Dvara KGFS Receives Rating Upgrade from ICRA Agency

Credit rating agency ICRA upgraded the long-term rating of Dvara KGFS one notch up from BBB-  to BBB. The rating upgrade is for both the Line of Credit (LOC) and Subordinated Debenture Programme of Dvara KGFS, with the outlook on the long-term rating set at stable.

The rating upgrade comes on the back of a recent equity infusion of 97 crores in April 2019, which allowed the company to diversify its operations into newer geographies, strengthen its presence in existing geographies and solidify its capital base for further growth. The rating upgrade reinforces the strong collection efficiency witnessed across Dvara KGFS operations and is an affirmation of the management team’s ability to execute the company’s growth plans while maintaining its strong financial position.

Commenting on the rating upgrade, Joby C O, Chief Executive Officer, Dvara KGFS, said "This upgrade by ICRA is an endorsement to the credibility that the Company has earned based on its performance in the past many years, and a strong risk framework that has been put in place. This rating upgrade is hugely positive in the current market and an acknowledgement to the management’s clear intent and focus on performance. This helps to reinforce the confidence the banks have put on us. We are hoping that this helps our fund-raising effort in the next quarters. "

Highlighting the importance of the upgrade, Samir Shah, Executive Vice-Chair & Group President of Dvara Trust, said "Dvara KGFS is a key part of the Dvara Group with a mission to be the preferred financial partner to rural households in India. We are delighted to see its progress, excited about its future as a truly unique deep rural holistic customer-centric financial services business model and thankful to all our partners who support KGFS in its journey to help underserved rural households to achieve their aspirations."

McAfee to Acquire NanoSec to Enhance its Market-Leading Capabilities in Cloud Security

McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, has announced the acquisition of NanoSec, a multi-cloud, zero-trust application and security platform. The acquisition will enable organizations to improve governance and compliance and to reduce risk of their cloud and container deployments.

Organizations are increasingly looking to adopt container technologies to help modernize legacy applications and create new cloud-native applications that are scalable and agile. Gartner predicts that “by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today1.” Gartner recommends the following security and governance best practice, “security can’t be an afterthought. It needs to be embedded in the DevOps process, which Gartner refers to as ‘DevSecOps’. Organizations need to plan for securing the containerized environment across the entire life cycle, which includes the build and development process, deployment and run phase of an application.”

The acquisition of NanoSec will strengthen the container security capabilities of McAfee MVISION Cloud and MVISION Server Protection products, giving its customers the ability to speed up application delivery while enhancing governance, compliance and security of their hybrid, multi-cloud deployments. NanoSec’s security capabilities will be applied to applications and workloads deployed in containers and Kubernetes and will be integrated into McAfee MVISION Cloud and MVISION Server Protection offerings. These capabilities include continuous configuration compliance and vulnerability assessment as well as runtime application-level segmentation for detecting and preventing lateral movement of threats.

“McAfee’s focus and innovation have allowed it to deliver industry-leading cloud security capabilities to help our customers securely leverage the cloud to accelerate their business,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president and general manager of the cloud security business unit, McAfee. “NanoSec’s technology is a natural extension for McAfee MVISION Cloud, enhancing our current CASB and CWPP products, and adding to our ‘Shift-Left’ capabilities to deliver on the DevSecOps best practice to improve governance and security. NanoSec’s team brings a wealth of experience to McAfee, and together we are committed to enabling organizations to reach their full cloud potential.”

“Joining forces with McAfee means that our groundbreaking capabilities including our unique application-identity based approach for app-level protection and micro-segmentation will be available on a global scale,” said Vishwas Manral, founder and CEO of NanoSec. “McAfee has demonstrated not only its leadership in cloud security, but its desire to continually innovate and deliver new capabilities that reshape how organizations can operate workloads and applications safely in the cloud. It felt like a natural fit to join McAfee to deliver to application development and security professionals greater visibility and control over detecting, responding and resolving threats to reduce risk.”

McAfee’s acquisition of NanoSec further demonstrates how McAfee is working to integrate security natively into DevSecOps processes and toolsets to discover and address security issues before applications are deployed. 

Join Hands with Emirates to Celebrate and Conserve the Gentle Giants

As the world and India celebrate World Elephant Day on 12 August, Emirates is showcasing its commitment to wildlife conservation and the urgency for protecting these majestic beasts which are a fundamental part of the country’s heritage.

The airline brings this commitment to life in wide-reaching ways across different customer touchpoints and in global forums.

One delectable way is through Amarula, served in all cabin classes inflight. The award-winning cream liqueur is crafted with the fruit of the Marula tree, which is indigenous to the woodlands of Southern Africa and is also called the Elephant Tree because it’s a favorite source of nutritious food among African Bush elephants.

The amount of Vitamin C found in a single marula fruit is eight times that found in an orange, making it an excellent source of the vitamin, not only for elephants but also for Amarula consumers.  The brand has also co-founded the Amarula Elephant Research Programme at the University of Natal, Durban and is devoted to the conservation of these elephants. All this makes it a delicious way to save elephants on-board Emirates – one Amarula sip at a time.

