Monday, June 4, 2018
Philippines loses US$ 3.5 Billion due to Cybersecurity threats
A Frost & Sullivan study commissioned by Microsoft revealed that the potential economic loss in the Philippines due to cybersecurity incidents can hit a staggering US$3.5 billion. This is 1.1 percent of the Philippines’ total GDP of US$305 billion[1].
The study, titled “Understanding the Cybersecurity Threat Landscape in Asia Pacific: Securing the Modern Enterprise in a Digital World”, aims to provide business and IT decision makers with insights on the economic cost of cybersecurity breaches in the region and identify the gaps in organizations’ cybersecurity strategies. The study involved a survey of 1,300 business and IT decision makers ranging from mid-sized organizations (250 to 499 employees) to large-sized organizations (>than 500 employees).
The study reveals that more than half of the organizations surveyed in the Philippines have either experienced a cybersecurity incident (18%) or are not sure if they had one as they have not performed proper forensics or data breach assessment (34%).
“As companies embrace the opportunities presented by cloud and mobile computing to connect with customers and optimize operations, they take on new risks,” said Hans Bayaborda, Managing Director, Microsoft Philippines. “With traditional IT boundaries disappearing the adversaries now have many new targets to attack. Companies face the risk of significant financial loss, damage to customer satisfaction and market reputation — as has been made all too clear by recent high-profile breaches.”
The True Cost of Cybersecurity Incidents – Economic, Opportunity and Job Losses
The study revealed that:
A large-sized organization in the Philippines can possibly incur an economic loss of US$7.5 million, more than 200 times higher than the average economic loss for a mid-sized organization (US$35,000); and
Cybersecurity attacks have resulted in job losses across different functions in seven in ten (72%) organizations that have experienced an incident over the last 12 months.
To calculate the cost of cybercrime, Frost & Sullivan has created an economic loss model based on macro-economic data and insights shared by the survey respondents. This model factors in three kinds of losses which could be incurred due to a cybersecurity breach:
Direct: Financial losses associated with a cybersecurity incident – this includes loss of productivity, fines, remediation cost, etc;
Indirect: The opportunity cost to the organization such as customer churn due to reputation loss; and
Induced: The impact of cyber breach to the broader ecosystem and economy, such as the decrease in consumer and enterprise spending.
“Although the direct losses from cybersecurity breaches are most visible, they are but just the tip of the iceberg,” said Edison Yu, Vice President and Asia Pacific Head of Enterprise for Frost & Sullivan. “There are many other hidden losses that we have to consider from both the indirect and induced perspectives, and the economic loss for organizations suffering from cybersecurity attacks can be often underestimated.”
In addition to financial losses, cybersecurity incidents are also undermining the Philippines organizations’ ability to capture future opportunities in today’s digital economy, with more than half (57%) respondents stating that their enterprise has put off digital transformation efforts due to the fear of cyber-risks.
Key Cyberthreats and Gaps in the Philippines Organizations’ Cybersecurity Strategies
Although high-profile cyberattacks, such as ransomware, have been garnering a lot of attention from enterprises, the study found that for organizations in the Philippines that have encountered cybersecurity incidents, data exfiltration and data corruption are the biggest concern as they have the highest impact with the slowest recovery time.
Besides external threats, the research also revealed key gaps in organizations’ cybersecurity approach to protect their digital estate:
Security an afterthought: Only 44% of organizations consider cybersecurity before the start of a digital transformation project. Majority of respondents (56%) either think about cybersecurity only after they start on the project or do not consider it at all. This limits their ability to conceptualize and deliver a “secure-by-design” project, potentially leading to insecure products going out into the market;
Creating a Complex Environment: Negating the popular belief that deploying a large portfolio of cybersecurity solutions will render stronger protection, the survey revealed that 17% of respondents with more than 50 cybersecurity solutions could recover from cyberattacks within an hour. In contrast, more than twice as many respondents (38%) with fewer than 10 cybersecurity solutions responded that they can recover from cyberattacks within an hour; and
Lacking cybersecurity strategy: While more and more organizations are considering digital transformation to gain competitive advantage, the study has shown that 46% of respondents see cybersecurity strategy only as a means to safeguard the organization against cyberattacks rather than a strategic business enabler. A mere 25% of organizations see cybersecurity strategy as a digital transformation enabler.
