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Asking around: What IT task took too much time this year?

IT pros talk cloud, SSO, and (you guessed it) AI.
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3 min read

What took you so long, IT?

Seriously, though. That’s what we asked some of today’s tech pros: What task involved the most time and effort in 2024?

Here’s a look at the cloud platforms, authentication exercises, and AI efforts that kept IT practitioners occupied.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity

Patty Patria, CIO, Babson College: From a digital transformation perspective, we had a year-long project to migrate a very old CRM system to a modern CRM system…when you have 30 years of data, it could be not-very-clean data, and you have to make sure it's clean and transformed. And then the other huge time consuming piece is reporting. You have to rethink the way you report, and reports are obviously critical to your operations if they're reporting on finances.

Paul Scott, forensics solutions engineer, Cado Security: Deploying cloud infrastructure with the right settings and configuration for the task, and then ensuring that it has the right IAM configuration to interact with other cloud resources that I need to use in a safe manner.

Lenny Zeltser, CISO, Axonius: One massive project that we have undertaken this year was to roll out what we call “device trust.” We're using Okta for single sign on (SSO), and one of the capabilities of this product is the ability to not only authenticate the user to see if they’re authorized to access the app that they need to access, but also to validate whether they’re accessing the application from a device in a trusted state.

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From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.

Troy Nelson, CTO, Lastwall: AI and LLMs: just tracking the astronomical pace of a) how do we offer those tools internally to our users? And b) what can we offer externally to our customers? And trying to do that in a regulated way that fits our compliance needs and the compliance needs of our customers.

Eduardo Oliveira, CPTO, DataCamp: Things are changing a lot in the last two years with artificial intelligence, and it has been a lot of work to stay on top of things that are being mentioned and learned quickly so you can apply them at your work…just the pace of innovation created by companies like Meta, OpenAI and others has definitely impacted my job, to stay on top of the new technologies.

Brad Cline, VP of IT applications, SolarWinds: We're having to really break it down, look at what this agreement says from whatever vendor, how their LLM works, how they treat the data, how they respond, what the model might talk back to the customer, or not talk [back] to the customer? Are they anonymizing data? Are they spreading that model across multiple companies? All of that is really on IT, I’ve seen, to really decipher. From what I’ve seen internally, and I can imagine most companies are struggling with a bit, you're having to bring the whole business up to speed, because everybody needs to understand it, all the way up to the executive team.

Top insights for IT pros

From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.