Shoot for the moon and if you miss, you will still be among the stars…and soon, possibly some data centers.

According to a recent white paper from Lumen Orbit, a startup with the goal of creating data centers in space, the future of AI development will depend largely on our ability to execute new data centers that require “many” gigawatts of new energy projects to power them, a task that might be challenging on Earth, but easier in orbit. Besides, in space, nobody can hear data centers scream.

Researchers of the white paper claim that data centers in space, dubbed orbital data centers, offer several advantages compared to their terrestrial counterparts, including:

• Reduced operating expenses from relying on 24/7 solar power that is unhampered by factors such as day/night cycles and weather.
• The ability to be linearly scaled almost “indefinitely,” allowing for power generation in the gigawatt range. (For perspective, Oracle chairman and CTO Lawrence Ellison told investors on the company’s latest quarterly earnings call that its largest data center has a capacity of 800 megawatts.)
• A faster speed of deployment due to a lack of permitting constraints.

The white paper was co-authored by Ezra Feilden, Adi Oltean, and Philip Johnston, co-founders of Lumen Orbit, the Redmond, Washington-based startup that believes data centers in space can be “cost competitive, sustainable, and rapidly scalable.” Johnston told IT Brew that the argument for orbital data centers goes beyond it just being a “cool” idea.

Read the rest here.—BM

Your IT might be holding you back from truly effective AI. What are you doing so your IT is able to support it? Optimize your technology and operations to support AI workloads through automation and AI-ready, hybrid cloud infrastructure with IBM. IBM can help you maximize the value of your own data while meeting your technology and compute needs across multiple cloud and on-premise environments to fuel AI.

Unite your IT to unleash AI across your business by:

• simplifying technology management and operations with automation
• unlocking more ROI from your IT estate to drive AI initiatives
• building a data and AI-ready IT infrastructure

Get started.

Should the US government follow China’s lead and be more proactive in how it works with hackers?

Kara Sprague, incoming CEO of HackerOne, argues that there are some aspects of the Chinese system the West could emulate.

“I have not seen North America or even the United States organize that level of defense activity, so to speak, or try to proactively identify those vulnerabilities and fix them,” Sprague told IT Brew. “And so I think there is something to be learned from how different nations are addressing these issues.”

Locked down. There are some government-sponsored hacking contests in the US. Hack the Pentagon, a competition to break through Department of Defense protections, has been running since 2016. In 2023, the White House launched an AI-based hacking challenge with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, commonly known by its acronym, DARPA.

Read more here.—EH

Like Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson indulging themselves at your expense on what was supposed to be the happiest day of your life, threat actors love to crash a union.

Mergers and acquisitions attract cyberattackers, according to tech pros who spoke with IT Brew, and businesses that lack a full understanding of their target partner’s security posture face costly risks.

“These target organizations: Maybe they’re startups, maybe they’re smaller. Thinking about risk management is usually something that comes later in the stage of a company,” Stephen Boyer, co-founder and chief innovation officer at risk-management provider Bitsight, told IT Brew.

In an August midyear assessment, cyber risk management and insurer Resilience revealed that vendor-driven claims were the fastest-growing area in the company’s portfolio, and now “the fastest growing cause of loss.”

“Some of the past year’s most devastating cyber incidents involved heavily interconnected systems or recently acquired companies,” the report’s authors explained.

CISOs have the challenge of knowing their partner’s security posture and are “not always fully understanding [the] cyber risk that’s outside of their direct realm of control,” Ann Irvine, chief data and analytics officer at Resilience, said during a live online presentation on September 12.

Keep reading here.—BH

System error: Please contact administrator. Is there a worse message to receive when managing your workflows? Nope. That’s why BetterCloud is hosting Become a Google Admin Superhero, a game-changing webinar that’ll spill the deets on how to get around all those pesky Google Workspace limits. Forget about admin headaches.