Why does a giant agricultural co-op need a chief technology officer? Farming has always relied on data (just think of the Farmer’s Almanac), but since assuming the CTO role at Land O’Lakes in 2018, Teddy Bekele has been busy modernizing the co-op’s data practice.

Bekele has overseen reorganizations of Land O’ Lakes’s IT departments, helped spearhead new ways of using the co-op’s treasure troves of agronomic data, and is working on an AI platform to help farmers plant and harvest more effectively. Big data is increasingly central to the crop inputs business, in which Land O’ Lakes buys farming supplies and sells them to retailers, he said—and it’s invaluable when providing insights to farmers.

At CES 2025, Bekele sat down with IT Brew to chat about what digital transformation at Land O’ Lakes looks like.

This interview has been lightly edited for content and clarity.

Can you walk me through how you’ve developed the data and analytics since you got there?

Obviously, insights were always a big thing for us. But first of all, in order to be able to generate the insight, you have to have a model—and then in order to create the model, you have to have the data in place to be able to put that in place. And so we’ve really put a lot of rigor over the last decade of really putting our data in a place where we can make it easily accessible and also do something with it.

So, whether it’s our operational, transactional data from our ERP [enterprise resource planning]—which is kind of traditional IT in general, and that’s where we do the normal reporting—[or] things like our agronomic data. What I mean is in our crop inputs business, we actually have about 150 research plots where they plant all the seed varieties. They plant in all the different conditions, different soil types, different practices. And now that data is captured. It’s always been available, but not been available from an analytical standpoint. So, we’ve cleansed that and made that available.

Read the rest here.—TM

It’s a great time to be a CISO looking for a new gig.

That’s according to Martha Heller, CEO of Heller Search Associates, an IT executive recruiting firm headquartered outside of Boston, Massachusetts, who told IT Brew that she foresees an “exciting” year ahead for leaders in the industry.

“2025 is going to be big for tech execs,” Heller said. “Big, big, big.”

Heller, who has been recruiting IT executives for 20 years, spoke with IT Brew about the big changes occurring in CISO recruitment and the qualities hiring managers are looking for in their next security leader.

The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

What trends have you observed in the recruitment of CISOs?

There has been a massive uptick in recruiting for CISOs. We have always done the most recruiting for the CIO role and as of last quarter, our CISO recruitment surpassed our CIO recruitment for the first time in my career of running this firm.

Another trend is that boards are putting pressure on CEOs to say, “Get us a new CISO.” You didn’t see boards drive deep tech recruiting in the past, but they are now. So, that’s a new one.

Something that CISOs on the market should also be aware of: Don’t fear a breach. Increasingly, CEOs and boards that are involved in these searches want to see somebody who has been through an incident so they know how to remediate it. Breaches and incidents are now a badge of experience and a rite of passage, not a stigma.

Keep reading here.—BM

A new update to Kubernetes is aimed at targeting Dynamic Resource Allocation, an important change to the open-source container system for the next year.

“These enhancements aim to improve the flexibility and efficiency of resource allocation for workloads that require specialized hardware, such as GPUs, FPGAs, and network adapters,” Kubernetes wrote in a December blog post announcing the change. “These features are particularly useful for use-cases such as machine learning or high-performance computing applications.”

It’s well-timed. Last month, Palo Alto Unit42 researchers revealed a series of Kubernetes vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure.

The weaknesses were misconfigured Kubernetes RBAC in the Airflow cluster, misconfigured secret handling of Azure’s internal Geneva service, and weak authentication for Geneva, according to the analysis. According to Unit42, the flaws “could allow attackers to gain persistent access as shadow administrators over the entire Airflow Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.”

For cybersecurity, it’s a good move. Kubernetes, as a major storage system, is increasing in utility as IT teams and other tech professionals are moving toward more data center and AI technologies. In order to keep that information safe, they’ll need a secure platform.

Read more here.—EH