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Published on:

27th Aug 2025

Radia Perlman: Spanning Tree, Networking Lessons & SharkFest Keynote

In this special interview, I sit down with Radia Perlman — the visionary computer scientist and inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), often called the “Mother of the Internet.” Her groundbreaking work made modern Ethernet and switching possible, shaping the way every network operates today.

Radia shares her journey as a pioneer in networking, her reflections on how STP became a global standard, and her thoughts on why Layer 2 forwarding was always a compromise — and what the industry still gets wrong about it. We also look ahead at quantum-safe cryptography, CLNP vs. IP, and the future of protocols like QUIC.

🔑 What you’ll learn in this episode:

  • How Radia invented Spanning Tree and why it was meant to be “just a temporary fix”
  • Why network loops and misconfigurations are still a common cause of outages
  • The missed opportunity of CLNP and what it could have meant for the Internet
  • The realities (and misconceptions) around quantum computing and cryptography
  • Radia’s candid thoughts on hype cycles like blockchain
  • A preview of her keynote at SharkFest — bringing theory and practice together

👩‍💻 Beyond the protocols, Radia also reflects on her role as a trailblazer for women in technology, offering encouragement to the next generation of engineers and innovators.

Whether you’re a network engineer, a cybersecurity leader, or simply curious about the hidden foundations of the Internet, this conversation with Radia Perlman is packed with insights, lessons, and history you won’t find anywhere else.

👉 Follow the show for more conversations with the leaders shaping networking, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery worldwide.

Transcript
Speaker:

Welcome to an exclusive interview

with a true networking pioneer and

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Visionary Radia Perlman, the renowned

computer scientist and inventor

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of the spanning tree protocol.

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Keynote speaker for the upcoming

Shark Fest Conference, Radia Perlman

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has made invaluable contributions

to the field of computer networking.

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We have the privilege of diving in

on her remarkable journey and gaining

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insights from her wealth of knowledge.

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Let's dive in to the interview.

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Hello.

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Hello.

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It's nice to see you and thank you for

indulging me with this interview today.

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If there was someone.

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That was the president and chief

executive of your fan club.

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I would be that person.

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There you go.

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So I just got finished talking to a

group and many of them were women.

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And so I took this as a little

something to share with them.

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The book on the profiles of amazing Women.

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And of course I pulled out.

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You're amazing woman profile

here, and I share this.

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I have four daughters, so I am very

interested in helping women find their

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place and voice in the technical world.

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And you have done such an exemplary

job of paving the way for female

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technologists in the industry.

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And so we are all very thankful

that you have paved that way.

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Some of the things that I just kinda

like to know is, of course we know that

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you invented the spanning tree protocol.

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And I just recently diagnosed a big

problem with about 50 different data

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centers where they did not have spanning

tree configured in the core of their

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network well, and it was causing loops,

and it was causing their entire data

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center to be slow for several years and

went and found the source of the problem.

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And it really is an epidemic

that people don't really know

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how to set the priorities.

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They don't know how it breaks

the ties of Spanning Tree.

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And it's actually brilliantly

designed and quite elegant.

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And so I wonder why people

don't embrace it more.

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But after we found these loops, I asked

them, I said, because they fixed it.

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They cleared the loops.

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And I said, How did you do that?

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Did you reconfigure spanning trees?

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So they block their correct

paths , and they wouldn't answer me.

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So I knew what they had done.

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They had just removed the loops.

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They just turned off those circuits.

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So it still is something that.

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Although it's automatic, people don't

really understand some of the elements of

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it, but they, nevertheless, that protocol

is incredibly necessary for every type

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of network at layer two to utilize.

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And I'm just wondering, what do

you hear about something that you

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developed out there and people have

been using it successfully for?

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Dozens of years now.

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Do you have any thoughts about how people

are using it or not using it, and what

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are some of the thoughts that you have

or maybe recommendations for the industry

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when they talk about spanning tree?

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Okay.

