#269 Cybersecurity, Emerging Tech Trends, Green Computing, and VC Insights: A Holistic Talk with Subbu Rao

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the studio show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased to have with me joining from London, so thank you very much for being with me today. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves, and I know that you have a great you know profile and bio, so the floor is used to introduce yourself. 

0:00:24 - Subbu
Thank you, mehmet, the pleasure is all mine. So, yes, I am Suburau and I've got a tech background. So I've been an account studio for telco providers here in the UK like BT, vodafone, virgin Media and a few others, and I've been in the industry for the last 15 years. So I've seen the ups and downs of telco and tech, especially cybersecurity, because that's where my expertise is. So I look forward to this conversation and, yeah, it's lovely to see you again. 

0:00:57 - Mehmet
Thank you, subut. So let's start with cybersecurity. So you know, you have this, all experience in technology, but cybersecurity, you told me it's something which you focus on. So why cybersecurity? And you know what are like some, some of the current trends that you are seeing today that you can share with us from you know what you, because you are on also different, I would say positions as well, so you're hearing about it all the place, all over the place, so I would love to hear that from you. 

0:01:33 - Subbu
Sure, absolutely. I mean it's, it's an integral part of any organization or any business for that matter. And normally people think you know cybersecurity and the the whole mechanism is for large enterprises and corporations who've got multiple data and cybersecurity and other things to protect, but in reality it's for everybody, starting from the end user, from SMB customers, small and medium businesses. It is absolutely imperative for every business which handles customer data, which handles their own information or anything to do with the data. So in that sense, yes, it becomes extremely important for the businesses to look after them, and how they do it is is dependent on their business operant. So, if you look at it, some of the smaller businesses they would normally outsource to an external party which will look after this. And again, there's also regulatory requirements, especially here in the Europe. So, let's say, you've got customer data, you handle customer data. With regards to GDPR, you give the end user the right to access, the right to erasure, the right to correction and then whenever there is a breach that happens, you also have to notify the end user. So you know, without a proper, robust security system, you won't be able to comply with these regulatory requirements. So it's absolutely important and, with regards to the effects that it can have. 

It is. It can be quite detrimental if you don't have the right, robust security structure. So it could be reputational damage. It could be your business could be completely offline and could face an outage resulting in direct monetary loss. It could be internal compromise, wherein a disgruntled employee might leak your company information or proprietary information, which could again put you out of business. So the impact is huge. It's real and and again it's it's. It's better to just invest in the proper posture as opposed to fighting the fire once it's happened. So that's why it's extremely important for you know companies to look after their cybersecurity posture. And then yeah, sorry, I've got a question. 

0:04:13 - Mehmet
No, no, no, that's fine. 

0:04:15 - Subbu
Go ahead. Yeah, with regards to trends, yes, of course it's changed and evolved a lot. The one thing we can't ignore the elephant in the room, of course there is AI now, so earlier, if you think about it, to write a piece of malware you have to be a software programmer, you have to be really good with coding, you need to understand what the backend database is, and that's that's how people use to create sophisticated malware. But now you go and chat GPT, tell what application you want to you know target. If you say, oh, it's a SQL database, can you write me a malware for that? It can spew out hundreds and hundreds of codes in no time and all you have to do is just put it on an email and create a phishing attack and send it to a vulnerable person for them to just click on it. So that's how easy it has become now. 

0:05:08 - Mehmet
Yeah, it's becoming scary day after day. I would say to your point too, and yeah, so it's not only about I, like you mentioned, it's not only about you know, large enterprises also, like any business, from any side, they can be there under the attack. Actually, one specific type of attack I want to ask you about because I think we didn't cover it much even here on on the show because we cover cybersecurity sometimes, which is the DDoS attack or denial of service attack. So so you work also with with the tailcars and you know, like these big guys who manage, you know, large amount of traffic. So if you can shed some light about DDoS in general and you know, is there a way to maybe avoid it? What can we do so we don't have a huge impact after such attack? 

0:06:03 - Subbu
Sure, it's a. It's a very notorious attack. So DDoS actually stands for distributed denial of service. So basically you're denying a legitimate user his or her end you know access to the end database or the application. So I mean, a simple analogy would be let's say you're an owner of a bookstore and you've got legitimate customers who want to come into the bookshop and buy stuff. But then let's say you've got an attacker or a competitor who just sends in hundreds and hundreds of fake customers just to crowd your place and stop the legitimate users to be from being able to make a purchase. So that's what DDoS is all about and it's been there for a very long time, at least for the last 25 years. So basically what they do is just create fake packets and fake requests and sort of just drown the server so that it doesn't have the capacity to serve legitimate users. And the way they do it is you've got software all over the place which can just create fake requests and fake packets and again the volume can be really big. 

