New year, new faces. Here’s who rotated in and out of the IT C-suite in January.

Adam Ford leaves Illinois CISO position

After working for the state of Illinois’s tech department since 2000, CISO Adam Ford departed for cloud security company Zscaler. He announced the change in a post on LinkedIn.

Ford served as CISO for six years and four months, previously working for the state as a network security manager and network engineer. He worked concurrently in the Illinois State Police tech department, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Tampa CIO-CTO retires

Tampa’s CIO and CTO, Russell Haupert, retired in January. Haupert spent more than 12 years in the position after working as director of IT services for the Peoria, Illinois, county government.

“One thing led to another and eight years later I was the director there,” Haupert told state and local government news outlet StateScoop.

Read more here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Moving fast to grow your biz often leads to blindspots, especially when it comes to locking down your information security needs. But if you want to keep things moving forward, your prospects and customers need to know their data is safe and secure.

How to do it? Earn a certification in ISO 27001. Tons of startups and orgs have been getting it done. In fact, certifications in ISO 27001 have risen 450% in the past 10 years.

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Best of all, Thoropass is the only solution of its kind to provide end-to-end ISO 27001 certification from zero to audit—it’s a no-brainer.

Certify your safety.

Pay growth throughout the tech sector hit a speed bump in 2023, according to the latest edition of Dice’s annual Tech Salary Report. Workers aren’t particularly happy about it, either.

According to Dice, the survey of over 6,100 respondents found the average tech salary stood at $111,193 in 2023—down $155 from 2022. Meanwhile, the number of tech professionals who reported a pay cut doubled year over year to 12%, and the percentage who reported being either somewhat or very dissatisfied with their salaries grew from 30% to 35%.

Dice CEO Art Zeile told IT Brew that in 19 years of conducting the survey, this was the first year salary growth was flat.

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

Go ahead and enjoy a slow morning with a cup of Java—a new tech startup has launched an AI-powered platform that helps designers and developers expedite their coding and design process with one Swift click.

Singapore-based Locofy—which was founded in 2021, and has 21 employees—recently rolled out a beta version of Locofy Lightning, a feature that aims to take care of 80% of front-end work for web app development, according to co-founder Honey Mittal. As of now, the platform is in beta, which means interested users can test it for free as long as they are willing to provide feedback.

We caught up with Mittal and co-founder Sohaib Muhammad to chat about Locofy Lightning and what this means for both designers and developers. 

Keep reading here.—AF

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $400 million to $1 billion. That’s how much Amazon Web Services could make annually from charging customers for public IPv4 addresses, according to an estimate by Border0 CEO Andree Toonk. (The Register)

Quote: “From an HR standpoint, this is a nightmare…It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer.”—Meghan M. Biro, founder of online community TalentCulture, on mass layoffs at Google (the New York Times)

Read: Trust no one. This $25 million Hong Kong heist shows the era of the deepfake scam is here. (The Guardian)

Certified fresh: How to keep your information security squeaky clean? Get certified in ISO 27001. Thoropass’s new guide has all the deets to help you earn the cert. Get started.

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