Global Information Security Spending Will Grow 7.9 Percent to Reach $81.6 Billion in 2016

Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $81.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2015, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. Consulting and IT outsourcing are currently the largest categories of spending on information security. Until the end of 2020, the highest growth is expected to come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP).

Preventive security will continue to show strong growth, as many security practitioners continue to have a buying preference for preventive measures. However, solutions such assecurity information and event management (SIEM) and secure web gateways (SWGs) are evolving to support detection-and-response approaches. Gartner expects the SWG market will maintain its growth of 5 to 10 percent through 2020 as organizations focus on detection and response.

"Organizations are increasingly focusing on detection and response, because taking a preventive approach has not been successful in blocking malicious attacks," said Elizabeth Kim, senior research analyst at Gartner. "We strongly advise businesses to balance their spending to include both."

Ms. Kim said that security spending will become increasingly service-driven as organizations continue to face staffing and talent shortages. Managed detection and response (MDR) is emerging, with demand coming from organizations struggling to deploy, manage and use an effective combination of expertise and tools to detect threats, and then bring their environment back to a known good state. This is particularly true for targeted advanced threats and insider threats. With more MDR providers emerging targeting the midmarket, Gartner foresees these services being an additional driver for security spending for both large and smaller organizations.

According to Gartner, spending in security markets such as consumer security software, secure email gateways (SEGs) and endpoint protection platforms (EPPs) continues to show constrained growth due to commoditization.

Other assumptions in the information security market behind Gartner's latest forecast include:

The average selling price for firewalls is expected to increase by at least 2 or 3 percent year over year until the end of 2018.

This is driven by the market benefiting from higher demand for high-end equipment among cloud providers and other service providers, due to larger bandwidth needs and an increasing number of devices. While vendor competition continues to put pressure on pricing, enterprises, service providers and web-scale organizations are moving toward deploying bigger and more expensive firewalls. As a result, the deployment of large firewalls by cloud service providers will remain an important source of revenue growth for vendors.

By 2018, 90 percent of organizations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP, up from 50 percent today.

Organizations have been deploying DLP to address regulatory compliance, intellectual property (IP) protection and data visibility and monitoring. Newer solutions that include user entity and behavior analytics, image analysis, machine learning, and data-matching techniques are being used to augment existing solutions.

Public cloud adoption will impact firewall spending by less than 10 percent until the end of 2019 but will have an impact after that.

While software as a service (SaaS) adoption is growing, the effect on firewall spending will be limited for the next three years. SaaS is the first choice for only 16 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner in 2015. Transitions also take time, during which vendors of cloud access security brokers (CASBs) will not only continue to evolve to cover more than just SaaS, but also perform similar roles for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). In addition, firewall vendors will also have to deal with one of their main challenges for the next few years: decrypting Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) at scale.

Half of midsize and large organizations will add bigger, more advanced inspection-oriented features to their network firewalls by 2019.

Bandwidth has been increasing, requiring larger-scale, higher-performing and more expensive firewalls. In addition, organizations are looking to firewalls to consolidate other features, such as web filtering and intrusion prevention capabilities. Some are enhancing their firewalls with new content inspection features, such as malware sand boxing.

Indian employees Fear Worse Retirement Life Compared to Parents: Willis Towers Watson Survey

More than half of Indian employees anticipate that they will be up against a less comfortable retirement than their parents’ generation, according to the latest survey by global advisory, broking and solutions company Willis Towers Watson. The 2016 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey found that while employees’ satisfaction with their financial situation in India has increased 9% since 2013, 56% of Indian employees still fear that they will be worse off than their parents in retirement.

When questioned about their current financial state, as many as 46% of employees express concerns and more than 1-in-3 stated that their financial problems negatively affect their lives.

The study of over 2,000 employees in India found that almost 54% worry about their future financial state. A growing proportion of employees expect to work through their sixties to meet their financial obligations. All these factors pertaining to financial insecurities hinder performance of employees at the workplace.

The research found that 52% of employees think that they are less effective at their work due to financial problems. Among employees who have both short-term and long-term concerns, 75% admit to above average or high stress. In contrast, the same is true for less than 2-in-5 employees in the unworried group, employees who are not worried either about the short or long-term. Employees with both short- and long-term concerns are 1.5 times more likely to report poor health and twice as likely to leave for another job.

Kulin Patel, Director, Willis Towers Watson India said, “The growing insecurities of employees around long-term financial stability demands the immediate attention of employers. Companies are beginning to take steps by making their employees’ financial well-being a core component of their overall well-being strategy and employee value proposition. Gradually, employers are understanding the link between their employees’ well-being and their performance and productivity at work, and how this affects the organisation’s bottom line. Soon, they will realise that a holistic approach is needed to address these issues effectively.”

