CLOUDSEC 2021, one of the industry's biggest cybersecurity events hosted by Trend Micro Incorporated attracted thought leaders and technology experts across sectors speaking at the virtual event this year. The speakers opined that Modern Architecture, Security by Design, Attack Surface and Business Enabler are the four key aspects that will play a pivotal role for organisations in defining their cybersecurity posture. The panelists emphasized that the need of the hour is to develop a platform-based approach than having a single point-based approach. With innovation fueling the change in enterprise architecture, unsecure innovation could lead to data loss and breaches. Hence, it is important to create a culture of cybersecurity where business leaders talk about the importance of cybersecurity within the company, and this is where Security by Design comes into picture. With an increased adoption of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code security, there is an explosion of the attack surface.

With new technologies like faster payments taking hold, the explosion of readily available data, and the ever-changing regulatory landscape, staying ahead of financial crime and compliance risk has become more complex and expensive than ever before. As these trends show no sign of abating, the compliance operations and monitoring staff of a financial institution often find themselves a major cost center. Financial institutions must manage compliance budgets without losing sight of primary functions and quality control. To answer this, many have made the move to automating time-intensive, rote tasks like data gathering and sorting through alerts by adopting innovative technologies like AI and machine learning to free up time-strapped analysts for more informed and precise decision-making processes. As financial institutions often benchmark themselves against their competitors, they are increasingly interested in seeing how these technologies are performing, and are asking themselves how to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to increase insight, reduce false positives and decrease compliance spend.

Heading into 2019, year-end trendspotting is surfacing predictions for the future of nearly every form of technology, and after years of software disruption in the contact center, customer engagement and customer experience industry, one CEO of a fast-growing Denver-based startup is turning away from the usual predictions and sharing, instead, insights driven by years of developing sensitive software that can analyze in near real time "digital conversations" happening between brands and consumers. "We're in a new world now," said Joe Galvin, founder of CustomerView, a company supported by CR-X, a global software development firm based in Australia, and developer of the CustomerView big data analytics, AI, natural language processing and deep machine learning platform. "Our collective team here in the US, Australia and elsewhere are veterans of the telecom and customer service industries, and even as we have been working very closely with customers and partners over the last three years to build a capability to truly understand, record, transcribe, analyze and report on interactions the landscape has become more dynamic and exciting than we originally believed." With technology giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft investing more in the space, Galvin believes the bar is being raised and that any successful brand – banks, insurance companies, travel companies, healthcare providers, consumer electronics innovators and more – will need to "lead with speed and service, giving this and coming generations who will expect immediate and accurate answers, and efficient and friendly support, through the channel of their choosing." Galvin sees the affordability and availability of more scalable and less expensive technologies (including AWS and other cloud application providers) as key to unlocking innovation which will not only drive adoption but change the compliance landscape in ways we could never have dreamed of in the premise, then hybrid, and now nearly pure-cloud world.

Business components such as sales, customer service, and marketing – tasked with generating new experiences that meet raised customer expectations – are changing their views to see IT as a tactical business partner. IT now has the prospect to not only improve customer-facing technology, but to transform it. IT is no longer a cost center, it's a value-based business partner Most IT leaders decide that the industry is undergoing the biggest ancient shift of its role. Over the next 12-18 months, 71% of IT organizations will shift from being a technology offering cost center to a value-based service brokerage. Today, IT is the central worried system empowering business transformation, partnering with sections to orchestrate experiences with associated data and new capabilities. The battle between searching time for invention and'keeping the lights on' is nothing new for IT leaders, yet business's appetite for innovation grows tougher by the minute.

No matter the field, it's the people that make or break companies. Yet historically, HR has been treated as an administrative cost center rather than a strategic department that drives productivity and value. Today's technology-driven world is constantly changing, and there is a continuous scarcity of high-value talent in ever-changing fields. This, together with millennials' different expectations about their jobs, puts pressure on companies to adjust how they handle their human capital. And while employers have realized that retention is key for their success, they are still struggling to increase it.