Celebrating 200 Episodes of Cloud Security Podcast by Google and Thanks for all the Listens!
A few weeks ago, our podcast turned 200! In this case, we are talking about episodes, not years. We (that is, Tim Peacock and myself) definitely feel like we have to say something humorous, pithy, and uniquely insightful about this!
Contrary to our previous commemorative blogs, we decided to focus on our favorite episodes. We’ve always published the top rankings and tops by category, and you can see our most popular episodes below, but we also wanted to cover our informal favorites. Both Tim and I have picked the episodes without looking at the listen statistics data. This, by the way, was hard as we sometimes feel that all our guests are our favorites :-)
Given that we’ve been podcasting for three years, we do not have exact memories about how we felt while recording each episode in 2021–2024. But we do recall some fun moments, fun energy, interesting insights, and other things. For example, I remember how our guest changed our minds about quantum computing right on the air during the episode.
We also accumulated a collection of video episodes where you can see more of our “kitchen” on camera. As somebody mentioned to Tim, somehow the otherwise audio-only podcast guests and hosts seem much more human on video. We aren’t AI fictions, we promise :-)
People sometimes ask us how we keep having energy to talk about these topics. Honestly, three years in, we feel like we have more energy and more ideas for episodes than ever!!
So, here are Anton’s 4 favorite episodes.
- EP171 GenAI in the Wrong Hands: Unmasking the Threat of Malicious AI and Defending Against the Dark Side because few guests told AI for evil stories that well
- EP18 More Cloud Migration Security Lessons for a set of hard-earned security client lessons
- EP54 Container Security: The Past or The Future? because of the amazing guest, Anna, Anton’s former colleague, who is sadly no longer with us.
- EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil because of an epic view of Google D&R
Here are Tim’s 4 favorite episodes.
- EP155 Cyber, Geopolitics, AI, Cloud — All in One Book? because our guest is Tim’s Brown professor who started me on the road to cyber. I wouldn’t be here without you, John!
- EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil because more Tims is better (and because detection at scale is hard/fun/mind-bending!)
- EP16 Modern Data Security Approaches: Is Cloud More Secure? because even more Tims is MORE better (and because Tim gave Tim a new appreciation for compliance!)
- EP67 Cyber Defense Matrix and Does Cloud Security Have to DIE to Win? for making Tim’s head spin to keep up with him
Finally, here are the top 7 episodes of all time by listens, excluding the oldest three:
- EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil
- EP8 Zero Trust: Fast Forward from 2010 to 2021
- EP47 “Megatrends, Macro-changes, Microservices, Oh My! Changes in 2022 and Beyond in Cloud Security”
- EP109 How Google Does Vulnerability Management: The Not So Secret Secrets!
- EP103 Security Incident Response and Public Cloud — Exploring with Mandiant
- EP17 Modern Threat Detection at Google
- EP71 Attacking Google to Defend Google: How Google Does Red Team
If you are an avid listener, you know that we like topics like cloud security practices, cloud migration security, security and AI, how Google does security, security operations, and cloud detection and response, and many others. We probably do not have a single favorite topic, but we can tell you that most of the episodes we felt passionate about covered threat detection and response.
In the end of this short blog, we wanted to reveal a secret.
Somebody asked us how we choose episodes and guests? After running the podcast for three years, we certainly have both “guest first” and “topic first” episodes. This means that for a fun guest, we are willing to listen to anything they have to say. I think a recent episode from the mWISE 2024 conference with Chris Hoff fits into this bucket. The episode started from “Oh, look, here is Chris! We should invite him to the podcast!” and the rest is history.
There are also episodes that started with a topic. For example, at one point, we realized that we talk about how IAM is very important in the cloud, but we don’t have that many solid IAM episodes. So, we started a quest for a perfect episode on this topic, and we have recorded and aired quite a few of those, all very good.
Part of what has made the podcast so rewarding has been hearing from our listeners where our content helped them land a job or get a promotion (yes, really!). We’re so happy to hear from listeners, and especially when the show has had a positive impact on you. On the other hand, if we’ve had a negative impact, well, we’re sorry :-(
Call to action? Cheers to the next 200 episodes, please send us ideas, guests and any feedback on our show. Thank you for listening, and of course, for subscribing!
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