If you’re a C-suite professional, you can probably talk to customers about strategic elements and big-picture goals—all while relating them to your own business’s goals. IT professionals on the ground, however, can have a harder time connecting one part of the process to the endgame.

One solution IT team leaders should consider is emphasizing the importance of soft skills and communication with clients. This, according to team leads, helps combat whatever friction might come up between a team that could lean towards cynicism and a client looking to solve a problem.

Sharpest tool. Avi Hein, senior product marketing manager for Checkmarx, said that IT professionals are often focused on their own goals, or their team’s goals, but not always those of the wider organization.

Hein offered that, on a project, the software-as-a-service team might not be the same as those who are scanning code or viewing the supply chain.

“If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Hein said. “You need a wide variety of tools in their tool kit.”

Why empathy in IT is essential.—CN

IT teams are familiar with tight budgets, but the federal government should be different—right?

Not so much. The new 2026 budget from the White House aims to cut 968 jobs from CISA, a potentially crushing blow to an agency that’s already seen reductions to its workforce.

CEO of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) Chris Gibson told IT Brew that the churn of the agency’s personnel in recent months is concerning, though the agency’s mission may be able to withstand the ups and downs.

“While I am concerned, I guess that there’s a lot of churn, and people are moving around and so on—I don’t see it as an absolute crisis,” he said, adding that while it wasn’t “Armageddon,” he would prefer to see more stability.

How CISA’s uncertainty threatens cybersecurity.—EH

Every IT team has been there—a data center shutdown leaves you scrambling to explain what’s going on to your customers and ensure you retain their trust.

Outages are serious business. A 2023 New Relic survey indicated that the majority of data center shutdowns cost upward of $100,000 an hour. And with potentially trillions to be invested in getting the centers up to speed for AI, data centers are more important than ever.

The list of reasons for a data center shutdown is long, F5 CTO of Government Solutions Bill Church told IT Brew. It could be maintenance, lease termination, or a number of other unscheduled—and it’s often unscheduled—circumstances, but the end result is the same: You’ll need to make sure that you’re covered, and hopefully before the inevitable occurs.

“Ideally we’ve documented everything, and we know what our resources are, who owns them, so we’ll go with that assumption, because there’s always corner cases where there’s stuff that’s missed or left out,” Church said. “But…if it’s completely unscheduled so there’s no warning, and there is no redundancy for alternate data centers or disaster recovery, your options could be somewhat limited.”

Why a shutdown can lead to a glow up.—EH