Tech means Business

The collected data at the modern organization's fingertips is truly immense in scale but also in possibility. Predictions of every company being "a data company" have been proven to be pretty accurate. But why then are so few organizations making the most of the information they have access to literally at their fingertips?

The answer lies in what has to happen to data before it can be queried, and then, of course, there's the thorny issue of composing queries. Neither process is particularly easy, and the situation is made more complex by the element of time: so-called up-to-date findings can be weeks or months old.

So how can companies access insights from data that's as close to real-time as possible, and do it at scale? The same repositories can yield value to multiple stakeholders, so there are multiple queries that need to happen.

Problematic? With today's featured guest, Jorge Sancha, co-founder and CEO of Tinybird the answer's "no." His company provides a way that developers (not data scientists) can create simple APIs in seconds that allow fast and powerful queries onto real-time data - without months spent at data science boot camp.

You can read more about Tinybird here:
https://www.tinybird.co/

Jorge Sancha is on LinkedIn here:
https://es.linkedin.com/in/jorgesancha

And your real-time host's profile lives here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

As the world digitizes at breakneck speed, companies and organizations are under pressure not only to produce products & services of high quality but also to do so efficiently and in ecologically-sound ways.

The new Dell PowerEdge server range produces the type of compute built for accelerating digital transformation but does it power-efficiently. Even the manufacturing and design of the range have been considered for their ecological impact, and the new PowerEdge portfolio offers impressive power consumption to processing ratios.

On this episode of Tech Means Business podcast, we talk to Andrew Underwood, the Field CTO for Data Centre Solutions at Dell Technologies, Asia Pacific and Japan, about the ethos behind the range's design, AI and ML workloads, and the balance today's enterprises have to achieve between service quality and sustainability concerns.

Edge or Cloud deployment, test environments or full production, Dell PowerEdge is the server for a new generation of efficient and cost-effective data centers.

See the PowerEdge announcement:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/corporate/newsroom/announcements/detailpage.press-releases~usa~2023~01~2023-01-17-next-generation-dell-poweredge-servers-deliver-advanced-performance-and-energy-efficient-design.htm#/filter-on/Country:en-us  

Sign up for a day's bespoke workshop tailored to your business and its C-footprint targets:
https://www.dell.com/en-au/dt/what-we-do/customer-engagement-programs/customer-solution-centers.htm

Learn more about the PowerEdge range from here:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/accelerating-transformation-anywhere-with-next-generation-dell-poweredge-servers/

Andrew Underwood is on LinkedIn here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjamesunderwood

Joe Green can be found here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Until companies and organizations get large enough to run their own dedicated cybersecurity function, many use the services of an MSP (managed service provider) to help protect them from the increasing number of attacks that happen each year.

Getting external help certainly works in dynamic computing environments, where companies are changing between on-premise, multi-, and hybrid-cloud deployments. But some companies shy away from contacting so-called big-name cybersecurity providers, wrongly assuming that large, expert companies are not interested in helping the smaller business.

In the APAC and Australasia region, Kaspersky is happy to explode the myth: it's here, especially that its expert services can be leveraged. As part of a larger digital transformation project, Kaspersky's easy licensing models keep the MSP's clients safe, drive cost efficiencies, and bring relief to organizations struggling to find specialized staff or with limited in-house resources.

Today's guests are Bridget Huang and Tako Nijsson from Kaspersky. We discuss the why's and wherefore's of cybersecurity via a third party and the growing threat landscape facing any online business in the APAC and beyond.

Read more about Kaspersky's Managed Service Partner Partnership:

https://www.kaspersky.com/partners/managed-service-provider

Find out more on how Kaspersky can deliver fully-managed detection and response services:
https://go.kaspersky.com/optimumsecurity.html

Bridget Huang is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bridgethuang/

Tako Nijssen can be found here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tako-nijssen-95646546/

Your host, Joe Green, appears here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

With public spending cuts and a greater awareness of obtaining best value for money, the public sector in the UK has to get the best possible value it can from its IT provision. The answer may be, to some degree at least, making more use of cloud technologies.

But it's not as simple as a lift-and-shift process for IT leaders in the sector. There are multiple considerations: data integrity, security, governance, cross-platform compatibility, and above all else, value for the tax-payer.

