Tech Show London was busy – too busy, at least, for your average bedraggled and bespectacled editor to find his interviewees without tripping over someone gazing slack-jawed at the number of exhibits on show, or suddenly pausing to consult the in-centre map about which stall lay where. It was after having negotiated these very human obstacles that Tech Monitor encountered Servecentric’s founder Brian Roe, deep in conversation with an attendee and, one might hope for Roe, a potential client.
“We’re a co-location provider based in Dublin,” said Roe, adding that his team were currently on the lookout for UK businesses interested in data residency in the EU. In addition to a couple of pre-booked meetings, he explained, Roe and his team would be canvassing some of the other exhibitors and – if there was time amid all this business – catch a talk or two.
Kevin Dunn was of a similar disposition. Manning Wasabi Technologies’ stall close to the hall’s entrance, Dunn was also busy lauding the cloud provider’s services to any attendees he could extend an arm around and usher into the firm’s bright green shopfront. “We’re getting customer meetings booked on the stand today,” Dunn told Tech Monitor, before expounding on Wasabi’s recent work in delivering an AI-powered media platform for Liverpool F.C and the news that the cloud provider had recently hoped a second UK-based data centre. There wouldn’t be time to attend talks while he was so busy talking to attendees, Dunn confirmed – especially when so many were eager to press him on his company’s sustainability credentials.
“Certainly in the last 18 months, we’ve started to see that accelerate in terms of how many customers are making those demands on us and, obviously, other vendors,” he told Tech Monitor. “It’s a real hot topic.”
Dunn was preaching to the converted. Just a stone’s throw away at the Cloud & AI Infrastructure Theatre, attendees were given an explanation about how OVHCloud and AMD were functionally responding to market demands for greater energy efficiency in the data centre, a discussion moderated by Tech Monitor’s own newly-minted editor-in-chief. Earlier in the day, audience members were also treated to the wit and wisdom of Pleo’s CTO Meri Williams, who dispensed advice on what startups should not be doing when scaling their operations.
“I laugh every time a startup tells me that they’re trying to do things the way that Google does things today,” said Williams, highlighting the ridiculous aspirations of many a new enterprise to the world’s largest search engine. Founders would get more done, said Pleo’s CTO, if they concentrated not only on more immediate goals but paid careful attention to the wellbeing of their staff, giving them tasks that weren’t just crucial to the future of the business and ones that they have a personal stake in making succeed.
Cybersecurity discussions also featured heavily at Tech Show London – particularly as they pertained to the nefarious potential of generative AI. On one side of the event, ManageEngine’s Shehnaaz Nizar explained to her audience how to better protect their businesses through enhanced security hygiene practices and blunt would-be AI-assisted hackers. She began by asking her audience to log into Shodan.io and view the many thousands of exposed ports across London.
“I’m not a hacker…not yet,” Nizar reassured her audience. But simply adding a popular AI chatbot to the mix saw the ManageEngine cybersecurity evangelist come dangerously close to becoming one. “I [told] ChatGPT, ‘Hey, this is an open port, can you tell me what I can do with it?’ And I was so surprised because it gave me a list of things that I could do to exploit all of the open ports and vulnerabilities.”
Nizar proceeded to give attendees a long list of actions they could undertake to patch those vulnerabilities and ensure their organisation’s ports and data were no longer inappropriately exposed online. But later in the day, Cato Networks’ Etay Maor highlighted another, less well-known area of concern for CISOs: the ‘excessive agency’ afforded to agentic AI platforms.
“‘Excessive agency’ is defined as giving AI agents too much autonomy and too many permissions,” Maor told Tech Monitor ahead of his own talk later that afternoon. Unfortunately, that’s normal for most AI applications, which work more efficiently when they have access to more data. “But then, if I’m a hacker, or a criminal, and I see that you’re using an agent that has access to your personal information, that is a treasure trove.”
Free-to-use generative AI platforms could also radically lower the bar for cybercriminals to subvert major organisations, many of which are ably defended according to the rules of yesterday’s cyber conflicts. Maor described one case, expanded in detail in a recent report by Cato Networks, of one researcher using ChatGPT to build malware specifically designed to hack into an agentic AI platform.
After Maor’s talk concluded in the late afternoon, the crowds had begun to thin. Before the trickle of attendees trying to beat the rush hour crush home turned into a flood, Tech Monitor sought Servecentric’s Brian Roe out at the co-location provider’s stall. “He’s gone,” a colleague said before happily motioning toward the sky. After a full day of insightful conversations and presentations, one hopes that Roe, too, left the day’s festivities feeling his attendance was worthwhile.
Tech Show London was held between March 12th and 13th at the ExCel Centre, London.
Read more: Tech Show London dives deep into the complexities of the cloud
