By Ivan Moreno ( February 24, 2025, 10:46 AM EST) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected petitions involving fee-shifting in copyright cases, whether judges or juries should decide what can be copyrighted, and if scraping public information online should be considered hacking under the Defend Trade Secrets Act when it is done by a computer…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

According to Mark Andreessen, sometime between 2006 and 2013, incoming freshmen at Harvard bought into the mantra that “tech is evil.” This has trickled into the general IT mindset. For many outside the profession, IT resembles the portfolio of televised advertisements during Super Bowl LIX: “very little creativity,” “not much in the way of simple, effective storytelling,” “not worth the money,” and “not targeted at me.” IT’s brighter future starts with stakeholders The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Your company culture is not words on your website or posters on the wall. It’s how your people feel on a Sunday night.” On Sunday night, are stakeholders thinking positively about putting their hands back on your systems? source

Logs and event data are becoming too labor-intensive to analyze manually due to the growing cyber threat landscape. As a result, organizations now rely on Security Information and Event Management, commonly known as SIEM tools, to collect and analyze these data types to gain actionable security insights. LogRhythm and Splunk are two prominent players in the SIEM market, and many organizations deploy them to monitor and manage security events, detect threats, and ensure a robust security posture. But what distinguishes one from the other? This article comprehensively compares LogRhythm and Splunk, examining their features, pricing, pros, and cons. LogRhythm: Best for an all-in-one SIEM, with User and Entity Behavior Analytics and centralized log management. Splunk: Best for customizability, powerful log analytics capabilities, and advanced threat detection. ManageEngine Log360 Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Micro (0-49 Employees), Small (50-249 Employees), Medium (250-999 Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Micro, Small, Medium, Large, Enterprise Features Activity Monitoring, Blacklisting, Dashboard, and more Graylog Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Medium (250-999 Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Medium, Large, Enterprise Features Activity Monitoring, Dashboard, Notifications LogRhythm vs Splunk: Comparison table The following table outlines the key features found in LogRhythm and Splunk. LogRhythm Splunk Real-time monitoring Yes Yes Advanced threat detection Yes Yes Centralized management dashboards Yes Yes Easy of deployment Easier to deploy Difficult Customizable dashboard Yes Has more customizable features Threat remediation features Yes Yes User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) Yes Yes LogRhythm vs Splunk: Pricing LogRhythm pricing LogRhythm operates a flexible pricing and licensing structure that comes with unlimited log resources and users. Prices are also offered on a perpetual, subscription, and unlimited data basis. For more details on LogRhythm’s pricing, contact their sales team for a proper quotation. Splunk pricing Similar to LogRhythm, Splunk operates a flexible pricing model, which is captured below. Workload: Customers are charged based on the types of workload they run with the Splunk Platform. Ingest: Here, customers pay based on the amount of data they bring into the Splunk Platform. Entity: This plan is based on the number of hosts using Splunk. Activity-based: This is based on activities being monitored by Splunk. Apart from the above pricing options, Splunk users also have the option to get an estimate of what they will be charged if they use Splunk. LogRhythm vs Splunk: Feature comparison Below is a head-to-head comparison between LogRhythm and Splunk. Deployment options LogRhythm users have flexible deployment options to match varying needs and goals. The deployment choices available to customers include self-hosting, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or engagement with a managed security service provider. There is also a cloud deployment option with LogRhythm Cloud, which presents a software-as-a-service (SaaS) choice. On the other hand, Splunk users can deploy the solution in a distributed search or single instance deployment. In addition, the software is available in cloud, on-premise, or multi-cloud formats. Data analysis When it comes to data analysis, LogRhythm’s Machine Data Intelligence (MDI) functionality helps users to make sense of their data. This functionality contextualizes and enriches data at the time of ingestion. It also helps to translate complex data into digestible chunks of information to enhance the accuracy of data analysis. Splunk also has a data analytic engine designed to gather, index, and manage large volumes of data, regardless of its format. Splunk’s data analytics can analyze data in real-time and dynamically generate schemas. This eliminates the need for users to deeply understand the underlying data structure, as they can easily query and explore the data without any prior knowledge. Customizable dashboard LogRhythm allows users to customize their dashboards in ways that suit them. For instance, users can decide to customize the report template, create custom log detail reports, restore the default logo to a report, schedule and manage scheduled reports, rename a custom dashboard, and decide which dashboard to make public or private. LogRhythm dashboard. Image: LogRhythm Splunk also offers a highly customizable dashboard. Users can choose from various charts and other virtualizations to act on their data. For instance, users can integrate reports, charts, and reusable panels to derive more insight from their data. In addition, there is also the option to tailor data for different use cases and users, such as business, security analysts, auditors, developers, and operations teams — to facilitate their operations. Splunk data virtualization dashboard. Image: Splunk More cloud security coverage Centralized log and incident management LogRhythm offers centralized log and incident management that helps users collect, store, and analyze logs/events from various sources for auditing, compliance, and forensic purposes. There are also case management and playbooks, which offer incident management functionalities to facilitate log and incident management processes. Similarly, Splunk also provides a central log management feature that allows users to collect and store logs from various sources in centralized storage. Users can also encrypt the logs collected to prevent unauthorized access. Advanced threat detection Both LogRhythm and Splunk provide users with advanced threat detection capabilities. LogRhythm does this by combining machine analytics and search analytics. These functionalities offer users a risk-based monitoring strategy that automatically identifies and prioritizes attacks and threats. Splunk also rides on the power of machine learning to detect advanced threats and other 1790+ out-of-the-box detections for frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST, CIS 20, and Kill Chain. Splunk executed playbook & actions. Image: Splunk SEE: Securing Linux Policy (TechRepublic Premium) LogRhythm pros and cons Below are the key takeaways from the LogRhythm SIEM solution. Pros Users can map their security and IT operations to existing frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and NIST. Offers real-time visibility across environments for easy identification and prioritization of potential threats. Centralized log management support. Offers User and Entity Behavior Analytics capabilities (UEBA). Offers free training videos. Cons Complicated pricing plans. The customization feature is not broad. No free trial. Splunk pros and cons The pros and cons of Splunk are highlighted below. Pros

