Best of LinkedIn: ICT & Tech Insights CW 37/ 38

00:00:00: This Steam dive is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about ICT and tech insights in CW-Thirty-Seven and Thirty-Eight.

00:00:09: Frennis supports ICT enterprises with market and competitive intelligence, decoding emerging technologies, customer insights, regulatory shifts, and competitor strategies.

00:00:19: so product teams and strategy leaders don't just react but shape the future.

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00:00:51: Okay, let's jump right in.

00:00:52: We're taking a deep dive into the biggest ICT and tech trends popping up on LinkedIn over the last couple of weeks, calendar weeks, thirty seven and thirty

00:00:59: eight.

00:00:59: Yeah, and looking at the sources, two big things really stood out.

00:01:02: First, this intense pressure really to harden the digital core against all these escalating attacks.

00:01:07: Right.

00:01:08: And second, keeping an eye on these well looming discontinuities in compute and cryptography.

00:01:16: Big shifts coming.

00:01:17: Definitely.

00:01:17: So our mission here for you listening is basically to boil down the key strategic takeaways from all that chatter.

00:01:24: Exactly.

00:01:25: We're focusing on how you actually do zero trust, what the real world impact of quantum is today, not just hypothetically, and how to build that resilience.

00:01:34: you need to, frankly, survive the next wave of big cyber threats.

00:01:39: We want you to get the critical insights without getting buried in information.

00:01:42: All right, so theme A has to be cybersecurity, and specifically Zero Trust or ZT.

00:01:47: It feels like it's just table stakes now.

00:01:50: Absolutely.

00:01:50: No longer a trend, it's the foundation.

00:01:53: It's amazing.

00:01:54: John Kinderveg introduced that core idea.

00:01:56: Never trust, always verify, what, fifteen years ago?

00:01:58: Fifteen

00:01:59: years.

00:01:59: And now it's just essential.

00:02:00: You can't run these hyper-connected systems without it.

00:02:03: And it

00:02:03: really forces a shift in thinking about access.

00:02:05: Antonio Veeh put it really well, I thought.

00:02:07: He said Zero Trust isn't really about saying no all the time.

00:02:10: It's about building the systems that let you confidently say yes securely, which means continuous verification.

00:02:18: Always checking.

00:02:19: Like NIST SP-E-A-H-R-O-T-O-S-E-V-O-N lays out.

00:02:23: Access isn't static.

00:02:24: Continuous

00:02:25: verification.

00:02:26: But what if you don't get it right?

00:02:28: The costs are, well, they're eye-watering.

00:02:31: Jane Franklin pointed this out with the cooperative group.

00:02:33: Oh yeah, that was a big one.

00:02:34: An eighty million loss.

00:02:36: and just the first half of the year following an attack, that proves this isn't just some IT headache.

00:02:41: Exactly.

00:02:42: That number, eighty million pounds, it totally reframes the risk, doesn't it?

00:02:45: It's not just cleanup cost.

00:02:47: It's business continuity.

00:02:49: It's a direct hit to the finances.

00:02:51: Something you report to shareholders immediately.

00:02:53: It's C-suite level stuff.

00:02:55: And you see the knock-on effects in these super specialized, you know, efficiency-driven systems, like that Collins Aerospace ransomware attack.

00:03:03: Marcello Devonso flagged that one.

00:03:04: It reportedly it grows European airport systems for seventy-two hours.

00:03:08: Yeah, three days.

00:03:09: That's not just a delay.

00:03:10: That's critical infrastructure going down.

00:03:11: It's terrifying.

00:03:12: It really is.

00:03:13: Yeah.

00:03:13: And it shows how these highly connected efficient systems can accidentally create these really dangerous single points of failure.

00:03:22: Devonzo even mentioned a warning about a potential six hundred percent surge in aviation cyber attacks.

00:03:27: A hundred percent between twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five.

00:03:30: That's

00:03:30: the projection he cited.

00:03:32: So it really hammers home why Zero Trust has to cover the whole supply chain, not just your own core systems.

00:03:38: So, okay, if ZT is the architecture, what's the key enforcement tool?

00:03:43: Timur Iblal made a strong case for identity and access management, IAM.

00:03:48: He called it maybe the most underrated service.

