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

With talk of agentic AI and digital twins gripping the industry, it can sometimes feel like a company not already automating workflows and implementing “AI teammates” is living in the past.

But it’s still early days, and companies are figuring out the best use of these latest innovations. For some, it’s simple: What if executives were available to 

 and talk with employees without needing to actually participate in a conversation? Or even better, what if everyone in the company had a digital twin that was just like them, only trapped inside the cloud?

To get a sense of how far this AI teammate tech has actually progressed, I set up a demo to see how they worked. I was also able to talk to an AI persona I never expected: one of myself.

Personal AI, a company that builds out AI teammates, envisions a time when every person has their own personal AI. Specifically, it is aiming to create digital twins that can act as a knowledge base, answering specialized questions for other users.

Jonathan Bikoff, chief business officer at Personal AI, told IT Brew that the company has embraced an “ensemble of approaches” composed of distinct “small language models,” 

, and “some LLM access.” A user can hook the model up to specific digital folders or labels on platforms like Gmail or Google Drive, Bikoff said.

The utility of a small language model depends on how much data the user feeds it. If the AI teammate lacks data, it will respond to questions from a user with a response along the lines of “I don’t have the answer,” or it will retreat to using a third-party LLM. (Bikoff said that he was unable to name the LLM that Personal AI uses “because customers bring their own. Sometimes it’s self-hosted or cloud-hosted or on-prem.”)

The persona that a user or organization builds out has a combination of long-term, short-term, and relationship memory. Bikoff said during a demo of the model that “each user has the ability to create and access and manage their personas or shared personas that they’ve been added to.”

“There’s a lot of configurability in terms of instructions and guardrails and limitations and behaviors and guidance and all this stuff, as well as directives,” Bikoff said. “I can effectively tell your persona to behave differently or act differently, depending on its audience.”

Bikoff and I met via videoconferencing, where he walked me through how this product works, pointing out the ways that someone can train a persona on available data—in my persona’s case, it was trained on articles I’ve written.

After our discussion, I was granted the ability to speak with my digital twin. Because it was trained on my publicly available articles, if I asked it a question outside the realm of tech journalism, it would simply say, “I cannot answer that or don’t have anything relevant in my memory. I’ve let Caroline know.”

But when I asked the bot if it had spoken directly to Caroline, it insisted that it 

 Caroline Nihill, a tech reporter at IT Brew: “Let me be clear, I am Caroline Nihill…I apologize for my earlier inconsistent response, which may have caused confusion.”

Later, it changed its mind, identifying itself as my AI persona, “trained to assist with technology reporting and analysis for IT Brew,” adding: “Let’s focus our discussion on enterprise technology, cybersecurity, and IT strategy topics that I cover in my reporting.”

From a privacy perspective, one might find having a digital twin to be an unnecessary risk to take during a time where cybersecurity is at the forefront of most organizations' concerns. Given the endless warnings that bad actors are looking for any footing to impersonate an executive, convince others to hand over access, and deceive vulnerable systems, I'm doubtful about the helpfulness of this tech.

Digital twins are already here and transforming a variety of industries, according to a study by 

, which found that 75% of businesses are already investing in digital twins in some capacity. And the digital twin industry is expected to keep growing—

 reported last year that the global market for digital twin tech will grow 60% over the next five years, reaching $73.5 billion by 2027.

Some IT pros might find the idea of a helpful assistant that can retrieve data in their absence useful, as well as something that could give them peace of mind if someone has a question for them after office hours. But will this reporter want a digital twin anytime soon? All signs point to no. 

A woman using a laptop with a pixelated self-reflection on the screen.

Should everyone have an AI teammate? 

The AI teammate that this reporter never wanted, but suddenly had. 

Gather round practitioners and listen if ye dare

To hear this Halloween tale of possessed office ware—

A printer, one cursed by a dark, mysterious power

That spit out strange symbols three to four times an hour…

Ten Halloweens ago or more, Bobby Kuzma, now director of offensive cyber operations at cybersecurity company ProCircular, received a help desk ticket with a ghastly title: 

A client’s printer was regularly sending “garbled garbage” to the tray, Kuzma said. The outputs included letters and the full 

 character set—similar to the output shown in 

. According to Kuzma, an IT consultant at the time, the client received a mysterious printout every 15 minutes or so.