In this podcast we talk to global IT partner and service provider, Wipro, about how it is helping the public sector realise full value from its cloud acquisitions and how its consultative and partnership-based approach is helping organisations provide world-class services to their users.

Hyperscalers may talk big and are recognised as de facto players, but are they always the best choice? And is the cloud the right answer to every situation facing the sector? We explore the issues and possible solutions with Anurag Aren (Director, Cloud Advisory Services, Europe) and David Asfaha (Managing Consultant) at Wipro, UK.

The Wipro public sector offerings can be seen here:
https://www.wipro.com/public-sector/
https://governmentbusiness.co.uk/company-focus/wipro-ltd

Anurag Aren is here on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuragaren/

David Asfaha is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-asfaha-750942b/

And finally, your host's social media profile is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Even relatively modern cybersecurity concepts and access management technologies like PAM are beginning to falter confronted with hybrid- and multi-cloud environments. How can today's privilege access management cope with multiple SaaS and IaaS apps and services, other than grant or deny blanket access?

We talk to Scott Hesford, the Director of Solutions Engineering, Asia Pacific at BeyondTrust, about applying granularity of privileges to multiple users at scale, and keep on top of it all, too. What could be a simple granting of privileges to a subcontractor for a day, can turn into a gaping cybersecurity hole that can bring an organization to its knees. And BeyondTrust is the company that's here to help!

We talk about implicit zones, movement through the IT stack to get a day's work done, and NIST's airplane analogy for cybersecurity: who can get through to the departures lounge, who can board the plane, and (even) where a user can sit Or, in more direct terms, allowing a subcontractor to restart a service without sudo.

It's all possible, it just needs the right partner; one with the cybersecurity tooling that's not out of its depth in a multi-cloud, mobile, cloud-heavy environment.

Read more about BeyondTrust here:
https://www.beyondtrust.com/

The NIST zero trust information we refer to is here:
https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-207/final

The US Federal Government directive on Zero Trust can be found here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/M-22-09.pdf

The CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model can be found here:
https://www.cisa.gov/zero-trust-maturity-model

Scott Hesford is on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-hesford/

Joe "economy class" Green is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Making a few purchases on an online marketplace site seems simple: a few clicks here and there, a payment card, and then sit back and wait for delivery. But under the hood, the complexity is astounding.

Marketplace operators not only have to send and receive funds in multiple currencies, but they also have to do it quickly, and they need to do it reliably. It's that surety that keeps good vendors engaged with a marketplace and customers coming back, time and again.

So a payment gateway in this context is much more than a means of moving monies between different currencies. Keeping the fly-by-night characters out of the ecosystem and ensuring swift and reliable money transfers are the tasks of our guests today, Payoneer.

It's a name behind many gig economy sites, retail marketplaces, and online entities disrupting and changing markets worldwide.

The company behind this business model has to establish trust among the disparate players: customers have to trust the site, and sellers need to establish trust in the integrity of their customers. The basis of all this is reliable, fast, and secure systems that give value to all participants.

Our guest from Payoneer is Eran Tal, the Enterprise Sales Director EMEA. We talk about new business models created by smart tech, how monies can be moved quicker than the oddly-named SWIFT system, and why a banking presence on the ground solves 80% of finance problems when trading internationally at scale.

Eran Tal is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/taleran/

The Payoneer site is here:
https://www.payoneer.com/enterprise/

And Joe Green, the host of the show, can be found here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Retail businesses involve a great deal more today than setting up premises and organizing wholesalers. The technology needed to run an omnichannel retail outfit has to be secure, powerful, reliable, and most of all, focused on quality customer experiences.

With shoppers today used to the "big label" quality of experience, smaller companies are facing significant challenges to raise their own standards to turn shoppers into brand advocates.

A company with a broad range of retail operations solutions is Wipro, a company whose AUS/NZ division we've featured before on the Tech Means Business podcast. Today we talk to Prabhu Ramaiah and Darren Gerry, the Director & Head of Retail, and UK and Europe Lead for Wipro Digital Interactive, respectively.

How can a retailer today scale and digitize without breaking the bank? And where to start? We talk solutions, industry trends, common and not-so-common approaches to the business of selling, and about the common pitfalls that await the unwary.

