Cultivating AI: H&R Block's CISO On The Parallels Between Farm Life And Cybersecurity

From a farm nestled in the rolling hills of Southern Virginia, a Chief Information Security Officer ponders the parallels between cultivating the land and cultivating technology.

Veteran security exec, farmer, author, and current Vice President and Global CISO at H&R Block, Phillip Miller, drew the compelling analogy in a recent LinkedIn post about finding his chickens' eggs in unpredictable locations throughout the barn:

• "Checking every nook and cranny in my barns and barnyard for eggs would take many hours. Not something that can be easily automated. I certainly cannot watch the hens all day long, either... It is also that way for computer systems. There is simply not enough available processing power (or money) to watch everything all of the time. The ‘art’ of our world has always been about making informed decisions about where to focus our efforts. Sometimes it may be the most likely to be attacked area, other times we may hone in closely on the data with the most value."

The analogy extends to the risk and reward of "agentic sprawl" in the enterprise. As companies rush to deploy intelligent agents, they risk creating the very same silos (no pun!) and technical debt that a generation of cloud tools was meant to solve. But the ROI of AI is often worth temporary disorganization, provided that the methods for retroactive clean-up are well-governed.