Daily Tech Digest - March 26, 2024

What Every CEO Needs To Know About The New AI Act

The act says “AI should be a human-centric technology. It should serve as a tool for people, with the ultimate aim of increasing human well-being.” So it’s good to see that limiting the ways it could cause harm has been put at the heart of the new laws. However, there is a fair amount of ambiguity and openness around some of the wording, which could potentially leave things open to interpretation. Could the use of AI to target marketing for products like fast food and high-sugar soft drinks be considered to influence behaviors in harmful ways? And how do we judge whether a social scoring system will lead to discrimination in a world where we’re used to being credit-checked and scored by a multitude of government and private bodies? ... The act makes it clear that AI should be as transparent as possible. Again, there’s some ambiguity here—at least in the eyes of someone like me who isn’t a lawyer. Stipulations are made, for example, around cases where there is a need to “protect trade secrets and confidential business information.” But it’s uncertain right now how this would be interpreted when cases start coming before courts.


What’s behind Italy’s emergence as a key player in Europe’s digital landscape?

Regional cloud providers can respond promptly to needs that hyperscalers do not meet, equipped with more flexible offerings, highly customized services, and attention to local specificities. These are increasingly popular and insistent demands from businesses that require greater flexibility and customization of cloud services to adapt to their specific needs and a widespread presence in particularly strategic geographical regions to offer services that better meet local or sectoral needs. As a result, regions like Italy are increasingly becoming preferred cloud regions, and the data center sector is taking the same parallel path, which sees Italy as Europe's newest data hub. Credit is also due to local providers breaking away from the 'one size fits all' dynamic, offering tailor-made and ad hoc services for the needs of companies migrating to the cloud. ... Combined with the geographic benefits of being based in Italy, the current socio-economic climate, and the focus on regulatory compliance, Italy is well-positioned to solidify its place as a significant player in the future of the European cloud and data center scene.


Customer science: A new CIO imperative

Science is defined by many as the rigorous and systematic identification and measurement of phenomena. In both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors the most important phenomenon is customer behavior and mindset. Customer science puts customer behavior and mindset under a microscope. Is your organization good at customer science? Does your organization measure customer experience? Does your organization employ “scientists” to observe and explain customer behavior based on the data you have collected? ... The path to customer science is fraught with paradoxes. The organizational paradox is that if the “Customer is King” why is there no one in the enterprise with the authority to ensure that every interaction meets or exceeds expectations. Is this the role of the now very much in vogue chief customer officer? The chief experience officer? Glenn Laverty, now retired and former president and CEO at Ricoh Canada, finessed this responsibility/authority paradox tying every employees’ compensation to customer experience/satisfaction metrics. What gets measured and what gets rewarded drive behavior. 


Enhancing Secure Software Development With ASOC Platforms

There are many ways to adopt DevSecOps. For those looking to avoid complicated setups, the market offers ASOC-based solutions. These solutions can help companies save time, money, and labor resources while also reducing the time to market for their products. ASOC platforms enhance the effectiveness of security testing and maintain the security of software in development without delaying delivery. Gartner's Hype Cycle for Application Security, 2021, indicated that the market penetration of these solutions ranged from 5 to 20% among the intended clients. The practical uptake of this technology is low primarily because of limited awareness about its availability and benefits. ASOC solutions incorporate Application Security Testing (AST) tools into existing CI/CD pipelines, facilitating transparent and real-time collaboration between engineering teams and information security experts. These platforms offer orchestration capabilities, meaning they set up and execute security pipelines, as well as carry out correlation analysis of issues identified by AST tools, further aggregating this data for comprehensive insight.


The cybersecurity skills shortage: A CISO perspective

Experienced cybersecurity professionals are poached daily, enticed with higher compensation and better working situations. Successful CISOs keep an eye on employee satisfaction and make sure to help staff manage stress levels. Active CISOs also open avenues for staff to grow their skill sets and career opportunities. ... There’s no reason why cybersecurity staff should be underpaid or underappreciated. Proactive CISOs educate the brass on competitive salary comparisons and risks/costs associated with understaffed teams and employee attrition. When it comes to cybersecurity staffing, executives must understand the foolishness of tripping over dollars to pick up pennies. ... How do you bolster staff efficiency without adding more bodies? Automate any process that can be automated. Automating security operations processes is a good start, but advanced organizations move beyond security alone and think about process automation across lifecycles that span security, IT operations, and software development. Examples could include finding/patching software vulnerabilities, segmenting networks, or DevSecOps programs.