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Spanning Tree was a hack that was a

short intended to be a short term fix for

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the fact that when Ethernet came along,

people thought this was the network.

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Instead of what my career had

been all about, which was what

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people refer to as layer three.

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Now, what layer three of the networking

stack is, you put your data in an

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envelope and you say who the source is,

who the destination is, and a Hop count.

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And then the layer three switches,

people call them routers.

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It doesn't matter what you call them, have

a forwarding table and they forward it.

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But given that you can't have a

topology, that instantly changes

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in case there are changes.

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You need to have the Hop count because

there might be temporary loops.

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So temporary loops are not that bad with

layer three because there's a Hop count

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Now, nobody Ethernet was

intended to be layer two.

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Now, what layer two really is

supposed to mean is you send

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a message to your neighbor.

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You're not supposed to have a device

that forwards it from link to link.

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Yeah, so that the problem was

that people built applications

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directly on Ethernet without layer

three, and I was alarmed by that.

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Ethernet came along with such big

fanfare and I was saying, no, you

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still need layer three, and people

said, Oh Radia, you're just upset

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cuz no one needs your stuff anymore.

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And I said, but you may wanna

talk from one Ethernet to another.

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And they said, our customers

would never wanna do that.

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Their stuff was good and they made

lots of money for the company.

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They would've made just as much

money had they done it properly,

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which was on top of layer three.

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But it's hard to explain to managers

why this group that was making money

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for the company had done something bad.

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That was how the spanning tree thing

came about, which my manager said, oh,

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Radia, you do distributed algorithm

stuff and we need to have Oh, yeah.

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And surprised.

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Some customer said, Hey, we really

would like this application to work

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across more than a single Ethernet.

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And a single Ethernet could

be within a single building,

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support a few hundred nodes.

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So the constraint was design something

that will work even though the

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end nodes don't have layer three

implemented and there's no extra

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fields in the Ethernet header.

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And there was a hard size limit.

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So that was the concept of just having

these devices mindlessly forwarding

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from port to port, which of course

doesn't work if there's loops that was

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just mindlessly forward, but have some

sort of algorithm that figures out

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a loop free subset of the topology.

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And I thought this was a bad idea because

you really shouldn't be forwarding a

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header that doesn't have a Hop count.

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It's irresponsible, but whatever.

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It didn't really matter, even though

it was a dangerous kluge because it was

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only going to last for a few months until

people fixed the index and put, and so

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here we are today and spanning Tree is

everywhere, on every network, on every

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little switch that we buy for our home.

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It's.

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Everywhere.

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Did you ever, obviously, you just

said that you didn't think it was

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gonna need to be lived longer than

a few months, but now did you ever

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dream that it would be so ubiquitous?

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Not at all, nor did I yearn for that.

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Yeah, as I said, the proper solution

would be a layer three thing, but

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for subtle reasons, which I think

I'll get into at Shark Fest, IP is

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not the ideal layer three protocol.

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People don't think about that.

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The way networking is taught is as

if TCP/IP arrived on tablets from

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the sky, and it's awesome perfection

doesn't occur to anyone that

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things could work any differently.

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And the problem with IP is that

if you move from one side of an

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IP router to another, you have

to change layer two address.

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And that's not inherent to layer three.

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It's inherent to ip and

there was a competitor to ip.

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At the time, which was done by ISO

and it was called CLNP stands for

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Connectionless Network Layer Protocol,

and that had a 20 byte address.

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And what's really a subtle but extremely

important advantage of that was that.

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There were sort of two

forms of addressing.

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You could have a large cloud with lots

and lots of links, and inside there

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was no configuration of the routers

because everyone shared the same.

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14 by prefix.

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And you could Hop around within

that cloud and keep your address.

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So the way routing worked was the first

14 bytes worked like IP, where you

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could have as many levels of hierarch

as you wanted, but where IP thinks that

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the final thing is a single link, that

IP just sends it here with CLNP, the

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routers would say, oh, this is my cloud.

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And so therefore, then it would

route based on the bottom part

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where it would route individually

to each end node within the cloud.