“‘The printer keeps spitting out gibberish. It’s like the girl in [

As our hero set forth to understand such possession,

He found in the shadows a seeker in session

“Anyone there?” asked the seeker. Then an answer: “I am here!”

Kuzma and his team learned that the printer’s port was assigned to the incorrect virtual local area network (VLAN), one of several partitioned segments of the client’s network. Additionally, Kuzma discovered that an abandoned network and asset discovery tool had been scanning a range that included the printer, which then received the tool’s discovery packets and dutifully treated them like an order.

“The printer was cheerfully going, ‘Oh, I have a print job! A purpose in life here. Let me print all of the things,’” Kuzma said.

With connection, the printer had so much to say

To solve the spooky issue, Kuzma fell back on computing 101, starting at the top of the OSI networking model, a seven-layer diagram illustrating how computer systems communicate over a network. The fix involved layer one: the physical layer.

A physical cable, Kuzma discovered, had been plugged into the wrong port and subsequently assigned to an incorrect network—one that was continuously scanned by the network tool. The fix involved plugging the cable into a different port and properly labeling it so such issues wouldn’t happen in the future.

Nathan Hunstable, a network-architecture pro and current CISO at CEC Entertainment, owner of Chuck E. Cheese, recommends IT leaders place printers on their own VLAN, then lock down communication pathways with a firewall, enforcing that a network is only allowed to access the printer’s isolated VLAN network via the default printer port.

And even then, make sure you connect the right device to the right VLAN…physically.

“We got that scanner disabled. We got the printer on the correct VLAN and considered the demon exorcised,” Kuzma said.

Be careful, practitioner. If you dare print again,

And darkness always lurks inside of the queue.

Credit: Morning Brew Design, Photos: Adobe Stock, Koi / The Noun Project

 The ballad of the possessed printer

Danger lurks in these trays.

The Trump administration’s attempt to change the H-1B visa now includes two proposed rules around selection and eligibility. This could alter how companies use the visa to acquire foreign professionals to work in specialty fields, and even drive some employers to build an offshoring presence to keep their IT operations going.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently proposed a 

 to reform the H-1B program that revises eligibility for cap exemptions, scrutinizes employers that have violated the program’s requirements, and oversees third-party placements (meaning subcontracting). At the end of September, DHS began requesting comment for a proposed rule that would introduce a 

 favoring “the allocation of H-1B visas to higher skilled and higher paid aliens, while maintaining the opportunity for employers to secure H-1B workers at all wage levels.”

This follows the Trump administration’s announcement that employers will need to pay a flat fee of 

 for new H-1B petitions, which DHS clarified only applies to new applicants who are currently living abroad.

The current overseers of the H-1B program are reacting to incidents where companies, specifically major contractors, are sending lower-paid IT workers on the H-1B to other companies, according to Cecilia Esterline, a senior immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

 that one of these instances involved banking companies like Citi, which use Tata Consulting Services (a supplier of H-1B contractors) as a way to hire these specialty workers. The consulting company is

 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for bias claims.

Esterline said that as H-1B was originally intended to be a temporary program for workers to come and go—and is now one of the only programs that allows someone to remain in the US while going through the green card—there are instances where bad actors have taken advantage of the program.

Third-party worksite cases should, in Esterline’s opinion, “undergo more scrutiny.”

“I think that it’s widely accepted that this is an area that is ripe for abuse, simply because of the number of actors that are involved,” Esterline said. “I think that it is a genuine concern, and it’s something that we need to really address, look into, and figure out how is it best that we ensure that…someone’s wages are being compared to other employees at the third party, at the contracting company, but also at the place where they are being placed.”

A lead data engineer at AT&T, Monika Malik said she can understand how the proposed adjustments to the H-1B program can be helpful in combating companies taking advantage of the program through duplicative submissions and filing multiple registrations for single workers.

Malik, who said she has a few team members working on H-1B who have studied in the US to receive degrees, and said via email that she believes the current lottery “doesn’t favor merit or US education, so even talented students who studied and trained in the US face the same odds as mass-filed petitions.”

Stricter rules and the $100,000 fee could drive companies to consider outsourcing, since “now working remotely is as easy,” Malik said. “We have the tools where we can work with people who are not in the same time zone.”

Esterline told IT Brew that the tech sector is facing a “cacophony of pressures” regarding the talent pipeline normally accessible via the H-1B.

