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.

IT Brew

Eoin Higgins

itbrew.com

Two people in an office sit on opposite sides of a desk.

Tech unemployment jumps as sector jobs slow down

Despite the decline in the tech jobs market, employers across the economy did add 185,000 new tech postings.

Tom McKay

RTO mandates don’t help businesses succeed, but decimate staff morale, study finds

“If you look at all these RTO firms, most of them did have a stock market price crash,” says the University of Pittsburgh’s Mark Ma.

Billy Hurley

An close-up of a computer screen showing a cursor and the symbols for lock and home.

How to handle test accounts

Checks on test accounts are essential, but there are often too many reasons for IT pros to go around them. 

Former admins talk test accounts (and how to handle them) 

IT Operations

Caroline Nihill

The Trump administration released an executive order (EO) that aims to sustain “select efforts” to strengthen national cybersecurity and amends the executive order from the Biden administration that was released just days before the current administration took office. As a result, a significant portion of the Biden EO has been replaced.

“More must be done to improve the nation’s cybersecurity against these threats,” the EO states. “I am ordering additional actions to improve our nation’s cybersecurity, focusing on defending our digital infrastructure, securing the services and capabilities most vital to the digital domain, and building our capability to address key threats.”

Removes an entire section on actions to combat cybercrime and fraud. 

The Trump directive does not replace the fifth section of Biden’s last cyber EO, which aims to have solutions for cybercrime and fraud.

Biden’s January cyber EO states, “The use of stolen and synthetic identities by criminal syndicates to systemically defraud public benefits programs costs taxpayers and wastes federal government funds.”

The EO asks the executive branch to “strongly encourage” the acceptance of digital identity documents to access public benefits programs that require identity verification, “so long as it is done in a manner that preserves broad program access for vulnerable populations and supports the principles of privacy, data minimization, and interoperability.”

Trump’s directive from June strikes the fifth section entirely and redesignates subsequent sections.

The fact sheet also states that the Biden administration “attempted to sneak problematic and distracting issues into cybersecurity policy,” which the administration said includes the introduction of digital identity mandates.

The Trump administration moves section six up to fifth place and erases language from the Biden EO that says the federal government “must accelerate the development and deployment of AI, explore ways to improve the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure using AI, and accelerate research at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity.”

Instead, the president inserted requirements for the Department of Commerce (DOC), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy to ensure that “existing datasets for cyber defense research” are accessible to the broader academic research community, “either securely or publicly” and “to the maximum extent feasible.”

DOC, DHS, the director of national intelligence, and other executive branch offices also are required to incorporate the management of AI software vulnerabilities and compromises into respective processes and interagency coordination mechanisms for vulnerability management.

The executive order directs the DOC’s secretary to act through the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish a consortium with industry.

Trump directs DOC to establish the consortium at the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in order to develop guidance based on a NIST special publication regarding the 

 (SSDF) that offers recommendations for mitigating the risks around software vulnerabilities.

On Dec. 1, DOC (with other appropriate agencies) are required to publish a preliminary update to SSDF that includes “practices, procedures, controls, and implementation examples regarding the secure and reliable development and delivery of software as well as the security of the software itself.”

Additionally, by Sept. 2, DOC must update another NIST special publication (

) that outlines security and privacy controls for information systems and organization. NIST has to update the publication, according to the directive, to provide guidance on deploying patches and updates for systems.

Changes for aligning policy to practice. 

The current administration declared that agencies have to align investments and priorities for improving network visibility and security to reduce cyber risks. The current president revised Biden’s cyber EO to omit a section regarding the need to modernize agencies’ IT infrastructure and networks that support their critical missions.

The Trump administration requires the Office of Management and Budget director to issue guidance and revisions to 

 regarding managing information as a strategic resource to address “critical risks and adapt modern practices and architectures across federal information systems and networks” within three years.

Changes to post-quantum cryptography language. 

The order also erases some lines on the Biden administration’s work on post-quantum cryptography (PQC), and extends the deadline for DHS, acting through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to release a list of product categories where items that support PQC are “widely available.”