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So that was a much better solution.

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Now indeed, knowing the danger of

spanning tree, it's so fragile,

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like without the hot count.

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I also hate computers and I'm

not a hands-on person, but I

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like to design things so that

people don't have to understand.

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The what's going on, you should

just be able to plug it together

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and it should just, but don't you

think you did that materially with

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the spanning tree protocol and the

default MAC address, breaking all the

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ties , because it really is auto magic

if it's not a very complex environment.

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It's gonna just work and it's gonna be

completely automatic for the last 20, 30

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some odd years since you developed it.

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The Spanning Tree algorithm was intended

to be like, just plug it together

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and you don't have to think about it.

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So all of this configuration

of priorities and stuff.

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When I first did it, somebody

said to me, Hey Radia, some of the

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customers are complaining because.

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It's the most boring product that

digital ever did, and they like to

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configure things and I said, fine.

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If they like to play and configure

with things, I'll put in knobs, but

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you don't have to touch the knobs.

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And even if you do, any setting

of the knobs will still work.

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It was intended to be rock

solid, but I also knew that if.

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The reliability of this thing depends

on you not losing you being a bridge,

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not losing any Spanning Tree messages.

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The digital spec said you must be

able to keep up with wire speed.

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So I don't care what you do with the

data, I'm not interested in the data,

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but when you're receiving packets, if

you're a bridge, you look at it and

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say, is the Spanning Tree message?

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And if it is, then you must process it.

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And what you have to do to

process it is incredibly trivial.

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This is an incredibly simple thing.

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You have to store the best

Spanning Tree message you've

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heard on each one of your ports.

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And when you receive one, you

compare the received one with the one

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that's stored and there's a trivial

comparison about which is better

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and you throw away whichever one is

not better and save the other one.

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The digital bridges wouldn't have

these problems, but when I took it

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over they, there were some vendors that

wanted to build super cheap devices

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that couldn't keep up with wire speed.

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Imagine if you have a loop.

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Not only do you have this data that

goes around, but it exponentially

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multiplies itself because if you have

five ports, you receive a packet,

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you'll make four copies of the thing.

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What would happen is everything would

work great until there was a momentary

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glut of traffic, which would the

spanning tree, if you don't hear from

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a neighbor, You assume, oh, I must be

the most qualified bridge on this link.

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So you will start forwarding on that link.

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Oh, the loop.

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So if couldn't keep up with the momentary

glut of traffic, wait until you actually

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cause more and more of these cheap

bridges to turn on extra links and

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have all of these loops and stuff.

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So it's not really a fault of

the Spanning Tree algorithm.

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First of all, you shouldn't

need a Spanning Tree algorithm.

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There shouldn't be

forwarding at layer two.

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It should just all be layer three.

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But if you are going to do that,

which is a nice simple thing, you

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have to be able to do it safely.

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What has happened with

the CLNP these days?

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I know it's an ISO standard.

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I remember looking at some of the packets

from it way back in the late eighties.

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And trying to understand it.

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And I even taught some lessons on it

a little bit, but it never seemed to

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garner much support and the only company

that really moved on it was deck and

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then they didn't really move forward.

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So is anybody else using CLNP or is

that standard completely just latent.

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Yeah, I would say it died, but it's,

oh, and just for listeners, deck

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and digital are the same thing.

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People call it different things.

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The problem was it was widely deployed

and it worked just great, but, and

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that was what DECnet was, basically

CLNP, but then in 92 someone said,

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Hey, IP addresses are too small.

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Four bytes.

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Hey, maybe we should do

something with bigger addresses.

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And someone said, oh, there's

this CLNP thing with 25 addresses.

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It's widely deployed.

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It seems to work great.

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Let's use that.

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And unfortunately, standards

bodies tend to be very tribal.

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Territorial.

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Yeah.

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Yes.

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And the reason, so that was actually

recommended the recommendation in

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92 that we should move to CLNP.

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And somebody showed how to

make TCP work on top of CLNP.

