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Month: June 2024

Mitigating Space Debris

Posted on by Katja Schmieding

Orbital debris and mitigation are pressing issues in today’s Satellite and NewSpace industry. On Episode 29 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast, we spoke with Andrew Faiola, the Commercial Vice President at Astroscale, who is leading the charge in tackling them. 

Why has it taken so long for the industry to do something about debris and future mitigation? 

The proliferation of spacecraft in orbit has accelerated the realization that something needs to be done. Most people are familiar with the Kessler effect, which identified space debris as an issue a long time ago. But now, things are accelerating very quickly. 

The other part of it is technology, and its ability to deal with the issue is starting to catch up. 10 years ago, when Astroscale was founded, our founder had identified that there was going to be an issue, but there wasn’t then the technology to deal with it in a cost-effective way. Because of this burgeoning space economy and the number of companies that are operating in this space, the pace of technology and innovation is accelerating as well. It’s enabling us to start addressing an issue that wasn’t even able to be addressed just a couple of years ago.

What do you think is the viability of the long-term market for these missions beyond the next decade or so? 

The environment is going to get more and more crowded. What we want to do is both mitigate risk by removing large, dangerous objects and ensure that we’re not creating more small debris. In the long term, there is going to be a view towards technology helping remove the smaller pieces of debris as well. I look at all of these things as stepping stones to the in-orbit space economy that everybody talks about. 

Astroscale today is focusing on removing debris from orbit, but what we’re really good at is rendezvous and proximity operations. 10 or 20 years from now, we’re looking at more and more private industries in space, whether it’s human spaceflight, manufacturing, etc; those vehicles are all going to have to coexist together. They’re going to have to be flying, viewing and being serviced in space. Nobody wants to launch tonnes and tonnes of stuff from the ground because no matter how cheap a starship gets, you still have to start on Earth. Can’t we start to repurpose things that are already in orbit? How do we get to a circular economy in orbit rather than just deorbiting? That has to start somewhere. 

On a national scale, what more needs to be done? And more importantly, by whom? 

It needs to come from a number of places, all at the same time. Public awareness is key to putting pressure on legislators to actually enact laws. The industry can only do so much, it needs to come from both ends. Astroscale and others have done an extremely good job of influencing policy over the past years to the point where it is now recognised that the orbital environment has a pollution problem that needs to be sorted out, preferably before we have another tragedy of the commons. 

But what’s the next step to actual legislation or regulation? Historically, I would have come from the standpoint of ‘more regulation is bad’, right? Let the market sort itself out. But in the time that I’ve been here, I’ve actually realised that having the right regulatory framework in place that places the right incentives for behaviour rather than penalties is actually going to catalyse investment and innovation. We need that foundation in order to make a success of it, because this is a brand new market that we’re trying to develop. 

Without having public awareness and the right regulatory and legislative framework in place, it’s hard to make it work. We’ve seen this before in other areas, whether it’s cod fisheries in the North Atlantic, or the Amazon rainforest, everyone knows that they should behave better or things will go bad, but until the right frameworks are in place that incentivise the right behaviour, people will act in their own self-interest. 

To your point about who is responsible, is it national governments or international governmental organisations, I think everybody has a part to play in this. My background in communications for mobility, in-flight connectivity and maritime has shown me that there are organisations like the IMO that put rules of the road in place that people have to adhere to, but there’s national legislation as well. It is probably going to be a combination of all of those that help us move the industry forward. 

To hear more from Andrew, tune into Episode 29 of The Satellite & NewSpace Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

How Tosibox is Reshaping OT Cyber Security

Posted on by Tom Wilding

In Cyber Security, we are always looking for new, innovative ways to secure critical infrastructure. On Episode 29 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast we spoke to Dmitriy Viktorov, the CTO of Tosibox, about how he’s bringing his experience with cloud protection solutions to a new market. Read on to find out more about securing data through OT networks. 

What are the main challenges associated with securing critical infrastructure?

I’m coming mainly from the IT security world, but now I’m jumping into what we call the industrial operational technology world. There are many similarities, especially on crates, but the OT and maybe IoT domains are lagging behind. They’re more conservative compared with IP or cybersecurity in general.

One thing that is quite important for customers is operational continuity. You can take some IT systems down for a short period of time if you need to patch it, update it or migrate it. In OT, it’s very difficult to do that because you are providing critical services, such as buildings, manufacturers, careers – you name it. You can’t take them down. If you want to apply a patch or you need to reconfigure something, that’s a big thing. 

