In episode #77 of The Tech That Connects Us, we were delighted to be joined by John Spiegel, CTO at Axis Security.  

In this episode we unpacked everything from his career trajectory through to the nitty gritty world that is cybersecurity. 

We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did recording it. 

What challenges does the internet being the network now create in the cyber security space? 

“Oh, my, the internet really is is the is the is the future for connectivity.  

And it’s good and it’s also bad. The good is that you have this ubiquitous connectivity out there that for the most part is is inexpensive.  

If you think about the cost per megabit of an internet line versus an MPLS line, it’s significant. And, as a result, it’s enabling this incredible amount of productivity from companies. 

You don’t have to do constant maintenance, or patch upgrades, and the ability to access that from anywhere is amazing. But, on the other hand, we have this challenge of if businesses can get to any application at anytime, anywhere.  

The same thing is true for the bad cyber actors, you know, they can easily get into your network. Maybe because you misconfigured everything or something or maybe you know, you left something open. And that’s that’s a huge challenge.  

What I’m excited about is this rise of this concept called zero trust. And I know there’s a lot of marketing around it.  But it’s probably, in my mind, the most important thing that has happened. we had an opportunity to interview interview John Kinder bog a few days ago, he was one of the fathers of, of zero trust.  

And, his whole journey started because he started working on a pix firewall. And, he did not like the concept that there was one side that was untrusted and one side was untrusted. And he’s like, “come on, this is a computer. A computer is not a human.” You know, we built a society built on trust.  you know, we trust one another that, you know, when you pay for something you trust that person.  

Every interaction you do is built on this concept of trust. Computers don’t understand trust, they are built of silicone, rare metals, and they think in zeros and ones, trust is not a concept for them. So, that kind of started sparked him on this journey of zero trust.  

And if you think about how wins are built and what I did with SD win what I did in my past, building out these networks, these global networks for Columbia, sportswear and others.  

And I spent my career building these these artefacts, artefacts of of trust, and to me that was completely wrong. I should have gone a different way. And I think the future about branch connectivity is not good. it’d be about interconnections between a branch and, and a location, it’s going to be about building islands.  

Essentially companies are going to be building these islands. And the connections going out are going to be these almost you could say “zero trust” connections out to a SaaS application, or it’s a remote worker. Those sorts of things!” 

To listen to the full episode, click here. 

Every Wednesday we sit down with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.