CLOUD

Morning Brew Inc.

Sometimes, deploying AI is like an “As seen on TV” product. Take light-up shoelaces (bear with us). They’d certainly be useful if you frequently...lose your shoes in the dark. But if you manage to keep tabs on your trainers? You’re stuck with something you paid for that you won’t use.

The same goes for AI: Before deploying it, identify a use case. That’s the biggest piece of advice Morning Brew got from experts when we asked them what IT pros need to do to ensure their cloud platforms are ready for the data storage and analytics that AI entails. Without a thought-through use case (and AI-ready data), you risk committing AI—and its associated energy and costs—to questionable projects that might not benefit larger goals.

“Workload optimization goes down to even the granular task, job, application, and user level,” Linda Yao, VP and general manager of hybrid cloud and AI solutions at Lenovo, told Morning Brew. “That actually allows the organizations to ensure that they are using that precious compute [power] and using that precious technology on things that have a chance of succeeding rather than churning through those tokens.”

Chat, maximize strategy for me.—TC

      

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IT STRATEGY

Mike Anderson

If you’re a CIO who wants to figure out how your organization’s sales team can use AI agents, you’ll need to hear from the sales team directly. That’s harder than it sounds when you’re at a company with thousands of employees.

Mike Anderson, chief digital and information officer at cybersecurity and networking company Netskope, supports enterprise technology innovation for the organization’s 3,000 or so global employees. Back in May, he met with the company’s chief marketing officer, chief revenue officer, and head of go-to-market operations to figure out ways for the sales team to effectively use agents beyond just writing emails.

Such a discussion involves understanding everyone’s workflows, “really asking good questions and listening,” Anderson said.

That kind of meeting contrasts slightly from his experiences between 2018 and 2021, when he was SVP, CIO and digital leader, North America, at Schneider Electric, the energy-tech giant with 160,000 employees worldwide and many organizational layers between leadership and those executing projects.

Are there real differences?—BM

      

SNAP POLL

CYBERSECURITY

Francis Scialabba

Over the past few years, ransomware has evolved into one of the most pressing threats facing organizations and the IT professionals tasked with defending them. Ransomware attackers have embraced AI and cutting-edge tools to more effectively deceive employees, encrypt stolen data, and target vulnerable infrastructure.

Yes, it’s an intimidating problem, but cybersecurity experts have done excellent work figuring out how to mitigate this threat. In addition to employee education (“Don’t click on those suspicious links!”), organizations everywhere are adopting effective playbooks for ransomware attacks, including whether to pay ransoms, how to shield the tech stack against future attempts, and how to detect intruders before they penetrate too many systems.

IT Brew’s new e-book, Surviving Modern Ransomware, covers some of those defensive techniques, as well as the long-term impacts of attacks.

Survival tips.—BM, CN, BH, EH

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 284 million. That’s how many customer records cybercriminal group ShinyHunters claims it stole from McKesson, a healthcare provider. (SecurityWeek)

Quote: “We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore.”—one anonymous Meta data center worker on the social media giant’s push to autonomize its data centers (Ars Technica)

Read: AI trained on medical tasks is making human doctors nervous. (Wired)

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