Quote for the day:
"Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless." --Jamie Paolinetti
A Primer for CTOs: Taming Technical Debt
Taking a head-on approach is the most effective way to address technical debt,
since it gets to the core of the problem instead of slapping a new coat of paint
over it, Briggs says. The first step is for leaders to work with their
engineering teams to determine the current state of data management. "From
there, they can create a realistic plan of action that factors in their unique
strengths and weaknesses, and leaders can then make more strategic decisions
around core modernization and preventative measures." Managing technical debt
requires a long-term view. Leaders must avoid the temptation of thinking that
technical debt only applies to legacy or decades old investments, Briggs warns.
"Every single technology project has the potential to add to or remove technical
debt." He advises leaders to take a cue from medicine's Hippocratic Oath: "Do no
harm." In other words, stop piling new debt on top of the old. ... Technical
debt can be useful when it's a conscious, short-term trade-off that serves a
larger strategic purpose, such as speed, education, or market/first-mover
advantage, Gibbons says. "The crucial part is recognizing it as debt, monitoring
it, and paying it down before it becomes a more serious liability," he notes.
Many organizations treat technical debt as something they're resigned to live
with, as inevitable as the laws of physics, Briggs observes.
AI agents are a digital identity headache despite explosive growth
“AI agents are becoming more powerful, but without trust anchors, they can be
hijacked or abused,” says Alfred Chan, CEO of ZeroBiometrics. “Our technology
ensures that every AI action can be traced to a real, authenticated person—who
approved it, scoped it, and can revoke it.” ZeroBiometrics says its new AI agent
solution makes use of open standards and technology, and supports transaction
controls including time limits, financial caps, functional scopes and revocable
keys. It can be integrated with decentralized ledgers or PKI infrastructures,
and is suggested for applications in finance, healthcare, logistics and
government services. The lack of identity standards suited to AI agents is
creating a major roadblock for developers trying to address the looming market,
according to Frontegg. That is why it has developed an identity management
platform for developers building AI agents, saving them from spending time
building ad-hoc authentication workflows, security frameworks and integration
mechanisms. Frontegg’s own developers discovered these challenges when building
the company’s autonomous identity security agent Dorian, which detects and
mitigates threats across different digital identity providers. “Without proper
identity infrastructure, you can build an interesting AI agent — but you can’t
productize it, scale it, or sell it,” points out Aviad Mizrachi, co-founder and
CTO of Frontegg.
Rethinking digital transformation for the agentic AI era
Most CIOs already recognize that generative AI presents a significant evolution
in how IT departments can deliver innovations and manage IT services. “Gen AI
isn’t just another technology; it’s an organizational nervous system that
exponentially amplifies human intelligence,” says Josh Ray, CEO of Blackwire
Labs. “Where we once focused on digitizing processes, we’re now creating systems
that think alongside us, turning data into strategic foresight. The CIOs who
thrive tomorrow aren’t just managing technology stacks; they’re architecting
cognitive ecosystems where humans and AI collaborate to solve previously
impossible challenges.” IT service management (ITSM) is a good starting
point for considering gen AI’s potential. Network operation centers (NOCs) and
site reliability engineers (SREs) have been using AIOps platforms to correlate
alerts into time-correlated incidents, improve the mean time to resolution
(MTTR), and perform root cause analysis (RCA). As generative and agentic AI
assists more aspects of running IT operations, CIOs gain a new opportunity to
realign IT ops with more proactive and transformative initiatives. ...
“Opportunities such as gen AI for hotfix development and predictive AI to
identify, correlate, and route incidents for improved incident response are
transforming our business, resulting in improved customer satisfaction, revenue
retention, and engineering efficiency.”
Strengthening Software Security Under the EU Cyber Resilience Act: A High-Level Guide for Security Leaders and CISOs
One of the hardest CRA areas for organizations to get a handle on is knowing and
proving where appropriate controls and configurations are in place vs. where
they’re lacking. This lack of visibility often leads to underutilized licenses,
unchecked areas of product development, and the potential for unauthorized
access into sensitive areas of the development environment. One of the ways
security-conscious organizations are combating this is through the creation of
“paved pathways” that include very specific technology and security tooling to
be utilized across all their development environments, but this often requires
extreme vigilance of deviations within those environments and very few ways to
automate the adherence to those standards. Legit Security not only automatically
inventories and details what and where controls exist within an SDLC so you can
ensure 100% coverage of your application portfolio, but we also analyze all of
the configurations throughout the entirety of the build process to find any that
could allow for supply chain attacks or unauthorized access to SCMs or CI/CD
systems. This ensures that your teams are using secure defaults and putting
appropriate guardrails into development workflows. This also automates baseline
enforcement, configuration management, and quick resets to a known safe state
when needed.
Observability 2.0? Or Just Logs All Over Again?
As observability solutions have ostensibly become more mature over the last 15
years, we still see customers struggle to manage their observability estates,
especially with the growth of cloud native architectures. So-called “unified”
observability solutions bring tools to manage the three pillars, but cost and
complexity continue to be major pain points. Meanwhile, the volume of data has
kept rising, with 37% of enterprises ingesting more than a terabyte of log data
per day. Legacy logging solutions typically deal with the problems of high data
volume and cardinality through short retention windows and tiered storage —
meaning that data is either thrown away after a fairly short period of time or
stored in frozen tiers where it goes dark. Meanwhile, other time series or
metric databases take high-volume source data, aggregate it into metrics, then
discard the underlying logs. Finally, tracing generates so much data that most
traces aren’t even stored in the first place. Head-based sampling retains a
small percentage of traces, typically random, while tail-based sampling allows
you to filter more intelligently but at the cost of efficient processing. And
then traces are typically discarded after a short period of time. There’s a
common theme here: While all of the pillars of observability provide different
ways of understanding and analyzing your systems, they all deal with the problem
of high cardinality by throwing data away.
