David Warshavski, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Tonic Security, joins Techzine TV to talk about how his company is rethinking exposure management from the ground up. He can draw on decades of incident response experience defending Fortune 500 companies against nation-state threat actors from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, and has seen that cybersecurity isn't about finding vulnerabilities, but about prioritizing and fixing the right ones before a breach occurs. This sounds like common sense, but is actually quite rare in the cybersecurity industry.

Tonic Security wants to address the problem of alert overload by building a context engine that taps into both IT/security tools and collaboration platforms like Slack, Notion, Confluence, Teams, and ServiceNow. By extracting business operational context from unstructured data, Tonic can determine whether a vulnerability is exploitable. Not only that, it can also determin whether exploiting it would actually impact critical business processes. That last distinction should fundamentally change how security teams spend their time.

The platform acts as both an insight layer and an execution engine. It features the Tonic Mobilization Coordinator. This is an agentic workflow that can fully automate remediation in low-risk scenarios, Warshavski tells us. We also discuss how Tonic can replace legacy vulnerability scanners like Tenable, Rapid7, and Qualys, how it feeds context to DIY agentic workflows and SIEM solutions, and why opening up to an ecosystem is the company's next frontier.

Key takeaways:
• Most security breaches involve vulnerabilities that were already known but not properly prioritized or remediated in time
• CVE and CVSS scores alone do not reflect real business impact and create massive, misleading backlogs
• Tonic Security ingests unstructured data from collaboration tools to determine true business criticality of assets
• The platform differentiates between exploitability, reachability, and actual business blast radius
• The Tonic Mobilization Coordinator automates remediation in high-confidence, low-risk scenarios
• Security teams report significant time savings, reduced burnout, and freedom to focus on strategic priorities
• Tonic can displace legacy scanners and act as a context engine for other security tools via API and MCP server
• Fully on-premises deployment is available for heavily regulated industries

Chapters:
0:54 - David Warshavski's background in incident response
2:15 - Why Tonic Security was founded
5:32 - The prioritization problem and CVE noise
9:03 - Understanding business impact and context
17:17 - Tonic as a decision and execution engine
20:53 - Reducing alert fatigue and saving security teams time
27:44 - Where Tonic fits in your security stack
33:12 - Flexible deployment and next frontiers

At Cisco Live in Las Vegas, Techzine TV sat down with Gordon Thomson, president of EMEA at Cisco, for a wide-ranging conversation about the explosive pace of market change, and some of the most significant product and strategic moves Cisco has made in decades.

A major focus of the conversation is Cisco's Sovereign Critical Infrastructure (SCI) initiative. Launched in September 2025 with limited scope, SCI has since evolved into a formal legal framework giving customers guarantees around air-gapped operation, no backdoors, and continued product functionality even during embargoes or conflict. Thomson talks about how SCI has expanded to 13 product families, including data center, campus, wireless, collaboration, and Splunk on-prem, and how Cisco plans to allow customers to recertify existing installed-base devices as sovereign toward the end of the year, switching them from subscription-based to perpetual licenses.

The interview closes with a deep dive into Cisco Cloud Control, which Thomson, a 29-year Cisco veteran, describes as one of the most fundamental things the company has ever done. By unifying networking, security, and observability into a single AI-assisted platform with agentic automation, Cisco Cloud Control represents the culmination of years of incremental innovation. Currently rolling out in the US before expanding to Europe, it is a cloud-only service, a deliberate trade-off that Thomson acknowledges some customers will need to weigh carefully.

Key takeaways:
• Why Cisco shifted from cloud-first thinking to Sovereign Critical Infrastructure
• How SCI moved from a market signal to a binding legal framework with perpetual licenses
• The plan to recertify hundreds of millions of existing Cisco devices as sovereign
• The sovereignty debate: emotion, trust, chip-level demands, and the price customers are willing to pay
• AI's role in reducing interoperability costs for sovereign cloud deployments
• Cisco Cloud Control: unifying networking, security, and observability in one platform
• Why Cloud Control is cloud-only, and what that means for sovereign customers

Chapters:
1:08 - Navigating a world of generational change
3:06 - Cisco's cultural and organizational transformation
5:01 - Sovereign Critical Infrastructure: from intent to legal framework
8:50 - The sovereignty debate: emotion, trust, and chip-level demands
11:28 - 13 product families and recertifying existing sovereign devices
16:47 - AI, sovereign clouds, and on-prem dashboard trade-offs
20:14 - Cisco Cloud Control: networking and security unified

Rob Bunger, Global Director of Data Center Solution Architecture at Schneider Electric, sits down with us to talk about why the industry is moving from traditional 48V AC to 800V DC power distribution for next-generation AI workloads. As AI racks scale from 150kW to potentially 1MW per rack, the current power architecture simply cannot deliver the required density without consuming all available rack space with cabling and power supplies.

The solution involves leveraging 800V DC technology (partly coming from the EV charging industry), deploying power through sidecar systems, and eventually centralized DC distribution. This shift addresses critical challenges including space constraints, safety requirements, and the need for live-swap capabilities in high-density environments. Bunger discusses real-world deployment timelines, with pilot projects expected in 2024, and explains how this represents a fundamental shift in data center power architecture.

Key takeaways:
• Why 48V AC power distribution cannot scale beyond current AI rack densities
• How 800V DC reduces cabling complexity and saves rack space
• The role of sidecar systems in transitioning to DC power
• Safety testing and breaker technology for high-voltage DC systems
• Timeline for commercial deployment of 800V DC infrastructure

Chapters:
0:15 - Introduction to 800V DC power systems
1:38 - Current 48V power architecture explained
3:21 - Power density challenges with AI racks
8:12 - Why 800V DC is the solution
12:12 - Sidecar deployment architecture
15:01 - Deployment timeline and future outlook
17:24 - The return to DC power distribution
19:01 - Safety considerations and testing