Techzine TV podcast

VM replacement has gotten very real over the past couple of years. During KubeCon earlier this year we had a chat about this with Venkat Ramakrishnan, VP and GM for Portworx at Pure Storage. How are organizations responding to market disruptions in virtualization?

The days of tire-kicking Kubernetes and containers are firmly behind us. Today's enterprise customers are running tens of thousands of Kubernetes nodes in production environments. Some of them operate over 250,000 containers simultaneously. This shift coincides with significant pricing changes in the VMware ecosystem following Broadcom's acquisition. It creates what Ramakrishnan calls "a compelling event" that's accelerating containerization journeys.

Migrate or modernize?

Organizations need to decide: will they migrate to another VM-based platform or are they going to modernize with Kubernetes? Many are choosing the latter, Ramakrishnan tells us. They recognize that if retraining is necessary anyway, it makes more sense to invest in learning a platform representing the future of infrastructure. A platform like KubeVirt enables developers to run VMs and containers side-by-side on Kubernetes. This is important, as it provides a unified control plane that eliminates the need for separate teams with distinct skillsets.

That said, not all workloads will move to containers. Legacy applications with significant "code gravity" will continue running as VMs for the foreseeable future. Organizations need the tools and platforms to manage this hybrid reality effectively. 

With proper planning and the right partners, replatforming is achievable for enterprises of all sizes. The idea is that this gives them the foundations to support innovation for decades to come while gaining the flexibility to operate across any cloud environment. 

Listen to this new Techzine Talks episode now!

Amazon S3 is the oldest service in the catalogue of Amazon Web Services (AWS). We sat down with Andy Warfield, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, to talk about the 19-year journey of Amazon S3 from simple backup solution to sophisticated data foundation.

Warfield talks about how S3 began as essentially "a storage locker across town" for archival purposes, before customers discovered its REST architecture made it capable of handling massive parallel workloads. This unexpected advantage fueled S3's growth beyond unstructured data into analytics and AI domains. The introduction of columnar formats like Parquet and open table formats like Iceberg transformed what was possible, culminating in AWS's recent launch of S3 Tables.

Besides the general direction Amazon S3 has taken and takes, we also talk about other challenges related to current developments. One of them is how AWS and Amazon S3 handles the bloat that is associated with vectorizing databases for use in AI use cases. This challenge is driving significant innovation at AWS to optimize storage for the AI era.

All in all, Amazon S3 has had to evolve continuously to mirror the broader developments in how businesses approach data - from static archives to dynamic, queryable assets powering real-time decision making. 

The final topic we talk about is the future of Amazon S3. Warfield wants it to be "pulled closer to application code" with improved performance and more flexible access methods to ensure customers don't have to choose upfront how they'll use their data.

We are slightly biased of course, but we think this is a very good episode of Techzine Talks, and highly recommend anyone interested in the topic to listen to it. Tune in now!

The cybersecurity landscape has transformed in recent years, with managed security services gaining widespread acceptance as organizations face the realities of today's threat landscape. In this conversation with Erik van Buggenhout, responsible for managed security services at NVISO, we delve into the practical challenges that have made outsourcing security operations a necessity rather than just an option for many businesses.

Erik shares an analogy that illustrates how we should think about cybersecurity: "It's like the brakes on your Ferrari. It gives you the confidence to accelerate because you know you can stop when needed." This perspective shifts security from being viewed as an obstacle to an enabler that allows organizations to move faster while managing risks effectively. That is the idea, at least.

We discuss the fundamental reasons organizations struggle with security basics. Think of things like the proliferation of tools but also the challenges of prioritizing foundational controls like asset management and patch management. Despite vendors' promises of next-generation solutions, many security teams find themselves drowning in alerts while they can't see the forest for the trees.

The conversation also touches on the rapid evolution of AI in cybersecurity. While approximately 75% of security alerts are already handled automatically through simple playbooks, agentic AI presents both tremendous opportunities and significant risks. There's a clear role to play here for the concepts of transparency and explainability, and, as a result, trust. Agent-to-agent interactions will only make this more important.