“The ever-changing threat environment is challenging, but there are ways to be more effective using the right blend of modern technology, strategy, and expertise,” added Hans. “Microsoft is empowering businesses in the Philippines to take advantage of digital transformation by enabling them to embrace the technology that’s available to them, securely through its secure platform of products and services, combined with unique intelligence and broad industry partnerships.”
Artifical Intelligence (AI) is the Next Frontier in Cybersecurity Defense
In a digital world where cyberthreats are constantly evolving and attack surface is rapidly expanding, AI is becoming a potent opponent against cyberattacks as it can detect and act on threat vectors based on data insights. The study reveals that more than almost four in five (79%) organizations in the Philippines have either adopted or are looking to adopt an AI approach towards boosting cybersecurity.
AI’s ability to rapidly analyze and respond to unprecedented quantities of data is becoming indispensable in a world where cyberattacks’ frequency, scale and sophistication continue to increase.
An AI-driven cybersecurity architecture will be more intelligent and be equipped with predictive abilities to allow organizations to fix or strengthen their security posture before problems emerge. It will also grant companies with the capabilities to accomplish tasks, such as identifying cyberattacks, removal of persistent threats and fixing bugs, faster than any human could, making it an increasingly vital element of any organizations’ cybersecurity strategy.
Recommendations for securing the modern enterprise in a digital world
AI is but one of the many aspects that organizations need to incorporate or adhere to in order to maintain a robust cybersecurity posture. For a cybersecurity practice to be successful, organizations need to consider People, Process and Technology, and how each of these contributes to the overall security posture of the organization.
To help organizations better withstand and respond to cyberattacks and malware infections, here are five best practices that they can consider in improving their defense against cybersecurity threats:
Position cybersecurity as a digital transformation enabler: Disconnect between cybersecurity practices and digital transformation effort creates a lot of frustration for the employees. Cybersecurity is a requirement for digital transformation to guide and keep the company safe through its journey. Conversely, digital transformation presents an opportunity for cybersecurity practices to abandon aging practices to embrace new methods of addressing today’s risks;
Continue to invest in strengthening your security fundamentals: Over 90% of cyber incidents can be averted by maintaining the most basic best practices. Maintaining strong passwords, conditional use of multi-factor authentication against suspicious authentications, keeping device operating systems, software and anti-malware protection up-to-date and genuine can rapidly raise the bar against cyberattacks. This should include not just tool-sets but also training and policies to support a stronger fundamental;
Maximize skills and tools by leveraging integrated best-of-suite tools. The best tools are useless in the hands of the amateur. Reduce the number of tools and the complexity of your security operations to allow your operators to hone their proficiency with the available tools. Prioritizing best-of-suite tools is a great way to maximize your risk coverage without the risk of introducing too many tools and complexity to the environment. This is especially true if tools within the suite are well-integrated to take advantage of their counterparts;
Assessment, review and continuous compliance: The organization should be in a continuous state of compliance. Assessments and reviews should be conducted regularly to test for potential gaps that may occur as the organization is rapidly transforming and address these gaps. The board should keep tab on not just compliance to industry regulations but also how the organization is progressing against security best practices; and
Leverage AI and automation to increase capabilities and capacity: With security capabilities in short supply, organizations need to look to automation and AI to improve the capabilities and capacity of their security operations. Current advancements in AI has shown a lot of promise, not just in raising detections that would otherwise be missed but also in reasoning over how the various data signals should be interpreted with recommended actions. Such systems have seen great success in cloud implementations where huge volumes of data can be processed rapidly. Ultimately, leveraging automation and AI can free up cybersecurity talents to focus on higher-level activities.
For more information on the study, please visit:
https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/cybersecurity-in-asia/
To better understand the cyberthreats happening globally and in Asia Pacific, please download the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 23 here: https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-Security-Intelligence-Report-Vol-23-Landing-Page-eBook.html
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
VXI Victorious during the 12th International ICT Awards
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(L-R) PETER MAQUERA – Senior Vice President for Enterprise Group, Globe Business; Jared Morrison – VXI’s Executive Vice President and Country Manager; Karen Ibasco – Miss Earth 2017 |
VXI Global Solutions, LLC (VXI) emerged victorious once again, winning a hat trick at the 12th International ICT Awards Philippines held at the Manila Marriott Grand Ballroom recently.
