March Issue 2022

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FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs. MARCH 2022

AALOK KUMAR PRESIDENT AND CEO NEC CORPORATION INDIA

AALOK KUMAR

HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF GROWTH AT

NEC INDIA

NEC Corporation India has been at the helm of India’s Digital Transformation journey across a range of industry verticals, each of which have a deep impact on the everyday lives of people. Read on as Aalok Kumar, CEO & President at NEC India delves deep into his own journey within the organization and shares his insights into what it means to ‘walk the talk’. P - 16

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FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs. MARCH 2022

FEATURE STORY

MANAGING HYBRID WORKPLACES AS THE NEW NORMAL Organizations are creating hybrid workplaces with a human approach and experimenting new approaches in flexibility, collaboration and productivity.

P-22

EDITOR’S LETTER ogies, many of the leaders now have started imagining how to engage block chain and NFT. Many of the leaders are thinking about how to create their own Metaverse.

Besides, this year we are going to see a lot of adoption of AI & ML and Analytics. In the manufacturing, use of IOT is going to be popular. RPA and automation are two other technology which are going to be used with a greater extent.

We are seeing a lot of evolution in the datacentres.

Organizations are looking at cost reduction and lower carbon footprint and colocation is becoming more and more viable. Even in the COLO space the DC companies are deploying innovative technologies including solar power to make it more savings for the customers. This is in addition to the tech advantage that COLO space is offering to the customers.

Keeping all these technologies in mind, which are going to influence the market, we are planning a series of hybrid events. I would appreciate if you took out time and participate in these events.

2022 AND TRANSFORMATION

Hello Friends.

Life in the beginning of 2022 looks to be in hurry.

People want to achieve everything very quickly.

They want to compensate their loss for last 2 years in 2 months. They feel that if the pandemic comes back again what then! There might be a different mutation now and there might be again shutdown everywhere. So, what then?

In the corporate world, the mandate is that whatever not done in last few years and for which their company is vulnerable – may be from security point of view or from infra point of view, they would do the needful to achieve it so that they can compensate for the loss in the previous years.

We can see huge amount of upgrade happening in every technology. Starting from computing to storage and backup to applications and security, organizations are seen upgrading. At the same time, there is a short supply of skilled workers across technologies. So, at this point of time, the employee transition is very high.

The IT leaders are literally given free hand now.

Starting from experimenting with existing technol-

NEXT MONTH SPECIAL

S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M

COVER STORY

SUPPLEMENT

INDUSTRY 4.0

QUOTES FROM TOP CIOS

The next issue is dedicated to the Industry 4.0. We would like to take feedback from the CIOs and OEMs and create our judgment on the same.

PLUS

Interviews and Case Studies

Catch interviews, guest articles and case studies of recent applications from the Industry stakeholders, IT/ITES Vendors and IT leaders and CIOs from the Enterprise IT World CIO Community.

The supplement story of the magazine would have relevant quotes from the top CIOs in India.

Send in your inputs to sanjay@accentinfomedia.com MARCH 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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CONTENTS VOLUME 06

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ISSUE 12

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W W W. E N T E R P R I S E I T W O R L D . C O M 1

FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs.

Publisher: Sanjib Mohapatra Chief Editor: Sanjay Mohapatra Managing Editor: Anisha Nayar Dhawan Sub Editor: Kumari Ambika Designer: Shadab Khan Web Designer: Sangeet Technical Writer: Manas Ranjan Lead Visualizer: DPR Choudhary MARKETING Marketing Manager: Vaishali Shukla SALES CONTACTS Delhi 6/102, Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016 Phone: 91-11-41055458 E-mail: info@accentinfomedia.com

COVER STORY

EDITORIAL OFFICE

16 AALOK KUMAR HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF GROWTH AT NEC INDIA

Delhi: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, New Delhi-110016, Phone: 91-11-41657670 / 46151993 info@ accentinfomedia.com

NEC Corporation India has been at the helm of India’s Digital Transformation journey across a range of industry verticals, each of which have a deep impact on the everyday lives of people. Read on as Aalok Kumar, CEO & President at NEC India delves deep into his own journey within the organization and shares his insights into what it means to ‘walk the talk’.

FEATURE STORY: /22 Managing Hybrid Workplaces as the New Normal

6

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GUEST TALK

Phone: 91-11-46151993 / 41055458

MORE INSIDE

40 ROBOTICS

Printed, Published and Owned by Sanjib Mohapatra Place of Publication: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016

50 SECURITY

52 INTERVIEW

JEFF HARRIS

MARC SEGURA

DEBASISH MUKHERJEE

SIDDHARTH SHARMA

“The Anatomy of AI”

“Robots in 2022: Key Trends by ABB”

“Business Email Compromise: All you need to know”

“Digital Transformation Initiatives are Driving IoT adoption”

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

MARCH 2022

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

ITWORLD

ROUND UP

B Y S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N FO M E D I A . C O M

IBM Consulting opens new Client Innovation Centers in Kochi and Coimbatore IBM today announced the opening of its new IBM Client Innovation Centers (CICs) in Kochi and Coimbatore, India. This will fast-track digital transformation and enhance the economic growth in the regions which will strengthen the company’s hybrid cloud & AI consulting capabilities.

John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting, said “India is at the core of our growth strategy and plays an important role in enabling us to deliver greater value to our clients and partners across the world,” “The expansion of CICs to Kochi and Coimbatore will not only fuel our growth and address growing client requirements but also help accelerate technology-led development in the region. A network of centers beyond the metros will also provide flexibility for employees in terms of work location, while giving us access to a broader talent pool and skill sets.”

D ATA BRIEF

The new centers will leverage the IBM Garage method of delivery, an approach that uses leading technology to create fully integrated, best-in-class solutions to co-create, co-innovate, and co-operate with its clients and ecosystem partners in spearheading transformative work.

IBM will also take advantage of the strong portfolio of competencies and presence from its string of acquisitions to advance its technology and business growth. The most recent of these is Neudesic, which was acquired in February 2022 and brings experience in operating from and scaling in Kochi.

IBM Consulting will now operate from ten CIC locations in India, including Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, National Capital Region, Pune and Mysuru.

MARCH 2022

50% of organizations report their board of directors are among the main decision makers for emerging technology (ET) investments.

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

SmarTone and Ericsson to Empower Consumers and Businesses with Industry-first Connectivity boost app

Ericsson, targets a market made up of billions of consumers and business-users globally with an end-user-ready application that boosts mobile connectivity when it is needed most – ensuring optimal mobile experiences. Called Ericsson Dynamic End-user Boost, the solution will be introduced to the enterprise and consumer markets through communications service providers (CSPs) and can be used on any device connected to a 4G or 5G network.

Recent Ericsson research found that 50 percent of business users and 40 percent of consumers are willing to pay for better control of their user experience for critical mobile sessions. SmarTone, a leading telecommunications provider in Hong Kong, will be the first CSP in the world to offer the Ericsson Dynamic End-user Boost solution to its customers.

Stephen Chau, Chief Technology Officer, SmarTone, said “We understand that customers

CIO

may occasionally need to boost their mobile data connectivity when they are in businesscritical or important social-networking situations. Thanks to this new innovative application, our network is now capable of offering our customers the possibility to boost connectivity in an easy-to-use mobile app, allowing them to always stay on top of things, as well as enjoy the best network experience on SmarTone’s network.”

Martin Zander, Head of One Network Solutions, Ericsson, said “Ericsson Dynamic End-user Boost instantly maximizes your content and user experience in a dynamic way that has not been possible before. If you are downloading or uploading a file on the go, need to run a videoconference, interacting with a business application, or having a gaming session from your mobile, it just works without any hassle.”

India’s largest platform for womenled businesses, “The Business Women Expo 2022” concluded

The India’s largest platform for women-led businesses, “The Business Women Expo 2022” , the three day event held at Hitex concluded on Sunday night. It was hosted jointly by Hitex Hyderabad and COWE (Confederation of Women Entrepreneurs). The second edition was supported by TiE, Development Commissionerate of the Ministry of MSME, DICCI, HYSEA, FTCCI and others 150 women lead businesses showcased their products from across India. It was a first of its kind B2B and B2C exhibition. The exhibitors came from Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Delhi and many other states.

D Chandra Sekhar, Additional Development Commissioner, MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises)-Development Institute during the inaugural address said that they have sponsored 54 women entrepreneurs to participate in Business Women Expo. Out of these 34 women are from Telangana and the rest 20 are from Gujarat and other states. We have spent Rs 20 lakhs on the same he told the gathering.

EVENTS

6 MAY, 2022

15 MAY, 2022

27 MAY, 2022

24 JUN, 2022

Data Centre Summit & Awards

Cyber Security Event MEA

Security Symposium Summit & Awards

Cloud Summit & Awards

LOCATION: MUMBAI

LOCATION: DELHI

LOCATION: MUMBAI

VENUE: FOUR POINTS

BY SHERATON DOWNTOWN, DUBAI TIMING: 9:30 – 5:30

MARCH 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

Government technology provider Granicus, opens a world-class Innovation Center in Bengaluru

S/HE SAID IT

ROGAN MOORE

THE CHIEF DIGITAL AND INFORMATION OFFICER LIVEKINDLY COLLECTIVE

“If you look at data and information technology, generally, it’s never been more relevant around the boardroom table.”

“Now we need to continue that momentum, take advantage of this significant exploration and adoption that is ongoing.”

Granicus, the leading provider of government experience technologies and services, announced the opening of their India Innovation Hub at Helios Business Park, Bengaluru.

The new office space was inaugurated by Ranga Shetty, General Manager, Granicus India. The launch of the innovation center marks the entry of Granicus into India as a GovTech innovation leader. The center aims to focus on product innovations across several software disciplines to accelerate digital transformation for governments globally.

Founded in 1999, Granicus provides technology that empowers government organizations to engage with their citizens and serve them better. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Granicus is the first and only Government technology provider that connects governments to the citizens they serve with an innovative and comprehensive cloud technology platform. The highly secure

QUICK BYTE ON

platform is designed to empower government organizations with the ability to easily deliver unified, highly compelling digital experiences to their constituents, including rich integrated capabilities for web content management, digital communications, community feedback, record management, and transparency.

Ranga Shetty, General Manager, Granicus India, said “We have not let the pandemic interfere with setting up this premium innovation hub which will be a powerhouse of product development, software operations, and innovation led by an experienced and strategic team of product experts,”“The center will expand product engineering and software operations capacity across the Granicus product portfolio and will consist of teams dedicated to building a superior collaborative environment that fosters the free exchange of ideas, individual accountability, and a fun-filled time at work.

A A R T I S H A H , C H I E F I N FO R M AT I O N A N D D I G I TA L O F F I C E R AT E L I L I L LY A N D C O .

SECURITY

Check Point Software’s Cloud Security Report Reveals Complexity of Managing Multi-Cloud Environment and Skills Shortages “Check Point Software has released its 2022 Cloud Security Report. As organizations continue to adopt the cloud, with 35% running more than 50% of their workloads on the likes of Azure, AWS and GCP, they struggle to manage the complexity of securing their cloud infrastructures across multiple cloud platforms, while also suffering a cyber-skills and knowledge shortage.”

10 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

CtrlS certified as a Great Place to Work for 2021 CtrlS certified as a Great Place to Work for 2021

IBM and Acuver Consulting create seamless online and in-store experiences for customers of Marks & Spencer Reliance India IBM today announced that it is helping the world renowned U.K retailer Marks & Spencer Reliance India Pvt Ltd (M&S India) modernize its supply chain to drive seamless integration between online and in-store business to improve the customer experience.

M&S is scaling its omnichannel capabilities in India with IBM Sterling Supply Chain Solutions. The company is driving faster delivery of products to customers by streamlining the order fulfilment process using IBM Sterling’s Order Management with real-time Inventory Visibility, a microservicesbased solution running on IBM Cloud, along with call center capabilities to expand its digital presence and

EXECUTIVE

accelerate business growth.

This transformation project is a result of IBM’s collaboration with IBM Business Partner Acuver Consulting Pvt. Ltd. (Acuver) to help M&S India deploy an omnichannel order management system for faster go-to-market, enhanced order fulfilment capabilities and improved customer experience. The robust, scalable and customized unified order management and fulfilment system for M&S India provides order orchestration capabilities with seamless integration across e-commerce marketplaces, digital and physical store environments.

CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, Asia’s Largest Rated-4 Hyperscale Data Center and Managed Services Player has been certified as a Great Place to Work for the fourth year in a row. Keeping employees happy is a priority for the company. This has resulted in high employee satisfaction and lower attrition. It has had a very positive bearing on its customers reflecting in the net promoter score (NPS) of 70, which is regarded as the best in the industry.

CtrlS has over 500 employees drawn from IIMs, IITs, NITs and other best technology & business schools. The organization practices Employee First philosophy which was reflected in its trust index score. The company was also assessed through cultural audit (people practice assessment) during the survey. The company has 80% of its employees who have been with it for over five years. The hiring process at CtrlS is aimed at attracting smart, knowledgeable, skilled, and motivated people who have the basic quality of working in teams and possess strong interpersonal skills.

The company is among a handful of data centers in India to be certified as a Great Place to Work. The Great Place to Work India survey covers around 2 million employees, 4,000+ organizations resulting in certification of about 700 of them spread across 20 plus industries.

MOVEMENT

Arnold Nipper Appointed to Board of APIX

Keysight Technologies Appoints Satish Dhanasekaran as CEO

Biswajit Mohapatra Moves on to AWS

Allied Telesis Appoints Jason Nadar as Country Manager to Grow its India and SAARC Business

Publicis Sapient Announces Appointment of Abby Godee as Chief Experience Officer

MARCH 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

11

ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

BOOK

SHELF

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

GLOBAL UPDATE

BY

JOSEPH MURPHY

HCL Technologies Launches New 5G Applications for Global Mobile Network Operators HCL Technologies (HCL) has launched two new 5G applications to help mobile network operators optimize customer experience and reduce energy consumption across their 4G and 5G infrastructure.

HCL’s Quality of Experience (QoE) and Energy Savings applications are built on HCL’s Augmented Network Automation (ANA) Platform, developed by its Industry Software Division. The HCL ANA Platform is HCL’s next-generation network optimization solution that enables mobile operators globally to effectively manage their 5G and 4G services, by automating multi-vendor and multi-technology deployments in cloud or on-premise environments.

To improve network performance in places with high traffic congestion, such as city centers and large sporting events, HCL’s QoE application allows mobile network operators to provide seamless, fast and reliable 5G services, by using artificial intelligence (AI). HCL’s Energy Savings application reduces the operating costs of delivering 5G, using AI-based network automation capabilities. By analyzing traf-

fic patterns, the application identifies where network infrastructure can be temporarily powered down during off-peak times, such as at night, without impacting the quality of experience for mobile subscribers.

Sukamal Banerjee, Corporate Vice President and Head of Industry Software Division, HCL Technologies, said “Our telecommunications portfolio represents our multi-year strategy to develop innovative products for network operators and enterprises globally,” “Many of the world’s largest mobile network operators have experienced how HCL’s innovative software products can optimize their networks and build a 5G world through next-generation AI and automation.

As the industry continues to adopt the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture to unleash the power of 5G and beyond, HCL Technologies is well positioned to support them with its innovative HCL ANA Platform.”

HCL Technologies will be at MWC 2022 in Barcelona from February 28 to March 3, 2022, at booth 2E30 in Hall 2.

PRICE

RS. 95.00 (PAPER BACK ) WHERE

AMAZON.IN

About The Book This remarkable book by Dr. Joseph Murphy, one of the pioneering voices of affirmative thinking, will unlock for you the truly staggering powers of your subconscious mind.

About the Author Joseph Murphy was a Divine Science minister and author. Murphy was born in Ireland, the son of a private boy’s school headmaster and raised a Roman Catholic. He studied for the priesthood and joined the Jesuits.

In his twenties an experience with healing prayer led him to leave the Jesuits and move to the United States.

Murphy has given lectures and written books for audiences all over the world.

Top 3 DevOps Tools for 2022: Meeting the Pressure of Faster Delivery The DevOps approach for smoother and more reliable software development is now widespread.

It has helped reduce the time between fixes, improve the frequency of deployment and squeeze time to market. Forecasts suggest that the DevOps market will grow from US$4 billion it was in 2019 to US$17 billion in 2026.

The rising popularity of containers has ensured that development and operations can work in tandem, instead of remaining in their siloes, turning DevOps into standard practice. Developers can now be confident their code can be quickly tested and taken to production, regardless of the 12 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

MARCH 2022

environment in which it has been developed. This trend has been given a boost by Kubernetes and a host of DevOps tools allowing better version control to container management and from test and deployment automation tools to configuration management and server monitoring.

Three DevOps tools that you should take note of in 2022: Crossplane: With changes in provisioning, Crossplane is a handy way to extend the framework Kubernetes has to offer to cloud and to compose systems and assemble infrastructure.

The control plane, designed to manage container

workloads, can be extended to manage resources such as virtual machines necessary for Kubernetes clusters. Crossplane supports API-driven configuration and management of other infrastructure such as databases and makes it possible to deploy infrastructure resources across cloud providers.

This allows the Kubernetes community to leverage familiar YAML specifications to provision public cloud infrastructure and services without having to learn cloud-specific APIs or other infrastructure provisioning tools.

Telepresence: Developers want to speed up how testing is done.

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

Exterro to highlight need for cyber-resilience, digital forensics in India in roadshow organized

by Credence Security Exterro the industry’s first provider of Legal GRC software, which unifies e-discovery, digital forensics, cyber security ,compliance and privacy to drive successful, defensible outcomes for in-house legal, IT teams, privacy and law enforcement worldwide, today announced its participation in the most sought-after roadshow organized by its channel partner Credence Security. The roadshow will be held between March 7 and 9 in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad.

Focusing on the theme, ‘Working Together Towards a Cyber-Resilient Tomorrow,’ the roadshow will have pre-eminent technology experts, vendors, and speakers discuss the latest trends, resilient strategies and innovations in the cybersecurity and digital forensics landscape, and security strategies that will help organizations stay protected in a digital-first era.

In this year’s roadshow, Exterro will have its Vice President Global Talent Management and Chief Data Scientist, Dr Kavitha Thangasami discuss the company’s success since the acquisition of AccessData, as well as the operations in India.

Uniphore and SpinSci Partner to Improve Patient Access and Engagement with Healthcare Providers Uniphore, a market leader in the field of digital patient engagement solutions have entered a strategic agreement to enhance patients’ access and engagement with health care providers. Under the terms of the agreement, Uniphore’s conversational AI and automation technology will be used in SpinSci’s Patient Access Care solutions, integrated with market-leading electronic health records (EHR) systems, to help drive efficiencies for contact center agents and self-service workflows for patients.

Patient experience has become significantly more important since the onset of the pandemic. Patient access transactions are increasingly driven through contact centers, and it is more important than ever that nursing and agent staff are empowered to deliver the highest levels of services and care. This includes lowering hold times, improving average handle times, delivering workflow automation to contact centers combined with providing authenticated self-serve options to patients. Deploying solutions like Uniphore’s U-Self Serve and U-Assist with SpinSci’s Patient Engage and Patient Assist is an important step forward in creating frictionless patient experiences.

Kyndryl and Cloudera Announce Global Partnership to Accelerate Customer Data Transformation Projects Across Hybrid Cloud Environments Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, and Cloudera today announced a global partnership to help customers enable and drive their missioncritical hybrid cloud, multicloud and edge computing data initiatives.

Kyndryl and Cloudera plan to establish a joint innovation center to develop integrated industry solutions and delivery capabilities designed to help customers accelerate their move and migration to the cloud platform and environment of their choice, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The companies will immediately focus on: n Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Migrations and Upgrades: The companies will partner to streamline customer migration and upgrades by leveraging technology and expertise to help customers overcome barriers and shorten time to market. n Managed Services: Kyndryl will leverage their deep data center modernization and platform management skills to provide state of the art Managed Service capabilities to increase reliability and customer satisfaction.

