The hidden cost of speed
The software development engine within a company is like the power grid: it’s a
given that it works, and there are no celebrations or accolades for keeping the
lights on. When it fails or goes down, however, everyone’s upset and what’s left
is assigning blame and determining culpability. Unfortunately, in many
industries, the responsible application and development of software is not
considered until there’s a problem. There is no “working well” for a developer
in an ecosystem without insight and intuition as to how difficult the workload
is for various projects or positions. The black and white reality is simply
”Working” or “Not working, what the hell is going on, do we need to fire them,
why is everything so slow lately?” This can be incredibly frustrating for
developers. In my own experience, the person in the worst position is the
developer brought in to clean up another developer’s mess. It’s now your
responsibility not only to convince management that they need to slow down to
give you time to fix things (which will stall sales), but also to architect
everything, orchestrate the rollout, and coordinate with sales goals and
marketing.
Tracing The Destructive Path of Ransomware's Evolution
Contemporary attackers carefully select high-value organizations and
infrastructure to cripple until substantial ransoms are paid — frequently
upwards of seven figures for large corporations, hospitals, pipelines, and
municipalities. Present-day ransomware groups’ techniques reflect a chilling
professionalization of tactics. They leverage military-grade encryption,
identity-hiding cryptocurrencies, data-stealing side efforts, and penetration
testing of victims before attacks to determine maximum tolerances. Hackers often
gain initial entry by purchasing access to systems from underground brokers,
then deploy multipart extortion schemes, including threatening distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, if demands aren’t promptly met. Ransomware
perpetrators also tap advancements like artificial intelligence (AI) to
accelerate attacks through malicious code generation, underground dark web
communities to coordinate schemes, and initial access markets to reduce
overhead. ... Ransomware groups continue to innovate their attack methods.
Supply chain attacks have become increasingly common. By compromising a single
software supplier, attackers can access the networks of thousands of downstream
customers.
Zero-Touch Provisioning Simplifies and Augments State and Local Networks
“With zero-touch provisioning unlocking greater time efficiencies, these
agencies can more optimally serve the public,” he says. “For example, research
shows that shaving mere seconds off emergency response calls yields more lives
saved.” Government agencies also can reach wider and broader audiences and
increase constituent trust by delivering crucial food and mobile healthcare
services faster. Even agencies with strong budgets can benefit from more
efficient spending thanks to zero-trust networking, DePreta adds. “By
eliminating the need for manual intervention, government agencies can optimize
budgets to better serve their communities and become smarter in the way they
deliver services. From public services such as mobile healthcare clinics to
public safety activities such as emergency response and disaster relief, ZTP
enables government agencies to do more with less,” he says. ... “You can take a
couple of devices and ship them to a branch, and someone who is not necessarily
a technical expert in that branch can unbox them and plug them in. You are then
up and running right away,” DeBacker says.
Why employee ‘will’ can make or break transformations
Leaders who focus on making work more meaningful and expressing their
appreciation inspire and motivate employees. Previous McKinsey research shows
that executives at organizations who invest time and effort in changing employee
mindsets from the start are four times more likely than those who didn’t to say
their change programs were successful. Indeed, employees notice when their
bosses don’t change their own behaviors to adapt to the goals of transformation.
... he best ideas for how to implement transformation initiatives may come from
frontline employees who are closest to the customer. Organizations that
encourage employees to pursue innovation and continuous improvement see a higher
share of employees that own initiatives or reach milestones during
transformations. ... Once leaders have elevated a core group of employees
to own initiatives or milestones, they should turn to empowering a broader group
to serve as role models who can activate others. These change
leaders—influencers, managers, and supervisors—play a visible role in shaping
and amplifying the behaviors that enhance organizational performance while
counteracting behaviors that get in the way of success.
Deploying digital twins: 7 challenges businesses can face and how to navigate them
An organization adopting digital twins needs to be well-networked. "The
biggest roadblock to digital systems is connectivity, at the network and human
levels," Thierry Klein, president of Nokia Bell Labs Solutions Research, told
ZDNET. "Digital twins are most effective when multiple digital twins are
integrated, but this requires collaboration among stakeholders, a robust
digital network, and systems that can be connected to the digital twin." ...
The ability to represent physical environments in real time also presents
challenges to digital twin environments. "With digital twins, you're generally
relying on your model to run parallel with some real-life physical system so
you can understand certain effects that might be impacting the system," Naveen
Rao, vice president of AI for Databricks, told ZDNET. ... "The lack of open,
interoperable data standards presents another significant roadblock.
"Antiquated technology, legacy proprietary data formats, and analog processes
create silos of 'dark data' -- or data that's inaccessible to teams across the
asset lifecycle," Shelly Nooner, vice president of innovation and platform for
Trimble, told ZDNET.
