Key Points:
- The report identifies digital trust as the paramount concern for tech leaders in 2025, marking a significant shift from previous years' challenges around AI integration and resource limitations.
- It found that organizations are now grappling with the consequences of rapid digital transformation, including heightened security vulnerabilities, questions about AI reliability, and an intensifying talent shortage for specialized roles.
- "One of the biggest challenges identified by this year's Reveal survey was AI code reliability, with 45% of respondents citing it as one of their top concerns," JJ McGuigan, Reveal and App Builder Product Marketing Manager,
Infragistics
, told ITPro Today.
- One major barrier is the difficulty of integrating AI systems with existing infrastructure, which often requires significant adjustments to legacy technology. Another challenge is the lack of quality data, as many AI models rely on large, clean datasets that organizations struggle to obtain or maintain.
- According to McGuigan, successful AI implementations tend to prioritize clear objectives, invest in continuous team training, and ensure robust data governance practices. In contrast, struggling implementations often lack these foundations, resulting in missed opportunities and inefficiencies.
"Unfortunately, in many cases, AI is advancing more rapidly than organizations' ability to train and reskill their employees on this evolving technology," McGuigan said. "Companies that want to succeed need to adapt to the growing demand for AI engineers, invest in AI training initiatives and reskilling programs, and expand their recruitment efforts."
You already know that every day at ITPro Today is about helping IT Pros learn about, assess, and manage the acquisition of next-gen technology that drives business innovation.
That means original reporting from our team of journalists and unique commentary you won’t see anywhere else! But in case you missed them, here are some of our other must-read favorites from this week:
Mental Health Can't be an Afterthought in IT
Key Points:
- There is no question that the IT industry faces unique challenges within its workforce. By initiating proactive strategies, IT organizations or leaders can help their employees effectively address mental health concerns and foster a healthier environment overall.
- Several unique demands inherent to the IT industry can contribute to specific mental health challenges for workers. Not the least of these is the pressure to stay up-to-date with consistently evolving technology or risk becoming obsolete, which can be a heavy burden.
- The breakneck speed at which technology is changing can also create precarious mental health situations for IT workers. Many workers must constantly learn new skills and adapt on a dime, leading to many people wrestling with imposter syndrome and fearing their lack of ability.
- Workplaces are becoming aware of the link between mental health wellness and employee satisfaction and productivity. By implementing approaches that contribute to building a culture that values mental health wellness, organizations can create workplaces that guard against burnout and bolster employee happiness and health.
Will eBPF Have a Greater Impact on ITOps?
Key Points:
- In theory, the extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, is an IT operations engineer's dream: By allowing ITOps teams to deploy hyper-efficient programs that run deep inside an operating system, eBPF promises to simplify monitoring, observing, and securing IT environments.
- eBPF is a framework built into the Linux kernel that makes it possible to write and execute custom programs. The programs can collect virtually any type of data from the system on which they're running. This makes eBPF a powerful way to collect information for security monitoring, system monitoring, and performance management purposes.
- Since its emergence about a decade ago, eBPF has certainly seen some adoption. For example, the Cilium open source project uses eBPF for observability and security in cloud-native environments. Some commercial monitoring and observability tools also now support eBPF to collect data.
- This begs the question: If eBPF is so great, why isn't it running everywhere? After all, eBPF technology has existed for years and has received plenty of attention in the IT community (including from this website). Why are IT pros still doing things the old way rather than turning to eBPF?
Get Familiar with These Top 5 Linux Security Best Practices
This tutorial highlights essential Linux security best practices that every administrator should follow. Knoetze emphasizes proactive security measures, such as securing remote access, keeping software up to date, and enforcing strict access controls to minimize risk.
Additionally, he underscores the importance of firewalls and continuous monitoring through logging and auditing tools. By implementing these best practices, admins can strengthen their system's resilience against cyberattacks.
Inside the State of FinOps
Key Points:
- The 2025 edition of the State of FinOps Report reveals a dramatic expansion of FinOps practices beyond traditional cloud spending, as organizations grapple with the financial implications of AI adoption and proliferating SaaS applications.
- "The spread of FinOps into additional areas of cloud infrastructure — SaaS, licensing, private cloud, etc. — was a big reveal to us, not necessarily that it was happening, but to the extent that it was already happening and then how fast it is expected to ramp up,"
J.R. Storment
, executive director at the
FinOps Foundation
, told ITPro Today.
- With FinOps for the cloud, a lot of teams are looking for optimization, which makes sense given their maturity, he noted. With FinOps for other areas of spend, such as SaaS, AI, and private cloud, organizational priorities are around more fundamental things like understanding costs.
- Additionally, he noted that AI cost tends to be supplementary, not substitute, so the cost of AI is added to existing costs, not replacing some other category of spend. As such, Storment said it is easy to see how companies may get in too deep, too quickly, or they won't actually be capturing all of the areas of AI spend that can sprout up around an organization.
PowerShell Tutorial of the Week
PowerShell's Test-NetConnection cmdlet offers more advanced capabilities than the ping command. This tutorial demonstrates the cmdlet's most useful features.
[Root] Access: Column of the Week
If you need advice on IT issues, careers, or workplace concerns, [Root] Access is ITPro Today’s dedicated advice column. Submit your questions here. Please include “Root Access” in the subject line. Note that questions may be edited for publication.
Latest Major Tech Layoff Announcements
Original Story by Jessica C. Davis, Updated by Brandon Taylor
Key Points:
- As COVID drove everyone online, tech companies hired like crazy. Now we are hitting the COVID tech bust as tech giants shed jobs by the thousands.
- Updated February 28, 2025 with layoff announcements from Autodesk, Google, eBay, commercetools and Dayforce.
- Check back regularly for updates to InformationWeek's IT job layoffs tracker.
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