Five takeaways from the latest Trump executive order on cyber

The Trump administration, six months into its second term, took a Sharpie to Biden’s January EO on cybersecurity. 

Ask David Wilson, CEO of energy modeling company Energy Exemplar, what he thinks about the state of his industry, and you’ll get a measured answer.

“All these different organizations around the world and governments are looking into the future,” Wilson said.

Australian by birth, Wilson stays abreast of trends in the energy markets, especially how they relate to the tech industry. As one of the largest economic sectors on the planet, 

 17% of global GDP by 2028, tech is driving energy consumption and straining services, and companies are rushing to keep up.

IT Brew had a chance to sit down with Wilson and ask him about his views on where energy is at today, and where it’s going.

This interview has been edited and condensed

The last time we talked, we were discussing energy connectivity challenges in the US. As somebody from Australia, somebody who’s worked in a lot of different countries around the world, is that a challenge globally?

The nice bit about all the energy challenges that we face today is that there’s no major technological gap. We’ve solved everything that we need to do, the current transition, to connect all these different types of pieces. It’s how do you do it optimally.

We know how to build power lines. We’ve got some amazing new technologies coming online with large-scale batteries and other forms of storage. All those tools are in place, then how do you apply them?

What would you say are the main challenges?

Every different geography has some unique challenges and opportunities—does wherever you are have mountains and rivers, or is it plains and desert? Or are you closer to the poles, where you face those extreme seasons where you are buried under 20 feet of snow in winter and then endless sunlight during summer. So, those geographic pieces really matter.

Then there’s the legacy infrastructure. What’s already been built? Are there transmission lines in place and other things? Solving the puzzle of, how can we use those geographic features, those legacy infrastructure pieces to solve the future problem—let’s say, in this case, putting data centers in or other large loads, or scaling up a city. How do you do that at the lowest cost, while meeting all the other criteria that that everyone wants, such as reliability and emissions?

These challenges are unique in some ways to each country or region within those countries, but they’re also very similar. It’s the same physics all around the world. The electricity works the same way. So, it’s taking those tools and applying them to those local environments.

Looking ahead, where do you see the industry heading?

I’m a wild optimist at heart, and so I’m very excited about the technical innovations that have happened over the last years and decades, and how they will apply going forward. The ability for very large scale renewables, potentially modern nuclear as well—though we’re yet to see really any scale deployment of that—storage technologies, electrification of industry. And usages, such as your domestic applications, everything from your cooking through to your transportation and your vehicle.

All of these things are in place now and just getting cheaper and better. I think that there’ll be a pretty dramatic shift to electrification in most applications around the world, just based on the economics and better experience that that presents.

Is this already happening or is that still a hypothetical?

We’re already seeing that play out, but you’ll see that accelerate even further in the coming years. We’ve got some examples around the world of people running very high renewable grids. Australia is certainly part of that, parts of Europe, and they’ve shown that this can be done very successfully. People have developed all the systems and tooling to do that.

 happened, and it was actually a failure of the thermal or the old generating assets that caused that, not all the renewables. So, we’ve found ways to navigate into this future. There’s still work to be done, but I’m very excited that we can solve all of those challenges.

Energy exec tells IT Brew how tech is driving innovation and usage

“These challenges are unique in some ways to each country or region within those countries, but they’re also very similar,” Energy Exemplar CEO David Wilson says.

Brianna Monsanto

Nap pods, an in-office emotional support ferret, and yoga ball chairs are all things that businesses may have a hard time investing in. Surprisingly, 5G is also on that list.

, almost nine in 10 (88%) businesses believe 5G is “critical to optimizing the use of AI in the workplace.” The report is based on a Censuswide survey of more than 1,000 technology decision makers.

 While most businesses see that 5G and an AI-powered workplace go hand in hand, several obstacles stand in their way when it comes to investing in the wireless cellular technology. The biggest hurdle, which 52% of respondents identified, is the costs associated with deploying and maintaining 5G networks. Kyle Allen, a senior wireless solutions architect at Myriad360, told IT Brew that radios for 5G alone can run a company around $6,000. He added that while maintenance can be done by trained onsite IT staff, some companies will outsource it to a managed service, which may be another additional cost.

