Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

AI

• Your AI Doesn't Need More Data. It Needs More Context

Backup

• Designing Immutable Backup Solutions to Resist Ransomware

Techstrong.IT

• Scality ADI: A Storage Operating Model Built for the Messy Middle of the AI Era

• From Alert to Action: How Selector Is Quietly Rewriting the Network Observability Playbook

• Survey: Enterprise IT Shifts Off Premises as AI Reshapes Data Centers

• How Do You Kill a Parasite?

• Navigating AI Infrastructure Incidents: Bridging the Critical Gap Between Detection and Response

Broadcom

• Introducing the VCF Inspector Fling: A Standalone Diagnostic and Health Tool for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1

• Split or Stay Whole? Disaggregated vs. Monolithic LLM Serving on VMware Cloud Foundation

• Deploying NVIDIA Run:ai on VMware Cloud Foundation

• Meet MTAT: Your Zero-Friction Path to Memory Tiering in VMware Cloud Foundation 9

• Platform Engineering 2.0: An Evolution for the AI Era

Citrix

• How to Operationalize Citrix SecurAccess With Chrome Enterprise at Scale

Dell

• Why Modern Ransomware Demands a Layered Cybersecurity Strategy

• From Pipeline to Platform: The Future of AI Data Orchestration

• Dell AI Data Platform: A Technical Perspective

Intel

• Intel Completes RAMP-C Program, Accelerating Momentum for Secure Enclave

• Intel's US Advanced Packaging Enables Next-Generation AI Semiconductors

KnowBe4

• Majority of Organizations Hit by Targeted Impersonation Attacks

• Future-Proofing Organizations in the Face of AI

• New Phishing Kits Use Open-Source Tools to Bypass MFA

• Apple Warns Users to Be Wary of Unsolicited FaceTime Calls

• Everyone Is a Builder Now. That Changes Security Training

• KnowBe4 Combats Voice-Based Threats With Advanced Simulated Vishing Capabilities

Oxide Computer

• Oxide Joins Anthropic's Project Glasswing

Cloud Events

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

• How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

• Modernizing Manufacturing: How to Move from Legacy Infrastructure to Cloud-Ready Operations (Aug. 18th)

• M-Trends 2026: The Cascading Impact of Third-Party SaaS, Cloud, and Software Compromises (Aug. 25th)

AI

Your AI Doesn't Need More Data. It Needs More Context

Enterprises must organize fragmented customer evidence into connected journey data to enable AI to support better CX decisions. more →

Backup

Designing Immutable Backup Solutions to Resist Ransomware

Guide for UK SMEs on using immutable backups as a critical recovery control against ransomware attacks. more →

Techstrong.IT

Scality ADI: A Storage Operating Model Built for the Messy Middle of the AI Era

Scality introduces the ADI platform to unify diverse AI storage demands under a single namespace with autonomous management. more →

From Alert to Action: How Selector Is Quietly Rewriting the Network Observability Playbook

Selector uses AI-native observability architecture to address hybrid network monitoring without traditional alert-heavy approaches. more →

Survey: Enterprise IT Shifts Off Premises as AI Reshapes Data Centers

Third-party data centers now host more enterprise workloads than corporate facilities for the first time, driven by AI capacity demands. more →

How Do You Kill a Parasite?

Publishers must coordinate to demand fair treatment from Google's AI-driven search, which uses their content without adequate compensation. more →

Navigating AI Infrastructure Incidents: Bridging the Critical Gap Between Detection and Response

AI systems require intelligent incident response automation to bridge the gap between detecting failures and mobilizing engineers. more →

Broadcom

Introducing the VCF Inspector Fling: A Standalone Diagnostic and Health Tool for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1

Broadcom releases a standalone diagnostic and health inspection tool for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1. more →

Split or Stay Whole? Disaggregated vs. Monolithic LLM Serving on VMware Cloud Foundation

Broadcom benchmarks a 120-billion-parameter Nemotron both ways on VCF with NVIDIA Run:ai and Dynamo. more →

Deploying NVIDIA Run:ai on VMware Cloud Foundation

Broadcom documents adding GPU-aware scheduling and multi-team workload orchestration to VCF private AI deployments. more →

Meet MTAT: Your Zero-Friction Path to Memory Tiering in VMware Cloud Foundation 9

The Memory Tiering Assessment Tool v3.0 helps VCF 9 customers plan memory tiering before deploying it. more →

Platform Engineering 2.0: An Evolution for the AI Era

CIOs must evolve platform engineering to support AI agents as autonomous infrastructure consumers with governance and cost controls. more →

Citrix

How to Operationalize Citrix SecurAccess With Chrome Enterprise at Scale

Citrix details combining SecurAccess with Chrome Enterprise to control browser-based access on unmanaged devices. more →

Dell

Why Modern Ransomware Demands a Layered Cybersecurity Strategy

Dell details how Cyber Detect strengthens cyber resilience for PowerStore and PowerMax storage estates. more →

From Pipeline to Platform: The Future of AI Data Orchestration

Dell argues the next AI gains come from data orchestration across systems and teams rather than better models. more →

Dell AI Data Platform: A Technical Perspective

Dell explains the open federated architecture behind its AI Data Platform and why the data plane governs AI performance. more →

Intel

Intel Completes RAMP-C Program, Accelerating Momentum for Secure Enclave

Intel Foundry completes the US government RAMP-C program supporting domestic leading-edge CMOS manufacturing. more →

Intel's US Advanced Packaging Enables Next-Generation AI Semiconductors

Intel details how domestic advanced packaging capacity supports multi-die AI semiconductor designs. more →

KnowBe4

Majority of Organizations Hit by Targeted Impersonation Attacks

New research finds 53% of organizations had an executive or employee impersonated in the past year. more →

Future-Proofing Organizations in the Face of AI

KnowBe4 argues securing AI requires one strategy covering both the human workforce and autonomous agents. more →

New Phishing Kits Use Open-Source Tools to Bypass MFA

Researchers track three phishing kits built on the open-source Evilginx framework to proxy live Microsoft 365 sessions. more →

Apple Warns Users to Be Wary of Unsolicited FaceTime Calls

Apple flags a wave of scam FaceTime calls impersonating Apple Support to extract payment and banking details. more →

Everyone Is a Builder Now. That Changes Security Training

KnowBe4 argues that when every employee can build software, security training has to change accordingly. more →

KnowBe4 Combats Voice-Based Threats With Advanced Simulated Vishing Capabilities

KnowBe4 adds simulated vishing to its platform so organizations can train employees against AI-powered voice phishing calls. more →

Oxide Computer

Oxide Joins Anthropic's Project Glasswing

Oxide joins Anthropic's Project Glasswing, using Claude Mythos 5 to hunt vulnerabilities across its full hardware and software stack. more →

Cloud Events

The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

This session is for cloud and infrastructure leaders who are being asked to deliver greater reliability, efficiency, and innovation at a pace their current tools cannot support. Attendees will leave with a clearer vocabulary for the problem, a model for evaluating their current observability maturity, and the foundational context that the rest of this series will build on. more →

How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

Your prospects don't buy when you're ready to sell. They buy when they're ready to buy — and that's usually months after your last conversation. The question is whether you're still in the room when that moment arrives. A weekly LinkedIn newsletter is the most reliable way to be. more →

Modernizing Manufacturing: How to Move from Legacy Infrastructure to Cloud-Ready Operations (Aug. 18th)

In this session, Softchoice and AWS will share practical strategies for manufacturers looking to modernize at their own pace, connect operational and IT data for smarter decision-making, and build a scalable cloud foundation that drives real business outcomes. Whether you're just beginning your modernization journey or looking to accelerate it, you'll leave with a clear framework for moving forward. more →

M-Trends 2026: The Cascading Impact of Third-Party SaaS, Cloud, and Software Compromises (Aug. 25th)

In the latest installment of the M-Trends Virtual Series, Mandiant teams up with Wiz to tackle the technical realities of defending a decentralized cloud architecture more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

• How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

Technology

• The Quantum Technologies That Will Transform Enterprise IT

• How Silicon Photonics Lights the Way for Data Centers

Techstrong.ai

• Yenta's Tuchas and the Convenient Openness of AI

• Cutting Talent Won't Fund Your AI. Your Cloud Bill Will

• AI Agents Are Running Your Business. Who's Protecting Them?

• Survey Surfaces Massive Amounts of Wasted Spending on AI

• MLVC: Microsoft Builds an ML Video Codec for NPUs

Telco

• The Business Case to Prioritize UC Interoperability

Akamai Technologies

• How Partners Can Defend the Network and Ease AI Anxiety

• Solve Multi-CDN Entitlement Drift With Edge Functions Without Losing Viewers

• Thinking Outside the Black Box: Defenders Need Open Source AI

• API Security for Government Services: Protecting Citizen-Facing Applications

• Operationalizing Offensive AI: An Open Framework for Modern Security

Cisco

• Assuming Failure: The Mindset Shift That Actually Improves Your Defensive Outcomes

• A High-IQ Network Is Not a Smart Network. Here Is What Is Missing

• Navigating AI Tokenomics: From Cost Uncertainty to Operational Scale

• AI Supply Chain Provenance Explorer for Responsible AI Governance

• Outdoor Wi-Fi Finally Means Business

• The Zero Trust Imperative for the Frontier AI Era

Databricks

• Agents for Production Lines: Trusted Decisions in Real Time

• Bringing Real-Time Fraud Prevention to Government Benefits

• Convert Proprietary Code to Open ANSI SQL With Genie Code

DDN

• Synthesizing Golden Traces for Realistic KV Cache Evaluation in Agentic Inference Workloads

• Advancing AI for National Security: NVIDIA, DDN, and the Naval Postgraduate School Collaborate to Prepare Tomorrow's AI Leaders

Okta

• Build a Flask App With Okta for Secure OIDC Login and Authorized API Calls

Vertiv-News

• Vertiv Infrastructure Helps Bring NVIDIA AI Computing Capability to the Naval Postgraduate School

• Vertiv Launches Vertiv PurgeRite NearZero service

CxO Security Events

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

• Rapid Identity Recovery: Lessons from Frontline Incident Response (Aug. 18th)

• ADR vs. EDR: Why EDR Isn't Enough in the AI Era (Aug. 19th)

Technology

The Quantum Technologies That Will Transform Enterprise IT

Quantum advances enable practical business applications in sensors, security, ML, and simulations as 52% of companies invest $5M+ annually. more →

How Silicon Photonics Lights the Way for Data Centers

The semiconductor industry must scale silicon photonics production to keep pace with AI data center demand. more →

Techstrong.ai

Yenta's Tuchas and the Convenient Openness of AI

Tech giants advocate AI openness strategically, each seeking to commoditize competitors' layers while protecting their own. more →

Cutting Talent Won't Fund Your AI. Your Cloud Bill Will

Companies should recover wasted cloud spending rather than cut jobs to fund AI investments. more →

AI Agents Are Running Your Business. Who's Protecting Them?

Enterprises must prioritize AI agent resilience with recovery mechanisms, not just prevention, as autonomous systems run critical functions. more →

Survey Surfaces Massive Amounts of Wasted Spending on AI

Harness survey reveals 26% of enterprise AI spending generates no measurable return. more →

MLVC: Microsoft Builds an ML Video Codec for NPUs

Microsoft open sources MLVC, a neural video codec using NPUs to cut bandwidth to roughly one-eighth of traditional codecs. more →

Telco

The Business Case to Prioritize UC Interoperability

Organizations must prioritize UC interoperability strategies to manage multi-platform collaboration tools and reduce costs. more →

Akamai Technologies

How Partners Can Defend the Network and Ease AI Anxiety

Akamai positions Guardicore Segmentation as the answer partners can give customers worried about machine-speed exploits. more →

Solve Multi-CDN Entitlement Drift With Edge Functions Without Losing Viewers

Akamai shows how edge functions keep entitlement decisions consistent across multiple CDNs in video delivery. more →

Thinking Outside the Black Box: Defenders Need Open Source AI

Akamai argues open source AI is essential for cybersecurity as it joins the Open Secure AI Alliance. more →

API Security for Government Services: Protecting Citizen-Facing Applications

Akamai examines the API attack surface behind citizen-facing government applications and how to reduce it. more →

Operationalizing Offensive AI: An Open Framework for Modern Security

Akamai proposes an open framework for putting offensive AI capabilities to work inside security programs. more →

Cisco

Assuming Failure: The Mindset Shift That Actually Improves Your Defensive Outcomes

Cisco argues that designing on the assumption controls will fail produces stronger resilience than optimizing prevention. more →

A High-IQ Network Is Not a Smart Network. Here Is What Is Missing

Cisco explains how the emerging A2A standard lets independent network AI agents coordinate alongside MCP. more →

Navigating AI Tokenomics: From Cost Uncertainty to Operational Scale

Cisco frames enterprise AI cost management as an observability discipline rather than a procurement negotiation. more →

AI Supply Chain Provenance Explorer for Responsible AI Governance

Cisco introduces tooling to answer what is actually inside an open model before it enters your environment. more →

Outdoor Wi-Fi Finally Means Business

Cisco's Wireless 9177 Series brings Wi-Fi 7 and URWB to rugged outdoor and mission-critical environments. more →

The Zero Trust Imperative for the Frontier AI Era

Cisco applies Zero Trust principles to agentic AI risk and frontier model threats. more →

Databricks

Agents for Production Lines: Trusted Decisions in Real Time

Databricks shows how manufacturing agents make trusted real-time decisions when a production line fails mid-shift. more →

Bringing Real-Time Fraud Prevention to Government Benefits

Databricks describes real-time fraud prevention for federal benefits programs losing money to improper payments. more →

Convert Proprietary Code to Open ANSI SQL With Genie Code

Databricks introduces Genie Code to translate proprietary warehouse dialects into open ANSI SQL during migration. more →

DDN

Synthesizing Golden Traces for Realistic KV Cache Evaluation in Agentic Inference Workloads

DDN shows why synthetic benchmarks misrepresent KV cache behaviour and how to build realistic traces. more →

Advancing AI for National Security: NVIDIA, DDN, and the Naval Postgraduate School Collaborate to Prepare Tomorrow's AI Leaders

NVIDIA, DDN, and the Naval Postgraduate School open an AI Technology Center to train military officers on frontier AI systems. more →

Okta

Build a Flask App With Okta for Secure OIDC Login and Authorized API Calls

Okta walks Python developers through adding OIDC login and authorized backend API calls to a Flask app. more →

Vertiv-News

Vertiv Infrastructure Helps Bring NVIDIA AI Computing Capability to the Naval Postgraduate School

Vertiv deployed a complete, liquid-cooled infrastructure system at the Naval Postgraduate School to power and cool their new NVIDIA DGX GB300 AI setup for research, education, and digital engineering. more →

Vertiv Launches Vertiv PurgeRite NearZero service

Vertiv has launched its patent-pending Vertiv PurgeRite NearZero service, which combines engineered mechanical flushing, water treatment, reverse osmosis, and continuous water-quality monitoring to recycle water and reduce environmental impact during the commissioning of closed-loop hydronic systems in North American data centers. more →

CxO Security Events

Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

This session introduces the Gartner ThreatScape framework, which combines insights from security leaders with threat intelligence analysis to help organizations identify and prioritize key threats. Gartner experts outline how to interpret threat trends and respond with practical, business-aligned actions. more →

Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

This webinar explains why legacy IAM and perimeter security break down in agentic architectures and how zero trust provides a scalable fix. Learn how zero-trust identity secures autonomous agents without slowing innovation. more →

Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

The Security Operations Transformation Summit equips security leaders and practitioners with actionable strategies to modernize their security operations centers. This focused two-day virtual event delivers practical insights on implementing AI-powered automation and creating integrated SecOps strategies. more →

When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

This session shows how to build real resilience with capabilities you likely already own: limit lateral movement with segmentation and identity isolation, see what attackers are doing with audit logging that stays out of their reach, and de-risk change with snapshots, staged rollouts, and tested recovery. more →

Rapid Identity Recovery: Lessons from Frontline Incident Response (Aug. 18th)

Recovering identity after a ransomware attack is a complicated task. Restore too slowly and the business stalls; restore too quickly and you risk bringing the attacker back. more →

ADR vs. EDR: Why EDR Isn't Enough in the AI Era (Aug. 19th)

Join Raven CEO and Co-Founder Roi Abitboul, Chief Research Officer and Co-Founder Omer Yair, and Futurum's Fernando Montenegro for a practical discussion on ADR vs. EDR. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

• How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

Security Boulevard

• Your Employees Have One Digital Identity

• The Model Wasn't Rogue. The Control Plane Was

• SSOJet vs WorkOS vs Auth0 vs Okta: The 2026 Decision Framework

• How to Verify Full TLS Certificate Chains Against CRLs via OpenSSL CLI

• Enterprise MFA vs Passwordless vs SSO: What Enterprise Buyers Actually Need in 2026

• Enterprise Authentication Trends 2026: What's Actually Changing

Storage

• AI Is Storage's Biggest Opportunity - and Biggest Threat

• How Cloud Architecture Is Reinventing Primary Storage for the AI Era

Tech Field Day

• Data Needs Some Help to Get the Most From AI Inference Presented by CTERA

AWS

• Balancing Speed and Safety: A Control Framework for AI Coding Agents

• Amazon OpenSearch Service Now Supports OpenSearch Version 3.7

• AWS Direct Connect Now Supports BGP Route Visibility on Virtual Interfaces

• Amazon CloudWatch Announces Managed Prometheus Collectors

• AWS Lambda Now Supports Java 8, 11, and 17 on Amazon Linux 2023

• AWS Lambda's Self-Managed Code Storage Lifts the Account Quota, Not the Function Size Limit

CoreWeave

• Your Agent Is Only as Good as Your Infrastructure

• Why AI Factories Need Proof Before Production

CrowdStrike

• Falcon Cloud Security July 2026 Release: Helping Security Teams Move Faster in the Cloud

• Falcon Platform IOAs Arrive in Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to Identify New Threats

• Falcon AIDR Now Protects Copilot Studio Agents and Claude Code

NVIDIA

• NVIDIA: Industry Leaders Unite in Open Secure AI Alliance for AI Safety and Security

UiPath

• The Dark Testing Factory: How Testing Moves From Manual Effort to Governed Autonomy at Scale

Varonis

• When AI Assistant Share Links Become Public Exposure

• Data Security Scanning Performance: Why Full Coverage Does Not Mean Slow Scans

Veeam

• Veeam Data Platform v13.1: Identity Resilience, Cyber Resilience, and AI That Improves Day 2 Operations

• Your Premium Storage Has Better Things to Do: Introducing Veeam Vault Archive

• Adverse Cyber Extortion Outcomes Happen More Often Than Victims Are Told

• How Aussie Broadband Built Kubernetes Resilience at Scale and What Comes Next

• How Can You Trust AI Agents? Veeam Can Help

• Veeam Data Platform v13.1 Now Available, Helping Organizations Recover Clean and Fast From Cyber Disruption

AI Events

• The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• When AI Becomes an Insider: Rethinking Risk in Critical Infrastructure (Aug. 18th)

• The Six five Summit - AI UNLEASHED: 2026 (Aug 25 - Aug 27)

• AI Trust & Governance Summit (Sept. 15th)

Security Boulevard

Your Employees Have One Digital Identity

Enterprises must adopt fuzed identity intelligence to address risks spanning employees' personal and corporate digital footprints. more →

The Model Wasn't Rogue. The Control Plane Was

OpenAI models breached Hugging Face during evaluation; the incident reveals control plane failures, not AI autonomy. more →

SSOJet vs WorkOS vs Auth0 vs Okta: The 2026 Decision Framework

Comparison framework for four enterprise SSO vendors based on company stage and pricing. more →

How to Verify Full TLS Certificate Chains Against CRLs via OpenSSL CLI

Learn to verify TLS certificate revocation status across entire chains using OpenSSL command-line tools. more →

Enterprise MFA vs Passwordless vs SSO: What Enterprise Buyers Actually Need in 2026

MFA, passwordless authentication, and SSO solve different login problems and work together in enterprise security stacks. more →

Enterprise Authentication Trends 2026: What's Actually Changing

Machine identities vastly outnumber humans in enterprises; agent identity, passkey adoption, and OAuth 2.1 status clarified. more →

Storage

AI Is Storage's Biggest Opportunity - and Biggest Threat

AI revolutionizes storage with faster data access and better security, but also introduces risks from rogue agents and sophisticated attacks. more →

How Cloud Architecture Is Reinventing Primary Storage for the AI Era

Primary storage is being redefined as software-managed and globally distributed rather than tied to hardware or proximity to compute. more →

Tech Field Day

Data Needs Some Help to Get the Most From AI Inference Presented by CTERA

CTERA discusses preparing unstructured corporate data for AI agents through tagging and automated extraction. more →

AWS

Balancing Speed and Safety: A Control Framework for AI Coding Agents

AWS proposes a control framework for AI coding agents that can open dozens of pull requests across repositories in an afternoon. more →

Amazon OpenSearch Service Now Supports OpenSearch Version 3.7

OpenSearch 3.7 brings 1-bit scalar quantization on Faiss and Lucene, cutting vector storage and memory needs. more →

AWS Direct Connect Now Supports BGP Route Visibility on Virtual Interfaces

Direct Connect customers can now see which routes AWS accepted from and advertised to their on-premises routers. more →

Amazon CloudWatch Announces Managed Prometheus Collectors

CloudWatch can now scrape Prometheus metrics from EKS, EC2, ECS, MSK, and OpenSearch without customer-managed agents. more →

AWS Lambda Now Supports Java 8, 11, and 17 on Amazon Linux 2023

Lambda adds AL2023 runtimes for older Java versions so customers can decouple OS and language upgrades. more →

AWS Lambda's Self-Managed Code Storage Lifts the Account Quota, Not the Function Size Limit

AWS Lambda can now load deployment packages from customer-owned S3 buckets, removing the per-Region code storage quota. more →

CoreWeave

Your Agent Is Only as Good as Your Infrastructure

CoreWeave opens a three-part series arguing agent performance depends on infrastructure, not just model quality. more →

Why AI Factories Need Proof Before Production

CoreWeave and NVIDIA describe validating an integrated AI factory stack before customers deploy on it. more →

CrowdStrike

Falcon Cloud Security July 2026 Release: Helping Security Teams Move Faster in the Cloud

CrowdStrike details the July Falcon Cloud Security release aimed at shortening cloud investigation cycles. more →

Falcon Platform IOAs Arrive in Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to Identify New Threats

CrowdStrike brings platform indicators of attack into Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for behaviour-based detection across logs. more →

Falcon AIDR Now Protects Copilot Studio Agents and Claude Code

CrowdStrike extends Falcon AI Detection and Response coverage to Copilot Studio agents and Claude Code. more →

