6 key board questions CIOs must be prepared to answer
The board wants assurances that the CIO has command of tech investments tied to
corporate strategy. “Demystify that connection,” Ferro says. “Show how those
investments tie to the bigger picture and show immediate return as much as you
can.” Global CIO and CDO Anupam Khare tries to educate the board of manufacturer
Oshkosh Corp. in his presentations. “My slide deck is largely in the context of
the business so you can see the benefit first and the technology later. That
creates curiosity about how this technology creates value,” Khare says. “When we
say, ‘This project or technology has created this operating income impact on the
business,’ that’s the hook. Then I explain the driver for that impact, and that
leads to a better understanding of how the technology works.” Board members may
also come in with technology suggestions of their own that they hear about from
competitors or from other boards they’re on. ... Avoid the urge to break out
technical jargon to explain the merits of new cloud platforms, customer-facing
apps, or Slack as a communication tool, and “answer that question from a
business context, not from a technology context,” Holley says. “
From applied AI to edge computing: 14 tech trends to watch
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Mobility has arrived at a “great inflection” point — a shift towards autonomous,
connected, electric and smart technologies. This shift aims to disrupt markets
while improving efficiency and sustainability of land and air transportation of
people and goods. ACES technologies for road mobility saw significant adoption
during the past decade, and the pace could accelerate because of sustainability
pressures, McKinsey said. Advanced air-mobility technologies, on the other hand,
are either in pilot phase — for example, airborne-drone delivery — or remain in
the early stages of development — for example, air taxis — and face some
concerns about safety and other issues. Overall, mobility technologies, which
attracted $236bn last year, intend to improve the efficiency and sustainability
of land and air transportation of people and goods. ... It focuses on the use of
goods and services that are produced with minimal environmental impact by using
low carbon technologies and sustainable materials. At a macro level, sustainable
consumption is critical to mitigating environmental risks, including climate
change.
Why Memory Enclaves Are The Foundation Of Confidential Computing
Data encryption has been around for a long time. It was first made available for
data at rest on storage devices like disk and flash drives as well as data in
transit as it passed through the NIC and out across the network. But data in use
– literally data in the memory of a system within which it is being processed –
has not, until fairly recently, been protected by encryption. With the addition
of memory encryption and enclaves, it is now possible to actually deliver a
Confidential Computing platform with a TEE that provides data confidentiality.
This not only stops unauthorized entities, either people or applications, from
viewing data while it is in use, in transit, or at rest. ... It effectively
allows enterprises in regulated industries as well as government agencies and
multi-tenant cloud service providers to better secure their environments.
Importantly, Confidential Computing means that any organization running
applications on the cloud can be sure that any other users of the cloud capacity
and even the cloud service providers themselves cannot access the data or
applications residing within a memory enclave.
Metasurfaces offer new possibilities for quantum research
Metasurfaces are ultrathin planar optical devices made up of arrays of
nanoresonators. Their subwavelength thickness (a few hundred nanometers)
renders them effectively two-dimensional. That makes them much easier to
handle than traditional bulky optical devices. Even more importantly, due to
the lesser thickness, the momentum conservation of the photons is relaxed
because the photons have to travel through far less material than with
traditional optical devices: according to the uncertainty principle,
confinement in space leads to undefined momentum. This allows for multiple
nonlinear and quantum processes to happen with comparable efficiencies and
opens the door for the usage of many new materials that would not work in
traditional optical elements. For this reason, and also because of being
compact and more practical to handle than bulky optical elements, metasurfaces
are coming into focus as sources of photon pairs for quantum experiments. In
addition, metasurfaces could simultaneously transform photons in several
degrees of freedom, such as polarization, frequency, and path.
Agile: Starting at the top
Having strong support was key to this change in beliefs among the leadership
team. Aisha Mir, IT Agile Operations Director for Thales North America, has a
track record of successful agile transformations under her belt and was eager
to help the leadership team overcome any initial hurdles. “The best thing I
saw out of previous transformations I’ve been a part of was the way that the
team started working together and the way they were empowered. I really wanted
that for our team,” says Mir. “In those first few sprints, we saw that there
were ways for all of us to help each other, and that’s when the rest of the
team began believing. I had seen that happen before – where the team really
becomes one unit and they see what tasks are in front of them – and they scrum
together to finish it.” While the support was essential, one motivating factor
helped them work through any challenge in their way: How could they ask other
parts of the IT organization to adopt agile methodologies if they couldn’t do
it themselves? “When we started, we all had some level of skepticism but were
willing to try it because we knew this was going to be the life our
organization was going to live,” says Daniel Baldwin
AutoML: The Promise vs. Reality According to Practitioners
The data collection, data tagging, and data wrangling of pre-processing are
still tedious, manual processes. There are utilities that provide some time
savings and aid in simple feature engineering, but overall, most practitioners
do not make use of AutoML as they prepare data. In post-processing, AutoML
offerings have some deployment capabilities. But Deployment is famously a
problematic interaction between MLOps and DevOps in need of automation. Take
for example one of the most common post-processing tasks: generating reports
and sharing results. While cloud-hosted AutoML tools are able to auto-generate
reports and visualizations, our findings show that users are still adopting
manual approaches to modify default reports. The second most common
post-processing task is deploying models. Automated deployment was only
afforded to users of hosted AutoML tools and limitations still existed for
security or end user experience considerations. The failure of AutoML to be
end-to-end can actually cut into the efficiency improvements.