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It only took them a few weeks.

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It was the trivial exercise.

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And since all of the applications

worked on TCP, If they hadn't resisted

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immediately in 93, certainly the internet

would've been using 20 byte addresses.

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But yeah.

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Now one fault of the CLNP people

is whatever standards body that

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is certainly managed to make

their standards hard to read.

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All of this fancy, unnecessary

terminology and stuff.

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Plus they, you had to pay

for the specs, I think.

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Yes.

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I remember buying them in their big, thick

books from ISO standards body somewhere.

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Yeah.

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And the routing critical that I had

done for digital was got adopted

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by them and they renamed it.

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Unfortunately, So at some

point, Trump apparently said that

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Hillary and Obama invented IS-IS.

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And some of my friends noticed that

headline and forwarded that to me

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and said, didn't you get some credit?

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Look what you did.

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Yeah.

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And that's still widely deployed, but

at any rate, I wasn't going to those

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meetings, and so the spec had to be.

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Translated into ISOs and I

just international languages.

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I guess that was one of

the big things, right?

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Everything had to be translated into

every language on the planet and

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doing that and the terminologies,

it probably just got unwieldy.

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Yeah, I'm not quite sure why.

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One of my skills is that once I

understand something, I can explain

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it so simply that nobody's impressed.

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They go, oh, of course.

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Whereas other people can manage

to make anything incomprehensible.

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So the audience thinks, oh, I didn't

understand that cuz I'm not very smart.

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But I feel privileged to have been in the

room with someone who's such a genius.

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But at any rate, somebody else

translated it into ISO-ease and I

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could not read my own Spec after that.

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Oh my goodness.

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Something understand it.

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I'd have to compare it

with the DEC (Digital) one.

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But yeah, so that was part of the thing.

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But the excuse that there were

some vocal people in IETF that kind

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of went berserk at the notion of

adopting this layer three thing.

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So the kinds of arguments they

gave were actually hilarious.

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It's like that would be ripping

the heart out of the internet and

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putting in a foreign substance.

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Whereas CLNP is no less

compatible with IP than ip.

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V6 is Sure where.

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And that's pretty much continued to

be somewhat of a very difficult to

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maintain both of those simultaneously.

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Yeah.

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And 92 would've been really

trivial to move the internet,

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but now it's so entrenched.

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Another reason they gave was

we don't like ISO's layer six,

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which was the session layer.

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And indeed it was mysterious.

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It's not like you have to use

it, it's something that if you're

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doing file transfer, it does

checkpoints and things like that.

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But that has nothing to do with

the 25 layer three address.

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And they had other kind of

equally silly arguments.

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And I really wish that

people would understand.

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Technology before saying, oh,

those people are just idiots.

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It would waste our time

to try to understand it.

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I'm not quite sure what I'm answering at

this point, but yeah, I'm, yeah, I don't,

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oh, and it's because we went with ip, the

industry that we're stuck with having some

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sort of other technology that can glue

a bunch of links together to disguise.

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A cloud as a single link to the

IP routers, but it's not like

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the ideal way to build networks.

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Interestingly, and I'm not sure how much

you've kept up with the QUIC protocol, but

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the QUIC protocol does away with the need

for port and IP address sockets , and it.

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Uses that link ID that, then

you can have Nat and Pat changes

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. And it really doesn't matter

because it uses the link id.

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So we've had to glue in a lot of other

shims in order to make some of the things

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that you probably had working in CLNP that

we would not have had the same trouble.

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As protocols evolved, like the

QUIC protocol with the link id now?

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Yeah.

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I haven't looked at QUIC recently.

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I should refresh my memory,

but it did some and I like it.

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And so like when you think about strict

layering, That's not a no, there's no

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strict layering because they use the

UDP port 443 to pop the packet out, and

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that's typically our transport layer.

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And then they move transport

up into the QUIC session area.

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And so now QUIC basically takes

care of layers, part of layer

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three to some degree because.

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The link ID is akin to the socket

that we used to use with ports.