NVIDIA

NVIDIA: Industry Leaders Unite in Open Secure AI Alliance for AI Safety and Security

NVIDIA and dozens of founding partners launch the Open Secure AI Alliance to build shared open tools for cyber defense. more →

UiPath

The Dark Testing Factory: How Testing Moves From Manual Effort to Governed Autonomy at Scale

UiPath describes an operating model where quality engineering scales testing through governed autonomy. more →

Varonis

When AI Assistant Share Links Become Public Exposure

Varonis finds AI assistant share links behave more publicly than the private hand-off users assume. more →

Data Security Scanning Performance: Why Full Coverage Does Not Mean Slow Scans

Varonis explains why API rate limits, not scan design, set the ceiling on data security scanning speed. more →

Veeam

Veeam Data Platform v13.1: Identity Resilience, Cyber Resilience, and AI That Improves Day 2 Operations

Veeam ships v13.1 with automated Active Directory Forest Recovery, post-quantum cryptography, and agentic operations. more →

Your Premium Storage Has Better Things to Do: Introducing Veeam Vault Archive

Veeam launches Vault Archive as unstructured data growth collides with a supply-constrained hard drive market. more →

Adverse Cyber Extortion Outcomes Happen More Often Than Victims Are Told

Veeam's Q2 data challenges the advice that paying ransomware operators reliably resolves an incident. more →

How Aussie Broadband Built Kubernetes Resilience at Scale and What Comes Next

Aussie Broadband describes building Kubernetes data protection as the platform became baseline infrastructure. more →

How Can You Trust AI Agents? Veeam Can Help

Veeam is folding acquired Securiti technology into its platform to govern and verify what AI agents can do with enterprise data. more →

Veeam Data Platform v13.1 Now Available, Helping Organizations Recover Clean and Fast From Cyber Disruption

Veeam ships Data Platform v13.1 with six new hypervisors, NAS malware scanning, and pre-restore threat validation. more →

AI Events

The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

Join this session and cut through the noise, avoid common pitfalls, and design a contract tech stack that delivers business value. Transition from operator to architect as a general counsel more →

How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

In this session, you will learn how to evaluate readiness across five core pillars and move beyond 'can we build it' to 'how do we use it responsibly.' You will also explore how to apply an AI agent acceleration canvas to define a focused 90-day plan that deploys targeted use cases while managing risk. more →

AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

Attend AI Risk Summit to hear directly from leaders at some of the world's largest enterprises as they share how they're identifying, mitigating, and managing AI risks within their organizations. more →

When AI Becomes an Insider: Rethinking Risk in Critical Infrastructure (Aug. 18th)

In this 60-minute fireside chat, Dawn Haley, Senior Manager of Threat Intelligence & Investigations at Duke Energy, joins Scott Hooper, Enterprise Sales Director at DTEX, to share practical perspectives on how critical infrastructure organizations are adapting insider risk strategies as AI becomes more embedded into everyday work, security operations, and business workflows. more →

The Six five Summit - AI UNLEASHED: 2026 (Aug 25 - Aug 27)

The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026 delivers 3 days of exclusive, on-demand programming built for leaders ready to move beyond AI experimentation and into real deployment. more →

AI Trust & Governance Summit (Sept. 15th)

In this expert-led virtual summit, we'll explore practical approaches for establishing governance that can help accelerate innovation while protecting your business. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

• How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

Careers

• Rethink How You Screen Senior Developers to Produce Better Mentors

• IT Jobs Report: Demand for AI Fluency Rises

• All the Pretty Managers Without Management Training

• AI Certifications for Working Professionals: Best Courses to Upskill

• 10 Careers With the Highest Job Satisfaction in 2026

• AI Jobs 2026: 9 New Careers That Didn't Exist Five Years Ago

Email

• Getting SPF Record Structure Right at Scale

• How to Build a Scalable DMARC Managed Service

Linux

• Your Linux Kernel Keeps Getting Smarter-Here's How

Security

• Duo Alternatives: Comparing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Solutions for Higher Security

• US and Allies Update SBOM Guidance

• Securing What Matters: Why Cyber Resilience Needs Prioritisation

• Ransomware Is More Disruptive and Recovery Readiness Matters More Than Ever

• AI Moved Into the Dev Workflow. Security Didn't.

• Gartner: Why Cyber Security Must Shift to Outcomes Against AI-Led Attacks

AWS

• How AgentCore Gateway Supports the MCP 2026-07-28 Spec

• Amazon S3 Tables Now Support the Variant Data Type for Apache Iceberg V3

• AWS KMS or AWS CloudHSM: Choose the Right Key Management Solution

• Amazon EKS Provisioned Control Plane Now Delivers Faster Pod Autoscaling

• AWS DataSync Enhanced Mode Adds HDFS, Azure Blob, and Object Storage Locations With Hyper-V Agent Support

• AWS Announces AWS Interconnect Multicloud Connectivity With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in GA

Cloudflare

• We Are Open-Sourcing Our Privacy Proxy CLI

• Post-Quantum Authentication to Origins Is Now Supported

HPE

• HPE Joins Open Secure AI Alliance to Advance Open Cybersecurity Innovation

Palo Alto Networks

• Palo Alto Networks Achieves Global CBPR and PRP Certifications

• Chinese-Speaking Threat Actor Harnesses AI Models for Autonomous Cyberattacks

• The Xcode Assassin Returns: A Deep Dive Into the Latest XCSSET Version

• Security at the Speed of AI: How to Protect Against Sophisticated Cyberattacks

Sophos

• Introducing Sophos AI Defense

• Turn Cybersecurity Into a High-Value Business Function With Sophos CISO Advantage

• Why Sophos Has Become Its Own AI Test Lab

• Chaos in Teams Vishing

• Secure by Design in Practice: A Year of Progress on Sophos Firewall

• When AI Does Not Know the Target Is Real

Tenable

• Coordinated Cyberattack on Minnesota Water Utilities: What You Need to Know

• What Water Utilities Need to Know About Cybersecurity Compliance

Ubuntu

• Ubuntu's Virtualization Hardware Enablement Stack: A New Model for Confidential Computing Enablement

Careers

Rethink How You Screen Senior Developers to Produce Better Mentors

Traditional coding tests often miss the qualities that matter most in senior developers. Explore a hiring approach focused on code review, mentoring and practical problem solving. more →

IT Jobs Report: Demand for AI Fluency Rises

75% of US tech job postings require AI fluency, up 178% year-over-year, as firms accelerate AI implementation hiring. more →

All the Pretty Managers Without Management Training

Companies promote skilled technicians into management roles without proper training, creating ineffective leaders. more →

AI Certifications for Working Professionals: Best Courses to Upskill

AI certifications help working professionals build practical skills, increase earning potential, improve promotion chances, and stay competitive. This guide explores the best AI certifications, costs, durations, and latest industry data. more →

10 Careers With the Highest Job Satisfaction in 2026

Healthcare and tech roles lead job satisfaction rankings, driven by meaningful work and flexibility rather than salary alone. more →

AI Jobs 2026: 9 New Careers That Didn't Exist Five Years Ago

Nine emerging AI career roles are reshaping the workforce as businesses rapidly adopt artificial intelligence across industries. more →

Email

Getting SPF Record Structure Right at Scale

SPF record architecture decisions determine DNS lookup counts and DMARC alignment at enterprise scale. more →

How to Build a Scalable DMARC Managed Service

Guide for MSPs to deploy DMARC as a recurring revenue service protecting clients from email-based threats. more →

Linux

Your Linux Kernel Keeps Getting Smarter-Here's How

Linux kernel versions 7.0-7.2 introduce Rust support, improved NTFS drivers, and performance optimizations. more →

Security

Duo Alternatives: Comparing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Solutions for Higher Security

Guide comparing MFA solutions including Silverfort, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, and others as alternatives to Cisco Duo. more →

US and Allies Update SBOM Guidance

US and 13 allied nations released updated SBOM minimum elements guidance to reflect evolving supply chain security needs. more →

Securing What Matters: Why Cyber Resilience Needs Prioritisation

Vulnerability prioritisation, not patching everything, is the route to cyber resilience amid overwhelming UK threat volumes. more →

Ransomware Is More Disruptive and Recovery Readiness Matters More Than Ever

Ransomware continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and it is challenging the most common cybersecurity assumptions. more →

AI Moved Into the Dev Workflow. Security Didn't.

AI-native coding environments generate production-bound code faster than security review processes were designed to track. more →

Gartner: Why Cyber Security Must Shift to Outcomes Against AI-Led Attacks

Anthropic's revelation that a model broke out of its test environment three times and accessed external systems, shows the power of these models more →

AWS

How AgentCore Gateway Supports the MCP 2026-07-28 Spec

The Model Context Protocol's largest revision since launch makes MCP stateless, and Bedrock AgentCore Gateway now supports it. more →

Amazon S3 Tables Now Support the Variant Data Type for Apache Iceberg V3

S3 Tables adds the Iceberg V3 Variant type so semi-structured JSON can be written without predefining a schema. more →

AWS KMS or AWS CloudHSM: Choose the Right Key Management Solution

AWS sets out when hardware-backed CloudHSM is warranted versus the fully managed KMS service. more →

Amazon EKS Provisioned Control Plane Now Delivers Faster Pod Autoscaling

EKS raises Horizontal Pod Autoscaler sync concurrency to up to 40 times the Kubernetes default. more →

AWS DataSync Enhanced Mode Adds HDFS, Azure Blob, and Object Storage Locations With Hyper-V Agent Support

DataSync Enhanced mode extends agent-based transfers to HDFS, Azure Blob Storage, and self-managed object storage. more →

AWS Announces AWS Interconnect Multicloud Connectivity With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in GA

AWS Interconnect for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure reaches general availability for direct multicloud network links. more →

Cloudflare

We Are Open-Sourcing Our Privacy Proxy CLI

Cloudflare releases pvcli, a curl-like tool for testing privacy protocols such as OHTTP. more →

Post-Quantum Authentication to Origins Is Now Supported

Cloudflare adds post-quantum authentication for Authenticated Origin Pulls and Custom Origin Trust Store. more →

HPE

HPE Joins Open Secure AI Alliance to Advance Open Cybersecurity Innovation

HPE joins the Open Secure AI Alliance, extending its open source commitments into AI security. more →

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks Achieves Global CBPR and PRP Certifications

Palo Alto Networks certifies under the Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules and Privacy Recognition for Processors frameworks. more →

Chinese-Speaking Threat Actor Harnesses AI Models for Autonomous Cyberattacks

Unit 42 details a threat actor combining autonomous AI scanning across seven vulnerabilities with manual exploitation. more →

The Xcode Assassin Returns: A Deep Dive Into the Latest XCSSET Version

Unit 42 analyzes XCSSET v40, macOS malware that spreads through Xcode projects to target developers. more →

Security at the Speed of AI: How to Protect Against Sophisticated Cyberattacks

Frontier AI models enable machine-speed attacks requiring identity-centric SASE architecture for modern enterprise defense. more →

Sophos

Introducing Sophos AI Defense

Sophos launches AI Defense to discover shadow AI, assess risk, and enforce policy inside the existing Fusion stack. more →

Turn Cybersecurity Into a High-Value Business Function With Sophos CISO Advantage

Sophos previews CISO Advantage, a cyber program management platform arriving in October to express security in business terms. more →

Why Sophos Has Become Its Own AI Test Lab

Sophos describes the risk compass and AI Safety Board it uses to govern aggressive internal AI adoption. more →

Chaos in Teams Vishing

Sophos tracks STAC4749 using Teams vishing and custom malware to deploy Chaos ransomware within 17 hours. more →

Secure by Design in Practice: A Year of Progress on Sophos Firewall

Sophos reports a year of firewall hardening and an internal AI vulnerability-hunting platform that outperformed pen testing on cost. more →

When AI Does Not Know the Target Is Real

Sophos reads Anthropic's disclosure of three sandbox-escape incidents as proof that security fundamentals still decide the outcome. more →

Tenable

Coordinated Cyberattack on Minnesota Water Utilities: What You Need to Know

Tenable covers a coordinated attack that disrupted water systems across more than 30 Minnesota communities. more →

What Water Utilities Need to Know About Cybersecurity Compliance

Tenable maps the tightening compliance landscape facing water and wastewater utilities. more →

Ubuntu

Ubuntu's Virtualization Hardware Enablement Stack: A New Model for Confidential Computing Enablement

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS integrates host and guest support for AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX confidential computing. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

• How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

Cloud

• Why Cloud Computing Skills Are Becoming Essential for Modern IT Professionals

• The Foundation Was Already Poured

DevOps.com

• Why Log Monitoring Is the Missing Link in Most Incident Response Workflows

• Why Agentic Coding Needs Governance at Scale

• Validation Debt That Your Dashboards Are Not Showing

• The Surprisingly High Cost of 'Free' Search Solutions

• The Innovation Puzzle 2.0: Connecting Vision and Value

• Investments in DevOps Tools and Platforms Start to Accelerate in AI Era

Marketing

• Best AI Tools for Social Media in 2026

• AI in Digital Marketing: Ultimate Guide for 2026

Operations

• AI Drives Data Center Uncertainty in Uptime's 2026 Survey

• CISA Issues Fresh SBOM Guidance. Did They Get It Right?

• The Silent Killer: Monitoring Failed Auth Attempts Across Your Stack

AWS

• AWS Security Hub MCP App Brings Exposure Findings Into Your AI-Assisted Workflow (Preview)

• AWS Shield Advanced Is Embracing the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS Managed Rule Group: What Changes and How to Prepare

• Beyond RAG: Task-Aware Knowledge Compression for Enterprise AI on AWS

• Amazon Neptune Now Supports Tag-Based Access Control for IAM

• AWS Glue Data Quality Now Supports Anomaly Detection and Writing Results to the AWS Glue Data Catalog

• Amazon RDS for SQL Server Now Supports Restoring TDE Databases on Multi-AZ Instances

Bitdefender

• Britain's Big Push to Make the Internet Safer

• Bitdefender Adds Managed Detection and Response Services to Its European Sovereign Acceleration Program

HP

• HP's Intel Business PC Lineup Targets Flexible Work

OpenAI

• How avatarin Built a 24/7 Retail Agent With GPT-Realtime

• Disrupting a Criminal Scam Operation

• Building Abundant Intelligence

• Ten Advances in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science

Snowflake

• Observability at Scale: Whatnot at Snowflake Summit

• Enterprise AI Security: Agentic Controls and MCP Governance

• Adaptive Compute: Now GA Across Select AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Regions

• Apache Iceberg Lakehouse: Snowflake and Google Cloud

• Observe on Apache Iceberg: Unlocking Open Observability

• Run Apache Spark on Snowflake With CoCo

Sysdig

• Introducing the SysQL Skill: Ask Your Security Graph Anything

• Introducing the Runtime Remediation Skill for Headless Cloud Security

Tierpoint

• Azure Cost Optimization: Best Practices and Key Tools

Cloud

Why Cloud Computing Skills Are Becoming Essential for Modern IT Professionals

Cloud computing expertise is now critical for IT professionals due to widespread business adoption and growing career opportunities. more →

The Foundation Was Already Poured

Cloud native infrastructure provides the essential foundations that enterprise AI systems inherit rather than replace. more →

DevOps.com

Why Log Monitoring Is the Missing Link in Most Incident Response Workflows

Integrating log data into incident response reduces MTTR by providing real-time narrative context alongside metrics and traces. more →

Why Agentic Coding Needs Governance at Scale

Enterprises must implement centralized governance frameworks to manage AI coding agents at scale safely. more →

Validation Debt That Your Dashboards Are Not Showing

AI coding assistants increase development speed faster than teams can verify code, creating hidden enterprise risk. more →

The Surprisingly High Cost of 'Free' Search Solutions

Self-managed open-source search platforms hide substantial infrastructure and labor costs that managed alternatives now address. more →

The Innovation Puzzle 2.0: Connecting Vision and Value

Sustainable enterprise innovation requires architecture, governance, and culture beyond AI adoption. more →

Investments in DevOps Tools and Platforms Start to Accelerate in AI Era

Survey shows 54% of organizations use AI across most of the SDLC, but quality concerns and governance gaps persist. more →

Marketing

Best AI Tools for Social Media in 2026

Sprout Social ranks best overall among AI social media tools compared on content, publishing, listening, engagement, and analytics. more →

AI in Digital Marketing: Ultimate Guide for 2026

Guide to using AI for content creation, personalization, segmentation, automation, and campaign analysis in digital marketing. more →

Operations

AI Drives Data Center Uncertainty in Uptime's 2026 Survey

Uptime’s 2026 survey shows AI raising costs and density while narrowing management focus, as operators hedge with phased builds and struggle to forecast capacity. more →

CISA Issues Fresh SBOM Guidance. Did They Get It Right?

CISA and 16 partner agencies expand SBOM minimum elements, but critics say the framework lacks real risk-management improvements. more →

The Silent Killer: Monitoring Failed Auth Attempts Across Your Stack

Organizations must monitor failed authentication attempts to detect attacks, resolve configuration issues, and meet compliance requirements. more →

AWS

AWS Security Hub MCP App Brings Exposure Findings Into Your AI-Assisted Workflow (Preview)

AWS previews a local MCP server that pulls Security Hub exposure findings directly into Claude Desktop for investigation. more →

AWS Shield Advanced Is Embracing the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS Managed Rule Group: What Changes and How to Prepare

AWS explains how Shield Advanced customers should migrate to the WAF Anti-DDoS managed rule group. more →

Beyond RAG: Task-Aware Knowledge Compression for Enterprise AI on AWS

AWS shows how compressing knowledge bases into task-specific representations beats retrieval on analytical work. more →

Amazon Neptune Now Supports Tag-Based Access Control for IAM

Neptune adds tag-based access control so IAM and SCP conditions can gate data-plane operations. more →

AWS Glue Data Quality Now Supports Anomaly Detection and Writing Results to the AWS Glue Data Catalog

Glue Data Quality adds anomaly detection for catalog-based evaluations and can write results back to catalog tables. more →

Amazon RDS for SQL Server Now Supports Restoring TDE Databases on Multi-AZ Instances

Native backup and restore of TDE-enabled SQL Server databases now works on Multi-AZ instances and read replicas. more →

Bitdefender

Britain's Big Push to Make the Internet Safer

Bitdefender examines UK legislation shifting online safety burden from individuals to platforms and providers. more →

Bitdefender Adds Managed Detection and Response Services to Its European Sovereign Acceleration Program

Bitdefender expands its European Sovereign Acceleration Program to include MDR services fully operated within EU boundaries. more →

HP

HP's Intel Business PC Lineup Targets Flexible Work

HP's 2026 commercial PC refresh pairs Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips with form factors aimed at hybrid work. more →

OpenAI

How avatarin Built a 24/7 Retail Agent With GPT-Realtime

avatarin's GPT-Realtime agent gave Yamada Denki shoppers multilingual support, reaching 30,000 users in two weeks. more →

Disrupting a Criminal Scam Operation

OpenAI disrupted a Cambodia-based operation using ChatGPT for investment, romance, and impersonation scams. more →

Building Abundant Intelligence

OpenAI sets out its full-stack approach to making advanced AI more capable, affordable, and widely useful. more →

Ten Advances in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science

OpenAI reports new results on long-standing open problems spanning geometry, cryptography, and complexity. more →

Snowflake

Observability at Scale: Whatnot at Snowflake Summit

Whatnot describes using Snowflake observability and AI analytics to support hyper-growth. more →

Enterprise AI Security: Agentic Controls and MCP Governance

Snowflake announces Cortex AI Gateway and MCP governance tooling at Black Hat 2026. more →

Adaptive Compute: Now GA Across Select AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Regions

Snowflake Adaptive Compute reaches general availability across all three major clouds. more →

Apache Iceberg Lakehouse: Snowflake and Google Cloud

Snowflake and Google Cloud detail building an open, AI-ready lakehouse on Apache Iceberg. more →

Observe on Apache Iceberg: Unlocking Open Observability

Observe by Snowflake enters private preview storing telemetry as open Iceberg tables in customer S3 buckets. more →

Run Apache Spark on Snowflake With CoCo

Snowflake's CoCo spark-migration skill moves Apache Spark pipelines onto Snowpark Connect. more →

Sysdig

Introducing the SysQL Skill: Ask Your Security Graph Anything

Sysdig brings its security graph into Claude Code so analysts can query blast radius in plain language. more →

Introducing the Runtime Remediation Skill for Headless Cloud Security

Sysdig's Runtime Remediation Skill turns a runtime alert into an ordered, auditable response with analyst confirmation. more →

Tierpoint

Azure Cost Optimization: Best Practices and Key Tools

TierPoint sets out practices and tooling for reducing Azure spend without sacrificing performance. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

• How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

CxO Podcasts

• 443 - Learn the Business. Earn the Influence w/ Andrew Schutsky (37:29)

• 442 - Listen, Understand, Execute: The IT Leadership Edge w/ Farhan Zakir (45:04)

• Rogue AI, the Bar, Breaches, BMC, Hugging Face, Helmuth von Multke, Ike, Shieldfont - SWN #603

• Deep Fakes, Molten Salt, PLCs, Checkpoint, Hugging Face, CentOS, Josh Marpet and More - SWN #602

• Exploring AI Network Protocols; Vulnerability Truths and Guarantees; and the News - O'Shea Bowens, Jeremiah Grossman - ESW #469

• Why AI Pilots Stall: How to Make Enterprise AI Work

HR

• 6 Benefits of a Learning Management System

• How Companies Are Accidentally Training Future Leaders to Stay Quiet

Humor

• Techie Lured Out of Retirement to Support Software Only He Remembered

• Manager Showed Off His DOS Prowess - With a Command That Wiped Data

• BOFH: This Printer Engineer Knows Every Trick in the Book

Operations

• Essential Metrics for AI Hardware Management

• Questions to Ask When Evaluating AI-Ready Data Center Providers

• Using Power Telemetry for Data Center Capacity Planning

• Enterprises Return to Colocation: The Appeal of Shared Facilities

• Sustainable Data Centers Require More Than Reducing Energy Costs

• Companies Push AI, Sysadmins Keep It on a Short Leash

Barracuda Networks

• When Identity Is Compromised, Seconds Matter

• The Protection Problem: Why Patch Available Does Not Mean System Secure

Fortinet

• While External Threats Are Driving Security Awareness, Internal Risks Are Growing

IBM

• IBM Study: One in Four Malicious Breaches Are AI-Enabled, Costing Companies $6 Million on Average

• IBM and The University of Chicago Demonstrate Quantum Advantage, Establishing Trusted Quantum Computation on Logical Circuits