According to the survey, 57% of Indian employees support the idea that their employer should have a role in encouraging them to save for retirement. However, 32% would be uncomfortable receiving targeted messages from their employer on these matters. Such complexity should be addressed with sensitivity.

Notably, 46% of employers intend to offer a comprehensive suite of tools, seminars and education that cover budgeting, planned large purchases, debt reduction, wealth accumulation, protection/insurance and tax assistance/advisory by 2018, as revealed by the findings of the Willis Towers Watson’s Staying@Work 2015/16 survey**.

The biggest growth in promoting financial well-being in India will be in the use of customised and targeted messages, where 50% of employers intend to do so over the next three years, on top of the 13% currently doing so. Employers should aim to help employees address their different issues, from short-to-medium-term savings, through to the traditional long-term retirement savings.

The survey results also suggest that 1-in-4 employees, when asked about their top priorities, prefer superior retirement or health benefits to pay and bonus and more than 2-in-5 would prefer some alternative to pay and bonus.

Kulin Patel further said, “There is a need to boost engagement and productivity by reconfiguring the benefit package offered by employers. Different employee segments may require a different mix of benefits that depend on their financial priorities at their given stage in life. For employers to move beyond their conventional role and intervene to support their employees, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be adopted consistently across all organisations as a solution.  

Disruptive Technology for eSports Global Gamers with New Radeon RX 460 Graphics

AMD has unleashed the new Radeon RX 460 graphics card, engineered from the ground up for eSports gamers who demand pristine HD gaming, extraordinarily smooth beyond-HD streaming capabilities, and a distinguished assortment of future-proof gaming technologies. With an ultra-quiet cooling solution and sub-75W power footprint, the Radeon RX 460 brings this wide array of enthusiast class features with a stunning SEP starting at $109.

 “The Radeon RX 460 delivers the perfect balance of price, power, performance and package size, the four key pillars of modern GPUs,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “The Radeon RX Series is built on architecture designed for extraordinary power efficiency and is especially well suited to desktop gaming PCs targeted at mainstream price points. Radeon RX 460 users will enjoy an optimized software and hardware graphics card solution ideal for both eSports and iCafé systems.”

The supercharged Radeon RX 460 graphics card delivers surprising performance in the most popular global eSports titles, and was engineered from the ground up to take advantage of next generation DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs that power the most popular AAA game titles.  The Radeon RX 460 graphics card has up to 14 compute units, 2/4 GB GDDR5 memory and 2.2 teraflops processing power, yet typical board power is less than 75 watts, making it ideal for iCafé deployments that typically place a high value on a low power footprint. This produces astonishingly quiet gaming and incredible frame-rates.

Radeon RX 460 Features

* Astounding 1080p Gaming – Optimized for the most popular resolution gamers use today, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card delivers superior framerates at 1080p in eSports titles such as League of Legends, Overwatch and DOTA 2, even allowing for better image quality and reduction of “jaggies” with the Virtual Super Resolution feature and smooth gameplay using AMD Freesync technology, and latency optimizations available from Radeon Settings. The Radeon RX 460 excels in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, APIs that are powering the future of gaming.

* Cool and Quiet Gaming – Gamers can reduce fan noise with silent gaming features made possible by the revolutionary Polaris architecture, optimized for the 14nm FinFET process. The Polaris architecture-based Radeon RX 460 intelligently adapts to card temperature and completely turns off fans during idle and light gaming workloads With no power connector and low temperatures, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card is the optimal plug and play option for gamers looking to upgrade.

* Stunning HDR Pixels – Featuring a brand new display engine, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card is ready to help power the new generation of HDR content and displays for video and gaming

·* Game Changing Control –  As sophisticated as the Polaris architecture-based graphics cards are at a hardware level, the software that powers the cards is equally so. Radeon Software drivers enable the ultimate in performance, features and stability, designed to ensure an exceptionally smooth and fast out-of-box experience.

Radeon RX 460 Availability

Radeon RX 460 graphics cards are available from retailers and e-tailers around the world starting today. 

SQLServerGeeks Annual Summit - II to be held at NIMHANS from August 11- 13, 2016 at Bangalore

Asia’s Largest Data and Analytics Summit, SQLServerGeeks Annual Summit 2016 (SSGAS 2016), is being held in Bangalore from the 11^th to the 13^th of August 2016 at the NIMHANS Convention Centre. SSGAS 2016 organized in close collaboration with Microsoft will feature Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President (Data Group) from Redmond USA who will deliver the Keynote Address. He is being accompanied by a 20+ team of senior level data/analytics professionals. Legendary SQL Guru Bob Ward will also be speaking at the event. For additional information visit www.sqlservergeeks.com/summit2016. 