So if you look at some of the big attacks, so an entire nation I mean some of the attacks were in the whole of countries have been completely out of internet because they can. They can flood the entire network, the whole of the pipes where nobody is able to access anything at all, and we've seen time and again, especially government websites. All you have to do is just bring it down for a few hours and make a huge damage. And every time there is a war, you see the cyber warfare happening fatally, which is sad. And the first attack they pick is DDoS, and there are loads of articles on cloudflare, checkpoint and another prominent cyber security vendors, which also talks about the DDoS attacks that's been happening now between Israel and Palestine. So that's one of the attacks that can create a huge damage. 

And the way to avoid this and mitigate this is to invest in robust platforms. So the way to do it is, of course, create a security system. They call it anomaly detection, so find if something is out of ordinary. So if a packet looks out of the regular stuff, how do we detect it and stop it? And for volumetric attack, wherein it's just the volume, what can we do about the availability? So, rather than hosting your data in one server, can you geographically disperse it? Can you put it in multiple data centers in cloud, so that even if one or two gets sort of inundated. What about the other ones? There are mechanisms to cope with it. But then it comes with proper planning. It comes with choosing the right vendor, choosing the right DDoS mitigation provider. 

0:09:11 - Mehmet
Yeah, and actually it's one of the hardest ones, I think, because when you deal, for example, with, let's say, ransomware or, let's say, any kind of malware or fishing, so here there are some preventive things you can do, of course, here you can have, as you said, your proper systems. But, to your point, what we started to see, even companies with huge, I would say, investments and infrastructure because I think maybe two weeks back OpenAI they were under the massive DDoS attack also as well and even the API stopped to work, like chat, gpt stopped to work, which is it's like really to the point that you mentioned before. It's like brand damage, it's like sometimes affecting also the revenue. One of the things that I loved and you know, subbu, thank you for this explanation when you gave the bookstore example. So like it's your fill your shop with people who are not there to pay, just they fill the shop. The legitimate buyers are outside waiting because there is no space for them to enter, and yeah, so I love this one. 

Now, what I want to ask you, subbu, like what other, like big threats are you seeing? Like we talked about some of them, but what do you think is the one which is really will be dominant in the coming month. This year's to come from a cybersecurity perspective. 

0:10:47 - Subbu
So, with regards to the attack in itself, ddos is, of course, going to be there, and then, secondly, there's going to be a lot of AI generated malware, because it's a lot easier to craft a malware now. And then phishing attacks has always been there so and again. Emails are something that we use for everyday business, so we can't be without emails. So that again is another medium where an attack is sort of used to compromise the end users, and the other ones, I would say, is man in the middle attack. So it's not as common, but it's absolutely still doable. So especially, let's say, we have people working from public places like coffee shops and airports. 

So MITM is also an attack that's doable. And database attacks have become less prominent, I would say, because back in those days there used to be a lot of attacks, such as buffer overflow exploits, where you just look at the backend database and create a backdoor and create very specific attacks, but those have sort of obsolete, I would say, because we are good in creating quick patches and keeping the databases safe. It's more towards targeted towards the end users and on the networks nowadays. 

0:12:19 - Mehmet
Yeah, perfect, and I think I can agree with you also, especially AI. I think AI driven attacks are going to become also very common and famous also as well. Now you also have this mix between technology and business. And just to continue on the cybersecurity before we go forward to other topics Now, from business perspective, how can I make money with cybersecurity, but in a legitimate way, I would say, being the good guy, not the bad guy? 

