November Membership Meeting

Location: St. Petersburg College EpiCenter 13805 58th St. N, Room 2-304 Clearwater, FL 33760 Time: Thursday, November 12th 4:00 - 6:00pm ET Speakers: 4:00pm - 1st Speaker - Tim Parker Bio: Tim Parker is Founder and President of TDP Telecom Advisors, an advisory firm focused on telecom, fiber and data center infrastructure. He is an Air Force veteran with more than 30 years of leadership in network strategy, carrier evaluation and data center interconnection. He has held senior roles at Flexential, ViaWest, GoDaddy, PayPal, Charles Schwab and serves as Chief Growth Officer at Assured Communications, which develops subsea cable landing stations. He speaks at multiple industry events on network and data center infrastructure. Abstract: Introduction to Data Center and Cable Landing Station Vulnerability AI demand is pushing data center capacity and subsea connectivity to grow faster than ever, and our exposure is growing with it. A small number of cable landing stations carry most international traffic, and many sit on remote, unprotected land, have single power feeds, and well-known backhaul routes. Data centers face the same kinds of weak points: concentrated power, limited fiber diversity, and physical and cyber threats that are getting more sophisticated. One cut cable, substation outage or targeted attack can spread across regions in minutes. This session looks at where these single points of failure are, why they keep getting built, and what operators, carriers and hyperscalers can do to design for real resilience instead of assuming it. 5:00pm - 2nd Speaker - Rob Greggs Bio:* Rob Greggs has led security and operations teams for more than 25 years across healthcare, government, and higher education. His background includes both technical leadership and organizational leadership and transformation. He takes a people-first approach to technology and speaks on cybersecurity strategy, AI in operations, and leadership from his…