Executives at the Edge

Executives at the Edge


Telco Clouds: Putting Virtual Networks to the Test

October 13, 2022

Spirent Communications’ CTO, Dave Larson, explores how telecom providers are overcoming the technical debt associated with tightly integrated virtual private networks to leverage the cloud’s virtualized framework. 



In this Executives at the Edge podcast episode, host Pascal Menezes explores these topics and more with Dave Larson of Spirent Communications:



  • What do public clouds lack that telco operators still need and how do they get it?  
  • Why is testing system infrastructure and security in development through to production so difficult? 
  • How can they test and validate these critical infrastructure components virtualized in software?
  • What happens when a portion of the Kubernetes framework, a pod, or individual element goes down? How do things recalibrate? How do we recover? 
  • How does Zero Trust help to move the cybersecurity problem past the stack of capabilities to a higher level?


About Our Guest

Dave Larson, Chief Technology Officer and General Manager, Cloud & IP,
Spirent Communications


Dave Larson is the CTO for Spirent Communications and General Manager for Spirent’s Cloud & IP business. He is responsible for overall company technology vision and strategy, leading the Spirent Advanced Technology team that incubates forward looking test, measurement, and assurance solutions in the Cloud-Native realm for incorporation across all of Spirent’s product lines.

Dave has more than 25 years’ experience across networking, network security and cloud architecture, working in both emerging technology start-ups and large public enterprises. Before joining Spirent, Dave was Vice President and General Manager for the Data Center Networking business and Chief Technologist for Networking, Security, Advanced Cloud Technology & Strategy at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Previously, Dave was COO/CTO for Corero Network Security, a developer of carrier-grade, terabit-class DDoS mitigation solutions. He was also VP of Advanced Technology and CTO for HP Networking, and held senior product and technical roles for a number of organizations, including 3Com Corporation, TippingPoint, Xedia, Sandburst, and Tizor Systems. Dave has a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Gordon College in Wenham, MA.

Executives at the Edge podcast is brought to you by MEF, an industry association of 200 service, technology, and cloud providers who together accelerate enterprise digital transformation.



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