Tag: IBM India/South Asia.

Business World, News

IBM India’s volunteer teams honored for contributing to sustainable education during Covid

May 31, 2021 by Rekha Nair 0 Comments #CSR Leader, #IBM India/South Asia., #Manoj Balachandran

Bangalore: IBM  is recognizing three teams from India in its annual Volunteer Excellence Awards for their innovative work in making education more accessible during the pandemic being innovative in their community volunteering during 2020.

The initiatives and people being recognized include a 10-person team providing remote mentoring for girl students, a 43-member team that recorded audiobooks for visually challenged learners, and a 12-person team conducting webinars for technology students to sustain education projects during Covid lockdowns.

The IBM teams recognized from India are part of 15 IBM volunteers or winning teams from 25 countries who were selected worldwide. The organizations associated with each winner will each receive a grant from IBM of USD $10,000 to expand the work started by the IBM volunteers.

The winners are just some of the IBMers in the area who joined thousands of their IBM colleagues who logged 1.25 million hours of community service worldwide last year.

“The Volunteer Excellence Awards recognizes the contributions of those who have truly gone above and beyond in their duties. I’m proud that three of our teams have been selected this year which is a testament to the selfless commitment of our volunteers in driving societal change. We are continuing these efforts during the second wave, with over 2000 IBM volunteers working around the clock to help IBMers, their families, and the community. We have formed volunteer squads to take requests for hospital beds, ICUs, oxygen requirements, ambulances, medicines, and more and direct them towards verified and available resources. These squads help save lives by quickly triaging requests and ensuring they are matched to resources available nationally,” said Manoj Balachandran, CSR Leader, IBM India/South Asia.

This year’s winners are from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam.

IBM India’s GoodTech initiative focuses on supplementing India’s skilling efforts through programs that can be delivered online as well as through traditional methods. Today, we reach over 10 million learners in India through our good tech initiatives, skilling engagements, collaborations with clients and partners.

Since 2005, IBM’s Volunteer Excellence Award has recognized IBMers who best exemplify values of dedication, innovation, and trust through their volunteer efforts with not-for-profit organizations or schools.

 

News, Technology

Investing in next gen security solutions to propel modernization and digital transformation efforts in 2021

Dec 21, 2020 by Rekha Nair 0 Comments #IBM India/South Asia., #IBM Security Systems, #Sudeep Das, #Technical Leader
  • 5 key Security Tech trends that must be at the heart of every organization’s security strategy

Sudeep Das, Technical Leader, IBM Security Systems, IBM India/South Asia

2020 witnessed the threat landscape in India changing and evolving quickly, data breaches, ransomware attacks, privacy failures, and other cybersecurity challenges are now on everyone’s radar screen more than ever.  Yet most businesses still struggled with effectively preparing for them. Challenges that continue to hold companies back include:– complex regulatory requirements, lack of alignment on security strategy as well as cybersecurity and compliance maturity, frequent organizational changes, security skills shortages, uncertainty regarding security “best practices” and lastly insufficient practice of plans for responding to a cybersecurity incident — that is if they have an incident response plan at all. A recent IBM and Ponemon Institute study highlighted that 41% of the respondents from India review and test their cybersecurity incident response plan (CSIRP) only once each year. This is an alarming fact, specifically in the light of the current pandemic since many organizations had to overnight shift to a Hybrid work environment leading to many unforeseen risks.

Further, as per our 2020 Cost of Data Breach report, Indian companies witnessed an average of ₹140 million total cost of a data breach in 2020, an increase of 9.4% from 2019. Additionally, companies with fully deployed security automation were able to detect and contain a breach 27% faster than those with none. Showcasing the importance of technology preparedness.

We believe the next wave of the tech security landscape will be enhanced by these five trends helping organizations innovate and be prepared for all present and future uncertainties.

  1. Security to drive modernization efforts: Most large organizations that already have significant security deployment would be looking to drive modernization and transformation of their tools to better cover the increased threat landscape. Organizations are optimizing and scaling their existing tools both in terms of newer use cases and newer detection scenarios being operationalized. All of this leading to more coverage of their infrastructure across on-Prem, operational technology (OT) infrastructure as well as cloud infrastructure and services. Further, along with upscaling the tool’s output organizations would also look to modernize the security insight exchange between these controls in a platform-based manner rather than the existing manual methods of information and security context sharing.
  2. Blueprinting a Zero-Trust Framework: There is a renewed vigour around combining Identity, Data, Network, and Device security into a common analysis platform to better deliver security context and build on an organization’s Zero-Trust journey. Companies are realizing that all the siloed security programs are not delivering the right level of risk view to them and it is necessary to drive horizontal data analysis across “all” the security telemetry data that is available for the most critical resources in the organization – people, data and infrastructure.
  3. Adoption of Security From the Cloud: With a lack of skilled personnel being a major inhibitor to maximize the efficacy of security investments, we are seeing more and more organizations evaluating Security as a Service option. This empowers the organization to work with a security firm specializing in various security services. Security as a Service can help with the maintenance and operationalization of the security controls thereby driving security through an SLA-driven program rather than a traditional path of consuming an on-Prem security solution.
  4. AI/ML-powered security to be ubiquitous – While we have witnessed the use of AI/ML within the realm of security, moving forward, organizations will embrace the power of machine learning to help them monitor their risks across all security controls. There are mountains of security telemetry data available with all IT landscapes and not all of this data is being analyzed and used for security monitoring and threat hunting. ML-based tools could provide the necessary insights from each of these controls – be it the security information and event management (SIEM) system or the user behavior analysis system or the identity risk monitoring system and more importantly the data security systems. Companies will need to evaluate their AI journey for security to ensure that it is moving from just a promise phase to actual delivery of AI-based security insights.
  5. Automation and Orchestration to be the core of security strategy- Organizations have traditionally struggled to take quick and auditable action on security insights that are provided by the various protection systems in the organizations due to either lack of man-power or lack of process. Investments in orchestration and automation technologies can help ensure that the detected incidents are addressed in a systematic and compliant manner.