Zeus Kerravala

The world’s largest security conference, RSA, came and went earlier this month at its normal home in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. There was some speculation the show might be canceled due to Verizon, AT&T and IBM pulling out, but the show went on with more than 40,000 people, myself included, coming to learn […]

Consider this: Ransomware attacks take place every 14 seconds and have increased by 700% since 2016. Such attacks—where malicious software blocks access to the production data until payment is made—cost companies around $11 billion in financial, productivity and downtime losses in 2019. Attack prevention is necessary but not sufficient Many companies focus their efforts on preventing […]

High-performance network vendor Arista Networks last week announced it had acquired Big Switch Networks. The announcement was made during its fourth-quarter financial earnings call, which was solid despite some volatility with the cloud vendors. Big Switch was one of the pioneers in software-defined networking (SDN) and has raised north of $120 million since it was […]

Gone are the days when all applications and systems were centralized in data centers and IT departments had direct power over the user experience. Cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) changed all that, giving companies a cost-effective alternative to running apps in-house. What many infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders didn’t see coming is the lack of […]

SASE (secure access service edge) vendor Open Systems on Jan. 28 announced it was acquiring Swiss-based Sqooba, an AI-based IT analytics and visibility vendor. Open Systems will use Sqooba to enhance its SASE platform to include end-to-end visibility. The timing for Open Systems is good, because SD-WANs are quickly evolving to SASE. SD-WANs obviously have […]

SD-WANs (software-defined wide-area networks) are often praised for uniting the network and security functions into one solution, but there is actually a bigger story of convergence. Recently, some vendors and solutions are converging the network, security and artificial intelligence under the SD-WAN umbrella, giving way for AI-powered insights, virtual assistants and augmented management. With these […]

Earlier this month, secure access service edge (SASE) vendor Cato announced a way for mid-size companies to deploy SIEM at a fraction of the cost of traditional vendors. Cato has added SIEM capabilities to its SASE platform, which converges wide-area network edge and network security into a cloud-based service. With this option, companies can move […]

For the past few months, Cisco Systems has been promoting a special event in San Francisco where it would address the “Future of the Internet.” I’ve attended many of these types of events from various vendors in the past and some live up to the hype, but many do not. The Cisco one certainly did. […]

Health care has been one of the early adopters of artificial intelligence (AI), because the technology has the ability to find needles in haystacks of data much faster than people can. This increase in speed can often save lives; time is of the utmost importance in this industry. Also, AI systems can often find things […]

Quantum computers promise to solve the most complicated problems and equations that computers today cannot. But the promise is not all positive. The majority of global organizations see the emergence of quantum computing as a major threat to security, according to findings from DigiCert’s 2019 Post Quantum Crypto Survey. While quantum computers aren’t commercially available […]