Among US online adults, 37% regularly use retailer mobile apps to make a purchase. Retailers’ mobile apps help shoppers who want to research a potential purchase, find promotions and coupons, and buy products or services. Forrester’s newly published report, The Forrester Digital Experience Review™: US Retail Mobile Apps, Q1 2025, evaluates how well retailers are meeting customers’ needs and expectations with their mobile app capabilities. In late 2024, Forrester evaluated 10 leading US retail mobile apps to gauge their utility and effectiveness, as well as best practices that retail digital leaders should learn from. This review uncovers the leaders in US retail mobile apps, highlights key findings within the mobile app experience, and explores best-in-class features. Here are three main takeaways from the top Digital Experience Review performers: High scorers add innovative features where it makes sense. Top scorer Lowe’s offers its mobile app users a holistic shopping experience and has added functionality to enhance its search offering. The brand’s “Style Studio” offering allows customers to take a picture of their space and scroll through different design offerings to find new products that fit within it. Shoppers can then view the products they are interested in within the Style Studio page. Utility features go beyond management and offer added value. Kroger shines in the utility category: Shoppers can manage their accounts on the mobile app and track prior purchases. Kroger shoppers are also able to use the saved data from past purchases with “OptUP,” which gives holistic health scores to their purchases. App users also get product recommendations to improve the health score of their cart. Shoppers enjoy easy browsing regardless of how they choose to fulfill their purchase. Sephora makes it easy for mobile app shoppers to browse product result pages and see if the item is available for “buy online, pick up in store” or same-day delivery. Filter options allow users to only see items that they can pick up in the store or that qualify for same-day or next-day delivery. Shoppers may add all items to their cart, regardless of which fulfillment option the customer chooses, and can buy products in one transaction, regardless of the delivery type that they’ve chosen for each item in the cart. Sephora enables Apple Pay and PayPal as options for one-click checkout. If you’re a Forrester client, you can explore these findings in detail by downloading the full report. And if you’d like to discuss this topic further or understand how your mobile app measures up, please schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me. source

