2 companies well-positioned in AI-era cybersecurity

00:00 Speaker A

What changes have we seen in the cybersecurity landscape over the past few years? You know, there’s a sort of platforming trend among these companies that is trying to say, come to me for all your cybersecurity needs. How did this change the landscape? Have you made things safer or less safe? What do you think about this?

00:22 Speaker B

So, definitely, there’s consolidation and platforms like Crowdstrike are a big genre of packet-based capabilities and a lot of people are moving towards that. They say: Here’s a vendor, here’s a mouth to choke, here’s an organization that can help unify all these disparate security spends. There is also a risk of overconcentration; We now see this not only in cyberspace but also in the cloud; You have a global infrastructure that experiences occasional outages. We had AWS, recently we had Azure, recently we had Cloudflare. Last year Crowdstrike had a pretty notable outage. So you have the wonderful advantages of consolidation. Hey, everything works together but there’s a lot of systematic risk. What many vendors are thinking about right now is how to combine my global infrastructure with my old-school on-premises systems with sovereign investments, just in case, or multiple global platforms.

01:21 Speaker A

Yeah, I was going to say that old school was pretty interesting to me. I mean, do you think we’re going to see a backlash against the cloud, more like an on-premises redundancy trend?

01:38 Speaker B

Yes, that’s a great question. So it won’t go back to the way it was, right? This seems very expensive and difficult. It will be a truly private cloud. And I think a few to watch are Oracle and Google, which have made significant investments in on-premises cloud offerings, or sovereign cloud, where you can run in a box, in a data center, and have full control. You have all the benefits of the cloud and the ability to scale. Microsoft and AWS also have their own offerings, but Google and Oracle really rely on on-premises clouds and on-premises AI capabilities.