No. 1 Reason The ‘Shadow IT’ Trend Is Benefiting Careers But Hampering Companies
Kirimli agrees that while on the surface this trend might seem beneficial,
there’s a downside. “While ‘Shadow IT’ might seem like a quick solution for
faster project delivery, its drawbacks are too significant to ignore,” he
declares. “Safety standards are compromised, recovering accounts becomes a
nightmare and company resources are inefficiently utilized.” ... “Convenience
is a major reason that shadow IT occurs,” according to Vineet Jain, the
co-founder and CEO of Egnyte, a data security startup in Silicon Valley.
“Employees sometimes use unauthorized apps or services that make their lives
easier—regardless of whether their employer has approved their use of those
apps or services. For example, in the early 2000s, cloud technology was
becoming more prominent as a way to let workers access the same files and
services from any device or share heavy files that couldn't be attached to
emails. Before cloud technology went mainstream, employees were using their
own software of choice to access the cloud, bypassing IT in doing so. The
cloud eventually got so mainstream that it became a corporate initiative.”
AI governance and cybersecurity certifications: Are they worth it?
When the certifications are combined with a strong history of putting it into
action, then you get a strong competitive advantage. Once formal standards are
released, Bartoletti expects to see a lot more certifications coming out,
covering specific topics like how to comply with the EU AI Act, or with NIST,
or with other rules and regulations. “I think there will also be a lot of
attention on specific sectors, like governing AI in healthcare, or in
financial services.” Certifications like the AIGP are particularly valuable
for consultants, agrees Steve Ross, director of cybersecurity for the Americas
at S-RM Intelligence and Risk Consulting. “Our clients are feeling the
uncertainty,” Ross tells CSO. “They would like to increase the use of AI but
nobody knows how to use it safely, securely, ethically — and are looking for
someone they can trust to do that.” As a result, clients will be looking for
the certifications over the next two or three years. “I don’t have one of
these certifications, but am thinking of pursuing them,” Ross adds, such as
the AIGP certification, which he finds interesting.
Tech’s new arms race: The billion-dollar battle to build AI
Nevertheless, smaller models may be right for certain applications, especially
those where complete knowledge across multiple data domains is not needed. For
example, an SLM can be used to fine-tune company-specific data and jargon to
provide accurate and personalized responses to customer queries. Or, one could
be trained using data for a specific industry or market segment or used to
generate comprehensive and tailored research reports and answers to queries.
As Rowan Curran, a senior AI analyst at Forrester Research said recently about
the different language model options, “You don’t need a sportscar all the
time. Sometimes you need a minivan or a pickup truck. It is not going to be
one broad class of models that everyone is using for all use cases.” ... Just
as rising costs have historically restricted the number of companies capable
of building high-end semiconductors, similar economic pressures now shape the
landscape of large language model development. These escalating costs threaten
to limit AI innovation to a few dominant players, potentially stifling broader
creative solutions and reducing diversity in the field.
Strategies for preventing AI misuse in cybersecurity
No technology, including AI, is inherently good or bad. It’s all about how we
use them. And yes, while AI is very powerful in helping us speed up everyday
tasks, the bad guys can use it to do the same. We will see phishing emails
that are more convincing and more dangerous than ever before thanks to AI’s
ability to mimic humans. If you combine that with multi-modal AI models that
can create deepfake audio and video, it’s not impossible that we’ll need
two-step verification for every virtual interaction with another person. It’s
not about where the AI technology is today, it’s about how sophisticated it
gets in a few years if we remain on this same trajectory. Fighting these
sophisticated threats requires equally advanced AI-driven behavioral analytics
to spot anomalies in communication and AI-augmented digital content
verification tools to spot deepfakes. Threat intelligence platforms that
utilize AI to sift through and analyze vast amounts of data to predict and
neutralize threats before they strike are another robust defense. However,
tools are limited in their usefulness. I believe we will see the rise of
in-person and face-to-face interactions for highly sensitive workflows and
data.
9 in 10 Attacks Start With Phishing: Can AI Save The Day? Expert Analysis
Josh Amishav Founder and CEO at Breachsense told Techopedia that LLMs, like
those used in generative AI for anti-spam, offer significant advantages over
traditional methods by being able to understand and generate human-like text.
This helps them better identify subtle nuances and variations in phishing
tactics. “Unlike rule-based systems, LLMs can generalize from past data
to recognize and react to previously unseen types of spam and phishing
attacks. This adaptability allows them to continuously improve their detection
accuracy via continuous training to update their models. “Generative AI will
certainly enhance anti-spam and phishing protection by leveraging predictive
capabilities and natural language understanding to better identify and block
sophisticated threats,” Amishav said. “Having said that, there are a number of
techniques threat actors could use to evade detection. “LLMs are only as good
as the models they’re trained on. If attackers can poison the training model
or develop strategies that bypass the model’s ability to properly classify the
attack then the effectiveness of these systems could be compromised.”
