Help Wanted, page-3

Flashy, Hacker News gives you lots of daily information about the scale and variety of hacks, the code names used and often the types of penetration, but while we get a sense of the scale of the piracy and the sheer number of cyber security companies now giving advice on software and “hygiene” issues like being on guard for pfishing emails that increasing look completely authentic is not particularly helpful.

We get a sense of a scale of the piracy and how the state agencies are merging with criminal syndicates, but in the end this parade of hacks and vulnerabilities is not particularly helpful.

Cyber Daily from Recorded Future Newsis more useful as it gives a run-down of high-profile hacks but as it is edited professionally it does stand-back and provides free reports which put cyber security in a wider geo-political and technical framework. At a guess, some of the staff are ex CIA or from the US National Security Agency, but whatever their origins, Recorded Future News has about 1000 staff in Boston focussed on different aspects of cyber intelligence, including a division called Insikit which sells its own specialised cyber threat awareness software i.e. it is somewhat like the Netlinkz comfortably profitable internal “lawful intercept” business SSI Pacific, but on a larger scale.

Insikit’s report on the vulnerability of the world’s under-sea cable is no doubt a public edited version of a much more detailed report offered to the US security agencies. The focus of the article is the alarming possibility that Putin might use the special submarine Russia has for cable inspection for an attack on US or European Atlantic cable, but in the process of setting out the scale of risk we get a good picture of the physical aspects of global comms infrastructure.

As Netlinkz shifts gears and distributes the VSN NaaS through telcos like HGC, ALT, Spark and PT&T we begin to see how these strategic issues over-lap. Generally, the world’s 90 or so incumbent telcos and the 200 or so smaller telcos which have sprung up beside them have been slow to capture value from the data they were carrying. Many had data centres, but they were seen as largely for internal use, as not rentable facilities. The “loss” of the potential revenues they might have captured has been colossal. For example, we learnt last week, that Microsoft took in $56.5 billion for the quarter with $30.3 billion of this coming from Azure so more than half its revenue is now cloud services,"ïntelligent" and plain.

Is it now too late? Apparently companies like HGC Global don’t think so. One thing in their favour is that SE Asia is still digitising. Thailand already has 60 data centres to serve a population of 70 million. (The US has about 2500). Indonesia has about 40 with plans for several “hyperscaler” data centres to cope with rapidly rising data volume.

This digital infrastructure is a response to the general spread of public digital communication, but there is also the addition infrastructure needed as the great-decoupling from China relocates assembly and manufacturing in Thailand Vietnam and SE Asia more broadly.

One possible means of capturing this potential revenue is the VSN Naas platform which allow international and smaller businesses to manage their cloud activity selectively. Hybrid cloud is where the platform would come into its own. HGC also has its own data centres and cloud offering so the plan may be to steer business away from the US juggernauts to local services wherever possible. Why shovel money out to Geoff Bezos?

If they do buy local the VSN platform can be individualized for each of HGC and its downstream telco customers with the multi-tenant function.

Starlink comes into this as well, especially if Putin decides to go for broke. At a less dramatic level it serves as a back-up when typhoons and floods hit, or to simply capture new clients not served by existing mobile towers or optic fibre infrastructure.

So basically Netlinkz is becoming a telco proxy and sits at a sort of over-lap in technology where a comms network is also by default a digital security service. For a long time it has been hard to fully grasp that the software is two things at once but we only have to look at success of Roku, the software streaming software which is taking on Amazon, Apple and Google and winning to hope that Netlinkz can do something similar by allying with telcos. There's a lot of them and they would all like to have more of the digital pie.