Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services
Summary Bullets:
• In a survey of 2,486 IT professionals conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Google Cloud, 63% say AI will help them elevate threat detection and response.
• Most view AI as beneficial to their roles, rather than a replacement of personnel.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is central to many tech conversations. Cybersecurity is no different. Enterprises have been using machine learning (ML) to set a baseline of a normal operating environment and then to discern malicious activity from harmless anomalies. With the rise of generative AI (GenAI), there are more discussions on how to use the technology to improve threat intelligence, workflow, and incident response. At the same time, there is some nervousness about the integrity of AI output. There are also questions around the subject of bad actors using AI as an offensive weapon.
• After almost a decade in the market, Meta is closing its team collaboration platform named Workplace.
• Workplace users have a two-year horizon to depart the platform.
It’s official. Workplace, Meta’s team collaboration platform, will not last for even a decade. The platform succumbed to more pressing corporate priorities and unrelenting competition from marquee players. Although Workplace is not going anywhere immediately, the decision to shutter the platform that was launched in 2016 has been made and the timeline for its demise has been cast.
John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise IoT, Mobility, Private Networks, and Service Innovations.
Summary Bullets:
• Comcast Business has set a long-term goal of generating its “next $10 billion” in annual revenues.
• Mobile and IoT are among areas where some of that growth is being sought, but efforts so far can be described as pragmatic and realistic.
As Comcast Business contemplates what it sees as a total addressable market of $50 billion, it has been pragmatically plugging holes in its portfolio to pursue some of the lower-hanging fruit around small business, including mobile (where it reported 6.9 million consumer and business customers in Q1 2024). Indeed, mobility and IoT were included often in executives’ comments at the Comcast Business Analyst Conference in April 2024 where there was also agreement that it remains early days for the company in those domains.
• Virgin Media O2 reports significant direct carbon emissions reductions, climate-related efficiencies through smart meters, and progress in the circular economy with device refurbishment and reuse.
• BT’s trial of repurposed street cabinets for vehicle charging adds to initiatives and innovations that illustrate potential power of action by tech companies and customers.
In the week reported, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every single day of 2023 and – shortly after – the UK government was defeated in court for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is encouraging to see telcos in the UK addressing the global climate crisis.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services
Summary Bullets:
• Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) uncovered exploitation of vulnerabilities nearly tripled last year, up 180% from 2022.
• The DBIR underscores the need for end-user education, with non-malicious human interactions associated with 68% of breaches.
Verizon’s 2024 DBIR paints a complex and challenging picture of the global threat landscape. Studying 30,458 security incidents and 10,626 confirmed breaches, the report saw a huge jump in vulnerability exploitations versus the prior year. Fourteen percent of all breaches involved the exploitation of vulnerabilities with Verizon assigning responsibility for this to the targeting of unpatched systems and zero day vulnerabilities. Verizon noted threat actors used MOVEit and other zero day exploits to launch their ransom demands.
• Microsoft and AWS continue to invest in GenAI partnerships.
• OSS technologies begin to disrupt the GenAI space.
Cloud giants, used to pulling out all the stops in the ongoing cloud wars, are now directing a good amount of efforts (and budget) at the generative AI (GenAI) arena. Microsoft has set its sights on global dominance in the GenAI space with a new $1.5 billion investment in an Abu Dhabi (UAE) AI initiative. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed its final round of $4 billion in funding to partner Anthropic, striving to gain a foothold following Microsoft’s mega OpenAI investment.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon Bedrock in Australia, and it is helping customers develop generative AI (GenAI) applications using different foundation models to meet their specific needs.
• Australia is an attractive market for AWS since the company has a significant presence in the country, and it can support GenAI workloads sustainably as the country is seeing investments in clean energy and more efficient data centers.
AWS highlighted, at the recent AWS Summit in Sydney (Australia), that Australia was an important market for the company and that it was optimistic about the potential of GenAI adoption in the country. At the event, AWS also discussed its GenAI strategy. Rivals Microsoft and Google Cloud have been actively promoting their GenAI development through OpenAI and with Google Gemini, respectively, as well as building foundational models to help customers tap GenAI capabilities without building their own. While AWS has its models under the umbrella of Amazon Titan, it emphasizes giving customers their model of choice, including its own and partner models hosted within its cloud environment. This is through Amazon Bedrock, which is a fully managed service. It gives customers the ability to choose from a range of models based on their needs and preferences. They can develop GenAI capabilities and use cases without leaving the AWS environment. So far, AWS has agreements with several AI companies, natural language processing (NLP), and large language model (LLM) specialists, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, and Stability AI. The advancement of LLM is happening by leaps and bounds with new startups entering the fray and new versions being announced at an ever-faster pace. The introduction of Anthropic’s Claude 3, Mistral-Large, and Stable Diffusion 3, for example, have drawn global attention, offering even more powerful models and creating new possibilities such as self-awareness and actualization, tier reasoning capabilities, and video generation.
As training techniques improve, small language models (SLMs) are becoming more and more accurate, increasing their appeal.
The smaller models make sense for simpler tasks; they can work offline and are a good alternative when organizations want to process information close to the source of collection.
The generative AI (GenAI) landscape has been evolving at breakneck speed since OpenAI exploded onto the scene in late 2022. And despite the numerous new GenAI solutions and product enhancements already brought to market in the last 18 months, momentum around natural language processing (NLP) shows no signs of slowing down. The latest buzz worth paying attention to is around SLMs, which offer capabilities similar to large language models (LLMs) but require far less training data and processing power. Easier to adopt, less expensive to run, and with a smaller carbon footprint, these models hold the potential to further accelerate the already rapid pace of GenAI adoption.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services
Summary Bullets:
• IBM’s pending deal to acquire HashiCorp, with its Terraform infrastructure-as-code software platform, gives the company a popular cloud configuration toolset.
• The buy isn’t a slam dunk; HashiCorp has struggled to make money from its formerly open-source software.
One of the issues organizations struggle with is efficiently setting up and managing their multi-cloud environments. Last week, IBM announced plans to acquire Hashicorp, a vendor with a Terraform platform the company says can help IBM clients do that. HashiCorp’s catalog includes infrastructure lifecycle management and security lifecycle management solutions enterprises can use to automate hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This will extend IBM’s automation and multi-cloud management product set, which it delivers through the Red Hat subsidiary.
• UK telcos are using Earth Day to launch new climate change and circular economy initiatives for all types of customers from consumers to businesses.
• Selling benefits like cost savings and guaranteeing refurbished equipment alongside providing emissions reduction training, advice, and tools enable further sustainability progress.
April 22, 2024 marks Earth Day, which highlights the importance of protecting the environment. The impact of climate change is becoming more of a daily event worldwide as evidenced by reports of unprecedented flooding in Dubai (UAE) and Guangdong (China) in just the past seven days. Telcos in the UK are using Earth Day to launch and re-emphasize initiatives and programs they are undertaking to address the challenge of CO2 reduction.
IT Connection 
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