I recorded this conversation in Alpbach, Austria, a village that looks like a postcard and hosts a very serious tech gathering.

TechSummit25 is Barracuda’s deeply technical event, and it shows. The rooms are packed with solution architects, product managers, and engineers comparing notes with customers who run these systems every day. It is the kind of environment where product direction and real-world pain points meet over a coffee, then head straight into a lab to test an idea.

My guest is Neal Bradbury, Chief Product Officer at Barracuda, who leads engineering, product management, and the operations teams that keep services running around the clock. Fresh from a session titled “Secured today, secured tomorrow,” Neal breaks down what that promise means in practice. We explore why Barracuda is doubling down on a platform approach with Barracuda One, how a single dashboard helps teams see posture and value in one place, and why consolidation matters when alerts and tools pile up faster than teams can respond.

We also talk about the balance between immediate protection and longer-term planning. Neil explains how quarterly releases and shared services underpin the roadmap, how zero trust network access moves from theory to deployment as VPNs fade, and how managed vulnerability services help organizations find risks they did not know they had. He shares why service providers are shifting toward vCIO and vCISO models, how value reporting answers the board’s simplest question about where the budget goes, and why response time is the measure that keeps coming up in every conversation.

The headline theme is simple enough. Know where you stand right now, then set a clear plan for the next year. Barracuda One aims to cut noise and show whether tools are configured properly. The same view rolls up alerts across email, network, and application security, and for MSPs it stretches across all customers. That single source of truth is designed to reduce swivel-chair work and make decisions faster.

We dig into the reality of tool sprawl and alert fatigue. A recent study Barracuda commissioned points to teams carrying too many point solutions, with slower responses and misconfigurations as the cost. Neal’s answer is convergence without ignoring specialist depth. Product groups keep shipping, while shared AI and threat protection services raise the floor across the portfolio. That approach feeds directly into XDR, where integrations with tenants, firewalls, and endpoints help shrink the gap between detection and action.

AI sits in the background of all of this. Neal describes it as a reckless intern that needs guardrails. In practice that means setup wizards that cut deployment time, incident response that can pull a bad message from twenty tenants in one sweep, and ML-driven triggers that fire automated remediation when patterns line up. The aim is clear. Let machines handle the routine work at machine speed, so people can focus on decisions and the weird edge cases attackers love to try.

If you run security day to day, you will hear practical direction rather than slogans. Consolidated dashboards exist to show posture, not just counts. Value reporting exists to explain outcomes to a board, not to pad a slide deck. Managed services rise in importance because many organizations need strategy as much as tools, and that includes smaller enterprises that outsource large parts of their stack.

For leaders planning the next quarter, the emphasis on zero trust and managed vulnerability services will stand out. For operators, the XDR and SOAR focus is about shaving minutes into seconds, connecting identity with network and endpoint events, and giving analysts room to breathe. And for anyone curious about how product roadmaps form, conferences like this one offer a candid loop between feedback and action that you rarely see on a press release.

By the time we wrap, Alpbach’s quiet streets feel like an unlikely place to discuss ransomware, posture, and platform design. Yet that contrast makes the conversation land even harder. Secure today, plan for tomorrow, and give your team the visibility to do both.

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I’m joined by Todd Grabowski from Johnson Controls to unpack the physics, products, and design choices shaping the next generation of data center cooling. It’s a practical conversation that moves from chips and compressors to water, power, and land constraints, and what it really takes to keep modern infrastructure reliable at scale.

Todd brings three decades of experience to the table and a front-row view of how Johnson Controls and the York brand have kept their focus on energy efficiency, reliability, and sustainability for more than a century. That longevity matters when the market is moving fast. He explains why cooling now sits alongside power as the defining constraint for data centers, and why roughly forty percent of a facility’s energy can be spent on cooling rather than computation. If you lead technology, finance, or facilities, that single number should focus the mind.

Todd walks through Johnson Controls’ YVAM platform and the York magnetic bearing centrifugal compressor at its core, with real numbers on what that means in practice.

Consuming around forty percent less energy than typical cooling devices of the past five years and operating in ambient conditions up to fifty-five degrees Celsius, it is designed for the reality of hotter climates and denser loads. The naval pedigree of the driveline is a nice twist, since it was originally built for quiet and high-reliability conditions long before hyperscale data centers needed the same.

