Techzine TV podcast

What if our fundamental approach to security needs rethinking? In this conversation with Tia Hopkins, Chief Cyber Resilience Officer at eSentire, we explore why resilience has become the industry's latest buzzword—and why it demands more than just lip service.

One of the mantras Hopkins doesn't particularly care for when it comes to cyber resilience is the "not if, but when" mentality that dominates security discussions every now and again. Her suggestion is to shift more from mere acceptance to acknowledgment. This may sound like a subtle distinction, but is still very powerful. It keeps teams vigilant rather than resigned.

At the heart of our discussion is a critical examination of the industry's pivot from prevention to detection and response. While this shift made sense as organizations adopted cloud environments and borderless networks, Hopkins argues it's time to correct this imbalance through comprehensive exposure management. This approach extends beyond traditional vulnerability management to encompass people, processes, and technologies, all informed by business context and threat intelligence.

For security leaders wrestling with budget constraints while trying to balance prevention and response investments, Hopkins offers practical advice: eliminate technology duplication, maximize existing capabilities, and frame security investments in business terms rather than technical specifications. Most importantly, she advocates moving beyond annual risk assessments toward dynamic, continuous evaluation that reflects the reality of today's threat landscape.

There are a lot of really good insights in this conversation. Listen to this episode now.

Cisco made a swath of announcements at RSAC 2025 Conference. Unsurprisingly, several of them had something to do with AI. We sat down with Cisco's Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel to have a conversation about where he and Cisco thinks things are going.

When we spoke to Patel last year, he was quite optimistic. The use of AI in security solutions was going to mean that the defenders would, at least temporarily, get the upper hand. 

Between last year and now, a lot has happened, especially in the field of AI. The big question now is how to secure the use of AI in organizations. That's what many of the companies at RSAC Conference focused on this year. With the agentic wave of AI upon is, and new things like Agent-to-Agent and the MCP protocol that come with it, this is a very important challenge to tackle.

To us, two things stood out in Cisco's announcements this week. One was the deepening of the partnership with ServiceNow, with an integration between Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow SecOps. The other was the launch of Foundation AI and an open-source AI security model. Patel frames the latter innovation as follows: "You don't go to your dentist for heart surgery. Domain knowledge matters in AI and models."

Apart from the topics above, we also discuss the agentic future of security itself. This is important, because that enables defenders to elevate security from human to machine scale. That is especially important when facing machine-scale attacks. As Patel notes, "The models are going to get smarter... and as they get smarter, you'll find a tremendous amount of autonomy injected into workflows."

This and much more in this latest episode of Techzine Talks on Tour. 

Security awareness is a thing of the past. Rather, the term and what it stands for are things of the past. It just doesn't cover the actual challenge organizations need to address. We need to be talking about Human Risk. At least, that's what Perry Carpenter, Chief Human Risk Management Strategist at KnowBe4, thinks we should do. We were happy to oblige and learn more about it and ask him all kinds of questions about it too.  

When Carpenter says "awareness doesn't change behavior," he's not being controversial. He's sharing an insight that has reshaped how security professionals approach human risk. We meet him at RSAC Conference in San Francisco, where we discuss why we must move beyond traditional security awareness toward a comprehensive approach to human behavior.

Drawing from over a decade of experience, Carpenter challenges the notion that humans are the "weakest link" in security. Instead, he positions people as "a critical layer within the security stack". It's a layer that deserves proper support rather than blame when things go wrong. When a phishing attack succeeds, it means multiple technical controls have already failed, from secure email gateways to endpoint protection. The problem isn't human weakness but insufficient defense-in-depth.

Impact of AI on Human Risk

This being 2025, we talk about AI too of course. We examine how AI is transforming the threat landscape. While deepfakes and AI-generated content grab headlines, Carpenter emphasizes that we should continue to focus on the underlying psychology: "Every deceptive attack is a narrative attack" designed to manipulate emotions and beliefs. The difference now is scale and personalization. Attackers can create "individualized cognitive malware" targeting specific psychological vulnerabilities of each victim.

Looking toward the future, we discuss with Carpenter how agentic AI will transform both offense and defense in cybersecurity. These AI systems, functioning like team members with specialized capabilities, promise to deliver just-in-time training and personalized security guidance. However, they also introduce new risks. That is, AI agents themselves can be manipulated, compromised, or turned into insider threats. Organizations will need thoughtful control mechanisms and safety valves to navigate this new frontier.

This discussion is not only meant to warn security leaders, or a vision of a very bleak future. It also aims to provide them with a roadmap and some food for thought to avert such a bleak future. By combining technical controls with behavioral science, organizations can build more resilient security cultures that recognize human complexity without sacrificing protection. Listen now to get insights into how your security program must evolve to address the full spectrum of human risk, also when it comes to AI.

