Shefali Mookencherry’s first priority is building relationships.

So when she joined the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) as the school’s CISO and chief privacy officer in January 2023, that was the first thing she did.

“I met, within the first two months, about 400 people,” Mookencherry told IT Brew. “I had, every half hour on the hour, new people I was meeting.”

Patients zero. She’s still meeting people. UIC is a large institution, with nearly 34,000 students and 13,000 employees. The medical center has more than 550,000 visits a year. That’s a large pool of people whose security needs managing.

Being the CISO of an organization like UIC means protecting that population, and also handling the other concerns that come with the institution. Those include working with “every three-letter agency in the US,” Mookencherry said, and also managing the university’s global footprint.

A day in the life of a university CISO.—EH

Like a hurricane kicking off as a gentle breeze in the middle of the Atlantic, most cloud breaches start very small. All it takes is a bad actor stealing an identity or taking over a compromised endpoint such as a laptop, and suddenly an organization’s most valuable assets—often kept in a public or private cloud—are in danger.

Even worse, cloud intrusions increased by 136% during the first half of 2025 compared to all of 2024, according to CrowdStrike’s 2025 threat-hunting report. The cybersecurity organization attributed this to more threat actors understanding how to exploit cloud environments.

Cameron Sipes, the director of cloud security product marketing at SentinelOne, also pins the skyrocketing rate of intrusions on rising cloud adoption and the use of AI in cyberattacks.

“AI has rapidly expanded the attack service, very similar to what cloud did,” Sipes said. “It just introduced new surfaces that we haven’t had to think about before, and not only new surfaces but actually multiple layers.”

Sipe’s forecast for how malicious actors will target the cloud.—CN

Like a best man speech at a wedding reception, business data is often unstructured and messy.

Take insurance, for example. “Sometimes the auto insurance customer database is not directly connected to the homeowner database or to the life insurance database. And so if you want to get a holistic view of the customer, what sounds like a trivial event is not trivial,” Alex Singla, senior partner at McKinsey and co-leader of its AI arm QuantumBlack, told IT Brew.

Singla helps clients across industries deploy AI to solve business problems—and that, in simple terms, can come down to connecting datasets to decision-making algorithms.

Despite uncertainty on AI ROI, many orgs have spent or plan to spend on AI in 2025 (78% of global senior leaders, according to a Deloitte poll last year).

Following McKinsey’s Media Day on September 8, Singla spoke to us about how IT teams are being impacted as companies try out AI—and how one role for IT, amid these AI deployments, might be especially data-driven.

IT’s role in this AI blockbuster.—BH

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