Misaligned upskilling priorities could hinder AI progress

“The rapid rise of AI requires business leaders to build and shape the future workforce now to thrive or risk lagging behind in a future transformed by a seismic shift in the skills needed for the era of intelligence,” said Libby Duane-Adams, Chief Advocacy Officer at Alteryx. “Not all employees need to become data scientists. It’s about championing cultures of creative problem-solving, learning to look at business problems through an analytic lens, and collaborating across all levels to empower employees to use data in everyday roles. Continuous investments in data literacy upskilling and training opportunities will create the professional trajectories where everyone can “speak data” and exploit AI applications for trusted, ethical outcomes.” “As India invests US$1.2 billion in a wide range of AI projects, the country’s is set to become a significant force for shaping the future of AI” said Souma Das, Managing Director, India Sub-continent at Alteryx. “As organisations gear up for the future, our research highlights how imperative it is to nurture a diverse workforce with a range of data and analytics abilities to ensure employees are empowered to navigate the dynamic landscape together.


Want to be a DevOps engineer? Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly

"The DevOps ecosystem is huge and constantly evolving," he added. "Tools and frameworks so popular yesterday may be replaced by new alternatives. On top of your regular job as an engineer, you probably need to give up some of your free time for studying." Even when you gain more experience, "the learning doesn't stop," Henry said. "In fact, it's commonly noted as one of the things that DevOps engineers love most about their job. With the pace of development and introduction of AI tools like ChatGPT, DevOps engineering today won't be the same as DevOps engineering two or three years from now." One aspect that may separate passionate DevOps engineers from other colleagues is the infrastructure management part of the job. "If you're not a fan of managing infrastructure, you're going to struggle," Henry cautioned. "This is a big one. As a DevOps engineer, I spend a huge amount of time setting up, configuring, and maintaining the cloud infrastructure that supports various applications. This means dealing with servers databases networks and security on a daily basis. Now, if this excites you, great. This world could be perfect."


Decoding AI success: The complete data labeling guide

Data labeling is essential to machine learning data pre-processing. Labeling organizes data for meaning. It then trains a machine learning model to find “meaning” in new, relevantly similar data. In this process, machine learning practitioners seek quality and quantity. Because machine learning models make decisions based on all labeled data, accurately labeled data in larger quantities creates more useful deep learning models. In image labeling or annotation, a human labeler applies bounding boxes to relevant objects to label an image asset. Taxis are yellow, trucks are yellow, and pedestrians are blue. A model that can accurately predict new data (in this case, street view images of objects) will be more successful if it can distinguish cars from pedestrians. ... Locating and training human labelers (annotators) starts data labeling projects. Annotators must be trained on each annotation project’s specifications and guidelines because use cases, teams, and organizations have different needs. After training, image and video annotators will label hundreds or thousands of images and videos using home-grown or open-source labeling tools. 


4 steps to improve root cause analysis

It’s easier for devops teams to point to problems in the network and infrastructure as the root cause of a performance issue, especially when these are the responsibility of a vendor or another department. That knee-jerk response was a significant problem before organizations adapted devops culture and recognized that agility and operational resiliency are everyone’s responsibility. “The villain when there are application performance issues is almost always the network, and it’s always the first thing we blame, but also the hardest thing to prove,” says Nicolas Vibert of Isovalent. “Cloud-native and the multiple layers of network virtualization and abstraction caused by containerization make it even harder to correlate the network as the root cause issue.” Identifying and resolving complex network issues can be more challenging when building microservices, applications that connect to third-party systems, IoT data streams, and other real-time distributed systems. This complexity means that IT ops need to monitor networks, correlate them to application performance issues, and perform network RCAs more efficiently.


From Chaos to Clarity: Streamlining DevSecOps in the Digital Era

No development team deliberately sets out to build and deploy an insecure application. The reason applications with known vulnerabilities are deployed so often is because the cognitive load associated with discovering and remediating them is simply too high. The average developer can only allocate 10% to 20% of their time remediating vulnerabilities. The rest of their time is spent either writing new code or maintaining the application development environment used to write that code. If organizations want more secure applications, they need to find ways to make it easy for developers to correlate, prioritize and contextualize the vulnerabilities as they are being identified. Most of the time when developers are informed a vulnerability has been discovered in their code, they have long since lost context. Vulnerabilities need to be immediately identified at the time code is written, builds are created, and pull requests are made – and identified in a way that is actionable. Otherwise, that vulnerability is likely to be thrown atop the massive pile of technical debt that developers hope they’ll one day have the time to address. 



Quote for the day:

“Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed.” -- Abraham Lincoln

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