Close to a 1000 SQL & Data Professionals are expected to attend the 3-day summit that will feature 6 parallel tracks on Big Data, Analytics & Business Intelligence, Data on Cloud + Internet of Things (IoT), Database Administration and Database Development. 140+ Sessions will be delivered by 80+ Speakers across the 3 days. There will also be new ways of learning through Open Talks and Chalk Talks. SSGAS 2016 is the largest gathering of data professionals in Asia with participation from 250+ companies. 

The conference will showcase cutting edge tools, products & technologies focussed around Data & Analytics. For the first time in Asia, the summit will feature SQL Star Speakers such as Denny Cherry, Joey D Antoni, Grant Fritchey, Andreas Volter, Jen Stirrup, Alex Yates, Rimma Nehme, Tomer Weisberg and many more.  SSG Annual Summit will also feature battery of Microsoft SQL Product Team members from Redmond, USA.

Commenting on SSGAS 2016, Amit R S Bansal, Conference Chairman and Director of eDominer Systems, said, “Data and Analytics are the two big factors for any organization’s success today. The 80+ speakers and 140+ sessions at SSGAS 2016 make it bigger and better than last year and one of the leading tech events in this part of the world. Asia has one of the largest talent pool of data professionals. The summit will expose the data professionals to the latest in the world of data and analytics as well as facilitate skills up-gradation and immense networking opportunity.”

Lexis Practical Guidance First Online Solution Complements Legal Industry Works in India

Following overwhelming success in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong and Singapore, Lexis Practical Guidance, an innovative online workflow-based solution, was launched in India at The Lalit Ashok, Bengaluru, on July 28, 2016, in presence of distinguished members from the Society of Indian Law Firms (SILF) and the Indian Corporate Counsel Association (ICCA), along with several other eminent senior law firm partners, senior advocates and corporate counsels by LexisNexis, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions.

On Lexis Practical Guidance’s success globally, Karen Taylor, Executive Director, Lexis Practical Guidance Asia, said, “Lexis Practical Guidance has been a tried and trusted solution for legal practitioners across the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. LexisNexis’s award-winning platforms, combined with expert local content, bring the very best in know-how, drafting and compliance all underpinned by market-leading analysis and commentary with on-point links to cases and legislation. Whether for Indian matters, cross-border deals, or international compliance requirements, Lexis Practical Guidance is the solution. It is time for Digital India, Digital World.”

During the event, Vikesh Dhyani, Director Marketing, Customer Discovery and Innovation, LexisNexis India - Legal and Professional, said, “This solution provides an unprecedented advantage of having a specialist on their desktop to guide their associates that, in turn, enables them to save time on research, increase their billable hours and get instant guidance on unfamiliar subjects. Whether you are a law firm, or a corporate counsel, a solo practitioner or a start-up, struggling with competition driven by new players and offerings from alternative legal services, together with tighter economic conditions, it is a pioneering solution to drive efficiencies, bring more strategic approach to risk management and most importantly achieve a value-based cost structure.”

Sandeep Ganju, Senior Director, Sales & Business Development, LexisNexis India, said, “Now is the age of information, and the manner in which information is consumed and analyzed by law firms and corporate counsels is going to be a key differentiator in making product decisions, mitigating risks and managing the litigating process better. With solutions like Lexis Practical Guidance, LexisNexis has brought an advanced online platform that enables professionals to seamlessly navigate from case law to commentaries and legislations, thereby examining a point of law in a holistic fashion and giving a pragmatic view of the matter at hand.”

100,000 Accenture Employees Received Technology Education Through 10-Year Collaboration with MIT Professional Education

Accenture recently achieved a significant milestone by providing more than 100,000 employees globally with a world-class technology education developed through a 10-year collaboration with MIT Professional Education, the professional education arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Established in 2006, the Accenture Technology Academy (ATA) was created to equip employees with the skills needed to deliver leading technology services for clients, and to date, Accenture employees around the world have received more than 16 million hours of MIT education through the program.

“The Accenture Technology Academy has been a cornerstone of our enduring relationship with MIT over the past decade,” said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services. “Accenture is committed to investing in our people, and our relationship with MIT enables us to educate and grow our talent so we can differentiate ourselves. Our mission is to help our clients achieve business outcomes through new liquid strategies, and our focus is on new IT such as digital, cloud and security. We’re also expanding our capabilities to innovate in fast-growing areas like block chain and artificial intelligence.”

Over the past decade, Accenture invested in the Accenture Technology Academy to provide employees with access to MIT research, knowledge and expertise through advanced training programs. Drawing on the expertise of MIT faculty, the ATA is designed to arm employees with advanced professional and technology strategies, approaches and skills; it is comprised of two distinct components:

• A certification program – Four different certifications have been available to employees over the past 10 years: application developer, designer, tester and test designer. Accenture is preparing to launch 10 new certificate programs in several areas including: agile, artificial intelligence, cloud, data science, design thinking, DevOps, Internet of Things, mobile, security, and web essentials. When in-person training sessions aren’t possible, the sessions can be conducted via Accenture Connected Learning classrooms in 72 locations around the globe.
• Lectures and online videos, podcasts, and learning boards – Each person in Accenture’s global workforce has an opportunity to learn from MIT faculty through in-person lectures and online videos, podcasts, and learning boards. Many new online training courses are now available on a variety of topics including: artificial intelligence, micro-services and DevOps, security, next-generation cloud, and the Internet of Things.

“We at MIT Professional Education are proud to have facilitated quality training of tens of thousands of Accenture practitioners in the area of information technology over the last 10 years,” said Bhaskar Pant, Executive Director of MIT Professional Education. “Our expert faculty have provided research-based, cutting-edge knowledge to Accenture employees, deploying traditional to the most modern education dissemination methods. We enthusiastically look forward to the next decade of growing our relationship with Accenture through the development of new certificate programs covering emerging and transformation-enabling areas such as artificial intelligence, data science, mobility and security.”

“Accenture’s 10-year relationship with MIT began with the Accenture Technology Academy and grew to encompass additional valuable programs that involve research, thought leadership, and the development of innovative business concepts for our clients,” said Sanjeev Vohra, managing director and business sponsor for MIT, Accenture Technology Services. “Today, as we collaborate with several entities across MIT, we are steadfastly focused on learning, research and recruiting to spur innovation for both organizations, providing our employees with valuable opportunities, and delivering better business outcomes for our clients.”

Maharaja Whiteline Bring Revolution to Kitchen with New Range Lock Mixer Grinders

Maharaja Whiteline, a brand of Groupe SEB India (P) Ltd. is the country’s leading consumer durable brand and after an extremely successful year in 2015, it is all set to supersede the expectations this year. Maharaja Whiteline is also the no. 1 brand in North India in food preparation category as per Francis Kanoi report 2015.

The brand is bringing the next level of innovation to the market with the most innovative and stylish range of mixer grinders from its 750 watt series – Easylock. In line with its name, the range boasts of a unique audible and visible locking system which has proven to be a success across the globe. This distinctive mechanism does not let the mixer start until the jar is correctly locked on the main unit with the motor, hence making it extremely safe for use, especially for use in a home with small kids.  750 watt power makes this product all the more efficient. This enables it to grind even the hardest food ingredients in minutes and gives perfect results. Easylock Mixer Grinders are certainly a stylish addition for any kitchen given their international design and premium color scheme. With high aesthetic quotient, the range also guarantees best-in-class performance with superior user convenience. 

Commenting on the launch of this Easy Lock range of Mixer Grinders, Shirish Khedkar, Senior Vice President – Sales, Groupe SEB India (P) Ltd. said “As a brand which has been a leader in the mixer grinder’s category, our objective has always been to create well thought out solutions that make life easier, with beautiful and tasty results. Easy Lock is one such revolutionary range which is certain to appeal to the consumers given the provision of all new enhancements which a person can ask for in new-age mixer grinder. Its visible and audible locking mechanism makes it exceptionally safe for use by making the daily household chores safer.”

The range has been developed in-house by the RnD and Design departments of Groupe SEB India and it includes 2 mixer grinders – Easy Lock King and Easy Lock Queen. Both mixer grinders come with a powerful 750 Watt power rating, which is well complemented with heavy duty stainless steel jars. All the jars are equipped with efficient super sharp blades.

A look at the 2 Models:

Easylock King

·         Premium Black and Silver color scheme to add a dash of style to your kitchen

·         It comes with 4 jars i.e. one for liquidizing, one for dry and wet grinding and one for chutney grinding while the fourth one is a blending jar with fruit filter; with its help you can easily extract juices or even make purees etc.

 Easylock Queen

·         Happiness Red and White color scheme to add a splash of color to your kitchen

·         It comes with 3 jars, one for liquidizing, one for dry & wet grinding and one for chutney grinding

 2 years product warranty and 5 years motor warranty complements the promise of durability which comes with each product of the range.