Five Emirates A380s feature a special livery of animals threatened by poaching, including African and Asian elephants. Part of Emirates’ global wildlife conservation efforts, the airline seeks to use its brand power and passion to generate greater awareness of this cause.

According to recent estimates, only 400,000 African elephants and 50,000 Asian elephants remain in the wild today. Ivory trafficking has seen an estimated 20,000 elephants killed every year – that’s a shocking 55 every day. Unlike African elephants, only male Asian elephants have tusks, which means poaching of males skew the sex ratio, limiting its breeding opportunities. Over 5,000 kilos of ivory tusks were seized at airports in 2016 and, since 2009, there have been over 440 seizures of illegal ivory in air transport.

This is why Emirates is a partner of ROUTES (Reducing Opportunities for Unlawful Transport of Endangered Species), and has a zero-tolerance policy on the carrying of ivory tusks or any hunting trophies or products associated with illegal wildlife activities. Emirates is also a signatory to the 2016 Buckingham Palace Declaration and Buenos Aires Declaration on Travel and Tourism and Illegal Wildlife Trade. Both underline the airline’s dedication to the conservation of wildlife and commitment to championing the cause of biodiversity to ensure a sustainable future for the planet.

The airline’s ground handling teams are fully trained according to International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) Live Animal Regulations and its internal policies on carrying wildlife. Frontline employees are trained to recognise and report suspicious cargo. A dedicated reporting channel empower employees and partners to stop illegal trade by flagging confidential information that can protect endangered species.

Poster campaigns across its organisation generate greater awareness as does the regular feature stories about wildlife protection in its inflight magazines, podcast interviews, wildlife programming and feature films on its award-winning ice inflight entertainment system.

Emirates fully funds and sponsors the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve (DDCR), a desert wildlife reserve. In 2018, the reserve was accepted as a candidate for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Green List for Protected and Conserved Areas – a global standard for protected areas. The reserve practices sustainable tourism and hosted 285,000 visitors last year, making it one of the most popular yet protected areas in the region. Efforts to re-introduce antelopes to the reserve has also resulted in success, inspiring the relocation of Oryx and gazelle to other protected areas within the region. A regional leader in ecological research, DDCR actively collaborates with local and international universities through major research projects on animals, vegetation and the desert ecosystem.

Thompson Smart TVs Offer Big Discounts on Flipkart National Shopping Days Sale Aug 8-15, 2019

Thomson announces heavy price drops on all its smart and non smart TV models including the newly launched OFFICIAL ANDROID SERIES during the FLIPKART NATIONAL SHOPPING DAYS SALE from August 8-15, 2019.

The nine day long NATIONAL SHOPPING DAYS SALE on FLIPKART will have THOMSON  smart TV's starting from INR 10,999 and OFFICIAL ANDROID TV's from INR 28,999.

THOMSON had recently launched India’s only make in India OFFICIAL ANDROID series keeping in mind today’s tech savvy Indian consumer who aspires to watch 4k content and high quality videos at a super affordable price. THOMSON always have kept the need of Indian consumer in mind from all sectors of the country. The brand re - launched in India early last year and since then it has introduced umpteen number of SKUs from Non-smart to 4k televisions. This is the last price drop before this year's much awaited, Big Billion Day SALE.

Announcing the offers, Avneet Singh Marwah, CEO SPPL, and Exclusive Brand Licensee of Thomson in India, said: “Our constant effort is to equip Indian consumer with the most evolving technology while keeping the affordability in mind. THOMSON will keep at it and ensure every Indian household is able to bring home a smart TV without burning a hole in their pocket."

Security and Risk Management Leaders Must Leverage the Automation Continuum to Create New Values

Leveraging the automation continuum is security and risk management leaders’ latest imperative in creating and preserving value at their organization, according to Gartner, Inc.

Katell Thielemann, research vice president at Gartner, explains that the automation continuum emerging in the security and risk landscape is one where new mindsets, practices and technologies are converging to unlock new capabilities. Using automation in areas of identity, data, and new products and services development were identified as three critical areas for the security and risk enterprise.

“We are no longer asking the singular question of how we’re managing risk and providing security to our organization. We’re now being asked how we’re helping the enterprise realize more value while assessing and managing risk, security and even safety. The best way to bring value to your organizations today is to leverage automation,” said Ms. Thielemann.

Automation is All Around Us

Automation is already all around us — and it is starting to impact the security and risk world in two ways:

* As an enabler to the security and risk function itself
* As new security frontiers that need to be acknowledged and understood

“Automation follows a continuum of sophistication and complexity, and can use a number of techniques, either stand-alone or in combination,” said David Mahdi, senior research director at Gartner. “For example, robotic process automation currently works best in task-centric environments, but process automation is evolving to increasingly powerful bots, and eventually to autonomous process orchestration.”

By 2021, 17% of the average organization’s revenue will be devoted to digital business initiatives, and by 2022, content creators will produce more than 30% of their digital content with the aid of AI content-generation techniques.

“What this means to security and risk management professionals is that our organizations are likely building solutions and making technology-related choices often without realizing the risk implications of what they are doing,” said Mr. Mahdi.