Today we have a rather special guest on Techzine Talks on Tour. During Check Point's recent CPX conference in Vienna, we sat down for a 20-minute conversation with Gil Shwed, co-founder of Check Point and widely regarded as the inventor of the firewall. We asked him about the past 30+ years, the present and about the future for Check Point and the broader cybersecurity industry. 

Gil Shwed, co-founder and now Executive Chairman of Check Point Software Technologies, talks about how he conceptualized network security technology in 1990, years before the World Wide Web existed. He recognized early that internet connectivity would transform global communication, but also that it would create security challenges.

"We actually started a new industry, the cybersecurity industry, not just network security," according to Shwed. He describes Check Point as "probably the number one company that was founded solely around the internet that has survived up to these days, 32 years later." This longevity is particularly remarkable in technology, where few companies maintain market leadership for decades.

Shwed now transitions to his role as Executive Chairman alongside new CEO Nadav Zafrir, We talk about how the new CEO is different from Shwed and not different at the same time and what the new CEO may have in store for the company. However, Shwed is still acutely aware that a vendor like Check Point doesn't control the pace of innovation. "It's the attackers that are setting the stage," he notes. Cybersecurity will always be challenging and relevant. That is true three decades after Shwed and Check Point helped create it, but is most likely still the case three decades from now. 

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks on Tour now. 

What happens when integration meets artificial intelligence? In this conversation with Andrew Comstock, Senior Vice President and General Manager of MuleSoft, we explore the evolving role of integration in powering the AI revolution at Salesforce and beyond.

Despite being acquired by Salesforce six years ago and growing into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, MuleSoft maintains its platform-agnostic DNA. Surprisingly, Salesforce isn't even MuleSoft's number one integration target (though it ranks a close second), demonstrating the platform's continued commitment to serving diverse enterprise ecosystems.

The conversation delves into "MuleSoft for Agentforce," a groundbreaking solution transforming APIs into agent-ready actions. Through innovations like Topic Center and API Catalog, developers can now make their existing APIs accessible to AI agents by adding instructions that help agents understand how to leverage these API connections effectively. With a single click, Salesforce users can now use APIs within Heroku, MuleSoft, and the Salesforce platform and deploy them as agent actions.

Perhaps most intriguing is how MuleSoft now enables the replacement of traditional if-then-else logic with AI agents, essentially turning prompts into code. This approach shines in complex scenarios where simple conditional logic falls short, such as determining what constitutes a "good customer" based on multiple factors and nuanced reasoning.

With enterprises juggling nearly a thousand different applications on average, MuleSoft serves as a crucial data fabric alongside Salesforce Data Cloud, extending connectivity beyond what's possible with Data Cloud. This includes legacy systems, specialized applications, and even mainframes.

Looking ahead, Comstock views the AI transformation as even more significant than the cloud revolution of a decade ago, declaring that "the next generation of iPaaS will be agentic." He also said to stay tuned for major announcements at Dreamforce, including expanded support for additional AI partners beyond Salesforce's Agentforce.

For more details listen to this episode of Techzine Talks on Tour.

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A slight change of pace, or at least of topic, this week in Techzine Talks on Tour. We sit down with Reggie Townsend, VP of Data Ethics at SAS to talk about the important but not always easy topic of ethics and AI. 

Townsend offers his and SAS's perspectives on what it means to build AI that truly serves humanity. "My job is to make sure that wherever our software shows up, we help people to thrive," in his own words.

Bias

The conversation tackles several topics around the ethical component of AI and data in general. One of them is the concept of bias. There is no such thing as an unbiased data set. As Townsend puts it: "Bias exists because humans exist." The real question isn't about eliminating bias entirely but distinguishing between harmful bias and purposeful representation.

Synthetic data

Another topic we discuss with Townsend is the use of synthetic data. This can be seen as both promising and potentially problematic. While it can fill crucial gaps in fields like clinical trials where finding enough participants with specific conditions is challenging, Townsend cautions against overreliance, noting the risk of creating self-referential systems that generate new biases.

Trust

A discussion about ethics, AI and data almost always touches the concept of trust too. We also discuss this at some length with Townsend. He specifically mentions the trust gap that is very real when it comes to AI. Addressing this requires not just transparency through tools like model cards (which SAS compares to nutrition labels for AI) but improved global literacy about these technologies.

Organizations should start bold

Looking forward, Townsend challenges companies to start bold when it comes to AI, data and ethics. We should look to address fundamental challenges. Townsend sees various opportunities in healthcare, mental health, but also around the topic of inequality. 

Listen to this latest episode of Techzine Talks on Tour now.