We also know that the lifecycle for cybersecurity products is way longer than you might think because you don’t see the whole lifecycle. I remember when we were defining the lifecycle model, we said it would be a maximum of three years in OT, but it might actually be around five or even ten years in total. 

The other challenges in ICT and OT cybersecurity are the emphasis on legacy systems. There are several technologies in OT that are used by customers that rely on protocols, which have nothing to do with TCP IP. On the IT side, there are limited skills and technologies. It’s also about complexity and interdependencies – and again, a lack of patching and updates – and insider threats. Some infrastructures are physically exposed, which allows threats to get closer to them. 

How is Tosibox unique, and how does it solve some of those challenges?

Tosibox is in the specific niche of the whole of OT cybersecurity. However, we like focusing on network security. We are helping customers with at least one – or maybe a few – particular problems when it comes to OT cybersecurity and network segmentation. We are implementing access control, and we are making sure that our customers can do it easily, securely, and more automatically. Because, as I said previously, customers might use different technologies or different protocols, our unique proposition is that our platform is actually protocol-agnostic and even industry-agnostic. Even if you use old legacy technologies and devices, Tosibox makes it easy to connect with your IT network and then manage it remotely.

To hear more from Dmitriy, tune into Episode 29 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here.

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Inside Dalet’s Changing Product Offering

Posted on by Henry Johnson

On Episode 28 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast we were joined by Robin Kirchhoffer, the Chief Marketing Officer at Dalet. Robin gave us an inside look at the company’s evolving product offering, going from when he first joined the company to what we can expect to see from them in the future. Read on to find out more about the evolution of Dalet’s media management platforms. 

“The product has evolved a lot. When I first joined, we were much smaller, and we were just about to relaunch the OLED Galaxy, which is still being used today. When it was first launched, it was already a groundbreaking product, with a centralised media asset management and workflow solution for the media industry. That product has been growing a lot for the past six to eight years, and we have been adding a lot of functionalities. 

We’re focused on the ecosystem around the product. As the product has evolved to become a cloud product, everything around it has too. Adding other functionalities, such as transcoding media processing features, as well as more orchestration and automation capabilities for the workflow, has freed up creatives’ time. 

For news operations, we didn’t own a graphic solution back then. Now we’ve got an integrated studio automation. In 2019 we made the strategic decision to purchase a cloud-native asset management and workflow orchestration platform developed by VRLab. It’s the next generation of very light, fast and cloud-native solutions – with an analytical core as well. That has given us a new approach and accelerated our roadmap in going to larger media organisations, sports leagues and Federation teams, who are also trying to become a media organisation. They have so much amazing content around the players, and they’re creating experiences for their fans that extend what goes on in the stadium or at the games. 

There’s been big growth for us in that segment, and the Dalet Flex – the new platform – has accelerated that segment. Larger corporations or big brands are looking at breaking a business unit, and today we also have developed a next-generation user room ecosystem, which is compatible with Galaxy and Flex. That’s an ecosystem of apps to trade the news, write your scripts, and organise the work between journalists, editors and producers in your browser tab, in a very collaborative way. News stories break very fast, so we need to enable our customers to work just as quickly. 

For the past 30 years, we have always been about embracing and combining broadcast broadcast-first technologies with digital-first technology. We started our journey into cloud-first quite early by connecting little pieces of satellite products on the cloud to standard on-prem tools. Today we have taken a much broader step to the cloud. Our cloud-native media asset management and workflow orchestration solution, which is today at the core of all the solutions we provide, is the heart of our product. 

We also took the very big step of going private in 2020. That was the best way to free ourselves from the financial restrictions of being a public company and accelerate our innovation on the news side. Cloud-native applications facilitate collaboration beyond borders, and that really makes us newsroom-centric, because it used to be that you had to be on-site to be able to pick up the news to write it, but now you can do everything wherever you are. Everybody is connected. You can extend the power of the newsroom and major operations in general. 

Many of our customers have their own privacy systems in place and rely on that, and some don’t want to go fully onto the cloud because they want to have a more balanced approach. Including on-premises storage for the more valuable assets, for example, and being flexible, is extremely important. You have to be a giant in this transition, adapt, and take the steps that make everything we develop compatible for our existing customers – because that’s how we approach business. That’s why we have had customers with us for the past 10, 15, 20 or even 25 years, because we have been evolving with them. 

