Security Top IT Investment Priority in 2023
Dennis Monner, chief commercial officer at Aryaka, says he thinks what IT leaders are finding is that the talent that they really need on their teams is in short supply. “The boundaries between the traditional, functional disciplines are getting fuzzy, requiring a new breed of security professional,” he explains. “The cloud team needs to understand the network. The network team needs to understand security. It’s driving them to rethink their investment and hiring strategy.” He adds recruiting, training, and retention all takes real dollars from the budget that could potentially be deployed in services that guarantee performance. “You can only outsource security to a certain degree,” Haff cautions. “Even if you're 100% in a public cloud, you're still largely responsible for your own application security, as well as your internal access and authentication procedures.” While a cloud provider can implement all manner of security tech and processes if you don't control who has access, those won't do much good. “It was somewhat disappointing that, although our survey generally showed investments in people was a high priority, ‘hiring security or compliance staff’ was one of the lowest security funding priorities,” he adds.
How biometric payments are tackling financial exclusion
Even the most reluctant individuals are likely to have succumbed to contactless
payments and some form of digitised banking in recent times. This will have the
positive impact of making the needed transition to biometrics more seamless.
Using fingerprints or facial recognition to unlock phones or access apps is not
unusual. If anything, they have been convenient and comforting additions to the
surge of tech innovations over the last couple of decades. There is a relief in
knowing that these portals are being secured by methods that are almost
impossible to replicate. It is a breakthrough that financial players and
governments in the world’s most developed countries still need to catch up with,
as emerging economies have already capitalised on biometrics’ capabilities for
almost a decade now. In India, for example, internal fraud and leakage from
pension payments dropped by 47% after transitioning from cash to biometric smart
cards. Because the solution bypasses the need for prior credit ratings or
credentials, the country has also been able to catalyse safe online banking
among previously unbanked adults since biometrics’ introduction in 2014.
Decentralised finance – a threat for traditional FS firms, or an opportunity?
Done right, DeFi offers traditional banks and financial services firms the
ability to reduce costs, increase speed and attract new customers who are
looking for simplified, more attractive, and secure solutions. When we look at
the current payments ecosystem, we’re confronted with a maze of payments
services, systems and rules which rely on a cacophony of different players. DeFi
offers a solution to this inherent friction, delivering ecosystems than can run
autonomously based on rules and verify transactions without human intervention.
The main attractions of this innovation are two-fold. Firstly, it reduces
inefficiency while eliminating fees, manual effort (e.g. for corporate actions)
and intermediaries. Basic transactions can be executed at any time, from any
place, with the only requirement having an internet connection and a compliant
wallet. By removing the middleman in asset rights transfers, lowering exchange
fees, and giving access to wider global markets, moving securities on blockchain
could save between $17B and $24B in global trade processing costs.
Engineering Best Practices of CI Pipelines
The essence of a CI/CD system is to aim for green builds and to resolve issues
quickly when a red build occurs, meaning a test failed. When the automated tests
run, any failure results should be visible to all team members. Then, it should
be a top priority for the team to make the build work again. Green builds and
rapid fixes are critical for two reasons. First, when tests are failing, it is
not possible to test forthcoming development and changes accurately. Secondly,
continuous deployment will be halted, because no new and validated packages
exist. Although it may seem like a frustrating situation to stop active
development and instead focus on fixing failed tests, this mindset will ensure
optimal application stability. An efficient CI/CD system should be the only path
that leads to the production environment. In other words, if you have
confidently built a CI/CD system with a comprehensive set of tests, there should
be no other way to deploy applications to the production system. It can be
highly tempting — and common — to maintain administrator privileges and deploy
an application to the production systems just once.
Blue-Green Deployment From the Trenches
/filters:no_upscale()/articles/blue-green-deployments/en/resources/13figure-1-1672220471233.jpg)
The concept of blue-green deployment is to have (at least) two instances of an
application running at one time. When a new version is released, it can be
released to just one (or some) instances, leaving the others running on the old
version. Access to this new version can be restricted completely at first, then
potentially released to a subset of consumers, until confidence in the new
release is achieved. At this point, access to the instance(s) running the old
version can be gradually restricted and then these too can be upgraded. This
creates a release with zero downtime for users. There are, of course, caveats.
Any breaking change to data sources or APIs means that old requests cannot be
processed by the new version, which rules out a blue-green release. It’s one of
my favourite interview questions to ask how one might approach a breaking change
in a blue-green environment on the off-chance that someone comes up with a great
solution, but it would probably involve some bespoke routing layer to enrich or
adapt "old" requests to the "new" system. At which point, you’d have to consider
whether it isn’t better just to have some good old downtime.