VXI Philippines (VXI PH) was awarded three major honor including the most coveted Best Employer of the Year premier award. The qualification criteria were structured around people practices including HR leadership, policies, practices, breadth of competencies and overall public recognition by clients and employees.
“To be recognized as the Best Employer of the Year is a validation of our belief, our operating ethos, Passion for People. For the last couple of years we have singularly focused on one thing – taking amazing care of our people. It’s all about building skills and careers, taking care of aspirations, and rest everything falls in place”, said Jared Morrison, Executive Vice President and Country Manager, after personally collecting the trophy.
“This recognition from ICT is a celebration of VXI’s transformation story during the past 3 years. We strived to shape VXI to be a great place to work by building a great culture, creating meaningful careers, paying fairly and competitively, and communicating with passion,” said Jovy Llanes, Vice President of Human Resources.
Competing with the industry’s largest and best companies, VXI also took home the Best Contact Center & BPO Company of the Year award for the second straight year. Echoing this year’s theme, “Exemplifying Excellence”, VXI cemented its stature as one of the top and fastest growing IT-BPO companies in the Philippines.
“We are immensely proud and truly humbled that our hard work has been recognized on the international stage. This award is for all of us at VXI, our employees who embodied our values and delivered high performance consistently and the management team for providing authentic leadership” said Eppie Titong, Vice President of Operations.
The gala event was concluded with the announcement of VXI as the Most Innovative Company of the Year for focus on technology innovation, breadth and depth of R&D competencies and client profile. VXI was recognized for building several productivity and efficiency tools including Training SimulatorTM and PerformancePro360TM, which significantly increase speed to proficiency and drive KPI improvements respectively.
“This award is a great validation of the creative intelligence behind our tools and products. It will further our fascination to design more efficient solutions”, said Prateek Hastir, Vice President of Sales & Marketing.
The International ICT Awards Philippines are organized by The Canadian Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (CanCham) in close cooperation with the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP). The event is widely recognized as the most prestigious ICT Awards event in the Philippines.
About VXI Global Solutions
With 30,000 employees across 42 delivery centers, VXI Global Solutions is a leader in customer experience management and contact center solutions. With a diverse workforce and delivery centers in North and Latin America, Caribbean, Europe and Asia Pacific, VXI drives high Net Promoter Score (NPS) and positive bottom line impact through its customer management solutions, unified Omni channel communication platform, and purpose built productivity/efficiency enhancing IT applications.
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Brave New World – How AI Will Impact Work and Jobs
There’s no doubt that the advent of broadly-available Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers businesses the prospect of increased productivity and accelerated innovation, whilst also enabling society to help solve some of its toughest - and most persistent – challenges: disease, famine, climate control and natural disasters.
AI is already delivering tangible economic benefits for many organisations across Asia Pacific. For example, leading global container shipping company OOCL reports that applying AI to their business is already saving them $10m annually, whilst Apollo Hospitals in India are using AI to help predict heart disease amongst its patients.
While the benefits of Artificial Intelligence are undeniable, AI is a disrupter, especially when it comes to the displacement of jobs. The ramifications of AI on the workforce is a regular topic of discussion among CEOs and government leaders across Asia Pacific.
That said, it is also pertinent to examine the far-reaching implication that AI brings to the workforce. Will the social disruptions that AI can potentially create ultimately overshadow its benefits?
The Evolution of Jobs in the AI-Shaped Future
To put things in perspective: large-scale disruption is a challenge with every industrial revolution. Technology will always have profound implications on the creation, elimination, or evolution of jobs. For example, just a few years ago, it was common for offices to have a pool of typists. Clearly, this role is no longer relevant in today’s modern office, thanks to the proliferation of personal computing. The advent of AI will reshape jobs in a similar way.