Best Practices for Building Serverless Microservices
There are two schools of thoughts when it comes to structuring your
repositories for an application: monorepo vs multiple repos. A monorepo is a
single repository that has logical separations for distinct services. In other
words, all microservices would live in the same repo but would be separated by
different folders. Benefits of a monorepo include easier discoverability and
governance. Drawbacks include the size of the repository as the application
scales, large blast radius if the master branch is broken, and ambiguity of
ownership. On the flip side, having a repository per microservice has its ups
and downs. Benefits of multiple repos include distinct domain boundaries,
clear code ownership, and succinct and minimal repo sizes. Drawbacks include
the overhead of creating and maintaining multiple repositories and applying
consistent governance rules across all of them. In the case of serverless, I
opt for a repository per microservice. It draws clear lines for what the
microservice is responsible for and keeps the code lightweight and
focused.
5 Super Fast Ways To Improve Core Web Vitals
High-quality images consume more space. When the image size is big, your
loading time will increase. If the loading time increases, the user experience
will be affected. So, keeping the image size as small as possible is best.
Compress the image size. If you have created your website using WordPress, you
can use plugins like ShortPixel to compress the image size. If not, many
online sites are available to compress image size. However, you might have a
doubt - does compression affect the quality of the image? To some extent, yes,
it will damage the quality, but only it will be visible while zooming in on
the image. Moreover, use JPEG format for images and SVG format for logos and
icons. It is even best if you can use WebP format. ... One of the important
metrics of the core web vitals is the Cumulative Layout shift. Imagine that
you're scrolling through a website on your phone. You think that it is all set
to engage with it. Now, you see a text which has a hyperlink that has grasped
your interest, and you're about to click it. When you click it, all of a
sudden, the text disappears, and there is an image in the place of the
text.
Cyber-Insurance Firms Limit Payouts, Risk Obsolescence
While the insurers' position is understandable, businesses — which have
already seen their premiums skyrocket over the past three years — should
question whether insurance still mitigates risk effectively, says Pankaj
Goyal, senior vice president of data science and cyber insurance at Safe
Security, a cyber-risk analysis firm. "Insurance works on trust, [so answer
the question,] 'will an insurance policy keep me whole when a bad event
happens?' " he says. "Today, the answer might be 'I don't know.' When
customers lose trust, everyone loses, including the insurance companies." ...
Indeed, the exclusion will likely result in fewer companies relying on cyber
insurance as a way to mitigate catastrophic risk. Instead, companies need to
make sure that their cybersecurity controls and measures can mitigate the cost
of any catastrophic attack, says David Lindner, chief information security
officer at Contrast Security, an application security firm. Creating data
redundancies, such as backups, expanding visibility of network events, using a
trusted forensics firm, and training all employees in cybersecurity can all
help harden a business against cyberattacks and reduce damages.
Data security hinges on clear policies and automated enforcement
The key is to establish policy guardrails for internal use to minimize cyber
risk and maximize the value of the data. Once policies are established, the
next consideration is establishing continuous oversight. This component is
difficult if the aim is to build human oversight teams, because combining
people, processes, and technology is cumbersome, expensive, and not 100%
reliable. Training people to manually combat all these issues is not only hard
but requires a significant investment over time. As a result, organizations
are looking to technology to provide long-term, scalable, and automated
policies to govern data access and adhere to compliance and regulatory
requirements. They are also leveraging these modern software approaches to
ensure privacy without forcing analysts or data scientists to “take a number”
and wait for IT when they need access to data for a specific project or even
everyday business use. With a focus on establishing policies and deciding who
gets to see/access what data and how it is used, organizations gain visibility
into and control over appropriate data access without the risk of
overexposure.
Quote for the day:
"Leadership is a journey, not a
destination. It is a marathon, not a sprint. It is a process, not an
outcome." -- John Donahoe
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