The cloud creates “cloud cowboys,” says Yinon Costica, VP of Product and Co-Founder of Wiz. 

This creates, as you might imagine, security issues. 

“Cloud allows people to really own their stuff end-to-end. They can basically create whatever they want,” says Costica. But he says that security professionals need to ensure that the cowboys can “govern their environments in a way that is secured while they continue to build.”

These issues set the theme for this #CyberesecurityByDesign conversation between Costica, Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Aviv Srour, our Head of Cyber Innovation.

Rehman notes that the frequency of change in cloud is “great for software engineering,” but adds: “It also makes it very, very difficult for you to actually find your baseline, your footing,” regarding security.

One of the most useful things we learn in this episode is how cloud might help spread the responsibility for security. In the past, security was solely the problem of the security team but with cloud and its self-serve nature, Costica says: “Security now should be democratized to those who are actually managing the environments, running the resources, have the right context.”

As a group, the guys talk about the differences between on-prem and cloud security, the role of visibility plays in cloud, the pragmatism cloud brings to security, and more.

Understanding the manifold nature of cloud is critical, and it will require a lot more education than many organizations realize. Says Rehman: “If you don't have a good understanding of what your cloud looks like, which is majority of people out there, then you still have a huge problem.”

Be part of the solution: Listen.


Host: Kenji Ross
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 61: A Clear View of Cloud Security with Yinon Costica, Sam Rehman, and Aviv Srour

Equity is not easy. It’s tough enough to talk honestly about equity in US healthcare, and troublingly difficult to create solutions that can, and will, be implemented. 

But trouble—good trouble, as Representative John Lewis once put it—is precisely what interests the people on the latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* 

Dr. Djinge Lindsay, MD, MPH, and Arianne Graham are here to talk about their stalwart attempts to solve for equity. Johnathon Swersey, Senior Director of Innovation at EPAM, creates all kinds of necessary trouble by putting tough questions to our two guests. 

Swersey begins by addressing the idea that given the less-than-optimal state of US healthcare, why are we focusing on equity?

“If we don't fix the health disparities in our country, those will spread to the rest of the population and it becomes not just a public health issue, but frankly, a national security issue,” says Graham.

Or conversationalists agree that there has been much talk about equity but that talk is far too insufficient. 

“There has been a lot of verbal acknowledgement of the fact that structural racism is pervasive and all of our systems, including healthcare, but that verbal acknowledgement hasn't necessarily been followed with action,” says Dr. Lindsay.

To move things forward, we need to align our moral imperatives with proper levels of funding. Dr. Lindsay asks us to consider the history of social change: “There have been few successful social change movements that haven't been aligned with some financial incentive for those who hold power.”

One such alignment must just be possible with the new Health Equity Index that's being introduced to Medicare Advantage. Healthcare players, says Dr. Lindsay, will now be required to not only “look at their data, not only stratify their data but to action on closing disparity gaps. Closing differences in health outcomes for people based on their race.”

Ultimately, it’s about beginning from what Graham calls “an asset- as opposed to a deficit-based approach.” She says that understanding the history, pain, and ramifications of structural racism is important but also “there is space to celebrate what makes different cultures unique and use that as a leverage point to engage folks in conversation about health. To tap into the trusted messengers, trusted leaders, and representative figures within communities that are delivering messages of self-actualization and self-efficacy in managing our health.”

Let’s hope we can manage to take a step in a healthier direction. Begin by listening. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Executive Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 87: Health Equity Solutions with Dr. Djinge Lindsay & Arianne Graham

In this special edition of *Silo Busting,* Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, interviews Stepan Mitish, VP and Head of Ukraine, about how his role shifted from being a leader navigating war-time crises to a leader embracing the challenges of the business world. Mitish says that the year 2022 was so filled with extreme challenges that he and his team can count it as “three or five years of experience.”

He says the experience truly seasoned his team: “We understood what a great team means, not just in theory.” In hindsight, Mitish says, the experience puts COVID in perspective: “At that time, it was something catastrophical… but now you recall it with a smile on your face."

Mitish talks about how he and his team started preparation for a potential war before it actually took place, creating a very solid business continuity plan (BCP).  But if you ask whether he believed it would happen: “I didn't, and even now, for me it's hard to accept how could anybody in the 21st century do what actually was done.”

He tells the harrowing story of how it began very early one morning. Lots of messages pouring in from areas under attack. After that, “It was very loud night and morning,” he says, adding that he was focused on the quiet evacuation of our people to so-called shelters in the western part of Ukraine. Vinnytsia. Lviv. Ivano-Frankivsk. Uzhhorod.

