Trend Micro Hosts Discussions Around Hybrid Cloud Security and Detection and Response During CLOUDSEC India 2019

CLOUDSEC, the leading global cybersecurity conference, will take place in Mumbai on October 10th, 2019. Hosted by Trend Micro Incorporated, CLOUDSEC India 2019 provides an avenue for enterprises and organizations to discuss and collectively address issues such as the increasingly complex cyberattacks, shifting IT environments, and the upcoming industry trends and morphing threat landscape, with this year’s theme being ‘Picture This! See. Secure. Go further’.

The cybersecurity landscape continues to introduce challenges amid exciting new technologies. Organizations need to see order in chaos, see things from a different perspective, and even step back to see the big picture. Having visibility through the power of collective and connected intelligence helps businesses build cyber resilience and allows them to go further and do more. CLOUDSEC offers a platform for industry professionals to convene and share best practices and insights to combat cyber threats.

The day-long event will feature an interesting keynote, engaging theme-based sessions, and fireside chat and breakout sessions. At CLOUDSEC India 2019, some featured speakers include:

Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro
Ramachandra Hegde, SVP, CISO, Genpact
Sriram Lakshmanan, Vice President, Cybersecurity Assurance, Genpact
Brijesh Datta, Vice President and CISO, Reliance Jio Infocomm
Mathan Babu Kasilingam, CISO, NPCI
Venkatesh Subramaniam, Global CISO, Olam International

Commenting on the event, Nilesh Jain says, “It is important for the enterprises to have broader visibility of the risks and detect more complex attacks that otherwise remain unnoticed. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools have been available for a while, and many organizations have adopted the technology. While absolutely necessary, EDR is no longer sufficient to meet the requirement of faster detection and response. The industry is now moving to XDR - the ability to detect and respond across email, endpoint, server, cloud workloads, and network via a single platform or managed service. Trend Micro recently became the first to deliver XDR across all these vectors.”

Leading cloud service providers - Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware will join the event as platinum sponsors and share their insights on securing various types of cloud environments. At the event, Trend Micro researchers will also be sharing findings and insights around emerging threats. During the event, Trend Micro will showcase demos of their newly launched XDR technology.

CLOUDSEC India 2018 saw close to 750 participants in total. With 18 speakers, 85 CIOs, and 402 companies gracing the event last year, it was a huge success.

JLL Spark Invests in Qdesq, India’s Leading Digital Broking & Co-Working Technology Platform

Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of JLL, JLL Spark, has invested an undisclosed amount in India’s largest flex-space technology platform, Qdesq. Through this investment, the proptech focused fund has marked its first India focused investment, it said in a statement today.

Founded in 2015 by Paras Arora and Lavesh Bhandari, Qdesq is a digital platform that allows companies to transact flexible workspaces, managed workplaces, virtual offices and individual offices. The company lists India’s largest inventory of available flex spaces in near real t ime and currently transacts one desk every 20 minutes on behalf of corporates looking to avoid locking themselves into long term leases. At present, Qdesq has approximately 2,200 centres, lists over 500,000 desks in near real time, covering the top 35 Indian cities and has rapidly emerged as a dominant distribution channel for co-working operators like WeWork, 91Springboard, AWFIS, Regus, Smartworks, Innov8 and Oyo.

With this investment, the company plans to invest heavily into the analytics capabilities of its technology platform to allow enterprises to better self-solution their futur e real estate footprint and to allow commercial asset owners to create viable co-working and flex spaces within commercial complexes.

“The investment in Qdesq taps into the growth opportunity that the flexible workspace segment offers. JLL’s strong corporate relationships across the globe, combined with Qdesq’s technology platform and preferred partnerships with flex space operators, will help us provide a more comprehensive solution to our clients across 35 cities in India,” said Ramesh Nair, CEO & Country Head – India, JLL.

Demand from corporates, startups and entrepreneurs in India has resulted in a huge jump in the co-working share in total office leasing. According to a JLL study, the share of co-working office leasing has risen to 15 percent in the first six months (January to June) of 2019 from the 8 percent level seen in 2018. The segment has absorbed 10.1 mn square feet of cumulative space since 2017 to the first half of 2019, according to the findings.

“Qdesq sits at the cusp of one of the largest disruptions in commercial real estate. Companies are no longer interested in inefficient leases with long lock-ins. Businesses are increasingly looking for the flexibility to easily expand or contract their footprint. With their comprehensive inventory of real time availability of managed spaces, Qdesq is able to dramatically reduce the lead-time to occupancy for companies,” said Anuj Nangpal, Asia Pacific Lead, JLL Spark.

