Amazon S3 is the oldest service in the catalogue of Amazon Web Services (AWS). We sat down with Andy Warfield, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, to talk about the 19-year journey of Amazon S3 from simple backup solution to sophisticated data foundation.

Warfield talks about how S3 began as essentially "a storage locker across town" for archival purposes, before customers discovered its REST architecture made it capable of handling massive parallel workloads. This unexpected advantage fueled S3's growth beyond unstructured data into analytics and AI domains. The introduction of columnar formats like Parquet and open table formats like Iceberg transformed what was possible, culminating in AWS's recent launch of S3 Tables.

Besides the general direction Amazon S3 has taken and takes, we also talk about other challenges related to current developments. One of them is how AWS and Amazon S3 handles the bloat that is associated with vectorizing databases for use in AI use cases. This challenge is driving significant innovation at AWS to optimize storage for the AI era.

All in all, Amazon S3 has had to evolve continuously to mirror the broader developments in how businesses approach data - from static archives to dynamic, queryable assets powering real-time decision making.

The final topic we talk about is the future of Amazon S3. Warfield wants it to be "pulled closer to application code" with improved performance and more flexible access methods to ensure customers don't have to choose upfront how they'll use their data.

We are slightly biased of course, but we think this is a very good episode of Techzine Talks, and highly recommend anyone interested in the topic to listen to it. Tune in now!

The cybersecurity landscape has transformed in recent years, with managed security services gaining widespread acceptance as organizations face the realities of today's threat landscape. In this conversation with Erik van Buggenhout, responsible for managed security services at NVISO, we delve into the practical challenges that have made outsourcing security operations a necessity rather than just an option for many businesses.

Erik shares an analogy that illustrates how we should think about cybersecurity: "It's like the brakes on your Ferrari. It gives you the confidence to accelerate because you know you can stop when needed." This perspective shifts security from being viewed as an obstacle to an enabler that allows organizations to move faster while managing risks effectively. That is the idea, at least.

We discuss the fundamental reasons organizations struggle with security basics. Think of things like the proliferation of tools but also the challenges of prioritizing foundational controls like asset management and patch management. Despite vendors' promises of next-generation solutions, many security teams find themselves drowning in alerts while they can't see the forest for the trees.

The conversation also touches on the rapid evolution of AI in cybersecurity. While approximately 75% of security alerts are already handled automatically through simple playbooks, agentic AI presents both tremendous opportunities and significant risks. There's a clear role to play here for the concepts of transparency and explainability, and, as a result, trust. Agent-to-agent interactions will only make this more important.

We also try and be as practical as possible for our listeners. How do you build effective defense-in-depth strategies that combine automation, AI, and human expertise in a layered approach? He challenges the notion that humans are the "weakest link" and instead advocates for creating security controls that users can trust.

Listen to this latest episode of Techzine Talks now!

Smart manufacturing has many facets. There's the convergence of IT and OT, and the security challenges that brings. In recent years we've seen Private 5G coming up, at least as a topic of conversation if not in actual adoption. Finally, the edge environments of those factories recently fell under the spell of AI too.

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, we talked to Parm Sandhu, Group Vice President of Enterprise Products and Services at NTT Data, about all of these topics. What does Edge AI bring us and is private 5G finally delivering on years of promises? And what about the security issues associated with the convergence of IT and OT? And finally, how are all these developments interconnected?

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks now and let us know what you think.