The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

*Data and dairy.* You might not link these two words together—unless you’re Sidhant Jena, Co-Founder and Director of FaunaTech. In this conversation with our Duncan Freake, Jena explains his mission to bring “precision farming” to small farmers all over India (“probably the largest dairy producer in the world”) and, perhaps eventually, the globe. Jena is obsessed with solving the last-mile problems of dairy farmers, and he’s using the smartphone as a diagnostic tool to measure the quality of milk and health of the cows that deliver it. Freake says: “Last-mile measurement enables last-mile interventions,” and Jena compares what he’s doing to our recent experiences with COVID testing: “You need to do testing, and testing leads to tracing, and tracing leads to isolation.” Listen and learn about dairy data aggregation and sharing, the nuances of milk pricing, collaborating with government regulators, EHRs for farms, the quantified cow, and more. Intrigued? Pull up a stool and hit the play button. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

This episode of *Silo Busting* will school you on the topic of testing. In attendance are (1) Phillip Soffer, EPAM’s VP of Product-Service Systems; and (2) and Jonathan Lupo, our VP of Experience Design. Together they will ensure that the themes of testing, automation, and experience design are present and accounted for. Testing is critical in this day and age. “AIs are biased in favor of the datasets they are trained on,” says Soffer. “Which may not be the same people for whom the systems are intended, or it may introduce really dangerous algorithmic bias that needs to be checked somehow.” But the dangers are many in this world, and one of them involves time. In the old days, we had time for all kinds of individual tests: unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, user experience tests, accessibility tests. No more. “The time that there is for all these kinds of different tests is becoming increasingly compressed,” says Soffer. Says Lupo: “Clients are not giving us more time; they’re giving us less to perform due diligence when we develop products and services.” One benefit of automated testing and analytic, he adds, is that “we don’t have to create these moments in a product lifecycle for testing, validation.” These, says Lupo, “can be happening continuously, in real time.” Speaking of real time: Lupo asks Soffer if our current pandemic moment has an opportunity for automated remote testing? Soffer says we used to have “hallway testing”—in which you could walk around use use officemates as testers. Once, this was a substitute for formal testing, but the pandemic shut it down. “What happens when you take away the hallway because everybody’s in a different place?” he asks and then answers: “We’ve had a lot more interest in doing that kind of hallway testing in a virtual way, through the testing crowd that we have as part of Test IO.” So listen to what these experts have to say. What you’ll hear is not—*not*—a test. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

The cyberthreats are out there. They’re real. And they’re not going away. This is why having a strong Managed Detection and Response program is absolutely necessary for the modern organization. MDRS matters. And in the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, Shariq Hassan, EPAM’s Senior Manager Technology and Security Consulting, and Anton Romm, our Service Delivery Manager, explain to Producer Ken Gordon, why. It’s a complicated moment, and we need to take great care with everyone who wishes to connect with our organizations. As Hassan says: “Every user that logs into a network is a privileged user and should be considered a privileged user.” Listen to these experts to understand what Romm describes as “proactive threat-hunting activities.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

There’s no business like the idea business. That seems an apt motto for *The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,* a comprehensive new book by Louis Menand. Menand, who splits his time writing for *The New Yorker* and teaching at Harvard, is fascinated by the culture heroes who successfully brought their wares to market between 1945 and 1965. Also fascinated is producer Ken Gordon and in this episode, he interrogates Menand—who, by the way, snagged a Pulitzer for his 2001 book, The Metaphysical Club*—about his multi-dimensional new volume. Menand admits that his ideal reader isn’t some corner-officed CEO, but we think that any executive who aspires to be a systems thinker should consult *The Free World* to appreciate the panoramic context surrounding our famed American innovations. Despite the deep cultural focus, *The Free World* is, from certain angles, a business book. “The ideology of creation is that we don’t talk about the business side of it,” says Menand. “But without the business side of it you can’t get your product out to people.” *The Free World,* Menand says, details “the growth and maturity of the American culture industries. That would include Hollywood, the music business, book publishing, magazine publishing, and the art world. And also the university. All those industries boom after 1945.” Our interlocutors discuss the social networks that helped the characters in *The Free World* succeed—the *dramatis personae* includes everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Susan Sontag to The Beatles to James Baldwin and their many colleagues and friends—and how these compare to today’s digital communities. “I’m an analog dinosaur,” Menand says, adding that, during his Zoom-enabled pandemic teaching, his students were busy kibbitzing in the chat: “They’re carrying on a separate conversation, most of which is in kind of digital language I don’t even understand.” The talk here is smart and informative—the flat nature of the web’s cultural landscape (“There’s just an endless amount of stuff which all more or less has the same degree of temperature,” says Menand. “It’s like heat death in thermodynamics”), the surprises Menand found in writing (“Every time you open a door, there’s a whole story behind it”), the psychological importance of feeling free, and more—all of which will make you think about our present moment and how current social networks, market forces, and creative thinkers can and will align to take new ideas and make them real. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