We also try and be as practical as possible for our listeners. How do you build effective defense-in-depth strategies that combine automation, AI, and human expertise in a layered approach? He challenges the notion that humans are the "weakest link" and instead advocates for creating security controls that users can trust.

Listen to this latest episode of Techzine Talks now!

Smart manufacturing has many facets. There's the convergence of IT and OT, and the security challenges that brings. In recent years we've seen Private 5G coming up, at least as a topic of conversation if not in actual adoption. Finally, the edge environments of those factories recently fell under the spell of AI too. 

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, we talked to Parm Sandhu, Group Vice President of Enterprise Products and Services at NTT Data, about all of these topics. What does Edge AI bring us and is private 5G finally delivering on years of promises? And what about the security issues associated with the convergence of IT and OT? And finally, how are all these developments interconnected?

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks now and let us know what you think.

A little bit of a change of pace this week, as we talk about how big technology companies invest in other companies and what underpins their acquisition strategy. During Cisco Live we had the opportunity to sit down with Derek Idemoto, SVP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments. 

The pace at which Cisco launches products and services in the past four to five years is quite stunning. Especially when compared to the rather pedestrian pace at which the company moved forward prior to 2020, the difference is striking.

Cisco's strategy has never been to build everything from scratch, at least not in the past three of its four decades. It has done many acquisitions and also invests in a lot of companies. Sometimes investing turns into acquiring after a while, sometimes it doesn't.

In our chat with Idemoto, we talk about the rationale behind Cisco's approach. We specifically touch on the billion-dollar AI Investment Fund it set up last year. We dive into how Cisco determines when to invest and when to buy, what that means for the rest of the organization, what are some interesting areas of investment at the moment, and much more.

The work that Idemoto and his team are doing is a crucial part of how Cisco operates. It is therefore a crucial part to understand if one is to understand Cisco properly. If only because it means that the statement by Cisco President and CPO Jeetu Patel that Cisco is "the world's largest startup" actually holds water. It can move surprisingly quickly because of all of the investments and acquisitions, even though these also put a strain on the own organization.

Listen to this - in our humble opinion - interesting conversation now.

During PegaWorld, the annual conference where Pegasystems outlines its vision and has customers share their stories, we sat down with Pega CTO Don Schuerman and talked about what agentic AI means in the fields they're active in.

The Pega CTO sees a tendency in the industry to label anything with "a sprinkle of large language model fairy dust" as agentic AI. That's not how he and Pega look at it. He talks about a more comprehensive vision: true agentic AI designs, automates, executes, and optimizes the workflows and decisions that businesses depend on. This isn't about deploying thousands of agents indiscriminately—it's about implementing a few strategic, pragmatic agents that drive substantive business outcomes.

In this episode of Techzine Talks, we discuss the various GenAI and agentic components of Pega's platform, and how they interact to make agentic AI appealing to its customers. Pega Blueprint, a workflow designer, is an important part of it, but Pega will also add agentic capabilities to its appdev environment, and will introduce an Agentic Process Fabric to tie all of it together in an orderly and most importantly well-governed fashion.

According to Schuerman, it's a mistake to assume that underlying architecture is irrelevant in an AI-driven world. Listen to the podcast episode to hear why he thinks that is, and to hear much more about Pega's agentic vision, but more broadly also about agentic AI in general and how this relates to deployments in more challenging environments.

What happens when you study how millions of teams work and collaborate over 20 years? You learn a lot and can use those insights to help organizations operate more effectively. That's what Atlassian wants to achieve with its "System of Work" - not a product you can buy, but a framework for bringing teams together in tech-driven organizations.

Anu Bharadwaj, Atlassian's President, explains this approach to us and to you. It is built on four essential pillars: aligning work to goals, planning at scale, unleashing knowledge across silos, and making AI a natural teammate. The idea is that it all works like a box of Lego.

