Month: September 2019

Forces Network, a professional network of the military veterans in the corporate, has conducted a full day seminar on the theme ‘Future Ready U’ at Pride Plaza, Aerocity, New Delhi on 25 August 2019. “Today’s world is changing at a rapid pace. It offers continuous challenges as well as opportunities. However, to grab the opportunities, it calls for agility, informed decision making and taking massive action. Now if you consider the transitioning of military veterans embarking on a second career it seems that they would have to do a fair amount of heavy lifting to thrive in such a world. It was with this as the backdrop, the theme of the seminar was chosen. It aimed to inform and educate the seminar participants about the upcoming future trends and also how to prepare for them” – Col Iqbal Singh (Retd) Founder of Forces Network The seminar had an impressive lineup of marquee speakers. Prabhjeet Singh, Director, Operations and Head of Cities, Uber India & South Asia spoke on the future of mobility in a riveting talk. Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Airtel – an ex-IAF officer spoke about the apparent permanence of telecom industry in the future lives. He further emphasized upon the importance of learning new skills like computational thinking, new media literacy, trans-disciplinary abilities, design mindset, social intelligence, agility, and learning and unlearning ability. Vinay Gupta, Head of Data Analytics, SGSL made an extremely engaging presentation on data science whereby it was completely demystified for a layman to understand it. He also covered the path to building one’s skills as a data scientist. In the last segment of the seminar, there was an interesting discussion about whether in the era of digitalization, cloudification and virtualization would remain the jobs of physical security officers, or the chief info security officer (CISO) would take over these roles. The seminar was attended by convincingly a large number of participants – closed to 250 – who expressed a great deal of satisfaction over the content and conduct of the seminar. Strikingly, the participants came from across the length and breadth of the country such as Shillong, J&K, Cochin, Hyderabad and Binaguri etc. The seminar ended with an hour-long mentoring session where selected industry experts mentored the mentees in small groups of 4-6 people on a round table. They encouraged the mentees to ask questions – all that they wanted to ask and didn’t know where and whom to ask. The mentees found this session extremely enlightening. The Forces Network is more than 11 years old and it has more than 4900 members spread across the globe. Forces Network is focused on helping military personnel transition smoothly in to a corporate career and in building the network of the military veterans in the corporate.  

Breaches Pose Growing Risk for Small Businesses, Costing up to 5% of Annual Revenue IBM Security has recently announced the results of its annual study examining the financial impact of data breaches on organizations. According to the report, the cost of a data breach has risen 12% over the past 5 years comparison of the average global cost of a data breach from the 2014 Cost of as Data Breach Report to the 2019 report, which now costs $3.92 million on average. These rising expenses are representative of the multi-year financial impact of breaches, increased regulation and the complex process of resolving criminal attacks. The financial consequences of a data breach can be particularly acute for small and midsize businesses. In the study, companies with less than 500 employees suffered losses of more than $2.5 million on average – a potentially crippling amount for small businesses, which typically earn $50 million or less in annual revenue. For the first time this year, the report also examined the longtail financial impact of a data breach, finding that the effects of a data breach are felt for years. While an average of 67% of data breach costs were realized within the first year after a breach, 22% accrued in the second year and another 11% accumulated more than two years after a breach. The longtail costs were higher in the second and third years for organizations in highly-regulated environments such as healthcare, financial services, energy and pharmaceuticals. “Cybercrime represents big money for cybercriminals, and unfortunately that equates to significant losses for businesses,” said Wendi Whitmore, Global Lead for IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services, “With organizations facing the loss or theft of over 11.7 billion records in the past 3 years alone, companies need to be aware of the full financial impact that a data breach can have on their bottom line – and focus on how they can reduce these costs.” Some of the top findings from this year’s report include: Malicious breaches – Most common, most expensive: Over 50% of data breaches in the study resulted from malicious cyberattacks and cost companies $1 million more on average than those originating from accidental causes. ‘Mega breaches’ lead to mega losses: While less common, breaches of more than 1 million records cost companies a projected $42 million in losses; and those of 50 million records are projected to cost companies $388 million. Mega breach cost calculations are based on an analysis of 14 companies, applying a Monte-Carlo analytic approach to simulate results of greater statistical significance. Practice makes perfect: Companies with an incident response team that also extensively tested their incident response plan experienced $1.23 million less in data breach costs on average than those that had neither measure in place. U.S. breaches cost double: The average cost of a breach in the U.S. is $8.19 million, more than double the worldwide average. Healthcare breaches cost the most: For the 9th year in a row, healthcare organizations had the highest cost of a breach – nearly $6.5 million on average (over 60% more than other industries in the study). Malicious breaches pose a growing threat; accidental breaches still common The study found that data breaches which originated from a malicious cyberattack were not only the most common root cause of a breach, but also the most expensive. Malicious data breaches cost companies in the study $4.45 million on average – over $1 million more than those originating from accidental causes such as system glitch and human error. These breaches are a growing threat, as the percentage of malicious or criminal attacks as the root cause of data breaches in the report crept up from 42% to 51% over the past six years of the study (a 21% increase). That said, inadvertent breaches from human error and system glitches were still the cause for nearly half (49%) of the data breaches in the report, costing companies $3.50 and $3.24 million respectively. These breaches from human and machine error represent an opportunity for improvement, which can be addressed through security awareness training for staff, technology investments, and testing services to identify accidental breaches early on. One particular area of concern is the misconfiguration of cloud servers, which contributed to the exposure of 990 million records in 2018, representing 43% of all lost records for the year according to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2019. Breach response remains biggest cost saver For the past 14 years, the Ponemon Institute has examined factors that increase or reduce the cost of a breach and has found that the speed and efficiency at which a company responds to a breach has a significant impact on the overall cost. This year’s report found that the average lifecycle of a breach was 279 days with companies taking 206 days to first identify a breach after it occurs and an additional 73 days to contain the breach. However, companies in the study who were able to detect and contain a breach in less than 200 days spent $1.2 million less on the total cost of a breach. A focus on incident response can help reduce the time it takes companies to respond, and the study found that these measures also had a direct correlation with overall costs. Having an incident response team in place and extensive testing of incident response plans were two of the top three greatest cost saving factors examined in the study. Companies that had both of these measures in place had $1.23 million less total costs for a data breach on average than those that had neither measure in place ($3.51 million vs. $4.74 million). Additional factors impacting the cost of a breach for companies in the study included: Number of compromised records: Data breaches cost companies around $150 per record that was lost or stolen. Companies that fully deployed security automation technologies experienced around half the cost of a breach ($2.65 million average) compared to those that did not have these technologies deployed…

