From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.

IT Brew

Eoin Higgins

itbrew.com

Two people in an office sit on opposite sides of a desk.

Tech unemployment jumps as sector jobs slow down

Despite the decline in the tech jobs market, employers across the economy did add 185,000 new tech postings.

Tom McKay

RTO mandates don’t help businesses succeed, but decimate staff morale, study finds

“If you look at all these RTO firms, most of them did have a stock market price crash,” says the University of Pittsburgh’s Mark Ma.

Billy Hurley

An close-up of a computer screen showing a cursor and the symbols for lock and home.

How to handle test accounts

Checks on test accounts are essential, but there are often too many reasons for IT pros to go around them. 

Former admins talk test accounts (and how to handle them) 

IT Operations

Caroline Nihill

What’s the best way to bring the next generation of women into cybersecurity? For industry leaders, that’s a pressing question—and their answers vary.

What’s clear is that cybersecurity faces a significant gender gap. In 2024, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 

 that although women constituted nearly half the total US workforce, they only made up 22.6% of the “high tech” workforce across every industry—and just 19.4% of high tech jobs (i.e., STEM careers as defined by the 

, an advocacy organization for cybersecurity professionals, estimated women fill between 20% and 25% of the nation’s cybersecurity jobs. More than one in 10 (11%) cybersecurity teams have no women, compared to the 4% who said that women constituted more than half of their team.

“Increasing the representation of women across every industry is needed to help close the global workforce gap,” the ISC2 report stated. “Organizations should review their cybersecurity recruitment policies and practices to ensure that they get a more gender-balanced pool of candidates and that the women in their teams are also part of the recruitment process.”

Erin McFarlane, the VP of operations at Fairmarkit, is “always looking for more women in IT.”

“I think there is a need for women’s perspectives in the deeper tech roles,” McFarlane said. “I’m seeing more women in leadership-type positions, which is awesome and certainly more in the business facing technical roles, but less so in the hard, deep technical stuff.”

As field CTO of emerging technologies at Commvault, Vidya Shankaran said that she is part of a “very fortunate group of women leaders in IT and [the] security space” who are taking it upon themselves to foster the incoming cohort of women who can “fill in not just our gaps as we move on but also increase that footprint.”

“In IT, yes, there are lots of women,” Shankaran said. “In cybersecurity and IT, if you were to draw that Venn diagram, the number of women are very, very few.”

Shankaran said that she would encourage women looking to enter the workforce to earn key cybersecurity certifications to increase credibility as someone is starting out. Some examples of certifications include the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification, 

 describes as a globally recognized certification in the information security market, and the 

, which validates baseline practical skills.

Many of these organizations that offer certifications also include memberships and training, which provides networking opportunities for new IT professionals. “That is immensely helpful because it gives everyone visibility into the new incoming workforce of women,” Shankaran said.

She pointed to these spaces as an opportunity for leaders to begin coaching, mentoring, and hiring the next cohort of women.

Kara Sprague, HackerOne’s CEO, told IT Brew that bias is often introduced early within cybersecurity, due to the stereotype of the industry being predominantly male.

Sprague, who formerly served as a board member of Girls Who Code from 2016 until 2022, said she wants the next generation to know they can use their place in the tech industry to help drive the future.

“I would highly encourage and really strongly advocate for every woman to give it a chance and go there [the tech sector], because that’s where the future is going to be shaped,” Sprague said.

McFarlane, similarly, encouraged women to “believe in themselves and their ability to solve problems,” and to not be scared off by the math and science that comes along with careers within the industry: “Women have the ability to do remarkably in these fields, and I would love to see more of them give it a try.”

However, she cautioned, the industry can be hostile and lonely.

“There’s a lot of times where you’re the only woman in a room full of guys, and that takes a certain amount of resilience,” Sprague said. “It means that you have to put extra energy into finding a community that makes you feel the belonging.”

Large-scaled dress shoes on top of staircase with a small-scaled woman climbing up a ladder as another one stands by and looks up.

What women in cybersecurity want the next generation to know

The cybersecurity industry can feel hostile and lonely to those not in the majority, one leader says. 

OpenAI’s new deals with AMD and Nvidia are an opportunity for IT professionals—and a sign that consolidation is changing the tech industry landscape.

 on October 6. OpenAI will control 10% of the chipmaker if it hits certain milestones, a move aimed squarely at AMD’s competitor Nvidia that the latter’s CEO Jensen Huang 

 Just to make things even more tangled, Nvidia has pledged to invest $100 billion in OpenAI over the next 10 years.

