When the workaround becomes more work than it's worth, it's time for us to demand or develop a real solution. Have we finally reached that point? Will the next round of the Sobig virus force us get off our butts and solve the underlying problem? What is that problem? And what is the solution?
Ultimately, most IT problems stem from a combination of technical and social issues, and so do the potential solutions.
Quality Counts
On the technology side, it comes down to quality. How good is our hardware at handling a significant power surge or excessive environmental factors, such as heat and humidity. Is our software buggy? Are the vendors releasing patches faster than we can test and implement them?
Often the answers to these questions come down to specific decisions vendors made during product design and development. Netgear hardcoded a University of Wisconsin SNTP server address into several hundred thousand of its routers, for instance, effectively creating a DDoS on the school's network this summer--see www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp for details. (If you bought a Netgear router recently, please update your firmware now to advance the bug-removal effort for my alma mater!)
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
