Our security offering has a new weapon. 7networks is the commercial and technology partner of Ares Cyber for the Swiss market.

Ares Cyber is the agentic AI security testing platform that is redefining IT security analysis through processes such as automated penetration testing.

The platform goes beyond detection: every vulnerability is put to the test with a real exploit attempt, and every confirmed risk is documented with precision.

What we offer

Ares brings the whole security testing lifecycle into a single flow — code, applications, infrastructure:

• VA – infrastructure vulnerability assessment
• PT – AI-guided penetration testing with exploit chaining
• SAST – static source code analysis
• SCA – dependency and supply chain validation
• DAST – dynamic testing on running applications

Every result undergoes active verification: the AI attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities, confirms whether they are actually exploitable, and tracks every step in a complete, searchable audit trail.

What this means for your company’s security

• Focus on vulnerabilities that are actually exploitable
• False positives reduced to a minimum
• Audit and compliance reports: ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI-DSS, SOC2
• Continuous analysis, because threats don’t wait for the annual audit
• Results in a matter of hours

The platform is available in cloud, on-premise, or air-gapped deployments for the most critical environments, and integrates with leading development and ticketing tools.

Ares’ technology, 7networks’ experience and direction.

7networks provides the integration know-how, Ares analyzes and identifies the risk.

Want to see how it performs in your environment?

Contact us for a DEMO!

Generative AI is already embedded in business processes. Claude drafts documents, analyzes data, supports customer service, and accelerates development. Its usefulness is no longer in question.

The real question is about data and compliance. And this is where most companies get it wrong.

“Certified” doesn’t mean “compliant”

Anthropic offers a platform with serious credentials: international information-security certifications — including one, still rare among providers, dedicated specifically to AI systems — and data encrypted both at rest and in transit. And a crucial point: on enterprise plans, customer data isn’t used to train the models.

A solid foundation. But it remains just that — a foundation. It covers the platform, not the way you use it. The principle of shared responsibility applies: the provider secures the infrastructure, but the company using Claude remains responsible for access, internal rules, and the data that gets entered into the tool.

A concrete example: connecting Claude to your email and documents

Today you can connect Claude directly to your work tools: email, shared documents, company chat. The connection is read-only — Claude can consult and search, but it can’t send emails or modify files. And it sees exactly what the connected user sees: no more, no less.

It seems simple, and technically it is. But before enabling the connection, you need to answer a few questions: which people or groups to authorize, and for which services; what categories of data pass through those mailboxes and documents, including any sensitive information; and how to handle the fact that the data being queried — while remaining stored in your own systems — travels to the provider’s infrastructure to be processed. From the standpoint of the data protection law, this last point makes the provider a data processor: it requires an appropriate contract and an update to your records of processing activities.

Setting up the connection takes a couple of hours.

Doing it properly takes a full day’s work and some upfront analysis.

The difference between the two paths is the difference between a risk and an investment.

Where the risks arise

Almost never from the platform. Almost always from the choices made upstream:

The wrong plan. Personal plans aren’t suited to business use. Only enterprise plans provide the contractual guarantees on data processing, exclusion from model training, and advanced controls.

Data with no defined residency. Keeping data processing in Europe requires a setup designed for it from the start.

Access out of control. Without centralized access and activity logs, there’s no traceability. And without traceability, there’s no compliance.

No shared rules across the team. An employee pastes sensitive data into a prompt, simply because no one ever defined what’s allowed and what isn’t.

None of these is solved by a certification. And none is solved by a do-it-yourself approach: it takes a properly designed integration.

Our role

At 7networks, we’ve been using Claude for some time now, rigorously integrated into our own processes.

We put that experience at our clients’ disposal:

Together we choose the right configuration; we secure access and data — provider contracts, data residency in Europe, centralized access, activity logs; we define clear usage rules and update the documentation required by the Federal Act on Data Protection.

Ten years of experience in infrastructure, security, and cloud — now extended to artificial intelligence as well.

We apply that same rigor to ourselves: we’re completing the international information-security certification process, in line with Swiss and European regulatory requirements.

AI in business isn’t a question of technology. It’s a question of governance. The right tool, poorly configured, remains a liability; well integrated, it becomes a defensible competitive advantage.

Planning to bring Claude into your organization, or looking to secure an adoption already underway?

It starts with understanding your environment. Let’s talk.

Network security is undergoing a profound transformation. With the massive adoption of generative AI and the emergence of the first autonomous AI agents in enterprise environments, the traffic crossing networks is no longer generated only by users: increasingly, it is applications and agents communicating with one another, accessing data, and making decisions without direct human intervention.

In this context, Fortinet unveiled FortiOS 8.0 at Accelerate 2026 — the most significant release in years of the operating system that powers the Security Fabric. This is not an incremental update, but a paradigm shift addressing two critical areas: AI-driven security and quantum-safe protection.

AI-driven security: knowing what’s happening on your network

The starting point speaks for itself: industry estimates suggest that around 98% of GenAI applications used in enterprise environments are not formally authorized by IT teams. This phenomenon — known as shadow AI — represents a rapidly expanding attack surface that traditional security solutions struggle to detect.