Top 10 AI Trends that Will Redefine Technology in the Year 2023
The role of AI and data science in innovation and automation will increase
in 2023. Data ecosystems are able to scale, decrease waste, and provide
timely data to a variety of inputs. But laying the foundation for change and
fostering innovation is crucial. With the use of AI, software development
processes can be optimised, and further advantages include greater
collaboration and a larger body of knowledge. We need to foster a
data-driven culture and go past the experimental stages in order to change
to a sustainable delivery model. This will undoubtedly be a significant
advancement in AI. ... Over the past few years, IT systems have become more
sophisticated. Vendors will seek platform solutions that offer visibility
across numerous monitoring domains, including application, infrastructure,
and networking, according to a new Forrester prediction. ... The automatic
modification of neural net topologies and improved tools for data labelling
are two promising areas of automated machine learning. When the selection
and improvement of a neural network model are automated, the cost and time
to market for new solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) will be
reduced.
How the EU plans to take on big tech in 2023
Increasing competition could leave gaps for European challengers to enter.
The EU, however, has historically struggled to turn its world-leading
research into big tech companies. One barrier is the notoriously slow and
inefficient transfer of IP from academia to the economy. This problem is
illustrated by the EU producing more research papers than the US, but
turning far fewer into commercial applications. According to Luigi Congedo,
a venture capitalist and Innovation Advisor at marketing firm Clarity, this
weakness can be reduced by changing the EU’s investment framework. This, he
argues, could stimulate a more effective technology transfer — and prevent
promising startups from being acquired by Silicon Valley giants. “We need to
create our Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and, in order to do it, create a
better environment to compete and do business across the continent,” he
said. “If we fail in creating a real European platform for innovation and
instead maintain the current ‘country-based model,’ all our emerging
businesses will end up becoming M&A targets for American multinational
companies.”
The limitations of mathematical modeling
Thompson believes these failures are often owing to misaligned incentives:
“Those who correctly estimate significant tail risks [i.e., deviations from
the normal distribution in a statistical model] may not be recognized or
rewarded for doing so. Before the event, tail risks are unknown anyway if
they can only be estimated from past data,” and “after the event, there are
other things to worry about.” In short, it was in investors’ interest to
design a model that characterized unlikely risks as infinitesimally so, and
regulators weren’t paying attention. So why should we bother with models at
all? Occasionally, Thompson believes, they do get it right. Her preferred
example concerns research by two chemists, F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario
Molina, who in the 1970s modeled the potential impact on the ozone layer of
the continued release of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Within 15 years of
their research, an international agreement, the Montreal Protocol, had been
signed to limit CFC use, and it is now possible that the ozone layer could
recover to its 1980 level by 2050. “The acceptability of the model was a
function of the relatively simple context and the low costs of action,”
Thompson explains
Business and tech leadership predictions 2023
With remote working on the rise – despite some companies attempting to go
back to the office – global hiring will continue to increase. More and more
people will be able to work in digital jobs that can be done from anywhere.
“When you hire internationally, you have access to a much larger talent
pool, and with the possibility of hiring employees to work from anywhere in
the world, companies will have a unique opportunity of filling their roles
in a more diverse way to increase cross-cultural competency in remote
teamwork,” says Kelvin Ong, chief of staff at online software engineering
school Microverse. However, Ong agrees with James Wilknson, that this means
IT managers will have to develop their soft skills, such as explicit and
clear written communication (“low-context communicaiton” and sending
messages where there is a timelag before you get a response (“asynchrous
communication”). ... Hedley says: “Most recessions are mild and temporary.
While they are not fun, recessions can be endured. Second, business owners
can, to a large extent, control their own destiny. And that’s especially
true when it comes to identifying and hiring the talent that will move the
needle.”
How to be the manager your IT team needs in 2023
Authenticity is important in creating high-performing teams because it lays
the groundwork for strong relationships and environments in which employees
can bring their whole, best selves to work. Being authentic doesn’t mean
bearing all your darkest secrets, but it does mean understanding your own
personal style and drivers and helping your team understand those. Humans
are wired for consistency, so when you show up consistently and
authentically, your employees know what to expect, how to approach you, and
what’s important. Better still, they feel they have space to share who they
are and what drives them. ... Perhaps the most important tip, though, is to
be present when you are with your team. Shifting to all virtual work over
the last couple of years has taken a toll on our ability to focus in the
moment. We are constantly typing emails while listening to conference calls
or responding to chats and texts while also trying to write articles or
create solutions for clients. The pressure to multitask is great, but the
benefits of focus and attention are even greater.
Quote for the day:
"Be so good at what you do that no
one else in the world can do what you do." -- Robin Sharma
No comments:
Post a Comment