September 26, 2023

How to Future-Proof Your IT Organization

Effective future-proofing begins with strong leadership support and investments in essential technologies, such as the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI). Leaders should encourage an agile mindset across all business segments to improve processes and embrace potentially useful new technologies, says Bess Healy ... Important technology advancements frequently emerge from various expert ecosystems, utilizing the knowledge possessed by academic, entrepreneurial, and business startup organizations, Velasquez observes. “Successful IT leaders encourage team members to operate as active participants in these ecosystems, helping reveal where the business value really is while learning how new technology could play a role in their enterprises.” It’s important to educate both yourself and your teams on how technologies are evolving, says Chip Kleinheksel, a principal at business consultancy Deloitte. “Educating your organization about transformational changes while simultaneously upskilling for AI and other relevant technical skillsets, will arm team members with the correct resources and knowledge ahead of inevitable change.”

How one CSO secured his environment from generative AI risks

"We always try to stay ahead of things at Navan; it’s just the nature of our business. When the company decided to adopt this technology, as a security team we had to do a holistic risk assessment.... So I sat down with my leadership team to do that. The way my leadership team is structured is, I have a leader who runs product platform security, which is on the engineering side; then we have SecOps, which is a combination of enterprise security, DLP – detection and response; then there’s a governance, risk and compliance and trust function, and that’s responsible for risk management, compliance and all of that. "So, we sat down and did a risk assessment for every avenue of the application of this technology. ... "The way we do DLP here is it’s based on context. We don’t do blanket blocking. We always catch things and we run in it like an incident. It could be insider risk or external, then we involve legal and HR counterparts. This is part and parcel with running a security team. We’re here to identify threats and build protections against them."

Governor at Fed Cautiously Optimistic About Generative AI

The adverse impact of AI on jobs will only be borne by a small set of people, in contrast to the many workers throughout the economy who will benefit from it, she said. "When the world switched from horse-drawn transport to motor vehicles, jobs for stable hands disappeared, but jobs for auto mechanics took their place." And it goes beyond just creating and eliminating positions. Economists encourage a perception of work in terms of tasks, not jobs, Cook said. This will require humans to obtain skills to adapt themselves to the new world. "As firms rethink their product lines and how they produce their goods and services in response to technical change, the composition of the tasks that need to be performed changes. Here, the portfolio of skills that workers have to offer is crucial." AI's benefits to society will depend on how workers adapt their skills to the changing requirements, how well their companies retrain or redeploy them, and how policymakers support those that are hardest hit by these changes, she said.

6 IT rules worth breaking — and how to get away with it

Automation, particularly when incorporating artificial intelligence, presents many benefits, including enhanced productivity, efficiency, and cost savings. It should be, and usually is, a top IT priority. That is, unless an organization is dealing with a complex or novel task that requires a nuanced human touch, says Hamza Farooq, a startup founder and an adjunct professor at UCLA and Stanford. Breaking a blanket commitment to automation prioritization can be justified when tasks involve creative problem-solving, ethical considerations, or situations in which AI’s understanding of a particular activity or process may be limited. “For instance, handling delicate customer complaints that demand empathy and emotional intelligence might be better suited for human interaction,” Farooq says. While sidelining automation may, in some situations, lead to more ethical outcomes and improved customer satisfaction, there’s also a risk of hampering a key organization process. “Overreliance on manual intervention could impact scalability and efficiency in routine tasks,” Farooq warns, noting that it’s important to establish clear guidelines for identifying cases in which an automation process should be bypassed.

Introduction to Azure Infrastructure as Code

One of the core benefits of IaC is that it allows you to check infrastructure code files to source control, just like you would with software code. This means that you can version and manage your infrastructure code just like any other codebase, which is important for ensuring consistency and enabling collaboration among team members. In early project work, IaC allows for quick iteration on potential configuration options through automated deployments instead of a manual "hunt and peck" approach. Templates can be parameterized to reuse code assets, making deploying repeatable environments such as dev, test and production easy. During the lifecycle of a system, IaC serves as an effective change-control mechanism. All changes to the infrastructure are first reflected in the code, which is then checked in as files in source control. The changes are then applied to each environment based on current CI/CD processes and pipelines, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of human error.

National Cybersecurity Strategy: What Businesses Need to Know

Defending critical infrastructure, including systems and assets, is vital for national security, public safety, and economic prosperity. The NCS will standardize cybersecurity standards for critical infrastructure—for example, mandatory penetration tests and formal vulnerability scans—and make it easier to report cybersecurity incidents and breaches. ... Once the national infrastructure is protected and secured, the NCS will go bullish in efforts to neutralize threat actors that can compromise the cyber economy. This effort will rely upon global cooperation and intelligence-sharing to deal with rampant cybersecurity campaigns and lend support to businesses by using national resources to tactically disrupt adversaries. ... As the world’s largest economy, the U.S. has sufficient resources to lead the charge in future-proofing cybersecurity and driving confidence and resilience in the software sector. The goal is to make it possible for private firms to trust the ecosystem, build innovative systems, ensure minimal damage, and provide stability to the market during catastrophic events.

Read more here ...