Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the year winds down, my inbox is overflowing with Black Friday offers and festive greetings. It’s that time when Thanksgiving and the run-up to December holidays remind us to pause and appreciate what truly matters. Yet, in my recent conversations with IT leaders in financial services, I’ve noticed something: the time and calm need to do this feels elusive.

I wanted to share a story of a recent engagement with a law firm to highlight the strategic importance of compliance in today’s legal sector. It started with a single email. A mid-sized law firm received a regulator’s request for evidence following a client complaint. The issue wasn’t malpractice; it was a missed filing deadline caused by a system slowdown. The firm had no audit trail to prove the delay was technical, not procedural.

Every law firm I meet can explain its information security policy in minutes. Far fewer can tell me which AI tools their staff actually used last week, and what data those tools touched. That gap is where Shadow AI sits, such as unsanctioned, unmonitored use of generative AI slips in. It promises speed, but it quietly creates exposure: confidentiality breaches, weak auditability, and a risk to governance when the regulator (or a client’s GC) asks hard questions.

Every law firm fears the same ghost – the one that silently drains client trust. It doesn’t haunt the courtroom; it lurks in your digital experience.

It’s 3:30 p.m. A partner’s laptop refuses to authenticate to the VDI. The urgent filing is in two hours. The ticket title reads like a headstone you’ve seen a hundred times: “Can’t connect, tried rebooting, please help.” Another “undead” incident claws its way out of the queue. By home time, the backlog becomes a graveyard of recurring tickets, and your team, although brilliant and capable, is exhausted and applying the same fixes again and again.

When minutes matter, IT leaders need more than quick fixes; they need foresight. That’s where Teneo’s Managed DEX (Digital Experience Monitoring) comes in. Managed DEX is designed to detect what legal teams can’t afford to miss. It monitors for “ghost traffic”- those eerie, unexplained signals of abnormal network activity that often signal compromise or instability- and other anomalous device behaviors that can precede full-blown outages or cyber incidents.

In a recent survey, Udacity’s team explored the evolving landscape of AI adoption by asking 2000 professionals (including those in the legal sector) if they used AI. Unsurprisingly, over 90% of respondents said they did. More concerning, 72% of managers reported personally paying out of pocket for AI tools to use at work, introducing uncontrolled risk into corporate environments.

It’s been a noisy summer in the AI world. Headlines have been filled with doom and gloom: For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5 landing with a thud, and an MIT report claiming 95% of AI pilots are failing. For the sceptics, this is “proof” that AI is just hype. I don’t buy it. The MIT study looked at just 50 projects, a sample size so small you’d fail a basic stats exam for using it. And as someone who uses AI every single day, I can tell you the benefits are real.

The release of OpenAI’s new open-source model, GPT-OOS, has sparked a wave of excitement across the AI community. And rightly so. For organizations that want the benefits of generative AI without sending data out to the web, this is a compelling option. Running locally, GPT-OOS offers a level of privacy, control, and cost-efficiency that’s hard to ignore. It’s fast, lean and at least in its early benchmarks, surprisingly capable in coding, math, and STEM-heavy workloads.

August 5, 2025, Las Vegas Black Hat 2025, Abnormal AI officially launched its Security Posture Management for Microsoft 365. This release marks a critical turning point. In an era where attackers weaponized AI to uncover and exploit misconfigured cloud environments at machine speed, reactive security simply can’t keep pace. Threat actors are now leveraging automated AI to scan systems, identify configuration drift, escalate privileges, and deploy zero‑day exploits in seconds.