What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets – the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation.

This week, Palmer spoke with Lakshmi Sharma, chief product officer for Fastly. In addition to being a technologist herself, Sharma has also spent time working for companies such as Target that deploy network technologies on a large scale, which gives her some real-world perspective on the importance of IT infrastructure.

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of what Sharma shared in their conversation, edited for length. To hear the full conversation, be sure to watch the video.

The acceleration of the edge

Sharma: The internet has become more pervasive and more accessible than ever, especially since COVID. And the cloud has made it happen. But there are two types of cloud: one I like to call centralized, and the other is where I work, edge cloud. That's now accelerated because of where people want to place their workloads and their applications. It's application-driven, a localization of that information, of that compute, of that storage, of that data, that has generated the biggest amount of  disruption and transformation.

The importance of data privacy

Sharma: Because of the explosion of access to the internet post-COVID, and the resulting distribution of data and access to that data, questions of where you place data, data privacy and user privacy become really important. Where do I keep my data? What is my level of privacy? And every country started to take control of their users' privacy and information because, during COVID, everyone just wanted to take care of people. And then the problem became, uh-oh, all our information is on the web.

So what do I do for consumer privacy? User privacy, data privacy is a big challenge, with a lot of new regulations coming in. Recent geopolitical situations are happening because people have access to information they didn't have before. It's a very serious issue, a major area we need to focus on as technologists. I really worry about it and I see it because I met those customers in my job. Data privacy, user privacy is a huge area that we all need to be worried about and looking at.

What can enterprise leaders do?

Sharma: Put everything into people – process – technology.

I put people first because the change is so fast. As an enterprise leader, you take an inventory of the people you have, and the skills they have and figure out how many of them are going to be trained.

And what can you do to train them? What is your low-hanging fruit? The low-hanging fruit is the biggest problem you need to handle because otherwise, you're going to lose your business. What skills don't you have? Maybe you don't have the security skills? Maybe you don't have the bot management capabilities. So maybe you immediately need to have a managed security service like Fastly, or someone else.

And if you happen to have two clouds, the biggest issue these days is asset management. So you look into assets. Which are applications, endpoint? See where your biggest cybersecurity threats are, as well as your business threat — cost versus profit and margin.

Match it to the people skills you have. Look into those problems. And if security is the biggest one, you can't really hire enough. Talent is not available. Talent that you need is never available that day. So you start using manage security services provider (MSSP) to manage the business risk and the cybersecurity risk that you have. And then you start to look into how to train the rest of your workforce.

Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries.