is this massive paradox in enterprise tech right now, companies are just throwing money at new tools buying more software but somehow getting less secure.

00:01:42: It's totally counterintuitive But the data backs it up.

00:01:44: Mark Hughes shares some really interesting insights on This.

00:01:46: recently he pointed out that the average organization Is now managing something like eighty three distinct security solutions.

00:01:53: wait

00:01:53: eighty-three

00:01:54: yes Eighty-three spread across twenty nine different vendors.

00:01:57: That's

00:01:57: insane, right?

00:01:59: And his point is that this kind of fragmentation isn't actually security It's a structural vulnerability.

00:02:04: You've got all these disparate tools that don't talk to each other efficiently.

00:02:07: So isn't this like putting eighty three different locks on your front door But none of your roommates agree on who holds the master key?

00:02:14: The door is secure, but you can't even get out in a fire.

00:02:16: That's the perfect analogy!

00:02:18: And yeah it IS an IT problem on this surface.

00:02:21: But PremkumarAS made an excellent argument that goes way deeper.

00:02:26: He said the real cyber risk looking ahead to twenty-twenty six isn't missing some technical framework.

00:02:32: It's leadership misalignment.

00:02:33: Ah

00:02:34: so its people problems at very top.

00:02:36: Completely Think about If the board, the CIO and the

00:02:39: C.I.O.,

00:02:40: are totally fragmented on who owns what risk attackers.

00:02:43: they're just going to exploit that gap.

00:02:44: if there's no unified ownership your eighty-three tools won't save you.

00:02:47: Yeah because by the time the c-suite figures out Who is supposed make a call?

00:02:52: The attackers have already laterally moved through the network.

00:02:55: But it's interesting Because this leadership shift Is actively being forced right now By financial incentives Specifically Cyber insurance.

00:03:05: Oh, absolutely the insurance market is basically acting as a regulator.

00:03:09: Yeah

00:03:09: Manuel Pichlato shared some wild data on this.

00:03:13: cyber insurance actually covers ninety two percent of reported potential losses right

00:03:17: now.

00:03:18: Wow ninety-two percent yep.

00:03:19: But here's what catch.

00:03:20: seventy six percent Of those insured companies had to actively increase their security investments just qualify for the coverage in the first place.

00:03:28: So the CFO is essentially forcing the CIO and the CISO to get their act together because they need the insurance policy.

00:03:35: Exactly,

00:03:36: it's money driving the alignment.

00:03:38: And if we connect this alignment with new reality of threat landscape It leads us into our second theme Resilience as a system requirement.

00:03:46: Because once leadership finally on same page They have face really uncomfortable truth

00:03:51: Which is that preventing attacks entirely, Is basically a pipe dream now.

00:03:55: You have to shift your focus To operating through the disruption

00:03:59: Right.

00:03:59: Wendy Whitmore shared a stat That frankly blew my mind Eighty-six percent of incident response cases Now involve disruption Not just data theft.

00:04:08: Yeah they don't want you're data anymore.

00:04:10: They wanna break operations

00:04:11: Precisely And Rizwan Sheikh brought up a chilling Real-world example of this.

00:04:17: You know Stryker, the massive medical technology company?

00:04:20: Sure they make hospital beds surgical equipment all that.

00:04:23: yeah

00:04:23: so They got hit in Ireland.

00:04:25: But it wasn't ransomware where someone says you know pay us or we leak your data.

00:04:29: It was wiper malware.

00:04:31: Oh man just pure destruction

00:04:33: completely.

00:04:34: The goal wasn't a ransom.

00:04:35: the goal Was to permanently erase the data and physically halt the production

00:04:40: lines.

00:04:40: if We connect this to the bigger picture makes total sense.

00:04:42: unfortunately Woodley B. Prusall noted that in a single quarter they track two thousand, two hundred and eighty-seven ransomware victims.

00:04:50: That volume is just staggering

00:04:52: It IS.

00:04:53: But it's because Ransomware is a highly structured business model.

00:04:56: now Its ransomware as the service And to get paid quickly They have to inflict The maximum amount of operational pain.

00:05:03: but

00:05:03: wait if we Just assume We're gonna Get breached doesn't that feel like waving the white flag?

00:05:07: Like shouldn't we still be trying To keep them out.

00:05:09: its not waving A white flag at all.

00:05:11: it's engineering for reality.

