Daily Tech Digest - February 06, 2023

Preparing for Compliance With AI, Data Privacy Laws

Even though enforcement of data privacy laws in California and New York laws have been slightly delayed, and California regulations implementing the new AI law are not yet fully baked, businesses should be employing expert consultants now to be ready when enforcement begins. Platz notes that in the working world -- and especially in an environment that is often largely remote with employees around the country and the world -- these new privacy laws will affect employees beyond the states that enacted the laws if they live and work in different locations. “With flexibility to work from virtually anywhere, this legislation will have wide reaching impact across states and sectors and will only highlight the need for employers to look closely at their path to compliance across a significant amount of data,” Platz says. ... “As almost always happens, many other jurisdictions will follow suit, as New York City already has,” he says. “So, businesses should be preparing to deal not just with these two new laws but, ultimately, with similar ones in most or all states and perhaps other cities.”


While governments pass privacy laws, companies struggle to change

No single approach can ward off all dangers—it takes a potent combination of technologies, policies, and practices, all with boardroom support. Remember, employees often represent the weakest link in the data security chain since a simple phishing email can bypass the most sophisticated defenses. Strong protection starts with practical training and enforcement. Management can also help ensure every strategy builds on a solid foundation. Many enterprises are now engaged in major digital transformation and cloud migration initiatives. However, some still need help answering basic questions: Do we know where every piece of data in the house resides? Do we know how much of it contains PII, and who has access to it? How is the data managed in the cloud? What kind of encryption has been applied? Where are the encryption keys stored, and who has access to those? ... This way, there are no shared network resources, and the enhanced security is matched with greater flexibility to ensure a company-specific deployment—a dedicated cloud tenant and custom software to address specific needs.


Is the Answer to Your Data Science Needs Inside Your IT Team?

Allowing data scientists and developers to work together in real time provides multiple benefits. First, it allows for more expeditious and agile development of intelligent apps. Second, it allows developers and data scientists to learn about each other’s needs and processes. When each group is so closely connected and understands each other, it improves the chances of project success. Agile application development requires everyone to work in sync. When Red Hat began exploring ways to bridge the gap that has traditionally existed between developers and data scientists, we expanded on the idea of creating a common platform for real-time collaboration between them. Within this common platform, development and data science teams would have access to all the tools they need to perform their tasks, and could quickly build and share production pipelines. ... Open Data Hub was so effective at solving our internal data science and development challenges that we ultimately evolved it into a commercial offering called Red Hat OpenShift Data Science. 


20 Ways to Achieve Street Smart Wisdom for Leaders and Entrepreneurs

The necessity of cultivating an open mindset and being able to adjust to changing circumstances and obstacles swiftly is highlighted by adaptive thinking. To succeed, leaders need to be able to think quickly on their feet and modify their plans as necessary. Adaptive thinking focuses on maintaining persistence and focus in the face of difficulty. The need to think outside the paradigm and come up with unique solutions to challenging problems is emphasized under creative problem-solving. To create novel solutions, leaders need to be able to spot trends and think creatively. It underlines how important it is to be abreast of recent trends and advancements. Lastly, strategic planning emphasizes the need for a well-thought-out strategy and the capacity to picture the desired outcome. Leaders must be able to foresee possible difficulties and be ready to modify their plans as necessary. This highlights the need to maintain organization and concentrate on long-term objectives.


The Case for a Strong Data Governance Program in 2023

Effective data governance is also critical for complying with data-focused regulations, especially data privacy laws. Following in the steps of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, several U.S. states have introduced privacy laws, with more states poised to do the same. Existing regulations include California’s Privacy Rights Act and Consumer Privacy Act, along with similar regulations in Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia. In addition, because many organizations today anticipate incorporating artificial intelligence into decision making, they must make efforts to comply with emerging AI regulations. The standard-bearer is the EU’s AI Act, which aims to prevent potential data misuse and privacy violations. Acts like these depend on organizations adopting strong data governance practices. Clearly, every company today must have a data governance program. Lack of one can cause data inconsistencies, complicate data integration efforts, and create data integrity challenges. These issues can lead to a slew of negative outcomes: reputational damage, fines for noncompliance, reduced efficiency, and, of course, missed opportunities for business growth.


