August 23, 2024

Generative AI is sliding into the ‘trough of disillusionment’

“Even as AI continues to grab the attention, CIOs and other IT executives must also examine other emerging technologies with transformational potential for developers, security, and customer and employee experience and strategize how to exploit these technologies in line with their organizations’ ability to handle unproven technologies,” Chandrasekaran said. ... Autonomous AI software was among four emerging technologies called out in the report because it can operate with minimal human oversight, improve itself, and become effective at decision-making in complex environments. “These advanced AI systems that can perform any task a human can perform are beginning to move slowly from science fiction to reality,” Gartner said in its report. “These technologies include multiagent systems, large action models, machine customers, humanoid working robots, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning.” Autonomous agents are currently heading up the slope to the peak of inflated expectations. Just ahead of autonomous agents on that slope is artificial general intelligence, currently a hypothetical form of AI where a machine learns and thinks like a human does.

As Fintechs Stumble, A New Breed of ‘TechFins’ Move to the Fore

TechFins have provided many points of value in recent years, but particularly in 2024 and in the near future, they will highly benefit financial institutions in the areas of: Leveraging the power of transaction data cleansing and analysis;?Artificial intelligence (AI);?Fraud prevention and cost mitigation;?Extending the personalized user experience and reliability of the digital banking application;?Transforming digital banking platforms into a digital sales and service platform;?Increasing revenues and lowering costs for financial institutions. With financial institutions amassing high volumes of transaction data within their ecosystems, processing and analyzing that data is becoming a greater priority. According to the Pragmatic Institute, data practitioners spend 80% of their valuable time finding, cleaning, and organizing the data. This leaves only 20% of their time to actually perform analysis on it. This is the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. TechFins can provide vital support to financial institutions’ data teams through transaction cleansing, leaving them more time to build campaigns and take action on the data.?

The Developer Crisis: Mental Health, Burnout, and Retention

Seven out of 10 developers state that job satisfaction is the most important factor. Unplanned extra tasks and excessive overtime will have developers looking for the door. Businesses need to make it clear to both existing and new hires that they will do everything they can to respect these boundaries. Developers encounter constant roadblocks in their work, so time is precious. To help devs maintain a “flow state” (total focus on the task), businesses should consider re-evaluating their calendars to reduce unnecessary meetings. If not implemented, software development frameworks could help dev teams better organize their work and progress through projects faster. As with any operational change, feedback is critical. ... By freeing developers from burdensome backend duties, they can stay creative and focus on developing innovative new frontend solutions to improve a customer’s overall experience. This makes brilliant business sense, particularly in the case of e-commerce, where standard feature developments, which would otherwise take up tons of developer resources, can be handled much more efficiently by a tech platform.

Vulnerability prioritization is only the beginning

Scrutiny of cybersecurity processes and performance is ratcheting up due to the dual hammers of increased regulatory scrutiny and the brutal trend of highly damaging attacks. The US Securities and Exchange Commission, the European Union, the US Department of Defense, the British National Government, and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency have all put or are putting in place significantly more stringent requirements for CISOs and their teams. Both the SEC and CISA have moved to push accountability to the Board of Directors and the C-Suite. This means that metrics alone are no longer sufficient for CISOs that want to provide full transparency. Process transparency has become just as critical to validate KPIs and allow auditors and the government to peer inside what were formerly security process “bottlenecks”. These bottlenecks are highly variable, human-centric processes, such as opening or closing a Jira ticket, back and forth commenting in a Slack thread, pushing a pull request on GitHub, or running a CI/CD pipeline to test and redeploy software after a patch. All can have human path dependencies, injecting uncertainty and variability.

Authentication and Authorization in Red Hat OpenShift and Microservices Architectures

Moving up the layers and looking at the blue layer (that is, interacting with OpenShift or Kubernetes in general) means communicating to the Kubernetes API server. This is true for both human and non-human users, whether they're using a GUI console or a terminal. Ultimately, all interaction with OpenShift or Kubernetes goes through the API server. The OAuth2/OIDC combination makes perfect sense for API authentication and authorization, so OpenShift features a built-in OAuth2 server. As part of the configuration of this OAuth2 server, an supported identity provider must be added. The identity provider helps the OAuth2 server confirm who the user is. Once this part has been configured, OpenShift is ready to authenticate users. For an authenticated user, OpenShift creates an access token and returns that token to the user. This token is called an OAuth access token. ... Users and Service Accounts can be organized into groups in OpenShift. Groups are useful when managing authorization policies to grant permissions to multiple users at once. For example, you can allow a group access to objects within a project instead of granting access to each user individually.

Bridging the digital divide: driving positive impact where it is needed most

There are definitely pros and cons to building rural fiber networks. On the one hand, by nature the construction process is more complex and expensive, but this typically means that there is little to no competition, leading to higher customer demand and lower overbuild risk. The challenges are even more acute in areas that qualify for Project Gigabit subsidies, with barriers including challenging terrain, geography, and geology, which often increases costs and extends timelines. Due to the distances being covered, rural rollouts often also require more permits and wayleaves from multiple landowners, further increasing complexity. Without subsidies, these projects would not be commercially viable, but with cost cover of between 60 percent to 80 percent of capex, a defensive position is created for contract winners, which increases returns for investors, while also supporting some of the most neglected rural communities. In these cases, network commercialization is also likely to be more achievable and we are starting to see a growing evidence base of strong customer cohort penetration in these projects which supports that thesis.

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