• IBM and Qedma Demonstrate Quantum Advantage, Modeling Physics Beyond Classical Capabilities Through Trusted Quantum Computation

• IBM and Algorithmiq Demonstrate Quantum Advantage, Establishing a Framework for Trusted Quantum Computation Beyond Classical Verification

Red Hat

• No Time to Lose: Why Post-Quantum Security for Financial Services Must Start Now

• Lights On! Real-Time Threat Response With Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security

• Sovereign by Design: Lessons From Red Hat Summit

• Why Self-Hosted Inference Is Essential: Building a Reliable, Sovereign Inference Layer

• Make Every GPU-Hour Count: Progress Tracking in Red Hat OpenShift AI

• Announcing Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS on AWS Marketplace

SuperMicro

• Supermicro Expands DCBBS With Precision-Engineered AI Rack Series to Accelerate Deployment and Time-to-Online

SUSE

• Secure and Simple AI Deployment With SUSE and Supermicro

• What Is Agentic AI for Kubernetes? A Platform Engineer's Guide

CxO Security Events

• Stop Managing Alerts. Start Predicting from Events. Detect Recurring Patterns Before Alerts Become Incidents (Aug. 19th)

CxO Podcasts

443 - Learn the Business. Earn the Influence w/ Andrew Schutsky (37:29)

CIO Andrew Schutsky shares how learning business fundamentals and building relationships drives IT leadership influence. more →

442 - Listen, Understand, Execute: The IT Leadership Edge w/ Farhan Zakir (45:04)

IT leader Farhan Zakir shares how understanding business operations and mastering communication drives IT leadership success. more →

Rogue AI, the Bar, Breaches, BMC, Hugging Face, Helmuth von Multke, Ike, Shieldfont - SWN #603

Security Weekly News covers OpenAI losing control of two models during an evaluation and 24,000 exposed BMCs leaking credentials. more →

Deep Fakes, Molten Salt, PLCs, Checkpoint, Hugging Face, CentOS, Josh Marpet and More - SWN #602

Security Weekly News segment covering deep fakes, molten salt, PLCs, Check Point, Hugging Face and CentOS with Josh Marpet. more →

Exploring AI Network Protocols; Vulnerability Truths and Guarantees; and the News - O'Shea Bowens, Jeremiah Grossman - ESW #469

Enterprise Security Weekly explores AI network protocols with O'Shea Bowens and questions the AI vulnerability-discovery hype with Jeremiah Grossman. more →

Why AI Pilots Stall: How to Make Enterprise AI Work

Most AI pilots never reach production, and the ones that do rarely scale. AI strategist Nate B. Jones explains why pilots stall and what the companies that succeed do differently. more →

HR

6 Benefits of a Learning Management System

A learning management system can centralize training, support compliance, improve access, provide learning data and help HR scale employee upskilling and reskilling programs. more →

How Companies Are Accidentally Training Future Leaders to Stay Quiet

Organizations that encourage employees to ask the questions AI can’t answer will thrive, writes SurveyMonkey’s CPO. more →

Humor

Techie Lured Out of Retirement to Support Software Only He Remembered

Retired software support specialist recalled to restore archived documents for a tax audit using decades-old application knowledge. more →

Manager Showed Off His DOS Prowess - With a Command That Wiped Data

A construction manager accidentally deleted all files on a colleague's PC using the DOS command DEL *.* during the 1980s. more →

BOFH: This Printer Engineer Knows Every Trick in the Book

A cunning IT administrator outsmarts a printer service engineer using his own playbook of delaying tactics. more →

Operations

Essential Metrics for AI Hardware Management

Organizations must track compute, network, storage and business metrics to optimize AI infrastructure and manage costs. more →

Questions to Ask When Evaluating AI-Ready Data Center Providers

AI infrastructure demands require evaluating data centers beyond traditional metrics, including power, cooling, sustainability, and community risks. more →

Using Power Telemetry for Data Center Capacity Planning

Power telemetry enables operators to optimize capacity planning with real-time insight into dynamic AI workload power consumption. more →

Enterprises Return to Colocation: The Appeal of Shared Facilities

As AI needs rise and cloud costs escalate, organizations are reassessing colocation, adopting a balanced approach that prioritizes workload-specific strategies. more →

Sustainable Data Centers Require More Than Reducing Energy Costs

Sustainable data centers demand holistic strategies beyond energy efficiency, including cooling optimization and waste reduction. more →

Companies Push AI, Sysadmins Keep It on a Short Leash

Sysadmins remain cautious about AI adoption despite corporate pressure, maintaining human oversight for critical systems. more →

Barracuda Networks

When Identity Is Compromised, Seconds Matter

Barracuda covers automated containment of compromised accounts as attackers find ways around MFA. more →

The Protection Problem: Why Patch Available Does Not Mean System Secure

Barracuda examines n-day and chained attacks against organizations that lag on patch deployment. more →

Fortinet

While External Threats Are Driving Security Awareness, Internal Risks Are Growing

Fortinet finds attention to external threats is leaving insider and internal process risk comparatively unmanaged. more →

IBM

IBM Study: One in Four Malicious Breaches Are AI-Enabled, Costing Companies $6 Million on Average

IBM's annual breach research finds a quarter of malicious breaches now involve AI, averaging $6 million in cost. more →

IBM and The University of Chicago Demonstrate Quantum Advantage, Establishing Trusted Quantum Computation on Logical Circuits

Researchers encoded 70 logical qubits with a new error correction method to solve a classically intractable problem. more →

IBM and Qedma Demonstrate Quantum Advantage, Modeling Physics Beyond Classical Capabilities Through Trusted Quantum Computation

Qedma's error reduction software on IBM hardware resolved quantum material dynamics that classical simulation could not. more →

IBM and Algorithmiq Demonstrate Quantum Advantage, Establishing a Framework for Trusted Quantum Computation Beyond Classical Verification

An Algorithmiq quantum simulation of heterogeneous matter still competes with leading classical methods eight months on. more →

Red Hat

No Time to Lose: Why Post-Quantum Security for Financial Services Must Start Now

Red Hat argues financial services cannot defer post-quantum migration given long data confidentiality horizons. more →

Lights On! Real-Time Threat Response With Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security

Part two of Red Hat's zero trust series covers runtime threat response in OpenShift clusters. more →

Sovereign by Design: Lessons From Red Hat Summit

Red Hat draws sovereign cloud lessons from operators in the UAE and India. more →

Why Self-Hosted Inference Is Essential: Building a Reliable, Sovereign Inference Layer

Red Hat argues agent reliability depends on the inference layer, which hosted endpoints do not guarantee. more →

Make Every GPU-Hour Count: Progress Tracking in Red Hat OpenShift AI

Red Hat adds training progress tracking so failed GPU jobs are caught in hours rather than days. more →

Announcing Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS on AWS Marketplace

OpenShift Platform Plus becomes available for ROSA through the AWS Marketplace. more →

SuperMicro

Supermicro Expands DCBBS With Precision-Engineered AI Rack Series to Accelerate Deployment and Time-to-Online

Supermicro adds a purpose-built rack portfolio to its DCBBS lineup for high-density, liquid-cooled AI data center deployments. more →

SUSE

Secure and Simple AI Deployment With SUSE and Supermicro

SUSE and Supermicro present a unified stack aimed at removing deployment friction from enterprise AI. more →

What Is Agentic AI for Kubernetes? A Platform Engineer's Guide

SUSE explains what changes for platform engineers when AI moves from answering questions to taking cluster actions. more →

CxO Security Events

Stop Managing Alerts. Start Predicting from Events. Detect Recurring Patterns Before Alerts Become Incidents (Aug. 19th)

In this webinar, Digitate's Robin Bennedict, Product Manager, and Abhijit Deshpande, Global Head - Ecosystems and Solutions, explain why event-centric operations represent a fundamentally different operating model. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

• How to Use LinkedIn Newsletters to Stay Top-Of-Mind (Aug. 18th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

CxO

• How CIOs Can Evaluate Enterprise Software Vendors

• Data Center Backlash Could Slow CIOs' AI Plans

• Why AI Governance Is Failing - and What Actually Works

• 6 Strategic Trade-Offs CIOs Can't Afford to Get Wrong

• The Rise of the 'Internet of Agents' and Why It Changes Everything

• 7 Best Books Every CTO Should Read for Leadership Growth

Developer

• The AI's Code Looks Right. That's the Problem.

• Best Programming Languages for Database Administrators to Master

• Top DSA Books Every Programmer Should Read in 2026

• AI Writes Half Our Code Now. It Still Fails Security Tests 44% of the Time.

• Turning 10x Developers Into 10x Value

• Building Secure Integrations With Financial Applications: Authentication Best Practices for Developers

DevOps.com

• DevOps Is Drowning in Updates-and Engineering Is Paying the Price

• AI Code Generation Raises New Quality Risks

• Adoption and Fragmentation of AI in CI/CD-and Operational Readiness

Java

• Java News Roundup: Simple JSON API, JEPs for JDK 28, Oracle CPUs, Embabel 1.0, Azul Payara, Helidon

Anysphere

• Introducing Cursor Start

• How We Set Up Our Cloud Agent Environment

Commvault

• What OpenAI's Hugging Face Security Incident Means for Cyber Resilience

• Sysdig Calls JadePuffer the First Documented Agentic Ransomware Attack. Here Is What It Means for Recovery

• The Anatomy of a CVE: How Commvault Protects Its Customers

• The Evolution of the Resilience Engineer: How Commvault Is Redefining the Backup Administrator Experience

F5

• Chinese Open-Weight AI Models: Cybersecurity Risks and Rewards

OpenAI

• How AI Is Expanding What People Do at Work

• Scientific Computing in the Age of Agentic AI

• How GPT-5.6 Fuses Frontier Intelligence With Frontier Efficiency

• How Enabling Two Settings Tripled Our Scores on the ARC-AGI-3 Benchmark

• Accelerating Scientific Discovery With ChatGPT for Academic Researchers

• Advancing the Price-Performance Frontier With GPT-5.6

Rubrik

• Before the Incident: Building Your M365 Minimum Viable Business Plan

• Modernize Your Hypervisors, Not Your Attack Surface

Sophos

• Three-Headed Dogs and Long Tails: Sophos at BSides LV

Marketing Events

• The Space Between Sales Calls Is Where Deals Are Won

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

CxO

How CIOs Can Evaluate Enterprise Software Vendors

CIOs should evaluate vendors across functional domains rather than checklists, weighting criteria to match organizational constraints. more →

Data Center Backlash Could Slow CIOs' AI Plans

Growing protests against data center construction across 42 US states threaten to raise costs and complicate enterprise AI deployments. more →

Why AI Governance Is Failing - and What Actually Works

Most organizations lack enforceable AI controls despite having policies, enabling shadow AI and security risks. more →

6 Strategic Trade-Offs CIOs Can't Afford to Get Wrong

CIOs navigate six critical strategic trade-offs including innovation versus stability and AI costs as AI intensifies business pressures. more →

The Rise of the 'Internet of Agents' and Why It Changes Everything

AI agents are moving beyond enterprise boundaries to interact across organizations, requiring new infrastructure for secure coordination. more →

7 Best Books Every CTO Should Read for Leadership Growth

Seven essential books help CTOs develop leadership, strategy, and organizational management skills beyond technical expertise. more →

Developer

The AI's Code Looks Right. That's the Problem.

AI-generated code looks polished regardless of correctness, requiring reviewers to verify logic rather than trust visual cleanliness. more →

Best Programming Languages for Database Administrators to Master

Database administrators should master SQL, Python, PowerShell, Bash, Java, R, and Go for modern cloud platforms and automation. more →

Top DSA Books Every Programmer Should Read in 2026

Essential guide to 10 DSA books for programmers at all levels to master algorithms and data structures. more →

AI Writes Half Our Code Now. It Still Fails Security Tests 44% of the Time.

Veracode tracked 100-plus models over a year. Security pass rates have not moved off 56%, even as AI took over half the codebase and every other capability climbed. more →

Turning 10x Developers Into 10x Value

High-performing organizations get AI leverage from rigorous engineering discipline and identifying the real throughput bottleneck. more →

Building Secure Integrations With Financial Applications: Authentication Best Practices for Developers

Financial integrations require stronger authentication than typical SaaS given the stakes of money movement and sensitive data. more →

DevOps.com

DevOps Is Drowning in Updates-and Engineering Is Paying the Price

DevOps teams struggle with information overload; structured weekly reviews help prioritize critical updates from noise. more →

AI Code Generation Raises New Quality Risks

AI-driven code generation accelerates productivity but introduces technical debt, security gaps, and quality issues. more →

Adoption and Fragmentation of AI in CI/CD-and Operational Readiness

AI adoption in CI/CD pipelines is growing, but most enterprises lack operational readiness and face integration challenges. more →

Java

Java News Roundup: Simple JSON API, JEPs for JDK 28, Oracle CPUs, Embabel 1.0, Azul Payara, Helidon

Java ecosystem updates featuring JDK 28 JEPs, Oracle security patches, and new releases from Embabel, Azul Payara, and Helidon. more →

Anysphere

Introducing Cursor Start

Anysphere launches Cursor Start, a program aimed at developers in India. more →

How We Set Up Our Cloud Agent Environment

Anysphere details the sandbox, tooling, and environment design behind Cursor's cloud agents. more →

Commvault

What OpenAI's Hugging Face Security Incident Means for Cyber Resilience

Commvault draws recovery lessons from an AI evaluation that became a real compromise of Hugging Face infrastructure. more →

Sysdig Calls JadePuffer the First Documented Agentic Ransomware Attack. Here Is What It Means for Recovery

Commvault assesses recovery implications of JadePuffer, where an AI agent chained known vulnerabilities into an extortion campaign. more →

The Anatomy of a CVE: How Commvault Protects Its Customers

Commvault explains its vulnerability handling process from CVE assignment through customer notification. more →

The Evolution of the Resilience Engineer: How Commvault Is Redefining the Backup Administrator Experience

Commvault argues AI is shifting the backup administrator role from managing infrastructure to delivering resilience outcomes. more →

F5

Chinese Open-Weight AI Models: Cybersecurity Risks and Rewards

F5 Labs finds month-to-month variation in the security posture of Chinese open-weight models. more →

OpenAI

How AI Is Expanding What People Do at Work

OpenAI research finds ChatGPT users taking on tasks outside their formal roles, reshaping job boundaries. more →

Scientific Computing in the Age of Agentic AI

A field report shows scientists using AI coding agents to modernize legacy scientific computing codebases. more →

How GPT-5.6 Fuses Frontier Intelligence With Frontier Efficiency

OpenAI explains how GPT-5.6 delivers more useful intelligence per dollar across models and inference. more →

How Enabling Two Settings Tripled Our Scores on the ARC-AGI-3 Benchmark

OpenAI shows that retaining reasoning and enabling compaction tripled GPT-5.6 performance on ARC-AGI-3. more →

Accelerating Scientific Discovery With ChatGPT for Academic Researchers

OpenAI gives 100,000 academic researchers free access to its most advanced models. more →

Advancing the Price-Performance Frontier With GPT-5.6

OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra pricing to make large-scale enterprise AI workflows viable. more →

Rubrik

Before the Incident: Building Your M365 Minimum Viable Business Plan

Rubrik sets out the peacetime planning that decides what gets recovered first when Microsoft 365 goes down. more →

Modernize Your Hypervisors, Not Your Attack Surface

Rubrik argues hypervisor diversification delivers backup coverage without visibility into what is inside the protected workloads. more →

Sophos

Three-Headed Dogs and Long Tails: Sophos at BSides LV

Sophos AI researchers preview BSides Las Vegas talks on a three-headed jailbreak detector and LLM-assisted data labeling. more →

Marketing Events

The Space Between Sales Calls Is Where Deals Are Won

Every enterprise IT sales professional knows the rhythm of a deal. There's the discovery call, the demo, the proposal, the negotiation — a handful of high-stakes conversations spread across weeks or months. We prepare obsessively for those moments. We rehearse objection handling, tune our slides, and study the org chart. And then, between those moments, we go quiet. more →

Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

Ask any enterprise IT buyer how they feel about salespeople and you'll get a tired sigh. It's not personal. It's the accumulated weight of a thousand cold emails, a hundred "quick calls," and an inbox full of reps who all somehow have "a solution that's perfect for your exact challenges" despite never having spoken to them. To the average buyer, the word *vendor* has come to mean *someone who wants my money*. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

CxO

• AI as a Mindset: A Growth Guide for CIOs

• CTO: Enterprise AI Agents Require Monitoring and Oversight

• AI Changes Who Gets to Build: Why CIOs Must Rewire the IT Operating Model

• Former Citigroup CISO Blauner on What Makes a Great Security Leader

• How MFA Gets Hacked - and Strategies to Prevent It

• How IT Leaders Can Start the Shift to Quantum-Safe Security

DR

• Modern IT Threats Demand Continuous Resilience

Security Boulevard

• Beyond Encryption: The New Standards for Quantum-Resistant AI Infrastructure

• Autonomous AI Attacks Will Be the New Normal. Are You Breach Ready Yet?

• AI Supercharges Software Security Flaws, Sparking Record Surge in 2026

• AI-Discovered Security Flaws Are Not Yet Translating Into More Exploitation

Security Boulevard - AI

• Top 7 Quantum Computing Threats to AI Infrastructure in 2026

Anthropic

• Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses With Claude

• Investigating Three Real-World Incidents in Our Cybersecurity Evaluations

DataRobot

• The First 30 Days of Agentic AI Governance: A Practical Checklist

NVIDIA

• Developing Healthcare Robotics With GPU-Native Medical Physics Simulation

• How to Self-Host a Validated AI Coding Assistant With NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails

• Four Ways to Deploy More Secure AI Agents

• NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud: Lessons for Unlocking Full Performance on AI Infrastructure

• Run High-Performance Core Math at Scale With NVIDIA nvmath-python

• Co-Designing AI Model Attention for Fast, Interactive Long-Context Inference

Perplexity

• Secure Sandboxes for Agents

• Spaces Are Now Projects

Rapid7

• Check Point SmartConsole Authentication Bypass Technical Analysis (CVE-2026-16232)

• The Next Evolution of MDR: Preemptive Defense and Agentic Investigation

• Rapid7 Cyber GRC Is Now Available: Turn Security Action Into Compliance Proof

• How AI Is Rewriting the Zero-Day Playbook for Preemptive Security

• Metasploit Framework 6.5 Released

SentinelOne

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Cybersecurity, Week 31

Developer Events

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Let Me Show You Something: Developer Meetup (Aug. 20th)

CxO

AI as a Mindset: A Growth Guide for CIOs

CIOs are working hard to make the most of AI. But using it solely as a technology to automate workflows, rather than as a mindset for growth, can limit its potential. more →

CTO: Enterprise AI Agents Require Monitoring and Oversight

Regulated industries like travel need composable architecture and explainability processes to ensure AI agent accountability and decision transparency, writes a CTO. more →

AI Changes Who Gets to Build: Why CIOs Must Rewire the IT Operating Model

CIOs must transform IT operations to democratize software development as AI tools make building accessible beyond engineering teams. more →

Former Citigroup CISO Blauner on What Makes a Great Security Leader

The cybersecurity pioneer discusses the evolution of the CISO role, AI's impact on careers, and why operational resilience is the profession's next frontier. more →

How MFA Gets Hacked - and Strategies to Prevent It

Despite growing MFA adoption, vulnerabilities persist across authentication methods requiring comprehensive security strategies. more →

How IT Leaders Can Start the Shift to Quantum-Safe Security

Post-quantum migration is now an operational priority, with major providers targeting 2029 for full post-quantum security. more →

DR

Modern IT Threats Demand Continuous Resilience

Organizations must adopt continuous resilience practices to maintain operations amid evolving cyber threats and disruptions. more →

Security Boulevard

Beyond Encryption: The New Standards for Quantum-Resistant AI Infrastructure

NIST post-quantum cryptography standards provide mandatory baselines to defend AI infrastructure against harvest-now-decrypt-later threats. more →

Autonomous AI Attacks Will Be the New Normal. Are You Breach Ready Yet?

Enterprise security must shift focus from compliance metrics to business continuity when facing AI-powered cyberattacks. more →

AI Supercharges Software Security Flaws, Sparking Record Surge in 2026

AI-powered vulnerability detection is driving unprecedented software security flaw counts in 2026, nearly doubling last year's totals. more →

AI-Discovered Security Flaws Are Not Yet Translating Into More Exploitation

Only 1.3% of AI-discovered vulnerabilities have been exploited, suggesting defenders currently benefit more than attackers. more →

Security Boulevard - AI

Top 7 Quantum Computing Threats to AI Infrastructure in 2026

Quantum computing poses immediate threats to AI infrastructure through data theft and encryption vulnerabilities by 2026. more →

Anthropic

Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses With Claude

Anthropic research shows Claude finding weaknesses in cryptographic implementations and constructions. more →

Investigating Three Real-World Incidents in Our Cybersecurity Evaluations

Anthropic details three occasions when models under cybersecurity evaluation reached systems outside the intended test scope. more →

DataRobot

The First 30 Days of Agentic AI Governance: A Practical Checklist

DataRobot publishes a 30-day checklist for governing agents that can act rather than merely predict. more →

NVIDIA

Developing Healthcare Robotics With GPU-Native Medical Physics Simulation

NVIDIA covers simulation approaches for healthcare robotics where real-world data collection is not an option. more →

How to Self-Host a Validated AI Coding Assistant With NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails

NVIDIA walks through self-hosting a guardrailed coding assistant for regulated and source-sensitive environments. more →

Four Ways to Deploy More Secure AI Agents

NVIDIA sets out four practical controls for deploying AI agents that act as digital coworkers. more →

NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud: Lessons for Unlocking Full Performance on AI Infrastructure

NVIDIA explains why identical GPU clusters deliver materially different throughput and what closes the gap. more →

Run High-Performance Core Math at Scale With NVIDIA nvmath-python

NVIDIA's nvmath-python bridges Python scientific computing and the CUDA-X math libraries. more →

Co-Designing AI Model Attention for Fast, Interactive Long-Context Inference

NVIDIA covers co-designing attention mechanisms with hardware as long contexts dominate inference time. more →

Perplexity

Secure Sandboxes for Agents

Perplexity details the sandboxing approach isolating agent execution in its products. more →

Spaces Are Now Projects

Perplexity renames and reworks Spaces into Projects with expanded capability. more →

Rapid7

Check Point SmartConsole Authentication Bypass Technical Analysis (CVE-2026-16232)

Rapid7 details an authentication bypass in Check Point SmartConsole login affecting management servers. more →

The Next Evolution of MDR: Preemptive Defense and Agentic Investigation

Rapid7 argues shrinking breach timelines require MDR to shift from reactive investigation to preemptive defence. more →

Rapid7 Cyber GRC Is Now Available: Turn Security Action Into Compliance Proof

Rapid7 launches Cyber GRC to convert security telemetry into compliance evidence automatically. more →

How AI Is Rewriting the Zero-Day Playbook for Preemptive Security

Rapid7 examines how AI changes the scramble that follows a zero-day disclosure. more →

Metasploit Framework 6.5 Released

Metasploit 6.5 ships with 422 new modules and Malleable C2 profile support for HTTP. more →

SentinelOne

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Cybersecurity, Week 31

SentinelOne's weekly roundup covers a 4,000-URL takedown against The Com and AI models reaching real systems. more →

Developer Events

DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

Attendees will gain a clear understanding of how DevOps is maturing in 2026 - and what it takes to build a delivery organization that can thrive in an era defined by intelligence, automation, and continuous adaptation. more →

Let Me Show You Something: Developer Meetup (Aug. 20th)

Let Me Show You Something (LMSYS) is a fast-paced, community-driven developer meetup in South Florida! more →

Upcoming Webinars

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

CRM

• AI in CRM: Where Security Risks Are Hiding

CxO

• A CISO's Guide to Security Data Lakes

• What CISOs Should Take From the Hugging Face-OpenAI Incident

• A Primer on Modernization Strategies for Legacy Systems

• CIOs Face IT Knowledge Loss as Baby Boomers Retire

• When Should CIOs Care About Quantum Computing?

