IT Visionaries

NFTs, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Tokenization. There is more hype than ever for these technologies and endless debate on the utility of this technology. . While consumers are attempting  to understand the value of cryptocurrency, governments and private firms across the globe are doing the same, and they are experimenting with the idea of a central bank for digital currency that will adapt and meet changing consumer needs.Main TakeawaysBenefits of a Central Bank: The digitization of currency will not only simplify the distribution of government cash, but it will eliminate banking deserts, which are large populations of the country where traditional banking branches are not accessible to the general public. By moving to a digital currency, users will be able to easily complete transactions similar to how cash purchases are done, but without the time needed to complete a credit transaction.Programmable Money: One of the exciting innovations and benefits of digital tokens is the concept of “programmable” money. This means that during the design and build phase, the technology that houses the currency can be reconfigured to scale and add critical functions at any time.Easily Traceable: By modernizing currency and moving to a digital token, the flow of currency from one user to another will be much easier to track than physical transactions. When transactions are done digitally, you can trace that currency back to where it originated, making it simpler and easier to detect fraud.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform  -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gabe Gumbs has a deep-rooted passion for technology and information security, and his goal is to share that passion to push data security to the forefront of every business's agenda.“Security is all I've ever done. It's what I know, it's what I love. I enjoy every aspect of [security]. From building it, to talking about it, to marketing, into selling it to you, It's a passion.” Gabe is the Chief Innovation Officer at Spirion — a leader in rapid identification and protection of sensitive data— and these days he’s channeling that passion to make the digital world a safer place. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Gabe explains his vision for data privacy and why it’s time to kick siloed data to the curb. He also provides a detailed view on the future of work and why the talent shortage that security professionals have discussed may not be exactly as drastic as it seems.Main TakeawaysSilos are an Unnecessary Evil: Data professionals are ingesting data from various sources which is opening them up to unnecessary vulnerabilities. When data is sourced from multiple areas, such as datasets and the cloud, security models are spread thin, making that data harder to protect. By bringing that data into one single area, companies will have a better chance of not only understanding data, but protecting it as well.Your Off-the-Shelf Model Needs to Go: Organizations that use a cybersecurity maturity model as a framework to measure the progress of their security tactics are leaving themselves vulnerable to attackers. Every bad actor is different, which requires a unique model to prevent those attackers from infiltrating your network.The Security Skills Shortage That Wasn’t: Analysts have been writing about a cybersecurity shortage for years and some believe the data privacy sector will suffer a similar fate. The issue however is not a lack of talent, but rather data security professionals must broaden their hiring practices because security is no longer simply about keeping data safe, but it’s also about policy and compliance with new data rules.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

An A.I. the model is similar to a boat in that it needs constant maintenance to perform. The reality is  A.I. models need adjusted boundaries and guidelines to remain efficient.  And when you live in a world where everyone is trying to get bigger and faster and have a certain edge, Scott Clark is helping make that possible with his finely-tuned A.I. modeling techniques.“As you're building up these rules and constructs for how that system will even learn itself, there's a lot of parameters that you need to set and tune. There's all these magical numbers that go into these systems. If you don't have a system of record for this, if you're just throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks, and then only checking the best one, and you don't have a system of what you tried, what the trade-offs were, which parameters were the most important, and how it traded off different metrics it can seem like a very opaque process. At least that hyper parameter optimization and neural architecture search and kind of tuning part of the process can be a little bit more explainable, a little bit more repeatable and a little bit more optimal.”More explainable, and more optimal, but most importantly scaleable and reproducible. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Scott, the CEO and Co-founder of SigOpt, a company that’s on a mission to empower modeling systems to reach their fullest potential, explains the basic steps that go into successful models, how his team tweaks and optimizes those models to build more efficient processes. Plus, Scott touches on the future of algorithmic models — including how they will improve and where they struggle. Enjoy this episode.Main TakeawaysBad Data, Bad!: When you’re building algorithm models you have to not only focus on the data you are putting into those models, but you have to know where that data is coming from and if that data is trustworthy. When you have untrustworthy data — either its coming from an unknown source or is bias in any way — this can lead to models that deliver poor results.Delivering Consistency: While every algorithm needs to be tweaked and tuned at the start, the best way to deliver consistent, scalable algorithmic models is to make sure you are able to define hyper-specific patterns that the algorithm can abide by. When algorithms know what rules they are looking for (such as this person only likes medium sized shirts with stripes) it has a set of hyper-specific boundaries it can operate off of in order to deliver the best results.Where is the Band Conductor?: Algorithms will continue to infiltrate our everyday lives, but the truth is they still need humans to effectively run them, to tune them, and to make sure that the decisions they are making are the right ones. ---IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Over the last quarter century, data and its ability to provide valuable insights for companies to plan, predict, and implement strategies has expanded exponentially. Organizations have grown more reliant on data, and the speed at which data is uploaded and analyzed now must match the pace at which it is generated.“Data has to be up to date and available almost immediately in order to just keep the business running.”Mark Van de Wiel is the CTO of HVR, a company that specializes in partnering with enterprises to realize the full potential of data through real-time data replication. