As part of my role as a Technical Director, one of my tasks is to attend events and hear from the community about the challenges they have and to hear from tech vendors about how they are fixing them.
However, every now and again one of the things that happens is someone presents something that introduces me to a whole new challenge that I’d never considered.
That happened at a recent User group event, run by the excellent folk over at TechUG. On this occasion, they were joined by Francesco Giarletta of Avanite to discuss the mysterious world of the webcache and the vast array of web data that lives within it!
He shared how this cache, alongside the amount of web tracking data that is dropped down onto your systems via web browsing (regardless of browser), can have significant and unexpected consequences.
So it seemed only fair to ask Francesco to come onto the show and introduce you all to this often unconsidered world.
In this episode, we look at the problem of webdata, the kind of information that websites collect about us, the unknown amount of data that they drop onto our machines, from cookies to the tracking information that Windows keeps about our web whereabouts.
We look at the impact of this tracking on both system performance and maybe more importantly security.
Francesco shares some of the security impacts and how they can potentially expose us to the risk of breach, from the storing of unencrypted user credentials, to how this data that we don’t fully understand can expose us to regulatory infringement.
Finally, we share some ideas on how you can start to deal with the problem and how Avanite maybe able to help.
To find out more about the work Avanite do and the risks of storing unmanaged and uncontrolled web data on your machine you can visit their website www.avanite.com and follow them on twitter @Avanite_Ltd .
Next week I head off to NetApp Insight in Berlin, so no new show, but look out for a series of shows focussed on data and data management as I catch up with a host of industry leaders at the Insight conference.
To make sure you catch future episodes, why not subscribe and if you have any questions, contact me on twitter @techstringy.
If you are going to NetApp Insight why not come and find me, I’m hosting some sessions as well in charge of the Pop-up Tech Talks mic, come say Hi and have a chat.
Techstringy 