At the beginning of the war, he was orchestrating 15,000 employees but they were working as one. He says that after a week, “I was afraid to start hearing a lot of complaints from our clients about failed delivery, non-delivery in services.” Instead, he received emails from clients “who were praising our teams for working days and nights and even delivering planned releases.”

By the second or third week, everyone understood that Russia could not do a “so-called blitzkrieg in three days” and that it wasn’t “possible to break Ukrainians and to break EPAM in Ukraine.” He says: “Despite all the challenges, all the craziness that was going on,” he and his team continued to deliver. Relentlessly.  

“People were doing incredible, heroic things on the ground, but also doing delivery from bomb shelters and various faraway locations where people ended up moving to in order to avoid actually being in the midst of ongoing attacks,” says Shekhter. “From your point of view, why do you think they did it?”

Mitish says it was a combination of two things: (a) “Probably it's part of Ukrainian values or DNA to be very much focused on results”; and (b) “We don't have any other home and we understand that we fight for our lives, for our workplaces, for our families. And if not me, then who's going to do that?”

So where are we now in Ukraine?

“I believe that the worst, worst days are already behind us,” says Mitish who wants to encourage our clients and future clients to support Ukraine and bring more business there. “I strongly believe that once this war is over and Ukraine wins, there will be a huge queue of those companies’ investors… and if you're going to be on the end of the queue, probably it will be much harder to find the best talent for you and your business.”

You’ll want to listen to our resilient colleague tell his amazing story. Do so! 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 66: Operating in Ukraine with Stepan Mitish and Elaina Shekhter

Going mobile: It’s going to create vulnerabilities. That’s the way things work with apps. They aren’t just friendly pieces of software that help you beat traffic or bring your favorite tunes into your eardrums… they are opportunities, rich ones, for the bad guys.

Andrew Whaley, the Senior Technical Director (UK) at Promon and our guest on *Silo Busting,* says that with an app, “You have to be able to trust the security model that you've got around it.” 

Whaley talks with Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, about how apps operate on a client-server model, but “all the client code is distributed outside of your enterprise.” Some of these users could well be criminals who, once gaining access to that code, could "reverse engineer it and come up with ways to attack that.”

And the code in those apps can be a bit suspect. Whaley says that most apps are made up of 80% open-source software. “You know how many of those app developers go and build that source themselves from source and read over it before they compile?” he asks and then answers: “Probably close to zero.”

Speaking of putting the work in… Rehman talks about calibrating “the level of effort that the attacker would have to go through versus the yield.” The trick is, he says, layering on cybersecurity techniques “so that the yield is not worth it for them.”

Whaley replies that “once you layer obfuscation on, you then have this impenetrable forest” and that the “immediately accessible ways of attacking [an application] are taken off the table.”

Together they chat about supply chain attacks, nonlinear programming, and more. Tune in and be safe(r)!

Host: Glenn Gruber
Editor: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busing 67: Andrew Whaley and Sam Rehman on App Security

Sam Rehman—a frequent voice on this podcast network and EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP—was in the classroom recently, teaching students, and in the process was “surprised by the density of PII that's in in the system.” 

This led Rehman to realize that “at least here in California,” higher education’s investment in cybersecurity is “substantially behind.”

Catching up is a theme of today’s conversation about privacy, education, and artificial intelligence. 

Speaking for the (cyber)defense, with Rehman, is today’s guest on *The Resonance Test,* Scott Loughlin, Partner and Global Co-Lead of the Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice at the law firm Hogan Lovells. 

“It took a long time to get people to understand that the easiest thing to do is not always the right thing to do to protect the company’s interest and protect the company’s data,” says Loughlin. “And that is an experience that we'll all have with respect to generative AI tools.”

Loughlin and Rehman are put through their conversational paces from questions by Brian Imholte, our Head of Education & Learning Services.

They have much to say about data governance (“Data is not by itself anymore, it's broken up in pieces, combined, massaged, and then pulled out from a model,” says Rehman), data pedigree, the laws—and lack thereof—regarding privacy and generative AI. They also kick around the role that FERPA assumes here. “You’re trying to deploy this old framework against this new technology, which is difficult,” says Loughlin, adding: “There are some key areas of tension that will come up with using generative AI with student data.”

So where might an educational publisher or school begin? 

