About Maria Korolov

Maria Korolov is an award-winning tech journalist who covers cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and extended reality.
She’s also a science fiction author and the editor and founder of MetaStellar, an online magazine of speculative fiction, and of Hypergrid Business, one of the world’s top virtual reality blogs.
Contact her at maria@korolov.com to pitch articles or to hire her as writer, editor, or speaker at your event.
Latest AI articles
The essential check list for effective data democratization
Truly data-driven companies see significantly better business outcomes than those that aren’t. According to a recent IDC whitepaper, leaders saw on average two and a half times better results than other organizations in many business metrics. In particular, companies that were leaders at using data and analytics had three times higher improvement in revenues, were nearly three times more likely to report shorter times to market for new products and services, and were over twice as likely to report improvement in customer satisfaction, profits,…
Top automation pitfalls and how to avoid them
4 data quality challenges that hinder data operations
6 dimensions of data quality boost data performance
Latest quantum computing articles
How Quantum Computing is Supporting Financial Services
Practical quantum computing is often quoted as being ten years away, but financial services is one of the sectors already demonstrating benefits from its early adoption. Quantum computing use cases for financial organizations involve solving complex problems that have too many variables for classical computers to be able to return a result on a realistic timescale. These include making accurate predictions of markets, predicting trading signals in financial markets, calculating credit-decision outcomes, portfolio optimization, risk mitigation and identifying fraudulent activity. Current quantum computers have a limited number of qubits – a measure of quantum computing power – are unwieldy and…
What is Quantum Computing and What Does It Have to Do with Encryption?
Managing Encryption for Data Centers Is Hard. And It Will Get Harder
Quantum Teleportation Makes Progress, But Toward What?
Latest Cybersecurity articles
NTT, Palo Alto partner for managed SASE with AIOps
A new offering from IT services provider NTT combines Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma SASE offering with NTT’s managed network services and AIOps infrastructure. SASE – secure access service edge – has been gaining interest for its potential to reduce networking complexity while improving security. It combines SD-WAN with security services, including secure web access gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), in a single, cloud-delivered service model. Increasingly, companies looking to simplify their SASE deployments have been turning to managed services providers as an alternative to buying SASE services directly from vendors and doing the configuration and implementation…
Pros and cons of managed SASE
How AI chatbot ChatGPT changes the phishing game
The cybersecurity challenges and opportunities of digital twins
Latest Networking articles
NTT, Palo Alto partner for managed SASE with AIOps
A new offering from IT services provider NTT combines Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma SASE offering with NTT’s managed network services and AIOps infrastructure. SASE – secure access service edge – has been gaining interest for its potential to reduce networking complexity while improving security. It combines SD-WAN with security services, including secure web access gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), in a single, cloud-delivered service model. Increasingly, companies looking to simplify their SASE deployments have been turning to managed services providers as an alternative to buying SASE services directly from vendors and doing the configuration and implementation…
Pros and cons of managed SASE
What to expect from SASE certifications
IT supply issues have organizations shifting from just-in-time to just-in-case buying
latest Awards

2020 National Gold Award Winner, ASBPE Awards of Excellence
Maria Korolov’s Network World article, Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling, received top national honors.
latest Appearances
Profile: Sam Whitmore Media Survey
SANS Attack Surface Management Solutions Forum 2022: Building Resilience in the Face of Cyber Conflict
Guest Speaker: VWBPE 2022 Conference
Metaverse presentations: OpenSimulator Community Conference
Informa Webinar: Doing More IT With Less
MetaStellar: Setting up a WordPress website with DreamHost in 15 minutes
IDG Zero Trust Webinar
MetaStellar Interview: How we launched in a pandemic
BrightTalk cybersecurity panel
CIO Magazine New Reality Event
Look Left podcast
IDG Tech Talk: CCPA Revisited
InformaTech’s Cybersecurity Bootcamp
IDG Tech Talk: CCPA
older Awards and Appearances

Jan. 2018: Maria Korolov talks with Sine Wave about “Succeeding As A Retailer In Immersive Worlds.”

Dec. 2017: Speaker at Stereopsia conference in Brussels, Belgium. Topic was women in virtual reality. Click here for slides.
Dec. 2017: Speaker at OpenSimulator Community Conference. Topic was a statistical overview of OpenSim development. Click here for slides.
Apr. 2017: Profiled in Viar360’s Women of VR – 35 Ladies Who Are Killing It In Virtual Reality
Aug. 2016: Mentioned in Marie Claire’s Virtual Reality Has a Female Mafia—and They’re Looking for New Recruits

May 2016: Interviewed by the BCC about how virtual reality will change our lives. Listen to the broadcast here. Read the transcript here.
Sep. 2015: Mentioned in Fortune’s Meet the women shaping our virtual future.
Latest Blog Posts
Virtual assistant illustration created with Midjourney. Read my Midjourney review here. I’m working on a lot of projects these days. As you can see from the site, I’m busy with enterprise technology articles. Plus, I’m the…
Writing is all about the text. But marketing and promotion is often all about the images. Whether you’re sharing with your audience on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or your own blog, cool images make a big difference. At MetaStellar, we’re always…
A few days ago I wrote about how to use the free online app Miro to plot out a story. That’s all well and good if you already have an idea for a plot, and now just need to fine-tune…
A year ago, when the pandemic first hit, I wrote an article for CIO magazine about how to manage software development teams when you can’t meet in person. Many of the managers I spoke to said that they replaced the…
Last month, I posted an article about a bunch of ways writers can use to beat procrastination. But maybe you want to go deeper on the topic. Here are seven books on Amazon with over a 100 positive reviews that…
Have you ever stared at your screen or typewriter or notebook and couldn’t force yourself to write? You had the time block set aside for writing, and you can’t force yourself to get started. Maybe you didn’t even make it…