As the summer vacation season winds down, Black Hat’s early August event in Las Vegas marks a return to big tech industry trade shows. It is a somewhat unique gathering relative to other industry cybersecurity events, one that is heavily focused on security practitioners and the challenges they face in protecting organizational operations. To no surprise, many of the conversations and announcements this year focused on the weaponization of Frontier AI. Let’s examine three big takeaways and unpack what several cybersecurity infrastructure providers announced at Black Hat USA 2026 to address an ever-growing and AI-infused threat landscape. An Emerging Agentic Attack Surface The first big takeaway that emerged from…
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Many solution providers are charting a path of reimagining SASE services, and it is a logical evolution. With the rapid adoption of agentic AI applications and proliferation of corresponding workloads, SD-WAN and security will have to support the requirements of both human users and agents. It is anticipated that agents will generate far more network traffic than humans through persistent, around-the-clock MCP server, API, task, and orchestration calls across the infrastructure. These demands are expected to continue to escalate over time, and infrastructure providers will have to keep pace with deployments in both the cloud and on-premises as private AI adoption grows. To address these challenges, Fortinet recently announced an…
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Cisco recently held its signature Live event in the United States, returning to Las Vegas and featuring over 1,200 sessions, including keynotes, technical demos, and breakouts. Themes related to scaling networking for AI, securing the agentic workforce, and reimagining operations dominated agendas, and I had the opportunity to spend time with company executives, customers, and partners to dive deeper into deployments and business outcomes. The launch payload was massive again this year as Cisco continues to move its solution development at the speed of modern AI. With a continued practice of summarizing my event attendance with three big takeaways – let’s dive in! Maintaining Control Through Chaos This year marks…
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Extreme Networks turns 30 years old this year, and its recent Connect event in Orlando celebrated many of its achievements. Not surprisingly, AI-driven operations were a big theme, and it is abundantly clear that the company is focusing its efforts on delivering better business outcomes and improved network operational efficiency rather than just competing on speeds and feeds. With a continued theme of summarizing my event insights with three big takeaways – let’s dive in! Extreme Platform ONE’s Agentic Journey At Extreme Connect, executives spent considerable time discussing how AI can reduce operational burden across wired, wireless, and fabric environments. Enterprise networking teams continue to struggle with complexity, and cloud-managed…
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NTT Research held its signature Upgrade event in the heart of Silicon Valley this week. I had an opportunity for a third year in a row to join customers, partners, and company executives over two days for a visionary keynote, compelling panel sessions, and impactful technical demonstrations. With a continued theme of summarizing my event attendance with three big takeaways – let’s dive in! Incubation Designed To Scale Innovation Upgrade kicked off with its keynote emphasizing NTT Research’s efforts that serve as a foundation for meaningful innovation. It is a message that I have heard at past Upgrade events, but this year the Japanese tech giant put wood behind the…
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The concept of cloud computing can be traced back to the 1960s, rooted in the notion of time-sharing. This year marks its twentieth anniversary, and the cloud continues to play an instrumental role within IT and OT organizations. Cloud services provide scalable, cost-effective on-demand compute, networking, and security infrastructure to power business operations. Its ability to be treated as an operational expense is invaluable, as well as its ability to provide new features and capabilities to meet ever-changing applications and workloads, including the rise of generative AI and agentic frameworks. Over the past several weeks, I have had an opportunity to spend time with two NTT DATA executives and attend…
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Gigamon held its fifth annual Visualyze Bootcamp virtual event over three days in early September. Since its founding 20 years ago, the company has developed a deep observability pipeline that leverages network intelligence to detect threats often missed by traditional security tools. The Bootcamp serves as an opportunity for Gigamon to share its industry and technical knowledge with customers. Most organizations using cloud services employ a multi-cloud model to benefit from competitive pricing and access to best-of-breed service offerings. Additionally, the trend toward containerization and virtualization aims to enhance operational and cost efficiencies. However, hybrid cloud deployments can introduce complexities that require careful management. The Bootcamp addressed many of these challenges, with…
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