“Focus on your value first,” says Rehman. Do your experiments, but do them in small pieces, he says: "And then within those small pieces, know what you're putting into the model.”

This informative and spirited conversation is even occasionally funny. Loughlin brings up a court case about whether or not a selfie-taking monkey selfie would own the copyright to the photo. “The court said no,” notes Loughlin, adding that US Copyright laws are “designed to protect the authorship of humans, not of monkeys, and in this case not of generative AI tools.” 

Download now: It’s sure to generate some new thoughts. 

Host: Kenji Ross
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 88: Scott Loughlin, Sam Rehman, and Brian Imholte on Privacy, Education, and AI

“There’s been an incident,” is a sentence no one wants to hear… except perhaps people like Ron Konigsberg, Co-Founder and CTO of Gem and our guest on *Silo Busting,* whose business is cloud incident response (IR).

We know what you’re thinking: What makes cloud IR different from all other forms of IR? 

Let’s let Konigsberg explain: “The challenge is that the cloud is technically simply different.” If you’re using legacy tools, “you're going to protect probably 20% of the cloud.”

Konigsberg is joined in conversation by Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and the pair are pelted with questions by Aviv Srour, our Head of Cyber Innovation.

Konigsberg says that incident responders need to “adapt from network and agents to services and APIs, and constantly learn about new services and stay up to date and up to speed” with what the bad guys are picking up.

Oh, those bad guys! Regarding attackers, Konigsberg says: “They adopt innovation faster than defenders.” They can do so because they have fewer dependencies “and they care less [than defenders do] about breaking things.”

To illustrate, he asks us to think about migrating to the cloud: Imagine you’re an attacker and you simply never worry about any legacy systems from your previous environments. “They have much more liberty and they move faster.”

“They adopt techniques about new services that each cloud provider is releasing *tomorrow,*” says Konigsberg. 

So it is, in some ways, about playing catch-up. CISOs have had to adopt a new mindset and posture. “You can only block so many punches until you have to figure out [that] you need to move around, you need to counter, and so on,” says Rehman.

Rehman adds that CISOs have finally understood the “shared responsibility between you and the cloud provider.” But that’s not the only issue with the cloud. “It's much flatter than what you’re used to on prem,” he says. “Which means a lateral attack is a lot quicker, moving things around a lot easier, and the *simplicity* of people actually moving things around and infecting a large area is substantially higher.”

So how can an organization properly respond to, and learn to prioritize within, the cloud conundrum? One answer, says Rehman, is culture. 

“We have to adopt a learning culture in security,” he says. “They’re always gonna be one step ahead of us, but at least we're one step behind, not ten.” Pick up the pace of your learning and listen to the experts speak. Hit play!  

Host: Lisa Kocian
Editor: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 68: Cloud IR Readiness with Ron Konigsberg, Sam Rehman & Aviv Srour

Can today’s companies afford to be Luddites? 

This is one of the big questions that Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer and SVP, puts to today’s *Resonance Test* guest, Rowan Curran, Senior Analyst at Forrester. 

In the case of generative AI, both answer: No. Why? Shekhter notes that whatever your competitive edge in 2022, today everyone is encountering a different mode of operations. The positioning around the success or failure of your AI efforts must be “accelerating along the vector of AI, because the opportunity to get away from the competition, faster, is much greater now than it ever has been.”

In a lively and informed session of back-and-forth, they parse what is real and what is a hallucination in GenAI *at this moment.*

Curran says that lately there has been an “ebullient explosion” of work on tools and approaches to manage system outputs. “Are we there yet in terms of having these be optimized architectures and things like that? Absolutely not. But is there tons of work being done there or are we approaching reasonable solutions to those problems? Yes, absolutely.”

What should companies be doing to ensure they're ready to benefit and succeed with AI?

“Right now, everybody's building the gen one of enterprise generative AI applications,” says Curran, and this will make them ubiquitous. But if your organization fails to adopt them, he adds: “You are going to be falling behind everybody else who is actually building with this stuff today.”

Listen closely and learn what will the currency of the future be, the commercial and economic models of successful GenAI, the nature of productivity gains: “Somebody saving 30 minutes per day who makes $60K a year is going to have a very different economic impact on the company versus somebody who makes $200K a year and saves 30 minutes per day,” Curran says. They also discuss how this new tech will transform the shape of work and what companies will be focusing on this year: “2023 is the year of excitement and experimentation, and 2024 is the year of optimization and efficiency,” says Curran.