Balancing Emerging Technologies and People

“Automation is just the beginning. Emerging technologies will change everything and impact security and risk directly,” said Beth Schumaecker, director, advisory at Gartner. “Our reliance on data is ever increasing, yet it poses one of the largest privacy risks to organizations. In the next two years, half of large industrial companies will use some emerging form of digital twins, which will also need to be secured.”

The demands of these emerging technologies and digital transformation introduce new talent challenges for the security function, altering how organizations expect security to be delivered.

“Digital transformation demands that security staff play a wider range of roles, from strategic consultants to threat profilers to product managers, which in turn require new skills and competencies,” said Ms. Schumaecker. “It’s already impossible to fill all our existing vacancies.”

Mission-Critical Areas in Automation

The three mission-critical areas in today’s enterprises are automation in identity, data and new products or services development:

* Identity is the foundation for all other security controls, especially as the business increasingly moves to cloud environments. Identity decisions should always remain within the organization’s control, whether it is about humans or machines.
* Data is what organizations now depend on for virtually every transaction, and it needs to be shared as much as it needs to be protected.
* New products and services developed as emerging technologies gain a stronghold, prompting organizations to adapt and push the envelope.

Fossil Unveils its 4th Standalone Retail Store in Bangalore

FOSSIL announces the launch of its latest retail store in Bangalore at Forum Mall in Koramangala. Following the success of their existing stores in the metro and across the country, this new store will offer an entire range of Fossil merchandise. Fourth in the city, this brand store is scheduled to be inaugurated on Friday, 9th August 2019.

The store reflects the brand’s vintage and authentic personality while offering a unique shopping experience to its customers. The products range from traditional watches to smart watches, from leather bags to wallets, sunglasses, jewelry and more. Through the launch of this new retail store in Bangalore, Fossil expands its presence in the region and key cities across the country.

Announcing the launch, Mr. Johnson Verghese - Managing Director, Fossil India said, “We aim towards offering a seamless and delightful experience to all our customers who visit our stores. It is truly vital to continue engaging with them at a personal level in order to help them find a timepiece that is just perfect for them. The store also offers a wide range of products across categories, all known for their quality and style quotient.

With the launch of this store in Bangalore, our strategy is to bring more potential customers closer to the brand while highlighting the significance that the Southern market holds for Fossil.”

Following the launch of the last store in Chennai, Fossil continues to build their network of stores with the establishment of the brand’s 18th store in the country. The brand’s Fall collection and the much awaited, Generation 5 smartwatches are all set to hit the Fossil Stores later this year!

Trend Micro First to Deliver XDR Across Email, Network, Endpoint, Server and Cloud Workloads

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, today was first to offer detection and response capabilities integrated across email, network, endpoint, server and cloud workloads. This is designed to give enterprises broader visibility of a risk posture while connecting minor events from different security silos to detect more complex attacks that otherwise remain unnoticed.

ESG research shows that 55% of organizations use more than 25 individual cybersecurity technologies; despite this, attacks are increasing and bypassing existing controls. IT Security teams receive more than 10,000 security alerts daily, according to a 2018 SC Media Survey. The universal level of pain and inefficiency this causes is clear. According to the Verizon 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, “the mean time to identify a breach increased to 197 days and containing a breach increased to 69 days,” leaving criminals nearly 9 months hiding in an organization and causing damage.

“The threat landscape is unrelenting and the skills gap is nearly unsolvable, so we have done more to help,” said Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro. “Business security cannot rely on endpoints alone. Unlike legacy EDR offerings that ignore certain key threat vectors like email, we scale across more sources for the most complete detections generated as early as possible.”

Connecting detections, telemetry, process data, and network metadata across email, network, endpoint and cloud workloads minimizes manual work and quickly correlates events that humans are unable to process given the onslaught of daily alerts across individual product silos. Trend Micro’s global threat intelligence adds further relevance and context around event data and is enhanced by specific detection rules from the company’s security experts that target the highest priority threats.

In Trend Micro’s XDR solution, the “X” refers to the most extensive sets of data from more protection points, which is critical to find hidden threats. The resulting detections are more accurate, are generated faster and provide better context than ever before. Having one version of the security truth and a standardized schema for interpreting alerts also makes life easier for stretched IT security teams.

According to Gartner, “Threats are becoming more complex, multifaceted and easy to miss if you are only looking at one piece of the investigation puzzle. It takes collaboration from various security technologies, and great use of the data coming from external and internal sources to understand the big picture of which threats are truly a problem for an organization. It takes collaboration, context, system intelligence and visualization to really solve modern security problems.”

The comprehensive XDR solution applies the most effective expert analytics to the deep data sets collected from Trend Micro solutions across the enterprise, making faster connections to identify and stop attacks. In 2019, Trend Micro has identified a high number of attacks that utilized lateral movement, with most bypassing the endpoint altogether which illustrates the need for centralized visibility.

XDR is available as a managed service to augment an in-house team with Trend Micro threat experts. Trend Micro’s Managed XDR provides 24x7 full threat analysis, threat hunting, response plans and remediation recommendations.