The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

Prepare yourself for an episode of *Silo Busting* with a tremendous amount of, as they say, yield. Alex Gounares, CEO of Polyverse Corporation, has returned pick up the zero-trust thread. This time around, he and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, are following their way down the security supply chain. Asks Gounares: “If you don’t know where your binaries are coming from and you don’t know where the source code is and you don’t know who built it, what do you do then?” The guys chat about choosing between open source and proprietary code, building your own Linux as opposed to getting polymorphic, adding noise to the system, the *patience* of some attackers, and sophisticated back doors. It’s the insightful sound of #CybersecurityByDesign, friends, and it’s good. Trust us.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Healthcare in the pandemic era requires thoughtful innovation. One physician who’s up to the challenge is cardiologist Dr. Asif Ali, Chief Medical Officer of Preventric and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. In this sprightly conversation with Lisa Butcher, Senior Director of Digital Engagement at EPAM, Ali tells many stories. One of which involves a patient he calls “Arthur,” a man who weighed 700 pounds and went into sudden cardiac arrest during his first visit to Ali’s office. “With his obesity, no doctor would touch him, no bariatric surgeon would touch him, because he had this sudden cardiac arrest,” Ali says. But thanks to chronic care- and remote patient management—plus a donated wearable and a diabetes-prevention program-provided nutritionist—Arthur lost over 450 pounds! But this is just one of the dramatic stories on this episode of *The Resonance Test.* Ali and Butcher dig deep into the collection of data and the treatment of vascular disease, medical consumerism, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the importance of partnerships, and what Ali calls “point-of-care decision making.” You’ll want to hit play on this conversation with a doctor who has a heart and understands exactly what makes it tick.

Host: Kenj Ross

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Data sharing in the age of COVID can be, according Anshu Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO of Skyflow, a matter of life and death. Sharma, the latest guest on our #CybersecurityByDesign series on *Silo Busting,* explains that Skyflow’s data privacy vaults are being used, *right now,* for COVID testing and vaccine information. This urgent topic reunites Sharma and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, (both of whom worked at Oracle years ago) to unlock for us the mysteries of zero-trust privacy vaults. The pair talk about data privacy, look at contemporary encryption techniques, and consider how airlines, banks, Facebook, and the VA all deal with data. But the bass note of their conversation is COVID data: “all of this information needs to flow, but we have to be able to do this without compromising anybody’s privacy. This is not an unsolvable problem. The sad part is a lot of people think this is unsolvable but I think it’s totally solvable with today’s technology. If we solve this problem, we can save a lot of lives.” And that’s nor a mere assertion; it’s a fact.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Apps don’t just bring us our favorite music and allow us to engage in mobile banking; they present great opportunities for cybercrime. More than 80% of cyberattacks enter through the application layer. That’s why this #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting is focused on application security, or AppSec, as the experts call it. One of them, Eugene Dzihanau, EPAM’s Head of Defensive Security Services, joins Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Producer Ken Gordon to think out loud about what AppSec means right now. Dzihanau says that, in our cloud-driven present, “Applications became much more than applications” and that in this world “everything starts to become an application.” Rehman agrees and says that it’s a dangerous time because cybercriminals are looking vigorously for vulnerabilities. “Whenever there is change, there is chance for an exploit,” says Rehman. How to make applications more secure? Start at the start. Dzihanau says: “Thinking about security from an architecture perspective from the beginning will save you a lot of headaches.” Of course, it’s not simple to make this happen, and Dzihanau counsels us to approach this carefully and intentionally: “Don’t set the bar too high. Address the change in behavior of your developers and architects and make sure that the security steps are done throughout your SDLC, from the beginning to the end, from design to deployment.”

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

A bad experiment, says HBS professor Stefan Thomke, is one “where you learn nothing.” Thomke, the author of the recent volume *Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments* and our guest on *The Resonance Test,* should know. A thoughtful advocate of the methodical and effective testing of ideas, Thomke’s conversion with our Chris Michaud educated us on the many challenges of building an experimental culture and what leadership requires here. Experimentation is not easy. “Human nature gets in the way,” Thomke says. “We tend to happily accept good results, which are confirming our biases.” But when confronted by a “bad” result, he notes, “we challenge and *thoroughly* investigate it.” In *Experimentation Works,* we learn about the newly arrived Booking.com CEO who arrived and presented a logo to his staff. They responded: “That’s great; we’ll check it with an experiment.” Thomke also reminds us that building such a strong experimental culture can’t be done on the cheap. “CEOs get really excited about innovation and they tell everybody to be innovative but there are no budgets available,” says Thomke, adding: “You gotta put some serious resources into these kinds of things.” Invest in the next episode of the podcast and get smarter about your experiments.

