Frank Kesterman
While the IT universe has always been a rapidly evolving environment, it often has changed in an expected way – more speed, more capacity, less latency, for example, building on what came before. Occasionally, however, disruptive new technology or a major strategic shift in thinking is introduced and it takes a long time for the reverberations to be absorbed and the ecosystem to adjust to the new circumstances.
Over the past three years, for instance, government agencies have been wrestling with a new Executive Order to implement Zero Trust architecture – a strategic shift – to strengthen cybersecurity. At the same time, the sudden emergence of artificial intelligence – the disruptive new technology – led to another executive order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” to guide agencies in implementing AI applications.
And even though AI is still quite new, it already has spun off another emerging technology – generative AI (genAI). “Traditional” AI is intended to identify patterns in vast amounts of data and be able to make predictions or take specified actions based on those patterns; genAI also uses gigantic pools of data, but then can create something new from it, including new patterns, which means it needs careful control and monitoring.