Artificial intelligence is optimising the entire M&A lifecycle by providing data-driven insights at every stage to enable informed decisions. Companies considering a merger or acquisition can use AI to understand market trends, performance of past deals, and other events of relevance to decide the way forward. On the potential candidates, big data, analytics and AI algorithms help process vast corporate information from a variety of sources – financial statements, analyst briefings, media reports, and more– to identify acquisition targets meeting their requirements. AI augment the experts in due diligence performing complex financial modelling or reviewing extensive legal documents, conduct risk analysis with higher accuracy at a fraction of the time, compared to existing methods. ... For the legacy enterprise system, at times replacing with a cloud-based solution, organisations can become operational within six to fourteen months, depending on size, which is much faster than the time taken in a traditional on-premise scenario. ... Differences in the merging companies’ technology architectures, tools and configurations, make it extremely challenging to ascertain M&A security posture accurately, completely, and on time, even if the organisations are already on the same cloud.
Time for a change: Elevating developers’ security skills
With detection and remediation tools trivializing code security in the same environments they trained with, it’s not unreasonable to think that junior engineers could maintain the ability to perform this basic task as well as maintain an understanding of the risks and consequences of the vulnerabilities they create as they draft code. For mid-level engineers, given the increased security proficiency earlier in their careers, it can now be expected that it’s their responsibility to necessitate code security with their engineers, before it is even reviewed by senior developers. ... For this effort, developers get a pretty substantial boost to their skill set with this deepened security knowledge, which can be very valuable given the current state of affairs for hiring cybersecurity professionals with a dearth of talent available, growing backlogs, and increasing cybersecurity risks in number and scope. Most importantly, they can achieve it without sacrificing productivity – detecting and remediating vulnerabilities can be done as easily as spellcheck finds spelling errors, and training can be short and tailored to what they’re working on, all within the integrated development environment (IDE) they work in every day. ... In addition, organizations can finally achieve the vision of true shift-left by integrating security into every level of the SDLC and adopt the culture of security they’ve rightly been clamoring for.
How Your Digital Footprint Fuels Cyberattacks — and What to Do About It
If you are like most of us, you have been using digital services for years not
realizing that you have been giving hackers access to the details of your
personal life. On social media, we voluntarily share PII about who we are and
where we are, using the location check-in features. ... Reducing your digital
footprint doesn’t have to mean going off the grid. Here are some practical
steps you can take — Use separate emails for different accounts: Don’t rely on
one email for everything. This minimizes the damage if one account is hacked —
it won’t lead hackers to all your other services. Review privacy settings
regularly: Many apps have default settings that overshare your information.
For instance, on apps like Strava or Telegram, you can turn off location
tracking and limit who can contact you or add you to conversations. A quick
check of these settings can significantly reduce your exposure. Avoid saving
passwords in web browsers: Browsers prioritize convenience, not security.
Instead, use a password manager. These tools securely store your passwords and
can generate strong, unique ones for each account. This reduces the risk of
malware or phishing attacks stealing your credentials directly from your
browser. Think before you post: Share less on social media, especially in real
time. This will make you harder to track and target.
What is career catfishing, the Gen Z strategy to irk ghosting corporates?
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After slogging through the exhausting process of job hunting — submitting
countless applications, enduring endless rounds of interviews, and anxiously
waiting for updates from unresponsive hiring managers — Gen Z workers have
found a way to reclaim the balance of power. The rising trend, dubbed “career
catfishing,” involves Gen Zs (those aged 27 and under) accepting job offers
only to never show up on their first day. According to a survey by CV Genius,
which polled 1,000 UK employees across generations, approximately 34 per cent
of Zoomers admitted to engaging in career catfishing. ... Gen Z alone cannot
shoulder the blame for the rise of such behaviours. Office ghosting — where
one party cuts off communication without notice — is now a common phenomenon.
... Managers and owners identified entitlement, motivation, lack of effort,
and productivity as reasons for terminating Gen Z employees. Some even
referred to them as the snowflake generation and claimed they were too easily
offended, which further justified their dismissal. The practice of career
catfishing could further reinforce these stereotypes, making it even harder
for young professionals to build trust with potential employers.
The next AI wave — agents — should come with warning labels
AI agents that use unclean data can introduce errors, inconsistencies, or
missing values that make it difficult for the model to make accurate
predictions or decisions. If the dataset has missing values for certain
features, for instance, the model might incorrectly assume relationships or
fail to generalize well to new data. An agent could also draw data from
individuals without consent or use data that’s not anonymized properly,
potentially exposing personally identifiable information. Large datasets with
missing or poorly formatted data can also slow model training and cause it to
consume more resources, making it difficult to scale the system. In addition,
while AI agents must also comply with the European Union’s AI Act and similar
regulations, innovation will quickly outpace those rules. Businesses must not
only ensure compliance but also manage various risks, such as
misrepresentation, policy overrides, misinterpretation, and unexpected
behavior. “These risks will influence AI adoption, as companies must assess
their risk tolerance and invest in proper monitoring and oversight,” according
to a Forrester Research report — “The State Of AI Agents” — published in
October.
Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform
“We used to pay for VMware software one month in arrears,” he said. “With
Broadcom we had to pay a year in advance with a two-year contract.” That
arrangement, the CEO said, would have created extreme stress on company
cashflow. “We would not be able to compete with the market,” he said. “We had
customers on contracts, and they would not pay for a price increase.”
Windbichler considered legal action, but felt the fight would have been slow
and expensive. Anexia therefore resolved to migrate, a choice made easier by
its ownership of another hosting business called Netcup that ran on a
KVM-based platform. Another factor in the company’s favour was that it
disguised the fact it ran VMware with an abstraction layer it called “Anexia
Engine” that meant customers never saw Virtzilla’s wares and instead worked in
a different interface to manage their VM fleets. ... The CEO thinks more
companies will move from VMware. “I do not believe Broadcom will be
successful,” he told The Register. “They lost all the trust. I have talked to
so many VMware customers and they say they cannot work with a company like
that.” Regulators are also interested in Broadcom’s practices, he said.
Preparing for AI regulation: The EU AI Act
Among the uses of AI that are banned under Article 5 are AI systems that
deploy subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully
manipulative or deceptive techniques. Article 5 also prohibits the use of AI
systems that exploit any of the vulnerabilities of a person or a specific
group of people due to their age, disability, or a specific social or economic
situation. Systems that analyse social behaviours and then use this
information in a detrimental way are also prohibited under Article 5 if their
use goes beyond the original intent of the data collection. Other areas
covered by Article 5 include the use of AI systems in law enforcement and
biometrics. Industry observers describe the act as a “risk-based” approach to
regulating artificial intelligence. ... Organisations operating in the EU
will need to take into account CSRD. Given the power-hungry nature of machine
learning and AI inference, the extent to which AI is used may well be
influenced by such regulations going forward. While it builds on existing
regulations, as Mélanie Gornet and Winston Maxwell note in the Hal Open
Science paper The European approach to regulating AI through technical
standards, the AI Act takes a different route from these. Their observation is
that the EU AI Act draws inspiration from European product safety rules.
Enterprise Data Architecture: A Decade of Transformation and Innovation
Privacy and compliance drive architectural decisions. The One Identity Graph
we developed manages complex customer relationships while ensuring CCPA and
GDPR compliance. This graph-based solution has prevented data breaches and
reduced regulatory risks by implementing automated data lineage tracking,
consent management, and real-time data masking. These features reinforce
customer trust through transparent data handling and granular access controls.
The business impact proves substantial. The platform’s real-time fraud
detection analyzes transaction patterns across multiple channels, preventing
fraudulent activities before completion. It optimizes inventory dynamically
across thousands of locations by simultaneously processing point-of-sale data,
supply chain updates, and external market factors. Supply chain disruptions
trigger immediate alerts through a sophisticated event correlation engine,
enabling preventive action before customer impact. Edge computing represents
the next frontier. Processing data closer to its source minimizes latency,
critical for IoT applications and real-time decisions. Our implementation
reduces data transfer costs by 40% while improving response times for
customer-facing applications.
AI is set to transform education — what enterprise leaders can learn from this development
While AI tools show immense promise in addressing resource constraints, their
adoption raises broader questions about the role of human connection in
learning. Which brings us back to Unbound Academy. Students will spend two
hours online each school morning working through AI-driven lessons in math,
reading, and science. Tools like Khanmigo and IXL will personalize the
instruction and analyze progress, adjusting the difficulty and content in
real-time to optimize learning outcomes. The Charter application asserts that
“this ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal
level, preventing boredom or frustration.” Unbound Academy’s model
significantly reduces the role of human teachers. Instead, human “guides”
provide emotional support and motivation while also leading workshops on life
skills. What will students lose by spending most of their learning time with
AI instead of human instructors, and how might this model reshape the teaching
profession? The Unbound Academy model is already used in several private
schools and the results they have obtained are used to substantiate the
advantages it claims. ... For any of this to happen, the industry needs action
that matches the rhetoric.
6 ways continuous learning can advance your career
Joys said thinking critically is about learning how a new idea or innovation
might be translated into the current organizational context. "At the end of
the day, the company is writing a paycheck for you," he said. "Think about how
new stuff provides business value." Joys said professionals also need to
ensure the benefits of the things they introduce through their learning
processes are tracked and traced. "That's about measuring those efforts to
ensure you can say, 'Here's a new piece of technology. Here's how we'll
measure how this technology lines up with our corporate strategy and vision.'"
... Worsley told ZDNET he likes to learn on the job rather than acquire new
knowledge in the classroom. "I'm not a bookish person. I don't go out and
read. I recognize that I need to learn specific things because I've got a
problem to solve," he said. "I'll learn about it, get the right people
talking, and get the solutions underway. Tell me something's impossible and
I'll tell you it's not." ... Keith Woolley, chief digital and information
officer at the University of Bristol, said the great thing about his job is
that it's like a hobby. "I'm naturally interested in what I do. So, I read
things around me without realizing I'm consuming other information," he said.
"If you're excited about what you do, learning comes naturally because it's a
genuine interest. Then learning happens when you don't expect it."
Quote for the day:
"Doing what you love is the
cornerstone of having abundance in your life." -- Wayne Dyer