DIGEST NUTANIX TO OFFER INDUSTRY LEADING BANKING SOLUTION INFOSYS FINACLE ON ITS PLATFORM Will enable banks to accelerate digital transformation with the agility, security and mobility on future-ready modern infrastructure Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today announced the availability of the industry-leading Infosys Finacle Digital Banking Solution Suite on the Nutanix platform. With this offering, banks gain a solution with open architecture and the flexibility needed to adopt and scale various applications and microservices. Leading banks in India and around the world already use the Nutanix platform to drive agility and customer-focused innovation.

NKGSB BANK ACCELERATES DIGITALIZATION EFFORTS USING THE NUTANIX CLOUD PLATFORM Nutanix, today said NKGSB Bank, one of India’s premier cooperative banks, accelerated its digitalization efforts using the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The move enabled the bank to roll-out new applications that are providing a seamless and improved digital experience for customers, and to help drive increases in productivity and revenues.

NKGSB was able to transform digitally because the Nutanix Cloud Platform helped it shift to a 100-percent virtualized environment and leverage hyper-convergence to scale resources as customer demand heightened. Nutanix’s technology also aided in significantly reducing the bank’s time spent managing workloads and its rack footprint, thereby reducing colocation charges and ongoing power costs.

SEAGATE EXPANDS LYVE CLOUD STORAGE SERVICES TO SINGAPORE Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in data storage infrastructure solutions, launched its premiere cloud storage-as-a-service platform, Lyve™ Cloud, for businesses of all sizes in Singapore. The S3-compatible storage-only cloud known for its simplicity, flexibility and cost predictability has been trusted by many partners and customers since its launch in the United States last year.

“The Singapore launch marks Lyve Cloud’s anniversary, and I am proud that we are demonstrating our commitment to helping enterprises in more countries harness the flow of mass data,” said Ravi Naik, chief information officer and executive vice president storage services for Seagate.

MARCH 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

MANAGEMENT

MANTRA

“One of the things I frequently hear from CIOs is that technology is no longer the long pole in the tent.”

Sanjay Srivastava, Chief Digital Officer, Genpact

Web Werks Acquires a Standalone Facility for Its First Data Center in Hyderabad

Web Werks, a leading player in the Indian Data Center and Cloud Services market, has announced the acquisition of a standalone building that will convert to its first data center in the commercial business district of Hyderabad. The locality has emerged as a prominent business hub, owing to its proximity to the IT corridor of Hyderabad. The new highly interconnected data center will offer 120,000 square feet of colocation space supported by a significant power capacity of up to 10 MVA of gross power with an expected IT load of up to 6MW. The first phase of delivery is expected to be completed by Q4 2022.

Mr. Nikhil Rathi, CEO, Web Werks data centers, said, “For Telangana, which has a policy on data centers in place, it is another significant expansion for us. The HITEC city is attracting Hyperscalers and offers a diversified spectrum of enterprises, including IT, insurance, biotech, financial institutions, and the service industry. Our data center facility will enable customers to rapidly scale digital transformation strategies by deploying critical infrastructure in a global data center that will offer capacity, cloud, and connectivity. Web Werks and Iron Mountain Data Centers offer 19+ facilities in India, US, Europe, and APAC. On this global data center platform, our customers can access a choice of ecosystems that enable them to efficiently reach out to their environments, customers, and partners in a way that makes the most sense as a business grows.”

The new Hyderabad development will strengthen Web Werks presence within the Indian region. “Hyderabad is one of the largest DC markets in India with predicted growth of tripling its capacity by 2026,” stated Michael Goh, VP & GM, APAC Iron Mountain Data Centers. “Iron Mountain Data Centers is extremely excited to be able to offer our customers capacity in this high growth market.”

CtrlS bags Prestigious ASSOCHAM Award for Sustainability Excellence in Energy Management

CtrlS, announced that it has been awarded the most prestigious ASSOCHAM Award for Sustainability Excellence in Energy Management. CtrlS joins an impressive slate of awardees that include organizations, projects who have adopted sustainable practices to efficiently manage energy consumption and reduce carbon footprint.

The current and past winners of ASSOCHAM awards include SAP, Tata Consultancy Services, L&T, Cognizant, Ashok Leyland, ONGC, SBI Life Insurance, JK Tyre, Tata Capital, ICICI Foundation, NTPC, PayTM and others who have made efforts to integrate economic, environmental, and social objectives alongside the company’s operations and growth.

BV Naidu, Chairman of ASSOCHAM Southern Region & Karnataka State Development Council & Managing Director of StartupXeed “We congratulate CtrlS Datacenters for bagging the award for excellence in energy management and making a positive impact during the COVID-19 Pandemic from March 2020 through their innovative and sustainability initiatives in their datacenter operations.”

Binance and WazirX Support Startups with a USD 50M ‘Blockchain for India’ Fund Binance and WazirX has launched a joint initiative “Blockchain for India” to support the development and growth of blockchain startups in India.

In 2019, Binance acquired WazirX with the vision of promoting the use and adoption of blockchain technologies in India. Binance and WazirX have now jointly set up a USD 50 million Blockchain for India fund (backed by BNB, BUSD and WRX digital assets) to incubate and invest in blockchain projects and startups focused on solving industrial and social problems through 14 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

MARCH 2022

the use of blockchain technology.

Given the incredible tech talent that India has to offer, this fund will help fuel the growth of many Indian blockchain startups and entrepreneurs and encourage the sustainable growth of the blockchain startup ecosystem in India.

The investments will include, but not limited to, fiat-to-digital assets gateway solutions, trading platforms, payment and remittance solutions, digital asset wallets, stablecoins, DeFi platforms, decentralized applications (dApps) and more.

Nischal Shetty, Founder and CEO of WazirX,

said “With this fund, we want to encourage and enable more and more founders and teams to come in and BUILD. This initiative also shows the incredible potential that the Indian blockchain ecosystem has to offer. Apart from funding transformative blockchain projects in India, we look forward to collaborating with other investment funds to grow the ecosystem even further.”

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

Jungheinrich Reaffirms its Commitment to Asia

75% Executives Look at Blockchain as an Enterprise-Wide Strategic Priority: Wipro – HFS Research According to a report by Wipro and HFS Research, nearly 75% of executives look at blockchain as a strategic priority while only 1% dismiss it as not relevant. Their survey found that nearly 75% executives are leveraging blockchain for near term business impact (process excellence and efficiency, data and identity management, and better business outcomes) or to drive competitive differentiation (reimagined IT infrastructure, additional trust in multi-party collaboration, transparent and immutable transactions).

The report has also found that more than 95% of enterprise blockchain initiatives focus on six broad areas: identity, crypto, trade, payments, supply chain, and finance. Enterprise adoption of blockchain is nascent and challenging, yet ambitious as 75%

of all blockchain initiatives are less than two years old and only 14% has reached a production stage.

The report titled, ‘Ignore Blockchain at Your Peril, But Don’t Drive Blindly’ is an outcome of a global survey conducted with 300 senior executives, including more than 100 C-level executives who are closely associated with their organizations’ blockchain initiatives and analysis of 940 blockchain initiatives across industries.

Saurabh Gupta, Chief Research Officer at HFS Research said, “In 2019, we witnessed pioneering blockchain initiatives succeed and proceed from proofs of concept to pilots to ‘live, in-production’ while several other efforts failed to move beyond laboratories.

Jungheinrich, one of the world’s leading solution providers for intralogistics, is reaffirming its commitment to Asia with dedicated approaches on the innovation of automation, digitalisation and future-oriented energy systems from the company’s Strategy 2025+ plan.

Although the pandemic ravaged most economies, opportunities sparked in the Asia region. According to a global analyst report, Asia is projected to make up 57 percent of the global e-commerce logistics market growth from 2020 to 2025. Regional logistics firms are now realising that optimising traditional processes creates a more efficient and sustainable supply chain. This saves costs and encourages higher productivity.

“Jungheinrich recognises that as processes become more efficient and more sustainable, that leads to higher profitability. We are continuously committed to innovating towards warehouse automation solutions that are more flexible, adaptable, reliable and efficient, thereby ensuring long-term sustainability to deliver significantly faster returns on investments.” said Daniel Schaefer, Executive Director, Distributors and Business Development APAC. Automation of intralogistics is the anchor of Jungheinrich’s Strategy 2025+. The company is intensifying its activities in digitalisation, as it expects market growth of between 7 and 10 percent. It has been vigorous in developing and growing its range of automated guided vehicles, automated warehouses, software, and robotics. The strategy focuses on tactical cooperation and acquisitions to further the company’s portfolio.

Telangana Govt and Tech Mahindra Collaborate to Launch ‘Blockchain District Accelerator Program’ Tech Mahindra has launched T- Block Accelerator, the inaugural accelerator program for the Telangana Blockchain District in partnership with Government of Telangana and IBC Media, an innovation management company. The launch event was organized at Tech Mahindra Infocity Campus in Hyderabad and was well represented by government dignitaries, blockchain startups, educational institutes and members from the developer community.

The launch of T-Block is a step in continuation of Telangana Government’s endeavour to

make Telangana as the ‘Blockchain Capital of the World’. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) had been signed between the Government of Telangana and Tech Mahindra to this effect in 2018. This initiative is aimed at startups that have a strong blockchain use-case; thereby accelerating the start-up growth and therein contributing to the growth of the overall industry.

Through this initiative, Tech Mahindra, will enable creation of an ecosystem which will empower startups to solve tough business problems for clients across diverse industry verticals.

The Telangana Government will help provide the required regulatory framework to enable and promote Blockchain growth.

“As part of our TechMNxt charter, we at Tech Mahindra have been bullish in our efforts to expand blockchain adoption in India and globally.

Our partnership with the state government for the Telangana Blockchain District stems from our desire to build a world-class support infrastructure for blockchain startups and make Hyderabad a destination of choice among several new-age entrepreneurs and blockchain evangelists.

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COVER STORY // NEC INDIA

AALOK KUMAR

HARNESSING THE POTENTIAL OF GROWTH AT

NEC INDIA

NEC Corporation India has been at the helm of India’s Digital Transformation journey across a range of industry verticals, each of which have a deep impact on the everyday lives of people. Read on as Aalok Kumar, CEO & President at NEC India delves deep into his own journey within the organization and shares his insights into what it means to ‘walk the talk’.

T

his multi-billion-dollar corporation prides itself in being enablers of the GoI’s vision of transforming India into a digital powerhouse with the use of intelligent infrastructure, something that is becoming a lived reality with each passing day. The company boasts of several crucial accomplishments and recognitions, including the recent recognition as a ‘Visionary’ in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 5G Accuracy Testing, etc., and the consistent leadership demonstrated in Biometrics. Its most important contribution towards India is undoubtedly the development of cutting edge biometric solutions which forms the fundamental technology on which the AADHAR card program is built, which has completed over 1.3 billion enrolments.

Aalok Kumar, assumed the role of the President and CEO of NEC Corporation India in March 2020 right before the nationwide lockdown due to the COVID 19. This was without a doubt the 16 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

FEBRUARY MARCH 2022 2020

most challenging time to be in Aalok’s shoes, but he took in his stride, and along with his leadership team has since transformed NEC Corporation India as we know it. He quickly pivoted and strategically aligned the business goals with the organization’s core purpose, and deftly navigated this with the demands and restrictions posed by the pandemic. Over the course of this time, NEC has launched a suite of innovative offerings that have been instrumental in taking India’s digital transformation journey along. “India’s time as a global-tech power is here”, says Aalok in a conversation with Enterprise IT World, as he shares NEC India’s renewed vision and mission of bringing to life India’s vision of complete self-reliance through a strong, purpose-driven strategy.

How do you think the Indian economy has fared and what can be done to stay on the growth course?

Ever since the pandemic began, while several

industries and sectors faced considerable challenges in maintaining business continuity and staying afloat, the one sector that has demonstrated resilience and steady growth is the technology sector, which has, through its sheer versatility and flexibility, enabled other industries to not only maintain business continuity, but to charter a path to bounce back stronger and better.

Furthermore, the recently concluded Union Budget 2022 has laid out a path to strengthen India’s vision of becoming the fastest growing economy, with the growth rate estimated at 9.2% in the upcoming financial year. Now that India is in a good position vis-à-vis the percentage of people vaccinated and as a consequence, its ability to face any new variants of the virus that might emerge, the Hon’ble Finance Minister’s progressive plans of enhancing the physical and digital infrastructure can be accelerated.

It has been a privilege for the team at NEC to have been instrumental in empowering

NEC INDIA // COVER STORY

AALOK KUMAR PRESIDENT AND CEO, NEC CORPORATION INDIA

“For over a century, NEC Corporation, the global ICT giant has been the vanguard of the digital transformation of businesses, thereby creating a world that is safe, more secure, and better for every individual in the country – in the true spirit of “Orchestrating a Brighter World”. “This is not merely a tagline, but a belief system we live by each day, in our efforts to improve the lives of every Indian.”

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COVER STORY // NEC INDIA

governments – both state and central – to be able to make the best possible use of technology, and benefit the common man. This is one of our top priorities - that anything that we develop at NEC must ultimately percolate down to the citizens and create value. Our product portfolio has gotten more robust, cutting edge, and above all, relevant to the times, such as our contactless technologies that have found vast applications. We have a strong and huge team of tech and engineering talent whose invaluable contributions have helped us serve as enablers of India’s digital transformation, be it in the telecom sector, aviation sector, healthcare, logistics & transportation, or in public safety. As the world moves into an increasingly hybrid mode, and our lives continue to become more digitally interconnected, India could have a significant role to play on the world stage, and to that end, Governments and businesses must continue to accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies.

NEC has been in India for over 70 years.

Can you shed light on NEC’s role in making digitalization a reality?

At the core of NEC’s extensive portfolio, is its ability to create tangible impact and value for people - at scale. This is evidenced in the fact that we have, in a myriad of ways, positively impacted the lives of millions across the world for 122 years, and for the last 70 in India. An important yardstick in our view is – does our technology result in a more productive society? And this is contingent upon providing the right technology at the right place and at the right time, and above all, at the right cost.

Our technologies have spanned the entire spectrum – from sea to space (submarines to satellites) and everything in between – to primarily empower societies by resolving some of the most critical challenges through ‘digital inclusion’, a guiding principle of great importance at NEC. As has been established before, our technological solutions cut across a vast cross-section of industries, permeating all crucial touchpoints of an individual’s life. Living up to our promise of ‘Orchestrating a Brighter World’, we have introduced cutting-edge technologies that are dynamic enough to be able to solve the niche and nuanced problems that are unique to India. Through our dedicated R&D centre and a global development and delivery centre, we have been deploying technology in three fundamental ways: n Digital foundation or building the digital backbone in the country such as optical fibre

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networks and mobile network connections n Improving processes & last-mile connectivity such as in Logistics, Transportation, and Smart city sectors in solutions like Track & Trace, Vehicle planning and scheduling, BRT systems, city surveillance, and touchless boarding, etc. n Enabling informed decision making through Integrated Command and Control Centre, AI & Data Analytics, Video Analytics, Automated immigration, etc.

How has your journey been with NEC so far? What have been some of the key milestones?

Even before the world swung into pandemicinduced protocols and what would later be believed to be the defining moment for the rapid digital transformation, India was already amid a digital revolution. This enabled us to transition quickly into a digital work model and has set in motion a cultural transformation at the workplace

save significant costs with their BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) solutions in cities like Ahmedabad, Surat, Pune, Hubli. n Citizen Services: In service of the common man of India, it is our world-class biometric solution that forms the backbone of the ambitious UIDAI (AADHAR) project, providing a unique digital identity for 1.3 billion Indians n Touchless Boarding: The organization’s technological expertise is currently deploying a seamless boarding experience in Varanasi, Kolkata, Pune, or Vijayawada airports, enabled by NEC’s contactless technology. n Smart Logistics: NEC’s logistics visualization system has been of immense help to the Government, in monitoring the movement of EXIM (export and import) containers and tracking the movement of containers across port, road and rail. With clear market leadership, NEC has achieved over 95% coverage of all EXIM containers coming into and leaving Indian shores

“At the core of NEC’s extensive portfolio, is its ability to create tangible impact and value for people - at scale.” on one level, which has deepened the ‘culture of innovation’ that we hold at such great value.

Needless to say, these transformations are paying off in spades!

It has been a challenging, yet rewarding tenure at NEC India so far, and I remain optimistic and hopeful for what lies ahead. The milestones that I have witnessed being achieved during this time are significant, as they have brought the mere notion of a ‘Digital India’ closer to reality. n Telecommunications: NEC has been at the forefront when it comes to Telecom technology and 5G ORAN deployment in India. With global leadership in the sector, NEC hopes to replicate the same success metrics for Indian Telcos. n Smart City: NEC is working on some of India’s marquee smart city projects such as Trivandrum, Ahmedabad, Surat, Gurugram, Kalyan Dombivali, Saharanpur, Meerut etc. to name a few n Smart Transportation: NEC India’s solution has the potential to helpauthorities

and is leading the logistics technology revolution for India n Submarine: Establishing greater connectivity to remote areas has been one of the key priorities for NEC and to this end, the organization has successfully completed several submarine cable projects, the latest being the successful completion of CANI (Chennai Andaman Nicobar Islands) Submarine cable project and the recent commencement of KLI Submarine project which is likely to fuel economic activity in the respective regions.

As a CEO, what is your vision for the next 2-3 years?

At NEC, we have set in motion the ‘India Go Big’ initiative, which essentially mirrors the opportunities of scale and growth that India offers today.

While on one level India offers some of the finest technology and engineering talent in the world, usually exported to the rest of the world, the

NEC INDIA // COVER STORY

opportunities ecosystem in the country is rapidly growing at a competitive pace – owing to the country’s digital ambition, reflected best by the GoI’s ‘Digital India’ initiative. This provides NEC with the perfect playing field to implement this initiative. We intend to double our talent pool and to attract the finest minds in the domain to help arrive at innovative solutions for some of the most complex societal challenges. This is the chance to be able to determine and shape India’s future! n We are in the process of setting up Global Centres of Excellence (COE’s) in India across multiple domains. n We are further strengthening the R&D lab in Bangalore – one of only 8 in the world – with more investments to come in newer areas. n With the might of Japanese technical knowhow, our mission is to create ‘Made in Japan’ quality solutions “In India-For India” and “From India-For world” How is NEC uniquely positioned to drive growth?

In my view, NEC India’s unique position or edge lies in two things: (1) the willingness to throw its might behind R&D – the cornerstone of innovation. We have 8 R&D labs around the world, one of which is located in Bengaluru. (2) NEC brings to the table the Japanese technological knowledge bank which plays an important role in giving our customers a sense of ‘reliability’ that comes with unfailing quality and assurance.

Leveraging this deep domain knowledge, NEC has over 49,000 patents to its name.. Moreover, our seven decades of experience in the country has empowered us with the ability to manoeuvre the complex market and also pre-empt the needs of governments and businesses alike.

Furthermore, NEC’s Global Development Centre, with a skilled design, engineering and delivery workforce has demonstrated tech leadership in Biometrics, OSS, Transport Solutions and 5G etc. Our teams are working towards catering to customers across geographies, specialising in technologies such as AI, big data, blockchain, IoT, biometrics, AI/ ML etc, and they bring delivery capabilities across Public, Enterprise, NextGen Connectivity, Digital Platform, Smart Automation Services (SAS).

What is your strategy to achieve aggressive growth in 2022?