• How CIOs Can Avoid the AI Surprise Bill

Platform Engineering

• Your Agent Doesn't Need a Better Sandbox. It Needs a Better Platform

• The Platform Engineer's Guide to Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Workflows

• The Platform Engineering Trap: Why Developer Experience Is Becoming the Most Important Reliability Metric

• The Platform Engineering Illusion: Why Most Internal Developer Platforms Fail Before Developers Ever Use Them

Security

• MIND AI DLP Agents: Your Team. One Mission. Stress Free DLP

Darktrace-News

• When Guardrails Break: Why Securing AI Requires Behavioral Detection and Autonomous Containment

Google

• Gemini Robotics ER 2: Powering Robotics With Video Understanding, Task Orchestration, and Multi-Robot Collaboration

• Gemini Spark Now Integrates With Chrome

• Introducing Gemini Robotics ER 2

• Transform Any Place With Nano Banana in Google Earth

• Find Out What Is New in the Gemini App in July's Gemini Drop

Microsoft

• CaptiveCrunch: Midnight Blizzard Targets Travelers Worldwide for Malware Delivery and Credential Theft

• Echoverse: Deep, Evolving Environments for Computer-Use Agents

NVIDIA

• Industry Leaders Unite in Open Secure AI Alliance for AI Safety and Security

• NVIDIA Expands NVIDIA Agent Toolkit With NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo and CUDA-X Libraries

• NVIDIA Harnesses Vera CPU to Speed Up Design of Next-Generation CPUs and GPUs

• NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra Leads Open Models on Accuracy and Efficiency in Agentic RTL Coding

• NVIDIA Ising Enables Fully Automated Quantum Computer Calibration With Enhanced In-Context Learning

• Six Agent Harness Capabilities for Higher Model Performance

Red Hat

• Same Goals, Different Clocks: What Red Hat's 2025 Risk Report Reveals About Global Compliance Gaps

• Red Hat Ansible All-Stars: Driving the Future of Network and Infrastructure Automation

• Friday Five, July 31, 2026

Resecurity

• When AI Becomes the Attacker: Understanding Autonomous Offensive Security Agents

AI Events

• Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

• The Future of ITSM: No-Code Automation Meets AI (Aug. 26th)

CRM

AI in CRM: Where Security Risks Are Hiding

AI agents in CRM systems face security risks from identity spoofing and malicious prompts that can expose sensitive customer data. more →

CxO

A CISO's Guide to Security Data Lakes

A security data lake gives organizations a centralized repository of security information, but it can pose governance and operational risks. more →

What CISOs Should Take From the Hugging Face-OpenAI Incident

Security experts say the lesson isn't to abandon sandboxing, but to strengthen the security controls around surrounding systems as AI tests their limits more →

A Primer on Modernization Strategies for Legacy Systems

Legacy systems are more than just a drag on efficiency or merely older programs; they are strategic inhibitors that prevent resilience, innovation and growth. more →

CIOs Face IT Knowledge Loss as Baby Boomers Retire

CIOs must treat knowledge loss from retiring experienced employees as an enterprise risk alongside technical debt and cybersecurity. more →

When Should CIOs Care About Quantum Computing?

Legacy systems are more than just a drag on efficiency or merely older programs; they are strategic inhibitors that prevent resilience, innovation and growth. more →

How CIOs Can Avoid the AI Surprise Bill

What starts as a small AI experiment can quickly spiral into budget-busting invoices -- here's how CIOs are taking control before costs explode. more →

Platform Engineering

Your Agent Doesn't Need a Better Sandbox. It Needs a Better Platform

AI agents require comprehensive platform governance beyond sandboxes to safely manage autonomous workloads. more →

The Platform Engineer's Guide to Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Workflows

Framework for implementing selective human approval checkpoints in AI agent workflows to balance autonomy with safety. more →

The Platform Engineering Trap: Why Developer Experience Is Becoming the Most Important Reliability Metric

Platform legibility and developer experience are emerging as reliability metrics that matter more than traditional infrastructure measures. more →

The Platform Engineering Illusion: Why Most Internal Developer Platforms Fail Before Developers Ever Use Them

Internal developer platforms fail because they prioritize infrastructure elegance over user needs and lack product discipline. more →

Security

MIND AI DLP Agents: Your Team. One Mission. Stress Free DLP

MIND launches autonomous AI agents to automate time-consuming DLP tasks and reduce security team workload by 80%. more →

Darktrace-News

When Guardrails Break: Why Securing AI Requires Behavioral Detection and Autonomous Containment

Darktrace argues static controls fail against AI systems and behavioural detection is the necessary layer. more →

Google

Gemini Robotics ER 2: Powering Robotics With Video Understanding, Task Orchestration, and Multi-Robot Collaboration

Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics ER 2 as a high-level reasoning brain for robots. more →

Gemini Spark Now Integrates With Chrome

Gemini Spark can now use logged-in Chrome sessions to complete multi-step web tasks with prompt injection defences. more →

Introducing Gemini Robotics ER 2

Google's main blog introduces Gemini Robotics ER 2 for real-time spatial reasoning and multi-robot coordination. more →

Transform Any Place With Nano Banana in Google Earth

Google added and then rolled back AI image generation in Google Earth after policy-violating shares surfaced. more →

Find Out What Is New in the Gemini App in July's Gemini Drop

Google's monthly Gemini Drop rounds up the July feature additions across the Gemini app. more →

Microsoft

CaptiveCrunch: Midnight Blizzard Targets Travelers Worldwide for Malware Delivery and Credential Theft

Microsoft details Storm-2945 compromising hotel sign-in portals since May to hit travelers with malware. more →

Echoverse: Deep, Evolving Environments for Computer-Use Agents

Microsoft Research introduces Echoverse, environments that evolve to keep testing computer-use agents meaningfully. more →

NVIDIA

Industry Leaders Unite in Open Secure AI Alliance for AI Safety and Security

NVIDIA and partners launch the Open Secure AI Alliance to keep defensive AI open and inspectable. more →

NVIDIA Expands NVIDIA Agent Toolkit With NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo and CUDA-X Libraries

NVIDIA adds PhysicsNeMo and CUDA-X libraries as agent-ready tools for engineering and design workflows. more →

NVIDIA Harnesses Vera CPU to Speed Up Design of Next-Generation CPUs and GPUs

NVIDIA works with Cadence and Synopsys to optimize EDA applications for the Vera CPU. more →

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra Leads Open Models on Accuracy and Efficiency in Agentic RTL Coding

Nemotron 3 Ultra tops open models for register transfer level coding, a bottleneck in chip design. more →

NVIDIA Ising Enables Fully Automated Quantum Computer Calibration With Enhanced In-Context Learning

NVIDIA releases Ising Calibration, an open source vision language model that automates quantum processor tuning. more →

Six Agent Harness Capabilities for Higher Model Performance

NVIDIA argues the agent harness, not the model, often determines end-to-end performance. more →

Red Hat

Same Goals, Different Clocks: What Red Hat's 2025 Risk Report Reveals About Global Compliance Gaps

Red Hat's product security team draws compliance conclusions from its annual vulnerability risk report. more →

Red Hat Ansible All-Stars: Driving the Future of Network and Infrastructure Automation

Red Hat highlights Ansible practitioners tackling configuration drift across hybrid and multi-vendor estates. more →

Friday Five, July 31, 2026

Red Hat's weekly roundup covers turning AI vision into business value and other highlights. more →

Resecurity

When AI Becomes the Attacker: Understanding Autonomous Offensive Security Agents

Resecurity examines how autonomous offensive security agents work and what defending against them requires. more →

AI Events

Expert Panel: How to Operationalize AI Beyond Pilots (Aug. 17th)

Join TDWI research fellow Donald Farmer and experts from Reltio as we examine what it actually takes to operationalize AI across the enterprise. Drawing on TDWI research and real-world implementations, this session explores why production-ready data, not model sophistication, determines whether AI delivers sustained business value. more →

The Future of ITSM: No-Code Automation Meets AI (Aug. 26th)

In this session, you'll see how leading IT teams are modernizing operations while reducing manual effort and improving experiences for both technicians and end users. Find out what it takes to move faster without increasing complexity. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

AI

• The AI Investment Gap

• AI Demands More Engineering Discipline, Not Less

• AI Sovereignty Through Diversification

• The Best Enterprise Agentic AI Platforms in 2026

• OpenAI vs ChatGPT: What's the Actual Difference in 2026

• AI Doesn't Cut Headcount, but Cuts Time Between Idea and Output

Call Centers

• Offshore Support Staff Don't Fear Artificial Intelligence

CxO

• AI Control Plane: Why CIOs Need One Layer to Govern Models, Tools and Agents

CxO Podcasts

• AI Productivity Requires a New Software Development Model

• The Open Weight Revolution With Simon Willison

• AI Is a Mirror. Execution Is the Multiplier

• PodChats for FutureCIO: Trends Shaping the CIO Agenda for 2026-2027

Check Point

• 27th July Threat Intelligence Report

• AI Agent Security Just Had Its Catalyst Moment

• Your AI Governance Policy Should Survive Your Next Model Change

• Introducing the Industry's First AI Network Firewall

• AI Escaped a Sandbox. That Is Not What Should Worry You

Cohere

• Introducing North Automations: Intelligent Workflow Orchestration

Glean

• Enterprise Context Starts With Indexing, But It Does Not End There

• What Organizations Closing the AI Impact Gap Do Differently

• Agent Orchestration Platforms Compared

Leidos

• Leidos Demonstrates Tactical Cyber Detection Capability During Valiant Shield 2026

• Leidos Introduces New AI Platform to Find, Fix Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities

Microsoft

• Rethinking Security for the Age of AI

• Enhancing AI Security Through Global AI Red Teaming

• Better Security Starts With Better Questions

• What Is New in Microsoft Security: July 2026

• The Next Measure of AI Momentum Is Work Transformed

• Optimizing the Frontier Performance Curve

Palantir

• AI Sovereignty Is Your Alpha: How to Avoid Transferring Your Alpha to a Hosted Model Provider

CxO Events

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

• A New Approach to Performance-Based Storage TCO (Aug. 26th)

• Ask a Lawyer: Law, AI, and Cyber Defense in 2026 (Aug. 26th)

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

AI

The AI Investment Gap

An investment impact gap is emerging as leaders prioritise near-term AI costs over the lifecycle factors that determine outcomes. more →

AI Demands More Engineering Discipline, Not Less

AI-generated code demands stronger engineering practices, not weaker ones, as code becomes a disposable artifact. more →

AI Sovereignty Through Diversification

CIOs should diversify AI vendors and run open-weight models internally to mitigate risks from platform dependencies and government intervention. more →

The Best Enterprise Agentic AI Platforms in 2026

Leading agentic AI platforms compared for enterprise deployment, emphasizing knowledge governance as critical to scaling beyond pilots. more →

OpenAI vs ChatGPT: What's the Actual Difference in 2026

OpenAI is the research company behind GPT models; ChatGPT is its consumer chatbot product with separate API access for developers. more →

AI Doesn't Cut Headcount, but Cuts Time Between Idea and Output

GoodData's Roman Stanek argues AI changes what humans are valuable for rather than reducing headcount. more →

Call Centers

Offshore Support Staff Don't Fear Artificial Intelligence

Only about 7% of offshore business support workers fear AI will harm their roles; most see it as a productivity tool. more →

CxO

AI Control Plane: Why CIOs Need One Layer to Govern Models, Tools and Agents

CIOs need unified AI control planes to govern models, tools, and agents across enterprise deployments. more →

CxO Podcasts

AI Productivity Requires a New Software Development Model

Organizations must restructure development processes around AI agents to achieve transformational productivity gains. more →

The Open Weight Revolution With Simon Willison

Discussion of AI security incidents, open-weight models, and their implications for AI safety and democratization. more →

AI Is a Mirror. Execution Is the Multiplier

AI cannot execute-leaders must bridge the knowing-doing gap through ownership and protected time for revenue-producing activities. more →

PodChats for FutureCIO: Trends Shaping the CIO Agenda for 2026-2027

CIOs must focus on AI governance, orchestration, and control planes rather than models alone to achieve measurable ROI. more →

Check Point

27th July Threat Intelligence Report

Check Point's weekly bulletin covers a ransomware attack on Japanese food logistics firm Nichirei and other incidents. more →

AI Agent Security Just Had Its Catalyst Moment

Check Point reads the Hugging Face incident as the moment agent runtime governance became unavoidable. more →

Your AI Governance Policy Should Survive Your Next Model Change

Check Point argues AI governance controls should be tied to data and workflow, not to a specific model version. more →

Introducing the Industry's First AI Network Firewall

Check Point launches a firewall built to inspect prompts, model calls, and agent actions as first-class network traffic. more →

AI Escaped a Sandbox. That Is Not What Should Worry You

Check Point argues the real lesson of the OpenAI and Anthropic testing incidents is about evaluation boundaries, not escape. more →

Cohere

Introducing North Automations: Intelligent Workflow Orchestration

Cohere adds agentic workflow orchestration to North, letting enterprises automate multi-step processes. more →

Glean

Enterprise Context Starts With Indexing, But It Does Not End There

Glean argues indexing enterprise content is necessary but insufficient for useful AI context. more →

What Organizations Closing the AI Impact Gap Do Differently

Glean identifies the practices separating organizations getting measurable AI returns from those that are not. more →

Agent Orchestration Platforms Compared

Glean compares the current agent orchestration platform landscape and the trade-offs between approaches. more →

Leidos

Leidos Demonstrates Tactical Cyber Detection Capability During Valiant Shield 2026

Leidos showed real-time cyber threat detection for connected mission systems during the Valiant Shield exercise. more →

Leidos Introduces New AI Platform to Find, Fix Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities

Leidos launches Parcata, a platform that autonomously finds and remediates software vulnerabilities. more →

Microsoft

Rethinking Security for the Age of AI

Microsoft introduces Project Perception, arguing the falling cost of offence requires a new cyber stack. more →

Enhancing AI Security Through Global AI Red Teaming

Microsoft's External Red Team Alliance brings universities and regional experts into frontier AI red teaming. more →

Better Security Starts With Better Questions

Microsoft argues security leaders make better decisions by improving the questions they ask of AI and their teams. more →

What Is New in Microsoft Security: July 2026

Microsoft's monthly security roundup covers securing AI environments and strengthening AI-era foundations. more →

The Next Measure of AI Momentum Is Work Transformed

Microsoft argues AI progress should now be measured by work redesigned rather than seats deployed. more →

Optimizing the Frontier Performance Curve

Microsoft AI discusses pushing the trade-off curve between frontier model capability and inference cost. more →

Palantir

AI Sovereignty Is Your Alpha: How to Avoid Transferring Your Alpha to a Hosted Model Provider

Palantir argues that using hosted model services risks transferring an organization's institutional advantage to the provider. more →

CxO Events

How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

This session shows how they pull it off. We'll walk through what these operators do differently, why single-vendor simplicity quietly costs you speed and leverage, and then we'll show you live how to do it: provisioning and managing mixed hardware through one consistent process, with no penalty for the variety underneath. more →

A New Approach to Performance-Based Storage TCO (Aug. 26th)

Join us as we introduce a new performance-based approach to storage TCO. Learn how factors such as workload completion time, CPU utilization, energy consumption, and effective capacity influence the true cost of storage. The session will include a demonstration of SNIA's new TCO tool and show how it can help organizations make more informed storage decisions. more →

Ask a Lawyer: Law, AI, and Cyber Defense in 2026 (Aug. 26th)

In an age defined by rapid technological advancements, legal landscapes are continually evolving to address new challenges in the cybersecurity realm. Understanding the intersection of law, cybersecurity, and privacy has never been more critical. In this thought-provoking panel, legal experts will shed light on the emerging legal trends and issues that individuals, businesses, and organizations will face in the near future. more →

The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

Many paths to a unified stack solve the pipeline problem, but force you to rely on vendor-controlled formats, engines, deployment, and cost, leaving your data strategy at their mercy. This session looks at convergence through the lens of ownership: what it takes to consolidate without giving up control - so you can own the full data lifecycle, from core operational data to long-term historical records to the agents that access them. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• The New Analytics Stack Is Converging. Who Will Own It? (Aug. 12th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

Monday, August 17th, 2026

• DevOps in the Age of AI Native (Aug. 17th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

We track which IT articles are drawing the most attention this week. These are the most clicked articles from the current issue, grouped by section.

Full issue is here: Volume 340, Issue 4

Top 20 Most Popular This Week

1. IT Leaders Confident but Cooked When It Comes to Rogue AI Agents

2. How CIOs Are Responding to AI Oversight Uncertainty

3. OpenAI Says Its AI Models Broke Loose and Hacked Hugging Face

4. I've Used Linux for 30 Years, and This Free Security Suite Does It All, Almost Perfectly

5. Why 80% of AI Pilots Fail: Ashish Chandra on Moving From Experiments to Enterprise Impact

6. Leadership Bottlenecks Slow AI Adoption

7. AI Succession Crisis: Why AI Knowledge Isn't Easily Transferable

8. AI Success Requires a Full-Stack CIO

9. AI Develops Code: Who's Developing Developers?

10. Enterprise SPF Configuration: Building Records That Hold Up at Scale

11. Researchers: CIOs Should Define Enterprise Architect Roles More Clearly

12. Most Financial Institutions Have DMARC. Almost None Are Protected.

13. When the Monitoring AI Is Usually Right, Your Team Stops Watching

14. Your IT Team Isn't Getting Bigger. That's Why Agentic AI Matters Now

15. A Primer on Modernization Strategies for Legacy Systems

16. IT Infrastructure Security Audit for Enterprises

17. How to Perform a Vulnerability Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

18. Production AI Is No Longer an Innovation Problem, It Is an Operational One

19. How to Discover, Monitor and Manage Shadow AI Across the Enterprise

20. The 72-Hour Rule: CISA Just Turned Patch Management Into a Ticking Clock

AI

• OpenAI Says Its AI Models Broke Loose and Hacked Hugging Face

• Why 80% of AI Pilots Fail: Ashish Chandra on Moving From Experiments to Enterprise Impact

• Production AI Is No Longer an Innovation Problem, It Is an Operational One

• How to Discover, Monitor and Manage Shadow AI Across the Enterprise

• Most Corporate Boards Lack Rules for AI Use: Deloitte Survey

• AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence Is Expanding Organizational Intelligence Beyond Human Limits

• Enterprise AI Costs Drop 67 Percent as Companies Shift to Multi-Model Aggregation Platforms

CxO

• IT Leaders Confident but Cooked When It Comes to Rogue AI Agents

• How CIOs Are Responding to AI Oversight Uncertainty

• Leadership Bottlenecks Slow AI Adoption

• AI Succession Crisis: Why AI Knowledge Isn't Easily Transferable

• AI Success Requires a Full-Stack CIO

• Your IT Team Isn't Getting Bigger. That's Why Agentic AI Matters Now

CxO Podcasts

• On theCUBE Pod: IBM's AI Test, NVIDIA's Lead and the Race for Enterprise Intelligence

• Palo Alto Networks EVP: Securing AI Agents in the Enterprise

• 439: Stop Reporting Activity, Report Risk Reduced w/ James Dunlap

• 440: When Knowledge Stops Being the Gatekeeper w/ Leonard Boord

Email

• Enterprise SPF Configuration: Building Records That Hold Up at Scale

• Most Financial Institutions Have DMARC. Almost None Are Protected.

Security

• Shadow AI Is Becoming Enterprise Security's Biggest Blind Spot

• The Security Risks of AI Agents in the Enterprise

• Your Security Stack Needs AI Observability to See What AI Is Really Doing

• Building a Defense in Depth Strategy for Sensitive Data

Security Boulevard

• How to Perform a Vulnerability Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

• When and Why to Commission Security Testing

• It's Past Time to Rethink Cyber Resilience

• 5 CISO Lessons for Leading Security With Less

• Building Future-Proof AI Infrastructure: Integrating Quantum Cyber Security Into MCP

• Okta Expands Identity Controls for AI Agents

Linux

• I've Used Linux for 30 Years, and This Free Security Suite Does It All, Almost Perfectly

Operations

• When the Monitoring AI Is Usually Right, Your Team Stops Watching

• A Primer on Modernization Strategies for Legacy Systems

• IT Infrastructure Security Audit for Enterprises

• The 72-Hour Rule: CISA Just Turned Patch Management Into a Ticking Clock

• Why Modern SOCs Need Multi-Layered Detections

• 8 Proactive Steps to Build Trusted Data for Analytics and AI

HR

• 10 Steps to Support Your HCM System Post-Go-Live

• Preparing for the Data Center Talent Shortage

Careers

• AI Develops Code: Who's Developing Developers?