When we first heard about System of Work, we thought it all sounded a bit esoteric and wondered how concrete it is. As it turns out, it is very fundamental to how Atlassian approaches the market, and therefore also fundamental for (potential) customers. Even though the separate components may not change that much, the way they integrate and interact with each other will (and has already changed with the launch of several Collections). 

Deeper integrations usually also have a lock-in ring to them. Bharadwaj is adamant that is not the case here, when we ask her about that.

Listen to the episode now to hear all about System of Work and what that means for tools like Jira, Confluence, Loom and Rovo AI agents and by extension for the market as a whole.

The security landscape is transforming rapidly as AI becomes embedded throughout enterprise technology stacks. Organizations (and security vendors) need to fundamentally rethink how they approach things like security governance and risk management. That's one of the pieces of advice Jonathan Trull, CISO at Qualys, has during the conversation we had at RSAC 2025 Conference. Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks to learn more about what he had to say.

Trull draws from his experience overseeing both corporate security and product security engineering when he highlights the gap between AI implementation and security considerations. While organizations race to adopt generative AI tools, few have developed comprehensive frameworks for securing them properly.

According to Trull, many conversations tend to focus on one thing when it comes to securing AI. "Everyone tends to focus on how to prevent sensitive data going into SaaS, AI-enabled products," he says. "But what about when you're building your own LLM models? When do you do data masking? How do you incorporate security in the engineering lifecycle?" These architectural security questions deserve answers too.

At the end of the day, cybersecurity is about creating a balance. A balance between innovation and cybersecurity, and the risks that organizations are willing to take. This conversations gives you some good insights into how to tackle this. Tune in now!

AI has in interesting side-effect for the role of the CISO, says Zscaler CISO Sam Curry when we sit down with him during RSAC 2025 Conference in San Francisco earlier this month. Their input becomes more important. That's good news for CISOs. Or is it? 

Security leaders haven long been judged and consulted along the technical axis. The (rapid) rise of AI means that dynamic had to change, Curry says. It had and still has an effect on cybersecurity in general that we haven't seen before, according to him. CISOs contribute to strategic discussions more and more. In fact, they're among the first to be consulted now. 

Besides discussing the role of the CISO in 2025 and beyond, we draw parallels between challenges and pitfalls that beset organizations during the cloud boom, and discuss the implications of them in the AI era.  

There are still so many things to look at from a security perspective when it comes to AI. That became clear again from Zscaler's survey, which showed that AI was simultaneously 2024's most adopted technology (growing over 600%) and most blocked technology. This paradox highlights the complex risk-reward calculations security leaders must navigate.

The last big topic we discuss is more forward-looking. What are the implications of the quantum era on how organizations need to look at cybersecurity? Post-quantum cryptography should be on organizations' radar. Is that the case though? What can organizations do now to prepare for this? And do they even have the resources to tackle this, while still tackling the current big wave of challenges?

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks and let us know what you think.

The security landscape is transforming rapidly as AI agents join our workforce, creating an urgent need to rethink how we approach identity protection. When 80% of breaches already stem from compromised identities, how do we secure virtual employees who can't use traditional multi-factor authentication?

We sat down with David Bradbury, Chief Security Officer at Okta, to discuss this topic. This is a very important discussion to have, because traditional security approaches fall short when protecting non-human identities. 

We ask Bradbury what organizations need to do to protect and secure their modern environments better from an identity perspective. He outlines the essential building blocks organizations need to implement. These have to do with token authentication, fine-grained authorization, and asynchronous workflows. We also talk about the role of the human in this new framework.

Looking toward solutions, Bradbury highlights promising developments like Google's Device-Bound Session Credentials, which cryptographically bind sessions to specific devices. He also emphasizes the need for broader adoption of security standards across the SaaS ecosystem and calls on CISOs to demand better security features from vendors. 

All in all, a lot of work needs to be done when it comes to protecting and securing identity moving forward in an agentic world. The first order of business is to understand what the challenges are that AI agents pose. Listening to this podcast episode is a good start, as we discuss all the fundamentals.