September 23, 2023

A CISO’s First 90 Days: The Ultimate Action Plan and Advice

It’s a CISOs responsibility to establish a solid security foundation as rapidly as possible, and there are many mistakes that can be made along the way. This is why the first 90 days are the most important for new CISOs. Without a clear pathway to success in the early months, CISOs can lose confidence in their ability as change agents and put their entire organization at risk of data theft and financial loss. No pressure! Here’s our recommended roadmap for CISOs in the first 90 days of a new role.?... This means they can reduce the feeling of overwhelm and work strategically toward business goals. For a new CISO, it can be challenging trying to locate and classify all the sensitive data across an organization, not to mention ensuring that it’s also safe from a variety of threats. Data protection technology is often focused on perimeters and endpoints, giving internal bad actors the perfect opportunity to slip through any security gaps in files, folders, and devices. For large organizations, it’s practically impossible to audit data activity at scale without a robust DSPM.

There’s No Value in Observability Bloat. Let’s Focus on the Essentials

Telemetry data gathered from the distributed components of modern cloud architectures needs to be centralized and correlated for engineers to gain a complete picture of their environments. Engineers need a solution with critical capabilities such as dashboarding, querying and alerting, and AI-based analysis and response, and they need the operation and management of the solution to be streamlined. What’s important for them to know is that it’s not necessary to spend more to ensure peak performance and visibility as their environmental complexity grows.?... No doubt, more data is being generated, but most of it is not relevant or valuable to an organization. Observability can be optimized to bring greater value to customers, and that’s where the market is headed. Call it “essential observability.” It’s a disruptive vision to propose a re-architected approach to observability, but what engineers need is a new approach making it easier to surface insights from their telemetry data while deprioritizing low-value data. Costs can be reduced by consuming only the data that enables teams to maintain performance and drive smart business decisions.

Shedding Light on Dark Patterns in FinTech: Impact of DPDP Act

In practice, these patterns exploit human psychology and trick people into making unwanted choices/ purchases. It has become a menace for the FinTech industry. These patterns are used to encourage people to sign up for loans, credit cards, and other financial products that they may not need or understand. However, the new Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”), can be used to bring such dark patterns under control. The DPDP Act requires online platforms to seek consent of Data Principals through clear, specific and unambiguous notice before processing any data. Further, the Act empowers individuals to retract/ withdraw consent to any agreement at any juncture. ?... Companies will need to review their user interfaces and remove any dark patterns that they are using and protect the personal data and use the data for ‘legitimate purposes’ only and take consent from users, through clear affirmative action, in unambiguous terms. They will also need to develop new ways to promote their products and services without relying on deception.

Can business trust ChatGPT?

It might seem premature to worry about trust when there is already so much interest in the opportunities Gen AI can offer. However, it needs to be recognized that there’s also an opportunity cost — inaccuracy and misuse could be disastrous in ways organizations can’t easily anticipate. Up until now, digital technology has been traditionally viewed as being trustworthy in the sense that it is seen as being deterministic. Like an Excel formula, it will be executed in the same manner 100% percent of the time, leading to a predictable, consistent outcome. Even when the outcome yields an error — due to implementation issues, changes in the context in which it has been deployed, or even bugs and faults — there is nevertheless a sense that technology should work in a certain way. In the case of Gen AI, however, things are different; even the most optimistic hype acknowledges that it can be unpredictable, and its output is often unexpected. Trust in consistency seems to be less important than excitement at the sheer range of possibilities Gen AI can deliver, seemingly in an instant.

A Few Best Practices for Design and Implementation of Microservices

The first step is to define the microservices architecture. It has to be established how the services will interact with each other before a company attempts to optimise their implementation. Once microservices architecture gets going, we must be able to optimise the increase in speed. It is better to start with a few coarse-grained but self-contained services. Fine graining can happen as the implementation matures over time. The developers, operations team, and testing fraternity may have extensive experience in monoliths, but a microservices-based system is a new reality; hence, they need time to cope with this new shift. Do not discard the monolithic application immediately. Instead, have it co-exist with the new microservices, and iteratively deprecate similar functionalities in the monolithic application. This is not easy and requires a significant investment in people and processes to get started. As with any technology, it is always better to avoid the big bang approach, and identify ways to get the toes wet before diving in head first.

Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisations

Collaboration is at the heart of teamwork. Many modern organisations set up teams to be cross-functional or multidisciplinary. Multidisciplinary teams are made up of specialists from different disciples collaborating together daily towards a shared outcome. They have the roles needed to design, plan, deliver, deploy and iterate a product or service. Modern approaches and frameworks often focus on increasing flow and reducing blockers, and one way to do this is to remove the barrier between functions.?However, as organisations grow in size and complexity, they look for different ways of working together, and some of these create collaboration anti-patterns. Three of the most common antipatterns I see and have named here are: One person split across multiple teams;?Product vs. engineering wars; and?X-led organisations,

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