She said tech firms trying to retain their workforce may reduce the number of visas they sponsor, or might even move jobs abroad. Specifically, Esterline said the US marketplace could see tech workers favor Canada (which seems to be a 

 among some analysts, despite no major movement by companies in that direction).

“[The H-1B is] pushing our innovation forward, it’s helping us maintain our competitiveness,” Esterline said. “If those individuals are working elsewhere, another country is able to benefit from those same things that we have long benefited from.”

Everyone's Thinking About How to Prepare For a Roboticized Workforce

Companies may look to move presence abroad amidst H-1B uncertainty

 Employers could be forced to build a presence outside of the US due to proposed changes to the visa.

Could this finally be the year of the Linux desktop?!

As Microsoft pushes users to upgrade to Windows 11, IT professionals find themselves in a familiar cycle: swapping out a tested, app-compatible Windows OS for a new and less familiar one.

Support for Windows XP, which launched in 2001, halted in 2014. XP’s end-of-life led many users to switch to Windows 7, and many IT admins to hang on to their legacy software as long as possible.

Windows 7, launched in 2009, stopped getting updates in 2020—not that it stopped the OS from maintaining market share.

Windows 8.1 was released in 2013 and lost support in 2023. This version of the OS was meant to correct many of the complaints about Windows 8, which radically altered some aspects of the traditional Windows UX.

Windows 10, launched in 2015, was a “back-to-basics” version of the OS after the criticism of Windows 8.

On Oct. 14, Microsoft announced an end to Windows 10 software updates and security fixes. IT pros considering a quick update to Windows 11 need to be aware of the OS’s specific hardware demands—at least 64 GB of available disk space, 4 GB or more of memory, and secure crypto-processor Trusted Platform Module 2.0, for example—which could lead some customers to buy new machines to remain aboard the Windows train.

That’s one reason some IT pros are questioning whether they need to stay on this upgrade at all when it comes to Windows 11.

Windows 10 was supposed to be the end of the upgrading cycle. As Microsoft’s then-evangelist 

 in 2015 at the company’s Ignite conference: “Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10."

But like an aging band announcing a “farewell” tour, there’s almost always another one.

“As technology evolves, updating operating system and hardware requirements is essential to ensure we stay ahead of the rise of increasingly sophisticated security threats,” Mark Linton, vice president for Windows and devices, wrote to IT Brew in an email in which he also noted Windows 10’s decade-long run.

Linton added that Windows 11 is “the most secure version of Windows ever by default” and meets the company’s 

 standards—a commitment made in May 2024 to create secure by default, continuously protected products. The 11’s required Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 chips, for example, store cryptographic keys designed to determine if an operating system or firmware has been tampered with. (The sign-in feature Windows Hello uses the TPM to securely hold fingerprint and facial-recognition data.)

A Q3 2025 study from employee platform ControlUp found 21% of more than 1 million investigated Windows machines had not migrated to Windows 11. September data from web-traffic analysis site StatCounter calculated Windows 10 market share at 41% and Windows 11 market share at 49%, despite the latter being on the market for four years.

The push to upgrade to Windows 11 frustrated project manager and indie game developer Rayan Khan. He and his small team had used Windows 10 previously for gaming and development tasks. “We were die-hard Windows people,” he said.

His brand-new laptop, equipped with Windows 11, was running hot, Khan said, impacting performance.

“Do I really want to have all this extra bloatware running on my computer?” he recalls asking himself. “A mark of a good machine is: If I can get you from point A to point B, using the least amount of resources possible, that’s good. We shouldn’t all be running the most energy intensive rigs just to, I don’t know, watch YouTube videos,” he told us.

Microsoft announced feedback features in July 2025 to address system sluggishness. Windows 11, according to Microsoft, arrives with lots of AI features. 

, Microsoft published a blog post saying new experiences from AI-powered assistant Copilot “make every Windows 11 PC an AI PC.”

Despite the promise of AI features, though, this Windows 11 upgrade is the latest version of a familiar frustration loop for IT professionals: an IT pro resists upgrading Microsoft yanks security updates or adds flashy features to move the migration along.

Instead of upgrading, Khan decided to switch to Linux Mint, a free, mostly open-source operating system.

“This whole ploy by Microsoft just felt like a way to make us get rid of working computers, just to buy new stuff,” he said.