0:12:58 - Subbu
Of course it's a lucrative industry. So because the skills that you need to enter the cybersecurity domain is a bit hard, but again, not to say that it's not doable, but it's a very niche area which requires specific training and specific knowledge to enter this domain. So can you make money out of cybersecurity? Of course yes. There is loads of verticals, loads of jobs that you can take. To give you an example, I would say let's say you can either work for a cybersecurity vendor, so that could be the likes of Fortinet, palo Alto or Zscaler or Cisco or just cybersecurity companies, work for them and look after its end customers. Or the other thing is you can become a consultant and provide consultation for businesses. And another way is to work for a large organization, so it could be BT, for instance, or Vodafone, and work in their IT department and every IT department would have somebody to look after the cybersecurity strategy. So you could also do that and all of these routes are decently compensated and yes, of course you will make a lot of money. But also, in the end, if you want to start your own cybersecurity company, absolutely that's another thing, because the total address will market for all of these domains, like network security or application security, endpoint security. It's a lot and it's been dominated by the traditional vendors for many, many decades. But things are changing now. So customers are looking for point product solutions. So if you've got a startup which is addressing a very specific niche use case, you can enter the market and definitely take some market share. A good example would be cloud security. So there are solutions like CSPM, dspm, which is data security posture management, or cloud security posture management. These ones are all new startup companies which are entering in this space and making an impact. 

And how do you get into cybersecurity? That's an interesting question Because I mean I did the traditional route of doing my undergrad and then doing a master's in cybersecurity, but then you do necessary. I mean it helps, but you don't have to go through a master's. The other things I would say is you can do like professional certifications, so CEH, like you know, ethical hacking, or certifications from Cisco, like CCNB or Comtia. But the good thing is nowadays you have a lot of these certifications which is free of cost, especially from vendors. 

So if you went to university.14netcom, they give you tons and tons of knowledge for free, and similarly, every other vendor has some program or other which teaches you the basics of cybersecurity. But the one thing I would suggest is, before somebody gets into the security space, they should also learn about the networking space. So they sort of go hand in hand, networking and security. So networking is when how you connect to data points or to entities, so in technical terms you call it OSI layer one to four, so that's how you connect to entities, and anything above layer four, which is layer four to seven, is all about security. So yeah, so start with your networking and then learn about security is what I would personally advise. 

0:16:54 - Mehmet
You know every single you know person we talk to on the show and I love the approach that you gave because you know the best way sometimes to become, let's say, entrepreneur in cybersecurity is to work for an established company, like one of the big vendors you mentioned, or maybe it's a telecommunication company or managed service provider. So where you can, you know, learn about the basics and then you start to understand where are the pain points. Yeah, and to your point, you know, like this new type of vendors who looks after specific niche areas, that customers, they don't get them covered from these big companies. So usually you know the posture management, whether it's like for cloud or even for other ones. So you know, like it's very, very valid and thank you for sharing that, sooboo. 

Now, one thing you mentioned is about you know the education and for you, sooboo, like also you took not only the technology, you know, I would say, around, but also you decided to deep more into the business world and this is why you have your executive MBA. So and I am asking you this question because I know a lot of even my circle, you know my friends who always, you know they say okay, we come from a very technical background. What could bridge us to become entrepreneurs, to become, you know, more familiar with the terms of business? So tell me more like a little bit about your decision to go this route and what were the benefits that you have acquired. 

0:18:43 - Subbu
Yes, mba is an interesting topic. It is something that is entirely different to what I was doing in the last 15 years. And again, that was another reason because COVID gave us the time to sort of introspect and sort of ask questions about what do you want to do with life and do something different? And again, I've been in the tech for a very long time and it felt like I was hitting the ceiling and I want to do something different. So, and hence the MBA. And again, mba gives you this sort of rounded experience, so it gives you exposure into finance and accounting and marketing and sales and business development. I think it's a useful skill to have. 

And again, I didn't do the regular MBA, so I did executive MBA, which is for more experienced professionals, which worked really well for me, because regular MBA you might have to just do it full time. Mine was more sort of in the weekend, so it didn't have an impact on my day job. In that sense it worked really well. And I was also fortunate to get a spot in one of the leading institutions here in the UK, which is London Business School and, again, which has fantastic faculty, really good course curriculum and the way it was set up again was more practical as opposed to classroom studies, so it was both hybrid. So we had educational trips to San Francisco, to Dubai, and also classroom based training. So it was a proper mix and exactly what I was looking for. 

So what did I gain out of that? Again, it's the networking bit as well, so meeting with other like minded professionals people have been in the industry and learning from them was a great plus point. And yeah, I mean prior to this I wasn't very good with finance or accounting or economics, so this gave me a good insight into other spaces, and also entrepreneurship and VC and private equity and fundraising. These are the things that you don't get exposed to unless you go looking for it. So MBA was a really good platform, which gave me a taster of all these interesting nuggets. 