Government plans to catch tax fraudsters with help of AI

Cabinet Office minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe said fraud against “the public purse is unacceptable and we’re stepping up the fight against those who wish to profit off the backs of taxpayers”. “Through the use of cutting-edge technology, the PSFA will use data and AI to help us in the fight against fraudsters,” she added. The government previously signed another deal with Quantexa, in October 2021, to help combat Covid-19 loan scheme fraud. During the pandemic, fraudsters abused the government’s loan scheme, with a number of businesses making fraudulent claims. The contract with Quantexa was part of the government’s response to those criminal activities. As part of the contract, the government used Quantexa’s Contextual Decision Intelligence (CDI) platform, which enables customers to “create a connected view of [their] data to reveal relationships between people, places and organisations”. It analysed an initial set of 250 networks of people, organisations and places, processing more than 100 million data items.


Insurance IT leaders herald new era for digital customer experience

With new platforms evolving, insurance CIOs are eyeing new possibilities for the future. Liberty Mutual, which has been an industry leader in digital transformation, operates a hybrid cloud infrastructure built primarily on Amazon Web Services but with specific uses of Microsoft Azure and, lesser so, Google Cloud Platform. ... The insurance company under his direction spent 17 years developing a robust platform that today enables consumers to access an automated claims system that uses chatbots, cameras, and e-mail to initiate a claim and rent a car while a machine learning model analyzes the photograph of the damaged vehicle to detect whether its airbag has been deployed, for instance, and to determine immediately whether a vehicle is totaled or the damage is limited to a fender bender. That’s today. The platform will enable data scientists to build the next generation of applications for its consumers tomorrow. “We’re really trying to understand the metaverse and what it might mean for us,” said McGlennon. 


Lambda Throttling - How to Avoid It?

When your lambda is throttled and you reach the maximum parallel execution limit, lambda returns a throttling error. Lambda has a retry mechanism with exponential backoff that starts from 1 second and reaches a max of 5-minute windows which can even run for 6 hours (by default), to try to complete the execution of a failed event. We should also mention that for better error-proofing your code, you could use a dead-letter queue (DLQ) which other queues can target for messages that can’t be processed / consumed successfully. A DLQ is for the cases it still fails to execute, but that is just for reference, and we will not dive into that now. The meaning of this is tremendous. It doesn’t matter if we send a message with SQS, Eventbridge, or other async services; you will practically never need to think about handling throttling issues. ... However, in contrast to synchronous invocation, this will not impact your application and service level agreement (SLA), as the events will be kept in the internal Lambda service queue and handled in time when the resources have freed up to manage them. Every single one of them.


Will your incident response team fight or freeze when a cyberattack hits?

CISOs shouldn’t be surprised to hear that even well-prepared teams can have moments of paralysis; it’s just human nature, McKeown says. She says sometimes responders may experience cognitive narrowing, where they’re so focused on the situation directly in front of them that they can’t consider the full circumstances—an experience that can stop responders from thinking as they normally would. Niel Harper, an enterprise cybersecurity leader who serves as a board director with the governance association ISACA, witnessed a team freeze in response to a ransomware attack on his first day working with a company as an advisor. “They literally did not know what to do, even though they had some experience with [incident response] walkthroughs,” he recalls. “They were in panic mode.” Harper says he has seen other situations where the response was stymied and thus delayed. In some cases, teams were afraid that they’d be seen as overreacting. In others, they were paralyzed with the fear of being blamed. 


Why 2023 is the time to consider security automation

Security automation done right doesn’t usually mean replacing human intelligence and ability – rather, it aims to give people the requisite power to strengthen the organization’s security posture and mitigate threats. Security automation doesn’t necessarily have to be exotic. Especially if you’re just starting out, some of the simplest automation can have considerable impacts. ... “Over the last several years, engineering teams have automated nearly all of their development and deployment processes across APIs in CI/CD pipelines and unfortunately, security has oftentimes been an afterthought,” says Paul Nguyen, co-founder and co-CEO of Permiso. “Accordingly, attackers have leveraged stolen API keys and compromised service tokens as methods to infiltrate a network or service and move laterally.” The course correction isn’t to dump DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, obviously – it’s to better secure them, and automation is key. So is DevSecOps. “It’s time for security teams to embrace automation and bolster their defenses in order to be able to respond to the modern tactics of bad actors,” Nguyen says.



Quote for the day:

"You can't delegate accountability" -- Gordon Tredgold

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