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So I've been studying QUIC

for the last several years.

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It's interesting in watching it.

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And so yeah, the problems that you talk

about probably would've been obviated

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with some of the technology that you were

advising that we'd take a look at in 92.

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Oh, people have to make money and

problems create the opportunity.

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Okay.

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There's.

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Making money.

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I understand that motivation when

it's just a, anyone that's not on

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our team are idiots and I don't

even wanna learn what they're doing.

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I have much less sympathy with that.

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The N I H factor not invented here.

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Exactly.

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Right.

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So I wanna get back before

we go to your famous.

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Poem and that, and I'm just

wondering what was the motivation?

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And it was probably somewhat

to do with that simplicity

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of explaining it to people.

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And so you chose an outlet, a

creative outlet to use a poem to

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help us all understand a little bit

and get it into our neural network.

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Do you have any remembrances

on what spawned those thoughts?

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This will be stepping a little

bit on the things I will say.

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Oh, during my keynote, but I, so

what happened, the story of this

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was, again, I was in a bad mood

because people didn't understand

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that Ethernet was not a network.

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It was a link and that keynote designer

should have called it Ether Link, but

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whatever given, you know that they were

misusing Ethernet as an actual network.

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My manager, as I said, called me in and

said, oh, you do this sort of thing.

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And he said, without any configuration,

just let people plug it together and

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they'll figure out a loop free subset.

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And he thought it was

gonna be really hard.

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And then he thought he was being

witty, I think, and he said, oh,

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and just to make this a little more

challenging, make it scale as a constant.

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So no matter how many links and

bridges there are in the world, the

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amount of memory necessary to run this

should be a constant, which is crazy.

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Nothing's a constant.

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Linear, might be the

best you can hope for.

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It'll probably be n squared.

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So anyhow, that he

mentioned this on a Friday.

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And then he was gone on vacation

the next week, and this was before

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email or cell phones or anything.

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So he was gonna be completely unreachable.

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And that night I realized,

oh my goodness, it's trivial.

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I know just how to do it.

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And furthermore, It scales as a

constant cuz all you have to do is

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hold onto the best spanning tree

message you've seen on each port.

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A spanning tree message is about 50

bytes, so if you have four ports, it

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takes 200 bytes to run the algorithm.

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No matter how big your network is,

Monday and Tuesday, because this

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is just such a trivial algorithm.

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I had written this back,

it was complete enough.

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That when the implementers started

implementing it, it only took them a

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month or two to get it working and they

didn't have to ask me a single question.

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So the spec was complete as of Tuesday

afternoon and I couldn't concentrate

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on anything else cuz I had to show

up to my boss and he wasn't around.

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So that's why I spent the remainder

of the week working on the poem.

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So I officially.

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Spent more time working on the

poem than I did inventing the

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algorithm and rating the spec.

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Wow, that is just incredible.

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Now we're all getting together,

uh, in a few weeks, and we're gonna

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talk about packets and security.

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Is there anything on the horizon that

you'd like to help us understand better

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or what we should be focusing on?

368

:

Is there Quantum things?

369

:

Are there other things?

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What do you see as some of the things

that, as we gather, and a lot of

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:

this is just workshops and as we

collaborate together, what are some

372

:

of the things that we should focus on?

373

:

Okay, so everyone's always

looking for the next big thing,

374

:

and they don't wanna miss out.

375

:

People come up with these buzzwords or

these nonsense technologies and everyone

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:

wants to jump on the bandwagon, and

the people create consortiums and they

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:

go to a company and say, look at these

companies that have already joined.

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:

Don't you wanna join too?

379

:

Or, look how many, how much they're

investing, so why don't you invest too?

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:

I try my best to dissuade

people from that.

381

:

So I have a whole bunch of anti

blockchain talks for a while.

382

:

That was, yes, everybody's big thing.

383

:

So what exactly is blockchain?

384

:

One way to think of it is as a magic

thing that will solve all problems.

385

:

And so you just figure out how to

stick it into your application somehow.

