Thirty-five years ago, I had a vision for creating a platform that would connect global business technology executives with each other along with search executives, venture capitalists and other industry leaders.
That vision has since come to fruition. HMG Strategy helps foster networking, connections and cutting-edge thought leadership to 500,000+ business technology and industry executives through a variety of channels. These include Executive Leadership Summits in 30+ markets each year. We also bring executives together through our webinars, advisory board meetings, VIP dinners and other forums.
Last week, we had the privilege of hosting a webinar on ‘Empowering Hybrid Work Models with AI, Cloud and Security.’ The webinar was moderated by Tom Hoffman, our VP of Research here at HMG Strategy and featured Aidan Walden, Global Director of Public Cloud Engineering & Architecture at Fortinet.
The webinar covered a range of issues that are critical to optimizing the performance of hybrid work models, including the importance of unifying networking, security and computing. It was a salient discussion, given that the hybrid model is the future of work, along with the need to optimize network, security and infrastructure in today’s cost-conscious environment and some three years since the global pandemic initiated the widespread shift to the cloud.
As Aidan sees it, there are multiple factors at play. For starters, as interest rates continue to increase, the cost of capital has risen. As such, CIOs, CISOs, CTOs and other practitioners have adjusted their investment approaches to hybrid work models. This includes a move towards OpEx to manage opportunity costs.
Meanwhile, as a growing number of employees continue to return to the office, Aidan points to an evolution among companies to adopt Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) capabilities to better protect the user experience for optimal hybrid work deployments.
“All of this has come together to form what we now refer to as Universal SASE as a cloud opportunity,” says Aidan.
Aidan also shared how as CIOs and business technology leaders have become more strategic in their approach to the cloud, tighter economic conditions have also prompted executives to scrutinize their cloud investments more closely, including flexible, simple on-demand licensing and provisioning for security solutions and services for all their cloud environments.
“At the same time, with the changes in how employees are interacting with the network with a mix of remote and in-office work, security and networking are consolidating as a strategy to remove complexity,” says Aidan. “The fact that you can consolidate network security into single nodes drives efficiency and overall infrastructure management, but it also drives down cost because those points in the network are consolidated.”
It was a fascinating discussion and I highly encourage you to view the webinar here for additional insights on how the hybrid workplace is evolving along with the impact that AI is having on hybrid work models. If you would like additional information or to speak to a cloud security specialist, please click here.
