Decades before Rob Hughes became CISO at RSA Security, he led tech-support at a small marketing-services software company—and got an early crash course in incident response.

“Someone came in and grabbed a bunch of laptops and just ran out of the building,” Hughes said.

These days, employees are likely the ones taking their laptops out of the building, if they even come into the office at all. An especially remote-friendly workforce today means work devices are carried to conferences, airports, hotels, cars, and coffee shops—and sometimes left behind (or taken).

We spoke with IT pros, including Hughes, about what to do when an employee loses a laptop to ensure data is protected and services remain running.

Check out the checklist.—BH

In a few years, you may have a few coworkers who are made out of metal and wires as business leaders increasingly cozy up to the idea of robotics in the workplace.

According to an April report by BlackBerry QNX, 47% of businesses not currently using robotics plan to do so within the next two years. The surveyed technology leaders said they see several opportunities in having robotic automation at work, including growth in productivity and efficiency, a downtick in repetitive tasks, and improvements in work–life balance for human workers.

The report queried 1,000 leaders across various industries and seven countries in March of this year. On average, the business leaders predict almost 20% of their workforce to be replaced by robots in the next decade.

Why IT matters. Winston Leung, a senior strategic alliances manager at QNX, told IT Brew that robotics will likely be a “widespread trend” in the next few years and will introduce a new set of responsibilities for IT employees.

Read more about these new responsibilities of yours.—BM

Major players in the cybersecurity game are moving on from passwords to the more secure (and still esoteric) passkey. Think of passkeys, said RSA Security’s Jim Taylor, like a ripped-in-half bank note: One side (a private key) remains tied to a user’s device, and the other side (a public key) remains with a given server. The keys together, activated by a user’s pin or biometric signature, initiate access.

But passkeys can eliminate the use (or reuse) of a password that can be easily compromised. Passkey users are also protected against phishers looking to deploy a fake, realistic-looking site, but one that lacks a public key—the other half of that bank note.

Passkeys offered an upgrade for Taylor, chief product and technology officer at the network security company, and his team as they recently deployed passwordless options across their organization. Taylor warned, though, that passkeys still can be compromised.

“It doesn’t matter how good the credential is if I use a bypass attack and get new credentials,” Taylor said.

Read more about the different types of passkeys.—BH