Oh… and it might also transform the future of fun! “I do think we could use the new technology to make work more fun for people,” says Shekhter, who sees in the soaring advance of multimodal LLMs an opportunity for people “to develop in an enlightened way.”

Enlighten yourself first. Smash that play button. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 89: Guest Speaker Rowan Curran and Elaina Shekhter on Generative AI

Responsible AI isn’t about laying down the law. Creating responsible AI systems and policies is necessarily an iterative, longitudinal endeavor. Doing it right requires constant conversation among people with diverse kinds of expertise, experience, and attitudes. Which is exactly what today’s episode of *The Resonance Test* embodies. We bring to the virtual table David Goodis, Partner at INQ Law, and Martin Lopatka, Managing Principal of AI Consulting at EPAM, and ask them to lay down their cards. Turns out, they are holding insights as sharp as diamonds. 

This well-balanced pair begins by talking about definitions. Goodis mentions the recent Canadian draft legislation to regulate AI, which asks “What is harm?” because, he says, “What we're trying to do is minimize harm or avoid harm.” The legislation casts harm as physical or psychological harm, damage to a person's property (“Suppose that could include intellectual property,” Goodis says), and any economic loss to a person. 

This leads Lopatka to wonder whether there should be “a differentiation in the way that we legislate fully autonomous systems that are just part of automated pipelines.” What happens, he wonders, when there is an inherently symbiotic system between AI and humans, where “the design is intended to augment human reasoning or activities in any way”?

Goodis is comforted when a human is looped in and isn’t merely saying: “Hey, AI system, go ahead and make that decision about David, can he get the bank loan, yes or no?”

This nudges Lopatka to respond: “The inverse is, I would say, true for myself. I feel like putting a human in the loop can often be a way to shunt off responsibility for inherent choices that are made in the way that AI systems are designed.” He wonders if more scrutiny is needed in designing the systems that present results to human decision-makers.

We also need to examine how those systems operate, says Goodis, pointing out that while an AI system might not be “really making the decision,” it might be “*steering* that decision or influencing that decision in a way that maybe we're not comfortable with.”

This episode will prepare you to think about informed consent (“It's impossible to expect that people have actually even read, let alone *comprehended,* the terms of services that they are supposedly accepting,” says Lopatka), the role of corporate oversight, the need to educate users about risk, and the shared obligation involved in building responsible AI.  

One fascinating exchange centered on the topic of autonomy, toward which Lopatka suggests that a user might have mixed feelings. “Maybe I will object to one use [of personal data] but not another and subscribe to the value proposition that by allowing an organization to process my data in a particular way, there is an upside for me in terms of things like personalized services or efficiency gains for myself. But I may have a conscientious objection to [other] things.”

To which Goodis reasonably asks: “I like your idea, but how do you implement that?”

There is no final answer, obviously, but at one point, Goodis suggests a reasonable starting point: “Maybe it is a combination of consent versus ensuring organizations act in an ethical manner.”
This is a conversation for everyone to hear. So listen, and join Goodis and Lopatka in this important dialogue. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 90: Responsible AI with David Goodis and Martin Lopatka

“One of the most essential parts of bringing innovation to market is often the most rarely noted,” says host Macy Donaway on the latest Resonance Test podcast. “And it’s those dedicated client leads and sponsors who have political capital built that they can spend to then overcome hurdles.” We call such people mavericks, and Uma Gopinath, the CIO of Porter Airlines and our podcast guest, perfectly embodies that term. 

Gopinath has been a highly successful change-maker in numerous companies and industries (she was the CIO of Metrolinx, the Director of Technology and Innovation at Lush, and the AVP of Intelligent Automation at Canadian Tire Corporation). Along the way, she has learned how to thrive in the heavily male-dominated technology industry and shares some of her wisdom in this conversation. 

Giving back, in fact, is central to her work. “As a person of privilege, you need to share that privilege with others,” she says, noting that when at Metrolinx, she noticed the diversity of her teams was “in the low teens when we started,” and by the time she exited “We were close to 30-35% in diversity.”

She says that change happens “by intention.” And notes that when a woman didn’t win a particular role, she would ask her colleagues why and was often told, “But she’s the second best.” To this, Gopinath argued that perhaps she was “second best because she's never been given the opportunity to be the first best.”

Fixing systemic bias, she notes: “Calls for courage, calls for some unpopular statements sometimes.”

Courage is a central part of Gopinath’s general ethos, and it takes the shape of a willingness to be curious, to experiment (and experiment at scale: “your denominator has to be big for you to get those useful, successful experiments,” she says). Gopinath talks up the importance of focusing on the customer. Continuously. 

