“The only constant in life is change, we need to adapt to change”: the interview with Cristian Critelli

Edited by Paola Chiara Tolomeo

“Technology can help and helped a lot: I think technology fought back very strongly enabling us to better adapt and we are leveraging what we have developed to support ourselves in this time of crisis”.
This is how, Cristian Critelli, Azure Cloud Technical Advisor at Microsoft, introduced himself.
His passion for IT and tech in general drove him to study and predict the direction the world would take.
Today he tells us about his training and professional experience, something of his work that unites him with the work of BV TECH professionals. He has shared his thoughts on the future of privacy, data security and technology in general. And what the next types of innovations that can change the technology market will be.

1. Good evening Cristian, for years you have been working in the IT sector, qualifying yourself as a professional, specialized in network infrastructures and cloud architectures. A curriculum as broad as it is full of interesting experiences… Would you like to tell us something about your training course? How did you come to take this path? How did you understand which was the most appropriate ICT area that best suited your characteristics?

I am passionate about IT and tech in general, I always have been, but networking was one of the areas of expertise that interested me the most, the network, the ability of transporting/exchanging data on a physical layer and manipulate the direction of the data, always fascinated me. Additionally, everything is connected by networking in this day and age, networking is everywhere and this is exactly what I was thinking years ago when I started, in some way I knew this was the direction the world would have taken and someday this was going to be the foundation of our society.

For this reason I started studying on my own, I signed up to the CISCO Academy which is the most advanced type of certification a network engineer can achieve and started my way from there.

Throughout the years “something else was coming out”… people started thinking about the “cloud” this “imaginary place” where we can leverage “somebody else’s hardware” instead of using our own, yes that’s what cloud is, basically using somebody else’s hardware, this of course is a funny way to look at it but in the end, it is true.

Companies are moving their hardware, DC (data centers) from their physical location to the cloud, renting big company’s hardware. This has a lot of benefits of course.

With the Cloud Computing blooming like a flower in the spring, I started studying Networking in the Cloud which is different as we have multiple layers of software defined network with its own rules. In 2016, I had the opportunity to join Microsoft and this helped me grow my knowledge in Cloud Architectures.

2. You currently hold the role of Technical Advisor at Microsoft in the Azure Networking Team. What are your goals along with the team’s main goals? Which are the most challenging tasks?

As Technical Advisor I am one of the Technical Leads in the EMEA Azure Networking Team, my role is to empower and enable the engineers to provide and deliver technical excellence to our worldwide customers. On top of that, I collaborate with the Readiness Team to create and deliver training material to the Engineers part of the Global Networking Team. I also react to critical escalations, help and advise stakeholders on how to quickly solve and fix service disruptions.

There are, of course, many other projects I am part of within the company related to knowledge sharing, readiness, training, developing technical paths to increase engineer’s productivity etc.

3. Problem solving, design and implementation of complex security for the prevention of data loss: these are the main moments of the process that unite your work to that of the BV TECH specialists. How do you intervene operationally in each of these phases?

Part of my job is of course to provide and advise security implementation to our customers. This is strictly related to networking technologies and not data loss prevention, there is another Team responsible for implementation of DLP technologies. My responsibility as Technical Advisor for the EMEA Networking Team is strictly focused on Networking technologies and offerings. Having said that, of course we can collaborate with other Teams within our company to provide our customers with all they need. I apply my knowledge with cloud design and network infrastructural cloud topology which of course have to consider security. We also have specific offering such as Application Gateway which is a Layer 7 load balancer capable of providing End2End SSL encryption as well as Web Application Firewall integration, these techs, though, are not directly related to DLP.

4. Customer on one hand, business on the other. How important do you think it is for a company to let itself also be inspired by moral and ethical values ​​when dealing with particular technologies?

I personally think that moral and ethical values are very important pillars of our society and of course we need to consider these when dealing with technology. However, technology evolves faster than certain social norms which can sometimes create hostility and resistance from groups that fear change. Having said that, we should always consider what we are trying to achieve with an unbiased judgement.

5. Microsoft is a privileged observatory to understand where the hi-tech world is going. What are the next types of innovations that you think will be capable of changing the technology market?

I can for sure mention AI is a big thing right now, everything is moving towards that direction and all of our offerings, in some way or another, includes AI to better shape our features and offer better services to our customers. Obviously, Cloud is also growing. Many customers are moving from an old concept of DC to a new more fresh and agile Cloud environment.

6. Like ours at BV TECH, your work is customer-oriented so that they can achieve better results using the Azure Cloud infrastructure.

With what values ​​and objectives do you try to guarantee this result?

I always start from the customer point of view, not from mine or from my company one. Of course we want to understand exactly what the customer goal is and help them achieve it in the way they want, we are only advocates and advisors that want to enable them, empower them to better use our technology and ultimately achieve better results.

The most important value is the customer vision, we are here to help and that is a privilege, seeing our customers winning means achieving our goals as individual and as company. I see my success in the success of the others, Engineers or customers.

7. The implementation of safety technologies is at the heart of the work of the BV TECH group. The global geopolitical and pandemic crisis have prompted us to reflect on the need to rethink the future around more resistant values ​​and technologies. What are your thoughts surrounding this?

COVID pushed us to rethink and re-adapt. We needed to think about how to change our way to live and work in this crisis. We started working from home and many companies adapted very quickly, we personally observed this also from the amount of requests we received from customers that wanted to enable their employees to be able to work remotely. The amount of Site2Site VPN we helped customers deploy was incredibly high. We are proud we were able to support them in this difficult time.

Technology can help and it helped a lot, implementation of AI to find a cure for the virus, tracking of outbreaks, drones to help reduce human contact in deliveries for example, chatbot providing help to customers looking for answers.

I think technology fought back very strongly enabling us to better adapt. The only constant in life is change, we need to adapt to change, and we are leveraging what we have developed to support ourselves in this time of crisis.

8. Data privacy and security is increasingly a key aspect when building cloud infrastructures. Do customers see a real concern about this aspect? Do you think this demand for privacy and data security will tend to grow in the near future?

Yes, customers are incredibly conscious about privacy and security. It is one of the most important features a cloud infrastructure needs to implement. Four pillars for Cloud environments are compute, security, networking and data. As you can see, security is one of them, applied to each layer of the infrastructure, not only networking. I think the demand for such will increase in the future for sure, as we work constantly to implement the best security techniques in our infrastructure, hackers also improve their skills and we work hard to be always a step ahead of them, this guarantees our customers the peace of mind when they move their infrastructure to our Cloud.

9. How do you think the world of technology and Cyber ​​Security will change in ten years’ time? What are the challenges to be met?

I think computational power is the main driver here, if we think that quantum computers are cheaper, faster, more accessible to everyone, I can for sure foresee a future where this technology will be leveraged so much that we will be able to grow in 10 years more than last 100 years.

Networking comms, robotics, AI, virtual reality, will improve accelerating the speed at which we live our lives, improving tech, health, quality of life. We will be able to solve more problems in less time, we will have less problems to solve, also more capital will be available which, in return, will mean that we will have more money for more crazy/interesting ideas. We are already on the path of brain computer interface, AI capable of predicting what we need before we need it, this is technology accessible to everyone today, I am thrilled to witness what it is going to be in 10 years time and I can’t wait for it to be real.