00:05:14: Helen, you and Joe Peterson have been talking a lot about this concept called resops resilience operations.

00:05:19: Resops?

00:05:20: Okay how does that differ from standard security?

00:05:22: it shifts the focus.

00:05:24: instead of obsessing over protecting every individual technical asset You engineer the system to ensure that the critical business services just keep running no matter what part Of The Network goes down.

00:05:35: so your isolating the core business functions From the blast radius

00:05:38: exactly and Mukesh Pande emphasize That This Requires really specific architecture, things like immutable backups and tested automated recovery processes.

00:05:49: If your backup can't be deleted by an attacker you can

00:05:52: recover.".

00:05:52: Right because an immutable back-up by definition cannot be altered even if the attacker has admin credentials.

00:05:59: but here's a thing about this shift to resilience.

00:06:02: it isn't just a best practice that you can opt into anymore.

00:06:05: governments are literally forcing me issue which brings us regulation as a design constraint.

00:06:13: Yeah, regulatory volatility is absolutely the new baseline.

00:06:16: you can't escape it.

00:06:17: Arthur S put this really well.

00:06:19: he pointed to the SEC disclosure rules in U.S along with NIS-II and DORA in Europe.

00:06:25: they have completely dismantled the illusion that we're ever going.

00:06:31: It's true.

00:06:31: You can't just build a software product and then try to staple compliance onto it right before you launch.

00:06:36: Compliance has to be embedded into the system architecture from day one,

00:06:39: And it gets really complicated when you look at the physical world.

00:06:42: Vitaliy Bolivak and Yannis Ioenides shared very practical example regarding NIS-II.

00:06:47: under new directive we need total operational technology or OT asset visibility which

00:06:53: is incredibly difficult on factory floor

00:06:56: Exactly.

00:06:56: You can't just check a box on a spreadsheet, you need actual tools like they mentioned the Siemens Industrial Asset Hub integrated with ServiceNow Just to physically see what PLCs and machines are connected to your network

00:07:10: Because if don't know it's there then you're legally liable when it gets breached.

00:07:15: But let me ask you a provocative question here Are we regulating ourselves into a corner?

00:07:21: Like, is Europe just creating mountains of red tape while other regions are moving fast and innovating.

00:07:27: That's the exact debate happening right now.

00:07:30: Marcus Fletch brought up a really sharp comparison on this.

00:07:33: He pointed out that US is treating cybersecurity as strategic power deeply tied to technological dominance so they're actively removing regulatory barriers

00:07:42: Basically clearing their runway for tech companies.

00:07:45: Meanwhile, he argues that Europe risks overregulating.

00:07:48: They are turning cybersecurity into a bureaucratic check-the-box process which could really stifle their ability to compete in emerging fields like quantum computing and AI...

00:07:58: Which is the perfect segue?

00:07:59: honestly because

00:08:00: A.I.,

00:08:01: is the ultimate wildcard throwing massive wrench onto all these new compliance frameworks?

00:08:06: This our fourth theme – AI moving into core operations!

00:08:10: Here's where it gets really interesting.

00:08:11: It does.

00:08:12: Oka and Yildiz highlighted a huge shift, we all know large language models right?

00:08:16: Right But they are no longer just chat bots that write emails for you.

00:08:21: They're evolving into operators.

00:08:23: Yeah ,they can plan investigations .They actually call APIs And modify configurations on the fly.

00:08:28: Exactly!

00:08:29: They take action not generating text.

00:08:32: It kind of feels like hiring an invisible intern giving them the CEO security badge Just letting them run loose in your network.

00:08:39: That's a terrifying way to put it, but yeah.

00:08:41: It's accurate.

00:08:42: Matthew Rosenquist and Francis Odom have been sounding the alarm on this.

00:08:46: they call it agentic AI And they warn that it completely breaks traditional identity in access management models

00:08:52: because Traditional I am assumes a human is sitting at a keyboard.

00:08:55: right

00:08:56: exactly?

00:08:57: you give a Human permissions based on their role But if you have an AI agent doing tasks for you?

00:09:03: It inherits those excessive permissions.

00:09:06: And Odom noted that we could see an estimated one point three billion AI agents operating by twenty-twenty eight billion with a B. Yes, so non human identities are about to become the single largest attack surface in enterprise tech.

00:09:20: Okay To make this really visceral for you listening I have to bring up this terrifying deep fake story That Jane Franklin shared.

00:09:26: This happened at The Engineering firm Erup.

