Cloud misconfigurations can create vulnerabilities and IT infrastructure issues that AI is being leveraged to fix, but there may still be a need for a human touch to support enterprise resilience.
Layers of components make up cloud configurations, which require data clusters, buckets, balancers and virtual machines to cooperate. AI can assist with anomaly detection and help identify suspect behavior, but it can also lead to overreporting of alerts or misunderstandings about how systems function. In other words, keeping humans in the misconfiguration loop remains a critical part of the architecture.
In this episode of the InformationWeek Podcast, Kandarp Desai, CTO at Xactly, and Jan Bee, CISO at TeamViewer, discuss what role AI plays when dealing with cloud misconfigurations.
They talk about common causes behind cloud misconfigurations, AI's effect on the speed of awareness and consequences if misconfigurations go unchecked.
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They also address how the timetable for fixing misconfigurations has changed with the onset of AI, and whether leadership expectations for the turnaround have changed as well.
Finally, Bee and Desai participate in InformationWeek’s Questionable Ideas tabletop exercise, serving as interim executives of a fictional company where kobolds, goblins and gremlins push ill-conceived plans to use AI to solve cloud misconfigurations.
About the Author
Senior Editor, InformationWeek
Joao-Pierre S. Ruth edits stories for InformationWeek as well as reports on C-suite tech leaders across a multitude of industries and tech disciplines. He also hosts the InformationWeek Podcast, which brings together CIOs, CTOs, and other C-suite leadership to discuss their different approaches to addressing shared challenges. He joined InformationWeek in 2019, initially as a Senior Writer covering cloud computing and DevOps. He became a Senior Editor in 2023.
His work with InformationWeek garnered American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBE) awards in 2024. This included "Could the DOJ's Antitrust Trial vs Google Drive More Innovation?" as part of the team’s Government Coverage, which collectively won a Bronze National award and a gold Northeast regional award, as well as a bronze regional award for a Web Feature Series on the environmental impact of data-driven organizations published during Earth Month. That award included his story "How Do Supercomputers Fit With Strategies for Sustainability?"
He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight.
Joao-Pierre can be reached via email at [email protected]