We’re in an AI revolution, Shishir Shrivastava told IT Brew. Shrivastava, practice director for tech services and consulting firm TEKsystems Global Services, sees the industry evolving, and IT pros will continue to have nearly every element of their daily experience impacted by what companies like OpenAI are doing in the AI space. Change is the constant.

“For workers, some of the things which are very critical for them are going to go away,” Shrivastava said. “They have to focus on the new trends, or upskilling—with the revolution a lot of things are going to go away, and new things are going to come in the market.”

ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo agrees. He told IT Brew that tech pros need to realize that the evolution is happening and not let themselves be left behind.

“It will transform the way we work, the way we live, the way we educate people, etcetera, and those that adopt it will probably prosper,” Rivelo said. “Those that don’t adopt it will probably be left behind.”

IT pros can expect to see many of their responsibilities streamlined by AI, turning them into “augmented workers,” Rivelo said; agentic AI help desks will take the burden off of resolving ticket issues, for example, but the technology should be seen as an enabler. OpenAI’s bet on AMD and Nvidia’s bet on OpenAI indicate that we’re still in the early stages of AI workforce development.

“There’ll be some jobs that are no longer required for humans to do, but there’ll be other jobs that AI creates for humans, more advanced or different work to be done,” Rivelo said.

Looming over the discussion is increasing concern that AI could be a bubble—one that, if it pops, could have wide ramifications across not just IT but a number of sectors. Shrivastava recognizes the danger and said that, from his perspective, the question is less about the financial implications and more about the impact on the IT space. Companies like OpenAI will dominate the market, but there could be downstream benefits for the IT business.

“I think that’s just the beginning, and we will see the other players also coming into the mix,” Shrivastava said. “Open AI is leading the charge, it’s creating, or playing that role of AI anchor in this whole AI landscape.”

OpenAI deal latest sign that technology is changing sector

“For workers, some of the things which are very critical for them are going to go away,” executive says. “They have to focus on the new trends, or upskilling.”

In case of a government shutdown…don’t panic? That might be hard to do for IT pros who work for the government, either directly or as contractors—but experts suggest there are helpful steps to take during these events.

Every week of the current shutdown could cost the economy $7 billion, 

reporting. The last government shutdown cost the national economy approximately $11 billion and lasted for 34 days, CBS said, sharing data from the Congressional Budget Office.

, a California Democrat, during the 2018–2019 shutdown, an estimated 4.1 million people were working under government contracts, “though the exact number of those furloughed is unclear.” The number of IT contractors is unknown, but the Government Accountability Office 

 that the government spent approximately $10.2 billion on IT and telecom labor in fiscal year 2023.

Shutdowns can disrupt both contracted work and purchased services from the private sector, including data science, IT infrastructure maintenance, and cybersecurity. Additionally, government contractors face different challenges in the face of a shutdown than federal workers because they do not receive back pay once the government reopens.

Kevin Brancato, the SVP of product strategy at TechnoMile, told IT Brew that during a government shutdown, those contracting IT services to the government can do nothing more than look to win more business.

“That’s basically all they can do, and what they should be attempting to do right now,” Brancato said. “Make sure they’ve got their ears to the ground, listening for where the opportunities are.”

Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior advisor with the Federation of American Scientists, said “any industry that touches the federal government is going to be able to avoid any near-term harm where industries may be able to, through proper training and risk management.” These contractors can also help themselves by thinking through how they might recover financially in the long term from a shutdown.

Schulman pointed to another IT contractor concern when the government shuts down: cyber vulnerabilities. Shuttered government agencies and furloughed cybersecurity pros can make infrastructure more vulnerable to bad actors and threats. While some federal employees may still be working without pay, contractors might not be operating in any official capacity during a shutdown, making things confusing and risky.

“So much of [IT] work is not just day to day, but minute to minute, second to second,” Schulman said. “Those minutes and seconds really matter in terms of the ability to keep track of any potential risk, vulnerabilities, and updates that go on.”

Since non-essential activities are stopped during a shutdown, Brancato said, contractors should have plenty of time to provide mission-critical activities, like IT services that are necessary for security: “There’s no one there calling IT, the support staff because there’s nobody there doing these things because they’re not being worked on.”

Brancato emphasized how, with the pause in operations, contractors have the bandwidth to consider how to approach the broader IT marketplace when the shutdown is over…whenever it’s over.

