The Knowledge to Decide

As dependence on big data and analytics grows, so does the risk of IT security breaches. The imperative for companies and governments to protect their IT systems has never been stronger. IT security today is a USD60 billion industry with the U.S. at its forefront. As the number of threats increases, will our existing IT security tools be enough to hold the line? The IT security industry is poised for growth. Its core product offerings continue to perform well: firewalls, anti-malware, authentication and encryption, plus 80 other product categories. Investors in the US are bullish about this sector. They ploughed USD3 billion into IT security companies between 2011 and 2013, eventually funding some 300 firms. The most recent instance of a wildly destructive IT threat was the Heartbleed bug, discovered in April 2014. It left 600,000 servers vulnerable. The Achilles heel it exploited was the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) – an encryption technology...

The movement to digitize healthcare information promises to deliver massive gains in efficiency, effectiveness and patient access to personal data. The next steps in this revolution involve making health data accessible via mobile devices and applying big data analytics. Can healthcare IT really revolutionize the age-old healthcare industry? Medical records have traditionally been stored at hospitals and medical centers in the form of paper or analogue film explaining the old joke about doctor’s handwriting. Remarkably, a large share of medical records across the world is still stored in this way, especially in developing economies. But for decades now, a quiet revolution has been underway to make medical information digital, portable across different medical institutions, amenable to big data analytics and accessible to the patient. This revolution is now nearing the tipping point when big changes may become visible. Nowadays, leading healthcare providers in develop...