EIC 2021 finally took place in Munich in a hybrid format between on-site and online. Of course, Matthias took the opportunity to sit down with his analyst colleagues in person for some EIC special analyst chat episodes. In the first of three specials, Christopher Schütze talks to him about the findings from his pre-conference workshop on defending against ransomware, and they also turn their attention to a promising new approach to creating globally secured identities.

Martin Kuppinger and Matthias discuss the high-priority topic of how to achieve automation of management and security across the entire multi-hybrid, multi-cloud IT infrastructure based on well-defined policies.

Cybersecurity is one of the areas where virtually every business will need to invest because of ever-growing cyber risks and ever-tightening regulations, and in the post-Covid era, the cybsersecurity market continues to evolve and grow, having gained even greater importance. Warwick Ashford joins Matthias to discuss the factors driving the trends in this market and what businesses should be considering when making cybersecurity investments.

Christopher Schütze provides the fundamentals for a pivotal topic in cybersecurity, namely how to create processes and systems for comprehensive and continuously improving vulnerability management. Together with Matthias, he provides an overview of elementary aspects that need to be considered.

The market segment of products and services that are designed to manage and secure APIs as essential resources in a multitude of different environments is constantly evolving. On the occasion of the publication of the latest edition of his Leadership Compass "API Management and Security", Alexei Balaganski explains the fundamentals and current developments of these products and services.

Business Intelligence is the discipline of deriving business insights from raw enterprise data to inform decision making. Although this is a mature market, new trends are stirring up this market sector. Annie Bailey joins Matthias to explain what is changing and what 'Next-generation BI platforms' are.

Paul Fisher has researched the topic of Data Governance Platforms extensively, and he published a Market Compass on this topic at KuppingerCole Analysts just a few weeks ago. In the current episode of Analyst Chat, he explains this market segment to Matthias and provides insight into current developments.

The path toward a Zero Trust architecture to improve cybersecurity for modern enterprises in a hybrid IT landscape often seems overly complex and burdensome. Alexei Balaganski is this week's chat partner for Matthias and he draws attention to an often overlooked benefit of such an infrastructure. One key idea of Zero Trust is to actually reduce complexity and unnecessary effort and instead focus on what really needs to be protected.

This episode concludes the four-part series on hybrid IT. To wrap things up, Mike Small and Matthias focus on the latest developments in hybrid infrastructures, between containers, hyperconverged, edge and cloud in a box.