The enterprise is enjoying a period of rapid technological innovation driven by real-time collaboration on a grand scale. New tools have brought the ability to work from anywhere, on any device, and at any time. Centralized offices and individually assigned desks are giving way to a distributed, mobile workforce. Digital workspaces offer enormous benefits for the enterprise and for workers, but there are also challenges ahead.

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In September 2014, Apple made encryption default with the introduction of the iPhone 6. Then, in February 2016, a Los Angeles judge issued an order to Apple to help break into the encrypted iPhone belonging to a terrorist involved in a mass shooting.
Apple had used some of the strongest encryption technologies and practices to protect its users and their data. The encryption technology did not discriminate between lawful and unlawful users. While there were many sides to this issue, it surfaced many important debates on security, privacy, and civil rights.

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Fraud is a challenge businesses struggle to find remedy for. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently stated that last year saw nearly six million fraud and cyber crimes take place in 2015, in the UK. What is more, these crimes impact everyone in some way. Take insurance fraud for instance; personal premiums may rise as insurance providers seek to recover the money lost. Ultimately, this is a problem which needs tackling from the ground up.

In 2014, insurers found 150,000 fraudulent claims which cost over £1.3 billion. This has led to companies, who have a vested interest in defeating fraud, to invest £200 million to identify and prevent fraud. That would be £200 million well spent if it indeed reduced the risk but it’s hard to tell if it is.

Investing in digital technologies is key to securing the future of the insurance industry. Digitisation has rapidly transformed the landscape for consumers in how they can look for, and acquire, policies. Customers are no longer going to their high street brokers. The impact of less footfall was illustrated by Swinton who plans to close 130 of its high street branches within the next 12 months. High street brokers are being replaced by online price comparison and brokerage websites that can give you the best deals, for your particular circumstances, in real-time.

This sheer number of information requests and transactions online, coupled with the needs to satisfy customer demands in real-time, has significantly increased the risk of online fraud. Unfortunately, the means to detect these risks are still relatively archaic. KPMG found that most companies rely on old-fashioned tips rather than technology to overcome fraud. The question is, why is technology, which can help monitor behavioural patterns, overlooked when trying to combat this?

Something which has intrigued all data driven businesses is the thought of data analytics on an industrial scale. Data analytics is touted as a viable means for brokers to detect fraud by examining the swathes of data insurers have.

The de facto post-incident response in insurance is erroneous, relying on post-breach investigation and hours of legwork by “field agents”. Detecting it whilst it is happening, or better still, predicting incidents based on behavioural analytics, is a little more enticing and it is possible. A real-time look at validation data is the holy grail of detecting fraud, not just on new policies but renewals as well. To do this, a robust database infrastructure is needed to handle the queries of not only prospective clients but brokers too.

Backend technologies which make up the underlying infrastructure are able to provide this sort of capability. By building specialist applications and using them to aggregate data of individuals trying to take out policies, especially analysing past and current customer behaviour, would make it possible to detect and root out those who are trying to defraud the organisation, before they strike.

To do this with efficiency, it is important to have the database, which serves and receives the data, functioning in good order. One which is robust and scalable, capable of handling billions of queries coming from prospective customers on a price comparison website and the brokers who need to confirm or deny application success. Management of the database is also critical; if it isn’t properly monitored and implemented with a view of handling large quantities of data, downtime and revenue loss, due to unidentified fraud, can almost be guaranteed.

Technology might not be the only solution, it might take a combination of tactics to help reduce the risk from the 150,000 fraudulent claims which were uncovered within the last year, with probably several thousands more still hidden. The astronomical growth of data, and the ability to analyse it, will definitely play a part in the future success of the insurance industry.

The smart bet for insurers to move forward is by having a strong database foundation, one that can handle transactions at scale and continue fighting hard against the new world of cyber fraudsters. 

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IT professionals are becoming more confident in the security of the public cloud compared to corporate data centres, according to the latest study from IT consulting firm SADA Systems.

The poll, which quizzed more than 200 IT managers around their use of public cloud services, found that 84% of respondents were using some form of public cloud infrastructure today.

49% of respondents said they used Google Cloud Platform, compared with 48% for Microsoft and 42% for AWS – although it’s worth noting that SADA’s work comes primarily through Google and Microsoft reselling.

Half (50%) of those polled said they are likely to increase their public cloud usage by at least 25% over the next three years, with a further 25% saying they would increase their usage by more than half. 45% of firms polled said it took them three to six months to migrate to public cloud, with 23% saying it took three months.

In terms of issues with cloud adoption, more than half (51%) of respondents said concerns around data security prevented them from quicker adoption, while long-term viability of cloud (40%) and escalating costs (33%) were also highly cited.