Almost half (46%) of surveyed tech leaders also said a “complex” upgrading process for hardware to support 5G networks was a barrier. Scott Schober, CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, a wireless test and cybersecurity solutions provider, told IT Brew that companies making the jump from 4G to 5G can’t just “turn a switch” to complete the process.

“The costs are very high. It takes a long time to migrate over, and there’s physical hardware in play…be it at the base station or be it in our actual devices that we’re using,” he said.

Another 21% said not having a clear return on investment was a struggle associated with the wireless cell tech.

Schober told IT Brew that there are several reasons 5G might be catching the eye of enterprises at this time. Because of its fast speed and low latency (meaning there’s a smaller delay between when information is sent and received), he said 5G is fundamental in supporting innovations like autonomous driving, smart cities, and smart infrastructure.

“Can you do it with 4G? Eh, not so good. It falls short,” Schober said.

Allen added that these factors also make 5G useful in supporting AI in industrial settings, such as in factory or agriculture use cases.

“In that context, yes, 5G is the optimal resource because wi-fi just cannot cut it,” he said.

Most businesses think 5G goes hand in hand with AI on the job

Almost nine in 10 surveyed technology decision-makers view 5G as critical to “optimizing the use of AI in the workplace.”

Owen Quinlan is head of data at Arbor, a free service that helps consumers find lower rates on their electricity. That kind of offer may be more enticing than ever as AI systems—and all the 

 those AI systems require—are poised to suck up a lot of energy in the neighborhood.

, wrote that one ChatGPT query equals approximately 0.34 watt-hours, “about what an oven would use in a little over one second.”

An April 2025 report from the International Energy Agency revealed that data centers accounted for around 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2024, and the IEA expects that number to double by 2030, consuming more electricity than the “production of aluminium, steel, cement, chemicals, and all other energy-intensive goods combined.”

An AI-focused data center holds a 100-megawatt capacity, “consuming as much electricity annually as 100,000 households,” the report said.

“AI is not going to go away. Building new data centers isn’t going to go away,” Quinlan told IT Brew. “People want it. We shouldn’t hold out hope that demand is going to temper.”

Quinlan spoke with us about the power demands of AI, and what’s limiting our supply.

Responses below have been edited for length and clarity.

How much of a data center’s cost goes to the Big Tech company, and how much gets passed along to consumers? Is there a loser?

Consumers are generally the loser…Generally speaking, large industrial has the lowest rate on a per-unit basis because they’re a large consumer, and it’s pretty guaranteed that they’re going to use a lot of energy. They generally have the lowest rate, but they are now a net-new consumer, and they’re just paying their regular price. So, that gets socialized out across all consumers, residential, consumer, industrial, the whole population. What happens, though, is that these capacity prices that forecast how much additional load is going to show up…hit everybody pretty much equally.

Do we have the energy infrastructure to support the rising demand from AI?

Almost definitely not. The grid that we have in this country is poles and wires that have been built over the last 120 years. A lot of them are fifty, sixty years old...Our transmission lines have been sort of lagging behind [the] new generation…For various red-tape reasons, it’s really hard to build a new transmission, which means it’s really hard to move electricity from where it’s being generated to where you want to consume it. As these new data centers pop up, they usually pop up near existing transmission. We just add additional strain to that [existing] underwater transmission system that we have.

What are the alternative energy options that can save the day here?

I’m an “all of the above” advocate. With the way that the demand is looking, we just need to build more electricity generation of all types. One that has gotten a lot of play recently, and is starting to pop up in meaningful ways 

, is batteries: large-scale energy storage. The classic challenge with wind and solar is that they’re intermittent. You can only generate it when the sun shines; if you need power and the sun’s not out, you’re out of luck. But that gets tempered with large-scale storage...That is a big one to focus on, because the time to develop it is short.