00:03:50: Oh, definitely underrated.

00:03:51: Yeah.

00:03:52: But maybe the highest leverage control you have.

00:03:54: Because if you ignore IAM, you end up with roles that have way too many permissions.

00:03:58: Right.

00:03:59: And those over-permission roles, that's how attackers move laterally.

00:04:02: This is the main thing ZT is trying to stop.

00:04:04: You need least privilege to be like how things actually work, not just a policy written down somewhere.

00:04:08: And that least privileged thinking, it needs to go beyond human users now, right?

00:04:12: Especially with AI agents becoming more common.

00:04:15: Absolutely critical.

00:04:16: Dimitri Tepper was talking about this move towards just in time, or JIT access enforcement.

00:04:21: JIT access.

00:04:23: So what's different

00:04:23: there?

00:04:24: It's not just giving access when someone requests it.

00:04:27: It's continuous enforcement based on live conditions.

00:04:30: Like, what's the user's risk score right now?

00:04:32: Ah,

00:04:33: okay, dynamics.

00:04:35: Exactly.

00:04:36: And why that's so important for AI, particularly things like our Ag agents, you know, the ones pulling external data for generative models.

00:04:43: Yeah.

00:04:43: Well, traditional provisioning is slow.

00:04:45: It's clunky, lots of overhead.

00:04:48: It just doesn't make sense for these non-human agents that might need very specific access for a very short time.

00:04:53: Andrew Fraser actually warned that these AI agents could be security disasters waiting to happen if they don't have super granular JIT privileges.

00:05:00: Security disasters waiting to happen.

00:05:02: Okay, scary thought.

00:05:03: So let's say you've got ZT, you've got IAM tightened up, but things still go wrong sometimes.

00:05:09: Humans are involved.

00:05:10: Always.

00:05:11: So when a breach does happen, how do you handle that chaos effectively?

00:05:15: This gets into operational discipline, right?

00:05:17: Yeah, and Rob McGowan have this brilliant analogy.

00:05:19: He compared a really good breach response.

00:05:22: to a NASCAR pit stop.

00:05:24: A

00:05:24: pit stop?

00:05:25: Okay, I like that.

00:05:26: Think about it, four, maybe six people.

00:05:28: Everyone knows their exact job.

00:05:30: No time to discuss, just immediate coordinated action.

00:05:34: It's all muscle memory from practice, from drills.

00:05:37: That's the only way to minimize the damage when things go sideways fast.

00:05:41: Muscle memory.

00:05:42: Yeah.

00:05:42: And the culture has to support that speed and crucially transparency.

00:05:46: Laura Vaughn highlighted sofos after one of their senior people got fished, even bypassed MFA.

00:05:51: Right.

00:05:52: And what was so good?

00:05:52: there wasn't just the technical fix.

00:05:54: It was how open they were.

00:05:56: They did a public root cause analysis.

00:05:58: Wow.

00:05:58: And the key thing, the employee felt safe enough to report it immediately.

00:06:03: Because Sophos had a clear no reprimand policy for this kind of thing, that immediate report stopped a small mistake becoming huge.

00:06:09: That's a win for security culture.

00:06:11: Makes total sense.

00:06:12: If people are scared of getting blamed, they wait.

00:06:14: And waiting is fatal in an attack.

00:06:16: Absolutely.

00:06:17: And we also need to remember the personal side of this.

00:06:21: The toll it takes on security pros.

00:06:24: Shashi, Shankar and Ayan.

00:06:25: shared a very personal story about battling imposter syndrome when he moved careers to Germany.

00:06:30: Yeah, that was powerful.

00:06:31: He called it the cruel irony.

00:06:33: He'd implemented zero trust for all these complex systems, but not really for himself, struggling with self-doubt.

00:06:40: And

00:06:40: the stats back that up, don't they?

00:06:41: Something like, eighty percent of CISOs fighting burnout.

00:06:44: It's a tough gig, immense pressure.

00:06:46: That self-doubt is part of the reality of carrying that weight.

00:06:49: It really is.

00:06:50: Okay, let's shift gears now.

00:06:51: From hardening the present to preparing

00:06:54: for a

00:06:55: pretty massive future disruption, quantum computing.