Host: Kenj Ross

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

When Sun Tzu wrote: “All warfare is based on deception," he probably wasn’t thinking of the SolarWinds attack. But it seems like we might learn something about that recent event by studying his legendary text, *The Art of War.* Or so says Alex Gounares, CEO of Polyverse Corporation and our guest on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting.* Sun Tzu and the military talk about using decoys, says Gounares, and "cyber attackers use decoys all the time. And it works. It fooled World War II Germany with the decoys for the Calais invasion, it fooled in Confucian times, and it fools today in 2020.” If you don’t want to be fooled, you’ll attend—carefully—to what Gounares and Sam Rehman say in this spirited conversation. Gounares—who in a previous life was Bill Gates’ technological advisor—zeroes in on the extremely topical theme of zero-trust software. Says Gounares: “Zero trust is this idea of saying: Assume the world around you is messy.” Listening to these two veterans talk about micro-segmentation, entropy, and repeatability is an educational experience you won’t want to miss. Trust us.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Robots are inching their way toward us. In the workplace. In hospitals. In grocery stores. This isn’t a necessarily alarming development. It's certainly not in the eyes of people like our guest, Marcio Macedo, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Ava Robotics. Macedo says it’s all about creating the right kind of human-to-robot partnerships: “To us, it comes to down to a focus on learning with the customer.”

Luckily, Macedo’s interlocutor this episode, Toby Bottorf, is the author of a classic blog post called “Robots for People: A Humanist Reframing of Automated Labor.” Their conversation is anything but robotic. For instance, Macedo talks about how, during family visits to nursing facilities during COVID times, Ava’s telepresence robot is “a very physical way for family members to come in,” adding that it’s “much more immersive and engaging than an iPad being brought on a tripod.” Bottorf points out the “stalking pandemic of loneliness, which Zoom is no cure for” and Macedo says: “There’s a lot of promise in robotics for sure in helping address that.”

Macedo talks about the hybrid office situation so many of us do, or will soon, face, and says that here robots will “not just deliver the productivity but some amount of accessibility and fairness as well, because there are populations that will not be able to be physically in the [workspace].” Can you see our robot avatars hanging out with each other? Bottorf can: “I have a mental image that makes me smile: The idea that in 2021 there will be workplaces where clusters of remote workers, or their robot physical presences, will be having a water cooler conversation.”

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

producer: Ken Gordon

Fast data is something else. The data from IoT, gaming, and media streaming needs to be collected and quickly analyzed by companies in order to make smart business decisions. Not every company understands how this works… though they all should learn. Fortunately, Mark Makary, CTO and Co-Founder of Logic Keepers—and our guest on *Silo Busting*—understands. The latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of our podcast finds Makary and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, burrowing deep and into this tricky subject. Makary says there are “a lot of business cases where you can use fast data to process events coming to you, including security” and that its predictive analytics are like a crystal ball. But Makary also warns: “This business advantage has also a window of opportunity,” and if you wait too long “you might actually lose the business benefits and that will diminish the return.” Note: This is a high-level and sometimes technical conversation. For those of you who are looking to learn more about how machine learning works here, for both the good guys and bad guys; the danger areas of fast data attacks; and the problems of model poisoning, the time has come to plug in your AirPods.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

No doubt about it: COVID has *educated* us. The pandemic has taught the education ecosystem—students, parents, teachers, administrators, publishers—to review our educational tools and systems and say, “These could be better!” The big question is: How? To begin answering it, we spoke with two men who are deeply enmeshed in questions of EdTech. Our latest episode of *Silo Busting* features Kevin Labick, our SVP of Digital Engagement, and Dmitry Krasovskiy, our Head of Education & Learning, who are both present and ready with some A+ answers to producer Ken Gordon’s queries. Together they talk about how education's traditional a B2B2C business model is no more. “That broke when learning [went] virtual, en masse,” says Labick. For educational publishers and content creators, this means a focus on the leaners, and when end users become buyers, Krasovskiy says, “You need to change the way you approach product building and product implementation.” Take a seat in the virtual classroom of this episode and you’ll learn about the part design thinking plays here, the competencies educational publishers must take on, and even the future roles educators might play in our digital future.

Host: Alison Kotin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Loneliness: It’s hurting us. Dr. Sachin Jain, President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, has been talking about and treating the scourge of loneliness for years. Now he discusses this with Gaurav Rohatgi on the latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* Jain reveals the roots of his obsession: It started with an undergraduate course with Robert Putnam and his book *Bowling Alone,* which “showed us all the importance of social connection to social outcomes.” The dialogue ventures into the world of social media (“We’ve substituted a lot of community participation with online connection”) and COVID (a friend of Jain’s said about the pandemic: "I’ve spent more time with my son in the last six months than I had in the previous five years of his life”). Jain recalls his Togetherness Program at CareMore, in which “small nudges ultimately translated into fewer admissions and better health outcomes for the people who were part of the program” and covers his recent work at SCAN: “We employ a number of our senior citizen members to make regular outreach phone calls to fellow members.” It’s a fascinating and occasionally paradoxical conversion. Jain says that loneliness “is not a complicated problem to solve,” while at the same time maintaining that “This isn’t simple work—it’s simple on the surface but it’s quite meaningful and quite emotionally complicated when you actually dig into it.” We suspect you’ll dig it a lot.

Host: Kenji Ross

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon