Up Times
by Bryley · June 2024
Recently-retired Duke basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski (that’s not him, above) said about coaching that he doesn’t pursue success. Instead, he said, when you attain excellence success just naturally follows. To achieve business continuity – where your organization avoids getting severely disrupted by an unwanted incident – takes preparation, the right tools for the job, their correct deployment and training employees about their responsibilities.
Staying In the Game – Boston Celtics Coach Joe Mazulla said, usually what happens is you have those empty possessions on the offensive end and your defense starts to weigh in or you start to mistrust the discipline of your spacing and your shot selection, and you end up giving transition and getting cross-matched. So the guys trusted and stayed disciplined and we were able to stay out of cross-matches and we were able to kind of keep the game in the way we wanted to play it.
Often bad things happen when we are under stress of one sort or another and we do something that we soon regret. The Celtics couldn’t buy a three-pointer in Game 2 of the Finals. Earlier that same day Scottie Scheffler couldn’t get a putt to fall. But both the Cs and Scheffler trusted and stayed disciplined and won.
A friend decried that in our culture we only coach kids who pursue athletics. People tend to feel grateful and lean for years on the little bits of coaching they encounter. I’ve come to find Bryley President Garin Livingstone an excellent coach. I’ve heard him refocus people from feeling bad or blaming to ‘Now what can we do to move ahead?’
When dealing with computer systems there are all kinds of stresses, from forgetting to save a document to mistaking an adware-installing website for something legitimate, from internet service going down to ransomware data encryption that keeps your files from being accessed.
Like a successful sports team, planning for the inevitable is the best approach. That’s why Bryley, like a good General Manager looks for areas of greatest weakness in an organization and recommends to ownership how to best fill those gaps. In this Up Times we look at current strategies for achieving business continuity. You might think of it as not only getting to the playoffs, but seeing the thing through.
Skipping the Down Times
If employees cannot access files or applications to do their work, organizations feel the pain of lost revenue and low employee morale. It may also be felt by clients, vendors and prospects who may question the organization’s fitness.
Online calculators can help you estimate the cost of downtime for your organization. Roughly, an organization with twenty-five employees and an average revenue/employee of $100/hour means a $2,500 loss per hour of downtime. If your organization has 10TB of data backed up locally, the backup might take 40 hours to be restored. That means the cost of the downtime is $2,500 x 40 = $100,000.
And this is why business continuity as we talk about it in the IT world has been so highly prized … [5 min. read] Continue Reading >
Rylie Fuller Promoted to Senior Field Technician
Bryley Systems is proud to announce the promotion of Rylie Fuller to Senior Field Technician
According to Vice President of IT Operations Kristin Pryor, Rylie has made great progress at Bryley Systems, picking up new tasks easily and creating a niche for projects and support in Microsoft 365, Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Network Detection and Response (NDR) and SharePoint … [4 min. read] Continue Reading >
Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:
Governor Healey’s Mass Leads Bill aims to bring business-development funds to Central Mass – The $3.5-billion Mass Leads Act development proposal is a multi-faceted economic plan that includes funding for the expansion of climate tech, biotech and advanced tech organizations.
There’s a piece [$75 million, proposed] that would go towards establishing essentially tech hubs in Worcester and in Springfield, providing some resources to really help those industries flourish in those areas, according to Worcester’s biotech incubator MBI’s CEO Jon Weaver.
UMass’s Donahue Institute projected the climate tech part of the bill to create $16.4 billion in economic activity, creating nearly 7,000 new jobs out of Governor Healey’s $1.3 billion proposed investment … [6 min. read] wbjournal.com
Large language model tools like ChatGPT can be used to generate convincing phishing emails at high volume [that no longer have non-native speakers’] spelling and grammatical errors –Kiri Addison, Mimecast
Lexington-based Mimecast (a Bryley partner) reports on criminals jailbreaking publicly-accessible chatbots like ChatGPT (Bryley partner CheckPoint uncovered the example shown) and inexpensively using dark web large language chatbots that have been built to execute fraud and other crimes.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are generally the most costly email-based attacks and they depend on knowledge of business relationships. Criminals are now using these chatbots to collect and make use of that kind of relationship data, too, so that the emails come across as familiar, lowering the recipient’s resistance.
As the criminal tactics evolve, employees must be trained to question atypical emailed requests. Also managers must see that the business’ defensive tools remain able to meet the new challenges … [4 min. read] mimecast.com
It is in our nature to want to please those around us … One of the first tricks of a sociopath is to exploit this to create an expectation of compliance. As an email technologist, it pains me that email has become a powerful tool for subtly exploiting others –Nathaniel Borenstein, former chief scientist, Mimecast
After envisioning and creating the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) email protocol in the ’90s that accommodated languages other than English and enabled email attachments, Dr Borenstein became chief scientist for Mimecast. He left the company in 2022 and teaches now at the University of Michigan.
Dr Borenstein’s vision helped grow Mimecast into its current state as an enterprise-grade email defense (during his oversight the company grew from 150 to nearly 2000 employees).
Email is the primary form of business communication and is historically among the most criminally exploited. And email was never inherently secure. That remains true today. That means security has to be achieved in other, additive ways such as the technologies Mimecast has developed.
Dr Borenstein’s website gives a glimpse into the mind that has helped bring us these security tools. Mostly he is shown to be a thoughtful and self-effacing computer scientist on behalf of them all … [5 min. read] guppylake.com
An AI assistant that is not reliably helpful and can be actively harmful puts a lot of the burden on the individuals using it –Aleksandra Korolova, Princeton University
In a Metro Boston Buy-Nothing item-swap Facebook group, a member wrote a looking for post. An hour later, because that is Facebook’s schedule if another human being doesn’t answer the post, came a response from its AI chatbot that the bot owned a gently used Canon camera and an unwanted portable air conditioner.
And as this AP article shows there are dangerous examples of what is in this case just nonsense.
There’s a human need to be actually understood and not just met with a mimicry of understanding. Sure, we get fooled at times by disingenuous tactics from fellow humans. But is it fair to use the large dataset of what we’ve been saying online to make each of us a fool to software? [7 min. read] apnews.com
Don’t publish slop is a useful baseline –Simon Willison, a programmer prominent for his work integrated into the event-management app Eventbrite
I’m a big proponent of [Large Language Model chatbots] as tools for personal productivity, and as software platforms for building interesting applications that can interact with human language, writes Simon Willison. But I’m increasingly of the opinion that sharing unreviewed content that has been artificially generated with other people is rude. Slop is the ideal name for this … [4 min. read] simonwillison.com
Note: The section directly above is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.
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