SOFTWARE

Brittany Holloway-Brown, Photos: Adobe Stock

Docusign’s CTO Sagnik Nandy sees AI as a time-saver, an output accelerator…and a chainsaw.

AI can lop time and effort off tasks, but still requires a living being to approve the cuts—especially when integrating AI tools into your infrastructure.

“A human still is responsible for the chainsaw,” Nandy told us.

The agreement-management company has been proud of its AI assistance lately. Docusign’s CTO claims that AI has helped create around three-quarters of the organization’s new code, including internal tools, individual features, and platform enhancements. In the company’s most recent earnings call, CEO Allan Thygesen saw the increased output of AI-assisted shipped code as a way “to gain efficiencies and boost productivity in both engineering and customer-facing teams.”

A couple of years ago, Nandy said, the company’s use of AI was minimal and “vanilla.” His team wanted to scale adoption. “We really want to lean in. We want to do this big. We want to do this right, and we want to do this in a sustainable way,” he said. “We wanted to add clear value, leveraging AI tools.”

Sign here.—BH

      

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CYBERSECURITY

Cris Thomas

The online cybersecurity community is a vital force when it comes to identifying and closing vulnerabilities in software and systems. However, many organizations seem determined to keep that community at arm’s length—even if the latter’s work can help keep tech stacks secure.

Cris Thomas, security advocate at cybersecurity company Semgrep, told IT Brew that this tension is a longstanding one.

Thomas entered the cybersecurity scene via L0pht Heavy Industries, an early hacker collective. In 1998, Thomas, and his L0pht colleagues testified in front of Congress about the younger internet’s vulnerabilities.

Since then, Thomas has worked in cybersecurity roles for companies like IBM, Tenable, and Trustwave, while also serving as a white hat hacker and cybersecurity pundit.

More on (cybersecurity) community service.—CN

      

HARDWARE

Amelia Kinsinger

In early 2023, legal services firm TWM Solicitors got a lean, mean, and virtual machine.

The UK-based law practice gave each of its approximately 220 employees a thin client—a small physical computer (a 10ZiG, in this instance) that connects to one central desktop image managed by the company’s head of IT, Alan Barrett. While the firm had used Microsoft Remote Desktop Services for years, Barrett and his team migrated from that platform to Azure Virtual Desktop, upgraded to Microsoft 365, and rolled out dual monitors across all desks.

Thin clients seem like the right approach for a company with multiple physical locations and just a few IT professionals, including Barrett.

“Having a virtual desktop environment has been absolutely brilliant for us because it’s allowed us to control the configuration very accurately and run it centrally when we have such a diverse and dispersed workforce,” Barrett said.

Has the moment arrived for thin clients?—BH

      

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 20%. That’s the cash pay premium that network architecture skills are earning above base salary, according to a new report. (Network World)

Quote: “We can’t push everything into a once-a-month patching cycle anymore because the patch may arrive today and the working exploit could follow in less than three days.”—John Strand, owner of Black Hills Information Security, about the need for organizations to react rapidly to new patches (Dark Reading)

Read: How IBM built a powerful code-breaking computer for the NSA during the Cold War. (IEEE Spectrum)

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Francis Scialabba

A new survey of 300+ healthcare IT pros finds 6 in 10 aren’t confident they could contain a cyberattack, and 1 in 5 call themselves critically understaffed and at burnout risk.