"Whenever you see a successful person you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them." -- Vaibhav Shah
The Cost of Doing Nothing: Why Unstructured Data Is Draining IT Budgets
Think of it this way: the fundamental problem contemporary enterprises have with unstructured data isn’t actually the volume they own but the lack of visibility into what exists, where it resides, who owns it, and whether it still holds value. In this context, the only alternative they have is to store everything indefinitely, including redundant, obsolete, or trivial data that serves no business purpose. The key question here, of course, is how to manage data through its lifecycle? Ideally, an effective and strategic data management process should begin by establishing a single, enterprise-wide view of unstructured data to uncover inefficiencies and risks. ... Lifecycle management plays a central role in this, with files that have not been accessed for an extended period of time can be moved to lower-cost storage, while data that has been inactive for many years can be archived or deleted altogether. Many organizations discover that more than 60% of their stored information falls into these categories, illustrating just how much wasted capacity can be reclaimed with a policy-driven approach. ... It’s an approach that also benefits from the integration of vendor-neutral data management platforms capable of integrating data across diverse storage environments and clouds, eliminating lock-in while maintaining scalability. The outcome is greater cost control, improved compliance posture, and stronger decision-making foundations across the enterprise.Agentic AI is supercharging the deepfake crisis: How companies can take action
As agentic AI propels fraud to a whole new level, the best way to keep your company secure is by fighting fire with fire, or in this case, AI with AI. To do so, companies need to implement multi-layered AI defense strategies that make it exponentially harder for bad actors to succeed. Enterprises can’t rely on traditional verification methods that add more layers of friction or collect more personal data as that would deter customers. Instead, businesses need to rethink digital identity protection to reduce fraud and fraud-related losses, but to also preserve customer trust and digital engagement. To achieve this, organizations’ defense systems should contextualize individual actions, granularly isolate scopes of impact, and rely on ongoing reassessments of authorization. In other words, a highly secure system doesn’t just check a user’s identity once but continuously evaluates what the user is doing, where they are doing it, and why they are doing it. ... Using layered risk signals throughout the lifecycle of users—not just during onboarding— can provide companies with detailed information on potential risks, especially from internal sources like employees who can be fouled or whose access can be hijacked to compromise a company’s key assets. Companies can continuously check the reputation of users’ email addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses to see if any of those channels have previously been used for fraudulent activity, identifying fraud rings that are deploying AI agents at scale.Cyber resilience, AI & energy shape IT strategies for 2026
The historical approach - that of considering cyber resilience as a stand-alone issue, where one vendor can protect an entire company - will be put to bed. Organisations will move away from using point solutions and embrace the wider ecosystem of options as understanding grows that they can't go it alone. An interconnected framework can help prevent a ripple effect when an attack happens - users should be able to identify and halt an attack in progress. The rate and scale of attacks will continue and having a properly integrated framework is vital to mitigate risk and speed up recovery. ... As AI inference workloads are becoming part of the production workflow, organisations are going to have to ensure their infrastructure supports not just fast access but high availability, security and non-disruptive operations. Not doing this will be costly both from a results perspective and an operational perspective in terms of resource (GPUs) utilisation. ... By 2026, organisations will face a new problem: accounts and credentials that belong to people no longer with the company, but which still look and act like insiders. As HR and IT systems become more automated, old identities are easily missed. Accounts from former employees, departed contractors, and dormant service bots will linger in cloud environments and company software. Attackers will exploit these 'digital ghosts' because they appear legitimate, bypass automated offboarding, and blend in with normal system activity.
6 coding myths that refuse to die
A typical day as a developer can feel like you’re juggling an array (no pun intended) of tasks. You’re reading vague requirements, asking questions, reviewing designs, planning architecture, investigating bugs, reading someone else's code, writing documentation, attending standups, and occasionally, you actually get to write code. Why? Because software development is about problem-solving, not just code-producing. Real-world problems are messy. Users don’t always know what they want. Clients change their minds. Systems behave in mysterious ways. Before you even think about writing code, you often need to untangle the people-side and the process-side. ... The truth is that coding rewards persistence, curiosity, and willingness to improve far more than raw talent. Most developers I’ve worked with weren’t prodigies. They were people who kept showing up, kept asking questions, and kept refining their skills. ... Every working developer, no matter how experienced, looks up syntax constantly. We search the docs, we skim examples, we peek at old code, we search for things we’ve forgotten. Nobody expects you to memorize every keyword, operator, or built-in function. What matters in programming is the ability to break down a problem, think through the logic, and design a solution. Syntax is simply the tool you use to express that solution. It’s the grammar, not the message. So don't make this programming mistake and myth waste your time.Enterprises are neglecting backup plans, and experts warn it could come back to haunt them
Crucially, only 45% consistently follow the ‘3-2-1’ backup rule - three copies of data, stored on two different media types, with one copy kept off-site. The same number are failing to keep tamper-proof copies by using immutability across all their organizational backup data to ensure resilience against cyber attacks. ... "Most organizations now recognize the need to identify phishing scams or social engineering tactics; however, we can’t lose sight of what to do when disaster does strike. While complete prevention is near impossible, assurance of rapid recovery is fully within organizational control," he said. "Our research shows that UK organizations still aren’t taking adequate precautions when it comes to data backups. By storing data on immutable platforms, they can ensure business-critical information remains beyond the reach of adversaries and that operations stay up and running, even when systems are compromised." ... Backup strategies are now front of mind for many IT professions, alternative research shows. A survey from Kaseya earlier this year found 30% are losing sleep over lackluster backup and recovery strategies, with some pushing for a stronger focus on this area. Complacency was also identified as a recurring problem for many enterprises, according to Kaseya. Nearly two-thirds (60%) of respondents said they believed they could fully recover from a data loss incident in the space of a day.
