Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Back in 2018, I wondered (perhaps loudly if SD-WAN was just IT’s hype-of-the-year, destined for the same eye-rolls as signature-based antivirus and GDPR compliance drives. Even then, I knew we couldn’t let messaging fatigue blind us to real technology shifts. Fast-forward to 2025: SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) not only stuck around, but became the springboard to something far bigger – SASE (Secure Access Service Edge).

A recent BBC article, “Weak password allowed hackers to sink a 158-year-old company,” outlined a serious security lapse. This case reinforces the message that we, at Teneo, advocate every day: true resilience comes from defense in depth, i.e. policy, product and process, not just tools at the edge. In a recent customer engagement, we discussed a transition from VPN to ZTNA. While ZTNA offers enhanced security including continual checking, improved segmentation and a minimized attack surface.

Yesterday, like many others in the tech community, I found myself pausing to fully grasp the implications of the Microsoft SharePoint hack. As one of the most widely adopted document management and collaboration platforms globally, SharePoint’s compromise inevitably sends ripples of concern through businesses everywhere. This news reminded me of a conversation I had just last week with an enterprise customer. We were discussing how one might approach cybersecurity from a hacker’s perspective.

The recent launch of Grok 4 has set the AI community buzzing. With an impressive score of 73 on TLDR’s AI benchmark, Grok 4 edges ahead of OpenAI’s O3 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, both scoring 70. Elon and the X AI team deserve praise for this breakthrough, reinforcing Grok 4’s status as potentially the most powerful LLM yet.

It’s only a matter of time. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in 2024 that he thought this could be achieved by the end of 2026. Personally, I feel this is a little optimistic; however, based on the evidence I’ve seen, it won’t be long after that. Consider Telegram: a global messaging giant with just 30 employees, already achieving a remarkable $1 billion in revenue. Or Midjourney, revolutionizing creative industries with only 40 employees and generating an impressive $500 million.