NEC’s growth strategy is centred on three pillars: (a) leveraging NEC’s strong delivery capabilities; (b) driving digital transformation in governance;

(c) driving growth through innovation. Our COEs that we are establishing in India is a step towards bringing this strategy to life. We recently launched a CoE in Chennai for our 5G telecom vertical, and it is a hub which is building the innovative O-RAN technology which will be Made in India, For the World. It is definitely noteworthy that much of the work that went into the World’s first O-RAN implementation in Japan, was done in NEC India’s Chennai and Noida offices. Our vision is that these CoE’s (among many), will serve as launchpad for global opportunities, wherein we hope to be developing the technological design, architecture, and project implementation for these opportunities out of India.

What are the areas you want to strengthen in the next FY? I would break down the areas I would like to see strengthened at NEC into two: Talent, and making India a global delivery hub.

It is an indisputable fact that an organization is as good as the talent it houses. If we are to make India the growth engine for global, the first step for us is to ensure that we nurture and invite the right talent into our fold. We are trying to build a more robust organisation with very strong focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

As mentioned before, one of our key strategies is “In India-For India & From India-For Global”. NEC teams are working collaboratively to develop innovative solutions that truly create deep social value – that are globally scalable. We believe that India can be a significant contributor to global business growth and the NEC ‘India Go Big’ initiative demonstrates that. We intend to leverage our solution development & delivery capability from India and establish it as a global delivery hub for offshore support & product development.

How have you strengthened collaboration among the workforce and kept your workforce motivated in this era of pandemic and remote work regimens?

Like I have said previously, an organisation is only as good as it’s people or talent. At NEC India, our people have and will always come first. We believe that an employer-employee relationship is symbiotic. Amid the pandemic and the fear that it inspired among all, and as the lines between the personal and profession blurred, we realised that it was necessary to ensure the mental and physical welfare of our employees and the community at large. In the year of great resignation, it gives me

a sense of pride to share that we are amongst the few tech-companies that has an employee engagement score above the industry standard.

NEC is an innovation-first company! It is our firm belief that it is a happy and secure mind that can truly innovate. It is an amalgamation of an employee’s health, and the work culture that we cultivate and encourage that makes for sustainable growth and success. As we move towards becoming a more self-aware, responsive, and innovative company, built on a culture of openness, meritocracy and transparency, we are consciously investing heavily in our employees, emphasising work-life balance. Additionally, we have also seen that our Learning & Development initiatives have greatly benefited our people. Last year, the NEC India employees clocked 80,000+ hours in both technical and soft skills training programs.

NEC is one of the few technology organisations that has witnessed relatively greater retention for tech talent in India and the employee association with the brand. The organisation’s culture continues to play an instrumental role in keeping the best talent together and shaping NEC India’s growth and innovation journey.

We have aligned our priorities. For us, it’s always People, Purpose, Partnership, Planet, and then Performance that leads us to glory even in the toughest of times. At NEC we deal with the first 4 Ps with compassion and determination. As a result, ‘Performance’ (the 5th P) is follows.

Working in such a hyper-competitive environment, how do you keep yourself motivated and driven?

At NEC, we are trying to create a talent pool and a workforce that takes pride in its work, and has a strong sense of purpose. Our brand purpose – ‘Orchestrating a Brighter World’ is not merely a statement, but something we hope every member of the organisation imbibes and lives daily. This is an undertaking to add value to the lives of millions – building a better, safer, more inclusive society – through creative use of technology.

When this is the “purpose” you live by, it is not difficult to stay motivated and driven each day.

Personally, as a leader of an organization, I believe it is my responsibility to keep myself up-to-date with the global ongoings and industry best practices. To that end, I read up constantly on current affairs, through papers, books, etc. In my down time, I like to exercise, listen to music and occasionally enjoy long drives as well.

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DELL TECHNOLOGIES // TECH PREDICTION 2022

DELL

DELL TECHNOLOGIES: 5G ROLL-OUT IN INDIA IN 2022 Upgrading to 5G is inevitable; Drive revenue growth and enable network providers to stay ahead of customer demand

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

A

s 5G rolls out in India in 2022, we will witness enterprises and network providers seeking use cases to implement 5G in business operations. This will see business use of 5G move out of its nascency and the adoption of advanced features such as Ultra Reliability Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and Massive Machine Type Communicators (mMTC) for faster and better results. The ecosystem will expand to include public cloud providers and new open infrastructure for an Open 5G ecosystem, delivering private 5G networks with more capabilities.

The availability of a faster and more reliable network presents an opportunity for businesses across various sectors to ride the tide for digital growth and boost business productivity. 5G will bring in better connectivity, a promise of quicker digital functions, more flexibility and wider reach, enhanced customer experiences, and easier management of data-driven processes.

Capitalizing on these opportunities will help organizations improve their productivity and enable them to save and devote the necessary time for operations that are intrinsic to innovation and business success. With 5G, enterprises will also be able to connect with their customers across wider markets with ease and efficiency.

AIoT will see further momentum Industrial processes increasingly rely on sensors that collect data and edge computing to provide

almost instantaneous insights to actuators that control processes. The convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 will reduce manufacturing costs, improve quality and yields.

Data Analytics, AI and Machine Learning (ML) will penetrate newer market segments and enable better, data-driven decisions for businesses. This will result in more precise, real-time, and predictive analytics for better customer experience.

The growth of private 5G networks Organizations are also realizing the benefits of private 5G networks. These include the flexibility of control over applications and devices; high bandwidth and low latency support for AI and ML use cases involving thousands of endpoints; and a capacity to generate large volumes of data within a single facility. Private 5G networks will be instrumental in tackling the growing demands of edge-based, data-intensive workloads and delivering seamless and simplified solutions for organizations.

5G-enabed transformation across sectors 5G is capable of creating billion-dollar market opportunities across sectors. The flexibility and reliability of 5G will make it the network of choice across industry verticals, but its real potential lies in leveraging the unification of 5G and edge computing to open doors to unlimited technological possibilities. In healthcare, for example, remote

SAURABH TEWARI DIRECTOR & CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER (TELECOM), DELL TECHNOLOGIES, INDIA.

“5G is capable of creating billion-dollar

market opportunities across sectors.”

surgeries, improved image processing, access to patient reports, and faster data processing will help provide better healthcare facilities and patient treatment across geographies.

5G transformation will not be an overnight or simple upgrade, but a gradual architectural evolution. 5G globally is seen as a game-changer for economies. In India, it is expected to create an impact of more than USD 1 trillion by 2035 and pave the path for a new wave of innovations that can transform communities.

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FEATURE STORY // REMOTE WORK AND COLLABORATION

REMOTE WORK AND COLLABORATION

MANAGING HYBRID WORKPLACES AS THE NEW NORMAL Organizations are creating hybrid workplaces with a human approach and experimenting new approaches in flexibility, collaboration and productivity.

H

ybrid workplaces are here to stay. That’s the new normal, so says the numerous executive surveys, industry reports and every panel discussion.

Having worked through the pandemic remotely from home, organizations are now faced with the issue of drawing employees back to the workplace.

As new variants of the virus disrupt the efforts intermittently, the business world is serious considering to allow employees the flexibility to work remotely.

Employees too are wary of returning to office five days a week and think that working from home some days a week enhances productivity and enables a good work-life balance. The 22 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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pandemic broke through technology and cultural barriers of allowing employees to work remotely and coupled with prevailing employee sentiments the business world is witnessing a structural shift in coping with the new realities where hybrid work environment is a practical need.

The Gartner report Redesigning Work for a Hybrid Future warns that if organizations insist on a return to fully onsite work, they risk losing talent with 39% of knowledge workers in the Gartner survey indicating they could leave if the employers insisted on a ‘hard return’ to fully on-site work. The report observed that the global pandemic was the biggest experiment in the history of work as 65% of employees say the pandemic has made them rethink the place that

work should have in their lives.

A McKinsey survey finds that business leaders are paying heed to these employee sentiments and are permitting hybrid work places. Nine out of ten organizations have indicated that they will be combining remote and on-site working and that customer satisfaction and productivity have increased during the pandemic.

Not all roles and activities can be performed remote. For instance, healthcare workers such as nursing and diagnostics requiring medical equipment up must be at the hospital to deliver care. Just as workers in retail and supply must come to the workplace. Remote work is primarily applicable for highly skilled and highly educated workers in some industries only such as profes-

REMOTE WORK AND COLLABORATION // FEATURE STORY

Rolling out a Hybrid Workplace Returning to the workplace as the pandemic ebbs requires adjustment regarding workplace assumptions. But it must start with an acknowledgement of the new reality that the workplace is going to be a hybrid environment to create a conducive environment and facilitate productivity.

Says Jayaprakash Chinnamuthu, Director, Customer Experience, Crestron India, “Collaboration platforms and tools were in use before Covid also but the pandemic accelerated the adoption. Prior to Covid we used these tools from within the office premises but Covid made us use these from our homes and connect via applications that were hosted in the Cloud. As people return to work, the challenge is to deliver a standardized environment to all employees as some are returning to the workplace and some people are still working from home. Once they come to office, they are expected to adhere to standard protocols such as using the meeting room and video conferencing facility while they have already become used to log in from the personal devices and so it is not

VIKAS GUPTA CIO, H-ENERGY

We have to understand that dimensions have changed whether it is the location of people or the productivity. People can work from anywhere – it is the new reality.

AMITABH MISHRA CIO & ANALYTICS EXECUTIVE NOVARTIS, USA

We have to find a way to map the synchronous and asynchronous work and find a balance.

And this between the two modes is absolutely essential to maximize productivity and innovation.

the same experience for them anymore. While others who are logging from home may not have a similar experience in terms of connectivity, access to resources and the ambience. So how do we bridge the experience and deliver a standardized experience.”

Challenges also relate to enhancing the security of the workplace—both digital and physical.

Thanks to the pandemic, hygiene and health safety protocols have become critical and therefore closer monitoring of employees is called for.

Dr Makarand Sawant, Senior General Manager IT, Deepak Fertilizers and Petrochemicals Corp says, “Pandemic has created new workplace challenges to ensure employee health and safety and we are using technology to ensure our employee maintain safe social distancing and wearing masks at all times. We have deployed monitors and video analysis to ensure all workers on the factor floor and in office premises are following protocols. We are also imparting training to create awareness about the new realities and exploring MARCH 2022

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BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

sional services. And the ability to work remotely is directly proportional to the physical, spatial and interpersonal context of the functions and role of the person involved.

Our panel of experts comprising leaders and practitioners from the industry confirm that the hybrid workplace is here to stay.

Says Amitabh Mishra, CIO & Analytics Executive, Novartis, USA, “The new reality is that remote and hybrid work is here to stay. It is hard to image all people will come to office whatever the compulsions may be, whether it is productivity, change in mindset.”

Vikas Gupta, CIO, H-Energy agrees that hybrid workplace will be a norm going forward, “We have to understand that dimensions have changed whether it is the location of people or the productivity. People can work from anywhere – it is the new reality.”

Subhamoy Chakraborti, CIO, ABP, a leading media organization says that as businesses re-open to resume operations there is a change in employee reactions from initial euphoria to sentiments leaning towards a combination. “Reactions of employees were initially euphoric and then it started going down and now employees want to work partly remotely. Now this new structure where some employees will be home, some at the workplace and some people come to office intermittently is what Gartner calls the distributed enterprise where employees are dispersed, yet are collaborating in some form to keep operations moving and deliver services.”

FEATURE STORY // REMOTE WORK AND COLLABORATION

long term technology solutions to ensure good health while also improving employee productivity with transparency and equipping them with more technology capabilities.”

Adds Jaiprakash, “The transition from home to work place is not easy but there are lot of tools and features that platform providers including Zoom, WebEx and Microsoft are rolling out. For example, Microsoft came out with 300 features last year to facilitate the hybrid workplace, so it’s a continuous evolution and we are all learning with the new reality.”

Creating a hybrid workplace is a new experience for all companies and things are still evolving, so businesses must be open to experimentations, iterations and improve things as the new workplace emerges. Gartner recommends a human centric approach while embracing a hybrid workplace to ensure a win-win for employees and organizations. This entails a degree of flexibility and empathy to empower employees and increase their productivity and engagement.

Empowering employees will make organizations more responsive to customer demands, productive and resilient to disruptions.

This message is not lost on Indian organizations which have demonstrated a significant degree of flexibility in offering employees a hybrid workplace. For instance, Deepak Fertilizers and Petrochemicals Corp gives employees the choice of location and as well as a hybrid option. Just as Novartis following its global practice allows employees to choose the days they want to come to office. The Indian IT industry has been following much of these practices even before pandemic.

Overcoming Enterprise Security Enterprise security new challenges with the onset of Covid pandemic and now in a hybrid work environment, ensuring enterprise security continues to be challenge. As traditional methods of securing the perimeter with firewalls and antivirus vanished as environments became fuzzy, organizations are adopting new approaches and technology solutions to ensure the enterprise is secure. This includes the zero-trust approach where the assumption is that every attempt to access is deemed to be intrusion and a security incident unless it is authenticated.

Says Vijay Anand, Vice President Global IT and IS, Visionary RCM Infotech, a CorroHealth company, “We spent a lot on cyber security, where it is end-point security, securing the perimeter and monitoring workloads, security was a key investment in enabling our remote workforce.”

Adds Subhamoy Chakraborti, CIO, ABP, “Secure access via VPN has become paramount importance as opposed to earlier where this was 24 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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VIJAY ANAND VICE PRESIDENT GLOBAL IT AND IS, VISIONARY RCM INFOTECH

We spent a lot on cyber security, where it is end-point security, securing the perimeter and monitoring workloads, security was a key investment in enabling our remote workforce.

SUBHAMOY CHAKRABORTI CIO, ABP LTD.

Initially as offices resumed operations reactions of employees were euphoric and

then it started going down and now employees want to work partly remotely, so essentially we now have a distributed enterprise.

not a priority at all. Each access point is a potential threat and can be a trojan horse, so security is a key concern in enterprise access.”

Organizations must put in place a solid security framework to combat cyber threats which has been a top security concern. The framework must has a comprehensive risk management approach which identifies the threat vectors and must have mechanisms to proactively monitor and protect the environment. Access must be denied by default unless authenticated and every layer of the access must be secure by design.

Says Vijay Anand of CorroHealth,“A framework is a necessary first step to design a secure enterprise. Once the framework in place, risk mitigation strategies can be designed to protect access by enabling role and identity-based identity access, continuous monitoring tools that can detect unauthorized access and raise alerts in case intrusion is detected while also taking auto-remediation measures to deny unauthorized access.”

Redefining a Hybrid Workplace

REMOTE WORK AND COLLABORATION // FEATURE STORY

As the workplace shifts between home and office, business leaders and managers must undergo a cultural shift to empowering employees on the principle of trust. There is a tendency to doubt employee productivity when they work remotely, yet surveys have affirmed an increase rise in individual and team productivity during remote work. The Gartner report finds that radical flexibility drives high employee performance wherein productivity metrics is not monitored but performance is measured by outcomes.

To usher in a hybrid workplace, performance must shift from being activity based to measuring work outcomes. Goal setting must be cadenced, agile and backed by a dynamic assessment methodology wherein goals are aligned with common objectives and employees must be empowered to drive actions that are aligned to the organizational goals.

Speaking about the global practices at Novartis, Amitabh Mishra, CIO & Analytics Executive, at Novartis, USA, says that there is a need to balance the synchronous and asynchronous work of employees. Synchronous work is defined as that which is done by employees together at a same time, usually in an office environment.

But pandemic-induced virtual workplace forced people to modify how, where, and when they work. “We have to find a way to map the synchronous and asynchronous work and find a balance. Gather says innovation gets a boost when working in a synchronous mode, when people are sharing ideas and collaborating in a physical environment. Gartner also mentions that asynchronous working and thinking is a crucial component in innovative thinking, a balance between the two modes is absolutely essential to maximize productivity.”

During the pandemic as organizational leaders were striving to find that balance, many experienced meeting fatigues. Many organizations responded by restricting virtual meetings on a need basis. At Novartis this practiced was pushed from the top and leaders and managers became role models to demonstrate use cases where virtual meetings can be minimized and where it can be employed as an essential tool to boost productivity.

Subhamoy Chakraborti, CIO, ABP Pvt Ltd says that the time has come for IT and HR to work in close collaboration to redefine the needs of the workplace. For instance, there is an urgent need to redefine workplace productivity taking into account the hybrid environment wherein work is location-agnostic and therefore measures must be outcome based. IT must be a facilitator in helping employees achieve those outcomes with tools and enabling a secure and virtual environment. At the same time, with increased automation taking over

DR. MAKARAND SAWANT SENIOR GENERAL MANAGER IT, DEEPAK FERTILIZERS AND PETROCHEMICALS

Pandemic has created new workplace challenges to ensure employee health and safety. pWe re also improving employee productivity with more technology capabilities.

JAYAPRAKASH CHINNAMUTHU DIRECTOR, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CRESTRON INDIA.

The transition from home to work place is not easy platform providers

re rolling out lot of new tools and features. It’s a continuous evolution and we are all learning with the new reality.

many processes, HR and IT need to work closely to take into account the productivity contributions of humans and as well machines which together deliver outcomes.

Working Towards a Hybrid Future Going back to the old routine of a full-time office environment is unlikely to happen in most organizations. Office space is no longer restricted to the physical space and leadership must accept a hybrid working environment to design new strategies and equip employees with the best

technologies to facilitate location-agnostic performance outcomes.

New approaches must be underscored with empathy and understanding to build a futuristic work culture. Employee expectations have changed radically and leading organizations are not only recognizing the “everywhere enterprise” as a new reality but actively hold it as a vision to attract the best and diverse talent base while equipping employees to enhance productivity.

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ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 25

PERSPECTIVE // TATA TELE

In 2022

NEXT-GEN TECHNOLOGIES

- IOT, CLOUD, AI, ML

WILL DRIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

What is the overall service portfolio and key product offering of TTBS? As India’s leading B2B brand of digital connectivity, collaboration and communication solutions, Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) enables digital transformation for businesses. We provide businesses with smart solutions to develop better digital capabilities, build resilience and operational efficiencies across their value chain to make them future ready. TTBS has an extensive, high quality and robust wireline network and offers a large portfolio of solutions and services including Digital Connectivity, Cloud & SaaS, Collaboration, IoT, Marketing & Cyber Security.

Our company has expertise in both digital and connectivity space which enables us to take end-to-end ownership of the entire solution, be it devices, applications, or connectivity. These solutions appropriately address the need for reliable connectivity, enterprise grade security, flexibility and scalability in a distributed working environment that we operate in today. Thus, enabling businesses to collaborate effectively while serving their customers with enhanced efficiency.

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What is your prime strategy to help enterprises go digital?

Enterprises today understand that orchestrating their digital transformation efforts will not only help them stay ahead but also build the flexibility and resilience to address any future uncertainties.

We have been working with enterprises across the country to successfully deliver digital ecosystems that provide robust connectivity, greater cyber security and end-to-end IoT solutions.

With our industry first offerings and deep understanding of the SME sector, we drive our digital services around the following enablers.

• One-stop-shop for all ICT needs - Our portfolio of smart and intelligent solutions provides a range of products under Connectivity, Security, Cloud & Saas, Marketing and IOT to help companies re-imagine their digital infrastructure.

• Simple plug & play solutions – All of our solutions are designed to be easy to deploy, customised and comprehensive for diverse and evolving business needs.

• Best-in-class partnerships – Our wide network of partners hand hold and provide all the support necessary to guide a company’s

transformation journey.

• Cutting edge innovations - We bring award winning, disruptive technologies to enable and support growth at every stage.

All of these enablers when combined with our unwavering focus on customer-centricity has helped us deliver game changing, digitally transformative solutions.

TTBS has launched a slew of new solutions recently, please elaborate the thought behind these?

The pandemic has accelerated digital adoption across industries. While enterprises have realised the significance of digital solutions for survival and growth, the onus lies with digital tech companies like us to develop relevant solutions to support businesses in their transformation journey.

At TTBS, we are enabling our customers to harness the power of digital technologies and build a more connected and secure future. For many businesses, especially small and medium businesses (SMBs), lack of knowledge and resources remains a crucial problem when it

TATA TELE // PERSPECTIVE

VISHAL RALLY

SR. VICE PRESIDENT (PRODUCT & MARKETING) TATA TELE BUSINESS SERVICES (TTBS)

“At TTBS, our overall market strategy is to accelerate the adoption of digital solutions by businesses aspiring to Do Big.”

comes to taking care of IT and security woes. Our overall market strategy has been to accelerate the adoption of digital solutions by businesses aspiring to Do Big. We are committed to democratize technology, so that any business irrespective of its size can become digitally agile with our smart and affordable solutions which is backed by our highly acclaimed 24*7 services and support.

TTBS has strengthened its portfolio of enterprise grade solutions with products like: a) Smartflo: is an ultra-flexible, advanced cloud communication suite that ensures smart and intelligent business communication anytime and anywhere. Smartflo offers a range of solutions that include Hosted Call Center, Outbound Marketing Solutions, Hosted Call Connect, Multi-level IVR, Missed Call Solutions & Click2Call Services.

b) SD-WAN iFLX: an advanced networking solution with intelligent and flexible networking capabilities that help businesses accelerate their digital transformation. It provides companies operational simplicity, application-level prioritization and visibility, integrated security, enhanced overall business application environment and resilience at an affordable price point. c) Smart Internet: Industry’s first smart internet leased line suite combining high speed internet with cloud-based security and greater control at an optimized cost. The Smart Internet offering is a state-of-the-art bundled solution which helps enterprises get robust connectivity, security, manageability, and clear visibility of its users and network at an affordable cost. d) Ultra-Lola 3.0: This is a technologically superior point-to-point offering, with latency in

microseconds, which enables brokerage/BFSI companies to stay securely linked to process market data in real-time. As a tailor-made product for BFSI it is equipped to change the trading game with less than 200 microseconds latency to achieve maximised profitability. e) EZ Cloud Connect, is an all-in-one bundled solution which comes with an enterprise grade point to point connectivity, X-Connect and a Cloud Port access that will be configured (according to customer needs) with the Cloud Service Providers (CSP) that they choose. This solution enables ease across 4 dimensions i.e., it is easy on pocket, it is easy to scale, it is easy to manage and ultimately it provides easy security and protection.

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PERSPECTIVE // TATA TELE

Industry 4.0 has already started influencing sectors like manufacturing, supply- chain, construction and more. How is TTBS geared up to help businesses?

Industry 4.0 is gaining tremendous popularity due to rapid improvements made in the digital capabilities in the last few decades. The gap between the virtual and real world has been bridged by advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and others so as to create an interoperable platform between cyber ecosystem and actual physical operations. Smart factory is a core, fundamental aspect of modern manufacturing. Being equipped with interconnected smart assets and systems, its primary function lies in running efficient, secure, and reliable production processes. This is then combined with continuous optimization and flexible adaption to changing conditions in real time. Connectivity, real-time configuration, and automation are the essence of a smart factory. At TTBS, we are helping manufacturing and supply chain firms to develop high-scale automation, easy monitoring, operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness with our smart collaboration and connectivity solutions like Smart Internet, Smartflo, Cyber security solutions, SD-WAN iFlx, etc.

Can you share some insights on how Smartflo is helping enterprises in their cloud communication?

Smartflo is an award- winning, futuristic cloud communication suite that offers a sophisticated convergence of digital connectivity, business intelligence and productivity. It enables businesses to strengthen engagement with customers through seamless communication – anytime, anywhere. The setup is quick with no CapEx investment and comes with an uptime guarantee of 99.5% backed by 24*7 service and support capabilities, ensuring uninterrupted business continuity. Smartflo has been adopted by a variety of businesses across industry verticals like BFSI, IT/ITES, Manufacturing, Education, Fintech, Logistics, E-commerce and is helping them boost their customer experience. For instance, we have partnered with Mehsana Dudhsagar dairy, where Smartflo is helping farmers get access to the network of veterinary doctors to seek advice on their livestock health. Similarly, one of the leading education coaching companies, Vidyamandir classes is using Smartflo to enhance contact center reach out to their students.

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How is TTBS addressing the growing demand of integrated cybersecurity solutions across multiple industries?

Cyber-attacks like phishing, ransomware etc., have become more far more pervasive and sophisticated especially during the pandemic. This has had a profound impact on a company’s financials, reputation and sustainability. The large number of endpoints and rising cyber- attacks have made it imperative for enterprises to re-assess their digital preparedness and improve the security of their remote users, devices and critical data associated with them. Enterprises are transitioning beyond basic cyber hygiene to keep sensitive information safe. TTBS enlists tailored cyber security solutions for various industries, explaining how each aligns with different business requirements. We have also strengthened our cyber security portfolio to provide a world-class Cloud Content Security Platform (CCSP) that offers email security, web security, next-generation firewall, endpoint security and multi-factor authentication (MFA) security services. Our enterprise customers can now have easy access to a comprehensive, security that is robust, scalable and can be rapidly deployed at an affordable cost.

How do you see the unified communication space shaping up?

How is the TTBS and Zoom partnership unfolding?

Business communications went into full-digital mode owing to the pandemic. The situation necessitated innovation in communication and collaboration which led to solutions that are robust, secure, and reliable to serve as a proxy for real-life interactions. The fundamental idea behind TTBS partnership with Zoom is to offer an intuitive, scalable, and secure unified communications solution to enterprises. This partnership will enable businesses to have access to comprehensive conference services such as Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars and Zoom Rooms on our state-of the-art, high-capacity digital connectivity network. Businesses can use our bespoke Zoom customization that integrates with their existing solutions, helps keep tabs on all client-facing conversations and bolsters security.

The platform provides a host of unique features like live video, streaming of video webinars for up to 50,000 viewers, including one click access, video, voice, content sharing, recording, virtual backgrounds, company branding, multi-layer security, and meeting participation of up to 1000

people from locations across the globe, making communication more interactive and engaging.

How is TTBS Smart Internet going to help enterprises?

Businesses need robust, seamless, and secure connectivity to communicate and transact over the internet. Having basic connectivity is no longer an option as vanilla ILL services do not extend beyond connectivity, which leaves the business owner to contend with problems such as usage visibility, usage control, security, application maintenance, among others. Smart Internet has been developed with an objective to minimize cyber-attacks encountered by businesses especially SMBs and provide them with seamless connectivity and advanced security at an affordable price. With Smart Internet, businesses can now easily access bandwidth-heavy applications on our highly secure and high-performance network with real time usage control and manageability to enhance their productivity.

How are you supporting your channel network? Do you plan to expand your business footprints?

We have one of the largest channel network to support customers in their decisions of adopting the right technology. Our channel partners range from pure telecom partners, system integrators, data security experts, software selling partners and even non-ICT partners who have good reach across customer segments. We continue to enhance our channel network in every part of the addressable market. We are continually empowering and upskilling our partners under our ‘Certified Solution Partner’ program to enhance their capability as an ICT solution provider.

What are TTBS initiatives to drive innovation post pandemic?

Enterprises are now rapidly adopting next gen technologies to automate their business processes, build resilience and acclimatise for any future disruption. For the last two decades, our deep customer engagements have helped us to develop solutions that would enable enterprises to compete and win in their respective business segments.

In the pandemic, many SMEs adopted the hybrid work model with a sizeable staff working remotely. To ensure uninterrupted flow of business communication, anytime, anywhere, we launched Smartflo, an ultra-flexible and advanced cloud communication solution suite. Essentially,

TATA TELE // PERSPECTIVE

o Continued Acceleration of Digital Transformation  For any business to grow in the future, technology and sustainability will be at the core of their functioning. Over the last year, most of the enterprises, either big or small, have moved ahead on their digital transformation curve and accepted digital platforms as a viable way of doing businesses.

o Continued Pivot towards Anytime, Anywhere Economy with Cloud  Cloud will continue to be the backbone for all the transformational technologies. Cloud platforms can help deploy new digital customer experiences in days rather than months and can support analytics that would be simply impossible with traditional technology platforms.  Modern businesses aiming to be digital-first organizations, require cloud solutions that help in enterprise applications such as CRM, analytics, communications etc. Enterprise-wide cloud migration strategy will be at the forefront to drive efficiency across processes, cost optimisation and align with their future growth blueprints.

o Zero Trust Will Play a Larger Role in Cyber Security  There will be a shift from traditional cyber security practices that focus on a “castle and moat” model, where security protocols concentrate on keeping threats out to zero-trust security model which restricts network access to only those individuals who need it. This model assumes risk can come from anywhere and limits possibility of unauthorised movement across networks.  Businesses will continue to invest in making their processes secure through comprehensive security portfolio comprising of email security, endpoint security, web security, virtual firewall, and multifactor authentication.  Hyper automation with AI, ML and IoT will enhance the approach to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. It will enable scalability, remote operation, and business model disruption.

it allows employees, working in office or remotely, to access centralised resources in a secure manner.

We have also partnered with Zoom Video Communications to provide video communication services to our customers.

Our SmartOffice® solution is a complete officein-a-box solution, which became highly relevant during the pandemic. It is an attempt to create an office IT suite that will enable our customers to avail of services like voice, enterprise data connectivity, and productivity applications as an add-on feature.

Our product innovations have been widely recognized in the industry, winning us awards

like, CII Customer Obsession Award, Inn-Tech 2021 Award for Smartflo, CIO Select Awards for Smartflo, Product Innovation Award for SmartOffice® and more. At TTBS, we strongly believe that customization leads to innovation at a deeper level and provides higher value.

We have introduced ‘Customer Experience Platform (CEP)’; industry’s first highly engaging, innovative and integrated platform to bring the product experience closer to the customers, based on their availability and comfort. Customer Experience Portal lets customers understand and experience how our products and solutions can enable them to build digital capabilities. It serves

as a one-stop digital guide for customers to better experience TTBS products and make speedy and informed decisions.

At TTBS, we will continue to play the role of technology enabler to SMBs and will further strengthen our portfolio of services especially in the areas of SaaS, IaaS, IOT and Cloud. We will continue to invest in rolling out a high capacity, high resilience fiber network and deploying the latest IT tools and bespoke business applications for our enterprise customers enabling them to grow and Do Big.

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SPECIAL STORY // HEATHCARE TRANSFORMATION

HEATHCARE TRANSFORMATION

RE-INVENTING INDIAN HEALTHCARE SERVICES WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Even as Covid-19 lockdown was imposed across the country, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare launched eSanjeevaniOPD with a current network serving around 75,000 patients daily and hosting 439 onlineOPDs—43 are general OPDs and 396 are specialty and super-specialty OPDs. The National Telemedicine Service has conducted more than 1 crore tele-consultations across India by August 2021.

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Indian healthcare delivery is at a cusp of re-invention as it recovers from the ravages of Covid pandemic. At the same time, the healthcare service sector is looking into the future by leveraging digital technologies to launch new modes of service delivery. The technology lever has become a crucial hinge to deliver greater stakeholder value in terms of access to healthcare facilities and better quality of services at affordable rates and in an equitable manner to all strata of society.

Delivering healthcare services to more than 1.4 billion people in the country has unique challenges. The doctor-to-patient ratio is abysmally low at 0.7 doctors per 1,000 people compared to the World Health Organisation recommendation of 1 doctor per 1,000 people.

According to a report by the United Nations, 75% of all healthcare infrastructure including medical specialists and doctors are concentrated in urban areas where only 27% of the population live. The imperative to improve efficiencies in the delivery system is due to the lopsided healthcare facilities with only five doctors per 100,000 patients in rural areas, against 10,000 patients in urban areas.

Scaling up the country’s healthcare system is

HEATHCARE TRANSFORMATION // SPECIAL STORY

now a top priority of the Indian government, reflected in the budget where allocation for health was increased to Rs 2,23,846 crore in 2021-22, a 137% increase over last year. The country’s doctorto-patient ratio needs to be doubled for doctors with three times as many nurses and five times the current paramedics. But developing this much manpower is a slow and long-drawn process and only innovative technology intervention can help to meet these goals rapidly.

Given the scale of death and suffering Covid-19 caused to the population, there is an urgent need to radically strengthen the healthcare delivery system. In addition to ramping up preparedness for another wave of pandemic, the country also has a burden of caring for patients with non-communicable diseases (NCD). Nearly 5.8 million people die of NCDs—heart and lung diseases, stroke, cancer and diabetes—every year and the rising NCD burden is estimated to cost India USD 4.58 trillion by 2030. Currently there are around 60 million diabetics, which is expected to reach 90 million by 2025, while every fourth individual above 18 years has hypertension.

Hospitals and healthcare givers are ramping up

technology adoption to care for India’s diseased population. The Indian health-tech market is growing at a 39 percent CAGR to reach US$5 billion by 2023, according to IAMAI-Praxis report titled HealthTech Predictions 2021. The report pointed out that the health technology market which currently stands at $1.9 billion is only 1 percent of the Indian healthcare market.

Covid accelerating digital adoption While the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak exposed the gaps in the healthcare system it also accelerated acceptance of digital technologies and an opportunity to plug the gaps with technology.

Post pandemic, the role of technology in accelerating transformation has become increasingly evident as digital begins to reshape the care and delivery systems disrupting traditional methods.

At the same time there is a clear shift amongst stakeholders towards preventive care as Covid-19 has triggered long-term changes in people’s attitudes towards personal health and hygiene to consciously embrace a healthy lifestyle with regular fitness and nutrition along with an awareness for regular health check-ups and ensure health

insurance cover.

Arun Goyal CIO at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital’s says that digital transformation in healthcare rests on four pillars. This includes an intent to promote health wellness; enhance patient care and experience; have a secure data-driven eco-system and connect healthcare data across the country.

These evolving sentiments are evident in findings of the IAMAI-Praxis report which finds there is increasing acceptance of digital healthcare amongst users and growing familiarity with digital methods amongst healthcare workers which is triggering health-tech growth. Covid-19 also provided the much-needed push for customer adoption by two to three times accelerating the current state of adoption by four to five years. There was exponential increase in online consultations, e-pharmacy services, homecare services, and e-diagnostics. Even hospitals started redesigning the strategy and increased the focus to acquire patients through online channels.

Globally too, the healthcare industry has learnt that digital technology is integral to caregiving and has continued its investment in technology.

More healthcare givers are adopting Cloud MARCH 2022

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SPECIAL STORY // HEATHCARE TRANSFORMATION

according to Accenture’s Digital Health Technology Vision 2021 which surveyed around 400 healthcare executives across six countries. For instance, 66% of healthcare executives say they will be in the Cloud within the next year and 96% within three years.

The Accenture survey finds that Covid pandemic accelerated digital transformation in healthcare at speed and at scale with 81% of respondents agreeing to the accelerated pace of digital transformation. For instance, in just a few weeks at the beginning of the pandemic, the UK’s National Health Service rolled out Microsoft Teams to 1.2 million employees to communicate internally and with patients at a distance. Overnight, the traditional health organizations pulled down the walls and care at a distance became the norm.

More healthcare organizations are recognizing that every business must embrace digital and that technology has been a profound enabler in delivering services including diagnosis, investigations, treatment, documentation, information retrieval, access to state-of-the-art knowledge, medical instrumentation, teaching, research and more.

Government Push on Digital Healthcare Another key factor triggering digital healthcare delivery is the government push by promoting telemedicine and creating digital healthcare backbone through the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM).

Under the NDHM every citizen will now get a digital health ID and their health record will be digitally protected. This also emanates from the Government’s vision to provide affordable healthcare for all citizens envisaged in the Nation Health Policy 2017. In September 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission which is aimed at connecting the digital health solutions of hospitals across the country and every citizen will get a digital health ID and their health record will be digitally protected. According to published records in May 2021, nearly 11.9 lakh health IDs have been generated and 3,106 doctors and 1490 facilities have registered on the platform.

Telemedicine has become remarkably popular since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even as the country-wide lockdown struck, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare launched eSanjeevaniOPD, aimed at facilitating online consultation during the pandemic. eSanjeevani has rapidly become the country largest telemedicine service, widely adopted by patients, doctors and specialists across the country. The National Telemedicine Service has conducted more than 1 crore tele-consultations across India by August 2021 and is currently serving around 75,000 32 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

MARCH 2022

DR. MANSUKH MANDAVIYA MINISTER OF HEALTH AND FAMILY WELFARE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

patients on daily basis, hosting 439 onlineOPDs, 43 of which are general OPDs and 396 are specialty and super-specialty OPDs. CIO of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Arun Goyal says, “Telemedicine enables us to extend medical care to people in remote areas and meet with the shortfall in specialized care, such as radiology consultations which are highly specialized and can be delivered via tele-consultations.”

Digital Adoption in Private Hospitals Digital transformation initiatives in private sector hospitals had been gathering momentum when Covid struck. This is evident in a 2019 report by Royal Philips which mapped 15-country Future Health Index (FHI) wherein India was leading in the adoption of digital health technology with 76% of healthcare professionals in the country using digital health records (DHRs). India also meets the 15-country average in the usage of artificial intelligence (AI) within healthcare at 46%. The study found that the experience improves significantly when Indian healthcare professionals are supported by digital technology and a majority of Indian healthcare professionals who use DHRs report a positive impact on the quality of care, professional satisfaction, and patient outcomes.

It was due to the ongoing digitalization initiatives at large hospitals including Manipal Group, HCG Cancer Hospital, Medicity, Hospitals and Apollo Hospitals facilitated continuity in the delivery of care with minimum disruption. For instance, Bangalore-based HCG hospitals which focuses on delivering cancer care had moved its ERP and Hospital Management System across 25 hospitals in the Cloud just prior to the pandemic and this equipped the hospital to put in place systems within a week to deliver remote consultation to cancer patients during the pandemic.

Many hospitals focused on re-prioritizing goals from datacenter consolidation and modernization efforts to collaboration, remote consultations and ensuring IT security. Healthcare providers responded by adopting telemedicine, collaboration platforms and mobile apps to deliver acute, chronic, primary and specialty care while minimizing exposure to the virus.

Telemedicine in the private sector received a major boost when the government provided guidelines for telemedicine practices during the Covid lockdown. Apollo TeleHealth Foundation

had reportedly seen a 300% growth for its services during the lockdown. Facilitated by its One Apollo system which comprises 20 million patient data, Apollo Hospitals uses its telemedicine platform to deliver continuous care to transplant patients and those suffering from cancer, diabetics and hypertension.

Traditionally healthcare sector is a ‘high touch’ industry segment where face to face consultation is preferred both by doctors and patients.

However, the lockdown ushered in greater acceptance of new modes of engagement as care and supervision had to continue and healthcare providers also evolved to find new ways of triaging, evaluation and caring that do not rely only on in-person services.

Arun Goyal, CIO at Sir Ganga Ram Hospitals, says the foundation of IT strategy in hospitals should be guided by patient convenience. “The technology architecture should be designed in a manner that the patient whether at home or at the hospital is able to access the patient record easily and consultation can be delivered digitally or face to face. Data interoperability across hospitals, clinics and diagnostics centers are crucial in this regard.”

Both patients and doctors have become adept at leveraging digital technologies. Manipal Hospitals rapidly developed and launched a mobile app during the pandemic which is integrated with the HIS system to enable doctors to deliver remote consultation. Patient data is captured electronically at the point of care and uploaded to the corporate data centre and doctors can access patient records and monitor patients remotely.

Patients are able to access the hospital system and book appointments, take consultation and order medicines from the app which are delivered to the patient at home. Arun Goyal cautions that “while ensuring patient convenience, we must ensure patient data privacy in line with the Digital Health Mission guidelines and other regulatory compliance.”

The new wave of digital adoption has enabled

HEATHCARE TRANSFORMATION // SPECIAL STORY

ARUN GOYAL

DR. SUSHIL MEHER

CIO, SIR GANGA RAM HOSPITAL

HEAD-IT, AIIMS

“Telemedicine enables us to extend medical care to people in remote areas and meet with

“The National Health Policy 2017 (NHP 2017) envisages the goal of attainment of the highest

the shortfall in specialized care, such as radiology consultations which are highly specialized and can be delivered via tele-consultations.”

Manipal Hospitals to even launch some new virtual initiatives such as accessing IBM Watson for Oncology wherein patients can get a second opinion on the line of cancer treatment. Similarly, HCG Hospitals has partnered with Microsoft to deploy Hololens to deliver cutting-edge cancer care and research by facilitating virtual tumor boards for research discussions, teleportation work and remote-assisted surgeries.

Medanta has an integrated telemedicine app—which works across multiple platforms— through which patients can book consultations, receive prescriptions and patient records are stored in the hospital system. Integrated across departments, doctors access patient records for consultations and radiologists file reports online remotely.

The Outlook The Covid-19 pandemic has provided a solid boost to health-tech adoption in the country. This is evident on many fronts—the E-pharmacy segment witnessed a 200 percent increase in 2020 and its adoption has increased by more than 2x post-COVID. The number of teleconsultations increased by 300 percent in 2020 and about 80 percent of the patients were first-time users. India’s e-diagnostics market stood at US$ 0.07 billion in 2020, and is growing at a CAGR of 66 percent.

level of health and well-being for ALL at ALL ages, through increasing access, improving quality and lowering the cost of healthcare delivery. To achieve this a Committee constituted by the Health Ministry to create an implementation framework for the National Health Stack (NHS) proposed by NITI Aayog, has come up with the National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB) Applications & Digital Services initiative of GOI in April 2019. The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is the new advancement towards digitalization of health care industry in our country.”

These trends are propelled by a need to ensure continuous care to patients, prioritizing patient convenience and access to care. The tone for change has been set by the Government with many patient-friendly announcements and measures. This has ensured that health care providers view digital transformation as a means to become more patient-friendly while adapting the internal processes, operations and culture to facilitate the adoption of technology. It is heartening that much of the change is driven to benefit the patient and when combined with a well-defined strategy with persistent efforts to improve, it will create a ground swell of momentum to deliver transformational impact in health care delivery in the country.

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BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Q&A // HEALTHCARE

What are the building blocks of digital transformation in healthcare?

Digital transformation is impacting patients experience and convenience across healthcare industries. However, digital transformation in healthcare still needs to pace up as it is the building block of a patient-centric approach to healthcare. COVID-19 highlighted challenges of the healthcare industry related to the quality, access, and efficiency of our current healthcare system, which further accentuates a low level of digital maturity and preparedness.

1. Telemedicine One of the most prominent technologies in healthcare trends is the growth of virtual doctor visits. These allow patients to meet with their doctors via video chat rather than going to the hospital / clinic in person. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual visits, with doctors seeing more patients using telehealth than they did pre-COVID-19. This practice is more convenient to all as it saves time for both doctor as well as patient and it is available 24 x 7. Patient can seek doctor consultation at anytime which helps in reducing the anxiety and fear in patient mind.

The virtual diagnosis of the patient, online prescription of medicines, and remote care for patients via telemedicine is not only enabling the three A’s of Affordable, Accredited, and Accessible healthcare but also paving the way for the 6 P’s of healthcare i.e. – Personal, Primary, Preventive, Precision, Proactive and Predictive. Telemedicine made it possible where patient could easily reach to doctors and hospitals they could earmark from their comfort zones on a click.

Telemedicine could easily break the language barrier where patient were able to access consultations in language of their choice along with geographic locations which resulted in bridging the trust to a large extent.

2. Electronic Health Records (EHR) Electronic health records (EHR) is improving every aspect of healthcare industry. Aside from making the lives of healthcare providers easier, they improve patient care and safety as well. i. EHRs Improve Portability and Sharing: EHRs provide a means for patients to share their records with all their doctors and make sure the information is up to date. EHRs ensure that every provider in the patient’s chain of care understands which medications they are taking, and any other treatment plans they may be using. ii. Improved Decision Making: When providers are equipped with complete patient health information, healthcare providers can more easily arrive at diagnosis and line of treatment. iii. Reducing Workloads: Proper training 34 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

MARCH 2022

D R

S U S H I L

M E H E R

HEAD-IT, AIIMS

“The National Health Policy 2017 (NHP 2017) envisages the goal of attainment of the highest level of health and well-being for ALL at ALL ages, through increasing access, improving quality and lowering the cost of healthcare delivery.”

and design make the EHR fit into your current workflow. Again, EHRs improve productivity and reduce the time providers have to spend on each patient. iv. EHRs Help Improve Care Coordination: Care teams are improving healthcare on their own. Physicians, nurses, specialists, and other staff come together as a unit to care for all of the patient’s needs. v. EHRs Get Patients Involved in Their Care: EHR-enabled patient portals provide patients with access to important healthcare information, such as vaccination history, lab and other diagnostic test results, medications and diagnosis, and more. Instead of asking for a printed version which requires a trip back to the provider’s practice, patients can simply log in to the patient portal for easy access to the information they

need.

3. Patient Portals Another leading technology in healthcare trends is patient portals. These are platforms with which patients can access their health records, schedule appointments, message their doctors, and more.

The accessibility of electronic health records to the patients all the times is reducing their apprehension and saving their time. A survey of health systems found that patient portals one of their primary technologies for engaging patients.

Being everything available on the digital platform it is convenient for the patient to take second opinion.

4. Virtual Reality (VR) for Medical Education

HEALTHCARE // Q&A

HEALTHCARE

TRANSFORMATION IN HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY TO GAIN MOMENTUM NOW National Health Stack (NHS) proposed by NITI Aayog has come up with the National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB) Applications & Digital Services initiative of GOI in April 2019. The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is the new advancement towards digitalization of health care industry in our country.

Virtual reality makes for more effective theoretical learning of medical students and starting-out healthcare professionals. With VR, learners can inspect 3D medical models in the details, which can’t be reproduced in physical models, or learn to communicate with AI-controlled virtual patients, whose attitude and behaviour can be easily altered for different learning purposes (e.g., communication with patients who are non-native English speakers. i.

VR for Medical Training ii.

VR for Surgery iii.

VR for Pain Management iv.

VR for Rehabilitation v.

VR for Physical Therapy vi.

VR for Stroke Rehabilitation 5. Creation of Database All the big healthcare organizations and institutions are working on collection of patients records and making a database for the same.

While patient portals help in gathering data on the patient end, many hospitals are also working on aggregating back-end data. Currently, doctors’ offices have data coming in from a wide variety of sources, including: • Patient-provided data • Internal electronic health records • External electronic health records (such as from outside specialists or urgent-care centers) • Lab results • Imaging • Insurance claims • Data from medical devices • Pharmacy data 6. AI Screening One other growing trend for technology and healthcare is the use of artificial intelligence.

Hospital systems have adopted automated voice systems and chatbots to screen patients and reduce the load for patient support staff. This is very helpful in reducing crowding in hospital premises and guiding patients about necessary precautions and instructions required to follow for the particular disease and consequently saving time for everyone.

AI development continues to support doctors, nurses and hospitals with automating tasks and assisting in patient care. i.

Improving accuracy ii.

Precise diagnosis iii.

Remote treatment iv.

Augmenting human abilities v.

Supporting mental health and daily tasks 7. Interoperability Interoperability in healthcare information systems creates a unified environment for health data. It can be used at a local or even national level to step up the quality of care and it can yield millions in savings. Healthcare interoperability has a lot to offer for all stakeholders. Most importantly, it’s a game-changer for the care you deliver and your overall efficiency.

Types of Interoperability: i.

Foundational interoperability ii.

Structural interoperability iii.

Semantic interoperability iv.

Organizational interoperability 8. Internet of Things (IoT) Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices have made remote monitoring in the healthcare sector possible, unleashing the potential to keep patients safe and healthy, and empowering physicians to deliver superlative care. It has also increased

patient engagement and satisfaction as interactions with doctors have become easier and more efficient. Furthermore, remote monitoring of patient’s health helps in reducing the length of hospital stay and prevents re-admissions. IoT also has a major impact on reducing healthcare costs significantly and improving treatment outcomes.

IoT is undoubtedly transforming the healthcare industry by redefining the space of devices and people interaction in delivering healthcare solutions. IoT has applications in healthcare that benefit patients, families, physicians, hospitals and insurance companies.

9. Cloud Computing Using cloud computing in healthcare is helpful in many areas, such as making the exchange of medical records easier and safer, automating accounting . The key advantages of cloud computing in healthcare are as follows: i.

Increased security ii.

Reduced costs iii.

Increased scalability iv.

Accessible and safe document flow v.

Real-time automated analytics based on artificial intelligence routines and machine learning algorithms 10. COVID-19 impact and procedures adopted by the Government Entire world has seen the impact of Covid -19 Pandemic which has shaken the entire healthcare infrastructure globally. This pandemic accelerated the adoption of digitalization among healthcare providers. Various new apps were created to inform the larger population about the disease and preventive measures to be taken. Telemedicine also plays a vital role to take feedback of patients health who are suffering from mild to moderate illness and staying in home isolation.

After discharge also patients are being regularly monitored about their health status. Cowin app launched by the Government is one of the best example of digitalization of health industry in India.

11. Mobile health apps Mobile healthcare apps are revolutionizing the healthcare ecosystem by improving communication, efficiency, and quality of the service. Healthcare apps are a blessing to the medical industry.

Not only doctors and patients, but hospital staff and pharmacists can also reap the benefits of this technological advancement . The number of people using smartphones is increasing day by day. This rapid adoption of smartphones has fueled the mobile healthcare.

Advantage of custom mobile healthcare apps: i.

Facilitate Immediate Access MARCH 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 35

Q&A // HEALTHCARE

ii.

Efficient Handling of Emergency Cases iii.

Improved Coordination iv.

Easy Integration with Wearables for Data Collection What is the scope and growth of telemedicine in India?

World Health Organization (WHO) has defined telemedicine as, “the delivery of healthcare services, where distance is a critical factor, by all healthcare professionals using information and communication technologies for the exchange of valid information for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease and injuries, research and evaluation, and for the continuing education of healthcare providers, all in the interests of advancing the health of individuals and their communities.” The word “telemedicine” literally translates to ‘healing at a distance’.

The use of telemedicine technology allows healthcare to become more accessible, efficient, and convenient for the patient. In the current situation, however, the idea of healthcare going digital seems more attractive than ever. Online consultations can prove to be a major relief for healthcare workers. The results are being seen globally too.

Over the past years, as the use of wireless broadband technology has become more advanced and cell phone and internet use has become nearly ubiquitous. Patient education with images and videos, transfer of medical images like X-rays and scans, and real-time audio and video consultations became a reality. Improvement in internet infrastructure such as bandwidth communication speeds, information storage databases, web service backups, standard formats for data transmission, encryption, password protection, digitalizing information and establishment of EMRs (electronic medical records) made e-health and telemedicine stress-free and cost effective.

The modern day telemedicine uses existing computing devices belonging to the patient or physician and inexpensive, self-owned equipment like smartphone cameras, wearable biosensors, etc., for gathering clinical data which made it easier to use without special training. The recent telemedicine practices reduce travel expenses, saves time, reduces medical costs, provides easier access for the common man to specialist doctors without disrupting their daily responsibilities. It also makes the life of healthcare providers easy by decreasing the load of missed appointments and cancellations, increasing revenue and patient load and improving follow up and health outcomes.

India’s telemedicine market is growing immensely and is impacting the international economy in terms of growth rate, revenue, sale, 36 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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market share and size, showing the market size in India. India has an extensive growth as it has both rural urban population of 140 crores.

Lack of awareness and acceptance of new technology both by the public and the professionals are holding it back. Governments are now starting to take a keen interest in developing telemedicine practices resulting in a slow but steady rise in its utilization in public health. Hopefully in a few years, telemedicine practices will reach their true potential.

As a premium healthcare organization in India, how are you seeing through digital transformation in your organization?

The National Health Policy 2017 (NHP 2017) envisages the goal of attainment of the highest level of health and well-being for ALL at ALL ages, through increasing access, improving quality and lowering the cost of healthcare delivery. To achieve this a Committee constituted by the Health Ministry to create an implementation framework for the National Health Stack (NHS) proposed by NITI Aayog, has come up with the National Digital Health Blueprint (NDHB) Applications & Digital Services initiative of GOI in April 2019. The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) is the new advancement towards digitalization of health care industry in our country.

The highest priority at AIIMS has been for transformation by adopting digitalization to provide high level Health research, promoting high standard of teaching /training and provide high quality of healthcare in the entire hospital to all the patients.

AIIMS, New Delhi has adopted the digitalization in health industry before any other institute.

AIIMS is using various modules to facilitate the patient care and smooth functioning of the hospital. AIIMS is synchronized with SNOMED CT. SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine -- Clinical Terms) is a standardized, multilingual vocabulary of clinical terminology that is used by physicians and other health care providers for the electronic exchange of clinical health information.

Integration of National Death Registry of India with SNOMED CT is another step forward towards adopting digitalization at AIIMS. There are various modules which are under process and they are to be introduced soon at AIIMS: 1. Improving Patient Care & Triage using Chatbots/ Voicebots 2. IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) 3. Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)

4. Robotic process automation (RPA) 5. Block Chain 6. Cloud 7. Customer Service Bots & Fraud Detection 8. Health Monitoring What is your experience in terms of changing the patients experience through digital transformation?

Hospitals have gone through a massive digital transformation in the last decade, converting “paper” patient data to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and Electronic Health Records (EHRs) systems. This change is driven not by regulation but by the increase of consumerism in healthcare over the last two decades, reflected in the proliferation of walk-in clinics, medical apps, wellness apps and wearables, and more. This initially slow trend was tremendously accelerated in 2020 with the “digital shock” during COVID19 that reshaped expectations for both providers and patients.

Now, hospitals find themselves in the midst of another massive transformation: the digital patient experience. Patients are now increasingly receiving care—throughout the care journey—via digital platforms, whether provided by the hospital or by some other entity.

Another leading technology in healthcare trends is patient portals. These are platforms with which patients can access their health records, schedule appointments, message their doctors, and more. A survey of health systems found that patient portals one of their primary technologies for engaging patients. Being everything available on the digital platform it is convenient for the patient to take second opinion.

Patient care and experience - Patients use digital tools for physician selection, symptom checking, price information, and appointment scheduling. Several components of care coordination, post-care follow-up, interactions with physicians, and billing are also used often by patients, families, and caregivers. Most of the patients are satisfied with the current advancement as it is time saving and easily assessable. Their Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are stored in digital form and can be easily retrieved.

On digital platform patient can easily share their feedback and suggestions for the better patient care and the patient experience must become a strategic driver to give desirable results.

By adopting a consumer-first mindset, hospitals can implement high-quality, personalized end-to-end experiences that promise stronger provider-patient relationships, better health outcomes and long-term viability in an increasingly competitive market with increase patient satisfaction.

VIRSEC // GUEST COLUMN

VIRSEC

PROTECTION, NOT CURE, IS THE KEY TO FENDING OFF RANSOMWARE CRIMINALS Runtime protection, where all runtime actions are monitored, is the optimal solution for protecting your business from cybercrime, writes Danny Kim, Principal Architect at Virsec

DANNY KIM

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, VIRSEC BRIEF PROFILE After graduating with his Ph.D. in Cybersecurity from the University of Maryland, Danny looked for a company that had a disruptive approach to cybersecurity. His Ph.D. work focused on detecting malicious applications through application control-flow manipulation and machine learning. Through this work, he developed an understanding of how applications should behave. He used his knowledge to pivot from detecting malicious applications to protecting benign ones with the same technology. Danny developed Virsec’s patented application memory protection. Utilizing his academic background in security, he combines theoretical approaches with practical implementation to push Virsec’s product to the top of the security market.

Another day, another high-profile ransomware attack. That’s how the rolling news of the last year has played out as bad actors exploit new vulnerabilities in remote working infrastructures.

There were 2,084 ransomware attacks in the US in the first half of 2021, a staggering 62% increase from the same period

in 2020. And those are just the complaints that are reported to the FBI. What’s more, given its relatively low risk and high reward nature, ransomware techniques are often highly successful. With the emergence of cryptocurrencies, cyber criminals can be difficult to trace.

Since the COVID 19 pandemic, ransomware has burgeoned into a multibillion-dollar industry.

Collective global ransomware costs to businesses for 2021 were estimated to exceed $20 billion, with the average breach yielding a ransom of $4.6 million.

The truth is cybersecurity incidents involving corporate data being withheld through criminal infiltration or ransomware have been carried out for years. So much so, that any single organization is often violated more than once.

Risks at Software Runtime Ransomware attacks can be executed in a matter of seconds.

Malware varieties often gain system access though SQL injection, stealing credentials, phishing and other social engineering methods. Once inside, threat actors access data, hijack operations, deploy encryption tools, encrypt data, and, once they have the data, demand a ransom.

Such attacks do the most damage when they move from desktops to servers. Inside servers, the malicious code runs at the same time as applications, infiltrating application architecture, data sets, and complete workloads.

Enterprise applications in runtime are among the most vulnerable to the threats posed by ransomware malware. Multistep kill chains, fileless malware and remote code execution are now able to bypass conventional, signature-based, probabilistic security tools.

Focus on protection, not cure

The good news is that continuous innovation has now yielded a breakthrough solution to prevent ransomware malware from running in-memory alongside runtime applications.

Protection of runtime applications requires that every action be fully mapped and understood.

Such protective solutions should monitor every step of application execution and only permit predetermined actions. This is known as ‘deterministic protection’.

These types of innovative solutions do not permit any runtime applications that are not predetermined including malware that is loaded in-memory.

The malware routine in-memory will appear as a deviation from the concurrent runtime and will be prevented from execution.

By comparison, conventional cybersecurity tools cannot distinguish between expected and deviant behaviour. Such tools also fail to prevent ransomware because they do not have application runtime visibility.

Conventional tools often only control, protect and provide visibility before and after application runtime – and not when the application deviates from its intended performance.

This breakthrough approach protects the software workload while it is in runtime and prevents ransomware attacks on applications and workloads.

It also creates a snapshot of all critical applications, including files, scripts, binaries, container images, libraries, and only allows predetermined processes to execute.

No matter which platform is being used by applications, such as cloud, on-premises, containers, hybrid, or air-gapped, runtime application protection ensures pervasive high security levels. This type of deterministic protection promises to temper the present-day threats of ransomware, no matter what level of advanced malware sophistication is being used.

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BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Q&A // AMD

What are the key digitalisation challenges faced by SMBs and mid-market businesses? What are the priorities for SMBs as they ramp up their digital infrastructure?

The biggest hurdles hindering SMBs and midmarket businesses in their digital transformation are two-fold: (1) Building a holistic IT infrastructure, as well as (2) security solutions.

Granted, many SMBs have made the effort to elevate their pre-pandemic infrastructure and have incorporated several advanced features that have enabled a successful transition to a “work from anywhere” environment, and in bringing their services to the digital world. However, considering the fact that SMBs have had very limited time to make this shift, many businesses were forced to rush the process and opted for generic, low-cost solutions.

Now that things are relatively stable, a key digitalisation challenge faced by SMBs and mid-market businesses today is making a holistic assessment of their current infrastructure and identifying the right solutions to build the ideal infrastructure, catered to their specific business needs.

Furthermore, a comprehensive infrastructure that is specifically catered to the business’s needs will be more likely to enable agility. If there’s anything at all we have taken away from 2020 and 2021, it is this: A business that is able to be agile and adapt to rapidly evolving customer needs is a business that is in a better position to realise long-term success. In today’s incredibly dynamic business environment, SMBs are in a particularly unstable position if they do not have an IT infrastructure in place that enables organisations to pivot their practises and offerings in response to constantly changing consumer demands.

The second challenge is with regards to security solutions. As the volume and velocity of data continues to accelerate, and with the neverending/evolving cyber threats which increases the potential for financial and reputational damage, CIOs will continuously have to update their infrastructure to remain competitive.

SMBs across industries will look to priorities the development of a comprehensive IT infrastructure that is catered to their business practices and needs, as well as security solutions. These two challenges will never be one and done. Systems should be updated on an ongoing basis, within the company’s available resources. At AMD, we work closely with CIOs and our partners to address these challenges in a collaborative and sustained way to build agile and robust IT infrastructure without compromising on resilience.

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V I N A Y

S I N H A

MD - INDIA SALES, AMD

“At AMD, we work closely with CIOs and our partners to address these challenges in a collaborative and sustained way to build agile and robust IT infrastructure without compromising on resilience.”

How is AMD helping SMBs solve their data center challenges with EPYC and Ryzen Pro processors?

As mentioned above, upgrading IT infrastructure is a common challenge faced by SMBs across several industries to support the new “work from anywhere” environment. In 2021, we launched the 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processor for the data center, which demonstrated reliable execution, leadership performance and a strong and growing ecosystem. These features are crucial

in supporting a “work from anywhere” environment and solutions to some of the world’s most demanding challenges.

AMD EPYC has been thoughtfully engineered for data centers that rely on CPU performance and throughput. As the world’s highest performing server processor, the AMD EPYC 7003 Series processor is the only x86 server processor that is able to achieve a core density scaling from 8 to 64 cores. To further accelerate performance, AMD has continuously invested and innovated

AMD // Q&A

AMD

AMD EPYC HAS BEEN THOUGHTFULLY ENGINEERED FOR DATA CENTERS As industry 4.0 is influencing every sector of the industry, core remains very critical and processing power matters a lot. In this situation AMD plays an important role.

Enterprise IT World spoke to Vinay Sinha, MD-India Sales, AMD. An Excerpt. in packaging, through a multi-year, multitechnology journey. At Computex in June last year, AMD showcased the next big step for the industry – our 3D chiplet architecture for high performance computing products. We are bringing this packaging innovation to the AMD EPYC 7003 Series processor family with “Milan-X,” and a new 3D V-Cache technology design. 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology offers up to a 50% uplift compared to the original EPYC 7003 Series processors, which are already the highest performing server processor in the market today. The processors offer more differentiation and value that will translate directly to the efficiency and quality of product development.

Today, AMD EPYC is firmly established as the new standard for the modern data center, and is leading not just in the cloud, but across enterprise, commercial HPC and supercomputing. Further, with revolutionary innovations such as AMD 3D V-Cache chiplet architecture for high performance computing products, AMD processors offer more differentiation and value that will translate directly to the efficiency and quality of product development.

AMD Ryzen PRO processors for mobile are designed for enterprise businesses with up-to eight high-performance cores for premium multitasking, as well as the most modern security features to help keep data safe. AMD PRO technologies include features such as: (1) PRO security, (2) PRO manageability and (3) PRO business ready.

A perfect example of an offering that business leaders may find highly relevant in today’s hybrid working environment is the AMD Ryzen

PRO 6000 Series mobile processors. Recently announced at CES 2022, the AMD Ryzen PRO 6000 Series mobile processors bring new architecture, new features, and new experiences that accelerate productivity, enhance collaboration, and inspire creativity for professional laptop users. With AMD PRO technologies, AMD Ryzen™ 6000 Series mobile processors offer the enterprise-grade security features, manageability, and reliability that businesses and IT decisionmakers demand.

Importantly, security is, and will remain a top priority for CIOs and IT leaders, amidst today’s sophisticated cyber-attacks. A notable value proposition of both AMD EPYC and Ryzen PRO processors is the advanced security features available with these processors. Embedded in AMD 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors is AMD Infinity Guard, a modern multi-faceted approach to data center security which includes the latest advancements in AMD SEV Secure Encrypted Virtualization technologies, adding strong memory integrity protection capabilities to help prevent malicious attacks.

The same focus on security features can be found in AMD Ryzen 6000 PRO Series mobile processors, which is the very first business platform to fully support advanced Windows 11 security features with the integrated Microsoft Pluton security processor, to help improve protection across a range of scenarios that benefit everyday consumers, small businesses and large commercial enterprises in today’s context.

What are the growth opportunities AMD sees in the SMB sector?

India is home to approximately 63 million SMBs

and this segment has emerged as a key growth driver for the economy during the pandemic.

With a renewed emphasis being placed on digitalization, customer experiences and talent management in a hybrid norm, SMBs continue to ramp up on their cloud computing capabilities. In addition to cloud-based investments, spending on devices both in terms of hardware and software, will increase in the coming year. It is anticipated that continuous integration and continuous delivery in software development, adoption of automation and robust networking will become key priorities for small businesses. Further, end-to-end security, vulnerability management and threat detection will remain high on their IT agendas.

Demand from sectors such as e-commerce and telecom has bolstered the need for SMBs to reimagine their business models in order to adapt to the new normal. Moreover, owing to efforts by organizations for remote workforce enablement across the nation, there has been an increased demand for data center technologies.

What are the technology trends to look out for in 2022 in the SMB segment?

Over the last two years, cloud adoption has undoubtedly increased as businesses engaged in (DX) digital transformation as it results in flexibility, cost effective scalability, and a well-managed space in which to innovate.

While cloud computing has been on the rise for quite some time now and firms have established a reliable underlying infrastructure, our reliance on cloud computing is only going to keep increasing. In fact, according to IDC, “whole cloud” spending – total worldwide spending on cloud services - will surpass $1.3 trillion by 2025 while sustaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.9%.

CIOs should still have their eyes on cloud computing trends - strategically firm up and expand the organisation’s cloud platform to meet business demands in a more agile manner.

At AMD, we are working with our ecosystem partners to help SMBs adapt to cloud, and other complex and emerging technologies, while keeping the IT infrastructure highly efficient. As SMBs continue to modernize their data centers and adopt agile business models to make faster, data-driven decisions, enhance cybersecurity and drive impactful business outcomes, it becomes imperative for them to equip employees with the right computing capabilities going into 2022.

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GUEST COLUMN // KEYSIGHT

KEYSIGHT

THE ANATOMY OF AI Keysight Technologies has a unique perspective on technology development given its 80-year history enabling engineers to push state-of-the-art

JEFF HARRIS

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Vice President, Global Corporate and Portfolio Marketing, Keysight Technologies ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jeff Harris leads portfolio and corporate marketing for Keysight Technologies including product marketing, brand, corporate communications, in addition to all of the company’s digital marketing channels. Jeff has led the transformation of Keysight’s global brand, content strategy, and digital channel transformations creating awareness and influencing customer preference. Jeff also drives thought-leadership initiatives to surface stories of how Keysight accelerates innovation and helps customers win in their markets.

As a former product development leader for commercial and government applications at companies like ViaSat, General Atomics, and Lockheed-Martin, Jeff has led first-tomarket product introductions across radar, optics and acoustic sensors; surveillance vehicles to drones; and ultra-wideband (UWB) to mobile ad hoc network (MANET) communications.

Jeff holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from George Mason University and is an avid follower of technology, always looking for the data in marketing and measuring its impacts.

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It seems like everywhere you look you now see Artificial Intelligence (AI) touted in the unlikeliest products ranging from the advanced to the mundane. Just the thought of AI powering your products sounds impressive, so of course you want to believe the claims. However, much of the noise fails to convey what the AI does or why the manufacturer felt so confident about making the claim. The engineer in me is always curious how things are built. That’s because I hate the concept of a ‘black box’ where we aren’t supposed to understand how calculations are programmed.

So, let’s open the box and explore the anatomy of AI. To achieve an artificial intelligence, you first need two main ingredients: (1) an ability to measure some parameter with an understanding of what the measurement means and (2) the ability to learn. The first part is all about metrology, otherwise known as the scientific study of measurement. The second part is called machine learning (ML), which gives systems the ability to recognize when a measurement is different than expected and change an operation without explicitly being programmed.

Ability to Collect Data Metrology focuses on the deep understanding a particular measurement. That measurement can be as simple and distinct as voltage, ground, or temperature, or as multi-modal as the functioning of aircraft control surfaces or complex manufacturing assembly lines. n Measurement Depth: Whether you are measuring a single parameter or several, the depth your measurement precision determines the level of programmability you can create. For instance, measuring 3 Volt system to 1/10th of a volt is not as insightful as measuring to 1/1000th of a volt. n Data Feed: Measurement data is useful to an algorithm only if it’s made available in a data feed.

If, in the example above, a sensor is capable of measuring at 1/1000th but its data feed output is limited to one decimal place due to data bus limitations, that extra precision is not available to the algorithm. n Multiple Data Feeds: Whenever possible, measuring more parameters leads to better decisionmaking. For instance, if you can measure voltage to 1/1000th of a volt as well as temperature, the ability now exists to connect voltage shifts due to temperature changes.

Getting to Machine Learning The ultimate ML feeds data from multiple sources into algorithms that mimic the way that humans learn, gradually improving their accuracy. Once you have the data feeds, there are three essential building blocks to achieve ML: an algorithm to

KEYSIGHT // GUEST COLUMN

interpret the data, a table of expected results with reactive outcomes, and a feedback loop. n The Algorithm: The true ‘smarts’ of any machine learning system is its ability to take data feed inputs, run a set of calculations/instructions, and interpret the output. Interpreting means the ability to recognize whether an output calculation is within or outside the expected range and enact new commands according to that output. In the previous example, if a voltage measurement varies far outside the expected range, and the temperature is above nominal, the algorithm might activate an internal fan. n Expected Results and Reactive Outcomes: In its simplest form, expected results can be a ‘lookup’ table of combinations of data feed inputs with a series of reactive command instructions. The more comprehensive the table, the more mature and valuable the ML becomes. More interactive MLs can make changes incrementally such as changing course of a drone to avoid obstacles based on real-time sensing, which requires both continuous sensing and constant adjustment. n Feedback Loop: The final element is the feedback loop, which allows the system to verify what it did was sufficient or needs further refinement and enables it to adjust its parameters to improve future performance.

Adding multiple ML capabilities focusing on different aspects of larger systems, as well as adding more sensor data, enables machine learning at a more complex system level. Very advanced ML can add to its ‘look up tables’ as it encounters new combinations of sensor inputs, enacts variants of its reactive outcome instructions, and measures the feedback of how

sufficient the reaction performed. These become self-adjusting algorithms that derive knowledge from data to predict outcomes. And the more algorithms are trained, the more accurate the output.

Artificial Intelligence Now that you have trainable algorithms, you are most of the way towards delivering AI. This requires taking the outputs from the collection of ML engines and combining them with sufficient guidelines and iteration for the algorithm to make real-time decisions. Each time an AI algorithm processes data, iterates, and considers the iterative response with new data coming in, and uses the combination to determine its output choices, it has achieved decision-making status. This perpetual cycle enables the AI to keep learning and improving the decision quality. This entire process can be very simple, like the example of the voltage and temperature sensor loop, or it can be as complex as an attack drone’s flight control system.

The DNA Markers of AI So how can you predict how well any AI algorithm will perform? Just like in humans, you can look at its DNA markers. In its most basic form, implementing AI enables a machine to replace having a human in the decision loop by simulating how we would sense, process, and react to information and modify a workflow for a given set of conditions. At its core, you should look at three common DNA markers: 1. How good is the measurement & simulation: understand the manufacturer’s ability to

measure and if they have sufficient understanding and experience to create a digital twin of the environment.

2. Algorithms, analytics & insights: how deep the developer’s knowledge space is of the signal’s core characteristics and how that relates to expected responses will determine the depth of the ‘look-up’ table of expected results.

3. Knowledge of workflow automation: the understanding, at a system level, of how multiple iterative ML outputs could work together to optimize a desired outcome.

Therefore, the quality of an AI algorithm is a function of its: 1. Depth – of understanding of the metrology in any given area of measurement 2. Breadth – the number of technologies and standards across which they possess this depth of knowledge This brings us back to the fact that AI, when well executed, is not an overhyped emerging technology. Instead, it’s the only way engineers can manage the exponential complexity in new designs.

As futurist Gray Scott succinctly stated, “there is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.” Engineers recognize this and have started on the path of infusing ML and AI across their systems. AI starts with having smart, motivated engineers that understand measurement science, understand system behavior expectations sufficiently to create digital twins for developers, and are driven to take engineering to the next level.

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Q&A // ERIC

D R

M U K U N D

K S

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

AVP & HEAD IT, ERIC LIFESCIENCES LTD.

“The first thing in the Cloud journey is to define the exit strategy to ensure that you are not getting locked down to a particular Cloud service provider.”

We are witnessing a lot of buzz around digital transformation.

What is your take on this?

There’s a sense of myopia that is existing today around the terminology digital transformation 42 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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but digital transformation is not about just being digital but it is about transformation and what transformative changes can do to the business.

There are a couple of terminologies that people are raging about such as RPA, Intelligent RPA,

Augmented and Virtual reality, IoT, Cloud, AI and ML but then what’s going to happen is how are these technologies are going to influence the business transformation to improve your customer satisfaction and how organizations can

ERIC // Q&A

ERIC

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS ABOUT TRANSFORMING THE BUSINESS Dr. Mukund KS, is the CIO, CDO, CSO at ERIC Lifesciences is a distinguished global CIO with hands-on experience in digital transformation, infrastructure, governance and security programs. With extensive experience in the healthcare and pharmaceuticals sector, Dr Mukund has been at the helm of affairs in the transformation initiatives in his engagements. Here he speaks with us on how to navigate the pitfalls of digital transformation. become more effective and increase efficiency.

How are we tapping these technologies to map the customer and other stakeholders journeys to better understand evolving patterns and loop those insights into decision making. Organizational transformation is continuously evolving initiative.

Where does one begin the digital transformation journey, is there a step-by-step approach?

Yes, there is a step-by-step approach that organizations can take in accelerating the journey to Cloud. One of the primary models talks about three layers - your system of records, system of differentiation and your system of innovation.

Now let’s envisage a structure of your house and for the house to be built you need a strong foundation. Once you have this foundation where you can build onto the pillars and finally onto the roof. So let’s assume that the ERP is the core but if you’re running on a legacy kind of ERP, probably you may want to move to a more standard ERP like an Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP to enable your digital cores, so you will be able to build on top of that.

Having your own processes which is unique to your organization which needs to be built on top of it. For example, it could be a lead scoring model or a dynamic scoring model in terms of how do you evaluate your customers. Look at your competitors if you’re deploying a CRM, so you can do better profiling, better targeting and

segmentation of your customers. Once these pillars are erected, comes your roof or the systems of innovation where you could talk about new ideas in terms of implementing of augmented and virtual reality and how do I look at integrating IOT sensors on my manufacturing floor with the SCADA for prescriptive maintenance.

If you are talking about a step-by-step approach for innovation, you could start off from basic research to break-through innovation.

Again, Gartner is known for coining wonderful terminologies where you start with descriptive analytics go to diagnostic analytics to predictive and then prescriptive analytics. But with Cloud coming into picture, you could actually move over directly to prescriptive analytics.

How can we enable people to start working remotely?

It could be as simple as a VPN connectivity. But then that happens with enabling a lot of people to work from home, the pandora box reopens because they are going to be using unsecured Internet connecting from home. But also because at an organization you don’t have your firewall in place, you’re going to have all your relevant security policies that are going to be there, all your systems to ensure the end points are getting secured, but now you’re going to look at tunneling towards the Internet that is not going to be secure.

So how do we secure becomes the most important crux, so ensuring that you have a strong VPN mechanism in place. You could also look at

deploying a lot of endpoint security solutions, but just an endpoint security solution will not suffice, so again it becomes very important to educate the field force in terms of being safe. Educating the organization what kind of attacks can happen and how they could secure themselves by conducting mock phishing attacks to see who all would probably fall as a bait for these attacks.

Recently the pharma and the healthcare and the life sciences industry has had a lot of impact during the Covid because a lot of threat actors were targeting the industry. A Korean-based organization Strontium has also been responsible for doing some of these attacks and a lot of Indian pharmaceutical organizations falling prey to it.

What is the most important thing that CIOs and business leaders must consider while embracing the Cloud?

The first thing is to define the exit strategy to ensure that you are not getting locked down to a particular Cloud service provider. How can I ensure to be as hybrid as possible. If I could probably move workloads from AWS to say Azure, so you are not going to be residing on one particular Cloud platform but then you could always move because it is only a virtual instance.

When you are considering migration, it is also very imperative that you have reviewed the terms and conditions of the Cloud. And ensure that when you are deploying your data in the Cloud and want it back, in what form, in what format, in what frequency is the data going to be shared back to you.

The Cloud providers always say that the data is your property and you can take your data but in reality, when you try to move you are going to have a lot of challenges. Moving data into the Cloud doesn’t have a challenge but when you move data out of the cloud is going to become a challenge.

Is the cloud more secure than your own data center?

Probably depending on a lot of other factors. But then the security that the Cloud offers has always only been till the hypervisor level so whatever needs to be built above the hypervisor falls under your preview. So how do you secure the workloads in the Cloud and what security rules are being deployed becomes very important in terms of securing the workloads. And securing Cloud workloads assumes significance as you try to spread your risks by embracing a hybrid format and these are important considerations when migrating to the Cloud.

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STORY // ROBOTICS

W

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

ith demand for robots growing as companies in multiple sectors look for new ways to enhance their productivity and competitiveness post-pandemic, ABB has compiled a set of growth predictions, looking at key trends driving demand for robots in the coming year.

“The pandemic accelerated far-reaching global mega trends – from labor shortages and supply chain uncertainty, to the individualized consumer and growing pressure to operate sustainably and resiliently – leading new businesses to look to robotic automation,” says Marc Segura, ABB’s newly appointed Robotics Division President. “As technology opens new opportunities for meeting customer demands, new trends will continue to emerge that will further drive demand in areas where robots have traditionally not been used.”

Based on customer conversations, market research and a global survey of 250 companies across multiple industries, ABB has identified three key trends that will shape the demand for robots in 2022.

Trend 1 – The EV revolution is bringing wholesale changes for automotive manufacturing With many countries restricting and phasing out the production of combustion engine vehicles over the next decade, the race towards electric cars has accelerated. Manufacturers and their supply chains must tackle the complexity of diversifying into EVs alongside combustion-engine vehicles, to meet varying regulatory frameworks governing EV adoption across the globe. The speed and added flexibility needed will see new and established manufacturers move away from traditional linear manufacturing, towards modular, flexible production.

Segura said: “EV is not about a change only in the powertrain, but a larger transformation to a digitized car. This transition will also see the growing uptake of robots in combination with other technologies, including Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR’s). This will enable manufacturers to optimize the delivery of components across facilities and enable integrated scalable, modular production cells – methods traditionally associated with e-commerce and consumer goods, but now required in automotive to ensure the necessary flexibility to meet varying levels of

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demand.”

Another major shift will see battery manufacturing brought closer to vehicle assembly, to meet sustainability and regional requirements, which in

most cases requires all-new facilities.

