Factory lines? Spacecraft? Animatronic pizza mice? If your firm has any of those, it might be time to hire a CISO.

Restaurant Business Magazine, for example, recently reported on the trend of restaurant chains hiring CISOs. Nathan Hunstable, who joined Chuck E. Cheese owner CEC Entertainment this year, has responsibilities including governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategy, as well as supervising franchisees and employee training.

“If you get into the weeds of the technical, most of them just aren’t going to follow it,” Hunstable told the magazine of CEOs, emphasizing that the role now centers around explaining security issues in terms of business risk.

“It’s kind of a nuclear race in the CISO space,” Rajiv Lulla, a partner in advisory firm Caldwell’s data, digital, and technology leaders practice, told IT Brew.

The CISO role is popping up in many industries that now manage large data sets and thus have to secure them, according to Lulla. He pointed to retail, which has to manage payments and supply chain security, and manufacturers of automated agricultural equipment. Lulla has also noticed competition for CISOs in exotic sectors ranging from quantum computing to mining and metal startups.

Read the rest here.—TM

What do you do when your organization is staring down a natural disaster that could shut down operations for weeks—if not months?

It’s increasingly not an academic question for the tech industry. With thousands of companies and manufacturing plants in the path of major storms, whether in the US or abroad, the consequences of the weather events can be far-reaching.

Florida, man. Hurricane Milton, the massive storm that hit Florida Oct. 9, showed the disruption that even the threat of a major event can have. Though Milton didn’t have the impact that it was feared to—Tampa wasn’t inundated with up to 12 feet of storm surge, for example—the high winds and torrential rain were enough to provoke moves on the part of Florida-based companies to cover the potential disruption.

Read more here.—EH

Good news for data center operators and digital hoarders alike: Hard drives are going to get a lot larger, and cheaper per byte, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

IEEE’s latest roadmap for mass data storage projects maximum hard disk drive (HDD) capacity rising to 40 terabytes by 2025 and 60 terabytes by 2028. By comparison, the largest HDDs available as of October 2024 max out at 32 terabytes. (ExaDrive holds the all-time record so far with a 100 terabyte flash drive, but at the jarring price of $40,000 each.)

The cost of storage will likely fall as well, according to IEEE. They predict the cost per terabyte for HDDs will fall from $13.6 in 2022 to just $3.46 by 2028.

Chris Opat, SVP of cloud operations at storage platform Backblaze, told IT Brew that there’s a “triangle of tension” when selecting storage devices: input/output operations per second (IOPS) competing between read, read/write, and erase cycles. Hard drives with different specifications, including speed and capacity, may be better suited for different types of workloads.

Keep reading here.—TM