IT STRATEGY

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There comes a time in every company’s life when they must choose: build out AI talent or outsource it?

AI talent is a hot commodity. According to a recent Dice report, almost three-fourths (73%) of tech job postings required at least one AI skill as of May.

But with a looming AI skills gap crisis, many businesses now face the challenge of securing that talent. Bjorn Reynolds, CEO at Safeguard Global, told IT Brew that businesses want to get to the “promised land of AI-driven efficiency,” and are weighing their options when it comes to finding professionals with the right skills.

“Businesses are evaluating large capital expenditures on the buy side and saying, ‘How do I find that capital, release that capital, [and] deploy it, versus trying to build it internally with my own teams?’” Reynolds said.

Get useful.—BM

      

Sponsored By JumpCloud

When an employee leaves, there’s a process. Access revoked, accounts closed, handoffs complete…you know the drill.

But when an AI agent’s project ends, well, nothing happens. No offboarding ticket. No access review. No one even notices because no one was formally responsible for it in the first place.

Research from JumpCloud found that only 21% of organizations have governance controls for nonhuman identities. That means most environments are quietly accumulating agents with standing access to systems, data, and workflows that no longer need them.

JumpCloud’s Agentic IAM treats agents like what they are—identities with a full life cycle. They give them a purpose and an owner. They govern their access while they’re active. And when the work is done, they wind them down like anyone else on the team.

Secure every identity—human or not.

CLOUD

Illustration: Anna Kim, Photos: Adobe Stock

Keep that engine running—but make sure it’s running smoothly.

For organizations looking to deploy AI solutions across the enterprise—especially agents—relying on complex, hybrid infrastructure is increasingly important. Those at the forefront of AI usage will also need new, powerful solutions to maintain their processing edge.

That’s part of what Robert Blumofe, EVP and CTO at Akamai Technologies, argues in a recent essay, in which he notes how the infrastructure changes necessary to handle agentic AI’s added demands are part of a historical pattern. Blumofe told IT Brew that the cloud is a good example of how technological infrastructure is adapting to the new needs of AI.

“The cloud is pretty central to almost all infrastructure—whether it’s web or internal or other types of applications—and I don’t think AI is an exception to that,” Blumofe said. “Which isn’t to say that there aren’t on-prem use cases; it’s not like the cloud took over 100% of all enterprise compute, but it took over a lot, and I think we see the same for AI.”

Embrace the agents.—EH

      

IT OPERATIONS

Anna Kim

One e-commerce CEO’s digital dream—a million site visitors in a day, all purchasing products!—is another site admin’s nightmare, especially if that IT pro hasn’t yet tested whether the platform and databases can handle a mob of lively leads.

A product launch or a flash sale often results in lots of new clicks from lots of new customers. A database “read” application request retrieves information and a “write” adds, changes, or removes data.

Off base! A database, like a tired parent, gets overloaded and ultimately breaks down when faced with lots of queries at once. One important countering strategy, according to Douglas Barahona, lead systems engineer at digital transformation agency Fueled, is to prevent queries from reaching the database where possible.

“The strategy starts way before the request gets to the database,” he said, noting these important safeguards.

List it.—BH

      

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $2.4 billion. That’s how much Visa will pay for BioCatch, an AI-forward fraud defense platform. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “We’re moving beyond this period of experimentation.”—Jennifer Hamel, IDC VP of enterprise data and AI services, on how AI deployment is shifting the tech industry (CIO Dive)

Read: New EU disclosure rules are about to show people how much AI they encounter day to day. (Wired)

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