While I was in Tokyo, I was asked if I was interested in joining a#CiscoChat. Thought about it in Singapore and again in London. Each of those countries have something in common. They are becoming Fintech incubators with great ideas that will drive digitization into every business.

Having traveled multiple countries, I was thrilled to travel to NYC for the Tetration announcement, one of the financial capitals of the world.

Everything happened at One World Trade Center. I was on top of the world seeing this unbelievable view:

I want to reflect the moment where I witnessed the Tetration announcement. Last week, I co-hosted my first#CiscoChat with my colleagues, Leni Selvaggio and R. Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research and want to share some insights in case you missed it.

The chat kicked off with:

How did you sneak in so fast Leni with two tweets?

Both tweets were spot on. As @ChuckRobbins said in his blog, data centers can be thought of as the 'brain' of a company where the most critical information operate and run.

Now with Tetration, you can watch and record everything like a DVR and look back in time if something goes wrong. Back to the Future indeed!

Ray nailed it, The Tetration Platform has a data collection layer for visualizations and analytics, all baked in with machine learning and AI. All critical from a financial services perspective. Latency and microburst visibility for trading environments (eg. order execution, market data distribution). The possibilities of providing relevant offers to online banking customers in real-time would be impressive.

Half way into the live chat, surprise guests join in the fun!

With all the experts in the room, the question on bad actors is a must see. Bad actors are cyber criminals who operate the most sophisticated malware challenging financial services institutions 24/7.

Zero trust model can heighten security in bank but the journey to this end state is not as simple. What you cannot see, you cannot secure! Hence, it becomes relevant to understand how the power of a machine learning analytics platform mixing with security framework can truly drive business value.

And just like that, the hour was over. We covered a lot, cloud, applications, security, predictive analytics and the latest Tetration platform. As confirmed by all the experts, financial services institutions need a strong security posture to succeed in their digital journey.

As extending network segmentation boundaries to any cloud is becoming a priority to firms, it becomes imperative to have a full real-time view on application behaviors in the digital world. Remediation, isolation and inspection of anomaly behavior are some of the benefits of segmentation.

David Goeckeler's quote sums it best:

I sincerely want to thank R. Ray Wang, author of the popular business and technology blog "A Software Insider's Point of View" and my colleague Leni Selvaggio, Cisco's global marketing lead for financial services for inviting me to join the party.

If you missed our live chat, please view our Data at the Speed of Now Storify recap. If you joined us, please share your thoughts on how we did, as we'll be hosting another live#CiscoChat on Wealth Management in mid-October. Please visit our Financial Services page and follow us on Twitter @CiscoFSI and follow me, @dmalik2 to stay current with the latest updates.