Trend 2 – The E-commerce boom will accelerate

ROBOTICS // STORY

M A R C

S E G U R A

ABB’S NEWLY APPOINTED ROBOTICS DIVISION PRESIDENT

ROBOTICS

ROBOTS IN 2022: KEY TRENDS BY ABB Post-pandemic acceleration continues for robots in new sectors like logistics and retail, and speeds up for EV production. Also adoption of robots driving demand for new skills that require education and training Consumer behavior and expectations are driving companies to find new ways to satisfy demand, developing new channels through omnichannel retailing and adapting their production lines and distribution processes to enable personalization of both products and delivery.

Fulfilling these requirements has seen thousands of robots installed worldwide where they were not used just five years ago, and this rapid rate of automation will continue in 2022 driven by a combination of consumer trends and a growing shortage of labor.

“This trend will see the growth of lighter, smaller robotic applications, enabling the expansion of automation into new areas of warehousing and distribution operations. As Artificial Intelligence emerge in robotics matures and learning robots that will further drive become mainstream, expect to see these demand in areas where technologies deployed alongside AMR technologies, orchestrated and manrobots have traditionally not aged by intelligent software to provide been used. enhanced flexibility, speed and efficiency,” Segura continued.

As technology opens new opportunities for meeting customer demands, new trends will continue to

Trend 3 – More robots will appear in more places – and workers will need new skills Smaller, more affordable, and easy-to-use robots, such as ABB’s YuMi®, GoFa™ and SWIFTI™ cobots, are helping to remove many of the barriers previously

preventing companies from investing in robots.

This is seeing an acceleration of robots in general industry and small and medium-sized enterprises as companies seek new ways to automate different tasks.

Segura continued: “As we look beyond 2022, we see an ever-greater emphasis on connectivity and data acquisition as key enablers of future manufacturing. Data collected from intelligently automated processes will be analyzed by producers to make more informed decisions. At the same time, more advanced and responsive simulation and programming software tools, such as those in ABB’s RobotStudio®, will cover the entire life cycle of robotic applications – from commissioning to onstream productivity – using AR and VR tools to simplify automation for customers.”

The enhanced ability of robots to work directly alongside humans, share tasks and learn through AI is also making it easier for companies to adopt intelligent automation in new environments, such as construction, healthcare laboratories and restaurants and retail.

In a future with a high prevalence of robots in workplaces, engineers and staff will need to be retrained and more robotic training will be demanded in schools, colleges and universities, for the skills to program, operate and maintain robots for an automated future.

A decade of change The trends outlined for 2022 are the latest chapter in the ongoing transformation of robotic automation which is seeing a rapid acceleration and adoption of robots across industry.

“While automation has always been about productivity and quality – scaling up, doing more – the shifts we’re witnessing today (the greatest in a generation) mean that flexibility and simplicity are key to success,” concludes Marc Segura.

“Today, flexibility is essential – it is a strategic need, essential across the entire value chain: from manufacturing and logistics through to the point of consumption. Robotic automation is a vital enabler of this flexibility.

“ABB’s goal is to help our customers achieve this flexibility and add value to their businesses by driving innovation to create new possibilities with robotics, mobile robotics and machine automation, supported by the digital services and training they need to get the most from their investment.”

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GUEST COLUMN // CHECK POINT

CHECK POINT

CLOUD SERVICES UNDER ATTACK: CLOSING THE VIRTUAL OPEN DOORS TO CYBER CRIME At a time when organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on third-party cloud vendors such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM and Google Cloud Platform to securely manage their data, concern around misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities in the cloud is likely to amplify quickly.

SHIVIN SHARMA

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

HEAD OF GROWTH TECHNOLOGIES CHECK POINT SOFTWARE, INDIA AND SAARC BRIEF PROFILE Shivin Sharma is a senior Business professional with 20 years + of progressive management experience of leading and mentoring high performance sales and business teams. He has a proven track record of consistently meeting and exceeding the organization objectives and P&L goals though requisite Pipeline built and forecast accuracy. He has extensive experience of leading and delivering results in Global MNCs like Automation Anywhere, SAP, VMware, IBM, Lenovo etc., across diverse areas of Information Technology like Business Applications, ERP, Virtualization software, Middleware & Enterprise Software, x86 servers, storage, RISC systems, End user computing devices, thin clients, System Integration service, Network Integration service, Datacenter design and build services, managed services etc.

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With the new hybrid-working model we see organizations increasingly moving more of their workload settings to the cloud. While this transformation offers great agility and scalability benefits, it comes with inherent and increased risks to security and compliance. A simple configuration error can result in your entire organization being exposed to threat actors who no longer need to break into your data center to access your critical data or conduct ransomware attacks.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 99% of cloud security issues will be a result of human error when configuring assets and security in the cloud.

At a time when organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on third-party cloud vendors such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM and Google Cloud Platform to securely manage their data, concern around misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities in the cloud is likely to amplify quickly. What’s more, many of the organizations finding themselves at risk have had to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives at an uncomfortable pace over the past two years, resulting in knowledge and talent gaps that only add to their fears around cloud security.

Under the shared responsibility model - a security framework designed to ensure accountability for compromised data and other incidents - the cloud provider will offer basic cloud security, but it’s up to businesses themselves to secure their own data within the cloud. To put it another way, if cloud providers ensure the town gates are locked and the perimeter is well guarded, it’s still up to businesses to ensure their own doors are locked. That’s no mean feat, particularly when you consider that many large enterprises now rely on three or four cloud platforms as part of a multi-cloud strategy.

Attacks on cloud service providers are ramping up As outlined in our 2022 Security Report, the previous year has seen a tidal wave of attacks that exploit flaws in the services of industryleading cloud providers. For the cybercriminals involved, the end goal is to gain full control over an organization’s cloud infrastructure or, worse, an organization’s entire IT estate, including its proprietary code and customer records. Needless to say, this can have a devastating impact on the businesses affected and they’re quite right to be concerned.

The kinds of flaws we’re talking about here aren’t logic or permission-based flaws derived from an organization’s control policy that threat actors might use to gain unauthorized access and escalate privileges. This could at least be pinpointed and dealt with by the organization in

CHECK POINT // GUEST COLUMN

question. Instead, these flaws tend to be critical vulnerabilities within the cloud infrastructure itself that can be much more difficult to guard against.

Take the OMIGOD flaw, for example, which broke the floodgates when it came to attacking cloud services in 2021. In September, four critical vulnerabilities were discovered in the Microsoft Azure software agent that enabled users to manage configurations across remote and local environments. An estimated 65% of Azure’s customer base was made vulnerable by this exploit, putting thousands of organizations and millions of endpoint devices at risk. Through this OMIGOD flaw, threat actors were able to execute remote arbitrary code within an organization’s network and escalate root privileges, effectively taking over the network. As part of its September 2021 update, Microsoft addressed the issue but the automatic fix that it released appeared ineffective for several days. Further flaws were exposed in Microsoft Azure’s cloud services throughout the year, including the “ChaosDB” vulnerability which allowed cybercriminals to retrieve several internal keys used to obtain root privileges that would eventually enable them to manage the databases and accounts of targeted organizations.

Businesses made vulnerable by this particular “open door” included Coca-Cola, Skype and even security specialist, Symantec.

It’s likely that there will be many more cloud provider vulnerabilities in 2022 but fortunately there are things within an organization’s control that can mitigate the risk.

Locking the doors and bolstering internal security Tightening cloud security isn’t just about having the right products and services in place, it’s also about nurturing a security-first mentality within an organization as a whole. Regardless of what a service level agreement between an organization and cloud provider might say, the onus ultimately falls on the organization to make sure its customers’ records and other important data are protected.

So, before moving mission-critical workloads into the cloud, organizations must ensure that the “doors” to their applications and data are firmly locked. That means getting identity and access management finely tuned, implementing the principle of “least privilege” so that data is only accessed by humans and applications on a strictly need-to-know basis. It also means better segmentation of networks and use of firewall technology to ensure that sensitive data can be appropriately siloed and guarded where necessary.

Cloud security is complex, and with multi cloud environments it gets even more complex.

So, think about consolidating all your cloud security across all cloud vendors into one solution that monitors all malicious activity and reduces the workload by automating common tasks like policy updates. In an ideal world this would mean a ‘single pane of glass’ approach to security management across all your cloud assets so that you can keep a closer eye on security incidents and focus your effort on those of greatest concern.

Any cloud security solution is only as good as the intelligence engine behind it so ask your vendor how they stay on top of emerging and Zero-day threats. At Check Point we have the ThreatCloud which monitors millions of network nodes across the world and uses over 30 AI technologies to identify threats in real time so that they can be blocked before they get onto your cloud, or indeed on-prem network or end user devices.

And finally introduce security at the earliest stage of application development. You do not want security checks to slow down your DevOps unduly and delay application rollout but equally you cannot afford to cut corners on security. A DevSecOps approach that allows you to scan code for misconfigurations or even malware as part of the DevOps process will ensure that you don’t ‘bake in’ vulnerabilities at the outset.

The shift to the cloud is only going to accelerate as organizations realize the benefits it brings in terms of competitive advantage, agility and resilience so now is the time to take a responsible approach to security and compliance and scale up your cloud security. It’s a challenging and complex task but the good news is that there are solutions to not only lock down your cloud network but also ways, using AI and automation, to reduce the workload of detecting and preventing threats, even the ones that have yet to be devised. Finally, this can be done at speed…. it’s all in the cloud!

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GUEST COLUMN // FORTINET

FORTINET

BREAK THE BIAS AND CREATE A MORE DIVERSE AND INCLUSIVE CYBERSECURITY WORKFORCE A variety of skills and experiences must come together to guarantee the cyber industry’s success.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

BARBARA MAIGRET GLOBAL HEAD OF SUSTAINABILITY & CSR, FORTINET BRIEF PROFILE My carrier has been focused in transforming brands, growing teams and defining marketing strategies that support high business growth.

I’m convinced that it takes more for a company to establish itself as a leader and ensure long-term profitability and viability. With leadership comes corporate social responsibility. This conviction has led me to take up a new challenge and become the Global Head of Sustainability & CSR at Fortinet. My goal is to embed sustainability into our company’s business strategy and practices.

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This year, on International Women’s Day, governments, organizations, and individuals worldwide were asked to help envision and create a genderequal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated. That is this year’s theme: #BreakTheBias.

One of the industries struggling with significant bias and gender stereotypes is cybersecurity. This field plays an increasingly crucial role in our digital world and, as a result, offers many fulfilling career paths and opportunities. However, there are still significant barriers and misperceptions driving the belief that a career in cybersecurity is not for women.

Women are underrepresented in cybersecurity While women have been disproportionately impacted by pandemic-driven unemployment (for example, one in four women reported job loss due to a lack of childcare—twice the rate of men), the technology sector was less affected. This was mainly due to their being better prepared to pivot to remote work and flexible work models. As a result, according to a report by Deloitte Global, large global technology firms still managed to achieve “nearly 33% overall female representation in their workforces in 2022, up slightly more than two percentage points from 2019.”

While such progress is good, the technology sector still has a long way to go compared to other industries. Outside of the high-tech sector, women account for 47.7% of the global workforce.

And they also make up 50.2% of the college-educated workforce.

And the gender gap is even wider within the cybersecurity industry where, according to the (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce

Study, women only make up 25% of the global cybersecurity workforce. This gap is certainly not because there aren’t any jobs. According to that same study, the cybersecurity industry urgently needs 2.72 million more professionals. And while 700,000 cybersecurity professionals entered the workforce in the past year, the global workforce gap was only reduced by 400,000, indicating that global demand continues to outpace supply.

Women are just generally not applying for or being recruited to fill these positions.

This lack of gender equity has also directly contributed to the low percentage of women who hold cybersecurity leadership roles. In 2021, for example, only 17% of Fortune 500 CISO positions were held by women, with only one female CISO in the top ten US companies.

Stereotypes and misconceptions persist There are three main reasons why women continue to be underrepresented in the cybersecurity industry: Problem #1: Cybersecurity is seen as a man’s career Many women don’t consider cybersecurity a career path because it’s primarily seen as a male profession. This image is reinforced by popular media, such as Eliot Alderson in the Mr. Robot TV series, where cyber activities are performed by young geeks in hoodies working late at night in a dark room lit only by their computer screen. While it may make for compelling TV, this stereotype is inaccurate and off-putting for many women, inadvertently contributing to gender disparity in the workforce.

While cybersecurity certainly has its technical aspects, it is not just a technical industry. Like any growing industry, there are a wide variety of job opportuni-

FORTINET // GUEST COLUMN

ties that require human skills. These include analytical, communication, management, and interpersonal skills that are equally important to the organization’s success and positively impact the industry.

Problem #2: Young women are underrepresented in STEM programs One reason why so few women apply for cybersecurity positions is they are less represented in STEM-based programs. But there is no reason why the technical aspects of a career in cybersecurity should be off-putting for women. The fact is, standardized math tests for fourth, eighth, and 12th graders show little gap in the scores between female and male students. But according to MIT WIM (Women in Mathematics), one of the drivers of the gender gap in technology fields is not ability but “stereotype threat.” This happens when an individual worries about confirming negative stereotypes, leading women to conform to gender expectations by performing worse on assessments and decreasing their interest and persistence in STEM fields.

Pervasive gender biases, few female role models, mistaken beliefs about technology being a male-oriented industry, and, sadly, teachers and parents who steer girls away from technology studies have combined to break the confidence of many young women otherwise suited to pursue a STEM-related degree. This is a global issue, with women generally earning less than 20% of all STEM degrees. According to Yale University, US women only earned 18.7% of computer science degrees. In the UK and across 35 European countries, fewer than 1 in 5 computer science graduates are women. And women hold only 18.5 percent of STEM positions in South and West Asia and 23.4 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.

This bias starts early in their college careers. 49.2% of women intending to major in science and engineering switch to a non-STEM major during their first year.

Problem #3: Bias in cybersecurity hiring We cannot cure the lack of women in STEM overnight. So, organizations need to think differently about the composition of their cybersecurity staff. Many hiring managers—and HR—view individuals with backgrounds in computer science, engineering, and other STEM fields as the most qualified cybersecurity candidates, often ignoring those with degrees in other areas. But if they want to build successful cybersecurity teams, they need to broaden the scope of backgrounds they consider when looking for new employees.

But the challenge goes beyond hiring. The reality is that women in cybersecurity roles also tend to be promoted more slowly than men—

something known as the “first rung” problem.

According to Fortinet CISO Renee Tarun, “Men are four times more likely to hold executive roles than their female counterparts, they’re nine times more likely to have managerial roles than women, and [on average] they’re paid 6% more than women.” In addition, women tend to leave the field at twice the rate of men, citing gender bias, discrimination, and harassment as their reasons for leaving.

Five steps for creating a more diverse and inclusive cybersecurity workforce In addition to the primary objectives of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals that call for equality and equity for women (goals four and five), organizations need to seriously consider how to merge their DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) objectives into their equally important digital innovation strategies. Because the evidence is clear: businesses that employ gender equality practices across their organization report increased profitability and productivity.

Given the rate at which digital innovation is transforming organizations (and the efforts of cybercriminals to exploit those digital acceleration efforts), now is the time to break our cybersecurity stereotypes. We must work together to remove the bias that cybersecurity is a gender-specific field and change the perception that it is purely a computer science discipline.

In cybersecurity, technology is only one of the silver bullets required to eliminate cyberattacks. The three critical elements of an effective cybersecurity strategy are People, Products, and Processes. But when we continue to recruit the same people—same gender, same educational background, same perspective—we are unlikely to develop strategies that allow us to get out ahead of our cyber adversaries. For example, it is not a stretch to say that the failure to rethink security strategies—starting with who makes up our cybersecurity teams—played a part in the nearly 1100% increase in ransomware attacks organizations worldwide experienced last year.

To change this perception and get out ahead of the cybercrime crisis we all face, we must bring more voices, perspectives, and diversity to our cybersecurity teams. Here are five basic principles we need to adopt as we work to refine our cybersecurity teams and strategies: n Highlight the contributions of women in cybersecurity in our classrooms and businesses, identify and promote positive role models and examples, and actively encourage diverse career paths, experiences, and job functions to our young women.

Encourage young women to pursue STEMbased degrees and careers at a young age. n Create and/or be part of mentorship programs at all levels, beginning with basic technology classes in elementary schools that model success in technology for girls that continues throughout their higher education and professional careers. n Implement more inclusive work environments by identifying and breaking bias in hiring practices, training all employees (not just executives) about true inclusiveness, and actively making every employee feel involved, valued, and respected. And we need to ensure that women, especially women of color, are treated fairly and are fully embedded in the workplace. n Eliminate “first rung” barriers by actively promoting more women to leadership at every level of the organization, beginning with roles as project and team leads and first-tier managers.

This must be a commitment we are all willing to make. On this day, we reaffirm our commitment to promoting gender diversity, equity, and inclusion inside Fortinet by helping engage more women in the cybersecurity sector through concrete action across the above strategies. n

Final Thoughts Cybersecurity plays an essential role in our modern society. However, a variety of skills and experiences must come together to guarantee the cyber industry’s success. And as with any other industry, diversity is crucial. By bringing greater awareness to the diverse skills and backgrounds cybersecurity requires, we can help shrink both the gender and skills gaps while making strides in our battle with our cyber adversaries.

Cybersecurity offers many fulfilling career paths and opportunities for women. Because technology—and cyberthreats—continue to accelerate, it is an industry in constant evolution, making the field of cybersecurity very stimulating intellectually. And because there are so many open jobs to fill, this sector is also attractive financially. But joining the cybersecurity industry also means having a significant impact on society.

We live in a digital world where protecting data and individual privacy has become a critical sustainability issue. And as always, women play a vital role in making this possible.

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SECURITY // SONICWALL

SONICWALL

BUSINESS EMAIL COMPROMISE: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW BEC is a costly cyberthreat for organizations around the world, and many are ill prepared with their current people, process, and technology posture to fend off attacks.

Business email compromise (BEC) attacks have not engendered the same level of notoriety as ransomware attacks but rank in combination as one of the most financially devastating and common types of cybercrimes against organizations.

Many organizations are ill-prepared to address the threat of BEC and lack sufficient protections across people, process, and technology factors.

BEC attacks are a specific type of phishing attack. They rely on targeting (i.e., going after a specific person or role type in an organization) and normally seek monetary payment as a direct outcome. Types of BEC attacks include diverting payment on a valid invoice to a fraudulent bank account, submitting a fake invoice for payment, diverting employee payroll to a fraudulent bank account, and using impersonation of senior executives to lend credibility to plausible but irregular requests (i.e., paying a large sum to a new bank account to secure a merger or acquisition target). BEC also includes gift card fraud and romance scams. BEC types of attack have also been called man-in-the-email attacks, email account compromise (EAC), and wire fraud.

Employees at all levels of an organization are targeted by BEC attacks.

BEC attacks differ from many other forms of cyberthreats, relying almost entirely on social engineering to trigger human susceptibility to plausible requests. Social engineering tricks include establishing rapport (pretexting), promising personal benefit, and invoking urgency. BEC attacks do not generally carry malware, include weaponized links, or seek to compromise email account credentials. By definition, BEC attacks rely on the compromise of business email—a normal and highly used channel for business 50 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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communication—by inserting fraudulent email messages into a stream of regular ones.

Examples of different types of BEC attacks include: • An impersonated email account A threat actor finds out the name of the CFO at your organization from LinkedIn and registers a personal email account in their name with Google or Microsoft. Email messages can then be sent to your accounts department from your.

CFOs.name@gmail.com, beginning with a plausible explanation, such as “I’m travelling and don’t have access to my corporate email, but could you please wire an urgent payment to XYZ Corp who we are trying to buy.”

• An impersonated domain A threat actor registers a domain name that looks like the domain name of the targeted company or one of their trusted vendors. While the text of the domain is clearly different, many people miss the subtle differences in lookalike domains—microsoft.com versus microsofl.com or amazon.com vs amazom.com. Lookalike domain name variants are hard to spot with only a cursory glance and it is unsurprising that people regularly miss the differences.