The recent Hikvision Certified Security Associates (HCSA) program of the series conducted during 22-24 July 2019 in Bangalore also concluded at a successful note. In conformity of the set pattern, the three day comprehensive HCSA program included training sessions on optics basics, turbo HD analog solution, PTZ configuration, network basics, IP camera, NVR, fish eye camera, iVMS 4200 and smart functions and applications. The HCSA training program was conducted by.Vinit Narvekar, Senior Technical Support and Training, Prama Hikvision India Pvt. Ltd. The idea behind HCSA is to give hands-on training and demonstration as a part of the training program. As part of this certification program a dedicated online examination and practical tests were conducted after training sessions. “Hikvision has set the industry standard by offering professional video surveillance certification to validate video expertise under Hikvision Certified Security Associate (HCSA) program in India. This program is specially designed for the security professionals. Besides, Hikvision provides meaningful endorsement to those who succeed in the exams and become Hikvision certified security professionals,” said Ashish P. Dhakan, MD & CEO, Prama Hikvision India Pvt. Ltd. The HCSA certification program focuses on training participants in essential configurations, operations and maintenance of Hikvision video surveillance products and its features. It is designed for technical engineers who have worked in the security industry for some years and have already gained knowledge and experience about security basics. The certification program is open to anyone looking at to gain expertise in video surveillance and total security solution. The trainee should have at least one- year of work experience in the security industry and be familiar with security basics. The HCSA Bangalore got a good response from the young engineers and installers coming from nearby areas and towns like Mangalore and Mysore. The successful batch of the program participants will receive the HCSA certificates along with the enriching technology updates and training experience.  

Jio, one of the world’s largest mobile data network service providers, and Guavus, a Thales company and the leader in AI-powered analytics for communications service providers, have recently announced a partnership centered on AI-driven analytics. Guavus’AI-based solutions will provide real-time customer experience analytics, predictive analytics to automate network troubleshooting and key marketing insights to Jio. As a result, Jio will be able to offer superior service to its customers while addressing critical service operations with intelligent automation. Jio is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing data service operators with more than 300 million subscribers. The Indian service provider, which has disrupted the market with its affordable data plans and unlimited calling benefits, has created a completely digital experience for its users – ranging from data services on smartphones, to gigabit Internet at home, along with a portfolio of media offerings and IoT devices such as smart speakers and switches for the smart home. “Our networks generate 4 to 5 petabytes of data each day. If this data can be properly analyzed in real-time using big data analytics and predictive analytics techniques, we can both improve the health of our network through intelligent automation and offer multiple, customized personal services to our customers. Guavus’solutions enable us to do this – we can make data-driven decisions that allow us to deliver a great experience to our customers while bringing intelligent automation to our operations,” said Anish Shah, President of IT, Reliance Jio. “Guavus provides us data analytics technology and out-of-the-box analytics solutions for intelligent operations and marketing – but they’re not just fishing for us, they’re giving us the ability to fish. Our teams will be able to take advantage of a ‘self-service’ platform to build custom analytics applications that are tied very closely to their areas of the business and to deliver quality new products much faster,” said Kiran Thomas, President, Reliance Industries. Anukool Lakhina, Founder and President, Guavus said, “Guavus has been a pioneer working on AI-powered analytics solutions with service providers around the world. The rapid growth, range, and affordability of Jio’s service offerings and their innovative use of AI and analytics is transformative for their customers and India. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Jio to provide the AI and analytics foundation for the digital services revolution in India.”