Sustainability threads through the entire discussion. Todd lays out how the company holds itself to internal targets while engineering solutions that reduce customer resource use. We talk about closed-loop designs that do not consume water, careful refrigerant choices with ultra-low global warming potential, and product footprints that consider carbon impact from the start. It is a useful reminder that sustainability is a systems problem, not a single feature on a spec sheet.

I was especially interested in the three resources Todd says every modern cooling strategy must balance. Land, because you need somewhere to reject heat. Power, because every watt pulled into cooling is a watt not used for compute. Water, because many regions are already under stress and consumption cannot be the answer. Good design weighs these factors against the climate, the workload profile, and the operational model, then standardizes wherever possible so the same unit can run efficiently in Scandinavia or Dubai without special tweaks.

We also dig into what AI means internally for Johnson Controls. It is showing up in manufacturing lines, speeding up design cycles, and improving the fidelity of compressor and heat transfer models. That translates into quicker time to market and more confidence in performance envelopes. On the market side, Todd is clear that demand has not softened. If anything, efficiencies tend to unlock more use cases, and the net effect is more workloads and continued pressure on facilities to cool them well.

If your team is wrestling with when to adopt liquid cooling, how to reduce PUE through smarter chiller choices, or how to plan for climate variability across a global footprint, this episode offers an honest, grounded view from someone who has shipped the hardware and lived with its trade-offs. It also doubles as a quiet celebration of engineering craft. The kind that rarely makes headlines, yet underpins everything we build in the AI age.

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I’ve spent years talking about endpoint security, yet printers rarely enter the conversation. Today, that blind spot takes center stage. I’m joined by Jim LaRoe, CEO of Symphion, to unpack why printers now represent one of the most exposed corners of the enterprise and what can be done about it.

Jim’s team protects fleets that range from a few hundred devices to tens of thousands, and the picture he paints is stark. In many organizations, printers make up 20 to 30 percent of endpoints, and almost all of them are left in a factory default state. That means open ports, default passwords, and little to no monitoring.

Pair that with the sensitive data printers receive, process, and store, plus the privileged connections they hold to email and file servers, and you start to see why attackers love them.

We trace Symphion’s path from a configuration management roots story in 1999 to a pivot in 2015 when a major printer manufacturer invited the company behind the curtain. What they found was a parallel universe to mainstream IT. Brand silos, disparate operating systems, and a culture that treated printers as cost items rather than connected computers.

Add in the human factor, where technicians reset devices to factory defaults after service as second nature, and you have a recipe for recurring vulnerabilities that never make it into a SOC dashboard.

Jim explains how Symphion’s Print Fleet Cybersecurity as a Service tackles this mess with cross-brand software, professional operations, and proven processes delivered for a simple per-device price. The model is designed to remove operational burden from IT teams. Automated daily monitoring detects drift, same-day remediation resets hardened controls, and comprehensive reporting supports regulatory needs in sectors like healthcare where compliance is non-negotiable. The goal is steady cyber hygiene for printers that mirrors what enterprises already expect for servers and PCs, without cobbling together multiple vendor tools, licenses, and extra headcount to operate them.

We also talk about the hidden costs of DIY printer security. Licensing multiple management platforms for different brands, training staff who already have full plates, and outages caused by misconfigurations all add up. Jim shares real-world perspectives from organizations that tried to patch together a solution before calling in help. The pattern is familiar. Costs creep. Vulnerabilities reappear. Incidents push the topic onto the CISO’s agenda. Symphion’s pitch is straightforward. Treat print fleets like any other class of critical infrastructure in the enterprise, and measure outcomes in risk reduction, time saved, and fewer surprises.

If you are commuting while listening and now hearing alarm bells, you are not alone. Think about the printers scattered across your offices and clinics. Consider the data that passes through them every day. Then picture an attacker who finds default credentials in minutes and uses a printer to move across your network.

Tune in for a fast, practical look at a risk hiding in plain sight, and learn how Symphion’s Print Fleet Cybersecurity as a Service can help you close a gap that attackers know too well.

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