Big Ideas: virtual AppSec, The End of Coders, and NPR’s Twitter insights

And we’ll end the week with some Friday Big Ideas.

Gartner had a solid guest post on CIO Dive.   Cloud IT service providers can enhance their value proposition by offering bundled services that combine different technologies to address specific use cases and drive better business outcomes. By focusing on business outcomes and creating comprehensive bundles, providers can improve digitalization outcomes, offer detailed management insight, reach more users and use cases, lower costs, and achieve greater market share. To create bundled offerings, providers should prioritize specific use cases, partner with public cloud providers, understand the target audience, define and understand the desired business outcomes, create service tiers, bundle complementary services, determine pricing models, develop user-friendly documentation, and consider offering trial periods.

MSPs talk about virtual CISO officers.  But what about Factional AppSec?    From Dark Reading, fractional security consulting firms like Zatik offer small companies access to unicorn-level AppSec expertise part-time, helping them establish and maintain a secure development process. The goal is to instill a security-by-design ethos from the start, enabling companies to grow with a strong security foundation.

If you’re interested in the potential change software coders are considering, James Somers writes a piece on the craft in the New Yorker.   Let me just quote.

“Bodies of knowledge and skills that have traditionally taken lifetimes to master are being swallowed at a gulp. Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now, I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it. I keep thinking of Lee Sedol. Sedol was one of the world’s best Go players and a national hero in South Korea, but is now best known for losing, in 2016, to a computer program called AlphaGo. Sedol had walked into the competition believing that he would easily defeat the A.I. By the end of the days-long match, he was proud of having eked out a single game. As it became clear that he was going to lose, Sedol said, in a press conference, “I want to apologize for being so powerless.” He retired three years later. Sedol seemed weighed down by a question that has started to feel familiar, and urgent: What will become of this thing I’ve given so much of my life to?”

I’ll end with this.  I haven’t covered the chaos on the former Bird app, but I did want to highlight an article about NPR and its departure from Twitter.   Six months after NPR left Twitter due to being labeled as “U.S. state-affiliated media” by Elon Musk, the effects have been negligible. Traffic from Twitter accounted for less than two percent of NPR’s overall traffic, and leaving the platform resulted in only a one percentage point drop. While Twitter provided a reputation-building platform and credibility, NPR and other stations have found alternative ways to engage with their audience, such as live blogs and other social media platforms like Instagram.   IBM suspended all their advertising there just this week.  

This should be a good collection of big ideas to consider.

That last one is less a big idea, and more something to take to customers right now.    If you or your customers are worried about giving the bird the bird, there’s some data to tell you it will all be fine.