On the way, we talk about the D2C challenges faced by big brands, and the types of technologies that can drive change for the better in a retail business.

Learn more about Wipro's offerings for retail outfits of any size here:
https://www.wipro.com/retail/

Wipro’s “How Retailers and Brands Drive Revenue and Growth with Cloud” report is here:
https://www.wipro.com/retail/cloud-leader-roadmap-retail-consumer-goods/

Prabhu Ramaiah's LinkedIn is here:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/prabhu-ramaiah-8328b06

Darren Gerry’s LinkedIn is here:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/darrengerry

Joe Green’s LinkedIn is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

This podcast is produced in conjunction with BeyondTrust.

Many of the security tools we use to protect ourselves and our organizations came into existence at a time before "the cloud" was a thing and certainly before hybrid working practices. Can we use the same tools in a different way, or do we need a new toolset? Or a whole new approach?

These questions and more are the subjects for discussion on the Tech Means Business podcast with our guest, Morey Haber, the Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust. We talk about zero-trust, privileges and access policies, geofencing, and cloud privilege brokering.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management is a catchall term that covers policy-based access, identity management, privileged access, and much more – the full toolkit and approach that organizations migrating to the cloud need to protect themselves and their employees.

Continuous validation needn't mean re-authenticating every time we switch to a different application or service, yet it's still the way many cybersecurity teams think. Listen in to discover how new security methods protect better and empower users to work more efficiently.

The NIST Whitepaper on Zero-Trust is here: [PDF]
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-207.pdf

BeyondTrust's information can be found here:
~https://www.beyondtrust.com/

Morey Haber's books are available here:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Morey-J.-Haber/author/B078HDPHSN

Morey himself is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjhaber

Your host, Joe Green, appears courtesy of LinkedIn here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Every piece of malware, every phishing email, reaches its potential victim via the network, the means by which the organization communicates internally and with the outside world. So who better to protect the company than the people who install and specialize in communications networks?

That's the premise of this episode of the Tech Means Business podcast when we're joined by Jonathan Magnell from Consolidated Communications, where he's the Director of Enterprise Solution Engineering for the Western Region.

For many years, Consolidated Communications has been designing and managing communications for companies in America. It was one of the first to offer VOIP at a time when copper cables and analog comms were the norm. Now it bakes cybersecurity at the network level into communications systems for its many clients, old and new.

When we understand how networks work, we get a better understanding of how malware and ransomware work, too, and Jonathan's background as a systems administrator gave him just that knowledge. It's expertise he shares with Consolidated's clients and with us at the Tech Means Business podcast.

Using high-end industry tooling, Consolidated Communications' cybersecurity offering makes protection an integral part of all types of networked systems for devices, voice, and digital commerce.

Read more about Consolidated Communications' security platform here:
https://www.consolidated.com/business/medium-enterprise/security-services

And more generally about the company:
https://www.consolidated.com/

Jonathan Magnell's profile is on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-magnell-58a5a8a1/

Joe Green's details via his ISDN line here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

The next generation of AI in the workplace is decision intelligence: the practical application of machine language in commercial settings. Applying AI in the workplace has, to date, being a slow process and one that involves a lot of resources. But that's all about to change.

Peak AI is the company that's driving decision intelligence in organizations, turning the typical 18 month wait between query and results into a matter of weeks or even days. Plus, there's no need to hire more data scientists and invest in ranks of super-expensive graphics processors.

The Peak AI offering is cloud-based, and while no ML solution is plug-and-play and operate-able by anyone, Peak AI's platform takes away the heavy lifting that's usually placed on data teams. In addition, it actively reduces the gap between the data science function (who may know little about business strategy) and pure-play business functions (who, in turn, know little about data analysis).

Peak AI's Decision Intelligence Index is drawn from its most recent survey of thousands of businesses that have begun an AI journey. We discuss the Index, the state of ML in the enterprise, and best ways forward to turn the "new oil" that's data into insights that will have positive impacts in the workplace.

Learn more about Peak AI here:
https://peak.ai/

Ira Dubinsky, Head of Go-To-Market Strategy at Peak AI is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iradubinsky/

Your host, Joe Green lives online here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/