Pills that are hard to swallow: Not everyone will like you, life isn’t always fair, and the internet may rely too much on a handful of tech providers that can crash everything if they go down.

This week’s outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) has some experts questioning the sustainability of the internet’s dependence on a small number of cloud giants.

The TL;DR of what happened. On Oct. 20, AWS seemingly broke the internet when it began to experience “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region” in the early hours of the morning. The cloud giant said the outage was caused by a domain name system-related issue.

Read the analysis of what happened with AWS here.—BM

Unlike your screenplay or novel labeled “Final_V5_USETHISONE,” government authorities want a clear, conclusive document from organizations hosting operational technology—the “OT” hardware and software powering physical machinery in factories, power plants, and water-treatment facilities.

On Sept. 29, the US cyber agency CISA, the FBI, and the UK National Cyber Security Centre released joint guidance for OT professionals on how to create an up-to-date asset inventory known as a “definitive record.”

Consultants and security providers who spoke with IT Brew see the move as a must-do for a sector that has lagged behind its IT counterparts. As OT environments are increasingly equipped to conduct remote monitoring, analytics, and real-time inventory management, operational-tech practitioners may require a strengthening of their security skills.

Learn more about why an updated system view is essential.—BH

It’s all fun and games until the person in charge of managing your organization’s AI subscriptions decides to leave.

The above scenario is not so far-fetched. As companies increase their investments in GenAI and AI agents, it may seem natural to designate the responsibility for the tools to one tech-savvy person in the organization. But what happens when that person’s time at the company comes to an end?

Zander Deitz, VP of sales at AI and SaaS portfolio management company Productiv, told IT Brew that documentation comes in handy for companies in the era of AI, especially when transitioning AI-related responsibilities from one person to another.

“If you don’t have a good system in place that is easy for someone to pick up and understand on day one, whether it’s the person directly managing AI or some other process…you’ve just backlogged their work by months,” Deitz said.

How to keep the ship running when your AI person leaves.—BM

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