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:

Or people say, what can I use it for?

387

:

And again, it's start with

what problem you're solving.

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:

Look at various ways of doing it,

and if blockchain is the best thing.

389

:

And furthermore, blockchain is not

even well defined anymore, like the

390

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Bitcoin engine, that's well defined.

391

:

But once you start talking about

blockchain as a service or a

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:

consortium of these things,

It's really not clear anymore.

393

:

So at any rate, there's that.

394

:

Then there's quantum where the mis,

there are so many misconceptions and

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:

I try desperately to tamp them down.

396

:

One is that a quantum computer is

just like a regular computer, but

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:

it's a gazillion times faster.

398

:

So any program that runs on a regular

computer, if you could run it on a quantum

399

:

computer, it would be blindingly fast.

400

:

And this is complete nonsense.

401

:

They're not faster, they're different.

402

:

And there's an incredibly small set of

problems that a quantum computer can do

403

:

better than a classical computer or could.

404

:

If you could build these things, and

one of them is factoring numbers.

405

:

And that's not very exciting.

406

:

I don't need to factor numbers.

407

:

Why do I care?

408

:

But it turns out that all of our current

public key algorithms, RSA, elliptic

409

:

curves, Diffie-Hellman, depend on a

math problem, factoring numbers in the

410

:

case of RSA discreet logs in the case

of Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curves.

411

:

It depends on those math problems.

412

:

Being difficult, but if we had a quantum

computer running Shor's algorithm,

413

:

which is a marvel, and I'm actually

really proud of the fact that I can

414

:

actually explain it so that regular

engineers can understand how it works.

415

:

And actually I can plug my new

book, which is the third edition of

416

:

network security, which demystifies

things like quantum and blockchain

417

:

and fully homomorphic encryption.

418

:

As well as doing, talking about

all the other things you'd expect

419

:

in a network security book.

420

:

But yes, so that would be really exciting

in a bad way if suddenly somebody could

421

:

break all of our current public key

algorithms, cuz suddenly all of the signed

422

:

code, you could claim that it was signed

by something by Microsoft when it wasn't.

423

:

You can impersonate anything on the

internet, so that might sound like

424

:

really bad, but it turns out that the.

425

:

The security, the cryptography community,

in conjunction with NIST is developing

426

:

new algorithms, new public key algorithms

that are normal everyday algorithms.

427

:

That work on normal everyday

computers, but they don't depend on

428

:

the kind of algorithm that Shor's

algorithm would be able to solve.

429

:

And so I like to call these

things quantum safe algorithms.

430

:

Unfortunately, NIST has called

them post quantum algorithms.

431

:

Which I think is a terrible name

cuz it makes people think, oh,

432

:

quantum is like so complicated.

433

:

Post quantum must be, and they think

that they run on quantum computers,

434

:

or they think that once the world

has converted all of our computers

435

:

to quantum computers, then we can

start wearing post quantum algorithms.

436

:

But at any rate, So that is the one

thing that will happen in the industry

437

:

is that we're all going to have to

look at all of our products that are

438

:

using publicly and figure out how to

convert to one of these new algorithms

439

:

that aren't quite standardized yet.

440

:

So we have a year or

two before we can start.

441

:

And we might have forever before we

really need to because it's really a

442

:

daunting thought of how to actually build

a quantum computer big enough to do this.

443

:

But so nobody really knows when

or if it will ever happen, but

444

:

you can't wait until it happens.

445

:

So therefore, you have to start as

soon as possible and soon customers

446

:

will no longer buy your products

unless you're using the new algorithms.

447

:

Wow, that's incredible.

448

:

One of my friends is a CIO over at Oak

Ridge National Labs, and I was there with

449

:

him about, I don't know, eight weeks ago,

and he took me by and showed me this new

450

:

Cray that they had.

451

:

That's the eighth fastest

computer in the world.

452

:

And then the old, the older ones.

453

:

Of course.

454

:

I don't really comprehend

that level of technology.

455

:

I just look at packets, but it's

fascinating to grasp a little bit.