What a government shutdown means for IT providers

One expert said those contracting IT services to the government can do nothing more than look to win more business.

Unlike your screenplay or novel labeled “Final_V5_revisions_USETHISONE_V2,” government authorities want a clear, conclusive document from organizations hosting operational technology—the “OT” hardware and software powering physical machinery in factories, power plants, and water-treatment facilities.

On Sept. 29, the US cyberagency CISA, the FBI, and the UK National Cyber Security Centre released joint guidance for OT professionals on how to create an up-to-date asset inventory known as a “definitive record.”

Consultants and security providers who spoke with IT Brew see the move as a must-do for a sector that has lagged behind its IT counterparts. As OT environments are increasingly equipped to conduct remote monitoring, analytics, and real-time inventory management, operational-tech practitioners may require a strengthening of their security skills.

“It’s not necessarily the fault of the operators up until that point. It’s just that they haven’t had that discipline because they didn’t really need to have that discipline necessarily,” Sean Arrowsmith, director of industrials at cybersecurity consultancy NCC Group, said.

Arrowsmith has entered facilities where the OT architecture, like every puzzle at an Airbnb, has missing pieces.

“That level of asset inventory that you might see in an IT environment doesn’t necessarily exist in OT in a lot of cases,” he said, referring to practices often present in enterprise IT scenarios, like scanning for on-network devices and listing assets in a centralized 

A Ponemon Institute survey of 1,056 global IT and security practitioners operating an OT environment, conducted in September 2023, found that 73% of respondents said their orgs “lack an authoritative OT asset inventory.”

However, OT security shows signs of improving, according to a July 2025 report from Fortinet, which found that 81% of orgs self-assessing their cybersecurity process in 2024 see their maturity level as 3 or 4 (out of a possible 4). At this level, “security activities and guidelines are documented, and at the highest level, security processes and tactics are also being improved through iterative feedback,” according to the report. The percentages are an increase from 2023 (72%) and 2022 (63%).

IT hasn’t necessarily been putting the inventory pieces together, either. A 2025 cybersecurity report, also conducted by Ponemon Institute, found that just 42% of 620 IT and cybersecurity practitioners surveyed say their organizations include an asset inventory program.

“definitive view” of an OT architecture

, according to the September guidance, includes five principles:

Defining processes for establishing and maintaining one

 For example, will you use passive monitoring tools to analyze network traffic?

Creating an OT information security management program

 Consider levels of criticality, exposure, and availability, the NCSC recommends.

What does the asset need to communicate with to perform its function? And what controls secure it? 

Practitioners should consider trust levels with external partners, as well as contractual obligations, according to the recent guidance.

Let’s say a vulnerability is announced on a turbine control or safety system. It helps to know if there are three or 300 of them on the factory floor. “Without a definitive record, you’re guessing,” Sean Tufts, field CTO for cyber-physical security company Claroty, told IT Brew.

In Q1 2025, OT cybersecurity company Dragos identified 708 global ransomware incidents impacting industrial entities—an increase from “approximately 600 incidents” documented in Q4 2024.

“The intensifying convergence of IT and OT further amplified operational impacts, causing IT disruptions to cascade into operational environments,” Dragos wrote in 

As IT and OT converge on the factory floor, Arrowsmith says IT and OT teams must come together as well—perhaps by finding IT security champions within OT engineering communities and bringing them into awareness training and security programs.

Fortinet’s 2025 report revealed that 66% of respondents expect increased regulation and security compliance requirements in five years or fewer.

As OT becomes a C-suite concern, the term definitive is important, Tufts said.

“Our CEOs, our CTOs, our CIOs are going to start asking: ‘What is our definitive record?’” he told IT Brew. “It will no longer be okay to say, ‘We’ll get back to you next week.’”

NCSC and CISA offer guidance on how OT can build a ‘definitive record’

Why an up-to-date system view is essential for operational-tech environments. 

Your company probably doesn’t have enough data—and there are third-party data brokers who want to help with that. However, choosing the wrong broker could mean risking customer trust, safety, and interactions. What do IT pros need to know about data brokering and its possible dangers?

First and foremost, IT pros and their companies have a responsibility to ensure data privacy for customers, or they could face legal penalties. Legislators have been working to add regulatory frameworks, like the 

, to help consumers understand what kind of data companies are collecting from them, and opt out if necessary.