We’re offering practical value, not just a little standalone app on one side of the disconnected from everything else. We’ve always been about connecting things and ensuring an integrated solution for our customers. The transition is key. We want to make sure that our customers can always go at this at the pace that they want. We don’t want to force them onto a new technology, we want to make sure that they are happy with what they have from us, they can carry on with it, they can enrich it. The day they say they want to replace their asset management or workflow orchestration with a cloud-native solution, we’ll have two solutions for that at the core of our offering today.”

To hear more from Robin, tune into Episode 28 of The Content & Media Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.     

Addressing Diversity at a Grassroots Level

Posted on by Daisy Steel

Diversity and inclusion have been prevalent topics across the Cyber Security industry for a number of years. On Episode 28 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast we spoke to Aarti Gadhia, the Principal Security Specialist at Microsoft and the Founder & CEO of Standout To Lead, about her perspectives of diversity in the industry. With over 15 years of experience in the Cyber Security space, as well as being named as one of the Top 20 Women in Cyber Security Canada, Aarti has some incredible insights on the topic. She also shared her advice for companies who are looking to address diversity at a grassroots level, which you can read below. 

“Change is taking place – which is good – but we need to accelerate that change. There are so many statistics that show how far we still have to come. ERG’s have been formed to influence changes at an organisational level, but everyone has to solve this problem. We shouldn’t just leave it to the affected groups to solve it. The first thing we could do better for diversity is acknowledge that everyone has a bias, including me, and we need to challenge it. Hiring managers need to find ways to challenge their own biases, which means starting by looking at your existing process and seeing where you could improve it. Each hiring manager needs to challenge their own process and look beyond just having 50% of resumes that are from diverse candidates. That process needs to be changing. 

The industry as a whole has been talking about changing the requirements. Instead of putting the emphasis on the number of years’ experience that you need to have in order to get a management position, the emphasis should be on demonstrating strong leadership qualities, right? Just changing that will give people an opportunity. There’s a great one that I saw on LinkedIn, where men get hired on what they’ll bring to the company or role, versus women, who are hired based on what they have to prove. Give everyone an opportunity! Instead of pursuing the standard or traditional qualification you’ve always hoped for, change your requirements to give other people a chance. 

After that you need to look at retention. The industry is doing a good job in bringing more women, but that’s not what it’s about, because at the same time women are leaving the industry. There are two reasons for this: the first is a barrier for growth opportunities, and the second is a lack of inclusion or belonging. We’ve heard in one of your other podcasts someone who shared that she was told she was emotional at work. The issue is that feeling of being labelled. We don’t feel welcomed when we can’t bring our true authentic selves to work, and that’s why we leave. 

I’ve seen many organisations try to solve this problem by sending us all on leadership courses, but it’s not about a lack of leadership skills. It’s about opening the doors and fixing that broken rung on the ladder. You’ve got women in your company, but what are you going to do to retain us? Are you going to give us the opportunity to develop? That’s another thing that the industry needs to really think about; how do we grow diverse talent and retain them? How do we make sure that they can continue to be their authentic selves? 

Finally, we need allies. We’re seeing allies in the industry who are supporting us, but we need more to take action. I get so many allies that come to me saying, ‘this is important because I’ve got daughters’. My next question to them is, ‘if you didn’t have daughters, would this still be important to you?’ It shouldn’t be a checkmark exercise for individuals. Everyone needs to solve this problem. It shouldn’t be hard to solve this problem if everybody’s on board. For allies, think about what you can do. Start thinking about what you can start implementing – don’t wait to be told. Don’t worry about saying the wrong things, because what really matters is that you’re genuine. We just need your voices. We need everyone to be on board, because that’s how change is going to take place. Try different things out – even try reverse mentoring. There’s a lot that you can learn. Try seeing things through our lens to better understand what’s happening. 

There’s a lot I could talk about when it comes to what needs to change. Fundamentally though, it comes back to those three things: bias, retention, and allies.

To hear more from Aarti, tune into Episode 28 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

We sit down regularly with some of the biggest names in our industry, we dedicate our podcast to the stories of leaders in the technologies industries that bring us closer together. Follow the link here to see some of our latest episodes and don’t forget to subscribe.