Daily Tech Digest - September 23, 2023

A CISO’s First 90 Days: The Ultimate Action Plan and Advice

It’s a CISOs responsibility to establish a solid security foundation as rapidly as possible, and there are many mistakes that can be made along the way. This is why the first 90 days are the most important for new CISOs. Without a clear pathway to success in the early months, CISOs can lose confidence in their ability as change agents and put their entire organization at risk of data theft and financial loss. No pressure! Here’s our recommended roadmap for CISOs in the first 90 days of a new role. ... This means they can reduce the feeling of overwhelm and work strategically toward business goals. For a new CISO, it can be challenging trying to locate and classify all the sensitive data across an organization, not to mention ensuring that it’s also safe from a variety of threats. Data protection technology is often focused on perimeters and endpoints, giving internal bad actors the perfect opportunity to slip through any security gaps in files, folders, and devices. For large organizations, it’s practically impossible to audit data activity at scale without a robust DSPM.


There’s No Value in Observability Bloat. Let’s Focus on the Essentials

Telemetry data gathered from the distributed components of modern cloud architectures needs to be centralized and correlated for engineers to gain a complete picture of their environments. Engineers need a solution with critical capabilities such as dashboarding, querying and alerting, and AI-based analysis and response, and they need the operation and management of the solution to be streamlined. What’s important for them to know is that it’s not necessary to spend more to ensure peak performance and visibility as their environmental complexity grows. ... No doubt, more data is being generated, but most of it is not relevant or valuable to an organization. Observability can be optimized to bring greater value to customers, and that’s where the market is headed. Call it “essential observability.” It’s a disruptive vision to propose a re-architected approach to observability, but what engineers need is a new approach making it easier to surface insights from their telemetry data while deprioritizing low-value data. Costs can be reduced by consuming only the data that enables teams to maintain performance and drive smart business decisions.


Shedding Light on Dark Patterns in FinTech: Impact of DPDP Act

In practice, these patterns exploit human psychology and trick people into making unwanted choices/ purchases. It has become a menace for the FinTech industry. These patterns are used to encourage people to sign up for loans, credit cards, and other financial products that they may not need or understand. However, the new Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”), can be used to bring such dark patterns under control. The DPDP Act requires online platforms to seek consent of Data Principals through clear, specific and unambiguous notice before processing any data. Further, the Act empowers individuals to retract/ withdraw consent to any agreement at any juncture.  ... Companies will need to review their user interfaces and remove any dark patterns that they are using and protect the personal data and use the data for ‘legitimate purposes’ only and take consent from users, through clear affirmative action, in unambiguous terms. They will also need to develop new ways to promote their products and services without relying on deception.


Can business trust ChatGPT?

It might seem premature to worry about trust when there is already so much interest in the opportunities Gen AI can offer. However, it needs to be recognized that there’s also an opportunity cost — inaccuracy and misuse could be disastrous in ways organizations can’t easily anticipate. Up until now, digital technology has been traditionally viewed as being trustworthy in the sense that it is seen as being deterministic. Like an Excel formula, it will be executed in the same manner 100% percent of the time, leading to a predictable, consistent outcome. Even when the outcome yields an error — due to implementation issues, changes in the context in which it has been deployed, or even bugs and faults — there is nevertheless a sense that technology should work in a certain way. In the case of Gen AI, however, things are different; even the most optimistic hype acknowledges that it can be unpredictable, and its output is often unexpected. Trust in consistency seems to be less important than excitement at the sheer range of possibilities Gen AI can deliver, seemingly in an instant.


A Few Best Practices for Design and Implementation of Microservices

The first step is to define the microservices architecture. It has to be established how the services will interact with each other before a company attempts to optimise their implementation. Once microservices architecture gets going, we must be able to optimise the increase in speed. It is better to start with a few coarse-grained but self-contained services. Fine graining can happen as the implementation matures over time. The developers, operations team, and testing fraternity may have extensive experience in monoliths, but a microservices-based system is a new reality; hence, they need time to cope with this new shift. Do not discard the monolithic application immediately. Instead, have it co-exist with the new microservices, and iteratively deprecate similar functionalities in the monolithic application. This is not easy and requires a significant investment in people and processes to get started. As with any technology, it is always better to avoid the big bang approach, and identify ways to get the toes wet before diving in head first.


Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisations

Collaboration is at the heart of teamwork. Many modern organisations set up teams to be cross-functional or multidisciplinary. Multidisciplinary teams are made up of specialists from different disciples collaborating together daily towards a shared outcome. They have the roles needed to design, plan, deliver, deploy and iterate a product or service. Modern approaches and frameworks often focus on increasing flow and reducing blockers, and one way to do this is to remove the barrier between functions. However, as organisations grow in size and complexity, they look for different ways of working together, and some of these create collaboration anti-patterns. Three of the most common antipatterns I see and have named here are: One person split across multiple teams; Product vs. engineering wars; and X-led organisations,


The Rise of the Malicious App

Threat actors have changed the playing field with the introduction of malicious apps. These applications add nothing of value to the hub app. They are designed to connect to a SaaS application and perform unauthorized activities with the data contained within. When these apps connect to the core SaaS stack, they request certain scopes and permissions. These permissions then allow the app the ability to read, update, create, and delete content. Malicious applications may be new to the SaaS world, but it's something we've already seen in mobile. Threat actors would create a simple flashlight app, for example, that could be downloaded through the app store. Once downloaded, these minimalistic apps would ask for absurd permission sets and then data-mine the phone. ... Threat actors are using sophisticated phishing attacks to connect malicious applications to core SaaS applications. In some instances, employees are led to a legitimate-looking site, where they have the opportunity to connect an app to their SaaS. In other instances, a typo or slightly misspelled brand name could land an employee on a malicious application's site. 


What Is GreenOps? Putting a Sustainable Focus on FinOps

If the future of cloud sustainability appears bleak, Arora advises looking to examples of other tech advancements and the curve of their development, where early adopters led the way and then the main curve eventually followed. “The same thing happened with electric cars,” Arora points out. “They didn’t enter the mainstream because they were better for the environment; they entered the mainstream because the cost came down.” And this is what he predicts will happen with cloud sustainability. Right now, the early adopters are stepping forward and championing GreenOps as a part of the FinOps equation. In a few years, others will be able to measure their data, analyze how they reduced their carbon impact and what effect it had on cloud spending and savings, and then follow their lead. It’s naive to think that most companies will go out of their way (and perhaps even increase their cloud spending) to reduce their carbon footprint. 


The Growing Importance of AI Governance

As AI systems become more powerful and complex, businesses and regulatory agencies face two formidable obstacles:The complexity of the systems requires rule-making by technologists rather than politicians, bureaucrats, and judges. The thorniest issues in AI governance involve value-based decisions rather than purely technical ones. An approach based on regulatory markets has been proposed that attempts to bridge the divide between government regulators who lack the required technical acumen and technologists in the private sector whose actions may be undemocratic. The technique adopts an outcome-based approach to regulation in place of the traditional reliance on prescriptive command-and-control rules. AI governance under this model would rely on licensed private regulators charged with ensuring AI systems comply with outcomes specified by governments, such as preventing fraudulent transactions and blocking illegal content. The private regulators would also be responsible for the safe use of autonomous vehicles, use of unbiased hiring practices, and identification of organizations that fail to comply with the outcome-based regulations.


Legal Issues for Data Professionals

Lawyers identify risks data professionals may not know they have. Moreover, because data is a new field of law, lawyers need to be innovative in creating legal structures in contracts to allow two or more parties to achieve their goals. For example, there are significant challenges attempting to apply the legal techniques traditionally used with other classes of business assets (such as intellectual property, real property, and corporate physical assets) to data as a business asset class. Because the old legal techniques do not fit well, lawyers and their clients need to develop new ways of handling the business and legal issues that arise, and in so doing, invent new legal structures that meet the specific attributes of data that differentiate data from other business assets. To take one example, using software agreements as a template for data transactions will not always work because the IP rights for software do not align with data, the concept of software deliverables and acceptance testing is not a good fit, and the representations and warranties are both over and underinclusive. 



Quote for the day:

"Rarely have I seen a situation where doing less than the other guy is a good strategy." -- Jimmy Spithill

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