How has the megabill impacted the “all of the above” option?

What happened with the recent bill is that the subsidies and tax credits available to people building solar, and less so wind, 

 over the next two years…In 2027, we’re going to see many fewer solar plants start to come online than what had happened under a different tax-credit regime. And that’s bad, because of the timeframe associated with all this and the ability to roll these things out quickly and meet the rise in demand.

What big data centers mean for your electric bill

In short, the bills go up, Arbor head of data tells IT Brew.

For Cisco, the networking behemoth, keeping on top of AI trends is not only essential, it’s part of the business model. So, when agentic AI became the hot new thing in 2025, the company’s SVP and GMr of Infrastructure and Security Tom Gillis knew another challenge was on the horizon.

At the peak of his powers after a career spanning nearly four decades, Gillis knows the ins and outs of the tech business well. And he’s aware that when a technological breakthrough like agentic AI bursts onto the scene, there’s ample opportunity—and danger.

At this month’s Cisco Live, the company announced a slew of new tools aimed at addressing the potential for agentic AI misuse, including in its Universal ZTNA (zero trust network access) and Hypershield offerings.

IT Brew sat down with Gillis before the conference to talk about how Cisco is approaching agentic AI and identity access.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I was at RSA in April and everybody was talking about agentic AI, but not about how it expands the threat surface. What do you think of that tension, and is it a concern?

AI agents are far more effective and useful than just prompts. That’s hopefully pretty self-evident, because, look, they actually do things. We’re going to see a rapid proliferation of agents.

So, here’s the security challenge. Networks are all built around the notion of access control...It’s all about who you are and what you get to access. Now, that’s well understood and kind of broadly available in the market—where we believe customers are focused right now, today, is not just putting least privileged policies in place for users, but you also have to think about the machines in your environment. Printers are people too, the idea is that a printer needs to be able to access the print server, and the telephones need to be able to access the call manager, but you don’t want a printer accessing a customer database, ever, under any circumstances.

So, that’s a little harder to implement, zero trust, because a printer isn’t going to log into a web proxy and do a multi-factor authentication. Cisco has a pretty unique capability here, where we can apply tags to both people and to things, and we can figure out, oh, this is a telephone, or this is a printer based on the tag that we applied at the point that it connects the network. And we’ve done that for a while.

That’s zero trust, right? Is that effective with agentic AI?

This is what the industry calls universal ZTNA. Where we think the AI agents are creating immediate challenges is that if I have an agent running on a computer, it’s gonna look an awful lot like a human. It can log in and provide a password, an authentic date and look like a real person. And so, if I’ve got a printer with a simple software, it doesn’t; but if I’ve got a printer with an agent running on it, it could actually look quite human and could be capable.

What’s even more challenging is if I have a machine and agent running on a human managed device, so I’m running open AI’s operator on my laptop, and it is checking in source code. I know it’s Tom, and his machine is configured properly. It’s coming from a network we recognize, and it’s checking in source code.

But Tom’s on vacation in Mexico. Okay, so it’s not okay.

So, this comes down to agentic AI tooling to manage identity access?

Having the ability to even just identify an agent and distinguish an agent from a human is something that is really, really important.

Cisco’s unique advantage is we have always talked about an identity of three layers. There’s the identity of a user, the password; that’s kind of old news. There’s the identity of the machine that you’re running on, and a continuous risk assessment of the posture chain—not just a snapshot at the moment it connects, but continuously understanding what is this thing doing.

But the most interesting form of identity is process-level identity. A process on Tom’s machine is initiating this connection. And if you have process-level insight, you can actually tell an agent from a human.

For the first time in my career, I feel like I’m not constrained by engineering capacity, because we can build all this stuff. And it’s not only can we build it—we can build it in a way that we can pack intelligence into the solution.

Agentic AI and identity access management: An interview with Cisco’s Tom Gillis

“You don’t want a printer accessing a customer database, ever, under any circumstances,” Gillis tells IT Brew.

