EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

Cisco Live is happening in Las Vegas this week. It remains one of the biggest annual gatherings of network infrastructure professionals in the world. It is also a venue for Cisco to showcase its latest products and services, and it is a place where Cisco lays out its overall vision to address customer requirements.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend Informatica World 2022 (IW22) in Las Vegas. Returning to the in-person conference scene caused some apprehension; however, reflecting on takeaways and engaging in discussions around data integration made this trip a worthwhile experience. I want to thank IW22 for a thought-provoking week of discussions centered on data management, data integration, interoperability, artificial intelligence, and navigating a complex, hybrid, multi-cloud digital environment with Informatica experts, sponsors, and customers.

Long gone are the days of simple, signature-based defenses against cyber-threats.

Cyber-threats are growing at an exponential rate in the perpetual cat-and-mouse game of cybersecurity, and traditional approaches to cybersecurity are struggling to keep pace. In 2021, anti-malware vendors estimated that they detected between 300,000 and 500,000 new pieces of malware every day. That means than in 2021 alone, over 100 million new pieces of malware were created. Even if cybersecurity vendors can keep up with the sheer volume of new pieces of malware, traditional signature-based and even heuristic-based detection algorithms will struggle to keep up – and that’s only for known malware.

I could spend pages and days talking all about the new technology that was released at Dreamforce 2018, but I am going to take the higher road and discuss what Dreamforce 2018 means to customer organizations. Salesforce demonstrated that it cares about its customers and is committed to increasing the productivity of customer-facing teams around the world. Of course, if customer-facing teams are more productive, that will mean increased revenue, higher customer satisfaction, and a palpable competitive advantage.

The C-Suite Should see Gains in Productivity and Profitability

Many sales leaders complain about the challenge of getting sales representatives to enter information into their sales automation systems. The results are incomplete information and the inability to properly forecast and manage sales teams for success. The introduction of Einstein Voice allows sales teams to interact with Salesforce products over their morning coffee or handsfree on their drive home, freeing them to do more of what they are paid to do: sell.

What should machine and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) do for IT operations, DevOps and container management? The following table represents my quick outline of the key challenges and specific problem ML/AI needs to address. The table is based on the believe that ML/AI needs to look over the shoulder of IT ops, DevOps, and business management teams to learn from their decision making. In other words, every virtualization administrator fulfills infrastructure provisioning or upgrade requests a little bit differently. Please regard the below table as a preliminary outline and basis for discussion. At this point, and probably at no future point either, I won't claim to know the 'ultimate truth.'

For two decades, IBM’s Power Systems family of high-performance servers has been considered the premier alternative to x86-based systems. Combining fast processing, high availability, and rapid scalability, Power Systems are optimized to support big data and cloud architectures. Popularly deployed to run IBM’s AIX and IBM i operating systems, the platform has seen stiff competition in recent years from x86-based Linux systems. In 2013, IBM responded to this challenge by investing a billion dollars into the development of enhancements to the Power line that would support Linux operating systems and open source technologies. This bold move was hailed as a strategy that would greatly improve the attractiveness of the platform and drive broader adoption.