As per JLL estimates, currently there are approximately 325 to 330 flexible workspace operators in the top seven cities in India. The study finds that the average size of transactions in the co-working segment increased from 37,000 square ft in 2017 to 52,000 sq ft in 2018 and further to 97,000 sq ft in the first half of 2019.

“The average time it takes to close a fixed time lease today is anywhere between three and six months. In comparison, Qdesq is able to close even large enterprise occupancy requirements within days. Our transaction volumes have been growing over 400 percent year-on-year and, with our shared vision with JLL, the opportunity is to scale the platform across Asia,” said Paras Arora, Co-founder of Qdesq. The company recently launched in the Philippines and plans to be present in most of Asia’s gateway cities in the near term.

Qdesq has solutioned real estate occupancy requirements for a wide variety of clients ranging from super high growth te chnology companies like Zomato, Phonepe and Zerodha to more established corporates like Bank of Baroda, Nagarro and Hyundai. India is one of the largest potential markets for co-working spaces in Asia, second only to China.

NA Shah Associates and Fortitude Law were advisors to the transaction.

Bold360 Suites Optimizes Workflows for Behind-the-Scenes Customer Support Teams

Today, LogMeIn announced enhancements to its AI-powered Bold360 suite that make it easier for supervisors, content managers, and other critical behind-the-scenes customer service teams to work smarter, faster, and improve overall performance. From aggregating valuable information to more advanced agent monitoring, these latest features drive operational efficiencies and empower support teams to deliver a better customer experience.

“Changing customer expectations are shifting the dynamic of customer service teams across the board. In particular, a supervisor’s role is evolving from task master and policy enforcer to coach and strategic decision-maker,” said Ryan Lester, Senior Director of Customer Experience Technologies at LogMeIn. “With these latest updates, Bold360 supports the demands of their evolving roles and ensures they spend less time navigating systems and more time guiding their agents to better serve customers.”

Building upon the momentum of previous Bold360 releases, these latest improvements offer:

Best-in-Class Knowledge Management Tools: This iteration of the Bold360’s Search Optimizer makes it easier than ever for knowledge and content managers to identify gaps and quickly address them, all within a single interface. New functionality includes:

* Robust search and filter on customer intents, building on Bold360’s industry-leading Voices Dashboard
* Task-driven interface to manage unanswered, answered, channeled, and muted intents
* Ability to create articles for unresolved intents directly in the Search Optimizer
* Add additional phrasings to an article directly from an unresolved intent

Robust Engagement Monitoring: The updated Monitor View arms supervisors with faster access to information they need to act on. With one click, supervisors can see the full content of live chats, chatbot engagements, emails, SMS texts, and messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, allowing them to keep a more detailed watch on engagements and quickly address issues as they arise.

Better Workload Organization: A new chat flagging feature makes it easier for agents to mark an engagement and come back to it later if they need to follow up with a customer or request supervisor review. Additionally, the Monitor View for supervisors can be filtered by agent flags so that supervisors can easily keep tabs on open engagements.

ISO 27001 Certification and New Security Controls: Bold360 has met the ISO 27001 Certification requirements for managing sensitive company information so that it remains secure. Additionally, Bold360 now offers IP Whitelisting for Agent Logins, which gives administrators the ability to restrict which networks agents can log into from the Bold360 Web Workspace. Whitelisting gives administrators peace of mind that their support environment is secure without the burden of manually monitoring logins. 

Pawan Munjal Inducted into Asia Pacific Golf Hall of Fame

Dr. Pawan Munjal, the Chairman, Managing Director and CEO of Hero MotoCorp – the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters - will be inducted into the 2019 Asia Pacific Golf Hall Of Fame.

Dr. Munjal joins legendary golfers such as Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and other leading golf personalities, such as Dr. David Chu, the founder of Mission Hills, the world’s largest golf resort.

Dr. Munjal co-hosts the ‘Hero World Challenge’, at Albany in the Bahamas, a PGA sanctioned Tiger Woods invitational event – one of the most high-profile golf tournaments in the world. He also hosts the ‘Hero Challenge’ – the innovative one-hole knockout contest played under lights, at three prominent European Tour events.