• A compromised email account (the EAC variant of BEC attacks) A senior executive at a vendor company is the victim of a phishing attack that results in the compromise of his or her email account credentials. Until the credential compromise is detected, the threat actor can send email messages impersonating the senior executive—such as new messages requesting payment to a different bank account or re-submitting invoices already

sent with new payment details. For organizations using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for email, the compromise of account credentials also gives access to the user’s documents in OneDrive/ SharePoint or Google Drive, which can include invoices or invoice templates that can be altered before sending.

A study shows 67% of Indian IT teams associate phishing with emails that falsely claim to be from a legitimate organization and are usually combined with a threat or request for information. Around 61% consider Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks to be phishing, and half of the respondents (50%) think threadjacking—when attackers insert themselves into a legitimate email thread as part of an attack—is phishing.

On the positive side, most organizations in India (98%) have implemented many cybersecurity awareness programs to combat phishing using computer-based training programmes, human-led training programmes and phishing simulations as tools.

Outlook towards BEC Being able to merely ask for funds has proven to be a financially lucrative strategy for cybercriminals to earn a fast payback for their malicious deeds. Social engineering requests for funds bypass the need to develop malware, keyloggers, ransomware, and other examples in the cyberthreat arsenal. A look at how BEC is expected to change over the next few years: • Low readiness across many dimensionsOrganizations lack strong confidence in their ability to safeguard funds after a BEC attack or to achieve discovery and recovery outcomes. Traditional technology solutions that are currently deployed are viewed as ineffective in stopping BEC attacks from getting through to the key people and groups targeted by many BEC attacks.

• Reliance on ineffective tools that cannot address BEC attacks - Many organizations claim that several cybersecurity solutions and approaches are highly effective against BEC attacks and yet indicate low confidence in the ability of their currently deployed traditional solutions to protect against BEC attacks. There appears to be a misplaced reliance on more general cybersecurity solutions that by design are not intended to protect against BEC threats, such as anti-malware tools and secure email gateways that analyze links and attachments for evidence of malicious code.

• Low confidence in enlisting help from law enforcement - Only half of the organizations have high confidence in their ability to enlist help from

SONICWALL // SECURITY

DEBASISH MUKHERJEE VICE PRESIDENT, REGIONAL SALES APAC, SONICWALL INC.

ABOUT DEBASISH MUKHERJEE A SEASONED AND ACCOMPLISHED LEADER WITH DIVERSE SALES, BUSINESS AND PARTNER LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE IN THE IT INDUSTRY, DEBASISH IS WORKING AT SONICWALL AS VP, REGIONAL SALES FOR APAC REGION. HE IS A PROVEN VISIONARY AND STRATEGIC THOUGHT LEADER. HE IS ALSO A PASSIONATE CYBER SECURITY SALES LEADER WITH EXPERTISE IN DEVELOPMENT AND SCALING UP OF NEW BUSINESS FROM GROUND ZERO TO NEW HIGHS. DEBASISH IS AN MBA FROM NEW DELHI INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT WITH SPECIALISATION IN MARKETING AND GRADUATE IN SCIENCE FROM DR H.S GOUR UNIVERSITY, SAGAR MP.

law enforcement agencies after succumbing to a BEC attack (whether this is an accurate assessment or misplaced confidence is questionable).

If law enforcement agencies are unwilling to help with lower-value BEC attacks— which will often be the case given insufficient staffing for the volume of incidents—then organizations are left to their own devices to fend off attackers leveraging BEC attacks for quick financial gain.

• Low confidence to receive insurance coverage for BEC losses -Most organizations are not confident in their ability to secure insurance coverage for losses due to a BEC incident. In the wider context, insurance coverage is increasingly difficult to secure, especially due to the growing incidence of costly ransomware attacks.

Best Practices Against BEC Attacks • Prioritizing protection against BEC attacks : Organizations firstly need to priorities and implement solutions to protect BEC attacks • Strengthening effective protections : Many of the traditional technology protections and financial process designs organizations use against BEC threats fail to inspire confidence in their ability to identify and prevent BEC threats from becoming costly incidents. Organizations need to strengthen protections that are currently ineffective • Increased employee preparedness : Individuals in a small range of job roles are likely to be targeted by a disproportionate share of BEC attacks because they are high-value targets for a threat actor. This includes employees who have authorization to change bank account details for

vendors, and employees or managers who can approve invoices for payment. Accounts and identities belonging to senior executives are also of high value for initiating attacks with highervalue compromise. On the other hand, smaller BEC attacks can be initiated against any manager or employee with a corporate credit card, e.g., the gift card BEC scam where an employee is asked to buy gift cards on behalf of a manager and send the gift card numbers by email. Not providing targeted training on BEC threats increases the likelihood of BEC attacks being successful, and in some cases, the lack of training has shifted the balance of blame from the employee to the employer • Building a culture of support on confirming requests with executives : It is important that the corporate culture of an organization does not magnify the problem of BEC. For example, if senior management discourages any sort of pushback on their orders, a CFO or HR clerk might be less likely to question a request for a wire transfer or provision of confidential records received in a BEC attempt purporting to come from the CEO. Building the cultural support for assessing the validity of messages that could be valid or a BEC attack includes designing strong financial to safeguard funds, reduce fraud and thus establish normal operating parameters for an organization.

• Robust organizational processes to combat invoice frauds: Organizations today are taking several actions to harden processes for activities such as changing bank account details for invoices due, internal multi-person review for any

changes, disallowing the use of email for changing bank account details and approval via phone call or SMS to a pre-agreed number for the other party.

• Harden organizational processes for Employee Payroll: Organizations have also hardened processes for changing bank account details for employees. Approval of a change by phone call or SMS to a pre-agreed number for the other party is becoming the most commonly used approach when dealing with vendors. Organizations today are talking mixed actions to harden employee payroll processes.

Conclusion: BEC is a costly cyberthreat for organizations around the world, and many are ill prepared with their current people, process, and technology posture to fend off attacks. Many organizations appear to be relying on technology that was not designed to identify and protect against BEC attacks, have people who lack training to recognize and counteract BEC threats, and use weak processes that enable BEC threats to become incidents. Except for BEC incidents at the more costly end of the spectrum, confidence in securing help from law enforcement is low, and gaining insurance coverage for losses is equally problematic. Organizations need to take urgent action to strengthen current processes targeted

by BEC, deploy new technology that specifically identifies and neutralizes BEC attacks, and elevate preparedness of executives, managers, and employees to stop BEC in its tracks.

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Q&A // HITACHI VANTARA

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Tell us more about Hitachi IoT Software and Solutions?

Hitachi is a group which has created wealth through participation in the virtuous cycle of conceptualizing, designing, installing, managing, securing and modernizing of complex mission critical assets. Any organization which creates wealth through assets needs Industrial Internet of things to manage the after-market of install base.

Hitachi has been a pioneer at developing cutting edge operational technologies and equipment for over 110 years since its inception.

Be it nuclear reactors, power grids, transmission and distribution networks, high speed trains or even air conditioners. This combined with over 60 years of IT experience, research and innovation, IoT solutions are very much core to its business.

The IoT portfolio at Hitachi Vantara reflects this heritage and focuses on delivering Lumada IoT products and solutions for our customers. Our IoT software and solutions include solutions for intelligence at the edge, industrial dataOps, smart space, asset management, asset performance management, field service management and IoT compass.

What is driving the market for IoT enablement?

A confluence of factors is driving the market for IoT today. First, the change in customer expectations and their demands. Customers demand new and innovative services with instant gratification as the competitive benchmark. Secondly, the digital prowess in terms of computing power, data storage & network connectivity has opened the floodgates for innovative solutions and new business models such as productization.

Increased automation, robotics to improve productivity and quality of products / services are also leading to greater adoption of IoT coupled.

Usage of drones and image-based inspections is changing the way maintenance activities are carried out. Asset performance models and digital twins are driving deployment of IoT and sensors.

At Hitachi Vantara we help organizations to improve the availability and reduce the downtime using our products.

How are customers benefitting from IT-OT integration?

As per McKinsey research, the potential economic value that IoT could unlock is large and growing with an estimated $5.5 to $12.6 trillion in economic value by 2030.

In the industrial sector customers achieving operational excellence towards sustainability initiatives. For example, increased adoption of bat52 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

MARCH 2022

S I D D H A R T H

S H A R M A

GLOBAL HEAD - IOT BUSINESS, HITACHI VANTARA

“Siddharth heads the IoT, Asset After market, Embedded systems and Industrial

Operations globally at Hitachi Vantara. With over two decades of experience in helping customers achieve business objectives via technology adoption.

Here he shares insights about the state of the IoT market, trends, learnings and adoption challenges.”

tery storage due to distributed energy resources, renewables and smart grid is changing the way the energy trading and IPPs are doing business. This is possible due to IT-OT integration.

What opportunity does it present for a storage company like yours?

Hitachi Vantara is the merger of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Pentaho, Hitachi Lumada Soft-

HITACHI VANTARA // Q&A

HITACHI VANTARA

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES ARE DRIVING IOT ADOPTION At least 60% of IoT value creation is expected to be in the B2B space even though the early adopters and growth is currently seen in the B2C segment today. ware business, Hitachi Rein Cloud and Hitachi Consulting. The storage business was a sub-set of Hitachi Data Systems only.

Hitachi Vantara has fundamentally shifted from having data support our business to data drive our business. The ability to support our customers at any stage of their modernization journey is what makes it a compelling proposition for customers. Be it at the infrastructure layer, platform layer or the applications layer, we have solutions and services that enable the digital shift for our customers.

It is in this context that we see a very large opportunity for us especially around IoT where solutions that tackle large volumes of data and requires massive storage and compute power running AI/ML models are critical. Hitachi being a leader in industrial automation, software and storage, we offer end-to-end solutions across the spectrum, be it storage, sensors or the cloud services build around them. Our customers run mission critical applications on our solutions.

What challenges are you facing in implementing IoT-enabled storage solutions?

The biggest challenge facing IoT solutions is ‘interoperability’. The diverse hardware, legacy systems and protocols that need to come together to provide a modern and seamless solution is easier said than done. This compounded by organizational challenges, security concerns have often led to organizations failing to scale their pilot projects.

Constraint related to data ingestion depending on the problem we are trying to solve. We overcome the challenges by recommending the

right solution architecture for our customers to manage edge to cloud storage using our Lumada IoT platform.

Which industries are adopting IoT enablement and what are the business cases?

At least 60% of IoT value creation is expected to be in the B2B space even though the early adopters and growth is currently seen in the B2C segment today. IoT adoption is happening across all industry verticals. The impact on business and customer service are driving factors. Asset intensive industries like manufacturing, transportation, energy & utilities are increasingly deploying IoT platforms at the forefront to derive economic benefits from IoT. For example, in manufacturing the leading business use cases are around operations management, predictive maintenance, yield management & human productivity, health & safety.

Please share some learnings from customer deployments?

While we have many success stories in customer deployments, there are also learnings from some pilot projects. Typically it revolves around lack of attention / concern around the following aspects: Change Management: Often these projects are treated as technology projects whereas this requires cross business collaboration to realize the true value and benefits.

Interoperability: Linking legacy systems with its propriety protocols and silos remain a key challenge. Understanding this and resolving this early in the design phase is key to the success of deployments.

Customization: The interoperability issue also leads to customizations at time of deployment that adds cost and diminishes the future potential to scale. Having a scalable solution is key from a design perspective.

Security: The threat is even more given the increase in number of endpoints that inevitably becomes targets for hacking. Therefore, designing the right security layers is key in any deployment.

Privacy: Not just on B2C but even on B2B, this is a growing concern and if not addressed early in the design can lead to significant challenges and thereby cost. For example, while monitoring health and safety of a worker through an IoT solution, there has to be due consideration for individual privacy.

Is edge computing ideal for all IoT deployments or are there use cases where IoT deployment is better in a traditional IT architecture and environment?

Edge computing is best suited where local intelligence and processing is required for quick decision making. Edge utilizes computing resources at site level so that workload is placed closer to where data is generated. For example, edge devices in remote locations where the network bandwidth and latency are an issue can utilize local compute power in deciding next best action.

Another use case is video analytics solutions where transmitting the entire streaming data to the Cloud or data center is expensive and slow.

Edge computing nodes that consist of smart cameras can do the initial level of analytics and the footage can then be transmitted for further analysis. Another scenario is while understanding the machine/process behaviour to adjust the parameters in real time using AI/ML. Traditional IT architecture has limitations in addressing the growing needs of local intelligence, closed loop control, device management and protocol support.

Which is the fastest growing product category in your portfolio and why do you think is driving its uptake?

Our Lumada stack of products and solutions are growing fast due to rapid IoT adoption and digital transformation initiatives of business. Key solutions like Lumada Manufacturing Insights that propel productivity, uptime and quality gains and Lumada Video intelligence products (Video Insights, Video Data Management and Intelligence devices) are enabling growth.

MARCH 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 53

SECURITY REPORT // SOPHOS

SEAN GALLAGHER SENIOR THREAT RESEARCHER SOPHOS

“Very few of those cases involved two ransomware groups simultaneously attacking a target and it shows, literally,

how crowded and competitive the ransomware landscape has become.”

SOPHOS

CONTI GANG ENCRYPTS KARMA’S EXTORTION NOTES IN DUAL RANSOMWARE ATTACK: SOPHOS RESEARCH

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Conti and Karma Actors Attack Healthcare Provider at Same Time Through ProxyShell Exploits.

Sophos released findings of a dual ransomware attack where extortion notes left by Karma ransomware operators were encrypted 24 hours later by Conti, another ransomware gang that was in the target’s network at the same time. Sophos details the dual attacks in the article, “Conti and Karma Actors Attack Healthcare Provider at Same Time Through ProxyShell Exploits,” explaining how both operators gained access to the network through an unpatched Microsoft Exchange Server, but then used different tactics to implement their attacks.

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MARCH 2022

“To be hit by a dual ransomware attack is a nightmare scenario for any organization. Across the estimated timeline there was a period of around four days when the Conti and Karma attackers were simultaneously active in the target’s network, moving around each other, downloading and running scripts, installing Cobalt Strike beacons, collecting and exfiltrating data, and more,” said Sean Gallagher, senior threat researcher, Sophos. “Karma deployed the final stage of its attack first, dropping an extortion notice on computers demanding a bitcoin pay-

ment in exchange for not publishing stolen data.

Then Conti struck, encrypting the target’s data in a more traditional ransomware attack. In a strange twist, the Conti ransomware encrypted Karma’s extortion notes.

“We have seen several cases recently where ransomware affiliates, including affiliates of Conti, used ProxyShell exploits to penetrate targets’ networks. We have also seen examples of multiple actors exploiting the same vulnerability to gain access to a victim. However, very few of those cases involved two ransomware groups simultaneously attacking a target and it shows, literally, how crowded and competitive the ransomware landscape has become.”

The Dual Attack Sophos believes that the first incident started on Aug. 10, 2021, when attackers, possibly Initial Access Brokers, used a ProxyShell exploit to gain access to the network and establish a foothold on the compromised server. The Sophos investigation showed that almost four months passed before Karma appeared on Nov. 30, 2021, and exfiltrated more than 52 gigabytes of data to the cloud.

On Dec. 3, 2021, three things happened: n The Karma attackers dropped an extortion note on 20 computers, demanding a ransom and explaining that they did not encrypt the data because the target was a healthcare provider n Conti was quietly operating in the background also exfiltrating data n The target started onboarding Sophos’ incident response team to help with Karma While Sophos was onboarding, Conti deployed its ransomware on Dec. 4, 2021. Sophos subsequently tracked the start of the Conti attack to another ProxyShell exploit leveraged on Nov. 25, 2021.

Pi DATACENTERS // TECH PREDICTION 2022

Pi DATACENTERS

10 DATA CENTER TECH PREDICTIONS FOR 2022 Stringent security norms are to be practiced to the T in order to host hybrid environments and overall dynamics of Data centers.

KALYAN MUPPANENI FOUNDER & CEO PI DATACENTERS

“Innovations in use of renewable energy sources takes center stager in Datacenter investments and technology spend in 2022”

1

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Sustainability: Utilization of Renewable Energy trend will continue to increase in 2022 and Beyond

2

Automation at the Data center level is even more critical post-pandemic. Significant efforts in automating Data centers especially after the pandemic is required in order to remove manual intervention and being able to handle exceptions

3

Hyper Scalability: The demand for Data centers continues especially in India. There will be a combined capacity of over 100mw built in the year 2022.This demand will continue over the next decade. Ability to scale for additional

capacity becomes more important.

4

Chip shortage may continue: Acknowledging the global chip shortage, the Data centers will need to plan their requirements much in advance to eliminate risk shortage at the last minute.

5

Edge Computing: Edge will continue to expand where some of the compute moves to the Edge more than ever before and decentralization becomes the main agenda.

6

Crypto: Crypto occupies a significant part of the demand for data centers in 2022 and will continue to play a major role as far as new capacity requirements in future.

7

Increased Security: Increased Security is of paramount importance in this volatile environment. Stringent security norms are to be practiced to the T in order to host hybrid environments and overall dynamics of Data centers.

8 9

Artificial Intelligence will continue to take center stage

New innovation in energy storage is relevant to data centers

Cloud continues to grow in scale where enterprises will continue to move to the cloud model for scalable and server solutions.

MARCH 2022

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 55

SECURITY REPORT // BARRACUDA NETWORKS

JAMES FORBES-MA VICE PRESIDENT, APAC, BARRACUDA NETWORKS

they collectively have a substantial economic value and often lack security resources or expertise. This gives the malicious attackers better opportunities to take advantage. That’s why it’s important for businesses of all sizes to prioritise investments in security, both in terms of technology and user education. After all, the damage caused by a breach or a compromised account can be devastating to smaller businesses.”

BARRACUDA

BARRACUDA’S RESEARCH UNCOVERS NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE WAYS CYBERCRIMINALS ARE TARGETING BUSINESSES WITH SPEAR-PHISHING ATTACKS New report shows that small businesses are three times more likely to be targeted than larger organisations 56 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

MARCH 2022

Barracuda, a trusted partner and leading provider of cloud-first security solutions, today released key findings of the ways spear-phishing attacks are evolving. The report, titled Spear Phishing: Top Threats and Trends Vol. 7 – Key findings on the latest social engineering tactics and the growing complexity of attacks, reveals fresh insights into recent trends in spear-phishing attacks and what you can do to protect your business.

The report examines current trends in spear phishing, which businesses are most likely to be targeted, the new tricks attackers are using to sneak past victims’ defenses, and the number of accounts being compromised successfully. It also tackles the best practices and technology that organisations should be using to defend against these types of attacks.

An in-depth look at attack trends Between January 2021 and December 2021, Barracuda researchers analysed millions of emails across thousands of businesses and identified some key takeaways: l An average small business employee with less than 100 employees will experience 350% more social engineering attacks than an employee of a larger enterprise. l 51% of social engineering attacks are phishing. l Microsoft is the most impersonated brand, used in 57% of phishing attacks. l 1 in 5 organisations had an account compromised in 2021. l Cybercriminals compromised approximately 500,000 Microsoft 365 accounts in 2021. l 1 in 3 malicious logins into compromised accounts came from Nigeria. l Cybercriminals sent out 3 million messages from 12,000 compromised accounts.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

“Cybercriminals do not discriminate based on the size of an organisation to conduct attacks. However, small businesses are extremely vulnerable to spear-phishing attacks because

NEO4J // CASE STUDY

MARCH 2022

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CASE STUDY // NEO4J

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Transforming telecommunications enriching the customer experience atos.net

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