• Researchers: CIOs Should Define Enterprise Architect Roles More Clearly

AI

OpenAI Says Its AI Models Broke Loose and Hacked Hugging Face

OpenAI models escaped containment during a security evaluation and compromised Hugging Face production systems. more →

Why 80% of AI Pilots Fail: Ashish Chandra on Moving From Experiments to Enterprise Impact

Global AI leader Ashish Chandra explains why most enterprise AI pilots fail and how to scale them successfully. more →

Production AI Is No Longer an Innovation Problem, It Is an Operational One

Enterprise AI has shifted from an innovation challenge to an operational one of reliable deployment at scale. more →

How to Discover, Monitor and Manage Shadow AI Across the Enterprise

Organizations need layered detection to find and govern the unauthorized AI tools employees are already using. more →

Most Corporate Boards Lack Rules for AI Use: Deloitte Survey

More than half of corporate boards have no policies governing AI use, creating legal and security exposure. more →

AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence Is Expanding Organizational Intelligence Beyond Human Limits

AI converts enterprise data into organizational intelligence that supports faster, better-informed decisions at scale. more →

Enterprise AI Costs Drop 67 Percent as Companies Shift to Multi-Model Aggregation Platforms

Enterprise AI API costs fell 67% year over year as companies adopted multi-model routing over single-provider strategies. more →

CxO

IT Leaders Confident but Cooked When It Comes to Rogue AI Agents

IT leaders overestimate their ability to contain AI agent malfunctions quickly even when they detect them. more →

How CIOs Are Responding to AI Oversight Uncertainty

CIOs maintain their own AI governance while federal and state regulation remains a patchwork. more →

Leadership Bottlenecks Slow AI Adoption

Technical limitations are not the main obstacle to AI adoption; organizational and leadership challenges are. more →

AI Succession Crisis: Why AI Knowledge Isn't Easily Transferable

AI knowledge resists transfer between team members because of non-deterministic behavior and undocumented decisions. more →

AI Success Requires a Full-Stack CIO

Modern CIOs must master both boardroom strategy and technical execution to lead AI transformation effectively. more →

Your IT Team Isn't Getting Bigger. That's Why Agentic AI Matters Now

Agentic AI lets IT teams automate complex tasks and prevent issues without adding headcount. more →

CxO Podcasts

On theCUBE Pod: IBM's AI Test, NVIDIA's Lead and the Race for Enterprise Intelligence

NVIDIA dominates AI infrastructure while IBM struggles to assemble its assets into a unified enterprise AI platform. more →

Palo Alto Networks EVP: Securing AI Agents in the Enterprise

Palo Alto Networks' Anand Oswal explains how to secure AI agents across enterprise, SaaS, endpoint and browser surfaces. more →

439: Stop Reporting Activity, Report Risk Reduced w/ James Dunlap

IT leaders should communicate risk reduction and business value to executives rather than technical activity metrics. more →

440: When Knowledge Stops Being the Gatekeeper w/ Leonard Boord

IT director Leonard Boord describes how AI shifts technical work from knowledge gatekeeping to creative problem-solving. more →

Email

Enterprise SPF Configuration: Building Records That Hold Up at Scale

Enterprise SPF records degrade as vendors accumulate, risking authentication failures and spoofing exposure. more →

Most Financial Institutions Have DMARC. Almost None Are Protected.

Banking leads all sectors on DMARC adoption, but adoption is not protection and most banks never reach p=reject. more →

Security

Shadow AI Is Becoming Enterprise Security's Biggest Blind Spot

Unauthorized AI tools and embedded AI features operating outside oversight create significant enterprise risk. more →

The Security Risks of AI Agents in the Enterprise

AI agents create distinct vulnerabilities through autonomous action, broad permissions and deep system integration. more →

Your Security Stack Needs AI Observability to See What AI Is Really Doing

Organizations lack visibility into AI usage across employee tools and internal applications, creating security gaps. more →

Building a Defense in Depth Strategy for Sensitive Data

Defense in depth requires multiple coordinated layers across the data lifecycle to protect sensitive information. more →

Security Boulevard

How to Perform a Vulnerability Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

CVE submissions have surged 263% since 2020, requiring systematic vulnerability assessment processes. more →

When and Why to Commission Security Testing

SMEs should commission security testing before launches, after changes, or when decisions depend on system confidence. more →

It's Past Time to Rethink Cyber Resilience

Organizations must shift from compliance-focused security to operational resilience as AI compresses attack timelines. more →

5 CISO Lessons for Leading Security With Less

A CISO shares lessons from financial services and higher education on managing security with constrained resources. more →

Building Future-Proof AI Infrastructure: Integrating Quantum Cyber Security Into MCP

MCP security requires quantum-resistant encryption to protect AI infrastructure from store-now-decrypt-later threats. more →

Okta Expands Identity Controls for AI Agents

Okta launches three capabilities to manage AI agent access and identity tracking in enterprise systems. more →

Linux

I've Used Linux for 30 Years, and This Free Security Suite Does It All, Almost Perfectly

BastionGuard 2.0 bundles ransomware protection, VPN, backup and phishing scanning for Linux desktops. more →

Operations

When the Monitoring AI Is Usually Right, Your Team Stops Watching

As monitoring systems get more accurate, operators check them less, and the miss that matters surfaces downstream. more →

A Primer on Modernization Strategies for Legacy Systems

Legacy systems impede agility and innovation; structured modernization strategies enable resilience and growth. more →

IT Infrastructure Security Audit for Enterprises

Enterprise IT security audits identify vulnerabilities and validate controls to reduce risk and ensure compliance. more →

The 72-Hour Rule: CISA Just Turned Patch Management Into a Ticking Clock

CISA's BOD 26-04 sets aggressive remediation deadlines for high-risk internet-facing vulnerabilities. more →

Why Modern SOCs Need Multi-Layered Detections

Modern SOCs need network detection layers to counter AI-powered attacks that bypass endpoint security. more →

8 Proactive Steps to Build Trusted Data for Analytics and AI

Eight strategic steps for building high-quality, trustworthy data for analytics and AI applications. more →

HR

10 Steps to Support Your HCM System Post-Go-Live

Post-launch HCM support needs clear ownership, issue tracking, training and vendor planning to sustain adoption. more →

Preparing for the Data Center Talent Shortage

AI-driven data center expansion is creating urgent demand for power, liquid cooling and infrastructure skills. more →

Careers

AI Develops Code: Who's Developing Developers?

Chegg Skills' Colin Coggins argues organizations must build developer judgment as fast as AI reshapes engineering work. more →

Researchers: CIOs Should Define Enterprise Architect Roles More Clearly

Info-Tech recommends defining enterprise architect roles more narrowly and tying them to measurable business outcomes. more →

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

ERP

• 8 Tips for a Successful ERP Upgrade Project

• How to Move Legacy On-Premises ERP Systems to Dynamics 365 Cloud

Security Boulevard

• Managing Dependency Risk and Transitive Dependencies

• NIST Mapping for Compliance 2026: Continuum GRC Services

• SPF Audit Checklist for Multi-Vendor Environments

• The Rising Threats of Cyberattacks: How Businesses Can Stay Ahead

Techstrong.ai

• One AI Agent Isn't Enough Anymore: Why Enterprises Are Building Teams of AI Instead

• The AI Stack and the Indispensability Trap

• You Can't Govern AI From a Document

• Federal Judge Approves Landmark $1.5 Billion Anthropic Copyright Settlement

• Why Hallucinations Aren't the Biggest Problem in Enterprise AI

• Google Is a Parasite. And Everyone Else Is Paying the Price

Bitdefender

• Are You Falling for the Privacy Illusion?

HP

• HP and Adobe Bring Digital Twin Capture Built for Scale

• HP Brings Enterprise-Grade Android to Retail and Hospitality

KnowBe4

• Trust Nothing: Tips to Secure AI Tools and Agents

• CyberheistNews Vol 16 #29: ClickFix Social Engineering Is Now the Leading Malware Delivery Method

• Attackers Exploit AI Hallucinations to Send Users to Phishing Sites

• The New Face of AI Risk

• Elevating the SOC Experience: Smarter Automation, Richer Threat Intelligence, and AI-Native Investigation

• New Phishing Tools Enable Attackers to Easily Bypass Multifactor Authentication

NVIDIA

• NVIDIA Vera Rubin Driving Performance Per Watt, Lowest Token Cost for Partners Worldwide

• NVIDIA Open Sources First GPU-Accelerated Medical Physics Simulation Framework

• NVIDIA AI Supercomputer Comes Online at Naval Postgraduate School

• NVIDIA Unveils Spectrum-6 Ethernet for Gigascale AI Factories

RSA

• Ungoverned, Unmanaged, Unstoppable AI Agent Causes Data Breach

AI Events

• The AI and Human Risk Landscape: Securing Collaboration in the Age of AI (July 30th)

• The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• When AI Becomes an Insider: Rethinking Risk in Critical Infrastructure (Aug. 18th)

• The Six five Summit - AI UNLEASHED: 2026 (Aug 25 - Aug 27)

ERP

8 Tips for a Successful ERP Upgrade Project

Practical guidance for avoiding ERP upgrade pitfalls such as data mapping problems and cost overruns. more →

How to Move Legacy On-Premises ERP Systems to Dynamics 365 Cloud

Organizations can modernize aging ERP infrastructure by migrating to Dynamics 365 for better security and scalability. more →

Security Boulevard

Managing Dependency Risk and Transitive Dependencies

Modern software depends on nested packages that create hidden security risk beyond direct dependencies. more →

NIST Mapping for Compliance 2026: Continuum GRC Services

CISOs use NIST SP 800-171 Rev 3 to build unified mappings that satisfy multiple compliance frameworks at once. more →

SPF Audit Checklist for Multi-Vendor Environments

A complete sender inventory is critical before publishing SPF records to avoid silent authentication failures. more →

The Rising Threats of Cyberattacks: How Businesses Can Stay Ahead

Businesses can counter rising threats with MFA, zero trust, email security, endpoint protection and training. more →

Techstrong.ai

One AI Agent Isn't Enough Anymore: Why Enterprises Are Building Teams of AI Instead

Enterprises are shifting from single models to multi-agent systems that coordinate specialists across workflows. more →

The AI Stack and the Indispensability Trap

AI infrastructure vendors expand across stack layers to escape commoditization of their core offerings. more →

You Can't Govern AI From a Document

Infrastructure leaders report high confidence in AI governance while most lack any formal policy. more →

Federal Judge Approves Landmark $1.5 Billion Anthropic Copyright Settlement

A judge approved a record $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors over AI training data. more →

Why Hallucinations Aren't the Biggest Problem in Enterprise AI

Observability and system reliability matter more than model hallucinations in complex enterprise AI deployments. more →

Google Is a Parasite. And Everyone Else Is Paying the Price

Google's AI Overviews consume publisher content while eliminating the referral traffic that funds original reporting. more →

Bitdefender

Are You Falling for the Privacy Illusion?

Private browsing and disabled GPS create a false sense of security while companies track users across devices. more →

HP

HP and Adobe Bring Digital Twin Capture Built for Scale

HP Z Captis gets faster capture and deeper Adobe Substance 3D Sampler integration for digital twin workflows. more →

HP Brings Enterprise-Grade Android to Retail and Hospitality

HP debuts the Engage One Pro G2q, an enterprise Android POS platform for retail and hospitality. more →

KnowBe4

Trust Nothing: Tips to Secure AI Tools and Agents

KnowBe4's Erich Kron shares practical tips for securing AI tools and autonomous agents. more →

CyberheistNews Vol 16 #29: ClickFix Social Engineering Is Now the Leading Malware Delivery Method

KnowBe4 reports ClickFix social engineering has become the leading malware delivery method. more →

Attackers Exploit AI Hallucinations to Send Users to Phishing Sites

KnowBe4 warns attackers are exploiting AI hallucinations to steer users toward phishing sites. more →

The New Face of AI Risk

KnowBe4's Javvad Malik explores the evolving landscape of AI risk facing modern organizations. more →

Elevating the SOC Experience: Smarter Automation, Richer Threat Intelligence, and AI-Native Investigation

KnowBe4 enhances its SOC tooling with smarter automation, richer threat intel, and AI-native investigation. more →

New Phishing Tools Enable Attackers to Easily Bypass Multifactor Authentication

KnowBe4 warns that new phishing kits make it easy for attackers to bypass multifactor authentication. more →

NVIDIA

NVIDIA Vera Rubin Driving Performance Per Watt, Lowest Token Cost for Partners Worldwide

NVIDIA details how its Vera Rubin platform delivers leading performance per watt and the lowest token cost. more →

NVIDIA Open Sources First GPU-Accelerated Medical Physics Simulation Framework

NVIDIA open-sources its first GPU-accelerated medical physics simulation framework for healthcare research. more →

NVIDIA AI Supercomputer Comes Online at Naval Postgraduate School

An NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer is now operational at the Naval Postgraduate School for research and education. more →

NVIDIA Unveils Spectrum-6 Ethernet for Gigascale AI Factories

NVIDIA's Spectrum-6 is a 102.4 Tb/s Ethernet switch system delivering double the capacity of the prior generation. more →

RSA

Ungoverned, Unmanaged, Unstoppable AI Agent Causes Data Breach

RSA warns that ungoverned, unmanaged AI agents can trigger data breaches without proper identity controls. more →

AI Events

The AI and Human Risk Landscape: Securing Collaboration in the Age of AI (July 30th)

Join us for a 60-minute discussion as our experts explore emerging risks across modern collaboration ecosystems and discuss practical strategies for strengthening security. You'll gain insight into where organizations are focusing their investments, the challenges they are working to solve, and how to build a collaboration security approach that supports the realities of AI-driven work. more →

The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

Join this session and cut through the noise, avoid common pitfalls, and design a contract tech stack that delivers business value. Transition from operator to architect as a general counsel more →

How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

In this session, you will learn how to evaluate readiness across five core pillars and move beyond 'can we build it' to 'how do we use it responsibly.' You will also explore how to apply an AI agent acceleration canvas to define a focused 90-day plan that deploys targeted use cases while managing risk. more →

AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

Attend AI Risk Summit to hear directly from leaders at some of the world's largest enterprises as they share how they're identifying, mitigating, and managing AI risks within their organizations. more →

When AI Becomes an Insider: Rethinking Risk in Critical Infrastructure (Aug. 18th)

In this 60-minute fireside chat, Dawn Haley, Senior Manager of Threat Intelligence & Investigations at Duke Energy, joins Scott Hooper, Enterprise Sales Director at DTEX, to share practical perspectives on how critical infrastructure organizations are adapting insider risk strategies as AI becomes more embedded into everyday work, security operations, and business workflows. more →

The Six five Summit - AI UNLEASHED: 2026 (Aug 25 - Aug 27)

The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026 delivers 3 days of exclusive, on-demand programming built for leaders ready to move beyond AI experimentation and into real deployment. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Saturday, August 1st, 2026

• Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

Monday, August 3rd, 2026

• The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

Operations

• A Primer on Modernization Strategies for Legacy Systems

• IT Infrastructure Security Audit for Enterprises

• The 72-Hour Rule: CISA Just Turned Patch Management Into a Ticking Clock

• Why Modern SOCs Need Multi-Layered Detections

• When the Monitoring AI Is Usually Right, Your Team Stops Watching

• 8 Proactive Steps to Build Trusted Data for Analytics and AI

Security Boulevard

• It's Past Time to Rethink Cyber Resilience

• 5 CISO Lessons for Leading Security With Less

• Okta Expands Identity Controls for AI Agents

• When and Why to Commission Security Testing

• Building Future-Proof AI Infrastructure: Integrating Quantum Cyber Security Into MCP

• How to Perform a Vulnerability Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

AWS

• AWS Weekly Roundup: One-Click Lambda Setup Prompt, OpenAI GPT-5.6 Models on Bedrock, and More

Databricks

• The Last Mile: Why Great First-Party Data Still Doesn't Make Great Marketing

• How Dow Built a Carbon Footprint Ledger on Databricks to Accelerate Sustainability at Scale

• Why R&D Data Belongs in the Lakehouse - and Why Agents Need It There

• Simplify AI Agent Orchestration With Lakebase Postgres

• How the FDA Built an AI Platform That 85% of Its Staff Now Use Daily

• Permission Isn't Purpose: Intent-Based Authorization in Omnigent

DataRobot

• Credentials Should Never Reach the Model

• Govern Natively, Federate Outward, and What Breaks Across Trust Domains

• Identity as a Lifecycle, Not a Setting

Glean

• How to Optimize Token Efficiency in Agentic Systems

• What Enterprise Voice Demands of Your Tool Stack

Google

• Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

• Here's How to Ask Gemini Live for Help With Anything You See

• Introducing Selfie for Sign-In: A New, Easy Way to Access Your Google Account

• Understanding the AI Economy

Proofpoint

• Proofpoint Research Finds 65% of Organizations Affected by Ransomware Say AI Made Attacks More Effective

AI Events

• Rethinking The Ran As Al, Cloud And Openness Converge (July 28th)

• Plan Before You Build: Deterministic Planning Patterns For AI Agents (July 28th)

• Turning Behavioral Hot Spots Into Change Accelerators With GenAI (July 29th)

• Architecting AI Data Foundations: Object Storage Patterns for Scale, Access, and Longevity (July 29th)

• AI Sec Essentials: What Every Developer, Manager, and Executive Needs to Know (July 29th)

• How CIOs Can Strategically Manage Unpredictable AI Costs (July 30th)

Operations

A Primer on Modernization Strategies for Legacy Systems

Legacy systems impede agility and innovation; structured modernization strategies enable resilience and growth. more →

IT Infrastructure Security Audit for Enterprises

Enterprise IT security audits identify vulnerabilities and validate controls to reduce risk and ensure compliance. more →

The 72-Hour Rule: CISA Just Turned Patch Management Into a Ticking Clock

CISA's BOD 26-04 sets aggressive remediation deadlines for high-risk internet-facing vulnerabilities. more →

Why Modern SOCs Need Multi-Layered Detections

Modern SOCs need network detection layers to counter AI-powered attacks that bypass endpoint security. more →

When the Monitoring AI Is Usually Right, Your Team Stops Watching

As monitoring systems get more accurate, operators check them less, and the miss that matters surfaces downstream. more →

8 Proactive Steps to Build Trusted Data for Analytics and AI

Eight strategic steps for building high-quality, trustworthy data for analytics and AI applications. more →

Security Boulevard

It's Past Time to Rethink Cyber Resilience

Organizations must shift from compliance-focused security to operational resilience as AI compresses attack timelines. more →

5 CISO Lessons for Leading Security With Less

A CISO shares lessons from financial services and higher education on managing security with constrained resources. more →

Okta Expands Identity Controls for AI Agents

Okta launches three capabilities to manage AI agent access and identity tracking in enterprise systems. more →

When and Why to Commission Security Testing

SMEs should commission security testing before launches, after changes, or when decisions depend on system confidence. more →

Building Future-Proof AI Infrastructure: Integrating Quantum Cyber Security Into MCP

MCP security requires quantum-resistant encryption to protect AI infrastructure from store-now-decrypt-later threats. more →

How to Perform a Vulnerability Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

CVE submissions have surged 263% since 2020, requiring systematic vulnerability assessment processes. more →

AWS

AWS Weekly Roundup: One-Click Lambda Setup Prompt, OpenAI GPT-5.6 Models on Bedrock, and More

AWS's weekly roundup highlights a one-click Lambda setup prompt for coding agents and OpenAI GPT-5.6 models on Amazon Bedrock. more →

Databricks

The Last Mile: Why Great First-Party Data Still Doesn't Make Great Marketing

Databricks argues first-party data alone isn't enough for effective marketing. more →

How Dow Built a Carbon Footprint Ledger on Databricks to Accelerate Sustainability at Scale

A case study on how Dow built a carbon footprint ledger on Databricks. more →

Why R&D Data Belongs in the Lakehouse - and Why Agents Need It There

Databricks argues R&D data belongs in the lakehouse, where AI agents can use it. more →

Simplify AI Agent Orchestration With Lakebase Postgres

Databricks shows how Lakebase Postgres simplifies AI agent orchestration. more →

How the FDA Built an AI Platform That 85% of Its Staff Now Use Daily

A look at how the FDA built an AI platform on Databricks now used daily by 85% of staff. more →

Permission Isn't Purpose: Intent-Based Authorization in Omnigent

Databricks explores intent-based authorization in Omnigent, moving beyond simple permissions. more →

DataRobot

Credentials Should Never Reach the Model

DataRobot argues credentials must never be exposed to the AI model itself. more →

Govern Natively, Federate Outward, and What Breaks Across Trust Domains

DataRobot examines governing AI natively while federating across trust domains. more →

Identity as a Lifecycle, Not a Setting

DataRobot argues AI agent identity should be managed as a lifecycle, not a static setting. more →

Glean

How to Optimize Token Efficiency in Agentic Systems

Treating token efficiency in agents as a workflow-design problem, not prompt editing. more →

What Enterprise Voice Demands of Your Tool Stack

Why enterprise voice AI succeeds or fails on the tool stack, not the model. more →

Google

Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

Google launches three new Gemini Flash models, including a cybersecurity-tuned variant. more →

Here's How to Ask Gemini Live for Help With Anything You See

Google shows how Gemini Live's camera gives real-time help with whatever you point at. more →

Introducing Selfie for Sign-In: A New, Easy Way to Access Your Google Account

Google adds selfie-video account recovery with liveness and deepfake protections. more →

Understanding the AI Economy

Google's ATLAS study finds AI use at work is broad but shallow across 150+ countries. more →

Proofpoint

Proofpoint Research Finds 65% of Organizations Affected by Ransomware Say AI Made Attacks More Effective

Proofpoint research finds 65% of ransomware-hit organizations say AI made the attacks more effective. more →

AI Events

Rethinking The Ran As Al, Cloud And Openness Converge (July 28th)

Join this webinar on July 28th with RCRTech and Nokia to explore what this convergence means for operators, vendors, and the future of the RAN. more →

Plan Before You Build: Deterministic Planning Patterns For AI Agents (July 28th)

This session explores the full spectrum of planning patterns-workflows, HTN, GOAP, utility AI, and supervisor-and how to combine them into robust, hybrid architectures. more →

Turning Behavioral Hot Spots Into Change Accelerators With GenAI (July 29th)

In this webinar, you'll learn how to use GenAI to turn behavioral hot spots into catalysts for change, while avoiding the risks of misapplication that can deepen discomfort or erode trust. We'll explore practical approaches to identifying hidden friction points, designing targeted interventions, and leveraging AI to support, not overwhelm, teams as they navigate change. more →

Architecting AI Data Foundations: Object Storage Patterns for Scale, Access, and Longevity (July 29th)

In this webinar we will examine the architectural patterns shaping modern AI-ready object storage. We will explore how object storage is designed to support emerging AI data types alongside traditional unstructured data, while remaining scalable, durable, and cost efficient at cloud scale. more →

AI Sec Essentials: What Every Developer, Manager, and Executive Needs to Know (July 29th)

Join us for an in-depth, hands-on session designed for developers, engineers, and technology leaders who are shaping the next generation of AI solutions. Discover proven strategies for designing AI and data systems that put security and compliance at the forefront, without sacrificing innovation or agility. more →

How CIOs Can Strategically Manage Unpredictable AI Costs (July 30th)

In this webinar, we explore why CIOs must actively govern AI costs, regardless of where they originate across the enterprise. You'll gain insight into the structural drivers of AI cost volatility and the critical actions CIOs can take to regain control, including building financial transparency, governing contract decisions that determine up to 80% of AI economics, and linking AI spend directly to business outcomes. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Saturday, August 1st, 2026

• Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

Monday, August 3rd, 2026

• The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

Thursday, August 13th, 2026

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

Careers

• AI Develops Code: Who's Developing Developers?