Unlocking Business Potential: Leveraging Data Protection for Growth and Privacy
The modern competitive business landscape demands businesses to differentiate
themselves from others in every aspect of customer satisfaction. And data
protection plays a crucial role in navigating the wonderful journey of lasting
customer relationships. Your customers actively seek service providers
prioritizing their privacy, security, and consent as a part of their business
strategy. This means if a business needs to thrive in a highly competitive
landscape, it must make data protection a core element of its value
proposition. Whether it’s about investing in tools and technologies or
implementing stringent privacy policies, everything contributes to enhancing
customer trust and brand reputation in the long run. Remember, when customers
perceive a business as a trusted guardian of their sensitive information,
they’re more likely to choose its services and products over those of
competitors. When we talk about data protection, it’s not just about a legal
obligation; it’s a strategic imperative for enterprises aiming to unlock
diverse growth opportunities. Hence, prioritizing data protection not only
lays a strong foundation of trust, it also enables customers to stay loyal to
a brand.
5 tips for building highly scalable cloud-native apps
To build systems that are highly available and horizontally scalable, you need
an architecture that is built using scalable and composable building blocks.
Concretely, the work done by a scalable system should grow linearly with the
increase in system size. The original Kafka architecture does not fulfill this
criteria because many aspects of load increase non-linearly with the system
size. For instance, as the cluster size increases, the number of connections
increases quadratically, since all clients typically need to talk to all the
brokers. Similarly, the replication overhead also increases quadratically,
since each broker would typically have followers on all other brokers. The end
result is that adding brokers causes a disproportionate increase in overhead
relative to the additional compute/storage capacity that they bring. A second
challenge is ensuring isolation between tenants. In particular, a misbehaving
tenant can negatively impact the performance and availability of every other
tenant in the cluster. Even with effective limits and throttling, there will
likely always be some load patterns that are problematic.
Implementing digital evaluation systems: Best practices for educators
The implementation of digital evaluation systems is an iterative process that
necessitates continuous evaluation and improvement. Board/University should
frequently examine the platform’s performance in meeting predefined goals and
fix any difficulties or challenges that occur. Soliciting comments from
evaluators and administrators can provide useful information for enhancing
system usability, functionality, and user experience. The Boards/Universities
can maintain the long-term sustainability and relevance of the digital
evaluation system by constantly analysing and developing it to improve result
processing. Digital evaluation goes beyond grading; it is a transformative
tool for educational excellence and legacy building. It enables
Boards/Universities to carefully review student answer booklets, ensuring
accuracy and fairness in evaluation. Streamlining administrative processes
speeds up the publication of results while maintaining security and
efficiency. This is more than just promoting student success; it is about
continuous improvement, data security, and personalised evaluation
experiences.
MongoDB and Google Cloud Collaborate to Optimise Gemini Code Assist for Developers Building Applications on MongoDB
Developers today want to integrate generative AI-powered coding assistants to
automate parts of their day-to-day workflows so they can significantly
increase their productivity and focus on difficult problems. Gemini Code
Assist is trained on publicly available datasets, has full codebase awareness,
and integrates with popular applications, source-code repositories, and code
editors. MongoDB and Google Cloud have partnered closely to help improve
Gemini Code Assist responses, bringing a greater depth of intelligence for
developers on MongoDB. Through this integration, developers can get enhanced
suggestions for MongoDB to help them more quickly build and modernize their
applications, and easily access highly curated content and code from MongoDB
documentation, detailed use cases, and common tasks with best practices that
developers encounter when working with data on MongoDB. Consequently, Gemini
Code Assist will help developers more quickly write high-quality code when
building data aggregations, performing database operations, and accelerating
migration of applications to MongoDB for modernization.
Eight Overlooked Emerging Tech Risks and How to Mitigate Them
When emerging technology doesn’t align with a company’s strategic goals, it
can lead to poor ROI and low stakeholder buy-in. For example, a manufacturing
company that installs IoT sensors to monitor equipment health without
integrating them into existing maintenance strategies risks unplanned
downtime, increased costs and reduced productivity. To avoid these risks,
ensure that emerging technology aligns with the company’s strategic vision.
This requires choosing technology that supports business objectives and
planning for change management, workforce training and adequate budget. ...
When the board of directors and executive leadership lack an understanding of
emerging technologies, it can impact decision-making. ... Treating emerging
technology as a tool for incremental improvement rather than business
transformation can limit success. A traditional retailer embracing e-commerce,
for example, needs to go beyond launching an online store by incorporating
data analytics and AI for personalized marketing to realize full benefits.
These changes improve the customer experience, streamline operations and open
new growth opportunities.
Quote for the day:
“The greatest discovery of all time is
that a person can change their future by merely changing their attitude.” --
Oprah Winfrey