Ron Zayas, CEO of Ironwall by Incogni, an online privacy protection and data removal service company, described the relationship between companies and data brokers as a door that swings both ways. For example, an organization might buy data to better inform advertising or product development, while a data broker might want data about a company’s user base.

“There’s lots of models that help make that very financially attainable, especially for startups and especially for companies that are gathering intimate information, because that’s what data brokers want,” Zayas said. “They want to help you get more customers so that you’ll feed them more information.”

Director of Litigation with the Electronic Privacy Information Center John Davisson regards data brokers as the “Big Tobacco of privacy,” and believes that companies should know more about interacting with them.

Davisson believes brokers are “selling products and services that can cause harm in so many different ways, that present harm to you in the form of data breaches, that threaten [for example] domestic violence survivors, that make it possible for people to track them down and cause them harm.”

“If you put all that into context, there’s an ethical thing, I think, for anybody who’s developing an ad, an app, marketing, any type of service,” Zayas agreed. “Are we collecting and selling information that puts people at risk? That is a conversation that IT and risk management has to be involved with.”

 continue to call for an increase in data privacy laws, companies see an increasing need for data to make informed decisions for tasks like product development, advertising, and more.

Jodi Daniels, a faculty member at IANS, told IT Brew that some businesses might seek out data brokers to gain access to data to help drive enterprise decisions and optimization. Using a data broker’s service can assist a company when resources are stretched thin, even if it means giving those brokers access to lots of sensitive data about customers.

“To get to [a company’s] market, they need data, if they don’t get to their market, then everyone has to see advertising that isn’t relevant—that’s really expensive for companies,” Daniels said. “In trying to reduce their costs, well, data is going to be able to help them do that.”

Davisson said that companies need to take serious measures to protect the personal information of users, especially as it pertains to jurisdiction of state laws and what action the Federal Trade Commission has taken against those who have violated consumer privacy and trust.

“There is serious legal risk attached to selling sensitive personal information,” Davisson said. “Even as I say that the regulatory landscape is not as robust as it needs to be when it comes to privacy protection, more and more states and more and more regulators are waking up to this problem and taking enforcement action against the companies.”

Zayas wants IT professionals to consider the risks of interacting with data brokering, considering the relationship between companies and brokers can increase cybersecurity risks, in addition to the ethical dilemmas of buying and selling user data.

While engaging with brokers can be a quick way to secure additional data, Zayas warned that there’s a lot of information that can get into the wrong hands. Data enriched by brokers is “even more sensitive,” he added, boosting the costs and need for infrastructure.

“Especially if you’re starting a new company, look at data being an asset, not just a commodity that you trade,” Zayas said. “See how you can protect your data—not give it out, not share it, not become a target for it being breached—so that you have a competitive advantage with everyone else.”

Correction 10/8/2025: This article has been updated to refer to "Ironwall by Incogni" for clarity.

AI visual representation with colorful dialogue windows 

What privacy experts think companies should know about data brokering

“That is a conversation that IT and risk management has to be involved with,” Ironwall by Incogni CEO says.

Brianna Monsanto

For years, executives have joked-not-joked about wanting to clone their best employees.

 could make those cloning dreams a reality…sorta. With workforces transitioning to a mix of employees and their virtual twins, there’s more pressure than ever to ensure that everyone inside the organization—both human and digital—remains on task.

So, what exactly is a digital twin of an employee? It depends on who you ask. In an 

, Gartner defined it as “a model that enterprises build to understand how real employees will respond or behave in a given context.”

“The [digital twin of employees] is an emerging way to use data, models, and simulations in support of productivity, performance, experience, and well-being goals,” Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Helen Poitevin wrote.

Ryan Hamze, director at technology research and advisory firm Information Services Group, said digital twins in the manufacturing industry refer to digital replicas of an employee’s workflow.

“You’re looking at how it is simply actually doing things, and through there you can find bottlenecks,” Hamze said. “You can find the inefficiencies of how they do things [and] the bureaucracy humans have to go through to get approval sometimes.”

Digital twins of employees may also mean an AI persona of an employee that is capable of communicating with others. CJ Meadows, head of innovation for Asia at the SP Jain School of Global Management, told IT Brew she digitally twinned herself in this manner using enterprise AI persona company Personal AI, and sees several use cases for this deployment.

“In future, we’re going to see more and more digital twins on the org chart. So, our organizations are going to be mixed,” Meadows said. “There’s going to be some humans in there and some technology people in there as well.”

