Blog by Alexei Balaganski

Blog
The Bletchley Declaration: The Imitation Game of a Different Kind
by Alexei Balaganski
The result of this meeting was “ The Bletchley Declaration ”, an international agreement signed by 29 countries, including the US, EU, and China, to confirm their shared commitment for future AI developments that “should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible”. Sounds promising, right? Experts have been talking about the dangers of uncontrolled AI proliferation for years. James Cameron warned us about AI gaining self-awareness forty years ago! Elon Musk has been...
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GPTs, Databases, and AI Agility
by Alexei Balaganski
I can imagine that some of the readers might look at the title and wonder: what do these three terms even have in common? Well, I must confess that the last one I’ve made up (or should I say “invented”?) recently – and I will explain it later. But the former two are, in fact, connected in more than one way. Although Generative AI has been with us for quite some time in various forms (remember deepfakes, for example?), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), the new-generation large language models, have literally taken the world by storm. After people saw what...
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Securing Tomorrow: Quantum Computing Horizons in Cybersecurity
by Alexei Balaganski
Arthur C. Clarke, the famous English science fiction writer, had once noted that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Back in the 1960s, he was probably thinking about space exploration, which was the hottest and most impressive topic of that decade. Since then, however, spacecraft have unfortunately lost a large portion of their glamour, becoming instead reliable workhorses for the industry. A few other revolutionary technologies have met the same fate during the later decades as well – the Internet, mobile communications, electric vehicles, etc. The...
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AI and Cybersecurity: A New Hope for Cyber Defenders?
by Alexei Balaganski
Benjamin Franklin, the famous American statesman (happy 4th of July, by the way!), once claimed: “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Well, nowadays, there is another certainty for every organization in the world – eventually it will be hacked. If yours has not yet been attacked by cybercriminals, then it can easily happen tomorrow or even worse: it might have already happened, but you just haven’t found out yet. Statistics from around the world clearly show that data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other kinds of...
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Oracle CloudWorld Impressions
by Alexei Balaganski
Last week, I had an opportunity to visit Oracle CloudWorld, the company’s new flagship conference for customers and partners, which is also the reincarnation of the familiar OpenWorld after the three-year break caused by the Covid pandemic. With the new title and location - the event has moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas - everything I felt after stepping into the venue was somehow different and yet the same. On the one hand, I was glad to meet the same crowd and fellow analysts, as well as see many Oracle employees in person after years of just Zoom sessions. On the other...
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Do You Really Need a VPN?
by Alexei Balaganski
It looks like we are halfway through the Cybersecurity Awareness Month of October already, and I thought it might be the appropriate time to talk about VPNs. Again. Haven’t we talked about them enough, you might ask? Every time KuppingerCole analysts bring up the topic of Zero Trust ,  we feel obliged to mention how VPNs have long outlived their purpose, and how organizations have to finally get rid of them and move to more modern solutions . I’m fairly certain, there will even be a bunch of sessions at the upcoming Cybersecurity Leadership Summit talking about them....
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The HeatWave is Spreading
by Alexei Balaganski
Just over a month ago, I wrote about the partnership between Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure that has finally enabled their customers to create “properly multi-cloud” applications without any hidden costs or limitations of earlier architectures. Well, unfortunately, announcements like that aren’t heard often, simply because the very idea of such partnerships goes against cloud service providers’ traditional business interests. This obviously has worked remarkably well for Oracle and Microsoft, but at least to a certain extent because there is no rivalry between...
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Who is Afraid of Security Automation?
by Alexei Balaganski
If there is one universally true statement about every organization regardless of size, location, or industry – it is that they all have too many security problems to deal with comfortably and in time. If you believe that you have your cybersecurity well under control, you probably simply don’t have full visibility into every corner of your IT… Unsurprisingly, the idea of replacing overworked (and increasingly scarce) humans with some kind of automation both for daily administrative routine and for responding to security incidents looks universally appealing to everyone...
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You Cannot Buy Zero Trust, But That’s Actually OK
by Alexei Balaganski
Zero Trust is undoubtedly one of the hottest buzzwords in the IT industry. The idea that just by following a set of simple principles an organization can dramatically reduce the complexity of its IT infrastructure and significantly improve its security posture and resilience to cyberattacks is, of course, extremely appealing to everyone. Unfortunately, even the companies highly motivated to adopt Zero Trust as their new strategy are often struggling even with the initial steps. If KuppingerCole analysts got a dollar every time we had to tell someone: “sorry, but you cannot buy...
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Finally, the Multi-cloud We’ve Been Waiting For
by Alexei Balaganski
“Multi-cloud” is a tricky term. At its face value, it simply means that your organization is using cloud services from more than one provider, right? But if it’s that trivial, why are so many people talking about “multi-cloud strategies” and why do entire market segments exist only to make managing your multi-cloud deployments slightly less unbearable? According to Flexera , over 90% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, and on average, a business is using the services of 2.6 public cloud providers. But of course, the number alone is not what...
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