Modern digital & cloud technology underpins the shift that enables businesses to implement new processes, scale quickly and serve customers in a whole new way. Historically, organisations would invest in their own IT infrastructure to support their business objectives, and the IT department’s role would be focused on keeping the ‘lights on.’ To minimize the chance of failure of the equipment, engineers traditionally introduced an element of redundancy in the architecture.

Companies are moving to incorporate the cloud into their computing infrastructure at a phenomenal rate. This is, without question, a very positive move. It permits companies to scale processing resources up and down in response to changing demands, giving companies the operational equivalent of unlimited resources while paying only for the resources that are actually used.

When Gronk the caveperson chipped out the first wheel from a slab of granite only to watch it roll away down a hill at some speed, he discovered we could build things to make our lives easier. We took this idea and ran with it, and now we have internet connected shoes. However, we also have cybercrime, data theft, phishing, scams, ransomware... the list goes on.

Cloud networks are popular targets for cybercriminals and organizations will inevitably face them. If you’ve ever administered a network of any type, you know that DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack attempts are really frequent, and there’s loads of malware out there too.

AWS is the most popular cloud platform for enterprises, and with good reason. Amazon has massive infrastructure around the world, and many years of experience with it. Whether your network is completely on the cloud or you have a hybrid network, using AWS saves your business a lot of money and physical space. You benefit from Amazon’s tremendous economies of scale, and a lot of the tedious work involved in maintaining a network can be delegated to them.

Nothing gets the AppSec / InfoSec community abuzz quite like a good old 0-day vulnerability. I mean, what’s not to love here? These vulnerabilities involve the thrill of adversaries knowing something we don’t, giving them a path to sail through our defenses to break into that sweet data inside. They are the James Bond of the security space — suave, sexy, and deadly.

At a point in time, smart devices and robotics were common elements in the storyline of futuristic fictional novels. Today, those concepts are the modern norm across the technology industry. Similarly, in cybersecurity, pioneering professionals held on to seemingly far-fetched dreams where logs were easy to analyze, and false positives didn’t exist. While these challenges still exist, artificial intelligence (AI) is making these once far-fetched dreams the new norm in the security industry.

It wasn’t a very long time ago when cloud computing was a niche field that only the most advanced organizations were dabbling with. Now the cloud is very much the mainstream, and it is rare to find a business that uses IT that doesn’t rely on it for a part of their infrastructure. But if you are going to add cloud services to your company, you will need to choose between the private cloud and the public cloud.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used all around us and if you’ve used some sort of voice activated technology to make your life easier, then there was likely some element of AI involved. Some of the most notable examples include Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Tesla semi-autonomous vehicles. Individual consumers no longer have to fumble around in the dark to flip the light switch at home, manually search playlists for songs, or type in a password to get into smartphones.

Computers are making humans now. Sort of. In a recent discussion at Bulletproof, someone casually mentioned ‘thispersondoesnotexist.com’. It’s a fairly harmless experiment in which AI randomly generates an image of a person who does not exist, thus solving the mystery of the name. This has since prevented me from sleeping at night, not least because I have turned up on it more than once.