FortiOS 8.0 introduces concrete tools to address the issue:

• FortiView for the AI attack surface and shadow AI: a dedicated dashboard that delivers real-time visibility into how AI applications are being used across the organization, automatically distinguishing between authorized and unauthorized tools. Security teams can quickly identify risky or unknown usage, reduce non-compliance exposure, and enable safe AI adoption without having to react after an incident.
• AI-aware Application Control: granular policies that allow the use of approved GenAI tools while blocking risky actions that could expose intellectual property, customer data, or regulated information.
• MCP and agent-to-agent (A2A) observability: arguably the most relevant innovation for organizations adopting AI agent–based architectures. FortiOS 8.0 detects and classifies traffic generated by the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent communications, bringing visibility to interactions that would otherwise remain entirely opaque.
• Enhanced DLP with OCR: the Data Loss Prevention system integrated into FortiGuard can now identify sensitive data hidden in images and screenshots, closing an often-overlooked exfiltration vector.
• FortiAI-Assist for FortiGate: an integrated AI assistant that simplifies firewall diagnostics and troubleshooting through a conversational interface, reducing configuration errors and accelerating response times — even in SD-WAN environments.

Quantum-safe protection: acting today against tomorrow’s threat

The quantum threat follows an insidious pattern known as “harvest now, decrypt later”: attackers capture encrypted data today with the intent of decrypting it in the future, once quantum computers become powerful enough. For data with a long lifecycle — industrial secrets, government information, healthcare records — the risk is already concrete.

FortiOS 8.0 extends post-quantum cryptography with:

• Hybrid key exchange compliant with FIPS 204/205, combining classical cryptography and quantum-resistant algorithms
• Enhanced SSL deep inspection with post-quantum cryptography, enabling traffic inspection without compromising end-to-end security
• Protection of critical paths: management access and agentless VPN with quantum-resilient security
• Crypto-agility: the ability to update cryptographic algorithms as standards evolve, without significant re-architecture

Want to learn more?

Get in touch for a tailored assessment of your environment.

Virtualization is now a strategic pillar of enterprise IT infrastructures, as it enables operational agility, resilience, and effective resource control. In this context, VMware has historically been the industry benchmark: a solid, reliable platform with a mature and widely integrated ecosystem.

However, with Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in 2023, the landscape has changed. This is not merely a standard product evolution: the new licensing model is concretely reshaping renewal strategies, scalability plans, and the long-term economic sustainability of virtualized infrastructures.

The New Broadcom–VMware Model: What Is Really Changing

The transition to Broadcom has marked a clear break from the past, particularly in terms of commercial and contractual models:

End of perpetual licenses, subscription-only: the traditional perpetual licensing model has been replaced by an exclusively subscription-based approach.

More standardization, less flexibility: the new licensing framework introduces stricter rules, including:

• Minimum purchase and renewal thresholds set at 72 cores.
• BMandatory bundles that limit the ability to purchase only what is actually needed.
• Penalties for late renewals, introducing additional financial risk for organizations.

These approaches support a large-scale simplification strategy, but they may prove poorly aligned with the realities of mid-sized environments, distributed sites, or SMB contexts, where flexibility and modularity are essential.

Increasingly unpredictable renewals: widely adopted editions such as VMware vSphere Standard 8 are no longer available as new SKUs. At renewal time, many organizations are being steered toward higher-tier bundles—such as vSphere Foundation—resulting in a significant cost impact compared to previous configurations.

Rising costs: finally, a significant increase in Broadcom’s price lists further compounds the issue, with additional hikes expected in 2026. This trend makes renewal and expansion costs less predictable, particularly for infrastructures with a limited number of cores.

Looking Beyond: HPE VM Essentials with Morpheus

In a context where licensing is becoming increasingly decisive, evaluating alternatives is not merely a cost-driven choice, but a strategic decision.

HPE VM Essentials, built on the Morpheus platform, positions itself as a modern solution for virtualization and infrastructure management, capable of bringing together in a single platform:

• Virtual machine management
• Advanced orchestration and automation
• Governance and cost control

Key Benefits of HPE VM Essentials

Cost control: the licensing model is aligned with actual infrastructure capacity, with no imposed minimum thresholds. This enables clearer, more sustainable, and more predictable long-term planning.

Native automation and centralized management: provisioning, orchestration, and policy management are natively integrated, reducing operational complexity and freeing up valuable time for IT teams to focus on higher-value activities.

Designed for hybrid cloud: HPE VM Essentials is built for on-premises environments and hybrid scenarios, adapting to continuously evolving infrastructures without rigid platform constraints.

Why Consider It Today

In light of recent changes to VMware’s licensing model, HPE VM Essentials with Morpheus represents a concrete option for organizations looking to:

• Reduce the risk of rising costs and contractual complexity associated with mandatory bundles and core-based thresholds.
• Adopt a modern, scalable, and automation-driven platform.
• Benefit from more transparent entry and renewal costs, based on actual infrastructure needs rather than standardized models.

In Summary:

• VMware under Broadcom remains a robust and well-established platform, still central to many enterprise environments.
• However, the new licensing model introduces additional complexity and a significant cost impact, particularly for mid-sized and smaller organizations.
• HPE VM Essentials with Morpheus positions itself as a credible and modern alternative, delivering operational simplicity, automation, and greater cost control.

Evaluating available options today means protecting IT investments, increasing infrastructure resilience, and building a more sustainable model for the future.