Microsoft recently partnered with the leading technology advisory firm IDC to assess the digital transformation landscape across the region. Titled “Unlocking the Economic Impact of Digital Transformation in Asia Pacific”, the study surveyed 1,560 business and IT leaders from 15 Asia Pacific economies[i]. It showed that 85% of jobs in Asia Pacific will be transformed in the next three years. (See chart below)
Diving deeper into the results, the respondents said that over 50% of jobs will be redeployed to a new position and/or retrained and upskilled for digital transformation. What’s interesting is that the Study shows that 26% of jobs will be newly created roles from digital transformation, which will offset the 27% of jobs that will he outsourced or automated. In other words, the overall workforce effect will be broadly neutral.
These are clear indications that how businesses organize work, how people find employment and the skills people need to prepare for the workforce are changing dramatically. These changes are likely to accelerate in the decade ahead.
As AI continues to transform the nature of work, education, skills, and training will have to transform as well in order to ensure that people are prepared for the jobs of the future and businesses have access to the talent they need to succeed. And as traditional models of employment transform, there will be a need to modernize legal frameworks to recognize new ways of working, provide adequate worker protections, and maintain social safety nets.
Building a Better Future Together
The recently published, ‘The Future Computed, Artificial Intelligence and its Role in Society’, makes sense of this AI conundrum as it offers three conclusions on AI and the impact on work and jobs:.
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(You can download the book here for free today). |
- First, the organizations and countries that will fare best in the AI race will be early adopters. The reason is straightforward: AI will be useful wherever intelligence is needed and it helps us to be more productive in nearly every field of human endeavor, which can lead to economic growth. Put simply, new jobs and economic progress will favor those that embrace the technology, not those that resist it.
- Second, while AI will help improve daily life in many ways and help solve big societal problems, its important to remain critical when examining the issues that it can bring. Beyond AI deployment, what’s equally important is to prepare society and the workforce for the impending changes that AI will catalyze by addressing the need for strong ethical principles, the evolution of laws, the importance of training for new skills, and even labor market reforms. These aspects must all come together in order tomake the most of this new technology.
- Third, to fully realize the benefits of AI, and to minimize the negative outcomes, technology companies, private and public organizations need to come together with a sense of shared responsibility -- AI must be democratized.
The AI building blocks that Microsoft is developing today, such as computer vision, speech, and knowledge recognition, should be made available to all so that they can create their own AI-based solutions. AI should not be controlled by just a few organizations. The AI future should be built by everyone with a vision on how AI can benefit economies and societies as well as how we can tackle AI issues and their implications.
The future of AI can burn brightly or dimly. Disruption is a norm, and the ability to adapt to disruptions is what defines all of us. And to adapt to the fast-approaching, rapidly evolving AI future, all parties – from workers to enterprises to governments - will need to spend more time listening to each other, collaborate and constantly learn new knowledge and skills.
Monday, May 7, 2018
Converge brings 13th annual FTTH APAC Conference in Manila 2018
The 13th
annual FTTH APAC Conference 2018 will happen on May 8-10, 2018
at Shangri-La at the Fort, Makati City, Philippines. Converge ICT, the pure end-to-end Fiber Internet provider in the country, together with FTTH Council Asia Pacific is proud to bring this innovative event.
Gathering
all the companies active in the Asia-Pacific telecoms market and the over 600
senior executives participating this year is no easy task. Yet, this annual
conference will serve as the meeting point for the region’s top operators,
solution providers, and vendors as well.
Now is your
rare chance to position your company as a market leader and take advantage of
this event to build networks, partake in open discussions, and be aware of the
latest regional market trends and technological disruptions.
Key topics to discuss:
-
The
importance of fiber to the network edge for future proof telecom networks in
the Philippines.
-
Digital
services as a critical economic platform for the country and a launch pad for
innovation.
-
Designing
win-win partnerships between the Philippine government, carriers, “over the top”
players and non-traditional investors.
-
What
are the entertainment and connected living needs of the Philippines?
-
What
are your visions for the future of telecommunications and entertainment in the
country?
This event
is hosted by the Republic of the Philippines Department of Information and
Communications Technology, the Philippine Cable Television Association,
CONVERGE ICT, together with leading Philippines ICT companies.
About Converge ICT
An
ISO-Certified company, Converge ICT is the fastest growing fiber Internet and
other digital consumer-centric services provider in the Philippines today.
Their premium products and services run through the first pure end-to-end fiber
Internet network in the country. Whether you are at home, in your business, or
in the corporate world, Converge is the brand of choice!
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