00:06:59: Yeah, the next big wave.

00:07:00: Ashish Shrivastava and Tony Moroni from KPMG, they were very direct.

00:07:04: They said, the threat is a fast approaching reality.

00:07:07: Basically current encryption like RSA and ECC they won't survive.

00:07:12: quantum computers won't

00:07:13: survive.

00:07:13: That's dark and some are calling this the crypto apocalypse.

00:07:17: That's term here and the timelines are getting kind of scary.

00:07:19: Farouk Arslan cited a fifty-fifty chance.

00:07:22: quantum could break Bitcoin's cryptography by twenty thirty.

00:07:25: twenty thirty for Bitcoin.

00:07:27: He called it an existential annihilation threat if the industry doesn't wake up.

00:07:31: existential

00:07:32: annihilation.

00:07:33: pretty strong words, but Dominic Briggs explained the how Quantum computers are just really really good at breaking that public-private key relationship.

00:07:42: Okay.

00:07:43: So, theoretically, an attacker could figure out your private crypto key just from your public one.

00:07:48: And if they can do that for Bitcoin or Ethereum, they can potentially do it for any sensitive data we're encrypting today.

00:07:55: Which brings us back to that whole harvest now decrypt later problem.

00:07:59: People grabbing encrypted data today, waiting for quantum to crack it open.

00:08:02: Exactly.

00:08:03: Which is why Steve Suarez was stressing that companies have to start planning now, exploring things like post-quantum cryptography, PQC, and maybe quantum key distribution, QKD.

00:08:12: And NIST finalized PTC standards just this year, with adoption expected.

00:08:19: That's a timeline, yeah.

00:08:20: So there's work happening.

00:08:21: But here's the twist.

00:08:23: Quantum isn't just a future threat destroying crypto.

00:08:26: Sam Boboev, Dr.

00:08:27: Jan Rainer-Lohman, and Nick Levy reported on something pretty groundbreaking.

00:08:31: The world's first quantum-enabled algorithmic trading demo by HSBC and IBM.

00:08:37: Trading.

00:08:39: Using quantum now.

00:08:40: What were the results?

00:08:41: A thirty-four percent improvement in predicting bond trade fills using IBM's Heron processor.

00:08:48: Thirty-four percent.

00:08:48: Wait, thirty-four percent?

00:08:50: That's huge in finance.

00:08:51: Is that purely quantum doing that or is it more complex?

00:08:54: We need to be careful not to over-hype the immediate risk based on

00:08:56: that.

00:08:57: That's a really important clarification.

00:08:58: And the sources are clear.

00:09:00: This is an integrated approach.

00:09:01: It's hybrid, classical quantum working together.

00:09:03: That's where the value is today.

00:09:05: Okay, hybrid.

00:09:05: But still, a thirty-four percent uplift in a real-world financial application.

00:09:10: It proves quantum is moving out of the pure research lab and into high-impact uses right now.

00:09:14: Okay, progress is real.

00:09:16: But there's still a bottleneck, isn't there?

00:09:18: Pradhyam Nagupta called it the dirty secret of quantum scaling.

00:09:22: Yeah, the dirty secret.

00:09:22: He says the real roadblock isn't the algorithms.

00:09:25: It's material science.

00:09:27: It's literally the dirt, tiny impurities, and defects in the materials that cause qubits to deco here to lose their quantum state.

00:09:34: So scaling up the number of qubits right now often just means... Scaling up the errors

00:09:39: pretty much.

00:09:40: That's the challenge.

00:09:41: It needs fundamental breakthroughs in the materials labs.

00:09:44: It was why you see Google IBM pouring money into

00:09:46: that got it And looking ahead, Daniel CFN really emphasized that quantum's true power will likely come from integrating it with AI, right, for tackling really complex problems.

00:09:57: Exactly, it's the synergy.

00:09:59: Hans Christian Hainbeck pointed out that even Nvidia is shifting strategy now, embracing this hybrid quantum classical market.

00:10:06: They see the potential for optimizing incredibly complex things like global logistics or supply chains.

00:10:12: It's not quantum or AI anymore.

00:10:13: It's quantum with AI.

00:10:15: Precisely.

00:10:16: Okay, so final theme.