Cisco gradually rolls out a complete ecosystem of solutions, both software and hardware, for the AI age. We discuss the objectives Cisco has in the compute space with Jeremy Foster, SVP and GM for Cisco's compute organization.

Cisco's compute business appeared to be in de doldrums a couple of years ago. That is, it appeared to coast along without a very clear objective. Cisco didn't make a lot of big announcements around UCS either, as far as we can remember.

This has changed fundamentally over the past year or so. Cisco wants to make it very clear now that UCS still plays a very important role in Cisco's strategy. The reason for this? AI of course. What else? With the rise of AI comes more and different demand for the underlying infrastructure. 

That infrastructure is about more than GPUs alone. Compute and networking also play a very important role. That's why Cisco has been focusing heavily on delivering AI stacks to customers. Hyperfabric is one of them, but the recent announcement of the AI POD, and the news together with Nvidia coming out of GTC are all clear indications of this.

During our conversation with Foster at Cisco Live EMEA, we asked him all about the changed dynamic within Cisco around UCS and compute in general. We talked about what makes a good AI stack, and what customers should take into account when setting one up. 

Foster promises one thing, Cisco's only getting started, so it's a good idea to be clued in from the start. Another good reason to listen to this new Episode of Techzine Talks on Tour now.

Sovereign SASE emerges as the new frontier in secure access solutions, addressing the critical balance between cloud convenience and regulatory compliance. Nirav Shah, SVP Products and Solutions at Fortinet, unveils how this innovation allows organizations to maintain control over their sensitive data while still benefiting from the operational simplicity that made SASE attractive in the first place.

The journey from traditional SASE through unified SASE to today's sovereign model reflects a market responding to real customer needs, particularly in highly regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare providers, and government entities can now implement modern security frameworks while keeping their data under strict governance. "Sovereign SASE brings the simplicity that SASE solutions provide, but gives customers control over where the data is," explains Shah.

What makes this approach particularly powerful is its hybrid architecture. Organizations maintain control of the data plane through their own points of presence, conducting security inspection and data storage according to their specific requirements, while vendors manage the control plane to reduce operational complexity. This creates a perfect bridge for companies previously unable to adopt cloud security models due to compliance restrictions. For service providers, it offers a strategic opportunity to capture higher-margin business by maintaining infrastructure control while leveraging vendor expertise.

Ready to explore how Sovereign SASE might transform your security posture while addressing your regulatory requirements? Discover how this technology can provide the flexibility your organization needs while keeping your sensitive data under your control.

The episode focuses on the evolving landscape of sustainable data center modernization, with insights from HPE’s Pascal Lecoq on the importance of efficient IT practices, liquid cooling technologies, and the role of software in maximizing sustainability. Key discussions include the balance between public cloud and on-prem solutions, strategies for improving energy consumption, and the growing trend of modular data centers.

• Overview of HPE's sustainability initiatives 
• Comparing public cloud and on-prem data center efficiencies 
• The role of software in optimizing energy consumption 
• Quick wins for enhancing data center sustainability 
• The impact of liquid cooling systems on energy savings 
• Adoption of modular data centers for flexible IT demands 
• Implications of AI for future data center designs

Chapters:

00:02:15 - Insights from HPE Discover Barcelona
00:05:30 - The Sustainability Edge of Public Cloud
00:09:45 - HPE GreenLake: Private and Hybrid Cloud Solutions
00:14:00 - The Role of Software in Data Center Modernization
00:18:20 - Innovations in Cooling Technologies for Data Centers
00:23:10 - The Rise of Modular Data Centers
00:27:50 - Conclusion and Future Trends in IT Sustainability

AI and cybersecurity seem to go hand in hand. That is, much physical and virtual ink has been spilled over the impact AI had and has on security solutions, as well as on how attackers use AI for bad purposes. But what about the security of the AI organizations use every day? We talk about this with Ric Smith, President - Product, Technology, & Operations, at SentinelOne in a conversation we recorded at AWS re:Invent.
 
At the end of the day, a large chunk of any discussion about AI security is also about cloud security. Much of the AI that companies use, stand-alone or as as a part of (SaaS), runs in the cloud. Hence the setting and location for our conversation with Smith. 

In our conversation, we talk about a large variety of topics. Starting with the initial skepticism about the security of the cloud, we work our way to present-day discussions of securing the AI that runs in the cloud (and on-premises, for that matter). AI comes up with its own challenges to cybersecurity and as such adds to the already complex patchwork that is the security stack.

We're not going to give away too much about the content of our conversation with Smith. We do promise, however, to also provide some actionable insights for customers regarding their security posture. And Smith also has something to say about how the security industry as a whole could and should do better when it comes to collaborating with each other.