0:21:28 - Mehmet
That's very cool too. And mentioning about you know two questions actually, because you mentioned about the skills, right, and I know that also you, you know you work with with other entrepreneurs also as well. You mentioned something about sales and marketing. How much are these two skills in your opinion, are very underrated, especially for technical co-founders, because I know you know that you find the founder sometimes both of co-founders, they are both technical and they miss or they lack these skills. So how much is it important? And if you want to rank it, like other than you know sales, so what do you say that they should learn, for example, first sales, second, this, third that. So how do you rank that? 

0:22:16 - Subbu
So the first one I would say is marketing. 

I mean, I could be wrong, it's just my personal perspective and the way I would want to rank it, because I know founders, technical founders, who've got fantastic products, brilliant products. It can be, really I don't know truly transformational products, but if they don't have the right narrative, if they don't have the proper storytelling, then it doesn't, it's of no use. Wherein I've also seen on the other spectrum, wherein the product in itself is mediocre, probably it's not even fully developed. You've got the basic idea, but then if you are a great storyteller, if you know how to package and market your product, that can go, you know, longer distance, which is exactly what people are looking for in the VC space, especially when you're raising for money. Yes, of course you need a good idea and a product and all that, but then how do you package the story and take it to your end customers? How do you take it to the VCs in the first place to sell them your idea and raise money if you need to? So in that sense, I would say marketing is absolutely crucial. And then the next thing I would say is probably the organizational skills, which is basic understanding of putting things together in a proper sequence. How do we do this? How do we plan for this? How do we make this happen? So we've got this target. How do we reach that target with these smaller milestones? So the way I would say is, when I work with founders, I tell them that have your strategic goal, to say this is where you want to reach in the next two, five, 10 years, and also have your tactical milestones, which measures the progress, to make sure that you're marching along the right direction and you don't get wavered off in things that you shouldn't be. 

So, yes, marketing first, organizational skills next, and third, I probably say sales. And again, sales is something that I wouldn't worry too much about because, especially when you're an entrepreneur, when you're a founder, when you start your own business, there are fantastic salespeople out on the field, out in the market, that you can hire. So, yeah, I mean sales is something that I wouldn't worry. And again, it's very regional and depends on the geography. So, if you've got your product, you probably want to hire the best of sales people from in UAE, for example, if that's where you want to sell it, or if you want to sell it in the Europe that you probably want to pick out the best salespeople from Europe, then, because geography also plays a huge part when it comes to the relationship building with the end customers and actually making a sale of that product. 

So, in that sense, the entrepreneur can be slightly hands off. And finally, a good product knowledge as well. Yes, you probably have developers and other people who build the product for you because, again, this can be outsourced. You basically need an idea, because most of the successful entrepreneurs I've seen they don't get hands on and build the actual product. They would create the organizational flow, they would create the vision for the idea or the solution that they're trying to build, and various bits and pieces of those is usually outsourced to I don't know, remote places like India or somewhere else, which is, who are good in building things. 

0:26:01 - Mehmet
You know I can put all my hands up with you on the storytelling and you know and I'm sure like this is something you do also yourself, subhu, on maybe daily basis, if I can say that, the number one thing I always tell founders, especially first time founders, that you guys, if you came up with a very fantastic product idea, but if you are not able to tell me in a story way, when I say story, you know I tell them. You don't have to write it like a, like a storybook. What I'm, what we mean by story, is you need to show me me as a user or customer or consumer of your product, service, whatever it is. Show me you know from where I am coming and where I will be ending by using your service. And if you don't or you cannot create this wow effect at me, you know and this is, I know exactly that DVC is. You know they look at these things because, yeah, I can bring them. You know the super. 

You know I say I have an AI powered, secure whatever product or service and then say, okay, so what? Like I don't care. But you know, if you tell it in a way which is a little bit I would say hooking and little bit can put, you know the suspense in it. Like it can all say you know, like really I want to use this product or I really want to understand more about what you're trying to do. And I am a little biased, although, like I don't have a marketing background, but I always tell like you need to do marketing in order to do sales, because without marketing you cannot do sales. Like, okay, you can, but it's not easy and it will then rely on personal relationship. It's not about you know the product or whatever. So this is why, also, you mentioned something very, very true. 

