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IT STRATEGY

Shannon May, Photo: Bastian Alexander-Coleman / Unsplash

The National Geographic Society has a lot of videos—like, oceans of them. The 138-year-old nonprofit org, most famous for supporting expeditions to the furthest flung corners of the world (and the stacks of magazines in your grandfather’s attic), annually produces the equivalent of about 100 days of 4K video alone, according to the group’s Chief Technology Officer Jason Southern.

Now Southern wants to lead an effort to send National Geographic’s cumulative 15 petabytes of video—or the data equivalent of over 3 billion high-res images from your phone—to the cloud, where the National Geographic’s editors and producers can quickly find clips and other assets they need to build future stories. With the migration, Southern aims to have the data not only backed up, but also positioned to fuel future AI efforts.

The end result, if everything goes right, could enable production teams to use a plain-text request rather than a manual search to find, say, that one video of cone-bearing conifers in Northern California that was previously buried on a random drive.

“You know, I’m looking for redwood trees in Northern California,” Southern told us. “We would be able to ask questions like that of a conversational interface in the media production platform, and then be able to pull up proxies of those almost immediately.”

One big unknown: metadata.—BH

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SOFTWARE

Retirement party

Illustration: Anna Kim, Photo: Adobe Stock

Even codebases deserve a comfortable retirement.

An abandoned software repo presents challenges for teams and companies that rely on it. When a widely used library loses an active maintainer and then a vulnerability is discovered, there may be no one around to merge fixes.

That was the worry in November 2025, according to Dan Lorenc, CEO and co-founder of open-source security company Chainguard, when a blog announcement revealed that Ingress NGINX, a favorite component of open-source application orchestrator Kubernetes, would no longer take on additional bug fixes, releases, or security updates.

A month later, Chainguard announced a program to support “mature,” retired, and sometimes abandoned codebases: EmeritOSS (where the OSS refers to “open source software”).

“This, combined with a bunch of the other efforts out there, I think are critical to keeping open-source healthy for everyone in the long term,” Lorenc said.

See what projects are in the program already.—BH

Cloud migration: A process in which an organization moves digital assets, which can include everything from applications to data, from one cloud to another, or from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud provider. Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

We need your input

Anna Kim

You’ve heard of prom season…but have you heard of its AI counterpart: prompt season?

In October 2025, cloud-native security platform company Netskope held its inaugural prompathon, where it gathered more than 600 willing employees to show off their best prompting skills and discover new use cases for internally approved AI tools.

IT Brew caught up with Netskope Chief Digital and Information Officer Mike Anderson, who told us that the company, after finding limited employee use of its AI tools, decided to take a unique approach to boosting AI fluency and adoption.

“A lot of people didn’t even know that they had access to Gemini, because we all know that people don’t read emails…so we knew we had to do something different,” Anderson said. In addition to anemic AI usage among their respective workforces, companies have been struggling to unlock productivity gains from the tools. For example, a January report from AI transformation company Section found 85% of employees don’t have an AI use case that delivers business value. IT Brew previously reported on how companies have been mandating AI use in hopes of driving productivity.

Review some prompt-posals.—BM

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PATCH NOTES

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 22%. That’s the proportion of US adults who throw out their old hardware, according to a recent survey. (CNET)

Quote: “What you begin to lose is not the job…It is the path into the job.”—Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, on AI impacting entry-level tasks (CIO)

Read: There’s a potential new target for today’s cyberattacker: electricity. (Dark Reading)

Another password reset ticket? Help desk overhead is the visible tax. The invisible one is credential-based breaches that legacy MFA (SMS codes, push notifications) wasn’t built to stop. Yubico’s webinar explores solutions.*

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