It was a sultry hot London night, with thunderstorms brewing, when Helen and Andy turned up to Newman Street in Soho for the 10th Cloud Native Media Meetup. Sponsored by Arqiva, LiveWyer and Techex.
The group meet regularly to talk about tech, TV and video media, audio and radio, with an emphasis on professional knowledge exchange through sharing technical, business, organisational and practical tips. On Wednesday the talk was all about cybersecurity for media operating on "cloud" infrastructure. Many thanks to Paul Markham and the crew for inviting us!
Helen began by challenging Andy to defend cloud technologies despite numerous known and hidden problems including; asymmetrical ingress/egress, untrusted hypervisors, unpredictable energy and bandwidth costs, and likely backdoors in TPM. They discussed the realities of moving cloud assets in a business that is becoming siloed into walled gardens like the social meda space.
The talk provoked lively debate with some commenting that we are hopelessly dependent on US providers that nobody dare compete with, and others identifying obvious resilience issues with the current situation, one that demands regulation and building of competitive European cloud capabilities.
Andy and Helen ended by highlighting new approaches to cloud security including federated compute using homomorphic encryption and advanced distributed filesystems that need not run on big-tech providers like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. They spoke about issues beyond organisational security, on public trust in the media in a "post-truth"/"post-trust" era, on AI and disinformation, and about the difficult position of the media with respect to cybersecurity in a new "cold war" period.