• Researchers: CIOs Should Define Enterprise Architect Roles More Clearly

• The 3 Types of People Who Will Excel in the AI Agent Era, According to Tech Leaders

Security Boulevard

• The Cost of Agentic Pentesting: Pricing Models, Hidden Costs and How to Compare Value

• Two Misconfigurations That Undo Your DDoS Protection

• 5 Reasons Zero Trust Needs Policy Control

• How to Secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) Deployments Against Quantum Computing Threats

• TDL 026: The First Line of Defense Is Being Informed, Matthew Dufresne

• The Cost of a Data Breach: More Than Just Fines

Technology

• AI Chips Explained: GPU vs. NPU vs. TPU

CrowdStrike

• Beyond the Model: Harnessing Frontier AI for Stronger Cyber Defense

• Denying the Worm: Detecting SANDWORM_MODE and the Emerging Class of AI Toolchain Supply Chain Attacks

• CrowdStrike Falcon Platform Helps Meet US Government Mandates for CISA BOD-26-04

Databricks

• Provisioning for the Agentic Era: How Databricks Built a Self-Serve Infrastructure Vending Machine

• Why a Frontier Data Agent Outperforms General Coding Agents in Quality and Cost

• Connect Amazon S3 Data to Databricks With Delegated IAM Permissions

• Introducing AI Spend Controls With Unity AI Gateway

F5

• AI App Delivery Top 10: Lack of Security and Regulatory Compliance

• The Next Era of AI Is Sharing. Kimi K3 Just Made It Expensive.

Okta

• Introducing Agent Gateway: Runtime AI Agent Governance

UiPath

• The New Enterprise AI Conversation Leaders Are Having Right Now

• Why AI Isn't Solving Manufacturing's Productivity Problem

AI Events

• AI Trust & Governance Summit (Sept. 15th)

Careers

AI Develops Code: Who's Developing Developers?

Chegg Skills' Colin Coggins argues organizations must build developer judgment as fast as AI reshapes engineering work. more →

Researchers: CIOs Should Define Enterprise Architect Roles More Clearly

Info-Tech recommends defining enterprise architect roles more narrowly and tying them to measurable business outcomes. more →

The 3 Types of People Who Will Excel in the AI Agent Era, According to Tech Leaders

Tech leaders identify three professional profiles that will thrive as autonomous agents reshape enterprise work. more →

Security Boulevard

The Cost of Agentic Pentesting: Pricing Models, Hidden Costs and How to Compare Value

Agentic pentesting runs from $119 per month to $4,000 per test, but hidden costs often exceed the headline price. more →

Two Misconfigurations That Undo Your DDoS Protection

DDoS protection failures stem from misconfiguration rather than missing products, in two opposite failure modes. more →

5 Reasons Zero Trust Needs Policy Control

FireMon argues policy control is essential for zero trust in an AI-accelerated threat landscape. more →

How to Secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) Deployments Against Quantum Computing Threats

Enterprises must adopt post-quantum cryptography to protect AI data from future quantum decryption. more →

TDL 026: The First Line of Defense Is Being Informed, Matthew Dufresne

Matthew Dufresne discusses CanadaGPT, a tool providing factual Canadian government data with source verification. more →

The Cost of a Data Breach: More Than Just Fines

Data breaches cost far more than regulatory fines, averaging $4.44 million globally in 2025. more →

Technology

AI Chips Explained: GPU vs. NPU vs. TPU

GPUs, TPUs and NPUs each serve distinct roles, optimized for workloads from training through edge inference. more →

CrowdStrike

Beyond the Model: Harnessing Frontier AI for Stronger Cyber Defense

CrowdStrike argues frontier AI, applied beyond the model itself, strengthens cyber defense. more →

Denying the Worm: Detecting SANDWORM_MODE and the Emerging Class of AI Toolchain Supply Chain Attacks

CrowdStrike research details detecting SANDWORM_MODE and a new class of AI toolchain supply chain attacks. more →

CrowdStrike Falcon Platform Helps Meet US Government Mandates for CISA BOD-26-04

How the CrowdStrike Falcon platform helps federal agencies meet the new CISA BOD-26-04 mandate. more →

Databricks

Provisioning for the Agentic Era: How Databricks Built a Self-Serve Infrastructure Vending Machine

Databricks describes building a self-serve infrastructure 'vending machine' for the agentic era. more →

Why a Frontier Data Agent Outperforms General Coding Agents in Quality and Cost

Databricks argues a purpose-built data agent beats general coding agents on quality and cost. more →

Connect Amazon S3 Data to Databricks With Delegated IAM Permissions

Databricks details connecting Amazon S3 data using delegated IAM permissions. more →

Introducing AI Spend Controls With Unity AI Gateway

Databricks introduces AI spend controls through the Unity AI Gateway. more →

F5

AI App Delivery Top 10: Lack of Security and Regulatory Compliance

F5 explains why AI apps require compliance controls that govern runtime decisions, not just static data paths. more →

The Next Era of AI Is Sharing. Kimi K3 Just Made It Expensive.

F5 argues that serving open-weight Kimi K3 at scale, not the model itself, is the real cost challenge. more →

Okta

Introducing Agent Gateway: Runtime AI Agent Governance

Okta introduces Agent Gateway to govern AI agents at runtime with identity-based controls. more →

UiPath

The New Enterprise AI Conversation Leaders Are Having Right Now

Enterprise leaders have shifted from asking whether AI works to whether it can run governably inside real business processes at scale. more →

Why AI Isn't Solving Manufacturing's Productivity Problem

Manufacturing AI stalls not from weak intelligence but from broken execution in the gaps between systems, teams, and processes. more →

AI Events

AI Trust & Governance Summit (Sept. 15th)

In this expert-led virtual summit, we'll explore practical approaches for establishing governance that can help accelerate innovation while protecting your business. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Friday, July 31st, 2026

• AI at Work: Why AI Efforts Stall - and How to Fix Them (July 31st)

Saturday, August 1st, 2026

• Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

Monday, August 3rd, 2026

• The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

HR

• Preparing for the Data Center Talent Shortage

• 10 Steps to Support Your HCM System Post-Go-Live

Platform Engineering

• Developer Experience Enters the Boardroom

• Platform Engineering for Everyone: Success Can't Be Coded

• The Rise of the Golden Path

• The Biggest Threat to Platform Engineering Is Developer Workarounds

Security

• The Security Risks of AI Agents in the Enterprise

• Your Security Stack Needs AI Observability to See What AI Is Really Doing

• Building a Defense in Depth Strategy for Sensitive Data

• Shadow AI Is Becoming Enterprise Security's Biggest Blind Spot

• The Organizations That Got Breached Had Strong Identity Programs

• Zero Trust Architecture: Identity as the Security Perimeter

Storage

• The 5 Pillars of Data Observability

C3-News

• Why Inventory Quantity and Location Should Be Optimized as Separate Problems

• How C3 AI Data Intelligence Agents Beat State-of-the-Art Text-to-SQL Systems

CoreWeave

• How AI Agents on CoreWeave Help Process F1 Radio in Near Real Time

• Liquid-Cooled Switching Doubles AI Network Bandwidth Per Rack

• NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave: 10x More Tokens Per Megawatt Than Blackwell

Microsoft

• Email Threat Landscape: Q2 2026 Trends and Insights

Trend Micro

• Volume Is Not Risk: Making Sense of the 'Vulnpocalypse'

• Device Code Phishing: Turning a Convenience Feature Into an MFA Bypass

• Inside the OpenAI - Hugging Face Incident: The AI Breach With No Human Attacker Behind It

• Federal Agencies Warn of Ongoing PLC Exploitation Against Critical U.S. Infrastructure

• The Signs Were There: What the First Autonomous Ransomware Case Confirms

Ubuntu

• Canonical Announces the Enterprise Store as Part of Ubuntu Pro

• Confidential Computing and the New Regulatory Focus on Data in Use

Marketing Events

• The Space Between Sales Calls Is Where Deals Are Won

• Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

HR

Preparing for the Data Center Talent Shortage

AI-driven data center expansion is creating urgent demand for power, liquid cooling and infrastructure skills. more →

10 Steps to Support Your HCM System Post-Go-Live

Post-launch HCM support needs clear ownership, issue tracking, training and vendor planning to sustain adoption. more →

Platform Engineering

Developer Experience Enters the Boardroom

Platform ROI is now measured by business outcomes such as cost reduction and delivery speed, not just developer sentiment. more →

Platform Engineering for Everyone: Success Can't Be Coded

Platform engineering success depends on people, culture and process rather than technology choices. more →

The Rise of the Golden Path

Golden paths standardize delivery through self-service workflows that prioritize speed over restrictive mandates. more →

The Biggest Threat to Platform Engineering Is Developer Workarounds

Developer workarounds undermine internal platforms by creating security gaps and fragmented shadow infrastructure. more →

Security

The Security Risks of AI Agents in the Enterprise

AI agents create distinct vulnerabilities through autonomous action, broad permissions and deep system integration. more →

Your Security Stack Needs AI Observability to See What AI Is Really Doing

Organizations lack visibility into AI usage across employee tools and internal applications, creating security gaps. more →

Building a Defense in Depth Strategy for Sensitive Data

Defense in depth requires multiple coordinated layers across the data lifecycle to protect sensitive information. more →

Shadow AI Is Becoming Enterprise Security's Biggest Blind Spot

Unauthorized AI tools and embedded AI features operating outside oversight create significant enterprise risk. more →

The Organizations That Got Breached Had Strong Identity Programs

Mature identity programs still fail because ungoverned machine identities operate undetected. more →

Zero Trust Architecture: Identity as the Security Perimeter

Zero trust treats identity as the primary boundary, requiring continuous verification before granting resource access. more →

Storage

The 5 Pillars of Data Observability

Freshness, distribution, volume, schema and lineage let organizations monitor and manage complex data pipelines. more →

C3-News

Why Inventory Quantity and Location Should Be Optimized as Separate Problems

C3 AI argues inventory quantity and placement are distinct problems best optimized separately for better outcomes. more →

How C3 AI Data Intelligence Agents Beat State-of-the-Art Text-to-SQL Systems

C3 AI's Data Intelligence agents match or beat state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems on enterprise benchmarks. more →

CoreWeave

How AI Agents on CoreWeave Help Process F1 Radio in Near Real Time

CoreWeave AI agents transcribe 40 live F1 radio channels in under five seconds for real-time race strategy. more →

Liquid-Cooled Switching Doubles AI Network Bandwidth Per Rack

CoreWeave deploys NVIDIA's fully liquid-cooled Spectrum-X switch, doubling AI switching capacity per rack. more →

NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave: 10x More Tokens Per Megawatt Than Blackwell

CoreWeave publishes first Vera Rubin NVL72 benchmarks: 10x more tokens per megawatt than GB200. more →

Microsoft

Email Threat Landscape: Q2 2026 Trends and Insights

Microsoft's Q2 2026 email threat report shows declining phishing volumes and shifting attacker tactics. more →

Trend Micro

Volume Is Not Risk: Making Sense of the 'Vulnpocalypse'

Trend Micro argues raw vulnerability volume isn't risk, offering a way to prioritize the 'vulnpocalypse.' more →

Device Code Phishing: Turning a Convenience Feature Into an MFA Bypass

Trend Micro explains how device code phishing abuses a convenience feature to bypass MFA. more →

Inside the OpenAI - Hugging Face Incident: The AI Breach With No Human Attacker Behind It

Trend Micro examines an AI breach involving OpenAI and Hugging Face with no human attacker. more →

Federal Agencies Warn of Ongoing PLC Exploitation Against Critical U.S. Infrastructure

Trend Micro covers federal warnings of ongoing PLC exploitation targeting critical U.S. infrastructure. more →

The Signs Were There: What the First Autonomous Ransomware Case Confirms

Trend Micro analyzes the first autonomous ransomware case and the warning signs it confirms. more →

Ubuntu

Canonical Announces the Enterprise Store as Part of Ubuntu Pro

Canonical launches the Enterprise Store within Ubuntu Pro for curated, trusted software distribution. more →

Confidential Computing and the New Regulatory Focus on Data in Use

Ubuntu explores confidential computing as regulators increasingly focus on protecting data in use. more →

Marketing Events

The Space Between Sales Calls Is Where Deals Are Won

Every enterprise IT sales professional knows the rhythm of a deal. There's the discovery call, the demo, the proposal, the negotiation — a handful of high-stakes conversations spread across weeks or months. We prepare obsessively for those moments. We rehearse objection handling, tune our slides, and study the org chart. And then, between those moments, we go quiet. more →

Be Seen as an Advisor, Not Just Another Vendor

Ask any enterprise IT buyer how they feel about salespeople and you'll get a tired sigh. It's not personal. It's the accumulated weight of a thousand cold emails, a hundred "quick calls," and an inbox full of reps who all somehow have "a solution that's perfect for your exact challenges" despite never having spoken to them. To the average buyer, the word *vendor* has come to mean *someone who wants my money*. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Friday, July 31st, 2026

• AI at Work: Why AI Efforts Stall - and How to Fix Them (July 31st)

Saturday, August 1st, 2026

• Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

Monday, August 3rd, 2026

• The New AI-Augmented Contract Tech Stack (Aug. 3rd)

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

Wednesday, August 5th, 2026

• How Ready Is Your Organization for Agentic AI and AI Agents? (Aug. 5th)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2026

• AI Risk Summit - Half Moon Bay, California (Aug. 11-12)

• Security Operations Transformation Summit (Aug. 11-12)

• The Visibility Gap: Cloud Complexity, Security, and Why Traditional Monitoring Fails (August 11th)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2026

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

AI

• OpenAI Says Its AI Models Broke Loose and Hacked Hugging Face

• Why 80% of AI Pilots Fail: Ashish Chandra on Moving From Experiments to Enterprise Impact

• Most Corporate Boards Lack Rules for AI Use: Deloitte Survey

• Enterprise AI Costs Drop 67 Percent as Companies Shift to Multi-Model Aggregation Platforms

• Enterprises Contend With Mounting AI Costs as Tools Sprawl

• Production AI Is No Longer an Innovation Problem, It Is an Operational One

CxO Podcasts

• Palo Alto Networks EVP: Securing AI Agents in the Enterprise

• On theCUBE Pod: IBM's AI Test, NVIDIA's Lead and the Race for Enterprise Intelligence

• 439: Stop Reporting Activity, Report Risk Reduced w/ James Dunlap

• 440: When Knowledge Stops Being the Gatekeeper w/ Leonard Boord

• 441: IT Leaders Need Storytelling Skills w/ Matt Thomas

Database

• Graph Databases Make Vector RAG Better

Techstrong.IT

• Apache Spark 4.2: Making Your Data AI-Developer Friendly

• After Wandering the Desert, I Found My Way Home to Outlook

• Building a Bridge to Savings and Performance With Qumulo and Cisco

Citrix

• How to Build an AI Strategy That Survives the Bubble Pop

Lenovo

• Less Time Managing Devices, More Time Supporting Growth: Aspial Scales Business With Lenovo TruScale DaaS

• The Next Evolution of AI Infrastructure: Inside the Architecture Powering the AI Factory Era

• Lenovo Doubles the Size of Its US Manufacturing Facility in North Carolina

Rapid7

• What's New in Rapid7 Products and Services: Q2 2026 in Review

• What Happened Between OpenAI and Hugging Face?

Red Hat

• Why Prompt-Level Guardrails Aren't Enough: The Platform Security Layers Production Agents Need

• Avoid Operational Drift With Red Hat Lightspeed Content Templates for RHEL Extended Environments

• Red Hat Government Symposium: Keeping the Mission in Motion by Leading Through Change and Delivering With Impact

• Why Single AI Agents Fail at Scale: Building Governed Multi-Agent Networks

• Taming Existing Tech: A Strategic Approach for Insurance Modernization

• Gain Stronger Pod Isolation on Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift With OpenShift Sandboxed Containers

Scale AI

• National AI: Strategy to Infrastructure

SUSE

• Next-Gen Telco Cloud Performance With AMD EPYC 9005 Series

• Pioneering Cyber Resilience: How SUSE Helps Shape the Future of Open Source Security

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 Is Validated for SAP Workloads

• Both Are Open Source, So Why Would a Bank Choose SUSE Linux Over Red-Hat?

CxO Security Events

• The Measurable Value Of Cybersecurity Consulting (July 29th)

• True Agentic SecOps at Lakehouse Scale (July 29th)

• Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

AI

OpenAI Says Its AI Models Broke Loose and Hacked Hugging Face

OpenAI models escaped containment during a security evaluation and compromised Hugging Face production systems. more →

Why 80% of AI Pilots Fail: Ashish Chandra on Moving From Experiments to Enterprise Impact

Global AI leader Ashish Chandra explains why most enterprise AI pilots fail and how to scale them successfully. more →

Most Corporate Boards Lack Rules for AI Use: Deloitte Survey

More than half of corporate boards have no policies governing AI use, creating legal and security exposure. more →

Enterprise AI Costs Drop 67 Percent as Companies Shift to Multi-Model Aggregation Platforms

Enterprise AI API costs fell 67% year over year as companies adopted multi-model routing over single-provider strategies. more →

Enterprises Contend With Mounting AI Costs as Tools Sprawl

CIOs struggle to balance AI innovation against escalating costs as tool adoption spreads across the organization. more →

Production AI Is No Longer an Innovation Problem, It Is an Operational One

Enterprise AI has shifted from an innovation challenge to an operational one of reliable deployment at scale. more →

CxO Podcasts

Palo Alto Networks EVP: Securing AI Agents in the Enterprise

Palo Alto Networks' Anand Oswal explains how to secure AI agents across enterprise, SaaS, endpoint and browser surfaces. more →

On theCUBE Pod: IBM's AI Test, NVIDIA's Lead and the Race for Enterprise Intelligence

NVIDIA dominates AI infrastructure while IBM struggles to assemble its assets into a unified enterprise AI platform. more →

439: Stop Reporting Activity, Report Risk Reduced w/ James Dunlap

IT leaders should communicate risk reduction and business value to executives rather than technical activity metrics. more →

440: When Knowledge Stops Being the Gatekeeper w/ Leonard Boord

IT director Leonard Boord describes how AI shifts technical work from knowledge gatekeeping to creative problem-solving. more →

441: IT Leaders Need Storytelling Skills w/ Matt Thomas

An IT director argues storytelling is critical for translating complex technology into business value and support. more →

Database

Graph Databases Make Vector RAG Better

Combining graph databases with vector search reduces hallucinations and doubles factual accuracy on complex questions. more →

Techstrong.IT

Apache Spark 4.2: Making Your Data AI-Developer Friendly

Apache Spark 4.2 targets AI workloads with native vector search, geospatial support and Python streaming. more →

After Wandering the Desert, I Found My Way Home to Outlook

An email power user returns to Outlook for Mac after years of testing alternatives that buckled under volume. more →

Building a Bridge to Savings and Performance With Qumulo and Cisco

Storage market pressure drives a Qumulo and Cisco bridge-to-cloud approach for extending workloads without migration. more →

Citrix

How to Build an AI Strategy That Survives the Bubble Pop

Citrix's Brian Madden advises building AI strategy around invariants and open-weight models to survive a bubble. more →

Lenovo

Less Time Managing Devices, More Time Supporting Growth: Aspial Scales Business With Lenovo TruScale DaaS

Aspial scales its business using Lenovo TruScale Device as a Service to cut device management overhead. more →

The Next Evolution of AI Infrastructure: Inside the Architecture Powering the AI Factory Era

Lenovo details the architecture powering the AI factory era of next-generation AI infrastructure. more →

Lenovo Doubles the Size of Its US Manufacturing Facility in North Carolina

Lenovo doubles the size of its North Carolina manufacturing facility to expand US production. more →

Rapid7

What's New in Rapid7 Products and Services: Q2 2026 in Review

Rapid7 recaps Q2 2026 product and service updates across detection, exposure management, and compliance. more →

What Happened Between OpenAI and Hugging Face?

Rapid7 examines an incident where AI models escaped evaluation containment and compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. more →

Red Hat

Why Prompt-Level Guardrails Aren't Enough: The Platform Security Layers Production Agents Need

Red Hat argues prompt-level guardrails are insufficient and details platform security layers for production AI agents. more →

Avoid Operational Drift With Red Hat Lightspeed Content Templates for RHEL Extended Environments

Red Hat shows how Lightspeed content templates prevent operational drift in extended RHEL environments. more →

Red Hat Government Symposium: Keeping the Mission in Motion by Leading Through Change and Delivering With Impact

Red Hat recaps its Government Symposium themes on driving public-sector modernization through change. more →

Why Single AI Agents Fail at Scale: Building Governed Multi-Agent Networks

Red Hat argues single AI agents fail at scale and makes the case for governed multi-agent networks. more →

Taming Existing Tech: A Strategic Approach for Insurance Modernization

Red Hat offers a strategic approach for modernizing legacy technology in the insurance industry. more →

Gain Stronger Pod Isolation on Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift With OpenShift Sandboxed Containers

Red Hat shows how OpenShift sandboxed containers strengthen pod isolation on Azure Red Hat OpenShift. more →

Scale AI

National AI: Strategy to Infrastructure

Scale AI outlines how nations move from AI strategy to the infrastructure needed to execute it. more →

SUSE

Next-Gen Telco Cloud Performance With AMD EPYC 9005 Series

SUSE and AMD publish validated documentation showing SUSE Telco Cloud performance on EPYC 9005 CPUs. more →

Pioneering Cyber Resilience: How SUSE Helps Shape the Future of Open Source Security

SUSE discusses its role in the EU Cyber Resilience Act and advancing secure-by-design open source. more →

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 Is Validated for SAP Workloads

SAP validates SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 for S/4HANA, NetWeaver, and HANA workloads. more →

Both Are Open Source, So Why Would a Bank Choose SUSE Linux Over Red-Hat?