What it really takes to build a resilient cyber program
A good place to begin is the ‘Identify’ phase from NIST’s Incident Response
guide. You need to identify all of your risks, vulnerabilities, and assets.
Prioritize them and then determine the best way to protect and detect threats
against those assets. Assets not only include physical things like laptops and
phones, but also anything that is in a Cloud Service Provider, SaaS
applications, and digital items like domain names. Determine the threats, risks
and vulnerabilities to those assets. Prioritize them and determine how your
organization is going to protect and monitor them. Most organizations don’t have
a very good idea of what they actually own, which is why they tend to be
reactive and waste time on actions that do not apply to them. How often has a
security analyst been asked if a recently disclosed zero-day affects the
company? They perform the scans and pull in data manually only to discover they
don’t run that piece of software or hardware. ... Many organizations use a red
team exercise to try and blame someone or group for a deficiency or even to
score an internal political point. That will never end well for anyone. The name
of the game is improvement in your security posture and these help identify
areas of weakness. There might be things that don’t get fixed immediately, or
maybe ever, but knowing that the gap exists is the critical first step.
Top tips for successful threat intelligence usage
“The value of threat intelligence is directly tied to how well it is ingested,
processed, prioritized, and acted upon,” wrote Cyware in their report. This
means a careful integration into your existing constellation of security tools
so you can leverage all your previous investment in your acronyms of SOARs,
SIEMs and XDRs. According to the Greynoise report “you have to embed the TIP
into your existing security ecosystem, making sure to correlate your internal
data and use your vulnerability management tools to enhance your incident
response and provide actionable analytics.” The keyword in that last sentence is
actionable. Too often threat intel doesn’t guide any actions, such as kicking
off a series of patches to update outdated systems, or remediation efforts to
firewall a particular network segment or taking offline an offending
device. ... Part of the challenge here is to prevent siloed specialty
mindsets from making the appropriate remedial measures. “I’ve seen time and time
again when the threat intel or even the vulnerability management team will send
out a flash notification about a high priority threat only for it to be lost in
a queue because the threat team did not chase it up. It’s just as important for
resolver groups to act as it is for the threat team to chase it,” Peck blogged.
How empathy is a leadership gamechanger in a tech-first workplace
Empathy isn’t just about creating a feel-good workplace—it’s a powerful driver
of innovation and performance. When leaders lead with empathy, they unlock
something essential: a work culture where people feel safe to speak up, take
risks, and bring their boldest ideas to life. That’s where real progress
happens. Empathy also enhances productivity, employees who feel valued and
supported are more motivated to perform at their highest potential. Research
shows that organisations led by empathetic leaders experience a 20% increase in
customer loyalty, underscoring the far-reaching impact of a people-first
approach. When employees thrive, so do customer relationships, business
outcomes, and overall organisational growth. In India, where workplace dynamics
are often shaped by hierarchical structures and collectivist values, empathetic
leadership can be transformative. By prioritising open communication,
recognition, and personal development, leaders can strengthen employee morale,
increase job satisfaction, and drive long-term loyalty. ... In a tech-first
world, empathy isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a leadership gamechanger. When leaders
lead with heart and clarity, they don’t just inspire people, they unlock their
full potential. Empathy fuels trust, drives innovation, and builds workplaces
where people and ideas thrive.
Analyzing the Impact of AI on Critical Thinking in the Workplace
Instead of generating content from scratch, knowledge workers increasingly
invest effort in verifying information, integrating AI-generated outputs into
their work, and ensuring that the final outputs meet quality standards. What is
motivating this behavior? Some explanations for these trends could be to enhance
work quality, develop professional AI skills, laziness, and the desire to avoid
negative outcomes like errors. For example, someone who is not very proficient
in the English language could use GenAI to make their emails sound a lot more
natural and avoid any potential misunderstandings. On the flipside, there are
some drawbacks to using GenAI. These include overreliance on GenAI for routine
or lower-stakes tasks, time pressures, limited awareness of potential AI
pitfalls, and challenges in improving AI responses. ... The findings suggest
that GenAI tools can reduce the perceived cognitive load for certain tasks.
However, they find that GenAI poses risks to workers’ critical thinking skills
by shifting their roles from active problem-solvers to AI output overseers who
must verify and integrate responses into their workflows. Once again (and this
can not be emphasized enough) the study underscores the need for designing GenAI
systems that actively support critical thinking. This will ensure that
efficiency gains do not come at the expense of developing essential critical
thinking skills.
Harnessing Data Lineage to Enhance Data Governance Frameworks
One of the most immediate benefits is improved data quality and troubleshooting.
When a data quality issue arises, data lineage’s detailed trail can help you to
quickly identify where the problem originated, so that you can fix errors and
minimize downtime. Data lineage also enables better planning, since it allows
you to run more effective data protection impact analysis. You can map data
dependencies to assess how changes like system upgrades or new data integrations
might affect your overall data integrity. This is especially valuable during
migrations or major updates, as you can proactively mitigate any potential
disruptions. Furthermore, regulatory compliance is also greatly enhanced through
data lineage. With a complete audit trail documenting every data movement and
transformation, organizations can more easily demonstrate compliance with
regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. ... Developing a comprehensive data
lineage framework can take substantial time, not to mention significant funds.
In addition to the various data lineage tools, you might also need to have
dedicated hosting servers, depending on the level of compliance needed, or to
hire data lineage consultants. Mapping out complex data flows and maintaining
up-to-date lineage in a data landscape that’s constantly shifting requires
continuous attention and investment.
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