“All signs point to public cloud adoption growing and enterprise IT becoming more comfortable with the prospect of running their most sensitive data on public cloud infrastructure,” said Tony Safoian, SADA president and CEO in a statement. “Security and reliability will always be primary concerns – as they should – and companies should lean on expert consultants and integrators to guide them in addressing these issues.

“The convenience of public cloud, coupled with easy access to proven resources for managing these environments, make the option of moving to public cloud too compelling to ignore,” Safoian added.

During the early days of my career, I used a variety of development environments, including the most popular Turbo C along with FoxPro, PowerBuilder, and Delphi before finally settling down with Microsoft Visual Studio. The first line of code that I have ever written was in QBasic running on Microsoft DOS. The editor had useful features like adding the line numbers and automatically converting the statements to uppercase. Hitting F5 would run the program instantly without having to switch to the command prompt.

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Last month, I returned from an overseas trip to a friend’s wedding to find the zombie apocalypse happening in my neighborhood near downtown San Jose. People of all ages and demographics united together in what looked like strange cult gatherings in public parks, stumbling around the streets of the South Bay with eyes glued to their phones and occasionally yelling something strange like, «OMG I hatched a Nidoking!» Cars would come to abrupt halts in front of me at unexplained times—I half expected a scene from the movie Zombieland to unfold where Woody Harrelson would leap out from an SUV ready to give me the nickname Minnesota and help navigate safely back to my parents’ farm.

Pokémon Go was released in the US on July 6, 2016. Unless you’ve been living off the grid in a yurt (in which case you won’t be reading this blog post), you’ve probably observed that this was much more than a game release and more like the dawn of a new way of life for some people. While there have been well-publicized challenges as the game has scaled to reach millions, it’s an amazing…

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Changing with the times is frequently overlooked when it comes to data security. Technology is becoming increasingly dynamic, but most data centres are still using archaic security measures to protect their network – which isn’t going to stand a chance against today’s sophisticated attacks.

Recent efforts to upgrade these massive security systems are still falling short. Data centres house a huge amount of data and there shouldn’t be any shortcuts when implementing security to protect that data. The focus remains on providing protection only at the perimeter to keep threats outside. However, implementing perimeter-centric security leaves the insides of the data centre vulnerable, where the actual data resides.

Cybercriminals understand this, and are constantly utilising advanced threats and techniques to breach external protections and move inside the data centre. Without strong internal security protections, hackers have visibility and access to steal data and disrupt business processes before they are even detected.

Businesses face security challenges as traffic behaviour and patterns are shifting. There is a higher amount of applications in the data centre, and these applications are integrated with each other. The increasing number of applications causes east-west traffic within the data centre to drastically grow, and as the perimeter defences are blind to this traffic, it makes lateral movement possible. With the rising number of applications, hackers have a broader choice of targets. Another challenge is that the manual processes for managing security are too slow. New applications that are rapidly created will evolve and change frequently, and static security controls are unable to keep up with the pace.

To address these challenges, a new security approach is needed – one that requires bringing security inside the data centre to protect against advanced threats. Enter micro-segmentation.

Micro-segmentation with advanced threat prevention is emerging as the new way to improve data centre security. Micro-segmentation works by grouping resources within the data centre and applying specific security policies to the communication between those groups. The data centre is essentially divided up into smaller, protected sections (segments) so that any intrusion discovered can be contained.

However, despite the separation, applications need to cross micro-segments in order to communicate with each other. This makes lateral movement still possible, which is why in order to detect and prevent lateral movement in the data centre it is vital for threat prevention to inspect traffic crossing the micro-segments.

In order to address data centre security agility, so it can cope with rapid changes, when new applications are added the security in the software-defined data centre learns about the role, scale, and location of the application. This allows the correct security policies to be enforced and removes the need for a manual process.

Strengthening the perimeter offers little help if there is no additional security within the data centre. With micro-segmentation, advanced security and threat prevention services can be deployed wherever they are needed in the environment. Implementing solutions such as Check Point’s vSEC for VMware NSX will provide multi-layered defences to protect east-west traffic within the data centre, and automatically quarantine infected machines for remediation. This puts required protection inside the organisation’s data centre, securing their company assets and valuable data from attacks.

By deploying advanced security solutions, businesses can better protect their data centres from undetected breaches and sophisticated threats. 

The next BriefingsDirect business innovation for procurement case study examines how UPS modernizes and streamlinines its procure-to-pay processes.
Learn how UPS – across billions of dollars of supplier spend per year – automates supply-chain management and leverages new technologies to provide greater insight into procurement networks. T

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