, digital twins of employees can be a valuable investment for companies. Hamze, for instance, said organizations can use these digital simulations for upskilling their workforce by showcasing the exact process new employees need to learn.

“If you replicate that exact process, especially with technical processes, more physical ones, it would be easy to train people for the future,” he said.

Gartner said digital twins of employees can also be beneficial in dangerous work environments, as well as for productivity gains in machine-heavy settings.

Meadows outlined one use case for her digital twin in her professional life: making herself available to answer questions for MBA students around the clock. She believes digital twins could likewise free up time for employees to tend to significant tasks.

“You know how you answer the same damn question for 50 people? Okay, how about we have your digital twin do that and you spend time doing what we actually need a human to do, and which would be hopefully more meaningful work for you,” Meadows said.

 Digital twins of employees can come with their own baggage. Hamze, for instance, said the replicas could stir up negative feelings among employees if organizations skimp on communicating their purpose and fail to build trust on the idea.

“Always understand that monitoring employees is always met with resistance because of surveillance issues and fear of being replaced,” Hamze said.

The Gartner report also notes that privacy regulation and labor laws can impact how organizations are able to collect data on employees for digital twin purposes, and that off-the-shelf solutions are rarely available.

In its report, Gartner said digital twins of employees are still in a nascent phase. However, Hamze said organizations looking to expand their workforce with these virtual employees can do so by clarifying what their purpose will be.

“You have to understand your scope of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what’s the highest value output you need,” Hamze said. He added organizations need a solid strategy for how the data leveraged by their digital twins will be collected.

“Is it coming from systems? Is it coming from cameras, monitoring the employee and AI analyzing those steps?” Hamze said. “Is it coming from data entry that you’re putting in?”

As for AI persona digital twins, Meadows said organizations may choose to treat digital twins of employees as “personal assistants” who can take on work that could be automated. Meadows said she keeps her own digital twin in check by making adjustments on the backend of it as needed.

“People have come back to me and told me things, and then with that feedback, I’ve gone in to make adjustments and corrections and so forth,” Meadows said.

A man in a suit stands on a platform across from an avatar.

What to expect when you’re expecting digital twins 

Digital twins of employees can help organizations reap productivity gains and useful for unsafe work environments.

Where were you at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Some folks may recall spending 2020 making sourdough bread or DIY dalgona coffee. Others might still cringe when they remember how they always forgot to unmute when speaking on endless Zoom calls.

For IT professionals, the pandemic presented some once-in-a-lifetime challenges. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of 

 in the country tripled, from 9 million people to more than 27 million, according to 

. The wave of remote work threw many IT professionals into the Wild West, forcing them to fight off pesky Zoom bombers, rescue remote colleagues from forgotten passwords and outdated apps, and act as cybersecurity sheriff amidst a swarm of scammers trying to take advantage of remote work and health anxiety.

IT Brew caught up with several IT professionals to understand how they dealt with all these issues (and more!) during the early days of the pandemic.

Between March 1 and May 31, 2020, 42 US states and territories issued stay-at-home orders, 

. Jesse Wolcott, who was an IT manager at hotel and casino entertainment company Caesars Entertainment during the pandemic’s early stages, told IT Brew he found out the Horseshoe Casino Baltimore would be closing just after he returned from a trip to Japan.

“We’re closing the casino…which is words that don’t go together,” Wolcott, now an assistant director of IT at Royal Farms, said.

The impromptu halt on the world came with a few benefits. For the next eight weeks, Wolcott walked through an empty casino, giving him the opportunity to tend to things he previously didn’t have the time to do.

“I’m walking around to my server room, blowing stuff out with compressed air, and taking the trash out, and cleaning up my server rooms,” Wolcott said. “And I’m like, ‘This is great. I’m finally getting all these things done.’”

For Wolcott, assisting casino employees in a remote work environment wasn’t “too tragic of a transition,” given the fact that employees who needed to do remote work had already done so to some extent in the past and already had equipment. However, that task was top of mind for many IT workers whose colleagues weren’t familiar with working from their couches. Pedro Mendez, director of IT at dairy product manufacturer Tropical Cheese Industries during the pandemic, said one of the challenging parts of this adjustment was helping his colleagues learn new ways of using technology.

“Not too many people realize how technology plays such an important part [in] how our company operates or runs,” Mendez said. “Not too many people paid too much attention to that until that time.”

