More than 50 people gathered to hear about trends and forecasts for the future of ICT when Silicon Luxembourg held The State of ICT on 7 June.
Hosted at SilverSquare and organised to mark the launch of the ICT issue of Silicon, the event welcomed speakers and guests from multiple industries.
A panel discussion focused on three core elements of ICT: cloud management, supercomputers and password management.
Dirk Alshuth, CMO of no-code cloud management solution emma, shared the estimates of industry experts that cloud’s value will reach $1 trillion by 2030 if companies pursue cloud opportunities. In the future, he expected cloud to become industry specific. “There will be more need for platforms that can help companies to be compliant in these sectors,” he said.
Supercomputing
Filipe Pais, CCO of LuxProvide, cited examples of several Luxembourg-based space companies, including SES, WEO and Spire in Luxembourg using Luxembourg’s MeluXina high-performance computer capacities. He explained how a sustainable design approach means it is ranked most-greenest high-performance computer in Europe and fourth in the world. In the future, he expects demand for capacity of existing infrastructure to reach critical levels.
He said: “With the rise of so many models and companies working with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, capacity is probably one of the biggest challenges everyone foresees.”
Cyber security and data privacy
Citing the sophisticated hack of password manager Lastpass (by targeting a developer), CEO of Passbolt Kevin Muller offered insights into the biggest threats to data privacy and security and the challenges facing all companies.
“Security is a team sport and companies should take a holistic approach,” said Muller. People and technology are at the heart of a company’s defences. Phishing attempts account for 80% of data breaches in Luxembourg. Employers should train employees to identify and neutralise phishing attempts, using testing tools like the European-based platform Riot. The CEO added that staff should not connect to work servers from personal computers. In terms of the technology, security for Passbolt was a mix of processes and good technology, and how they encrypt data.
Looking to the future, he outlined the threat of quantum computing, a rapidly-emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for classical computers. Because of its ability to break fundamental cryptography, it poses a serious cyber security threat. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) forecast that by 2029 quantum computers will be able to break existing public key infrastructure like 128-bit AES encryption, which is currently used to protect sensitive information sent over the Internet.
The event ended with pitches from Emailtree and Softbrik, followed by networking drinks.
See the photo gallery below.