Hero MotoCorp has been the title sponsor of Hero Indian Open for men, co-sanctioned by the Asian Tour and European Tour, since 2006 and the Hero Women’s Indian Open, which is a part of the Ladies European Tour, since 2010. Hero MotoCorp also sponsors India’s domestic Pro Tour for women.

Dr. Munjal is being inducted to the Hall of Fame for his unparallelled support and ongoing commitment to golf in India and around the world since more than two decades. His personal commitment to golf has seen Hero MotoCorp being a partner of all three prominent tours – The PGA Tour, The European Tour and the Asian Tour.

Announcing this Mike Sebastian, CEO of the Asia Pacific Golf Group, the owner of the Asian Golf Hall of Fame, said “It is really an honour to be able to recognise Dr. Pawan Munjal and to bring him into the elite fold of some of the greatest names in golf. Besides his wonderful support of golf, the induction of Dr. Munjal serves as a recognition of his invaluable contributions to nation-building and his strong commitment towards socio-economic development of India and in many other parts of the world.”

His induction into the Asia Pacific Golf Hall of Fame will be permanently installed at the Dr. David Chu Golf Museum at Shenzhen in China, the new home of the Hall of Fame.

The induction ceremony will be held on November 6th at the 2019 Asian Golf Awards Gala Banquet, to be held at the multi-award winning DLF Golf & Country Club in Gurugram, India.

Dr. Munjal has also always been a keen supporter and promoter of golfers around the world. Top Indian golfers such as Anirban Lahiri, Shiv Kapur and Sharmila Nicollette are supported by Dr. Munjal and have been brand ambassadors of Hero MotoCorp. Legendary golfer and 16-time major winner Tiger Woods is the Global Corporate Partner of Hero MotoCorp.

In addition to Golf, Dr. Munjal has also been one of the biggest promoters of football, field hockey and cricket in India and around the globe.

Dr. Munjal is one of India’s foremost corporate leaders, championing growth, socio-economic progress and technological innovation. Under his leadership, Hero achieved the coveted title of World’s No. 1 two-wheeler company (in terms of volume sales by a single company in a calendar year) in 2001 and has successfully retained this position till date, for 18 consecutive years now.

Hero MotoCorp commands well over 50% share in the domestic motorcycle market in India and has sold over 90 million motorcycles and scooters in cumulative sales so far.

Dr. Munjal has led Hero MotoCorp in its rapid growth as a truly multinational company with its global footprint spanning across 37 countries in Asia, Africa and South and Central America. The Hero family of people comprise a cross section of nationalities from different countries, including India, Germany, France, UK, Japan, Italy, Austria, Colombia, Bangladesh and the United States of America.

In keeping with Dr. Munjal’s vision of making Hero MotoCorp a technology powerhouse, the Company has set up a world class, state-of-the-art research, design and development centre called the Hero Centre of Innovation and Technology (CIT) at Jaipur in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. More than 600 engineers from around the world are engaged in designing and developing mobility solutions for customers in markets across the globe.

Siemon Strengthens its Operations Across Indian Market

Siemon India, an arm of The Siemon Company, a US headquartered leading global network infrastructure specialist, opened a new warehouse facility at Chennai today. Siemon offers high quality, high-performance IT infrastructure solutions and services for Data Centers, LANs and Intelligent Buildings in India.

Speaking on the occasion Mr. Prem Rodrigues Director of Sales & Marketing for India, Middle East & SAARC told that “This facility will help Siemon to cut down on delivery time and offer better service to our End users and Channel partners. We continue to follow our global standards of operation and aim to give best of customer experience”.

Siemon India has its Head Office at Hyderabad, where it has also established its Center of Excellence team to provide Datacenter design services, warranty and IT solutions to its global operations. Siemon has a robust team of Customer service representatives, Logistics team, demand analyst and Business analyst to manage the entire pre and post-sales support service. This facility also takes care of its marketing and other back end operations for India & SAARC region.

Siemon said in a statement here that it considers India a strategically important market and is committed to investing in its capabilities to better serve both customers and partners. Siemon is developing its relationships with Complementary manufacturers to provide value added solutions to its clients in Datacenter & Intelligent/Smart Buildings space and is also increasing its robust strength of System integrators and Certified Installers who can give pan India service.

“The company grew its tremendous presence in last couple of years and will ensure that world class IT infrastructure products are made available to Indian market. We foresee strong demand for our products & solutions and will continue to invest in this region with an aim to increase our market share” added Mr. Prem Rodrigues.