0:27:58 - Subbu
So look at, look at Apple, you know they are the best marketing company in the world. I mean the features. It could be mediocre, I don't know. There are other vendors out in the market who've got better solutions, better products, better technology, but then Apple is the one who were dominant and it all comes down to their marketing strategy, the way they do their storytelling. That's what makes them super sticky and creating the brand value of Apple 100%. 

0:28:29 - Mehmet
So even the way that you know, not only the story itself, the way of delivering the story also, you know like and I advise people to read the book, the book built by Tony Fadil, who was behind the iPod and the iPhone also as well, and he, he, he. In multiple places in the book he mentioned how you know, like Steve Jobs was mastering this art of storytelling and telling you, for example, 1000 song in your pocket, right. So so you try. So this is a hooking thing. Okay, I need to listen to you. I need to hear more about what you're trying to do. 100% on that one Now talking about, you know founders and raising and VCs from you know the activities that you do. Where are you seeing the majority of money going to? So which type of startup Like? Is it the fintech? Is it like which? Which? Which vector? Sorry, vertical Are we seeing the funds going more? 

0:29:37 - Subbu
Yeah, with regards to fundraising and VCs, it comes in waves and everybody is chasing that wave, so, and it's historically been this way. So right now, the current wave is all about AI, web 3 and crypto. So I know some of the founders where it's it shouldn't be the way it is, but again, it's not even an AI product. All they do is just add AI to it to make it appealing for the investors and try to push it through. So it is unfortunate because you know, at the end of the day, the end user, he doesn't care how it gets resolved, or how do you address? The problem? Is that if it's AI, if it's Excel, if it's whatever, it doesn't it doesn't matter as long as you solve the problem. But then, to answer your question, right now it's all about AI and Web 3 and blockchain and crypto. How can you use the blockchain to create, you know, additional applications, which is which is really unfortunate. I mean, especially in my view. 

It looks like you know there are, there are companies where who are trying to keep this whole blockchain technology alive by finding something or the other to keep it relevant. So initially it was all the crypto coins and and the whole decentralized finance and all that. And then afterwards, when that simmered down a little bit, they went for NFTs or we've got a new use case for the blockchain, we've got these NFTs and you can own your products and you can sign it and verify your authenticity, and all that. And now that's died down a little bit and they had to find a new use case for the blockchain, and it's it's all about Web 3. So how do we use Web 3 as an application of blockchain to create a more decentralized and a different way of browsing the internet? So it just feels like, yeah, churning the same thing again and again, hoping to keep it alive for for whatever reason. Yes, this is the. You know. The, whether we like it or not, is the current trends, which are super active and are also successful in raising funds. 

0:32:02 - Mehmet
Oh, wow, you know, like I'm not surprised by by the, you know, web 3 and if I, you know, I had, I had some founders on the show and they were telling me that even themselves, without pushing much for investors, investors actually were after them. Yeah, we need to watch this space Personally. I think you know, from technology perspective and again, I removed the cryptocurrency from the equation, so I become fair you know there are some real applications over there, but you know, the problem is there's so much noise in the market. I think, suvuan, you know this is what is affecting right. 

0:32:46 - Subbu
Sure and like and tech is, is again another prominent vertical which is raising a lot of capital. And the way it works in the in the VC space is that you have dedicated allocations of funds, so normally it's you wouldn't raise 200 million to sort of spray and pray, so I mean at least most of the established ones they would pick a niche. So if there is a fund which is dedicated for tech, it would just go into tech. If there is a fund that is dedicated for FinTech, it's mostly into FinTech and it could be for crypto or or normally they would pick a niche. And the other things we're also seeing are the climate ones, the impact investing wherein they are funding a lot about. You know companies which are looking at carbon footprints, you know carbon credits, renewables, so that again is another upcoming sort of vertical which is raising a lot of investment. 

0:33:55 - Mehmet
It's good you mentioned this, but I will ask you something about that. But from I mean source of this funds perspective. You know, and because I'm asking an expert here, so is it true, like my region, the Middle East region, dubai, saudi and Tabi and you know other is where the money of VCs is currently like? Is it still money in the VCs in the US and Europe? How you are seeing that space? 

0:34:27 - Subbu
It's interesting here in Europe and in the US, given the inflation rates and all that and again, at the end of the day, the investor needs to get the best return for their investments. Traditionally, when the interest rates were lower, it made sense to invest in more risky portfolio like VCs and PEs I mean, I would say VCs more than PEs but now things are slightly different. The free money is over now and again investors are looking for I don't know. They probably are getting better returns from traditional investing as opposed to VC investing. So in that sense there is definitely a crunch. I can see that here. That's what I hear from my network as well. 

