Like pop mogul Taylor Swift, Aviatrix has had a lot of “eras” in its lifetime.

The Santa Clara, California-based company, launched in 2014, initially started out as a “networking-focused” company, according to Bryan Ashley, Aviatrix’s VP of product marketing. Over the next decade, Aviatrix slowly “morphed” into the network security company it is today. However, Ashley added that the company’s changes over the years didn’t happen overnight.

“We’ve been able to evolve our traditional networking solution and apply it to more of those security outcomes,” Ashley said.

In its latest chapter, the cloud network security company relaunched its channel partner program with a revamped strategy around how it incentivizes its channel partners.

“We’ve brought on…Anh Profiti, a really strong channel leader, and have built out the appropriate motions to be able to scale those solutions effectively and reach more customers,” he said.

IT Brew caught up with Ashley to discuss Aviatrix’s journey in the past decade, and the trajectory of the cloud network security industry.

Read the rest here.—BM

The power of Intel Inside sounds like a big plus—until you’re on the outside.

A big shakeup is coming to one of the tech industry’s major players, as Intel plans to cut over 20% of its staff. The layoffs, framed as “restructuring” under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan, are expected to be announced this week, according to Bloomberg. Sources told the paper that the reductions are in service of efforts to “streamline management and rebuild an engineering-driven culture.” Intel did not return a request for comment by press time.

Flashback. That’s a marked difference from how former CEO Pat Gelsinger framed similar job cuts last August. Those reductions, 15% of the workforce at the time—ultimately, about 15,000 workers—were positioned as a regrettable response to slowing sales and a series of poor business decisions.

“Simply put, we must align our cost structure with our new operating model and fundamentally change the way we operate,” Gelsinger said at the time. “Our revenues have not grown as expected—and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends.”

Read more here.—EH

The AI threat facing IT professionals in 2024 was less evil, autonomous robot and more curious, human employee accidentally leaking data, according to Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations report, released on Apr. 23.

In addition to discovered increases in vulnerability exploits and third-party compromises, the report also noted GenAI threats are coming from inside the house, as companies build their own AI infrastructures and experiment with outside services.

A questionnaire of 2,850 global executives, conducted by employee-experience org G-P and fielded in Jan. 2025, found that 91% of respondents are “scaling up” GenAI initiatives. (And 35% of business leaders reported they would just “use the tools anyway, even if they were not authorized.”)

Verizon, in its look at more than 12,195 breaches between Nov. 1, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2024, noted that 15% of employees were accessing GenAI platforms, and of that group, 72% were using non-corporate emails as accounts identifiers. The findings suggest use outside of corporate policy, according to the report’s writers.

“The biggest challenge a lot of organizations face are really often self-inflicted at this point. Now that’s not to say that threat actors won’t continue to evolve the weaponization of AI, but for a lot of organizations, it’s their internal use that gets them in trouble,” Chris Novak, VP of global cybersecurity solutions at Verizon, told IT Brew.

We spoke with Novak about all that trouble, and how IT pros can stay out of it.

Keep reading here.—BH