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Forces Network, a professional network of the military veterans in corporate, conducted a full day Military to Corporate (M2C) Transition Workshop at Holiday Inn, Aerocity, New Delhi on 20 October 2019. GR Reddy the Founder of Husys, India’s first publicly listed HR company, gave a wonderful talk on the ‘opportunities for veterans in the MSME sector.’ He had flown in from Hyderabad especially for this session. In a post event interaction he said that he was pleasantly surprised to such an energetic and positive community and looked forward to an enduring association with them. Forces Network is an online community of military veteran officers in the corporate which today has grown into a vibrant global community with more than 5000 members worldwide. The Network was founded in 2007. This 11 years old network, with members spread across the globe, firmly believes that veterans have much more to offer to the industry and the society than what the current opportunities being made available to them. There is a reorientation required for the military personnel before they can rejoin the civilian workforce. –Col Iqbal Singh (Retd) Founder Forces Network CV Writing is felt to be the weakest link in the job hunt process for the veterans, and therefore, there was a great amount of stress laid on CV writing in this workshop. With their past experience and learning Forces Network trainers have reduced this activity to a system based on a framework created by them. Not only was the framework shared with the participants but the CV makeover of several participants was demonstrated in the workshop. Nearly two hours were devoted to this activity with the participants made to recreate their CV from scratch using the framework duly assisted by the trainers. In addition, a live mock interview was conducted in front of the participants. The interview panellists, who were practising industry professionals and veterans, shared their feedback which was found to be extremely insightful and valuable by the attendees. Salary negotiation aspects were also covered in detail by an HR professional. Mindset resetting is also an important part of the M2C transition. With that in view a session was devoted to this aspect wherein a clinical Psychologist Sqn Ldr Meena Arora (Retd) conducted a few Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) exercises – which were very well received. The seminar was attended by close to 100 people. The participants were excited after the workshop. They felt empowered and more confident, and expressed optimism towards their second career in the civil. Most past participants have reported accelerated learning as well as faster realization of their aspirational goals. The workshop concluded with an hourlong mentoring session where selected trainers mentored the mentees in small groups of 4-6 people on a round table. They encouraged the mentees to ask any questions. The mentees found the session to be extremely helpful and cleared a lot of ‘cobwebs’ from their minds.  

Prama Hikvision has recently inaugurated India’s largest and first world-class manufacturing facility at Vasai, near Mumbai. Dr. V. K. Saraswat, Member, Niti Aayog, former Director General of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Union Ministry of Defence; and Dr. Neeraj Sinha, Adviser, Science & Technology inaugurated the new facility on 1 October 2019. With this new facility, which is part of an investment commitment of INR 500 crores, Prama Hikvision will not only be able to cater to a fast expanding domestic market but also to overseas market in a phased manner. Employing over 2000 skilled and semi-skilled employees, the brown-field facility is spread over 12 acres of land comprising end-to-end production capabilities. It aims to initially support a localization target of 50%, which will gradually be transitioning to 100% in the next 18 months. An ISO 9001:2015 certified facility has the capability to manufacture over 850 product models. Ashish P. Dhakan, MD and CEO, Prama Hikvision India Pvt. Ltd. said, “This new integrated state-of-the-art manufacturing facility is an expression of our full commitment to the Government of India’s flagship ‘Make in India’ program. We remain committed as a long-term partner of the country and continue to pursue our vision of ‘Make in India for a Safer India’ with manifold commitments. We have so far invested Rs.500 Cr in this new plant with further investment commitments in the pipeline to ramp up productions, local R&D, skilling, and giving back to the communities. This new unit has an installed capacity to make 1.5 million cameras per month. It has nine lines that does surface mount technology level manufacturing and enables us to make electronic chips and cameras locally instead of importing them. To upskill a significant part of the workers in this factory, many of them being unemployed before joining us, we have developed in-house training programs comprising world-class modules – thus bringing them into the mainstream socio-economic fold.” A first-generation entrepreneur having built Prama Hikvision from a humble start since its inception in 2005, Ashish P. Dhakan is today a leader of the Indian security and surveillance industry who is credited for setting gold standards, now acknowledged world over. The new facility will make Prama Ashish Dhakan, MD and CEO, Prama Hikvision along with Dr VK Saraswat and Dr Neeraj Sinha at the manufacturing facility Hikvision the only video surveillance products and solutions brand that is truly made in India. Prama Hikvision is progressively using printed circuit boards (PCBs) at this new facility to ensure full alignment with the Government of India’s phased manufacturing program (PMP) goals. With the installed capacity of 1.5 million cameras per month, the facility has a potential to grow at the rate of 30% year-on-year. With this kind of a capacity, Prama Hikvision is already enjoying a market penetration above 35% in India. Driving the future of surveillance in India with an intuitive integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into its cutting-edge products and solutions, Prama Hikvision has established itself as a market leader by setting new benchmarks in the security and surveillance industry. As a true market leader, the company also has a technical support call center, R&D center and 17 RMA centers.    

International Institute of Security and Safety Management (IISSM) is to organise its 29th Annual Global Conclave at Hotel Conrad, Bangalore during 14- 15 November 2019. Since Bangalore is the IT capital of India and a major hub of IT business in the world, the central theme for the Conclave chosen is apt – ‘New Paradigms for Loss Prevention in the Digital Era.’ The Conclave estimates to draw approximately 400-500 professionals across the globe who will deliberate on the burning issues pertaining to ‘security, safety and loss prevention’ in the business arena. In modern highly connected world, loss prevention is a major challenge for all the industries. Since business security hinges on the information security, the survivability would be at stake if the information security is not ensured – and to do so, organisations and companies have to use technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, and likes in a much bigger scale than ever. These issues, challenges and opportunities will be deliberated in detail by the industry experts, scientists and professors from premier institutes like IIT/ IIM and IISC during the panel discussions (five) over two days. These panel discussions will be preceded with a key note address by the leaders and luminaries from the industry, government and academia.    

