Daily Tech Digest - July 31, 2023

The open source licensing war is over

Too many open source warriors think that the license is the end, rather than just a means to grant largely unfettered access to the code. They continue to fret about licensing when developers mostly care about use, just as they always have. Keep in mind that more than anything else, open source expands access to quality software without involving the purchasing or (usually) legal teams. This is very similar to what cloud did for hardware. The point was never the license. It was always about access. Back when I worked at AWS, we surveyed developers to ask what they most valued in open source leadership. You might think that contributing code to well-known open source projects would rank first, but it didn’t. Not even second or third. Instead, the No. 1 criterion developers used to judge a cloud provider’s open source leadership was that it “makes it easy to deploy my preferred open source software in the cloud.” ... One of the things we did well at AWS was to work with product teams to help them discover their self-interest in contributing to the projects upon which they were building cloud services, such as Elasticache.


Navigate Serverless Databases: A Guide to the Right Solution

One of the core features of Serverless is the pay-as-you-go pricing. Almost all Serverless databases attempt to address a common challenge: how to provision resources economically and efficiently under uncertain workloads. Prioritizing lower costs may mean consuming fewer resources. However, in the event of unexpected spikes in business demand, you may have to compromise user experience and system stability. On the other hand, more generous and secure resource provisioning leads to resource waste and higher costs. Striking a balance between these two styles requires complex and meticulous engineering management. This would divert your focus from the core business. Furthermore, the Pay-as-you-go billing model has varying implementations in different Serverless products. Most Serverless products offer granular billing based on storage capacity and read/write operations per unit. This is largely possible due to the distributed architecture that allows finer resource scaling. 


Building a Beautiful Data Lakehouse

It’s common to compensate for the respective shortcomings of existing repositories by running multiple systems, for example, a data lake, several data warehouses, and other purpose-built systems. However, this process frequently creates a few headaches. Most notably, data stored in one repository type is often excluded from analytics run on another, which is suboptimal in terms of the results. In addition, having multiple systems requires the creation of expensive and operationally burdensome processes to move data from lake to warehouse if required. To overcome the data lake’s quality issues, for example, many often use extract/transform/load (ETL) processes to copy a small subset of data from lake to warehouse for important decision support and BI applications. This dual-system architecture requires continuous engineering to ETL data between the two platforms. Each ETL step risks introducing failures or bugs that reduce data quality. Second, leading ML systems, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and XGBoost, don’t work well on data warehouses. 


How the best CISOs leverage people and technology to become superstars

Exemplary CISOs are also able to address other key pain points that traditionally flummox good cybersecurity programs, such as the relationships between developers and application security (AppSec) teams, or how cybersecurity is viewed by other C-suite executives and the board of directors. For AppSec relations, good CISOs realize that developer enablement helps to shift security farther to the so-called left and closer to a piece of software’s origins. Fixing flaws before applications are dropped into production environments is important, and much better than the old way of building code first and running it past the AppSec team at the last minute to avoid those annoying hotfixes and delays to delivery. But it can’t solve all of AppSec’s problems alone. Some vulnerabilities may not show up until applications get into production, so relying on shifting left in isolation to catch all vulnerabilities is impractical and costly. There also needs to be continuous testing and monitoring in the production environment, and yes, sometimes apps will need to be sent back to developers even after they have been deployed. 


TSA Updates Pipeline Cybersecurity Directive to Include Regular Testing

The revised directive, developed with input from industry stakeholders and federal partners including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of Transportation, will “continue the effort to reinforce cybersecurity preparedness and resilience for the nation’s critical pipelines”, the TSA said. Developed with input from industry stakeholders and federal partners, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of Transportation, the reissued security directive for critical pipeline companies follows the initial directive announced in July 2021 and renewed in July 2022. The TSA said that the requirements issued in the previous years remain in place. According to the 2022 security directive update, pipeline owners and operators are required to establish and execute a TSA-approved cybersecurity implementation plan with specific cybersecurity measures, and develop and maintain a CIRP that includes measures to be taken during cybersecurity incidents. 


What is the cost of a data breach?