Ransomware Moves: Supply Chain Hits, Credential Harvesting
Attack volume remains high. The quantity of victims listed across ransomware groups' data leak sites increased by one-third from September to October, says a report from cybersecurity firm Cyble. Groups listing the most victims included high-fliers Qilin and Akira, newcomer Sinobi - which only appeared in July - and stalwarts INC Ransom and Play. ... After a run of attacks targeting zero-day flaws in managed file transfer software, the group used the same strategy against Oracle E-Business Suite versions 12.2.3 through 12.2.14 to steal data. Clop appears to have targeted two zero-day vulnerabilities, "both of which allow unauthenticated access to core EBS components," giving the group "a fast and reliable entry point, which explains the scale of the campaign," said cybersecurity firm SOCRadar. Oracle issued updates fixing both of those flaws. Data theft tied to that campaign appeared to begin by August, although it didn't come to light until Clop revealed it ... One of the big reasons for ransomware's success has been cryptocurrency, which makes it easier for groups to monetize and cash out their attacks. Another has been the rise of the ransomware-as-a-service business model. This allows for specialization: operators can develop malware and shake down victims, while affiliated business partners focus on hacking, rather than malware development, with both reaping the rewards. Every time a victim pays a ransom, the industry standard is for an affiliate to keep 70% to 80%.
Essential 2026 skills that DevOp leaders need to prioritize
It may sound radical, but you should prepare for a future where DevOps professionals will no longer need to learn programming languages. The DevOps role will shift up more than most people expect, enabling your team members to become supervisory architects rather than hands-on coders. ... DevOps professionals will no longer need to rely on programming languages. Instead, they will use natural language to supervise and orchestrate processes across requirements, planning, development, testing, and deployment. This leads to the elimination of hand-offs between teams and a significant blurring of traditional roles. ... However, for this shift-up to be truly successful and safe in practice, that foundational knowledge of software engineering principles remains vital. Without understanding the why behind what you are asking AI to do, your team cannot evaluate the quality of the output. This lack of evaluation can easily lead to significant risks, such as vulnerabilities that result in security breaches. In the age of AI, human judgment remains as important as ever, but only if it’s informed by a deep understanding of what the AI is being asked to produce. ... As a leader, your challenge is to guide your organization through this transformative period. The future of software development isn’t about AI replacing humans; it’s about AI empowering humans to perform at a higher, more strategic level.
Building the Future: AI’s Role in Enterprise Evolution
The biggest obstacle we see for AI adoption isn't the technology itself, but the lack of clarity on the purpose for using it. The most critical part of any AI initiative is to understand why you want to use AI and how it can enhance your organisation’s unique attributes. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, since what works for one organisation may not work for others. A healthcare business needs data privacy for patient records, while a small startup’s goal is agility to release new product and sign new deals. These use cases will require different infrastructure investments and most workloads are not suited to the public cloud. ... Consider AI with a broader view, beyond just the technology itself. Dell approaches AI with three distinct perspectives in mind: the business side, the technical side and the people side. GenAI will provide a 20-30 per cent increase in productivity, eliminating mundane tasks and freeing people to focus on higher value work. Your employees are now available to use that extra time to reimagine processes and outcomes, creating value and efficiencies for the company.
From a people standpoint, the demand for curious, smart, adaptable employees will skyrocket. ... Many of our customers are in the early stages of their AI journey, experimenting with basic applications. Small and basic can have a big impact, so keep pushing forward. It's worth starting with pilot projects as they give you room to test and experiment with an application.
From a people standpoint, the demand for curious, smart, adaptable employees will skyrocket. ... Many of our customers are in the early stages of their AI journey, experimenting with basic applications. Small and basic can have a big impact, so keep pushing forward. It's worth starting with pilot projects as they give you room to test and experiment with an application.
We Need to Teach the ‘Inuit’ Mindset to Young Computing Engineers
Becoming accustomed to over-provisioned resources has brought further concerns. The decreasing cost of hardware encourages a certain complacency: if a code is inefficient in memory or CPU usage, one tends to trust that a more powerful machine or extra memory will solve the problem. ... This mindset contrasts with the traditional discipline of programming education, in which every instruction and every byte mattered, and optimization was an essential part of the computer science student’s training. The point here is that even while leveraging the benefits offered by AI in programming, an excessive dependence on AI-generated solutions and the over-provisioning of resources can undermine the proper development of computational, logical, and algorithmic thinking in future programmers or computing scientists. ... It is important to clarify that this is not about rejecting the use of AI and reverting to a former era of computing. Instead, we should integrate the best of both worlds. We must harness the tremendous potential of AI while instilling in students the ability to evaluate and improve solutions using their own sound judgement. As a direct consequence, a well-trained programmer will think twice before accepting an AI-generated solution if it uses resources disproportionately or does not guarantee adequate resilience when execution scenarios change drastically.