For all the doom and gloom surrounding the economy, the tech jobs market rebounded in June, dropping the sector’s unemployment rate as postings bumped up slightly.

That’s according to CompTIA’s monthly analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, which shows that tech unemployment has been consistently lower than the national rate, which is 

. But in recent months tech numbers had been ticking up—

—making the drop to 2.8% in June noticeable.

For all the warnings of job loss for the white-collar workforce because of AI, including recent 

, the reality tells a slightly different story. Tim Herbert, CompTIA chief research officer, said in a statement accompanying the numbers that the employment data “showed surprising strength for the month given recent expectations.”

That includes the perception that AI is driving the sector; as Herbert noted, the data tells a more complicated story—though CompTIA’s analysis did show job listings 

“It’s worth pointing out there is more to tech hiring than AI,” Herbert said. “The data continues to confirm employer hiring activity across many tech talent domains.”

Somewhat paradoxically, most of the tech subsectors CompTIA monitors showed 

 in their employment numbers. Only telecommunications registered an uptick of 800 positions; the remaining numbers showed sharp declines. Notably, PC, semiconductor, and components manufacturing dropped 4,900 jobs, IT and custom software services and system design saw a reduction of 2,500 positions, and general search services fell by 1,000.

Postings were more robust with increases in cybersecurity engineer and analyst positions (1,653), network engineer and architect (530), and tech support specialist (405). The top three states for job postings increases were Georgia, adding 875 from May, New York, up 750, and Washington, DC, with 611 more from last month. Washington also led the top five for metro area increases at 1,386, followed by San Francisco at 924, New York at 565, Atlanta with 561, and Baltimore at 532.

Tech jobs rolling along as sector unemployment falls

Tech unemployment has been consistently lower than the national rate.

Discussions about AI don’t get very far before someone mentions keeping a human in the loop. As companies look to a more hands-off approach to AI, they could run into an Amelia Bedelia scenario, where their agentic solution is prone to making larger scale mistakes in the spirit of being a helpful bot.

IT professionals agreed that industry is looking to have less of a human touch when it comes to 

, like answering quick questions from employees and customers about IT issues concerning things like accessing an email account.

Pat Casey, chief technology officer and EVP of DevOps at ServiceNow, said that he is seeing more customers ask about taking the human out of the loop for these situations, “and still hav[ing] the constraints in place to prevent the Amelia Bedelia scenario.”

He believes that customers wanting to move away from keeping a human in the loop should put more technical controls into place around the agent, preventing it from stepping out of line or being swayed by bad actors.

Casey said that the use of AI at a company’s IT help desk can be helpful for deflection rates, but the technology should be given the same level of privilege as a human in the position would, rather than complete access.

“Just like a human being, you can make an honest mistake, you can be badly motivated, you can be suborned by a third party,” Casey said. “We have years and decades of governance in [the] technology world about understanding how to take imperfect human beings and put them in part of a business process and get good, repeatable outcomes.”

He continued: “You got to assume agents need to flow through the same imperfect pipeline, rather than through some hypothetical, ‘It never makes mistakes,’ technology pipeline.”

Chief AI officer for industrial AI company IFS, Bob De Caux told IT Brew that he does believe that the human touch with AI bots will be relaxed, but not for some time.

“Even as we remove humans from the loop, it’s not like everything will need to be fully agentic in the way that an LLM will determine the process for decisions to be made,” De Caux said.

Vedant Sampath, CTO at Nexthink, told IT Brew that using AI for help desk support and automating the solutions is “giving the power to the employee to resolve the issues themselves,” which could decrease the need for professionals working in these positions.

“Initially, it will drastically reduce the size of the support desk, because the same number of people will be able to answer many more tickets,” Sampath said. “There will be naturally fewer tickets coming to them…and they might be serving the purpose of bumping it up to a [level two] or other person.”

Sampath suggested training employees to use AI in order to move them to a different position, but maintained that a 

 will not be staffed the way that they have been traditionally, or even currently.

Collaged side by side of an AI robot and human employee working at a desk. (Credit: Morning Brew Design)