Of pirates, mainframes, hurricanes, & 7 billion rows of data

At The Stack we're refraining from being distracted by the "events, dear boy, events" despite concerns at quite how badly this government seems to be intent on punishing the pound -- and instead looking this week at longer-term challenges.

One of those is at Lloyd's of London, the insurance marketplace that employs 47,000 people and writes ￡100 billion in premiums annually, where a digital and data transformation programme has been widely covered in The Stack and beyond.

Few have lifted the lid on what this entails in a meaningful way however. So we sat down with the man in charge of this transformation, Bob James, to discuss the challenges and how the market might change after the project has concluded.

It's a big one: 7 billion rows of data, 100 applications, 1000s of hearts and minds and the potential for innovation across this insurance behemoth is exciting...

Article in the link above, shorter video below. Let us know your thoughts.

Also on a longer timeline was Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger this week.

Intel was running its second innovation day and we sat in to learn more.

"Powering the IT stack of every technology leader is a semiconductor. Those ingenious little bits of silicon continue to evolve; tiny, astonishing engines that fundamentally underpin how businesses can digitalise" as The Stack's Ed Targett writes in our round-up below, which spans new data centre GPUs and more.

Here are some highlights emerging from that day, kept as succinct as possible.

The Stack is running a brand new event on March 9, 2023.

"The Stack X: Banking, Challenged" will include a range of intimate workshops for industry leaders on subjects like innovating with synthetic data, challenges around cyber resilience and governance, automation opportunities in compliance, core banking transformation and more; all led by senior industry leaders.

Signed up already: C-Suite trailblazers from BNP Paribas, TSB, Goldman Sachs and beyond. We have 200 tickets available -- subject to vetting - at ￡975. We're keeping vendor footprint at the venue (The Mandrake, London) to a minimum but do have a limited number of sponsorship opportunities available for our partners.

Get in touch to learn more about this event.

The sheer, refreshing pleasure of hearing a senior government figure call bullshit on the supposed "sophistication" of a major data breach: Australia's Minister for Cyber Security had zero patience with such claims after Optus was hacked.

The culprit? An unauthenticated API to a customer database, facing the internet. Do organisations need to do more robust basic scanning for exposed endpoints, APIs and other protocols? It would appear so; teenagers friendly with Shodan keep getting much further into organisations than they should. Boost that Red Team!

And finally, our new contributor Lara Olszowska spoke to some of the most influential people in the area when exploring the extent to which AI is really transforming drug discovery. With contributions and sometimes harsh words on data quality and availability from AstraZeneca, Novartis, Healx and Bayer.