Those who stick with Windows 10 face the risks of using a system that no longer receives security updates. For student and cybersecurity practitioner Byrch Baker, letting go of Windows 10 had to do with both security and a little nostalgia. Windows 10 has a flat design and user interface (UI) he’s familiar with; he knows the settings and start menu, and he only very recently made the change to Windows 11.

“Windows 11 asks you to embrace all that stuff of the future, like AI, cloud integration, tighter security, but by doing that, you leave behind a decade of finely tuned and stable releases of this system of Windows 10 that just 

Baker, too, has built many PowerShell apps in Windows 10, often using Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)—an application “no longer in active feature development,” according to Microsoft.

“I spent all my time developing on Windows 10,” he said. “It’s a new frontier that I don’t know if I want to go to.”

For some IT pros, the Windows 11 update isn’t an easy switch

An indie game developer and cybersecurity pro share their reluctance to move to the latest Windows OS.

Dahlia Bousaid Cox’s career has been about supporting the underserved—and her role as CEO of nonprofit Tech Goes Home continues that mission.

In the 2000s, Bousaid Cox worked at the Railroad Street Youth Project in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a nonprofit organization that worked with underserved young people in the community to provide support and steer them away from drugs and criminal activity. It was a collaborative approach, she told IT Brew.

“I felt like the Railroad Street could really step in and help to work hand-in-hand with young people to provide solutions for what they were facing,” Bousaid Cox said.

She left as executive director in July 2007, joining the Massachusetts Department of Public Health the following January. After four years with the department, during which she earned a Masters in Education from Lesley University, Bousaid Cox joined the United Way as director of community impact; she stayed there for a decade until moving to Tech Goes Home in 2022.

“Covid shone a light on the need for access to…digital skills, and Tech Goes Home was at a place where they were excited and ready to bring on their first part of development out of fundraising,” Bousaid told IT Brew. “And I was at a place in my career where I was ready to really take on that challenge.”

Bousaid Cox sees her work with Tech Goes Home as an evolution in not only her career but her personal life. Growing up in the 1990s, she and her mother only had one computer that her mother had to use for work. Bousaid Cox wasn’t allowed to use it because if it broke, “that would mean her livelihood, hence our livelihood, our rent, our food, and all of those budgets.”

Although tech has become more ubiquitous, Tech Goes Home aims to close the digital divide for underprivileged communities in Massachusetts. The organization works with stakeholders in the public and private sectors to further that goal and 

 of program graduates go on to better jobs or further degrees.

“That’s my throughline,” Bousaid Cox said. “Each of these organizations that I’ve worked for and with, it’s about providing a sense of community support so that folks can use and be confident in the use of the opportunity that's in front of them, and find their own agency in building their future.”

Serving the underserved: Tech Goes Home CEO Dahlia Bousaid Cox on her journey

“Each of these organizations that I’ve worked for and with, it’s about providing a sense of community support,” Bousaid Cox says.

What’s the best way to bring the next generation of women into cybersecurity? For industry leaders, that’s a pressing question—and their answers vary.

What’s clear is that cybersecurity faces a significant gender gap. In 2024, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 

 that although women constituted nearly half the total US workforce, they only made up 22.6% of the “high tech” workforce across every industry—and just 19.4% of high tech jobs (i.e., STEM careers as defined by the 

, an advocacy organization for cybersecurity professionals, estimated women fill between 20% and 25% of the nation’s cybersecurity jobs. More than one in 10 (11%) cybersecurity teams have no women, compared to the 4% who said that women constituted more than half of their team.

“Increasing the representation of women across every industry is needed to help close the global workforce gap,” the ISC2 report stated. “Organizations should review their cybersecurity recruitment policies and practices to ensure that they get a more gender-balanced pool of candidates and that the women in their teams are also part of the recruitment process.”

Erin McFarlane, the VP of operations at Fairmarkit, is “always looking for more women in IT.”

“I think there is a need for women’s perspectives in the deeper tech roles,” McFarlane said. “I’m seeing more women in leadership-type positions, which is awesome and certainly more in the business facing technical roles, but less so in the hard, deep technical stuff.”

As field CTO of emerging technologies at Commvault, Vidya Shankaran said that she is part of a “very fortunate group of women leaders in IT and [the] security space” who are taking it upon themselves to foster the incoming cohort of women who can “fill in not just our gaps as we move on but also increase that footprint.”