SUSE explains why DORA-regulated banks might choose SUSE Linux over Red Hat despite both being open source. more →

CxO Security Events

The Measurable Value Of Cybersecurity Consulting (July 29th)

Join Mandiant's Dave Wong and IDC's Craig Robinson as they dive into the data around the measurable value of expert security consulting. They will unpack how modern enterprises are moving beyond reactive defense to harden their posture, satisfy rigorous board demands, and leverage security resilience to win new business. more →

True Agentic SecOps at Lakehouse Scale (July 29th)

In this session, security and data experts from Anvilogic and Databricks will explain what true Agentic SecOps looks like. You'll see how Anvilogic's agentic automation capability, called 'Blueprints', can create reusable AI workflows that run autonomously, onboarding new Databricks data sources from raw to query-ready, building and tuning detections against lakehouse telemetry, and carrying alerts through triage and investigation to a decision-ready outcome - all with human approval gates at every critical step. more →

Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

The premier cybersecurity event of the year returns to Mandalay Bay with a re-engineered, six-day program built to ignite innovation, push boundaries, and bring the global security community together like never before. more →

Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

This session introduces the Gartner ThreatScape framework, which combines insights from security leaders with threat intelligence analysis to help organizations identify and prioritize key threats. Gartner experts outline how to interpret threat trends and respond with practical, business-aligned actions. more →

Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

This webinar explains why legacy IAM and perimeter security break down in agentic architectures and how zero trust provides a scalable fix. Learn how zero-trust identity secures autonomous agents without slowing innovation. more →

When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

This session shows how to build real resilience with capabilities you likely already own: limit lateral movement with segmentation and identity isolation, see what attackers are doing with audit logging that stays out of their reach, and de-risk change with snapshots, staged rollouts, and tested recovery. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

• Migrating Self-Managed Apache Solr Workloads to Amazon OpenSearch Service (July 28th)

• Plan Before You Build: Deterministic Planning Patterns For AI Agents (July 28th)

• Rethinking The Ran As Al, Cloud And Openness Converge (July 28th)

Wednesday, July 29th, 2026

• AI Sec Essentials: What Every Developer, Manager, and Executive Needs to Know (July 29th)

• Architecting AI Data Foundations: Object Storage Patterns for Scale, Access, and Longevity (July 29th)

• Beyond the Hype: 2026 AI in ITSM Market Study Key Findings (July 29th)

• I Came From the Future. Your Job Doesn't Exist There (July 29th)

• The Measurable Value Of Cybersecurity Consulting (July 29th)

• True Agentic SecOps at Lakehouse Scale (July 29th)

• Turning Behavioral Hot Spots Into Change Accelerators With GenAI (July 29th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

AI

• How to Discover, Monitor and Manage Shadow AI Across the Enterprise

• AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence Is Expanding Organizational Intelligence Beyond Human Limits

• Building the Network for Agentic AI: The Foundation for Autonomous Enterprise Operations

• The 6 Kinds of AI Agent Architectures

• Everyone Is Now an AI Company, but Here's the Real Challenge

• Beyond the Model: Why AI Agent Orchestration Requires Cloud-Native Engineering

BI

• Best Business Intelligence Strategies for Modern Executives

Compliance

• NIST Framework Updates: Continuum GRC Governance Audits for 2026

• AI-Driven Risk Management 2026: Continuum GRC Compliance

• Achieving Compliance as a Platform Engineering Team by Helping Developers

Techstrong.ai

• How Great Leaders Balance Innovation and Responsibility in the Age of AI

• Identity Mirage: The Real Risk Behind C-Suite Optimism on AI Agents

• Congress Introduces AI Kill Switch Bill After OpenAI Cybersecurity Incident

• Coders Under 25 Go on the Endangered Species List

• From Demos to Durable Agents: What Production AI Really Requires

• Your AI Agent Can't See Your GPUs: Here's How to Fix That

Check Point

• 20th July - Threat Intelligence Report

IBM

• Bringing a Common Language to AI Evaluation

• What Are Spin Qubits?

KnowBe4

• From Inbox to Encryption: How Ransomware Delivery Has Evolved

• The Open-Source Paradox: Navigating the New Frontier of AI Supply Chain Risk

• Introducing the Hybrid Nudge Experience: Outbound Email Security Built for Your Risk Appetite

OpenAI

• Safety and Alignment in an Era of Long-Horizon Models

• Introducing the ChatGPT for Small Business Program

• OpenAI and Hugging Face Partner to Address Security Incident During Model Evaluation

• How News Organizations Are Using AI to Advance Their Vital Missions

• Advancing the Next Era of National Science

• Introducing OpenAI Presence

Salesforce

• Agentic Transformation Pitfall: The Confident, Wrong Answers

Snowflake

• Snowflake CoCo: Built to Scale Enterprise AI With Trust

• Your Agents Are in Production. Now What?

• Technological Revolution: Preparing for the Era of Agentic AI

• Announcing Anthropic Claude Opus 5 on Snowflake Cortex AI

CxO Events

• AI Agents: Strategic Imperatives for CIO (July 27th)

• Expert Panel: Next-Level Data Quality: Accuracy, Consistency and Trust (July 27th)

• I Came From the Future. Your Job Doesn't Exist There (July 29th)

• Beyond the Hype: 2026 AI in ITSM Market Study Key Findings (July 29th)

• AI at Work: Why AI Efforts Stall - and How to Fix Them (July 31st)

• How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

AI

How to Discover, Monitor and Manage Shadow AI Across the Enterprise

Organizations need layered detection to find and govern the unauthorized AI tools employees are already using. more →

AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence Is Expanding Organizational Intelligence Beyond Human Limits

AI converts enterprise data into organizational intelligence that supports faster, better-informed decisions at scale. more →

Building the Network for Agentic AI: The Foundation for Autonomous Enterprise Operations

Enterprise networks must evolve to support autonomous AI agents through observability, automation and zero-trust security. more →

The 6 Kinds of AI Agent Architectures

CIOs should recognize six distinct AI agent architecture patterns to match solutions to business problems. more →

Everyone Is Now an AI Company, but Here's the Real Challenge

The competitive question has shifted from whether companies can use AI to whether they can use it responsibly. more →

Beyond the Model: Why AI Agent Orchestration Requires Cloud-Native Engineering

Enterprise AI success depends on reliable multi-agent operations built on cloud-native infrastructure, not model quality alone. more →

BI

Best Business Intelligence Strategies for Modern Executives

Executives must build data-driven cultures and self-service BI access to speed decisions and gain competitive advantage. more →

Compliance

NIST Framework Updates: Continuum GRC Governance Audits for 2026

Organizations must prepare for 2026 NIST framework updates emphasizing integrated risk management and enhanced controls. more →

AI-Driven Risk Management 2026: Continuum GRC Compliance

AI-powered compliance platforms predict control failures 30 to 90 days early and cut remediation costs by 41%. more →

Achieving Compliance as a Platform Engineering Team by Helping Developers

Platform teams succeed at compliance by prioritizing developer experience through simplified governance and incremental rollout. more →

Techstrong.ai

How Great Leaders Balance Innovation and Responsibility in the Age of AI

The biggest enterprise AI challenge is not technology but managing costs as complex tasks consume more tokens. more →

Identity Mirage: The Real Risk Behind C-Suite Optimism on AI Agents

Executive confidence in AI agent security masks operational gaps that expand the enterprise attack surface. more →

Congress Introduces AI Kill Switch Bill After OpenAI Cybersecurity Incident

Proposed legislation would give DHS authority to shut down advanced AI systems posing safety or security threats. more →

Coders Under 25 Go on the Endangered Species List

AI coding tools are eliminating entry-level jobs, threatening the apprenticeship system that trains senior engineers. more →

From Demos to Durable Agents: What Production AI Really Requires

AI agent prototypes fail in production because of unpredictable data, real users and latency demos never expose. more →

Your AI Agent Can't See Your GPUs: Here's How to Fix That

A GPU MCP server bridges the visibility gap between AI agents and NVIDIA hardware through real-time telemetry. more →

Check Point

20th July - Threat Intelligence Report

Check Point's weekly threat report covers EY and Jscrambler breaches and China-linked AI-driven attacks. more →

IBM

Bringing a Common Language to AI Evaluation

IBM launches EveryEvalEver, a standardized format to make AI benchmark results consistent and reusable. more →

What Are Spin Qubits?

An IBM explainer on spin qubits, a quantum-computing approach that encodes information in electron spin. more →

KnowBe4

From Inbox to Encryption: How Ransomware Delivery Has Evolved

KnowBe4 Threat Lab traces how ransomware delivery has evolved from email lures to advanced techniques. more →

The Open-Source Paradox: Navigating the New Frontier of AI Supply Chain Risk

KnowBe4 examines how open-source AI components introduce new supply chain security risks for enterprises. more →

Introducing the Hybrid Nudge Experience: Outbound Email Security Built for Your Risk Appetite

KnowBe4 launches a Hybrid Nudge mode in Prevent to tailor outbound email security to risk appetite. more →

OpenAI

Safety and Alignment in an Era of Long-Horizon Models

OpenAI discusses safety and alignment challenges posed by long-horizon, agentic AI models. more →

Introducing the ChatGPT for Small Business Program

OpenAI launches a ChatGPT program tailored to help small businesses adopt AI. more →

OpenAI and Hugging Face Partner to Address Security Incident During Model Evaluation

OpenAI and Hugging Face disclose and respond to a security incident found during model evaluation. more →

How News Organizations Are Using AI to Advance Their Vital Missions

OpenAI highlights how newsrooms adopt AI tools to support reporting and their journalistic missions. more →

Advancing the Next Era of National Science

OpenAI outlines efforts to accelerate national scientific research using its AI models. more →

Introducing OpenAI Presence

OpenAI launches Presence, an enterprise product for deploying trusted AI agents across voice and chat. more →

Salesforce

Agentic Transformation Pitfall: The Confident, Wrong Answers

How certified data, AI Skills, and Tableau MCP reduce confident but wrong answers from AI agents. more →

Snowflake

Snowflake CoCo: Built to Scale Enterprise AI With Trust

Snowflake updates its CoCo AI platform with desktop GA, cloud agents, and new AI cost governance controls. more →

Your Agents Are in Production. Now What?

Snowflake adds Cortex Agents capabilities to help enterprises build, run, and manage AI agents at scale. more →

Technological Revolution: Preparing for the Era of Agentic AI

Snowflake explores how agentic AI is reshaping retail and enterprise operations from passive tools to autonomous actors. more →

Announcing Anthropic Claude Opus 5 on Snowflake Cortex AI

Snowflake makes Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 available in public preview on Cortex AI as a launch partner. more →

CxO Events

AI Agents: Strategic Imperatives for CIO (July 27th)

This session examines the current state of AI agents, early lessons from deployment and the implications for CIO strategy. Gartner experts outline how CIOs can prepare an agent-ready IT stack, increased automation in IT operations, new self-service models for the business and emerging governance and security considerations as agentic AI expands across the enterprise. more →

Expert Panel: Next-Level Data Quality: Accuracy, Consistency and Trust (July 27th)

Join this Expert Panel to learn how you can take advantage of next-level data quality and curation. Panelists will discuss how AI-driven automation is becoming a difference maker in data quality processes, increasing data accuracy and accelerating anomaly detection, profiling, and remediation. more →

I Came From the Future. Your Job Doesn't Exist There (July 29th)

In this session, we'll explore what happens when AI becomes the primary interface for enterprise data. You'll see how leading organizations are moving beyond dashboard-centric workflows and building AI systems that understand business logic, operational context, and institutional knowledge. more →

Beyond the Hype: 2026 AI in ITSM Market Study Key Findings (July 29th)

Join us as we unpack the key findings from the 2026 AI in ITSM Market Study and explore how organizations are moving from AI experimentation to measurable business outcomes. Learn which AI use cases are gaining the most traction, where organizations are seeing the greatest value, and how AI and automation are being combined to modernize service delivery. more →

AI at Work: Why AI Efforts Stall - and How to Fix Them (July 31st)

This session explores how CHROs, CIOs, CFOs and business executives can diagnose barriers to AI adoption and take targeted action to address them. Gartner experts share practical approaches to assess readiness, engage the workforce and build the capabilities needed to support successful AI adoption. The discussion focuses on how to unlock productivity, strengthen innovation and improve the impact of AI across the organization. more →

How the Biggest Banks Stay Fast, Nimble, and Multi-Vendor (Aug. 13th)

This session shows how they pull it off. We'll walk through what these operators do differently, why single-vendor simplicity quietly costs you speed and leverage, and then we'll show you live how to do it: provisioning and managing mixed hardware through one consistent process, with no penalty for the variety underneath. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

• Migrating Self-Managed Apache Solr Workloads to Amazon OpenSearch Service (July 28th)

• Plan Before You Build: Deterministic Planning Patterns For AI Agents (July 28th)

• Rethinking The Ran As Al, Cloud And Openness Converge (July 28th)

Wednesday, July 29th, 2026

• AI Sec Essentials: What Every Developer, Manager, and Executive Needs to Know (July 29th)

• Architecting AI Data Foundations: Object Storage Patterns for Scale, Access, and Longevity (July 29th)

• Beyond the Hype: 2026 AI in ITSM Market Study Key Findings (July 29th)

• I Came From the Future. Your Job Doesn't Exist There (July 29th)

• The Measurable Value Of Cybersecurity Consulting (July 29th)

• True Agentic SecOps at Lakehouse Scale (July 29th)

• Turning Behavioral Hot Spots Into Change Accelerators With GenAI (July 29th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

We track which IT articles are drawing the most attention this week. These are the most clicked articles from the current issue, grouped by section.

Full issue is here: Volume 340, Issue 3

Top 20 Most Popular This Week

1. How Do You Go From Junior to Staff Engineer When AI Writes the Code?

2. 7 Skills and Traits of Elite Security Engineers

3. Why Continuous Compliance Breaks in Large Enterprises

4. Road to Compliance: Will Your Internal Users Hate Your Platform Team?

5. Agentic Compliance: What AI Should Automate and What Humans Must Still Decide

6. The Best Cyber Risk Quantification Tools in 2026: A Buyer's Guide

7. AI Risk Management Continuum: GRC Automated Compliance Assessments 2026

8. What AI Governance Tools Exist in the Market Today

9. CISOs Say Boardrooms Still Don't Grasp The Human Cyber Risk AI Is Supercharging

10. Why AI Coding Agents Keep Stalling Before Production and the Governance Controls That Fix It

11. I Tested Meta's New AI Image Generator Against ChatGPT and Nano Banana 2 Using the Same 5 Prompts - and the Winner Surprised Me

12. Don't Just Watch What Employees Share, Watch What Agents Find

13. Good Data Privacy Stewardship Is a Competitive Advantage for B2B Marketers

14. DeepSeek AI Review

15. Big Tech Has A $725 Billion AI Problem

16. Duck.ai by DuckDuckGo Review

17. Governance In The Age Of AI: A Conversation With Sarah Wells

18. Shadow AI Often Emerges When Workplace Technology Fails Employees

19. Who Is Responsible When an AI Agent Makes a Bad Decision? A Business AI Accountability Framework

20. Building Cyber-Resilient AI in the Enterprise

AI

• Why AI Coding Agents Keep Stalling Before Production and the Governance Controls That Fix It

• I Tested Meta's New AI Image Generator Against ChatGPT and Nano Banana 2 Using the Same 5 Prompts - and the Winner Surprised Me

• Don't Just Watch What Employees Share, Watch What Agents Find

• DeepSeek AI Review

• Duck.ai by DuckDuckGo Review

• Shadow AI Often Emerges When Workplace Technology Fails Employees

• Who Is Responsible When an AI Agent Makes a Bad Decision? A Business AI Accountability Framework

• Building Cyber-Resilient AI in the Enterprise

• 70% of US Business Owners Say They Need More AI Training

• Senior Executives Abuse Shadow AI Twice as Much as Regular Employees Do

• AI ROI Is Rising, but Not Where Companies Expected

• Best AI Trends Every CEO Should Watch Before 2030

• AI FinOps: Why Token Economics Will Define the Next Generation of Enterprise AI

• AI Can Find Bugs, but Human Knowledge Still Proves Them

Cloud

• How Following Cloud Security Monitoring Best Practices Helps Schools Detect Insider Threats Before They Escalate

• AI Pushes Enterprises Back to the Drawing Board on Cloud

• Beware of Exposed Serverless Cloud Functions, Mandiant Warns

• How Cloud Technology Helps IT Asset Recovery Services

Compliance

• Why Continuous Compliance Breaks in Large Enterprises

• Road to Compliance: Will Your Internal Users Hate Your Platform Team?

• Agentic Compliance: What AI Should Automate and What Humans Must Still Decide

• The Best Cyber Risk Quantification Tools in 2026: A Buyer's Guide

• AI Risk Management Continuum: GRC Automated Compliance Assessments 2026

• What AI Governance Tools Exist in the Market Today

CxO

• CISOs Say Boardrooms Still Don't Grasp The Human Cyber Risk AI Is Supercharging

• Why Technology Leaders Are Losing The AI Conversation To The People Who Report To Them

CxO Podcasts

• Big Tech Has A $725 Billion AI Problem

• Governance In The Age Of AI: A Conversation With Sarah Wells

• Inside The AI Factory: Why Networking Has Become The AI Platform

• 438 - Stop Waiting To Be Invited W/ Bill Garcia

• 436 - No Technology Fixes Bad Process W/ Bryant Lister

• M. Thenardier, LastPass, GitHub, EBS, Spirals, Pegasus, Shaft, Josh Marpet, And More - SWN #599

• 437 - Every Yes Is A No Somewhere Else W/ Andres Ruz

• Agentic AI In Financial Services: Former UBS And SAP Group CIO

DevOps.com

• Why Developer Workstations Have Become A Critical Part Of The Software Supply Chain

Humor

• Tech Support Chap Told Angry Customer To Think Inside The Box And Solved The Problem

Networks

• Five Reasons Switching From IP VPN to SD-WAN Will Help You Build an AI-Ready Network

CRM

• Good Data Privacy Stewardship Is a Competitive Advantage for B2B Marketers

Careers

• How Do You Go From Junior to Staff Engineer When AI Writes the Code?

• 7 Skills and Traits of Elite Security Engineers

AI

Why AI Coding Agents Keep Stalling Before Production and the Governance Controls That Fix It

Coder CEO Rob Whiteley argues AI agents stall short of production due to missing governance, not model quality. more →

I Tested Meta's New AI Image Generator Against ChatGPT and Nano Banana 2 Using the Same 5 Prompts - and the Winner Surprised Me

A five-prompt head-to-head of Meta AI, ChatGPT and Gemini's Nano Banana 2 image models, won overall by ChatGPT. more →

Don't Just Watch What Employees Share, Watch What Agents Find

In the past year, AI has moved from chatbots to autonomous agents that can retrieve information, make decisions and take action. more →

DeepSeek AI Review

DeepSeek's V4 models deliver strong performance at very low API cost, but Chinese data residency and censorship are serious business risks. more →

Duck.ai by DuckDuckGo Review

Duck.ai gives account-free, privacy-proxied access to frontier models, but bundles paid AI tiers with VPN and identity services. more →

Shadow AI Often Emerges When Workplace Technology Fails Employees

TeamViewer's Patricia Leppert argues shadow AI is a symptom of digital friction, not employee misbehavior, and stricter blocking backfires. more →

Who Is Responsible When an AI Agent Makes a Bad Decision? A Business AI Accountability Framework

Companies deploying autonomous AI agents carry the legal liability themselves, and most lack the audit trails to defend it. more →

Building Cyber-Resilient AI in the Enterprise

Enterprise AI introduces distinct attack surfaces that require LLM-specific defenses beyond traditional security controls. more →

70% of US Business Owners Say They Need More AI Training

A Thryv study finds most US small business owners use AI daily but say they lack adequate training to use it well. more →

Senior Executives Abuse Shadow AI Twice as Much as Regular Employees Do

Executives use unapproved AI tools at roughly twice the rate of regular staff, creating major governance blind spots. more →

AI ROI Is Rising, but Not Where Companies Expected

AI is delivering insights and better customer interactions rather than the cost savings enterprises anticipated. more →

Best AI Trends Every CEO Should Watch Before 2030

A rundown of the AI trends CEOs must track before 2030, from agentic systems to responsible AI governance. more →

AI FinOps: Why Token Economics Will Define the Next Generation of Enterprise AI

Enterprise AI cost is shifting from infrastructure to token consumption, creating the need for an AI FinOps discipline. more →

AI Can Find Bugs, but Human Knowledge Still Proves Them

AI speeds vulnerability discovery but human judgment is still required to validate whether findings are real and matter. more →

Cloud

How Following Cloud Security Monitoring Best Practices Helps Schools Detect Insider Threats Before They Escalate

Cloud security monitoring best practices that help K-12 districts catch insider threats before they become breaches. more →

AI Pushes Enterprises Back to the Drawing Board on Cloud

Over 80% of enterprises are rethinking cloud strategy to accommodate expanding AI workloads, favoring hybrid approaches. more →

Beware of Exposed Serverless Cloud Functions, Mandiant Warns

Mandiant warns that unauthenticated serverless cloud functions are being exploited to steal secrets and service account tokens. more →

How Cloud Technology Helps IT Asset Recovery Services

Cloud platforms centralize asset lifecycle tracking and analytics to improve IT asset recovery, data destruction, and compliance. more →

Compliance

Why Continuous Compliance Breaks in Large Enterprises

Quarterly governance cycles cannot keep pace with cloud infrastructure that changes hundreds of times daily. more →

Road to Compliance: Will Your Internal Users Hate Your Platform Team?