Where in the Middle East is an entirely different story. So there are sovereign wealth and they are looking for futuristic projects and not so much about the immediate returns. At least that's what I've experienced with the VCs that I've worked in the Middle East. A good example would be DFDF. So that's Dubai Future District Fund. So that's a sovereign wealth fund. It's government fund and they call it an evergreen fund, which means they don't have a cab. So, unlike other VCs in Europe or in the US, the fund size could range from 20 million to 200 million, but DFDF. They've got no cab. So as long as it's a futuristic project, they're happy to invest in it. So those are the stuff you see in the Middle East and not elsewhere. 

0:36:21 - Mehmet
Yeah, great insight again, subu. I will come back to our point, and by the time I'm airing this episode, it will be the week of COP28, which is happening here in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. So this huge topic green technology, climate tech and we hear about all these acronyms, esgs and all this. So what's happening in that space? Because, also, I know you follow and you work sometimes with these startups who are in that field. So what's happening in that too? 

0:37:02 - Subbu
And again, it's a huge field which is drawing a lot of attention, a lot of investments, and rightly so. Looking at the global warming, I think we should have a decent sense of responsibility to leave a better place for the future generations. So we are doing the right things, probably not as efficiently or quickly as it is currently needed, but then you know at least we are going in the right direction. So, with regards to what's happening, yes, and again, there is a lot of subverticles in it. So there is how do we use hydrogen as a source? How do we use batteries as an example? How do we think about carbon credits? So there are loads of different subverticles in it. So the one thing that I can speak about is what is tech doing with regards to this? So the concept is called green computing, which is to minimize the amount of carbon footprint that an organization or a data center is leaving on the planet. So what do I mean by that? So you know, if you have to run a data center with servers and you know all your networking gear, it's going to take a lot of electricity and a lot of power consumption. That needs to happen with the data center. So how do we make it efficient with regards to the hardware in itself and also with regards to the architecture to manage this efficiently. So the first thing to look at is the heat consumption at a data center level. So can we optimize that? Can we find better cooling systems within the data center? Can we recycle the power that's used by one device to another device? Can we optimize the fundamental hardware, like A6 and the FPGA chips, the semiconductor chips, which goes into these hardware? Can we optimize that to make sure that it doesn't use as much electricity? 

Or the other thing that I sort of look at it, which is what I've been advising large telcos to do, is the fundamental consolidation of that existing footprint. So an example would be let's say Vodafone has 500 firewalls or devices in their data center. Do they really need these 500 firewalls? Because usually the vendors who sell this technology they would want to sell as much as they want and usually it's overprovisioned. You probably don't need all of that hardware. 

Can we consolidate that and make it 300, for instance, can we use virtualization techniques to say we buy a big hypervisor and create VM instances, virtual instances of these 500 units, so that we just reduce the overall footprint of the entire data center, and that is something that a lot of telcos and large organizations have picked up as the first step that they should be looking at with regards to green computing and, yes, they are working on it, and I can see a lot of digital transformation happening whole of you know, in telcospace and banking space to basically getting rid of existing chunky, beefy hardware and making it virtualized, either in their own private data centers or moving it to the cloud, where you only create VMs for for your requirement, as opposed to just over provisioning it. And again, now the technology is really good as well. So if there is a sudden surge with regards to the traffic or the capacity, you can auto scale, you can just spin up additional VMs on demand, and the technology is there to support it now. 

0:41:15 - Mehmet
I'm happy that you brought this because I think, as people in technology you and I so we have also talking about climate and leaving the earth's better place than we found it. Yeah, like you know, consolidation is something pretty much needed and regardless what path you take whether it is public cloud you decide to keep the good thing. I'm starting to see so now we started to see companies, and even local companies, from cooling, from power generation they're trying to rely on, for example, solar energy and so on. But the good thing is you brought today is talking not only from the outside and on the big level, but going into the details, because, yeah, for people who are not technical, like, each one of these servers, like it, consumes some BTU power, which is like cooling electricity, you know, and this I'm not talking about all the other operational stuff. So, and that do, your point. So, when virtualization technology came actually to solve this fundamental problem is that you have a lot of wasted resources that is sitting doing nothing and actually you can benefit out of it. Now we're gonna see if we will be able to do that, because AI is bringing also again this you know, it's hungry for CPU, it's hungry for memory, it's hungry for computing power. So we're gonna watch this space. 