Gopinath notes that many organizations brew up a business case and do a project, “but then nobody goes back to effectively evaluate” the outcomes originally projected. Consequently, she says, “We hear lots of stories about how IT projects don’t deliver.”
She adds that sometimes it’s “a small feedback loop that's required” and that doing “a little more to get to that bigger benefit” is something businesses need to do better.

Gopinath ends with some memorable maverick-level inspiration for future leaders: “Enjoy what you're doing. If you’re not having fun, then go be successful somewhere else.”
Now go have fun and listen to the episode! 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 92: Lessons from a Maverick with Uma Gopinath and Macy Donaway

We’re talking about the lab of the future! Better than that… we’re *building* it. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* two of the builders are giving us a tour of sorts! Listen as Sridhar Iyengar, Founder, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer and Chairman of Elemental Machines, and Chris Waller, EPAM’s VP and Chief Scientist, chew the scientific fat about creating a collaborative model cell and gene therapy laboratory.

Waller says the lab of the future seeks to “reinvent the way we look at equipment and utilize equipment in a laboratory setting that's used to manufacture cells” by making it, as we say, real. “We’re building out that facility at the EPAM Continuum office in Boston and partnering with folks like Elemental Machines” to enable “the transformation that we're looking for in these laboratory settings.”

Creating such a next-gen lab is a very complicated task, says Iyengar. “Unlike many other disciplines that are primarily software driven or even mechanically driven, the life sciences have a much greater degree of variability.”  

To minimize this variability, they’re putting an Amazon Go level of scrutiny on lab processes. AI, Iyengar says, “can spot patterns across an enormous number of variables and dimensions, much more than any human being can do… To do that you need lots of data, so you can cancel out the noise and you can find the signal in the noise.” The key step here, he adds, is to collect “as many dimensions of data as possible and make it computationally available.”

At present, says Waller, the EPAM Continuum facility enables us to give the future a test run. The lab “allows us to bring our clients, our members of the [Pistoia] Alliance [and] our technology partners together in a safe space to work collectively to derisk the introduction of new technologies into these laboratory settings and show us the future.”

Iyengar adds that when he walks people through the lab, “You see their eyes light up and say, ‘Ohh, I get it; that means we can do XYZ!’” Listen to these two and you’ll soon be having your own XYZ thoughts. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 93: The Lab of the Future with Sridhar Iyengar and Chris Waller

“Can we use generative AI in a way that teaches us something that we might not have known otherwise, and in that learning… create something that actually has the potential to increase agency for all inside of the system?”

Good question, Angela Stockman! It is, in fact, one of many good questions that Stockman, the author of *The Writer’s Guide to Pedagogical Documentation,* raises as our guest on *The Resonance Test.*

In this episode, Stockman joins Kristin Heist, Senior Director of Innovation Consulting at EPAM Continuum, and our Brian Imholte to dig deep into Gen AI and education. 

Part of that digging involves the art of *asking questions.* Heist says that while building a tutor with input from educators, teachers have been “pushing us to design tools that follow the principles of Socratic method” and not just giving the answers to students.  

Stockman agrees saying that teachers don’t want to see “learners leaning on AI tools just to generate answers or to produce work in ways that you know undermine their opportunity to sharpen their own saw.”

The hope is that students will become keen enough to create whole new ways of doing things—and that teachers will, too. 

Part of teachers’ craft, says Heist, is “learning what works for their students, learning what their students understand, learning who their students are.” But the reality is that teachers are extremely time-constrained. And this makes personalization a challenge.
 
Stockman says that for teachers “who are working with sometimes over one hundred students in a single day,” personalization is “kind of unrealistic”—but a GenAI tutor can truly help.

The real focus is where GenAI tools can, as Heist says, “elevate the teacher's craft,” as opposed to replacing what they're currently doing.

And let’s not forget data! Stockman says that AI is “helping us scoop the data out of their lived learning experiences. We don't have to bring learning to a halt in order to assess what's going on and it can help us with the interpretation of massive amounts of qualitative data.” 

If you have questions about GenAI and EDU, and you know you do, listen up. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 94: Angela Stockman on GenAI in Education

EPAM Continuum's award-winning podcasts feature interviews with people practicing innovation in various forms, digging into their ability to deliver results. Repeatedly.

Silo Busting 61: A Clear View of Cloud Security with Yinon Costica, Sam Rehman, and Aviv Srour

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