00:10:17: All this intelligence, ZT, AI, quantum.

00:10:20: It needs infrastructure to run on and connect through.

00:10:22: Let's talk edge computing, IoT, and the underlying infrastructure.

00:10:26: Right.

00:10:27: Sameer Sharma made a really strong point.

00:10:29: Edge computing isn't just some technical architecture choice.

00:10:33: It's a business strategy.

00:10:34: How so?

00:10:35: It's about moving the value, the computation, closer to where decisions are made, reducing latency, and unlocking new revenue streams because of that speed and locality.

00:10:45: The strategy has to drive the edge deployment, not the other way around.

00:10:49: Makes sense.

00:10:50: And we're seeing this play out in industrial settings.

00:10:52: Definitely.

00:10:53: Jeff Winter and Osgar Tohumku highlighted how edge and manufacturing shifts things from just reporting problems after they happen to actually preventing them in real time.

00:11:03: Predictive maintenance, optimizing processes on the fly.

00:11:06: So smarter factories.

00:11:07: Exactly.

00:11:08: Oscar even mentioned Siemens partnering up, making their industrial edge cloud device available via AWS Marketplace.

00:11:14: So getting that processing power right onto the factory floor is getting easier.

00:11:18: And what about consumer applications?

00:11:19: Linda Grasso showed how IoT is changing retail.

00:11:23: Yeah, really interesting stuff there.

00:11:24: Smart shells, tracking stock automatically, beacons monitoring how shoppers move through the store to optimize layouts, connected signs showing personalized deals.

00:11:33: So less waste, happier customers.

00:11:35: That seems to be the value focus in retail.

00:11:37: Yeah, efficiency and better experience.

00:11:40: But all

00:11:40: this distributed tech, all this data, it puts a huge strain on the underlying infrastructure, especially power.

00:11:47: Oh, massively.

00:11:48: Lane, Joe's pointed out that even though investors like ninety five percent of institutional ones are pouring money into data centers.

00:11:55: The sheer electricity demand is becoming a bottleneck.

00:11:58: It's creating a license to operate.

00:11:59: problem and am be a test or not in my backyard.

00:12:02: These things need so much power.

00:12:04: Exactly.

00:12:05: And Nina Sadiki added that reliable data center operation now really depends on having effective control over the power generation sources themselves.

00:12:13: You need stable power, stable voltage.

00:12:15: As we push more to the edge, these power and reliability issues become really local, really immediate problems.

00:12:21: Okay.

00:12:21: quite a landscape, from zero trust foundations to quantum frontiers and the infrastructure holding it all together.

00:12:28: So if you enjoyed this deep dive, remember new additions drop every two weeks.

00:12:32: And you can also check out our other additions covering cloud, defense tech, health tech, digital products and services, artificial intelligence and sustainability and green ICT.

00:12:43: You know, we started this talking about that massive eighty million dollars loss from a cyber attack.

00:12:48: That kind of visible pain is clearly driving this.

00:12:54: So

00:12:55: what's the final strategic thought here, tying together resilience, identity, sovereignty?

00:13:00: What's the big picture takeaway?

00:13:02: I

00:13:02: think it comes down to reframing sovereignty.

00:13:04: It's not just policy anymore.

00:13:06: It's becoming core economic infrastructure.

00:13:08: Yeah.

00:13:08: That's the argument from people like Dr.

00:13:10: Carson Stucker and Byrne Wagner.

00:13:11: Core

00:13:12: economic infrastructure.

00:13:13: Yeah.

00:13:13: Think about it.

00:13:14: You see France's data protection authority, CNIL, using manga comics to teach teenagers about data privacy.

00:13:21: That's grassroots awareness.

00:13:23: And then you see the big push for things like the European digital identity wallet, the EUDI.

00:13:30: Europe seems to be realizing that having control over digital identity and data isn't just about ticking compliance boxes.

00:13:37: It's a strategic economic lever, a fundamental piece of infrastructure they need to build and control effectively.

00:13:44: Treating digital sovereignty as core economic infrastructure, definitely something to think about.

00:13:49: Well, thank you for joining us for this deep dive.

00:13:51: Thanks Ariel.

00:13:52: Be sure to subscribe for more insights like these.