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Securing Critical Infrastructure Starts With Skilled Cybersecurity Pros
Since the current U.S. war with Iran started on Feb. 28, the most pressing security questions stemming from the conflict have focused on economic concerns — the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its effect on global energy supplies and oil prices — as well as attacks on American military bases and personnel in the Middle East. While concerns over cybersecurity haven’t been raised to the same level, the war has increased scrutiny of vulnerabilities in U.S. critical infrastructure, especially as Iran is known to have an active offensive cyber program and has improved its capabilities for over a decade. A few months after the first shots were fired, reports surfaced that attackers associated with Iran’s government had begun targeting water treatment facilities in the Midwest and other locations. While nation-state groups are one concern, other reports have focused on ongoing U.S. critical infrastructure vulnerabilities and a lack of preparedness for what threat actors or cybercriminals
AI-Driven Activity Monitoring: What Tech Workers Need to Know
We all know that meeting or exceeding performance expectations is the best way to ensure your job security. But do you know how your employer is tracking and measuring your performance-related activities? Increasingly, employers are using a wide range of AI-powered tools and software platforms to track keystrokes, mouse movements, internal communications and calendar appointments as well as AI usage via prompts, tokens and tasks. In fact, 74% of U.S. employers now use online monitoring tools to track employee work activities. Potentially, the data could be factored into decisions about performance, promotions, raises and layoffs. But while companies have detailed visibility into activity and adoption rates, they have far less clarity on their impact on productivity, effectiveness and outcomes. Only 32% of employees report receiving formal workplace policies explaining online monitoring practices. Worse, taken in isolation, raw activity data can easily lead to incorrect conclusions abou
Cost Per Outcome: The FinOps Skill AI Agent Engineers Need
Engineers building enterprise AI agents increasingly need to explain the financial consequences of their technical decisions. Adding another reasoning step, retaining more context or delegating work to a second agent can improve results, but it can also increase spending without reducing the work employees must finish. Understanding that trade-off is becoming part of designing a useful system. The relevant skills extend beyond tracking token consumption to forecasting, allocating shared expenses and measuring cost per accepted outcome. Those capabilities will help engineers determine whether an agent delivers value—and give them a stronger basis for discussing architecture with finance and business leaders. Kevin Wade, director of FinOps at SHI International, says those decisions belong at the beginning of development. “Engineers should treat cost efficiency as a top-level design metric and first-party engineering concern, not something handed to FinOps after deployment,” he says. Lear
Platform Engineering vs. DevOps: Where Should Engineers Specialize in 2026 and Beyond?
For infrastructure engineers weighing their next career move, platform engineering presents a fundamental shift in perspective: How much of your career do you want to spend building internal tools, reusable features, and – well, platforms – that empower other developers to ship faster? Choosing where to specialize isn't just about picking a trending job title; it requires evaluating daily responsibilities, aligning with market demand, and deciding which class of technical problems genuinely excites you. In practice, the boundary between these disciplines is far more fluid than job descriptions suggest. Sai Joshitha Kathari, a senior site reliability engineer at Visa, points out that substantial functional overlap exists across DevOps, SRE, cloud, and platform engineering roles. Ultimately, the scope of technical ownership you carry matters significantly more than the label on your resume. Look at What the Team Owns Early in her career, Kathari spent her days configuring CI/CD pipelines
Cybersecurity Budgets Tighten, Change As AI Adoption Continues
Even with artificial intelligence spending expected to reach into the trillions, those dollars are not filtering down to internal cybersecurity teams as quickly. Security budgets are expected to grow by an average of 5 percent in 2026, compared with 4 percent last year, according to a recent survey of industry leaders. At the same time, 55 percent of CISOs report flat or declining budgets this year. While nearly seven out of 10 security leaders noted that AI is a major priority for new budgets heading into 2027, AI alone accounts for about 3 percent of security spending, while software and AI combined represent 35 percent of the security budget – about two percentage points behind staff and compensation. Additionally, about 38 percent of organizations fund AI security outside the security budget through areas such as IT, data or innovation, according to the report published by cyber-risk consulting company IANS Research and recruiting firm Artico Search. The data includes responses fro