Hot topics from the Pulse community in October 2021
The Pulse community was abuzz last month with tech leaders engaging in conversations on everything from whether data privacy is a national issue to what the results were after intentionally engaging in a phishing attack. Here’s a list of our top trending community content from October:
Is data privacy a national security issue?
91% of respondents stated that they do believe data privacy is a national security concern.
Should all employers adopt a four-day workweek?
68% of participants believe that a four-day workweek is best for employees, and the remainder of participants (32%) believe a four-day workweek would disrupt business.
Who is winning the cloud war: AWS, Azure, or GCP?
Compared to those in the arts, entertainment, and recreation industry, professional services respondents are nearly twice as likely to choose AWS, which is currently winning the cloud war at 53%.
47% of participants agree that security policy creation and synchronization based on application dependency mapping is the most important use case for a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.
Is your IT team a bottleneck in your organization?
Unfortunately, 51% of participants reported that their IT team is a bottleneck in their organization.
“...we aren't the only bottleneck. Frequently once [IT is] ready to move, [...] the business isn't ready or changed the requirements.”
– Chris Oehlerking, Former IT Director at Honeywell
What are the best practices for securing operational technology (OT) systems?
“I've hit [OT] security from a couple of different companies so I’ve seen how they protect their environments and how they approach security in the first place. [... A] lot of the solutions I saw for security were to create a whole bunch of ethernet local-area networks (ELANs) and access control lists (ACLs) and manage what those machines do.”
– Todd Dekkinga, CISO at Airgap Networks
What are your biggest concerns as AI capabilities become a standard industry offering?
“If AI is done right, it's a huge opportunity for technology; if we get it wrong it’s a huge slippery slope. There's already been evidence, in some cases, of the consequences involved if we mess up broad aspects of AI...”
– Malcolm Harkins, Chief Security and Trust Officer at Epiphany Systems
“The volume and cleanliness of data that is required for these capabilities to succeed. I normally estimate that 70% of any AI project is sorting out data and not value add.”
– Martin Davis, CIO at Mevotech
Should production support always be separate from sprint execution?
“I like the philosophy that if you create/build your feature, then you'll carry that feature with you and fix it in production. Because that is the promise of an agile team: you created it and if it's broken, you get to fix it. But it doesn't scale and you definitely want to have a separate organization that is focused on stability rather than feature development.”
– Gautham Pallapa, Senior Executive Advisor at VMware
Have you ever intentionally engaged with a phishing attack? If so, what were the results?
“I received a suspicious text the other day asking if I was free and that the person who I allegedly knew could only text and not call. I did say I was available since that was innocuous enough and there were no malicious links to click. As soon as I was asked to get Google Play gift cards, I blocked the contact and deleted the text. It was simple enough and seemingly harmless at first since there weren’t any links to click - but it did go downhill pretty fast. I could’ve stayed for another round or two but it was just easier to bail.”
– CIO
“...I always do a split between business metrics and operational metrics. Operational metrics would be bugs and post-deployment things; business metrics would be, what value did we add? Were we able to reduce our sales cycle? Customer case deflection could be another one to service cloud implementation.”
– CIO
“Strategic value generated is a good metric to use: Are you directly supporting some of the business strategies? Because sometimes it's difficult to quantify that in terms of dollars. You can put an ROI on something but it may be more strategically important if it's taking the company to the next level or targeting one of the company's key goals. So you have to have that in your metrics somewhere.”
– Martin Davis, CIO at Mevotech
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