Mendez’s team of three supported roughly 350 employees, 200 of whom owned at least a couple of different work devices. Employees were sent home with computers that had TeamViewer installed in the event that they needed IT support, which Mendez said grew tenfold. In addition to the challenge of troubleshooting problems remotely, employees had to deal with additional variables such as poor internet connectivity.

“We had a very tight shift. We were always on call,” Mendez, now a director of IT at bedding manufacturer Pegasus Home Fashions, said, adding that he is very proud of what his team was able to accomplish.

When it came to IT/OT operations involving machinery, Mendez said the company and his team took precautions that would help employees do their jobs while remaining safe: “We started implementing gloves or trying to minimize the amount a computer will need to be shared by multiple people, things like that.” Tropical Cheese was able to operate for the entire pandemic, excluding one week when a few employees were sick.

David Torgerson, VP of technology and security at Lucid Software, which builds software products for visual brainstorming and diagramming, said the hypothetical scenario of Lucid employees needing to work remotely had always been discussed within the company. However, that hypothetical suddenly became real when Lucid’s CEO told Torgerson that the company’s employees would be sent home to work remotely…in the next 20 minutes.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re ready. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine,” said Torgerson, who was a senior director of DevOps at the time. “And then I ran to my team, saying, ‘Are we going to be fine? If not, we have to make it fine.’”

Torgerson said the transition from in-person to remote at Lucid was smooth: Shifting the company from a free version of Zoom to the premium one was one of the biggest changes. However, fulfilling employees’ desire for connection proved a challenge.

The issue led Torgerson to leverage his technical role to foster more connections among the company’s workforce. In addition to leading an initiative that taught employees how to be “successful” while working remotely (tips involved taking showers as often as one would when commuting to the office), he helped his organization experiment with ways they could use their current application stack for virtual social events.

“We set up a rotation that was an opt-in of just connecting people randomly together, different departments, different teams, no agenda,” Torgerson said. “We just gave people time to just talk.”

“That intentional ability to help people feel recognized, feel seen, feel heard has made a huge difference,” Torgerson added.

Social distancing and social engineering, too.

 As employees juggled work and their personal lives from the comfort of their homes, malicious actors tried to take advantage of organizations as they navigated through unprecedented territory. Stratascale Field CISO Casey Corcoran said the pandemic accelerated the adoption of 

 policies to enable remote work during a time when endpoint detection and response was “scarce.”

Before 2020, Corcoran continued, organizations had mostly relied on resources like virus scanners. However, those tools weren’t as useful with workers falling back on their own PCs and phones.

“Your home computer may or may not have had any of that on it,” Corcoran said. “There was no way to understand what that machine had been exposed to [or] who was even using that machine.”

 was another problem for companies as employees got creative with tools and services to help them with the remote-work version of day-to-day tasks and communications. For example, many employees began using their personal Dropbox to exchange important documents.

“People were just doing it,” Corcoran said. “They just set up a Dropbox…and then they put a corporate document up there and then send a link to somebody with very little visibility oversight on how that was being secured.”

Threat actors took advantage of these hiccups. There was a 78% increase in the number of ransomware attacks executed in March 2021 compared to the same period a year prior, when the pandemic was just beginning, according to BlackFog’s 

 blog. The new standard of remote work also allowed for the rise of 

While the attack surface widened for a number of organizations, there were still some bright spots for the industry overall. Paul Bingham, SVP and executive dean of Western Governors University’s School of Information Technology, said the pandemic really outlined the importance of cybersecurity for both organizations and users.

“Everybody was now more cognizant of it, because they didn’t want some random dude showing up on their Zoom meeting or whatever,” Bingham said, referring to the advent of “

He added that the pandemic encouraged prospective cybersecurity professionals to clearly see the value of the 

Covid-19 also reshaped how some IT professionals lead in their roles. Wolcott, for instance, said the pandemic heightened his 

 for his team “up to 100” after watching some of his colleagues fall ill.

“You have this pit in your stomach of: What’s going to happen?” Wolcott said. “And it’s not because I’m going to have to rehire. It’s not because I have a gap at work. It’s because this is a person who I spend a lot of time with and I care about.”

Mendez said the pandemic taught him that everyone is capable of learning how to work remotely. He also feels more confident about helping his current organization navigate another catastrophe.

“Most of the IT professionals that have gone through the pandemic, I’m pretty sure we all know what to do better, or how to do it better, because of both the experiences that we had and [because] technology nowadays is so much more reliable.”

An IT professional at their computer station