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Volume 341, Issue 4 · 2026-08-24 – 2026-08-30 · Popular →

Monday’s Briefing · August 31

AI
Cloud
CxO
FOSS
Platform Engineering
Security
Linux
Java

Upcoming Event · Wed, Oct 14 · 11:00am

Modernize for the AI Era

Join PwC and AWS for a discussion on how AI is redefining cloud modernization priorities. We'll share examples from leaders in their sectors, as well as practical recommendations for building modern cloud platforms that deliver measurable business value, while navigating evolving regulatory, risk, and operational considerations. more →

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Modernize for the AI Era (Oct. 14th)
12touches.com

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

Sellers at large firms routinely stall on a personal newsletter because they haven't been approved to run one - and Scott McNealy's Sun-era mantra explains why asking is the wrong move: the person receiving an unprecedented request has no upside for yes and all the downside, so the safe answer is defer or decline, and a "no" on the record is far harder to reverse than a question nobody formally raised. more →

To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

Advisors, speakers and fractional CIOs don't have a lead generation problem, they have a recall problem - and their visibility is event-shaped, producing four tall spikes and forty-eight flat weeks, with the moment that mattered almost certainly landing in the flat part. more →

Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known.

Enterprise IT is a few thousand people per specialty, and a dozen professions orbit them with the same dependency and the same structural problem: the only contact their job naturally supplies is the contact that asks for something. more →

You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known.

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

Top sellers are the hardest people in the company to reward - cash is already maxed, the incentive trip ends, and promotion into management is often unwanted - while the independent streak that makes them outperform is exactly what makes corporate advocacy mandates slide off them. more →

Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 25th, 2026

Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow

In most enterprise deals the most trusted person isn't the account executive but the sales engineer, precisely because they'll say what won't work - yet that credibility is invisible outside the few accounts they're staffed on, living in the memories of a few dozen people and a CRM someone else owns. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public. more →

Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow

12touches.com, Thursday, August 25th, 2026

Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll

Alan Shimel's argument that Google's AI Overviews are engineered to make the click unnecessary - his "Google Zero" - lands as hard on technology vendors as on publishers, because organic search was always rented distribution that merely felt owned. The largest untapped alternative is already on staff: a few hundred customer-facing employees, each publishing a weekly newsletter carrying the company's news section, is hundreds of trusted channels reaching the market with no algorithm in between. It succeeds where employee advocacy usually fails because the employee owns the asset, and the resulting traffic is attributable and rewardable per person. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public. more →

Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll
Akamai Technologies

Upcoming Event · Thu, Oct 1 · 1:00pm

Agentic Runtime Security on AWS: Identity, Least Privilege, and Audit for AI Agents with IBM Verify Identity Access and HashiCorp Vault

This hands-on workshop deploys a working reference implementation of five control objectives for agentic systems - verifiable agent identity, no standing privileges, actions tied to user intent, enforcement at the point of use, and audit evidence correlated across all three trust planes (user, workload, data) - using IBM Verify Identity Access and HashiCorp Vault on Amazon EKS. more →

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Agentic Runtime Security on AWS: Identity, Least Privilege, and Audit for AI Agents with IBM Verify Identity Access and HashiCorp Vault (Oct. 1st)
Cloudflare
DataRobot
Dell
Huntress

Huntress, Friday, August 28th, 2026

Teach Yourself to Phish

Huntress explains the strategy behind phishing simulations and how they build organizational resilience. more →

Teach Yourself to Phish
Microsoft
Palo Alto Networks
Rubrik
Salesforce

Upcoming Event · Tue, Sep 22 · 1:00pm

Trustworthy AI in the Cloud: Observability as a Control System

This session explores why observability is emerging as a foundational capability for trustworthy AI. Rather than focusing solely on infrastructure health, modern observability provides the transparency and context needed to understand how AI systems behave, why they produce specific outcomes, and whether they continue to perform as intended over time. more →

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Trustworthy AI in the Cloud: Observability as a Control System (Sept. 22nd)
SentinelOne
Veeam
Zscaler