What’s the holdup?

Brittany Holloway-Brown

Failed login attempts, constantly crashing apps, glacial loading times: These are just some of the small but—when multiplied across years and organizations—consequential friction points that too often define digital workers’ professional lives.

The results? Lower productivity, frustrated workers, greater attrition, security issues, headaches for IT, HR, and the C-suite—and ultimately, a less satisfying consumer experience.

“There’s immense productivity loss. You have frustrated users,” Michael Lovewell, a solution consulting team lead at digital employee experience company Nexthink, told us. “Your applications aren’t being leveraged that you’re spending significant amounts of money on. That leads to a lot of these problems.”

So what’s an IT pro to do? Instead of responding to tech friction fallout after the fact, our sources emphasized the importance of reevaluating outdated protocols, gathering feedback on existing problems, implementing processes to identify issues before tickets start trickling in, and creating tighter feedback loops.

Why you need quicker, tighter feedback loops.—JG

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IT OPERATIONS

RTO-T-O-G-O

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How much does it cost to return to the office?

In a world where some tech companies are making RTO a condition of continued employment, taking stock of the financial and security costs is important while planning the policy.

It’s often not a simple fix, Mimecast CISO Leslie Nielsen told IT Brew. While he personally feels that it’s best for staff to work from wherever they have the most success, he understands organizations pushing workers to come back in. But there are problems that arise from that approach, including how to manage security when a hybrid or remote workforce returns to the office.

“As we start migrating users who were used to working in home locations back to central pools, it is going to change things,” Nielsen told IT Brew.

Have you updated your in-office infrastructure?—EH

CYBERSECURITY

Guardrails, guardrails, guardrails

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It’s no secret that AI presents unique challenges for security professionals—but are AI-based defenses keeping up?

In CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report, experts point to noteworthy increases in threats from artificial intelligence between 2024 and 2025. The organization reported an 89% increase in AI-enabled adversary attacks year-over-year, for example.

Adam Meyers, SVP of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told IT Brew that while adversaries are using AI to their advantage, enterprises relying on AI for defense are beginning to scale “for the first time, really ever.”

“We’ve always had this defender’s dilemma where the defender has to be right 100% of the time, and the bad guy only needs to get lucky once,” Meyers said.

“What happens through AI, you can actually start to invert that and…change the dynamic and say, ‘Okay, since we have these AI capable tools now…we can enable a defender to operate much quicker.’”

And don’t forget to guard against internal AI risks.—CN

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PATCH NOTES

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 39%. That’s the proportion of surveyed cybersecurity and HR professionals who said their cyber teams have faced moderate or significant restructuring due to AI, according to a recent report from SANS. (SC Media)

Quote: “We’re just gonna be left in the dust.”—Katie Noble, a board member for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program, speaking at the RSAC 2026 Conference about issues within the vulnerability-fixing ecosystem (Cybersecurity Dive)

Read: The reality of putting data centers in space. (Ars Technica)

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☕ The costs of “digital friction”