Day 1 at IDUG EMEA: Embrace AI, Get Quantum Safe

From the keynote, we learned that AI is not there to replace us DBAs. It’s there to assist us, mostly in positive ways: helping us resolve problems more quickly and efficiently (even proactively!?) and be more productive with less effort (I like this one!).

But one statement stuck in my mind like no other: “If you don’t embrace AI, then AI will replace you!” Scary stuff, but there’s enough time to get prepared.

We also learned that the (in)famous quantum computing is no longer “10+ years away”. It’s practically around the corner. It won’t replace classical computers, by no means, but it will bring huge changes, most notably in cryptography. This means we should all check and upgrade our encryption algorithms ASAP and make them quantum safe. Even if quantum computers can’t break into our systems yet, the real threat is the “harvest now, decrypt later” scheme. Put simply, our data may already be exposed, encrypted or not.

The keynote was followed by a wealth of good presentations, each full of interesting information.

My takeaway from today: the latest Db2 LUW version (v12.1) already provides “quantum safe” cryptography. So it’s now up to us DBAs to implement the new technology, as I said earlier: ASAP.