456

:

Of what the future is gonna hold for

us in developing something like you

457

:

said, not post quantum, but quantum

resistant or, I don't know what the

458

:

correct term would be now about the book.

459

:

How is it coming out soon?

460

:

Is it already out it, the physical book

started appearing a couple of months ago.

461

:

Okay.

462

:

They are available.

463

:

Oh yeah.

464

:

Let me just quickly show you.

465

:

Nice.

466

:

That's the book.

467

:

Yes.

468

:

Very nice.

469

:

I did rummage through my library and

I found your Bridges and Routers third

470

:

edition, and I was second edition.

471

:

There is third edition.

472

:

There is a third edition.

473

:

Send it to me so I can, so you can find

out who the heck's stealing your money.

474

:

Huh.

475

:

But I decided to just, I decided

to just talk about you as being

476

:

such an amazing woman and.

477

:

The industry.

478

:

Thanks you for all your contributions,

and obviously you're one of the kindest

479

:

human beings that I've known and come

across, and obviously you know a lot and

480

:

you help us all understand it a little bit

better without hurting our dignity because

481

:

we might not understand everything.

482

:

So thank you for the way that you

have worked so diligently to help

483

:

us understand these complex things.

484

:

And it is a gift that you have.

485

:

And I know I'm speaking for many

thousands or perhaps hundreds of

486

:

thousands of people who know of your work

and just appreciate you so very much.

487

:

So I look forward to snagging that book

and I'm gonna voraciously go through

488

:

it so that when we are together in

a few weeks, I might get to pull you

489

:

aside and spend five minutes with

you and ask you the big questions

490

:

that I have resulting from that and.

491

:

So thank you so much.

492

:

It's really a pleasure and I look

forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

493

:

And then do you have any last minute

little kind of teaser for folks who

494

:

are gonna come and hear your keynote?

495

:

Yeah, no.

496

:

Hopefully it'll be a little

bit heretical, a little bit

497

:

thought provoking, put things.

498

:

I'm amazed at people that can

manage networks cuz I don't do that.

499

:

I'm not a hands-on person at all.

500

:

But the fact that they can do that

without really quite understanding

501

:

why we have all these things.

502

:

Yeah, hopefully.

503

:

The conceptual people and the

hands-on people getting together can

504

:

actually make good things happen.

505

:

There you go.

506

:

That's perfect.

507

:

From a theorist to the practitioners,

we're really waiting to hear a little

508

:

bit more from you and hang out with you a

little bit in San Diego, sunny San Diego.

509

:

Look forward to seeing

you there very soon.

510

:

Thank you, Radia.

511

:

Thank you.

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About the Podcast

Disaster.Stream
Disaster Stream is a podcast series that delves into the world of disaster recovery
Disaster Stream is a podcast series that delves into the world of disaster recovery, cybersecurity incidents, and critical problem resolution in major organizations. Hosted by Bill Alderson, the podcast features expert insights, case studies, and interviews with leaders and pioneers in the technology and cybersecurity fields. Each episode shares lessons learned and best practices for crisis management, aiming to help organizations prepare for and respond to disasters effectively. Available in both audio and video formats, Disaster Stream is your go-to resource for understanding and navigating the complexities of disaster recovery and cybersecurity

About your host

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Bill Alderson

Bill Alderson is a historian at heart, a storyteller by nature, and a technologist by trade. For more than four decades, he has solved some of the toughest challenges in cybersecurity and networks — from helping restore communications at the Pentagon on 9/11 to training thousands of professionals worldwide.

But beyond technology, Bill is the proud grandson of Mabel and Ed Plaskett, California pioneers who passed down stories of resilience, family, and the rugged Big Sur coast. As the family historian, he has gathered photographs, journals, and documents to preserve the heritage of the Plaskett family for future generations.

Through this podcast, Bill shares those stories — weaving together history, heritage, and personal reflections — so that listeners, whether family or friends, can connect with the enduring spirit of the Monterey County coast.