Tech Diary of Cybersecurity Evangelist Sascha Martens

Day 1

Day 1 of VM World was an intensive introduction with many workshops and hands-on sessions. So there was no time to get sprinkled but one first-touch experience after the other. For me, security was already at the top of the agenda today – besides some very interesting conversations with interested users, I was also able to attend a great session on state-of-the-art Virtual Network Architecture. One focus of the session was of course Network Security – for us an elementary part of our security-by-design strategy.

From the administration of privileged accounts and API tokens to joint log evaluation, a holistic view of virtualization in the context of IAM can be extremely useful! Techniques like Micro-Segmentation do not only affect our future design. Already today Password Safe is securely operated in a Zero-Trust environment! With our DB-, App– and Web-Tier we create optimal conditions for strict perimeter firewalls. And to the admins: We’re also happy to help you break down workloads at 😉 Full of anticipation for tomorrow I let the first day in Barcelona fade away!

Day 2

The official opening was absolutely successful with an interesting general session – although the bigger hype was certainly the opening of the Solution Exchange area. I heard about one or the other Swag battle 😉 From a technical point of view, the focus was of course on the really big topics like Multi-Cloud and 5G. The expansion of the possibilities to operate a flexible platform of different resources in several cloud infrastructures drives the transformation of services in the cloud enormously.
With the new possibilities of 5G, these services are actually available – with less infrastructure in between.

We are already working closely with all major vendors to provide Password Safe as a service with all the capabilities but also all the capabilities to secure the architecture. Much more interesting for us and our customers are the management and security of cloud resources, apps, and services – such an object, which consists of various resources, requires 360 degrees of support when it comes to access. Whereas in the past we had to take care of a privileged account for our firewall, today it runs on every single host and is managed centrally by the hypervisor. I enjoy today’s closing with a bit of ‘Python for machine learning’ – more my personal hobby, but who knows 😉

 
Day 3

What a start into the day – Bear Gryls’ appearance at the General Session was eagerly awaited… Well, what can I say: Bear Gryls is definitely not an IT professional – the experiences he describes are definitely too exciting for that! In his lecture, the star adventurer nevertheless managed to build an exciting bridge to situations and problems from everyday life and also from the unusual life of an IT professional. Who of us is not afraid of a bad internet connection and we all feel the same anger when we see “Configure Updates – please wait” on the screen. The rest of my day, and felt like the rest of the conference, was completely taken up by the container orchestration with Kubernetes. For me, the focus was clearly on security! Cloud architectures are no less demanding in their security and design!
But now to the most important part of this successful day – the start of the VM World Fest. Of course, this also requires my full attention 😉

 
Day 4

Final spurt – and one or the other doesn’t look so fresh after the great party last night! Without a general session, the last day starts (luckily) and for many people, the departure is already planned early. Nevertheless, everyone is still focused on their topics and there will be more great sessions! IoT and EDGE devices are closely related to the cloud anyway and must of course also be illuminated in multi-cloud environments. There is more and more good technology – such as approaches to implement and simplify the connection of devices from different manufacturers via unified bridges – but the main topic is and remains a strategy to dare the step into a networked world. This strategy not only finds its place in the session descriptions but is also reflected in every discussion and in many questions within the framework of the various events. Last but not least, one of my personal favorite topics: the vRealize Competition! As always, it was a pleasure to participate in these competition formats – even if only as a spectator. Many teams fought their way through exciting challenges and the final clearly showed the class of the winning team!

 
Conclusion

As always, VM World has been a great, absolutely informative, and educational event: Visitors can look forward to a great audience, an exciting city, and a realistic outlook on the direction of real tech trends – even if they weren’t so spectacular in the beginning! Cybersecurity evangelist Sascha Martens is Head of Solutions Architect at MATESO. For the Password Safe Blog, he writes regular Tech Diaries, which give an entertaining insight into current topics and events from an IT perspective.