00:09:28: Oh, I read about this.

00:09:30: It's wild!

00:09:31: It's out of a movie.

00:09:32: so A finance employee gets invited to a video call with his CFO and several other colleagues.

00:09:37: He joins the call Sees them hears their voices And they tell him to authorize a series Of transactions.

00:09:42: he does it right because why wouldn't you

00:09:44: write?

00:09:45: He authorizes twenty five million dollars in Transactions and was only later that he realized every single person on That video Call except for Him Was a synthetic deep fake.

00:09:54: The entire call is AI generated.

00:09:56: yes

00:09:56: The video, the audio everything in real time.

00:10:00: Trust itself is literally being weaponized.

00:10:03: how do you defend against that with a firewall?

00:10:05: You can't!

00:10:05: You

00:10:06: really can.

00:10:06: and if you synthesize everything we've just talked about running billions of autonomous AI agents defending against real-time deep fakes resops to any of that...you need an immense amount computing power and flawless cryptography.

00:10:20: which brings us our final theme The physical and quantum infrastructure powering it all.

00:10:26: Yeah,

00:10:26: Joaquin Rodriguez Antibon had this mind-bending perspective on this.

00:10:30: He said, we need to stop thinking of data centers as IT infrastructure.

00:10:34: They aren't.

00:10:34: they are energy assets with servers inside them.

00:10:37: that

00:10:37: is a profound way To reframe it right.

00:10:39: the megawatt Is The new unit Of value.

00:10:41: if you don't have access to the physical power grid your entire AI strategy?

00:10:45: Is basically dead in the water.

00:10:46: and This infrastructure race isn't just about getting enough power to run today's ai.

00:10:51: It's About laying the groundwork for quantum computing.

00:10:54: Philip Intellura recently highlighted the UK's massive, two billion pound quantum investment strategy.

00:11:00: Two billion pounds is a serious commitment?

00:11:03: It is and Young Goats just shared news about the first commercial sale of a quantum computer to a private enterprise.

00:11:09: so this is not just theoretical lab science anymore.

00:11:12: it's entering the commercial market.

00:11:14: okay but what does quantum mean for everyday security right now like for the IT professionals?

00:11:19: listening to this

00:11:20: today Dr.

00:11:23: Corey O'Mara pointed out that Google has already developed a quantum algorithm... ...that is theoretically capable of cracking blockchain encryption.

00:11:31: Wait,

00:11:32: already?

00:11:32: Yes!

00:11:33: And Jan Michalon warned about a tactic called Harvest Now Decrypt Later.

00:11:39: Attackers are stealing heavily encrypted data today.

00:11:41: They know they can't read it right now But they're just sitting on it waiting for Quantum Hardware to mature so they can decrypt tomorrow.

00:11:49: That is incredibly concerning, so if you have intellectual property encrypted with current standards and someone steals the file it's just a ticking clock until its public.

00:11:58: Exactly!

00:11:58: Organizations have to start auditing their cryptographic exposure immediately.

00:12:02: You can't wait till quantum computers are sitting in every data center?

00:12:05: Man, we have covered a massive amount of ground today.

00:12:09: We went from the sheer vulnerability of having eighty-three different security tools to the necessity of resops dealing with NASS II compliance on factory floors The absolute chaos of billions of AI agents and deep fakes all the way to power grids in quantum decryption.

00:12:25: It's a lot but I want to leave everyone with final somewhat provocative thought to ponder.

00:12:29: Juanavelin V recently made an observation about Anthropics new AI model.

00:12:35: Oh,

00:12:36: yeah.

00:12:36: What did he say about it?

00:12:37: He noted that the model can find and exploit software vulnerabilities faster than human teams can patch them.

00:12:43: Wow!

00:12:44: Faster-than-humans

00:12:45: Yes.

00:12:46: So if we connect this to the bigger picture We've painted today what happens To our digital trust when these autonomous AI agents eventually gain access to The raw processing power of quantum

00:12:56: computing?

00:12:57: It becomes an arms race at machine speed.

00:12:59: Exactly...it's no longer just a technology question At that point..It is a survival Question for the Enterprise.

00:13:04: That is a heavy, but necessary thought to end on.

00:13:07: If you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:13:10: also check out our other editions on cloud defense tech digital products and services artificial intelligence sustainability in green ICT Defense Tech And HealthTech.

00:13:19: Thank You so much for listening.