What’s the cost of risk? It’s a big question for all sentient humans—but an extremely pertinent one for Padraic O'Reilly, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of CyberSaint Security. In fact, the dollar value of risk is a key element in how he does business with clients, as he explains to Boris Khazin, our Global Head of DRM Services, in our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation. It’s quite a moment for risk right now. Companies are deeply concerned about the plague of malware episodes and what they might cost them. “Because of the attacks we’ve seen this year,” he says, “we’re seeing that accelerate companies’ need to understand risk on the fly with fresh data.” The current “state of play” of GRC, says O’Reilly, involves “balkanized business functions talking to each other” and they might be doing a lot of this on spreadsheets (he calls it “spreadsheet madness”). They can do better, by going digital and using automation. It’s a very big deal. And O’Reilly underscores this by adding that even the big cloud providers say that they need partners who can “generate a view into risk.” This conversation will certainly generate great interest in the topic. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Imagine you’re a CEO. You settle into your office in the morning and open your laptop… and there's no way to communicate with clients. “No phones. No emails. Nothing,” says Ofer Levinger, Senior Director of Business Unit Operations at EPAM, on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting.* Levinger tells Adam Bishop, our Director of Information Security (and his podcast partner-in-crime): “It’s very hard for you in that particular moment to work [with] a cool mind, open the well-prepared incident response book, and play by it.” Bishop notes that the idea of incident response has been around for decades but “things aren’t really improving.” Looking at the headlines about massive data breaches, “It almost feels like things are getting worse.” Levinger, who has been the CEO of White Hat, the Israeli cybersecurity firm, since 2019, says most companies look at incident response as a “CISO problem, not an organizational problem. ‘It’s not a *business* problem.’” This, they say, needs to change. Listen as our conversationalists get into the intricacies of incident response: the communications challenges, the new ways hackers are getting in (“living off the land” attacks, for instance), zero trust, and more. It’s a highly charged topic, one that creates a lot of stress for organizations. Bishop says that just having good cybersecurity hygiene is not enough to allow companies to sleep soundly nowadays. Levinger says that it’s necessary to move beyond the reactive posture, which is an ongoing active process. And he adds: “If you have a CISO that sleeps good at night, you have a problem.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Innovation and agile: What do they have in common? How are they different? How can they work together? This episode of *Silo Busting* is about providing you a broad perspective on the way we work. We invited Eli Feldman, EPAM’s CTO of Advanced Technology, and Chris Michaud, EPAM Continuum’s VP and Head of Innovation Practice, to talk it out. Innovation for Michaud is “the act of bringing a new idea out into the market, out into the world” and that idea “creates value, creates impact.” Feldman says that this concept is “actually quite consistent with agile.” The pair spend much time thinking about the divergent/convergent methodology, which prompts Feldman to say that *divergent* is about “figuring out that we’re doing the right thing” while *convergent* hones in on “essentially getting that thing done.” They talk about both failing fast and learning fast. They even get specific and talk about our work on the Swiffer. It’s a lively dialogue that might invite you to bust a few silos of your own. Host: Toby Bottorf Engineers: Matthew Fuhrmeister and Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

ESG. Many companies are talking about these three letters but none of them have spelled out exactly what it means to measure—properly and effectively—their Environmental, Social, and Governance activities. The herculean challenges of attempting to do so prompted Jennifer Howard-Grenville, the Diageo Professor of Organization Studies at the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, to publish a smart piece in *HBR* entitled, “ESG Impact Is Hard to Measure—But It’s Not Impossible.” That article brought her to *The Resonance Test* to discuss with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer and SVP, the nuances and challenges here. Howard-Grenville says that businesses are increasingly recognizing that “sustainability is absolutely core to their strategy; you cannot execute a strategy in the 21st century in any business without understanding, sustainability.” Figuring out how to manage this will require acknowledging the hubris in conventional measurement plans and taking a more systems-thinking approach. This is no mean feat, as Howard-Grenville suggests. “We live in a paradoxical world—we need short-term results, but we need to orient to the long term,” she says. “We're *never* going to break down that tension. We need to live with it. We need to move back and forth with it. We need to be okay with it and we need to understand it's difficult.” Press the play button and listen to some frank and thoughtful remarks about trying to take the true measure of ESG. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

We learned many long-distance lessons during the pandemic. One of the most important involved visiting the doctor. As Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, author of *An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back* and Editor-in-Chief of *Kaiser Health News,* tells our Jonathon Swersey in the latest episode of *The Resonance Test:* “Many of us spend *way* too much time schlepping into doctors’ offices for things that could be done *perfectly* well over the phone.” The pandemic took telemedicine mainstream. Many who previously had only heard of it were forced to experience, practice, and pay for it. The question is: What’s it worth? “Is it 50% of a real, in-person visit? 70%? 100%? Sometimes [it’s] 120%! But I think it really depends on the kind of visit, and how it’s used, and who is creating the telemedicine system.” Regarding the myriad unresolved details of telemedicine—what works well remotely, what must be done in person, how to value all these different treatment options—Rosenthal says: “We have a lot of sorting out to do.” Rosenthal is, admittedly, somewhat skeptical about virtual care. “My worry always that it will be sold as useful because it’s commercial, before it’s useful—and that could give the whole field a bad name, frankly.” But whatever happens when the big telemedicine sort finally happens, it must ultimately be about creating balance. People will always need to do some things in a non-virtual way. As Rosenthal reminds us: “You can’t test someone’s reflexes on a screen.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“If you do a penetration test to an organization and you get blocked, this is where you stop the test, right?” says Sharon Nimirovski who founded White-Hat Ltd., a leading Israeli cybersecurity firm recently acquired by EPAM. “But in real life, the attacker doesn’t do that.” In our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation Nimirovski tells Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, that nefarious actors keep looking for other ways inside. “They don’t leave. They’re moving to, maybe, spear phishing. They’re moving maybe to infected URLs, maybe infected Android apps.” How do Nimirovksi and his team meet this barrage of digital assaults? Behind the scenes they repel attackers by building “a database of all the attack techniques and the vectors they use.” His team brings this offensive armada to clients, to test for their systemic weaknesses, and when they find them they create a “vaccine” against the vulnerabilities (“That vaccine is only a behavioral rule that we embed into the client’s given technologies”). A fascinating conversion straight from the front lines of offensive security. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon