Insights
Insights
Analysis for the leaders who run technology at banks, health systems and public agencies.
Latest · Week of 26 October 2026
OPM’s staffing-plan rule tucked a systems certification into a personnel regulation
OPM’s October 29 rule made workforce planning a quarterly data feed, moved the employee survey to agencies and had agency heads certify that their systems let HR leaders see the workforce. CIOs will carry much of it, on HR systems awaiting replacement.
Recent weeks
Week of 19 October 2026
A lost zone is the failure banks plan for. Google’s London outage tested five layers of that plan
A power failure took down one zone of Google Cloud’s London region on 20 October 2026, the loss multi-zone banking systems are built to absorb. Services stalled anyway. Surviving a lost zone depends on five layers, and each has to be tested.
Week of 12 October 2026
Ivanti’s October zero-day was a directory incident that came in through the VPN
CISA gave agencies three days to patch and triage Ivanti Connect Secure. The attacker left no implant on the gateway and used its directory account to hunt for administrator passwords and BitLocker keys. Permissions set long before decided how far that reached.
Week of 5 October 2026
Rural health transformation money runs on three clocks, and only two of them come with funding
In October 2026 states hurried to commit their first-year Rural Health Transformation money. For rural providers, the deadline that matters most comes later, when the grants end and the technology they bought has to pay its own way.
Week of 28 September 2026
Paused, not repealed: what CMMC’s suspension left defense contractors paying for
Six weeks before CMMC third-party certification was due to start, it sat suspended with no new date. Defense contractors setting budgets had to sort security spending into what was still owed, what could wait and what had changed price.
Week of 21 September 2026
Agency certificates now expire faster than agency budgets turn over
On October 1, 2026, the first day of the federal fiscal year, the first full-term 200-day website certificates ran out. Agencies built to buy, staff and schedule them once a year had to rethink all three.
Week of 14 September 2026
Hospital device data rights arrive one purchase order at a time
From September 12, 2026, the EU Data Act required new connected products to give users their data by design, but only for equipment marketed from then. Hospitals replace scanners slowly, so tenders carry the new right while older equipment runs on requests.
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About the series
Looking Back
Looking Back revisits one week at a time, from January 2020 to today, and asks what it meant for the banks, health systems and public agencies we serve. The series was written in 2026, with the benefit of hindsight, and each article says which week it looks back on.
Each article takes one real development from one week and makes one argument about what it meant, then ends with what we know now. Every article belongs to one sector and one of seven topics.
By sector and topic
The map of the series
How many articles sit in each sector and topic. Each number opens exactly those articles.
Before the series: The Rising Threat of Medical Device Hacking & How Healthcare Organizations Can Prevent It (21 June 2022).