Why CEOs and Corporate Boards Can’t Afford to Get AI Governance Wrong
The first step in preparing for safe and successful AI adoption is
establishing the necessary C-Suite governance structures. This needs to be a
point of urgency, as far more advanced and powerful AI capabilities, including
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where AI may be able to perform human
cognitive tasks better than the smartest human being, loom on the horizon. BCG
published a leadership report earlier this year entitled “Every C-Suite Member
Is Now a Chief AI Officer.” ... Corporate leadership and boards must determine
how best to manage the risks and opportunities presented by AI to serve its
customers and to protect its stakeholders. To begin with, they must identify
where management responsibility should sit, and how these responsibilities
should be structured. BCG’s report states that from the CEO on down, there
needs to be at minimum, “a basic understanding of GenAI, particularly with
respect to security and privacy risks,” adding that business leaders “must
have confidence that all decisions strike the right balance between risk and
business benefit.”
Get ready for a tumultuous era of GPU cost volitivity
Demand is almost certain to increase as companies continue to build AI at a
rapid pace. Investment firm Mizuho has said the total market for GPUs could
grow tenfold over the next five years to more than $400 billion, as businesses
rush to deploy new AI applications. Supply depends on several factors that are
hard to predict. They include manufacturing capacity, which is costly to
scale, as well as geopolitical considerations — many GPUs are manufactured in
Taiwan, whose continued independence is threatened by China. Supplies have
already been scarce, with some companies reportedly waiting six months to get
their hands on Nvidia’s powerful H100 chips. As businesses become more
dependent on GPUs to power AI applications, these dynamics mean that they will
need to get to grips with managing variable costs. ... To lock in costs, more
companies may choose to manage their own GPU servers rather than renting them
from cloud providers. This creates additional overhead but provides greater
control and can lead to lower costs in the longer term. Companies may also buy
up GPUs defensively: Even if they don’t know how they’ll use them yet, these
defensive contracts can ensure they’ll have access to GPUs for future needs —
and that their competitors won’t.
Optimizing Continuous Deployment at Uber: Automating Microservices in Large Monorepos
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The newly designed system, named
Up
CD, was designed to improve automation and safety. It is tightly integrated
with Uber's internal cloud platform and observability tools, ensuring that
deployments follow a standardized and repeatable process by default. The new
system prioritized simplicity and transparency, especially in managing
monorepos. One key improvement was optimizing deployments by looking at which
services were affected by each commit, rather than deploying every service
with every code change. This reduced unnecessary builds and gave engineers
more clarity over the changes impacting their services. ... Up introduced a
unified commit flow for all services, ensuring that each service progressed
through a series of deployment stages, each with its own safety checks. These
conditions included time delays, deployment windows, and service alerts,
ensuring deployments were triggered only when safe. Each stage operated
independently, allowing flexibility in customizing deployment flows while
maintaining safety. This new approach reduced manual errors and provided a
more structured deployment experience.
Cybercriminals use legitimate software for attacks increasing
The report underscores the growing trend of attackers adopting legitimate
tools to evade security measures and deceive security personnel. These tools
are used for various malicious activities, including spreading ransomware,
conducting network scanning, lateral movement within networks, and
establishing command-and-control (C2) operations. Among the tools identified
in the report are PDQ Deploy, PSExec, Rclone, SoftPerfect, AnyDesk,
ScreenConnect, and WMIC. A series of case studies detailed in the report
highlights specific incidents involving these tools. Between September 2023
and August 2024, 22 posts on various criminal forums discussed or shared
cracked versions of the SoftPerfect network scanner. ... Remote management and
monitoring (RMM) tools like AnyDesk and ScreenConnect are also prominently
featured in criminal discussions. An August 2024 post on the RAMP forum
described using AnyDesk during a penetration test and recommended disabling
secure logon for successful connections. Initial Access Brokers (IABs)
frequently sell access to networks through these established remote management
and monitoring tool connections.
Principles of Modern Data Infrastructure
Designing a modern data infrastructure to fail fast means creating systems
that can quickly detect and handle failures, improving reliability and
resilience. If a system goes down, most of the time, the problem is with the
data layer not being able to handle the stress rather than the application
compute layer. While scaling, when one or more components within the data
infrastructure fail, they should fail fast and recover fast. In the meantime,
since the data layer is stateful, the whole fail-and-recovery process should
minimize data inconsistency as well. ... By default, databases and data stores
need to be able to respond quickly to user queries under heavy throughput.
Users expect a real-time or near-real-time experience from all applications.
Much of the time, even a few milliseconds, is too slow. For instance, a web
API request may translate to one or a few queries to the primary on-disk
database and then a few to even tens of operations to the in-memory data
store. For each in-memory data store operation, a sub-millisecond response
time is a bare necessity for an expected user experience.
Quote for the day:
Leaders must be good listeners. It's
rule number one, and it's the most powerful thing they can do to build
trusted relationships. - Lee Ellis
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