November 30, 2022
Kannan Subbiah
FCA | CISA | CGEIT | CCISO | GRC Consulting | Independent Director | Enterprise & Solution Architecture | Former Sr. VP & CTO of MF Utilities | BU Soft Tech | itTrident
Things break, and in most cases, it comes as a surprise. IT consists of many systems requiring different degrees of connectivity and monitoring, making it difficult to know absolutely everything at every moment. The key to minimizing failures is to be proactive rather than simply waiting for bad things to happen. CIOs should not only expect things to break but also be honest about this with their team members and business colleagues. “Eat, sleep, and live that life,” advises Andre Preoteasa, internal IT director at IT business management firm Electric. “There are things you know, things you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know,” he observes. “Write down the first two, then think endlessly about the last one — it will make you more prepared for the unknowns when they happen.” Preoteasa stresses the importance of building and maintaining detailed disaster recovery and business continuity plans. “IT leaders that don’t have [such plans] put the company in a bad position,” he notes. “The exercise alone of writing things down shows you’re thinking about the future.”
Acts of war are a common insurance exclusion. Traditionally, exclusions required a "hot war," such as what we see in Ukraine today. However, courts are starting to recognize cyberattacks as potential acts of war without a declaration of war or the use of land troops or aircraft. The state-sponsored attack itself constitutes a war footing, the carriers maintain. ... Effectively, Forrester's Valente notes, larger enterprises might have to set aside large stores of cash in case they are hit with a state-sponsored attack. Should insurance carriers be successful in asserting in court that a state-sponsored attack is, by definition, an act of war, no company will have coverage unless they negotiate that into the contract specifically to eliminate the exclusion. When buying cyber insurance, "it is worth having a detailed conversation with the broker to compare so-called 'war exclusions' and determining whether there are carriers offering more favorable terms," says Scott Godes, partner and co-chair of the Insurance Recovery and Counseling Practice and the Data Security & Privacy practice at District of Columbia law firm Barnes & Thornburg.
Scalability is another challenge faced by professionals trying to make progress with their IIoT implementations. Bain’s 2022 study of IIoT decision-makers indicated that 80% of those who purchase IIoT technology scale fewer than 60% of their planned projects. The top three reasons why those respondents failed to scale their projects were that the integration effort was overly complicated and required too much effort, the associated vendors could not support scaling, and the life cycle support for the project was too expensive or not credible. One of the study’s takeaways was that hardware could help close gaps that prevent company decision-makers from scaling. Another best practice is for people to take a long-term viewpoint with any IIoT project. Some people may only think about what it will take to implement an initial proof of concept. That’s just a starting point. They’ll have to look beyond the early efforts if they want to eventually scale the project, but many of the things learned during the starting phase of a project can be beneficial to know during later stages.
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The customer CIO, an extremely smart person, spoke up, in beautifully-rounded European vowels: “Here’s a use case I’ve been told about that’s on my mind.” He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” ... I thought. Then said “As a lifelong technologist, I’ve always been dubious about technology as a solution to a political problem. It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but, blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers?” Later in the ensuing discussion I cautiously offered something like the following, locking eyes on the CIO: “There are many among Amazon’s senior engineers who think blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.” He went entirely expressionless and the discussion moved on.
The key message is that before persisting the data into the storage layers (Bronze, Silver, Gold), the data must pass data quality checks and for the corrupted data records that fail the data quality checks to be dealt with separately, before they are written into the storage layer. ... The “Bronze => Silver => Gold” pattern is a type of data flow design , also called a medallion architecture. A medallion architecture is designed to incrementally and progressively improve the structure and quality of data as it flows through each layer of the architecture. This is why it is relevant for today’s article regarding data quality and reliability. ... Generally the data quality requirement become more and more stringent as the data flows from raw to bronze to silver and to gold as the gold layer directly serves the business. You should, by now, have a high-level understanding of what a medallion data design pattern is and why it is relevant for a data quality discussion.
With people staying in workforces longer than ever before and careers spanning five decades becoming the norm, upskilling at a massive scale is needed. However, this need is not fully addressed; a worrying 6 in 10 (58%) people we surveyed in the UK told us that they have already been negatively affected by a lack of digital skills. Organisations can’t just rely on recruiting from a limited pool of digital specialists. More focus is also needed by organisations to upskill their own employees, in both tech and human digital skills. At a recent digital skills panel debate in Manchester, the director of a recruitment agency stated bluntly that: “Many businesses are currently overpaying to bring in external digital skills because of increased competition and this just isn’t sustainable. Upskilling your current teams should be as important as recruiting in new talent to keep costs in check and create a more balanced and loyal workforce.” It’s crucial to upskill employees, not only to get the necessary digital capabilities in our organisations, but to build loyalty and retain valued team members.