The International Conference on Cyberlaw, Cybercrime & Cybersecurity 2019 is being organized by Cyberlaws.Net and Pavan Duggal Associates, Advocates, Supreme Court of India during 20-22 November, 2019 at New Delhi. The conference aims to examine and analyze the emerging trends of cyberlaw, cybercrime and cybersecurity in today’s times. The conference will be attended by various international delegates and speakers as well as the representatives from the national diaspora representing the stakeholders in the digital ecosystem. The participants would include representatives from the central and state governments, various ministries, law enforcement agencies, police, business, information technology, corporate sector etc. They will also make academicians, scholars, service providers, export from international organizations, and other distinguished thought-leaders. The International Conference on Cyberlaw, Cybercrime & Cybersecurity is being supported by more than 110 international and national organizations. Insights Exploring the emerging trends in cyberlaw, cybercrime and cybersecurity. Conference aims to provide intellectually fertile platform for exchange of ideas, concepts, perspectives and opinions on cutting edge cyberspace ecosystem issues at a global level with more than 1100 experts from the given fields. Gaining knowledge and learning of international best practices Benefits to attend Enable international and Indian policy makers, government officials, corporate thought leaders and other stakeholders to keep pace with the emerging issues in cyber ecosystem. Offers a 3 full day conference with interactive sessions from different experts across the globe. Member participation will help in assessing the impact related to cyberlaw, cybercrime and cybersecurity. Conference to be addressed by more than 150 speakers. A wonderful opportunity for networking with the best minds in the cyber ecosystem and for being part of an unparalleled, holistic, multi-disciplinary discussions and debate on critical issues concerning cyberspace today under one roof.  

The 94th Annual Conference of World Association of Detectives (WAD) was held at Courtyard by Marriott Stockholm Kungsholmen, Sweden from 27 August to 1st September 2019. It was attended by over 300 delegates from 36 countries. This WAD conference was one of the largest conferences held for private investigators and security professionals in the history of Sweden. With 18 delegates, Indian presence was the largest folk family gathering at the forum. The participants experienced curated programs and events for over five days at Stockholm. Centered around innovation, the sessions covered subjects such as open source intelligence, data security, and an insight into the rising tide of wrongful convictions. The conference gave an opportunity to investigators from across the globe to debate on a variety of topical issues and to network with fellow professionals to discuss the latest best practices in the industry and enable their enhancement. On the social front the organisers apart from holding the annual gala banquet, provided plenty of time to take insights of Sweden’s beautiful capital city. Interestingly, Mike LaCorte has been re-elected as the Chairman of the World Association of Detectives who is also a past president of the organization. He was chosen to the chair of the organization for the second term following the announcement of the President, Ms. Laura Giuliani, to not to become the Chairman. “Indian investigation professionals have successfully created their high levels of skills and credibility to undertake cross boarder global assignments. We have achieved leadership positions at such an international organization like WAD which was founded in 1925 in USA. It is a matter of great honour to have led this apex body as its Global President and Chairman. Now R. P. Chauhan from Ahmedabad has been unanimously elected as 3rd Vice President of WAD, and Sh Mahesh Sharma of GDX, New Delhi as a member of the Board of Directors. It is a great recognition for Indian Investigators and the entire Nation” – Kunwar Vikram Singh Former Chairman, WAD & Chairman, CAPSI The gala event also witnessed recognition of those who carried out an outstanding investigation performance in the best traditions of the profession. While Jacob Ofir was named as ‘The Investigator of the year,’ Eric Shelmerdine received the WAD’s highest honor ‘The Norman J Sloan Memorial Award,’ that recognizes a long and meritorious service, beyond the call of duty for contributing to the betterment of the investigative and security professions. Mr. Eric has been a long serving member of WAD, as well as a former president and general secretary of the Association of British Investigators. “I am greatly honored to have been elected as the Director of WAD at the 94th Annual Conference of the World Association of Detectives. WAD is nearly a hundred year old organization connecting private detectives and investigators from all over the world. It has been my privilege to be associated with this international forum for the last one decade. Today the feel of my being a member of the Board of Directors of this esteemed institution is quite fulfilling” – Mahesh Sharma Director – WAD, & MD, GDX Group The conference concluded on a joyous note for the members from India. V M Pandit and R P Chauhan completed their tenure as the directors of WAD this year. Mr. Chauhan was nominated for the post of 3rd Vice President by Kunwar Vikram Singh, the past Chairman of WAD. His nomination was seconded by Mr. Pandit, and thus Mr. Chauhan was declared as the 3rd Vice President of the organisation. Moreover, Mahesh Sharma was appointed as the Director. For the first time in the history of WAD, elections were held for all vacant posts; interestingly however, only one nominee’s name was received for each post, and hence they were filled unopposed. “I became the member of World Association of Detectives long back in 1987, and since then, I have been traveling across the world for attending conferences and board meetings of the Association. I enhanced to designate Director in 2005 in Las Vegas, and was elected director for five years in 2006 at Tokyo, Japan. Today I am privileged and highly honored to be voted as the 3rd Vice President of WAD. Alongside, I am also serving the Board as the Area Governor for Asia” – R P Chauhan 3rd Vice President, WAD & MD – Perfect Investigation & Personnel Services Private Limited The World Association of Detectives is the largest and longest established association of its kind in the world, with close to 1000 members representing investigation and security practitioners in more than 80 countries. It promotes and maintains the highest ethical practices among its members and fosters cooperation between investigators globally.  

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.