But, yeah, like we need to be more responsible, because the amount of heat, guys, you need to know that, the amount of heat that comes out of these beasts I would call like these pieces of hardware that you see, maybe, in movies. 

Because the other day it was funny enough talking to, I was helping someone to deliver a training about technology to someone who doesn't come from a technology background and he asked, like, do you know what's a data center is? I said, ah, and then we showed you know, ah, okay, this is what we see in movies. I said, yes, exactly. So what you see, guys, in the movies, all these sophisticated computers, they produce a lot of heat, they need a lot of power, they need a lot of cooling energy. And I think, suu, you brought something very important here that we need to make sure that we are not wasting the resources and producing more heat. And again, this is in the spirit of the week of COP, actually, and the COP28, which is happening in the UAE. So, as almost we're coming to an end, any final thoughts you want to leave us with today, especially, for first time, founders, maybe, and people who are maybe interested in cybersecurity. 

0:44:01 - Subbu
Yes, absolutely. 

You know, cybersecurity is an interesting space. 

It's a very important space wherein people should get involved in, and not just from an organization's perspective, but also from an end user's perspective, because, you know, even till this day, we still have phishing emails, we have spam calls, and it all comes down to knowledge and education. 

So the one thing that I would urge I mean it doesn't matter if you're a startup company or if you're an established company cybersecurity is not about just the technology, but the fundamental awareness of not getting caught by the attackers and for that you don't have to be an ethical hacker but then to be able to protect yourself and not fall victims, because it's heartbreaking when I see elderly people losing their money for phishing emails and young people getting distracted with all sorts of you know, the content that they see that they're not supposed to be watching, so things like that. And parents, if they are sort of, you know, technically aware as to how to help their elderly and how to help their children, that is what you know would be. That's how we properly use the technology for our benefit, as opposed to going down with it. So that's my you know. The final fundamental conclusion I would say is to make sure that when we look at tech and especially cybersecurity, make sure that you're aware and look at it from an educational point of view. 

0:45:49 - Mehmet
Yeah, 100%. So, and especially if you are in the startup or a startup, don't delay talking to someone who can help you, because what you might think oh, I'm not important, I'm small, I just started that's not true, especially if you are a tech startup founder. You know your code. Whatever your designs, they are intellectual property for you and people are after them. Worst case scenario, they can just delete them and then you have to repeat the work again and again. 

You don't want to waste time. You don't want to waste money, especially if you have raised some funds from a VC or angel investor, because you need to protect now, not your investment, you need to protect the investment that actually you took from someone else. So to Subu's point this is very important. Don't delay, reach out to an expert to help you on that. And yeah, like, 100%, true, subu, on this one. Now, really I enjoyed the discussion with, like, we try to cover kind of a 360 degrees between cybersecurity, startups, venture capitalists and what you are seeing, and green technology and climate also as well. So it was a very rich episode. Thank you very much, subu, for that Final question where people can find more about you. 

0:47:06 - Subbu
Yes, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's a platform that I'm quite active on, so if there is any further questions or any clarifications that you might want, I'm happy to assist. And again, thank you, mehmet, for this invite. Absolutely loved it. It's nice seeing you again and I'm happy I'm a guest on the show. 

0:47:29 - Mehmet
It was my pleasure. So I will make sure that I will put Subu's LinkedIn address in the show notes. So, guys, if you want to reach out to him and also if you want to pass anything, you can also reach out to me and I will be happy. Subu and myself, we are connected. Thank you, subu again, and this is how I end my episode. 

So, for the people who are tuning in for the first time, I hope you enjoyed it. So, if you enjoyed it, please don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Or, if you are listening on the podcast platform, also subscribe there. And for the loyal listeners and audience, thank you again for being so loyal and sending all your compliments and the feedbacks to me and keep them coming. I love to read all of them. And also, if you are interested to be on the show, don't hesitate to reach out to me. We can make an arrangement. That's not a big issue, as long as you have a great idea. You want to talk about a topic which you think it should be shared with the rest of us? Please do so and thank you again. We will meet again very soon. Thank you, bye-bye. 

0:48:35 - Subbu
Thank you, buddy. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page