Microsoft's September 2019 Patch Tuesday: Tenable Roundup

Microsoft's September 2019 Patch Tuesday release contains updates for 79 CVEs, 17 of which are rated critical. In the wake of BlueKeep in May, and the four additional CVEs for Remote Desktop Services in August (DejaBlue), Microsoft has addressed four new CVEs for Remote Desktop Client. Additionally, Microsoft patched two elevation of privilege bugs which have been exploited in the wild this month. Click here to read the complete breakdown of the most important CVEs from this month's release.

Satnam Narang, Senior Research Engineer at Tenable said, "This month's Patch Tuesday release contains updates for nearly 80 CVEs, including four critical vulnerabilities in the Remote Desktop Client, and two Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities exploited in the wild as zero-days.

Since Microsoft warned about BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) in May, Microsoft's Platform Security Assurance & Vulnerability Research team identified additional vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop, patching four critical flaws in August in Remote Desktop Services, dubbed "DejaBlue." This month, Microsoft's internal research teams identified four new critical vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Client (CVE-2019-1290, CVE-2019-1291, CVE-2019-0787, CVE-2019-0788). Unlike BlueKeep and DejaBlue, where attackers target vulnerable Remote Desktop servers, these vulnerabilities require an attacker to convince a user to connect to a malicious Remote Desktop server. Attackers could also compromise vulnerable servers and host malicious code on them and wait for users to connect to them.

Microsoft also patched two vulnerabilities that were exploited in the wild as zero-days. CVE-2019-1214 is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver, while CVE-2019-1215 is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Winsock IFS Driver (ws2ifsl.sys). Both flaws exist due to improper handling of objects in memory by the respective drivers. Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities are utilized by attackers post-compromise, once they've managed to gain access to a system in order to execute code on their target systems with elevated privileges."

India’s First Senior Living Community ‘The Virtuoso Club and Serviced Residences’ Unveiled in Bengaluru By Columbia Pacific Communities

Columbia Pacific Communities, part of Seattle-based Columbia Pacific Management, today announced the launch of a new signature project in India. Columbia Pacific Management, brings together over 40 years of rich experience in senior housing design, development and management in the U.S., Europe and Asia.  Integrating global best practices in senior living design and management, The Virtuoso Club and Serviced Residences is a first of its kind offering in India. 

The 157 apartments and public spaces are designed to international standards and offer world-class amenities and facilities such as 24x7 healthcare, a club with a swimming pool, and home style food, making sure that a resident’s every need is taken care of. 

Commenting on the launch of the first property in India, Mohit Nirula, CEO, Columbia Pacific Communities, says, “We are pleased to announce the launch of our 10th senior living community in the country – The Virtuoso Club and Serviced Residences in Bangalore.  A lot of thought and Columbia Pacific Management’s four decades of experience in senior living of have gone into making India's first senior living community designed to international standards. 

Residents of The Virtuoso Club and Serviced Residences will be able to leave their daily chores to us and use their time instead to embrace life, pursue passions and give back to society in more ways than ever before.

Commenting on the India launch for the group, Carsten Belanich, Lead - International Senior Housing Funds, says,

“The senior population in India is expected to touch 173 million by 2026. There is an increasing need for a wholesome support system that takes care of physical, emotional and mental wellbeing of seniors. Drawing on our group’s deep expertise in developing senior housing across U.S., Europe and Asia, we are confident that Columbia Pacific Communities will positively shape the senior living category in India.” 

 Columbia Pacific Communities has associated with veteran actor Zeenat Aman, for the launch of its first signature property.

Speaking about her association with the launch of Columbia Pacific Communities’ new project, veteran actor Zeenat Aman, says, “Columbia Pacific Communities’ brand ethos of positive ageing resonates deeply with my personal philosophy of ageing gracefully. At 65, I am loving life like never before, and believe that age is just a number. Your advanced years can be very productive if you are in the right environment. I travel frequently, act in movies and theatre, spend time with my pets, enjoy gardening, meet my friends and do everything that brings me joy. This is doubtlessly the best phase of my life. With a burgeoning senior population in India, there’s an increasing demand for a wholesome lifestyle solution for seniors. With their rich legacy of building homes for seniors across the globe, I am confident that Columbia Pacific Communities is poised to set new benchmarks for senior living in India.”

With 40 years of rich global expertise in senior living, the company aims to reimagine senior living and senior care in India.