July 04, 2025
Kannan Subbiah
vCxO | IT Governance | Mutual Funds | Independent Director | C|CISO | CGEIT | CISA | FCA
Research published by Carnegie Mellon University this month found that groups that turned to Google Search came up with fewer creative ideas during brainstorming sessions compared to groups without access to Google Search. Not only did each Google Search group come up with the same ideas as the other Search groups, they also presented them in the same order, suggesting that the search results replaced their actual creativity. The researchers called this a “fixation effect.” When people see a few examples, they tend to get stuck on those and struggle to think beyond them. ... Our knowledge of and perspective on the world becomes less our own and more what the algorithms feed us. They do this by showing us content that triggers strong feelings — anger, joy, fear. Instead of feeling a full range of emotions, we bounce between extremes. Researchers call this “emotional dysregulation.” The constant flood of attention-grabbing posts can make it hard to focus or feel calm. AI algorithms on social grab our attention with endless new content. ... To elevate both the quality of your work and the performance of your mind, begin by crafting your paper, email, or post entirely on your own, without any assistance from genAI tools. Only after you have thoroughly explored a topic and pushed your own capabilities should you turn to chatbots, using them as a catalyst to further enhance your output, generate new ideas, and refine your results.
The shift toward AI-enhanced agile planning requires a practical assessment of your current processes and tool chain.Start by evaluating whether your current processes create bottlenecks between development and deployment, looking for gaps where agile ceremonies exist, but traditional approval workflows still dominate critical path decisions. Next, assess how much time your teams spend on planning ceremonies versus actual development work. Consider whether AI could automate the administrative aspects, such as backlog grooming, estimation sessions and status updates, while preserving human strategic input on priorities and technical decisions. Examine your current tool chain to identify where manual coordination is required between the planning, development and deployment phases. Look for opportunities where AI can automate data synchronization and provide predictive insights about capacity and timeline risks, reducing the context switching that fragments developer focus. Finally, review your current planning overhead and identify which administrative tasks can be automated, allowing your team to focus on delivering customer value and making strategic technical decisions rather than adhering to process compliance. The goal is not to eliminate human judgment but to elevate it from routine tasks to the strategic thinking that drives innovation.
AI workloads - generative AI and the training of large language models in particular - demand a profusion of power in just a fraction of a second, and this in itself brings some complications. “When you are engaging a training model, you engage all of these GPUs simultaneously, and there’s a very quick rise to pretty much maximum power, and we are seeing that at a sub-second pace,” Ed Ansett, director at I3 Solutions, tells DCD. “The problem is that you have, for example, 50MW of IT load that the utility is about to see, but it will see it very quickly, and the utility won’t be able to respond that quickly. It will cause frequency problems, and the utility will almost certainly disconnect the data center, so there needs to be a way of buffering those workloads.” ... Despite this, AWS and Annapurna Labs have made some moves with the second generation of their home-grown AI accelerator - Trainium. These chips differ from GPUs in both an architectural standpoint, and their end capabilities. “If you look at GPU architecture, it's thousands of small tensor cores, small CPUs that are all running in parallel. Here, the architecture is called a systolic array, which is a completely different architecture,” says Gadi Hutt, director of product and customer engineering at Annapurna Labs. “Basically data flows through the logic of the systolic array that then does the efficient linear algebra acceleration.”
Too often, security gaps exist because database environments are siloed from the broader IT infrastructure, making visibility and coordination difficult. This is especially true in hybrid environments, where legacy on-premises systems coexist with cloud-based assets. The lack of centralised oversight can allow misconfigurations and outdated software to go unnoticed, until it’s too late. ... Comprehensive monitoring plays a central role in securing database environments. Organisations need visibility into performance, availability, and security indicators in real time. Solutions like Paessler PRTG enable IT and security teams to proactively detect deviations from the norm, whether it’s a sudden spike in access requests or performance degradation that might signal malicious activity. Monitoring also helps bridge the gap between IT operations and security teams. ... Ultimately, database security is not just about technology, it’s about visibility, accountability, and ownership. Security teams must collaborate with database administrators, IT operations, and compliance functions to ensure policies are enforced, risks are mitigated, and monitoring is continuous.
Cyber vaults are emerging as a key way organizations achieve that assurance. These highly secure environments protect immutable copies of mission-critical data – typically the data that enables the “minimum viable company” (i.e. the essential functions and systems that must remain). Cyber vaults achieve this by creating logically and physically isolated environments that sever the connection between production and backup systems. This isolation ensures known-good copies remain untouched, ready for recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. ... A cyber vault only fulfills its promise when built on all three pillars. Each must function as an enforceable control. Increasingly, boards and regulators aren’t just expecting these controls — they’re demanding proof they are in place, operational, and effective. Leave one out, and the entire recovery strategy is at risk. ... In regulated industries, failure to demonstrate recoverability can lead to fines, public scrutiny, and regulatory sanctions. These pressures are elevating backup and recovery from IT hygiene to boardroom priority, where resilience is increasingly viewed as a fiduciary responsibility. Organizations are coming to terms with a new reality: prevention will fail. Recovery is what defines resilience. It’s not just about whether you have backups – it’s whether you can trust them to work when it matters most.
Trained youth are also acting as knowledge multipliers. After receiving foundational cybersecurity education, many go on to share their insights with parents, siblings, and local networks. This creates a ripple effect of awareness and behavioral change, extending far beyond formal institutions. In regions where internet use is rising faster than formal education systems can adapt, such peer-to-peer education is proving invaluable. Beyond defense, cybersecurity also offers a pathway to economic opportunity. As demand for skilled professionals grows, early exposure to the field can open doors to employment in both local and global markets. This supports broader development goals by linking digital safety with job creation and innovation. ... Africa’s digital future cannot be built on insecure foundations. Cybersecurity is not a luxury, it is a prerequisite for sustainable growth, social trust, and national security. Grassroots efforts across the continent are already demonstrating that meaningful progress is possible, even in resource-constrained environments. However, these efforts must be scaled, formalized, and supported at the highest levels. By equipping communities, especially youth, with the knowledge and tools to defend themselves online, a resilient digital culture can be cultivated from the ground up.