IT OPERATIONS

Illustration: Anna Kim, Photo: Adobe Stock

Like the breakout star in a blockbuster movie, forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are gaining traction within the tech industry.

Hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft are standing up teams of FDEs to help clients effectively implement AI solutions. Earlier this month, Microsoft debuted Microsoft Frontier Company, a division it claims will deploy 6,000 “industry and engineering experts” to assist companies in building and iterating AI systems. Microsoft said it would invest $2.5 billion in this new entity.

Microsoft’s announcement came shortly after Amazon Web Services (AWS) shared that it would roll out a dedicated FDE organization, backed by a $1 billion investment.

Join the club. Jaclyn Rice Nelson, CEO and co-founder of Tribe AI, told IT Brew the hyperscalers’ sudden affinity for FDE businesses is driven by enterprises still struggling to implement and adopt AI solutions on their own.

“There’s a gap between what the technology can do and what enterprises can do, and the value they can get out of it, and that is a really big problem if you are a model provider or a hyperscaler,” Rice Nelson said. “And so these FDE arms, these separate companies, are built to go accelerate and close the gap for their customers, and therefore drive adoption for their products.”

Why smaller companies might struggle finding FDEs.—BM

      

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IT STRATEGY

Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

New York put a marker down in the fight to regulate AI, becoming the first state in the nation to enact a moratorium on data center infrastructure.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, signed the bill on July 14, restricting construction of data centers 50 megawatts or larger for one year.

It’s a less ambitious bill than legislation in Maine vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills, also a Democrat, in May; that law would have put data centers 20 megawatts or larger on ice until November 2027.

Nonetheless, the moratorium is a major step toward tighter regulation on data centers, one that hasn’t escaped scrutiny from industry analysts and advocates like Daniel Castro, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. In an email, Castro told IT Brew that a moratorium was the wrong approach, citing the possibility data centers could be built overseas instead as a reason to keep the infrastructure domestically located.

“The goal should be to enable responsible development, not delay it,” Castro wrote. “Americans should want the AI economy to run on data centers built in the United States, creating American jobs and strengthening US competitiveness, rather than pushing that investment overseas.”

Will local freezes stop national momentum?—EH

      

IT STRATEGY

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Summer months are known for vacations and professional inertia—but for the tech C-suite, the work, and the executive back and forth, continues.

Coinbase snags Unit 42’s Michael Sikorski as CISO

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase hired former Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 CTO Michael Sikoski as CISO in July, a hire aimed at shoring up the company’s cybersecurity bench.

Sikorski spent four years at Unit 42 as CTO. That position followed a year at Mandiant in research and development; prior to that, he worked at FireEye, ending with a year as VP of the FLARE team, a research division. He also had earlier stints at the NSA and MIT.

At Coinbase, Sikorski said in a LinkedIn post, he will help “secure the future of financial services, disrupt threat actors, and scale a highly resilient world-class security architecture.”

“As the threat landscape evolves toward increasingly complex, decentralized ecosystems with AI-enabled attackers, it’s time to step out of the advisory seat and take on this challenge directly,” Sikorski wrote.

See who else is moving this summer.—EH

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 53%. That’s the percentage of data center operators who reported difficulties finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, according to a global survey from Uptime Institute. (Network World)

Quote: “Organizations have strong visibility into the agents they know about, and it’s easy to mistake that for seeing everything.”—Hillary Baron, AVP of research at Cloud Security Alliance, on governance blind spots (CIO)

Read: What happens when you ask high school juniors and seniors to write AI policy for K-12 schools? (NPR)

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