By Chris Villani ( February 22, 2025, 7:24 PM EST) — A New York federal judge on Friday barred Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing U.S. Treasury Department data, handing a win to 19 state attorneys general who claimed giving the new entity access to citizens’ personal information posed a massive cybersecurity risk…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More To get the best possible result from an AI query, organizations need the best possible data. The answer that many organizations have had to overcome that challenge is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). With RAG, results are grounded in data from a database. As it turns out, though, not all RAG is the same, and actually optimizing a database for the best possible results can be challenging. Database vendor MongoDB is no stranger to the world of AI or RAG. The company’s namesake database is already being used for RAG, and MongoDB has also launched AI applications development initiatives. While the company and its users — such a medical giant Novo Nordisk — have had success with gen AI, there is still more to be done. In particular, hallucination and accuracy continues to be an issue holding some organizations back from getting gen AI into production. To that end, MongoDB today announced the acquisition of privately-held Voyage AI, which develops advanced embedding and retrieval models. Voyage raised $20 million in funding in Oct. 2024 in a round supported by cloud data giant Snowflake. The acquisition will bring Voyage AI’s expertise in embedding generation and reranking — critical components for AI-powered search and retrieval — directly into MongoDB’s database platform. “Over the last year, and especially as organizations have tried to think about how they could build AI powered applications, it became increasingly clear that the quality and trust of the applications they build, or the lack thereof, was becoming one of the barriers for applying AI to mission critical use cases,” MongoDB CPO Sahir Azam told VentureBeat. What are the challenges of hallucination? Doesn’t RAG solve them? The basic idea behind RAG is that, instead of simply relying on a knowledge base from trained data, the gen AI engine can get grounded data from a database. Creating highly accurate RAG is quite complex, and there is still a potential risk for hallucinations — a challenge faced by MongoDB and its users. While Azam declined to provide any specific example or incident where gen AI RAG failed a user, he did note that accuracy is always a concern. Improving accuracy and reducing hallucination involves multiple steps. The first is to improve the quality of retrieval (the ‘R’ in RAG). “In many cases, the retrieval quality is not good enough,” Tengyu Ma, founder and CEO of Voyage AI, told VentureBeat. “In the retrieval step, if they are not retrieving relevant information, then the retrieval is not very useful, and the large language model (LLM) hallucinates because it has to guess some context.” The Voyage AI models now part of MongoDB help improve RAG in a few key ways: Domain-specific models and re-rankers: These are trained on large amounts of unstructured data from specific verticals, allowing them to better understand the terminology and semantics of those domains. Customization and fine-tuning:  Users can fine tune the retrieval mechanism for unique datasets and use cases. MongoDB’s competition MongoDB isn’t the first or only vendor to recognize the need for and value of having highly optimized embedding and re-ranker technology. After all, that’s one of the reasons Snowflake invested in Voyage AI and is using the company’s models.  It’s important to note that, even after being acquired by MongoDB, Voyage AI’s models will still be available to Snowflake and to Voyage AI’s other users. The big difference is that Voyage AI will now be increasingly integrated into MongoDB’s database platforms.  Directly integrating advanced embedding models in a database is an approach taken by other rival database vendors, as well. Back in June 2024, DataStax announced its own RAGStack technology that combines advanced embedding and retrieval models. Azam argued that MongoDB is a bit different, though. For one, it is an operational database, as opposed to an analytical database. Also, as opposed to just providing insights and analysis, MongoDB helps power transactions and real-world operations. MongoDB is also what is known as a “document model database,” which has a different structure than a traditional relational database. That structure does not rely on columns and tables, which are not particularly good at representing information about unstructured data (a critical element for AI applications). “We’re the only database technology that combines the management of metadata about a customer’s information, the operations and transactions, which is the heartbeat of what’s happening in the business, as well as the foundation for retrieval — all with a single system,” said Azam. Why Voyage AI matters for agentic AI workflows The need for highly accurate embedding and retrieval models is being further accelerated by agentic AI. “Agentic AI still needs retrieval methods, because an agent cannot make decisions out of context,” said Ma. “Sometimes, actually multiple retrieval components are used in even one decision.” Ma noted that Voyage AI is currently working on specific models that are highly customized for agentic AI use cases. He explained that agentic AI can use different types of queries that can still benefit from more optimization. As gen AI increasingly moves into operational use cases, the need to remove the risk of hallucinations is clearly paramount. While MongoDB has had success with gen AI, Azam expects the integration of Voyage AI to open new mission critical use cases. “If we can now say, ‘Hey, we can give you well north of 90% accuracy for your applications that today may only, in some cases, get to 30 or 60% accuracy for the results,’ the aperture widens in terms of the types of opportunities people can apply AI to in their software applications,” said Azam. source

By Helen Gugel, Melissa Bender and Glen Hai Chen ( February 21, 2025, 1:51 PM EST) — In the initial weeks of President Donald Trump’s return to office, the administration has introduced several initiatives aimed at reshaping the landscape for digital assets in the U.S. to promote regulatory clarity and innovation. Key developments include:… Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

