Public sector ransomware is a problem—in part because “a shocking amount of government organizations are willing to pay” the ransoms that criminals behind the attacks ask for, according to ExtraHop senior strategic advisor Sarah Cleveland.

Cleveland, a former cyber colonel in the Air Force—where she had a decades-long, commander-level career—sees ransomware attackers as terrorists, she said.

“You’re holding the American people hostage in the way that you’re demonstrating and creating chaos…so to me that feels like a terror attack,” she told IT Brew.

And negotiating with cyber gangs who make these attacks should be seen the same way as terrorists, Cleveland added.

Still, the federal government often pays ransomware attackers, a hotly contested decision when the White House has publicly considered banning paying ransoms in concert with its allies in the International Counter Ransomware Initiative.

Read the rest here.—EH

Did you know generative AI holds serious potential for transforming security ops? Let’s break this down a bit.

To start, organizations need practical guidance to navigate the considerations around data governance, model integrity, and responsible AI adoption. There also needs to be a phased approach to exploring use cases, building proof of concepts, and scaling production deployments.

It’s…a lot. That’s why Amazon Web Services (AWS) put together Generative AI for Security: Harnessing AI for Customer Impact, a free webinar where experts from SANS Institute and AWS provide a strategic roadmap for securely leveraging GenAI.

Watch it here.

A recent survey indicates that Broadcom’s takeover of VMware may have serious consequences for the virtualization software’s business, even if customers aren’t able to jump ship.

Hybrid cloud management platform CloudBolt commissioned a Wakefield Research poll of 300 enterprise IT decision-makers (both VMware customers and partners) on Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware. Early reports suggested VMware customers were bracing for rapid price increases and cutbacks in service, and the poll backs that up: 95% of respondents to the survey said the acquisition was disruptive to their IT strategy.

Around 75% of those who answered the poll anticipated the new management would raise their VMware costs by over 100%.

News of the acquisition sent “shockwaves” throughout the VMware ecosystem, Cloudbolt Chief Product and Technology Officer Kyle Campos told IT Brew.

“VMware has their product sets in all different areas of enterprises. In many cases, large enterprises don’t know a world apart from VMware,” Campos said. “But they know what the world with Broadcom looks like, and so they’re trying to de-risk that pretty heavily.”

Read more here.—TM

Big Data comes with a big problem: Big Storage. Choosing how and where to store the massive amounts of information needed for large-scale analytics is a technical and economic question with many possible answers.

Nowadays, organizations aren’t restricted to traditional data warehouses. Their options include data lakes, and more recently, data lakehouses. Here’s how those work.

What is a data lake?

The term “data lake” was first coined in 2010, according to Dataversity, by James Dixon, founder and former CTO of business intelligence firm Pentaho. The intent of a data lake is to store a quantity of Big Data so voluminous it couldn’t easily be organized or navigated via SQL tools. Since the value of the information is predominantly derived from its sheer quantity, it made economic sense to come up with a different architecture which required fewer relative resources to run.

“In the early days, when you had on-prem data...you’re talking about having to pay for really high-performing computers with lots of storage,” Alex Merced, developer advocate at data lake analytics platform Dremio, told IT Brew. This also resulted in situations where expanding storage might have meant someone paid for unnecessary processing at the time.

Keep reading here.—TM

Struggling to survive the trenches of SaasOps? BetterCloud hears ya. They created their 11th annual State of SaaSOps report to help. Get insights from real IT pros like you on the top IT concerns, mastering SaaS security, and why consolidation is the new battlecry. Download your free copy.