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Mark explains why data replication is an imperative step for companies wanting to take a more data-driven approach, how replication is providing real-time insight as opposed to batch data uploads, and why having a single source of truth when it comes to your data is just good business.Main TakeawaysHolistic Data View: Today, organizations are pulling data together from multiple sources. But regardless of whether your data pulls are from first-party or third-party sources, getting all of it into one unified space is paramount. Replicating data is a very quick way to migrate data from multiple sources in order to provide a holistic view of your data.Know Where Your Data is Coming From: Garbage in, garbage out is a philosophy every data leader is familiar with, which is why it's important to understand where your data is coming from. Be strategic about how you manage your data, what sources you are collecting your data from, and if the source is reliable.Real Time Data Application: Being able to replicate your data in real time and not have to wait on monthly or quarterly data uploads is an enabler for allowing an organization to be more data-driven.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The modern worker needs access to multiple applications. And with every new piece of software implemented, the security and identity requirements grow exponentially.  Identity authentication is creating increasing headaches for IT professionals everywhere. Relying on usernames and passwords won’t be enough much longer.“We've been using usernames and passwords as the primary identity feature for 50 years. I really have been working in my career to help change that and come up with a better way. When I think of usernames and passwords, I think that is a lose, lose situation. It's a bad experience and it's bad security because everybody uses the same passwords and doesn't change them.” That’s Fran Rosch, the CEO of ForgeRock, a company that is helping users connect with the world and its software safely and simply with it’s A.I.-driven platform. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Fran explains how ForgeRock is pioneering next generation identity authentication that can help verify users through multiple passive data points such as domains, ip addresses, time of day, previous logins, concurrent logins, and many others. If his future comes into reality, you might be able to forget that username and password for good.Main TakeawaysUnder Pressure: IT organizations today are under immense pressure to not only create a secure and safe digital environment, but also where their employees feel safe. Today employees need to trust where they are storing their information, but that user experience must also be seamless.What’s the Username?: For more than 50 years, usernames and passwords have been one of the primary features used to secure a digital environment. The problem with this process is those passwords have to constantly be changed in order to remain secure, which creates a poor user experience. An emerging tool when it comes to creating a seamless experience is using face ID.Demanding control: Enterprises are now demanding control over where their identity lives. As more companies operate in the cloud — whether that’s a private or public cloud — they want their identity authentication to run separately and have control over it and not have to have multiple identity services based on where they’re running the technology.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There’s a festering problem growing beneath the surface of small businesses everywhere, and it’s an issue that most SMBs are refusing to address. As large-scale companies invest big money in information security teams to protect themselves from data breaches and bad actors, their small business brethren simply refuse to invest in security at all.“People only spend money on things they can detect.”Gary Chan is an information security management consultant and president of Alfizo, a company that is helping SMBs and large-scale enterprises use IT as an enabler while meeting compliance, security and privacy obligations. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Gary dives into some of the biggest obstacles facing SMBs from a security perspective and why small businesses leave themselves vulnerable to cyber attacks. Plus he explains why regardless of how secure your network may be, the weakest link remains your staff.Main TakeawaysWalk in Through the Front Door: SMBs are leaving themselves vulnerable to security threats because they don’t believe they need to invest in the basic tools and services to protect themselves. SMBs are attacked at a far higher rate than large-scale organization because they often leave themselves open to attackersBasic Tips and Tricks: For SMBs that don’t want to invest high dollar amounts into a security tech stack, it’s still wise to invest in simple things that fit what you need, such as phishing training for your staff, which can help detect and report malicious emails, multi-function authentication, and password vaults.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maggie Louie remembers the moment her career changed forever. Working with the L.A. Times on digital and mobile products, Maggie, now the founder and CEO of Otto, remembers a friend asking her to look into an issue they were having with their website.“[they asked] me to look at their ad tags and figure out why their traffic was going through the roof, but they weren't making any more money. They couldn't figure it out. I had suspected that their ad techs were either misconfigured or there's something easy there, and after 24 hours looking through their code. I discovered that they indeed were being stolen internally. The head developer was hijacking all of the ad tags and just doing all sorts of crazy stuff.” The lines of code hidden in the JavaScript were driving traffic and stealing money, and it was that revelation that opened Maggie’s eyes to underground ad fraud and bot traffic, and this ad fraud wreaked havoc. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Maggie details how that moment led her to launch Otto and she discusses the company’s efforts to democratize access to internet security for all, its Chrome extension to protect consumers when online shopping, and the variety of enterprise solutions for businesses her team has developed.Main TakeawaysNew Frontier: Hackers are always looking for new industries with vulnerabilities to disrupt. Ad tech is one of the fastest-growing industries underserved by cybersecurity solutions. This is due to the complex nature of ad tech, which makes it difficult for cyber security experts to easily shift solutions into.Safety is a Fallacy: Popular ecommerce platforms want you to believe that just because you use their service and tools that your company is safe from bad actors. The truth is that just because you use popular no-code or low-code operating systems, bad actors still target vulnerable people who don’t secure their code.Always Be Testing: Just because your platform is safe today, doesn’t mean that it is safe tomorrow. The more your platform is customizable the more vulnerable your JavaScript becomes to outside bad actors. A general rule of thumb when it comes to security is to constantly be testing and looking over your code.