To prove the value of marketing, marketers need to deliver growth. Delivering sustainable growth hinges on a transformative go-to-market (GTM) strategy that prioritizes impact. This demands a fundamental shift: moving beyond a litany of disconnected product messages and reactive, short-term activities — the marketing activity trap — toward a long-term focus on engaging buyers and customers throughout their entire journey. It’s about moving from simply doing marketing to driving business impact. An Integrated Campaign Framework Sets The Foundation For Success Forrester defines integrated campaigns as marketing initiatives specifically designed to drive quantifiable growth — whether in revenue, customer retention, market share, or customer satisfaction — to achieve broader marketing goals. Organizations can achieve a distinct business advantage by implementing scalable campaigns that relentlessly prioritize buyer needs and target both revenue and non-revenue outcomes. By engineering campaigns with specific buying audiences in mind — through detailed target audience definitions and robust personas — organizations unlock significantly better results than those taking a less targeted, more scattershot approach. An integrated campaign framework and process provides the bedrock for strategic alignment and impactful execution, offering key benefits such as: Fewer, more effective campaigns. A buyer-centric approach enables fewer, more efficient campaigns by focusing on evergreen content that addresses buyer needs. Unified and amplified programs. Reputation building and demand acceleration are aligned with revenue enablement to maximize campaign effectiveness. Elimination of redundant effort. Buyer-focused campaigns eliminate duplicate programs and tactics targeting the same buyers, providing opportunities to evaluate and reduce non-campaign activities. Clear roles and responsibilities. Campaign adoption clarifies marketing roles and responsibilities through functional and regional representation. Forrester’s Framework In Action: Workday’s Experience Workday, a leading provider of cloud-based human capital management and financial management applications, provides a compelling example of a successful application of the Forrester Campaign Implementation Process. Workday developed a sophisticated campaign architecture that maps to the full scope of its target markets and balances resource and investment across the campaign hierarchy and all four program families (i.e., reputation, demand, customer engagement, and enablement) during annual planning. The company also innovated its operational processes by developing an interlock process across all functions with a stake in marketing campaign outcomes. Workday identified an opportunity to increase agility and regional relevance through a more integrated GTM planning approach. This transformation streamlined GTM planning and execution, empowered regional teams, fostered collaboration, and ultimately drove greater focus and measurable business outcomes. Orchestrating Growth: The Power Of Integrated Campaign Governance This integrated campaign governance empowers organizations to plan, develop, and execute with a precise focus on overarching marketing goals supporting business outcomes. The Forrester Campaign Framework and the Forrester Campaign Implementation Process provide a distinct go-to-market strategic advantage, fostering seamless coordination between development and execution teams and ensuring alignment across marketing, sales, sales enablement, partner enablement, and product groups. This unified approach not only streamlines operations but also maximizes impact by ensuring that everyone is working in concert toward common objectives. In our experience, the approach is particularly beneficial for organizations that are: Shifting to a solutions-focused approach. They facilitate the transition from a product-centric to a customer-centric go-to-market strategy. Expanding product portfolios. They support growth through the effective introduction and promotion of new offerings. Navigating audience segmentation. They enable targeted engagement with buyer groups spanning multiple geographies, solutions, verticals, or company sizes. Managing marketing technology infrastructure. They provide a consistent framework for leveraging marketing automation platforms and other technologies. Achieving centralized and field marketing alignment. They ensure consistent program delivery across central and regional teams, maximizing ROI. Join The Movement: Elevate Your Campaign Strategy At B2B Summit Join me at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America in Phoenix, Arizona, or online, from March 31 to April 3. I’ll be leading a session titled “Campaign Excellence: Proof Points That Integrated Campaign Planning Accelerates Growth” that explains how the Forrester Campaign Framework helped Workday advance its operating model and accelerate time to market. I’ll be joined by Workday’s Senior Director of the Campaign Center of Excellence Nate O’Neal and Vice President of North America Marketing Brianna Ross, who will describe how they implemented best practices to streamline workflows, improve efficiency, and maximize ROI. source

“These aren’t hypothetical scenarios — they’re the inevitable result of treating government service as merely a data-processing problem,” says Piscione, author of the new book Employment Is Dead: How Disruptive Technologies Are Revolutionizing the Way We Work. Some replacements now possible Right now, AI can replace some data processing, compliance checking, and customer service roles, says Manuj Aggarwal, founder and CIO at TetraNoodle Technologies, a digital transformation company focused on AI and other emerging technologies. However, there are many other types of jobs in government. “Government work isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about understanding people, making judgment calls, and building trust,” he says. “AI can process data, but it can’t empathize, negotiate, or truly connect with citizens.” source