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

For all the fear that AI is coming for people’s jobs, the data thus far has been inconclusive, if not outright dismissive, but that might be a matter of how it’s measured.

 from career-transitioning services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas analyzing employment data. The report found around 20,000 US job cuts in 2025 due to technological updates, including automation and AI implementation.

That 20,000 number is where things get interesting. Only 75 were specifically attributed to AI, but, as Challenger noted, “many companies categorize related changes more broadly.”

Those are national unemployment numbers. In the tech sector specifically, 76,214 jobs have been lost, an increase of 27% from the same period last year, when the number was 59,854.

“The disruptions in this industry, both from the advancement of AI and the current uncertainties around visas, [have] cost thousands of jobs this year,” Challenger said in a statement accompanying the report.

Tech unemployment has historically skewed lower than the national rate, and 2025 has been no exception. 

Nonetheless, impacts of AI have been seen. In June, journalist Brian Merchant talked to a number of tech workers who reported that executives at the firms they work at were using the 

 replacing them to demand faster work, as well as some who have seen their jobs completely eliminated by the technology.

“AI killed my previous job,” one worker Merchant spoke to said, “and it’s killing my current one.”

Other employers have tried to reframe earlier commitments to leverage AI over human workers. Language translator app Duolingo 

 an AI-first strategy, replacing contract workers with the technology, before customer backlash led to a 

 an AI strategy that prioritized the tech over human hiring.

Not everyone is so down on AI. Ethan Mollick, a University of Pennsylvania business professor, 

 that traditionally new technology has led to job creation despite the disruption it creates on the way there.

“It may be different this time around—AI is a very different technology,” Mollick said. “But we don’t know the shape of that.”

A human crushed by giant letters A and I.

Worries about AI coming for your job might not be overhyped

Only 75 job losses were specifically attributed to AI, but that might be due to improper categorization.

Brianna Monsanto

Bonnie and Clyde, Kirk and Spock, and Bert and Ernie are all examples of dynamic duos, but nothing trumps the pairing of the CISO and the CFO.

There are several reasons why a CISO may want to establish a good working relationship with their organization’s CFOs, the professional responsible for all financial activities associated with their business. But establishing rapport with these finance-focused execs may not come as easily for a CISO as it does with other security-minded professionals.

Improving their working relationship with the CFO is top of mind for some CISOs. Danielle Ruderman, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) senior manager of worldwide security specialists, leads the company’s “CISO Circle” program, a series of invitation-only events allowing CISOs to discuss pressing topics and challenges under the 

. Ruderman told IT Brew that the program hosted a meeting at last year’s AWS re:Inforce conference around how CISOs could better discuss their needs with CFOs. It generated so much discussion that the guest speaker, a former CFO, was unable to get through his slide deck.

“That’s just a sign that this topic [is]…important to our customers,” Ruderman said.

Masha Sedova, VP of human risk strategy at Mimecast, told IT Brew one of the mistakes she sees CISOs make when communicating with CFOs and other leadership team members is that they fail to speak about security as a “strategic business initiative.”

“As a security professional, if you go in and talk to a CFO about incidents and vulnerability management, you’re going to be speaking two very different languages,” Sedova said.

When communicating with a CFO, Sedova said CISOs should frame their needs around the return on investment they could bring to their organization.

“What a CISO needs to do is think about the investment into his or her team as a business enabler to go into the conversation explaining how the budget being put into your team is going to help sales sell more, customers buy more, customers stay on the product longer, and help the company expand its footprint,” she said.

She added that while jargon is highly regarded in the security industry, CISOs should lay off throwing out complex terms that their non-technical counterparts might not understand during conversations.

“Most successful security leaders I know and have seen do not pride themselves in using ambiguous acronyms and terms,” Sedova said. “They are able to articulate complex security ideas in a way that every executive can understand without having to have a background in security.”

Kirkham IronTech CEO and Founder Tom Kirkham told IT Brew that the CISO will know when they’ve successfully communicated their needs to the CFO and other stakeholders when security feels ingrained into the culture of their organization and conversations with them reflect that.

“You’ll know you’ve really gotten it done and baked into the culture when the…CEO is walking the talk, the finance person is walking the talk, all the whole C-suite is walking the talk, and everybody in the company is walking the talk.”

a pink hand and a yellow hand fist-bumping

How to make the CFO your greatest ally

“As a security professional, if you go in and talk to a CFO about incidents and vulnerability management, you’re going to be speaking two very different languages,” says one VP of human risk strategy. 

All you do is talk about AI—why don’t you appl-AI it at work?

That’s the question brought up by new research from SaaS provider GoTo, which estimates businesses in the US are missing out on $2.9 trillion annually by not using AI to its full potential. GoTo CEO Rich Veldran told IT Brew that part of the problem is the tension between overpromising potential and the ability for the technology to change the workplace.

