Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Say No Without Becoming the IT Dept People Avoid

You can still say no in IT without becoming the department everyone avoids. The person asking today might be key to winning a project two years from now. So the reflex shouldn’t be yes. It should be: here’s what’s on our plate, help me understand the ask. You still get to the no, but you keep the relationship, and you show up as a business partner, not tactical support. Watch the full IT Leadership Lab session — linked above.

How much does it cost to train an AI model? Frontier figures, graded [2026]

Training an AI model costs anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several hundred million, depending entirely on what “train” means. Fine-tuning an existing model: tens to thousands of dollars. Pretraining a small model from scratch: tens of thousands to millions. A frontier run in 2026: hundreds of millions, with Epoch AI projecting the largest runs will pass $1 billion by 2027.

Shipped: See which billing connections stopped sending data, and why

Every number in CloudZero comes from a billing connection. When a credential expires or a permission changes, that connection stops sending data, and your reports show less spend than you actually have. If you catch it early, you can fix the connection before month-end close. You also need to know what broke. For Azure and Snowflake connections, CloudZero now tells you which check failed, so you can send the fix to the right person without opening a support ticket.

PHP2Shell: Manage security patches at scale with Cortex

"Patch every PHP server. Today." That was the message a lot of engineering leaders got the week of October 20. PHP2Shell is a pair of unauthenticated remote code execution bugs in PHP itself, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, both rated CVSS 9.2. Attacks started before the patches shipped, and working exploits followed within days.

What Does AI Need to Know Before You Trust It? | AI SREDo you like this personality?

AI can make decisions. But can it make the right ones across your entire IT environment? For enterprise SRE teams, trustworthy AI requires three things: operational context, institutional memory, and guardrails. Without them, autonomous action becomes a risk instead of an advantage. In our latest webinar, we explore what it takes to bring AI SRE capabilities to enterprise scale.

NOC Monitoring: What a Network Operations Center Tracks and How

NOC monitoring decides how fast a network problem turns into a fix. If your NOC watches the wrong layers, it misses the fault. If it alerts on everything, the real fault gets buried. According to Uptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis 2026, 57% of operators said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. Most teams already collect plenty of data through network monitoring. The hard part is turning that data into a short queue of alerts that the right person acts on.

Fixing distrusted InCommon certificates with ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

Starting Tuesday, October 27, a lot of university websites will open in Chrome to this. Chrome is distrusting a root certificate, emSign ECC Root CA - G3, after eMudhra generated CA keys as small as 4. Every InCommon certificate issued from eMudhra’s ECC chain since April chains to that root.