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The journey to cloud is not the same for everyone. In fact, for some, it can be a grueling and daunting process. For CIOs and CTOs of century-year-old companies, they are burdened by server after server piling up and as they tackle the obstacle of migrating data to the cloud. Meanwhile, peers at digitally-native companies, born in the cloud, use their agility and ease of scale to soar past their old-school brethren. So what’s a legacy company to do?“The reality in the environment is that there are all stages of software in these companies and disentangling that and figuring out how to move to the cloud is a journey. And that's the thing where we're really excited about being able to help with at least kind of taking care of the infrastructure pieces. So CIOs and CTOs can focus on the application layers and not really have to worry about how the infrastructure gets operated.”  19:37That’s Preeti Somal, Vice President of Engineering at HashiCorp, a company constructed on the idea of building open-source communities to help users quickly implement the infrastructure necessary to run cloud applications. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Preeti unpacks how open-source tools are helping customers get to the cloud faster, how hybrid cloud models have evolved over the years, and more. Main TakeawaysAll Shapes and Sizes: There is not a one-size-fits-all method for companies trying to move to the cloud, but cloud adoption has been driven by organizations prioritizing the ability to quickly add applications and implement them within their network.Building a Secure Environment: The shift to operating in the cloud requires a different approach to security. Instead of focusing on a secure network perimeter with the assumption of trust, you must shift your focus to securing the infrastructure and application services themselves through a trusted source of identity managementBuilding a Remote-First Team: When you’re building a remote-first team, you have to be intentional about how you document your process so when you scale, your team members will have a complete understanding of the workflow.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Have you ever picked up a plant at the grocery store and wondered to yourself, can I really keep this alive? Or maybe you’ve planted seeds in the ground only to see them never sprout. Don’t worry, if you’ve struggled to find any success, you’re not alone. But imagine the pressure when the food industry’s supply chain is relying on your green thumb, so you have to find a way to plant trillions of seeds that yield crops covering millions of square miles to feed the world.. It’s no longer about having a green thumb. It’s a full on science and technology based operation, and it can’t fail. That’s where Bayer Crop Science and Elisha Herrmann step in to bring that supply chain to life.“We produce not only the seeds that the farmers plant, but we have to produce the fruits and the vegetables that produce the seeds that the farmers plant.”Elisha is a Global Supply Chain Strategy and Innovation Partner a Bayer Crop Science, a company that is currently utilizing all forms of science and technology, including drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics, to deliver the best produce from the moment seeds hit the dirt to the second you remove them from the shelves. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Elisha describes the unique ways Bayer Crop Science is utilizing technology to ensure quality from both ends of the supply chain, why blockchain is now an integral tool for the food industry when it comes to tracking and tracing products, and much more.Main TakeawaysCan You Track That: Being able to track the lifecycle of a plant is incredibly important when it comes to managing where certain plants and produce are shipped. If a plant or seed is infected with a fungus and is sent to a geographic location of the world that doesn’t have the resources to remedy the causes of that fungus, it could be detrimental in very severe ways.It’s Just Science: Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are used to track the overall health and life cycle of crops, but also to manage current and future food trends. By using A.I. and machine learning, scientists can let the growers know if they need to plan for different crops.Blockchain Grows in Necessity: A few years ago, most growers, suppliers, and distributors were tracking the whereabouts of their crops manually. This meant that regardless of where those crops ended up, the data they were inputting was done manually and could have discrepancies. With blockchain, they now have the ability to instantly track where their crops are going, to whom they are being shipped, and how they are getting there.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Smartphones are incredible pieces of technology. They allow users the ability to track stars, text people around the world, purchase items at the ease of a click, map their next destination, and so much more. Their individual capabilities are truly remarkable.“It's crazy. And all of that is powered by the battery and all of that and really what limits it, the engineer's imagination, you know, they're, they, they know how much, how much they can get out of that in terms of the energy. And so imagine now, if you could get 50% more energy from your phone and do 50% more, more tasks that we hadn't even thought of yet."That’s Rick Costantino, and while what he is saying may sound too good to be true, it’s not. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Rick dives into how Group 14 is reversing that trend by working to replace the traditional graphite anode with a silicon casing material. Plus, Rick touches on why silicon is the future of the battery industry, the impact it will have on devices that use  lithium-ion batteries, and how Group 14 is thriving despite some early stage struggles.Main TakeawaysA New Home: For the last two decades, there has been very little innovation as it pertains to lithium-ion battery casings.  Group 14 bucked that trend and by using a hybrid material of carbon and silicon, the company has found a way to eliminate the use of graphite, allowing batteries to weigh less, but produce more energyCan I get A Charge: It’s important to remember that while silicon allows for longer-lasting lithium-ion batteries, the real benefit is in unlocking the possibilities promised by that more powerful and energy-efficient battery.Built to Last: Another advantage of using a silicon-based battery is its sustainability benefits. The ability to consistently reuse silicon-based batteries means that there is less need to constantly dig into natural resources to constantly produce new batteries.IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform -- This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.---IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.