"One particular cost that continues to have a major impact on victim organizations is theft/loss of intellectual property," Glenn J. Nick, associate director at Guidehouse, tells CSO. "The media tend to focus on customer data during a breach, but losing intellectual property can devastate a company's growth," he says. "Stolen patents, engineering designs, trade secrets, copyrights, investment plans, and other proprietary and confidential information can lead to loss of competitive advantage, loss of revenue, and lasting and potentially irreparable economic damage to the company." It's important to note that how a company responds to and communicates a breach can have a large bearing on the reputational impact, along with the financial fallout that follows, Mellen says. "Understanding how to maintain trust with your consumers and customers is really, really critical here," she adds. "There are ways to do this, especially around building transparency and using empathy, which can make a huge difference in how your customers perceive you after a breach. If you try to sweep it under the rug or hide it, then that will truly affect their trust in you far more than the breach alone."


Meeting Demands for Improved Software Reliability

“Developers need to fix bugs, address performance regressions, build features, and get deep insights about particular service or feature level interactions in production,” he says. That means they need access to necessary data in views, graphs, and reports that make a difference to their workflows. “However, this data must be integrated and aligned with IT operators to ensure teams are working across the same data sets,” he says. Sigelman says IT operations is a crucial part of an organization’s overall reliability and quality posture. “By working with developers to connect cloud-native systems such as Kubernetes with traditional IT applications and systems of record, the entire organization can benefit from a centralized data and workflow management pane,” he says. From this point, event and change management can be combined with observability instruments, such as service level objectives, to provide not only a single view across the entire IT estate, but to demonstrate the value of reliability to the entire organization.


How will artificial intelligence impact UK consumers lives?

In the next five years, I expect we may see a rise in new credit options and alternatives, such as “Predictive Credit Cards,” where AI anticipates a consumer’s spending needs based on their past behaviour and adjusts the credit limit or offers tailored rewards accordingly. Additionally, fintechs are likely to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and add AI to digital and machine-learning powered services. ... Through AI, consumers may also be able to access a better overview of their finances, specifically personalised financial rewards, as they would have access to tools to review all transactions, receive recommendations on personalised spend-based rewards, and even benchmark themselves against other cardholders in similar demographics or industry standards. Consumers may also be able to ask questions and get answers at the click of a button, for example, ‘How much debt do I have compared to your available credit limits?’ or ‘What’s the best way to use my rewards points based on my recent purchases?’ improving financial literacy and potentially providing them with more spending/saving power and personalised experiences in the long run.


IT Strategy as an Enterprise Enabler

IT Strategy is a plan to create an Information Technology capability for maximizing the business value for the organization. IT capability is the Organization ability to meet business needs and improve business processes using IT based systems. The Objective of IT strategy is to spend least amount of resources and generates better ROI. It helps in setting the direction for an IT function in an organization. A successful IT strategy helps the organizations to reduce the operational bottlenecks, realize TCO and derive value from technology. ... IT Strategy definition and implementation covers the key aspects of technology management, planning, governance, service management, risk management, cost management, human resource management, hardware and software management, and vendor management. Broadly, IT Strategy has 5 phases covering Discovery, Assess, Current IT, Target IT and Roadmap. Idea of IT Strategy is to keep the annual and multiyear plan usual, insert the regular frequent check-ins along the way. Revisit IT Strategy for every quarterly or every 6 months to ensure that optimal business value created. 


AI system audits might comply with local anti-bias laws, but not federal ones

"You shouldn’t be lulled into false sense of security that your AI in employment is going to be completely compliant with federal law simply by complying with local laws. We saw this first in Illinois in 2020 when they came out with the facial recognition act in employment, which basically said if you’re going to use facial recognition technology during an interview to assess if they’re smiling or blinking, then you need to get consent. They made it more difficult to do [so] for that purpose. "You can see how fragmented the laws are, where Illinois is saying we’re going to worry about this one aspect of an application for facial recognition in an interview setting. ... "You could have been doing this since the 1960s, because all these tools are doing is scaling employment decisions. Whether the AI technology is making all the employment decisions or one of many factors in an employment decision; whether it’s simply assisting you with information about a candidate or employer that otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to ascertain without advanced machine learning looking for patterns that a human couldn’t have fast enough.



Quote for the day:

"A leader should demonstrate his thoughts and opinions through his actions, not through his words." -- Jack Weatherford

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