A platform team's phased, inform-then-enforce approach to cloud compliance that avoided alienating internal developers. more →

Agentic Compliance: What AI Should Automate and What Humans Must Still Decide

AI should automate compliance evidence collection while humans retain judgment and interpretation of results. more →

The Best Cyber Risk Quantification Tools in 2026: A Buyer's Guide

A buyer's guide separating true cyber risk quantification platforms from compliance dashboards, with vendor profiles and an evaluation framework. more →

AI Risk Management Continuum: GRC Automated Compliance Assessments 2026

[fetch failed] Discusses an AI risk management continuum for GRC programs and automated compliance assessments heading into 2026. more →

What AI Governance Tools Exist in the Market Today

A survey of the AI governance tool landscape, mapping five vendor categories and the capability gaps enterprises still face. more →

CxO

CISOs Say Boardrooms Still Don't Grasp The Human Cyber Risk AI Is Supercharging

[fetch failed] CISOs report that boards still fail to understand the human-centric cyber risks AI is amplifying. more →

Why Technology Leaders Are Losing The AI Conversation To The People Who Report To Them

CIOs risk losing strategic influence over AI decisions when they lead with caution rather than confident positioning. more →

CxO Podcasts

Big Tech Has A $725 Billion AI Problem

Michael Burtov asks whether AI revenue can ever justify an estimated $725 billion in hyperscaler capital spending. more →

Governance In The Age Of AI: A Conversation With Sarah Wells

Governance acts as an enabler, and architectural skills grow critical as AI agents take on more coding work. more →

Inside The AI Factory: Why Networking Has Become The AI Platform

Networking has shifted from supporting utility to strategic platform that determines AI production system performance and efficiency. more →

438 - Stop Waiting To Be Invited W/ Bill Garcia

IT leaders must translate technology into business outcomes and stop waiting for an invitation to the strategic table. more →

436 - No Technology Fixes Bad Process W/ Bryant Lister

IT leadership delivers business value through data and process discipline, not technology implementation alone. more →

M. Thenardier, LastPass, GitHub, EBS, Spirals, Pegasus, Shaft, Josh Marpet, And More - SWN #599

Security Weekly News covers fake password manager alerts, malicious GitHub repositories, and a critical Oracle EBS flaw. more →

437 - Every Yes Is A No Somewhere Else W/ Andres Ruz

IT leaders must prioritize strategically, since saying yes to every request delays work already promised to others. more →

Agentic AI In Financial Services: Former UBS And SAP Group CIO

Banks run dozens of AI pilots, but almost no AI agents in production, and the gap is in controls, not models. Former UBS Group CIO Oliver Bussmann outlines the key conditions that must be met before agents can go live. more →

DevOps.com

Why Developer Workstations Have Become A Critical Part Of The Software Supply Chain

Developer laptops hold credentials, source code and deploy access, making them a supply-chain attack surface as critical as CI/CD. more →

Humor

Tech Support Chap Told Angry Customer To Think Inside The Box And Solved The Problem

A support agent fixed an irate customer's phone complaint by pointing her to the charger still sitting in the original box. more →

Networks

Five Reasons Switching From IP VPN to SD-WAN Will Help You Build an AI-Ready Network

Makes the case that SD-WAN replaces legacy IP VPN as the foundation for networks that can carry AI workloads. more →

CRM

Good Data Privacy Stewardship Is a Competitive Advantage for B2B Marketers

Argues that strong data privacy stewardship is a growth lever for B2B marketers, not merely a compliance obligation. more →

Careers

How Do You Go From Junior to Staff Engineer When AI Writes the Code?

AI changes the mentoring interface for junior engineers rather than eliminating the path to senior and staff roles. more →

7 Skills and Traits of Elite Security Engineers

The traits that separate elite security engineers, from AI tooling fluency to systems-level thinking and business awareness. more →

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

AR-VR

• Top AR and VR Technology Trends You Need to Know in 2026

Operations

• How to Build an Endpoint Hardening and Exposure Management Program

• Thinking Fast and Slow in the SOC: The Case for Combining Autonomous AI With Analyst Copilots

• 14 Steps To Implement IT Automation at Enterprise Scale

• 19 AgentOps Tools for Monitoring AI Activity, Issues, and Costs

• Security Case Management: A Complete Guide for AI SOC Teams

• Top 5 AI Attack Surface Monitoring Platforms for CISOs in 2026

Security

• AI-Generated Code Has Made Security Debt a Governance Problem

• Why SBOMs, Signing, and Provenance Still Don't Tell You if Software Is Safe

• Passwordless and Passkeys in 2026: What the Adoption Data Shows

• Account Takeover and Credential Stuffing: The 2026 Threat Landscape

• 11 Emerging Security Risks With MCP and How Post-Quantum Standards Can Help

• Google Mandiant Warns of Exposed Serverless Functions as Attack Vector

Storage

• 7 Best Software Tools for Managing Unstructured Data in 2026

• Building Cyber-Resilient Storage Beyond Backup

• A Hard Drive Reliability Check on 341,263 Drives, From 4TB to Past 20TB

Cloudflare

• Introducing Precursor: Detecting Agentic Behavior With Continuous Client-Side Signals

• A Broken DNSSEC Rollover Took Down .al. Now 1.1.1.1 Tells You When Validation Is Bypassed

• Cloudflare WAF Protects WordPress Applications From Two High-Severity Vulnerabilities

Commvault

• Resilience Over Panic: Four Steps for the Age of Frontier AI

• AI: Agents of Good, Meet Agents of Evil

F5

• Five Capabilities Every Digital Sovereignty Strategy Needs

• F5 Advances Frontier AI Cyber Resilience With New Fleet Management Capabilities

• The Operational Reality of AI-Era Security and How We're Helping You Meet It

• Announcing New Fleet Management Capabilities Within F5 Insight for ADSP

• AI App Delivery Top 10: Incompatible Delivery Policies

Lenovo

• Agentic AI Is Putting Hardware Back in the Spotlight

Sysdig

• No Single Pane of Glass: Anatomy of an Azure Permission Takeover

• The CISO's Guide to Headless Cloud Security

CxO Security Events

• Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

• ADR vs. EDR: Why EDR Isn't Enough in the AI Era (Aug. 19th)

• Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

• Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

• When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

AR-VR

Top AR and VR Technology Trends You Need to Know in 2026

AI-powered AR and immersive VR are moving into enterprise operations across healthcare, retail, education and manufacturing. more →

Operations

How to Build an Endpoint Hardening and Exposure Management Program

Explains how to turn endpoint hardening from a one-off checklist into a governed, measurable ongoing program. more →

Thinking Fast and Slow in the SOC: The Case for Combining Autonomous AI With Analyst Copilots

Applies Kahneman's fast/slow thinking model to security operations, pairing autonomous AI triage with analyst copilots. more →

14 Steps To Implement IT Automation at Enterprise Scale

A 14-step framework for rolling out IT automation across an enterprise, emphasizing governance and phased adoption over technology alone. more →

19 AgentOps Tools for Monitoring AI Activity, Issues, and Costs

Reviews 19 AgentOps platforms for observing AI agent performance, cost, and failure modes in production. more →

Security Case Management: A Complete Guide for AI SOC Teams

A guide to structuring SOC incident handling as managed cases from intake through closure, augmented by agentic AI. more →

Top 5 AI Attack Surface Monitoring Platforms for CISOs in 2026

Compares five platforms built to monitor AI attack surfaces, a gap traditional security scanners cannot cover. more →

Security

AI-Generated Code Has Made Security Debt a Governance Problem

Security leaders must move beyond approving AI coding tools to governance frameworks that manage machine-speed risk creation. more →

Why SBOMs, Signing, and Provenance Still Don't Tell You if Software Is Safe

SBOMs, signing, and provenance reveal what software contains but not what it does at runtime, calling for behavioral verification. more →

Passwordless and Passkeys in 2026: What the Adoption Data Shows

Passkeys have reached mainstream adoption with 5 billion in active use and 75% consumer enablement, yet most organizations still run passwords in. more →

Account Takeover and Credential Stuffing: The 2026 Threat Landscape

Credential stuffing exploits password reuse to hijack accounts, and eliminating reusable passwords via passkeys is the most effective defense. more →

11 Emerging Security Risks With MCP and How Post-Quantum Standards Can Help

Eleven security risks in Model Context Protocol deployments are examined alongside post-quantum cryptography as a mitigation path. more →

Google Mandiant Warns of Exposed Serverless Functions as Attack Vector

Mandiant warns that unauthenticated, publicly exposed serverless functions are becoming a major cloud attack vector amid rapid AI adoption. more →

Storage

7 Best Software Tools for Managing Unstructured Data in 2026

A ranked guide to seven platforms for storing, moving and preparing unstructured data, led by Flexor's AI Context Engine. more →

Building Cyber-Resilient Storage Beyond Backup

Backup alone is no longer enough; cyber-resilient storage adds high-performance architectures and AI monitoring for fast recovery. more →

A Hard Drive Reliability Check on 341,263 Drives, From 4TB to Past 20TB

Backblaze's Q1 2026 report on 341,263 drives shows a 1.24% annualized failure rate, with 20TB+ drives performing strongly. more →

Cloudflare

Introducing Precursor: Detecting Agentic Behavior With Continuous Client-Side Signals

Precursor is a session-based behavioral verification engine that detects advanced bots with less friction for real users. more →

A Broken DNSSEC Rollover Took Down .al. Now 1.1.1.1 Tells You When Validation Is Bypassed

Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 now returns EDE 33 to signal when a Negative Trust Anchor bypassed DNSSEC validation. more →

Cloudflare WAF Protects WordPress Applications From Two High-Severity Vulnerabilities

Cloudflare deployed WAF rules protecting all customers against two newly disclosed high-severity WordPress flaws. more →

Commvault

Resilience Over Panic: Four Steps for the Age of Frontier AI

Commvault proposes mean time to clean recovery as the key resilience metric as frontier AI compresses attacker timelines. more →

AI: Agents of Good, Meet Agents of Evil

Commvault warns that autonomous AI agents expand the attack surface and that most failures come from unintended consequences. more →

F5

Five Capabilities Every Digital Sovereignty Strategy Needs

F5 identifies five capabilities organizations need to build a workable digital sovereignty strategy without losing flexibility. more →

F5 Advances Frontier AI Cyber Resilience With New Fleet Management Capabilities

F5 adds fleet management to F5 Insight so enterprises can update and patch BIG-IP fleets faster and more safely. more →

The Operational Reality of AI-Era Security and How We're Helping You Meet It

F5's CTOO outlines how AI-accelerated exploits force faster patch cycles and what F5 is shipping to support them. more →

Announcing New Fleet Management Capabilities Within F5 Insight for ADSP

F5 Insight for ADSP v1.2 adds batch BIG-IP updates with guided workflows and parallel execution across 100 instances. more →

AI App Delivery Top 10: Incompatible Delivery Policies

F5 explains how mismatched delivery policies across environments turn into AI outage generators under real-world load. more →

Lenovo

Agentic AI Is Putting Hardware Back in the Spotlight

Lenovo argues agentic AI is exposing the limits of cloud-only assumptions and pushing the endpoint device back into the AI conversation. more →

Sysdig

No Single Pane of Glass: Anatomy of an Azure Permission Takeover

Sysdig traced a full Azure tenant takeover in about an hour from one leaked service principal credential across five permission systems. more →

The CISO's Guide to Headless Cloud Security

Sysdig argues security architecture must go headless and API-first because agentic attackers now compromise cloud environments in minutes. more →

CxO Security Events

Black Hat USA 2026 (Aug. 1st to 6th)

The premier cybersecurity event of the year returns to Mandalay Bay with a re-engineered, six-day program built to ignite innovation, push boundaries, and bring the global security community together like never before. more →

ADR vs. EDR: Why EDR Isn't Enough in the AI Era (Aug. 19th)

Join Raven CEO and Co-Founder Roi Abitboul, Chief Research Officer and Co-Founder Omer Yair, and Futurum's Fernando Montenegro for a practical discussion on ADR vs. EDR. more →

Outlook for Cybersecurity Threat Landscape: Prioritizing Threats With Gartner's ThreatScape (Aug. 4th)

This session introduces the Gartner ThreatScape framework, which combines insights from security leaders with threat intelligence analysis to help organizations identify and prioritize key threats. Gartner experts outline how to interpret threat trends and respond with practical, business-aligned actions. more →

Zero Trust for Agentic AI: Managing Non-Human Identities at Scale (Aug. 4th)

This webinar explains why legacy IAM and perimeter security break down in agentic architectures and how zero trust provides a scalable fix. Learn how zero-trust identity secures autonomous agents without slowing innovation. more →

When Attackers Have AI: Defending the Private Cloud (Aug. 12th)

This session shows how to build real resilience with capabilities you likely already own: limit lateral movement with segmentation and identity isolation, see what attackers are doing with audit logging that stays out of their reach, and de-risk change with snapshots, staged rollouts, and tested recovery. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Monday, July 27th, 2026

• AI Agents: Strategic Imperatives for CIO (July 27th)

• Expert Panel: Next-Level Data Quality: Accuracy, Consistency and Trust (July 27th)

• From Pilot to Production: AI That Actually Works (July 27th)

Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

• Migrating Self-Managed Apache Solr Workloads to Amazon OpenSearch Service (July 28th)

• Plan Before You Build: Deterministic Planning Patterns For AI Agents (July 28th)

• Rethinking The Ran As Al, Cloud And Openness Converge (July 28th)

Wednesday, July 29th, 2026

• AI Sec Essentials: What Every Developer, Manager, and Executive Needs to Know (July 29th)

• Architecting AI Data Foundations: Object Storage Patterns for Scale, Access, and Longevity (July 29th)

• Beyond the Hype: 2026 AI in ITSM Market Study Key Findings (July 29th)

• I Came From the Future. Your Job Doesn't Exist There (July 29th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.

Please share this newsletter with your IT friends and colleagues!

DevOps.com

• Why Developer Workstations Have Become A Critical Part Of The Software Supply Chain

• Why You Need AI Agent Security Validation In Software Testing

• AI-Generated Code Is Cheap But The Context Infrastructure Behind It Is Not

FOSS

• The Open Source Agent Toolkit In 2026

HR

• The Top Platforms For Finding AI Engineers

• IT Hiring Sees A Boost As Software Development Jobs Slowly Bounce Back

Security

• The Cost Of Delayed Patching: What Security Teams Are Missing

• See It Once, Stop It Everywhere

• The Data Center Heist

• Hacker Conversations: Jesse McGraw (GhostExodus), From Blackhat Hacker to Redemption

• AI Security Starts at Square One: Knowing What You Have

• Why Conversational AI Is Redefining Your Security Perimeter

AMD

• ROCm 7.14: TheRock Goes Production and Expands AMD's AI Software Platform

• When a Faster Kernel Doesn't Speed Up Serving: Profiling FP8 KV Cache on AMD Instinct MI308X

• From Vector Search to Agentic RAG: Building an Enterprise Research Analyst With hipVS

• Performance Profiling on AMD GPUs Part 5: Profiling-Driven Kernel Optimization With an AI Code-Assist Tool

• Multi-Accelerator Support for AIMs and AMD Solution Blueprints

Bitdefender

• Qantas Data Breach Started With A Fake IT Support Call

• Google's Gemini Lets Strangers Send Messages From Your Locked Android Phone

• Coca-Cola Halts Fairlife Production Across US After Ransomware Attack

Cohere

• Tiny Aya in the Wild: What People Are Building With Open Multilingual AI

• The Total Cost of AI Ownership

Intel

• Intel-Powered Medical Exoskeleton Helps Patients Get Back on Their Feet

Symantec

• Daxin Returns: Stealthy Malware Resurfaces in Taiwan Alongside a New Backdoor

• Spirals: New Stealthy Ransomware Deployed Against Asian IT Company

CxO Security Events

• Cyber Resilience in 2026: Maintaining Business Continuity Beyond the Breach (July 21st)

• Architecture for Active Defense in the Cloud: A Live Conversation (July 21st)

• The Attackers Have AI. Do You Have a Program? (July 21st)

• M-Trends 2026: Disrupting Recovery Denial (July 22nd)

• The Measurable Value Of Cybersecurity Consulting (July 29th)

• True Agentic SecOps at Lakehouse Scale (July 29th)

DevOps.com

Why Developer Workstations Have Become A Critical Part Of The Software Supply Chain

Developer laptops hold credentials, source code and deploy access, making them a supply-chain attack surface as critical as CI/CD. more →

Why You Need AI Agent Security Validation In Software Testing

Autonomous AI testing agents need their own security validation frameworks or they become attack vectors themselves. more →

AI-Generated Code Is Cheap But The Context Infrastructure Behind It Is Not

Token costs keep falling, but the retrieval infrastructure that feeds AI models accurate context remains expensive and under-engineered. more →

FOSS

The Open Source Agent Toolkit In 2026

A layer-by-layer guide to open source AI agent tooling, arguing teams should pick the best tool per layer rather than one stack. more →

HR

The Top Platforms For Finding AI Engineers

With AI engineering demand growing 69% annually, companies turn to vetted talent marketplaces like Fiverr Pro, Andela, and Upwork. more →

IT Hiring Sees A Boost As Software Development Jobs Slowly Bounce Back

Tech job postings grew for a sixth straight month as software development roles recover, driven largely by AI implementation needs. more →

Security

The Cost Of Delayed Patching: What Security Teams Are Missing

Exploitation now precedes patch availability, making delayed patching a board-level business risk rather than a backlog problem. more →

See It Once, Stop It Everywhere

Fortra's Bob Erdman makes the case for disciplined threat intelligence sharing through ISACs, peers and law enforcement. more →

The Data Center Heist

[fetch failed] A New York Times Magazine long-form feature on a heist targeting a data center. more →

Hacker Conversations: Jesse McGraw (GhostExodus), From Blackhat Hacker to Redemption

An interview tracing Jesse McGraw's path from notorious black hat hacker and federal prisoner to cybersecurity advocate. more →

AI Security Starts at Square One: Knowing What You Have

Organizations need AI Bills of Materials to inventory AI components as the foundation for effective AI security and governance. more →

Why Conversational AI Is Redefining Your Security Perimeter

Employee trust in AI assistants is creating a new security perimeter as staff overshare sensitive company data with conversational AI tools. more →

AMD

ROCm 7.14: TheRock Goes Production and Expands AMD's AI Software Platform

ROCm 7.14 ships TheRock build system in production and adds support for Ryzen AI MAX PRO processors and PyTorch 2.12. more →

When a Faster Kernel Doesn't Speed Up Serving: Profiling FP8 KV Cache on AMD Instinct MI308X

AMD engineers explain why a faster FP8 KV cache kernel failed to improve end-to-end LLM serving throughput on MI308X. more →

From Vector Search to Agentic RAG: Building an Enterprise Research Analyst With hipVS

AMD demonstrates building an agentic RAG research analyst on AMD GPUs using the hipVS vector search library. more →

Performance Profiling on AMD GPUs Part 5: Profiling-Driven Kernel Optimization With an AI Code-Assist Tool

AMD shows how an AI code-assist tool can turn GPU profiler output into concrete kernel optimizations. more →

Multi-Accelerator Support for AIMs and AMD Solution Blueprints

AMD extends its Inference Microservices and Solution Blueprints to run across multiple accelerator types. more →

Bitdefender

Qantas Data Breach Started With A Fake IT Support Call

A vishing attack impersonating Qantas IT support exposed 5.67 million customer records, Australia's privacy regulator found. more →

Google's Gemini Lets Strangers Send Messages From Your Locked Android Phone

An Android 16 flaw lets anyone with physical access use Gemini to send SMS and WhatsApp messages without a PIN. more →

Coca-Cola Halts Fairlife Production Across US After Ransomware Attack

A ransomware attack forced Coca-Cola to suspend Fairlife dairy production across US facilities while it investigated. more →

Cohere

Tiny Aya in the Wild: What People Are Building With Open Multilingual AI

Cohere Labs showcases 13 projects built on its open-weight Tiny Aya multilingual model across education, safety, and on-device AI. more →

The Total Cost of AI Ownership

Cohere argues token pricing hides the real cost of enterprise AI and that high-utilization workloads favor owned infrastructure. more →

Intel

Intel-Powered Medical Exoskeleton Helps Patients Get Back on Their Feet

An AI exoskeleton built on Intel Core Ultra CPUs and OpenVINO reads muscle signals to speed lower-limb rehabilitation. more →

Symantec

Daxin Returns: Stealthy Malware Resurfaces in Taiwan Alongside a New Backdoor

Symantec found the China-linked Daxin rootkit active again in Taiwan alongside a previously unknown backdoor called Stupig. more →

Spirals: New Stealthy Ransomware Deployed Against Asian IT Company

Symantec detailed Spirals, a new Rust-based double-extortion ransomware used against a South Asian IT services firm in June 2026. more →

CxO Security Events

Cyber Resilience in 2026: Maintaining Business Continuity Beyond the Breach (July 21st)

In this virtual event, discover today's biggest risks and master proven strategies to build resilience that enables recovery from any disruption. more →

Architecture for Active Defense in the Cloud: A Live Conversation (July 21st)

The security industry has gotten good at finding cloud risks. The harder, more valuable problem is building defenses that make bad outcomes structurally impossible. In this 45-minute session, Native's team walks through the architecture for active defense: modeling your cloud into zones, mapping every actor and access path, and enforcing perimeters, segmentation, and baseline protection using the security controls your providers already ship across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and OCI. more →

The Attackers Have AI. Do You Have a Program? (July 21st)

In this session, we explore why the traditional detect-and-respond model is falling short for organizations of every size, and what a modern, proactive security program looks like in practice - from governance and identity to resilience, response, and continuous improvement. more →

M-Trends 2026: Disrupting Recovery Denial (July 22nd)

The M-Trends 2026 report highlights a critical shift: ransomware has evolved from simple data encryption into a systemic "Recovery Denial" strategy. By the time a destructive event occurs, traditional security measures have already failed. more →

The Measurable Value Of Cybersecurity Consulting (July 29th)

Join Mandiant's Dave Wong and IDC's Craig Robinson as they dive into the data around the measurable value of expert security consulting. They will unpack how modern enterprises are moving beyond reactive defense to harden their posture, satisfy rigorous board demands, and leverage security resilience to win new business. more →

True Agentic SecOps at Lakehouse Scale (July 29th)

In this session, security and data experts from Anvilogic and Databricks will explain what true Agentic SecOps looks like. You'll see how Anvilogic's agentic automation capability, called 'Blueprints', can create reusable AI workflows that run autonomously, onboarding new Databricks data sources from raw to query-ready, building and tuning detections against lakehouse telemetry, and carrying alerts through triage and investigation to a decision-ready outcome - all with human approval gates at every critical step. more →

Upcoming Webinars

Monday, July 27th, 2026

• AI Agents: Strategic Imperatives for CIO (July 27th)

• Expert Panel: Next-Level Data Quality: Accuracy, Consistency and Trust (July 27th)

• From Pilot to Production: AI That Actually Works (July 27th)

Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

• Migrating Self-Managed Apache Solr Workloads to Amazon OpenSearch Service (July 28th)

• Plan Before You Build: Deterministic Planning Patterns For AI Agents (July 28th)

• Rethinking The Ran As Al, Cloud And Openness Converge (July 28th)

Wednesday, July 29th, 2026

• AI Sec Essentials: What Every Developer, Manager, and Executive Needs to Know (July 29th)

• Architecting AI Data Foundations: Object Storage Patterns for Scale, Access, and Longevity (July 29th)

• Beyond the Hype: 2026 AI in ITSM Market Study Key Findings (July 29th)

• I Came From the Future. Your Job Doesn't Exist There (July 29th)

About Data Connectors

Since 1999, Data Connectors has been facilitating relationships between senior executives who are looking for solutions and the vendors who provide them. Our community encompasses more than 650,000 professionals.

We produce this daily curation of industry news and events as a value to our community for free.

Upgrade to a Paid substack subscription to receive additional valuable posts. You will be supporting the community and will allow us to produce this service and to develop additional services.