“In the moment, it’s a bit overhyped,” Veldran said. “If you go further, and talk to people, what you’ll find is most of them say that they believe that they’re not using it yet to its full extent, so they know there’s room for improvement.”

One way to look at AI in the workplace is as a “force multiplier,” Ensono Expert Mainframe Innovation Engineer Steven Perva told IT Brew. It’s a weapon of choice for the workforce that can be deployed effectively—but not one that is necessarily 

. For someone like Perva, developing code with AI assistance is a good reference to lean on.

“What took me 15 to 25 minutes has now taken me a handful of seconds,” Perva said. “I could be more productive, and I can get to my end goal much quicker. But the part that adds value to the business is still there.”

The survey numbers offer a nuanced picture, with 78% of respondents saying they do use AI in the workplace. Veldran said the $2.9 trillion efficiency gap is from the potential savings of 13 hours a week per worker in the US workforce, but that’s only if used to its full potential, Veldran added. “The large majority, 82% in this case, said they don’t know quite how to use it in their specific function to maximize its impact.”

“There’s an opportunity, and it’s not a technology problem, in our view, it’s more of a communications problem,” Veldran said. “How do you then train people? How do you give them, or customize, the tools so they can be used in specific work settings?”

There’s a disconnect in how the C-suite and workforce see AI, and GoTo’s survey results show it in detail. While 53% of IT leaders said they weren’t confident in AI’s accuracy and reliability, 86% of employees expressed reservations; IT leaders also overestimated how many workers are using AI to its full potential, with only 58% saying staff are underutilizing the technology, compared to 86% of the workforce saying the same.

Results varied depending on the size of the business, with larger firms seeing their employees more confident in usage reaching its full potential. Almost all (88%) employees said they would benefit from an AI virtual assistant, while only 43% say they currently have access. And how they’re using it is also a concern, with 54% surveyed admitting they are “improperly” deploying the tools for tasks.

“They know they shouldn’t use it for sensitive things like personnel decisions or legal matters in the work setting,” Veldran told IT Brew. “People acknowledge they probably shouldn’t be using it for these things, but there’s not a policy.”

Hands at a laptop with AI and code floating above keyboard

Questions of AI efficiency hover over tech, survey finds

“There’s an opportunity, and it’s not a technology problem, in our view, it’s more of a communications problem,” GoTo CEO says.

Caroline Nihill

Anthropic and Meta both won landmark cases concerning copyright infringement in two Northern California district courts in late June, signalling the beginning of the fight on fair use between AI companies and creators.

The law firm McDermott Will & Emery wrote 

 that both companies showed the use of copyrighted materials in LLM training is highly transformative. The decision in the case against Meta also signified a new battleground surrounding market-harm evidence, as the authors were not able to show data that tied the company’s AI, Llama, to a loss in book sales or licensing value.

The post said appeals for the cases are “virtually certain,” and concluded that while companies wait on clearer appellate laws, they should “assume that training on text obtained from dubious sources remains a high-risk activity and that a lack of market-harm evidence may be only a temporary shield.”

Anthropic’s case included the use of pirated material to create its central library, which will be subject to another trial, according to the judge’s decision.

Three authors (Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson) had their work copied by Anthropic through both pirated and purchased sources, according to the filing.

The company used the unauthorized copies to train LLMs and kept library copies in place as a permanent and general-purpose resource, “even after deciding it would not use certain copies to train LLMs or would never use them again to do so.”

Judge William Alsup, who oversaw the case against Anthropic, said that the evidence provided did not prove any non-transformative use of the work through its model, Claude.

“Yes, Claude could help less capable writers create works as well-written as [the plaintiffs’] and competing in the same categories,” Alsup wrote. “But Claude created no exact copy, nor any substantial knock-off. Nothing traceable to [the plaintiffs’] works.”

Alsup said that the use of the books to train Claude was “exceedingly transformative” and was fair use under the Copyright Act.

Judge Vince Chhabria, who oversaw the Meta case, also pointed out that the tech giant’s use of 13 authors’ works was transformative. He 

 that while a company is more likely to be protected by fair use doctrine, there isn’t a rule saying that this “inoculates you from a claim of copyright infringement.”

Chhabria continued that under the fair-use doctrine, the market harm for copyrighted work is “more important than the purpose for which the copies are made.” He continued in the conclusion that Meta’s use of the authors’ works presented no meaningful evidence on market dilution “at all.”

The plaintiffs in this case contended that Llama is capable of reproducing snippets of text from their books and that Meta’s use of their works for training without permission diminished their ability to license work for training LLMs.

“Both of these arguments are clear losers,” Chhabria wrote. “Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plaintiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data.”

Anthropic and Meta both win landmark fair-use cases surrounding LLM training

Authors took the companies to court concerning the use of copyrighted materials in LLM training—judges agreed that the tech’s final product was “transformative.” 

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.

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.