“In IT, yes, there are lots of women,” Shankaran said. “In cybersecurity and IT, if you were to draw that Venn diagram, the number of women are very, very few.”

Shankaran said that she would encourage women looking to enter the workforce to earn key cybersecurity certifications to increase credibility as someone is starting out. Some examples of certifications include the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification, 

 describes as a globally recognized certification in the information security market, and the 

, which validates baseline practical skills.

Many of these organizations that offer certifications also include memberships and training, which provides networking opportunities for new IT professionals. “That is immensely helpful because it gives everyone visibility into the new incoming workforce of women,” Shankaran said.

She pointed to these spaces as an opportunity for leaders to begin coaching, mentoring, and hiring the next cohort of women.

Kara Sprague, HackerOne’s CEO, told IT Brew that bias is often introduced early within cybersecurity, due to the stereotype of the industry being predominantly male.

Sprague, who formerly served as a board member of Girls Who Code from 2016 until 2022, said she wants the next generation to know they can use their place in the tech industry to help drive the future.

“I would highly encourage and really strongly advocate for every woman to give it a chance and go there [the tech sector], because that’s where the future is going to be shaped,” Sprague said.

McFarlane, similarly, encouraged women to “believe in themselves and their ability to solve problems,” and to not be scared off by the math and science that comes along with careers within the industry: “Women have the ability to do remarkably in these fields, and I would love to see more of them give it a try.”

However, she cautioned, the industry can be hostile and lonely.

“There’s a lot of times where you’re the only woman in a room full of guys, and that takes a certain amount of resilience,” Sprague said. “It means that you have to put extra energy into finding a community that makes you feel the belonging.”

Large-scaled dress shoes on top of staircase with a small-scaled woman climbing up a ladder as another one stands by and looks up.

What women in cybersecurity want the next generation to know

The cybersecurity industry can feel hostile and lonely to those not in the majority, one leader says. 

OpenAI’s new deals with AMD and Nvidia are an opportunity for IT professionals—and a sign that consolidation is changing the tech industry landscape.

 on October 6. OpenAI will control 10% of the chipmaker if it hits certain milestones, a move aimed squarely at AMD’s competitor Nvidia that the latter’s CEO Jensen Huang 

 Just to make things even more tangled, Nvidia has pledged to invest $100 billion in OpenAI over the next 10 years.

We’re in an AI revolution, Shishir Shrivastava told IT Brew. Shrivastava, practice director for tech services and consulting firm TEKsystems Global Services, sees the industry evolving, and IT pros will continue to have nearly every element of their daily experience impacted by what companies like OpenAI are doing in the AI space. Change is the constant.

“For workers, some of the things which are very critical for them are going to go away,” Shrivastava said. “They have to focus on the new trends, or upskilling—with the revolution a lot of things are going to go away, and new things are going to come in the market.”

ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo agrees. He told IT Brew that tech pros need to realize that the evolution is happening and not let themselves be left behind.

“It will transform the way we work, the way we live, the way we educate people, etcetera, and those that adopt it will probably prosper,” Rivelo said. “Those that don’t adopt it will probably be left behind.”

IT pros can expect to see many of their responsibilities streamlined by AI, turning them into “augmented workers,” Rivelo said; agentic AI help desks will take the burden off of resolving ticket issues, for example, but the technology should be seen as an enabler. OpenAI’s bet on AMD and Nvidia’s bet on OpenAI indicate that we’re still in the early stages of AI workforce development.

“There’ll be some jobs that are no longer required for humans to do, but there’ll be other jobs that AI creates for humans, more advanced or different work to be done,” Rivelo said.

Looming over the discussion is increasing concern that AI could be a bubble—one that, if it pops, could have wide ramifications across not just IT but a number of sectors. Shrivastava recognizes the danger and said that, from his perspective, the question is less about the financial implications and more about the impact on the IT space. Companies like OpenAI will dominate the market, but there could be downstream benefits for the IT business.

“I think that’s just the beginning, and we will see the other players also coming into the mix,” Shrivastava said. “Open AI is leading the charge, it’s creating, or playing that role of AI anchor in this whole AI landscape.”

OpenAI deal latest sign that technology is changing sector

“For workers, some of the things which are very critical for them are going to go away,” executive says. “They have to focus on the new trends, or upskilling.”