Express Computer (Vol.27, No.9) September, 2016

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WHY TECHNOLOGY IS CRITICAL FOR IMPROVING HEALTHCARE C

HEALTHCARE IN INDIA IS A HUGE OPPORTUNITY, AND AS MORE STARTUPS ENTER THE FRAY, THEY WILL START CHALLENGING AND DISRUPTING EXISTING BUSINESS MODELS

ancer, one of the deadliest diseases ever known to mankind, has proved to be extremely resilient, and is still one of the leading cause of deaths in the country. Data from ICMR released last year revealed that more than 1300 people succumb to cancer every day. Despite years of research and investments, there has been no definite cure to cancer. Can technology come to the rescue? While these are still early days, a ray of hope was exhibited when press reports recently stated how IBM's artificial intelligence machine, Watson, could correctly diagnose a 60-year old woman's rare form of cancer within ten minutes - a task that had stumped doctors as the original diagnosis did not work.

Human beings cannot process huge volumes of data, a task that can be achieved with ease by supercomputers like Watson. For example, for the above diagnosis, Watson sifted through 20 million cancer research papers. Through the ability to look at multiple sources of data and arrive at an inference is a complicated task for humans, but a machine equipped with AI capabilities can only improve over time.

Another exciting trend is the usage of wearables. For example, Manipal Hospitals has given pregnant women a wearable device that allows doctors to monitor key parameters via a mobile app. Apollo Hospitals has a remote health monitoring device which provides users with information about their health by using a compact portable device. This information is stored in the cloud and is made available to Apollo's network of doctors and physicians.

The healthcare industry is on the cusp of a huge digital transformation. Startup firms like Practo have acquired iconic status as they have scaled quickly. Practo today is the world’s largest healthcare appointment booking platform with nearly 40 million appointments managed every year. Similarly, Bangalore-based startup Daily Rounds, has created a doctor network app which serves as India's largest doctor network app with more than 1,60,000 doctors on its network. As the industry matures, there are new business models emerging. DoctorInsta, is trying to address the lack of specialty doctors in villages by setting up health ATMs. Patients can simply drop in and consult specialist doctors over a video link.

Using technology, India has a big opportunity to correct the dismal doctor-patient ratio. Healthcare in India is a huge opportunity, and as more startups enter the fray, they will start challenging and disrupting existing business models, and force traditional firms to relook at the way they provide services.

For example, in the future, you will not probably call the doctor.

The doctor will call you proactively before you get a disease, based on the alerts that your wearable is sending to a cloud. Proactive monitoring of health, just as we do for machines, will be a new reality! srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

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TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTHCARE: ACXO PERSPECTIVE The healthcare industry is in the midst of a huge technology shift. The growing use of cloud and mobile technologies is changing the face of Indian healthcare

opinion

feature

HOW MHEALTH IS IMPROVING MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH OUTCOMES

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Rohit MA, Managing Director, Cloudnine Group of Hospitals

TECHNOLOGYTRENDS INFLUENCING THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

HOWINDIAN STARTUPS ARE TRANSFORMING HEALTHCARE IN INDIA

How technologies such as IoT and Big Data are changing the face of the healthcare industry

Startups in India are constantly finding new ways to supply smart gadgets, new mobile apps.

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FUTURE OF PATIENT ENGAGEMENT IN INDIA’S HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

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Kaustav Ganguli, Healthcare Lead, Senior Director, Alvarez & Marsal

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SEPTEMBER, 2016

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case study

Express Technology Sabha 2016

HOWRUBYHALLCLINIC ACHIEVED

24 AMAJOR LEAP IN PRODUCTIVITY Ruby Hall Clinic, one of Pune’s largest hospitals adopted Citrix XenApp, to improve productivity and efficiency

news analysis

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NETMAGIC SEES IOTWAVE PUSHING

34 DATACENTER GROWTH IN INDIA

IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time.

event RSACONFERENCE APAC 2016:

62 THE DARK SIDE OFTECHNOLOGY The sessions at the three-day conference were split across six dedicated conference tracks

interviews VENKATARAMAN

22 SUBRAMANIAN

CTO, Columbia Asia Hospital

We are evaluating a cloud and mobile first approach SANJAY

29 DESHMUKH VP, End-User Computing, Asia Pacific & Japan, VMware

NSXcould potentially be the next vSphere for VMware EXPRESS COMPUTER

DAY 1 Welcome Address Special Address by Chief Guest From e-gov to m-gov Platform for co-creating Digital India e-Governance and modernization of Transport m-Governance for Digital India Software platform for Government Creating smart Software Defined Infrastructure for Digital India Ease of digital services adoption with new IP NxtGen Power Discussion Plenary Conclave: Technologies for Transforming India

DAY 2

DAY 3

The Cyber Security Issues Reliable Power Back Up Advance cyber security strategy for insider threat and ransomware How to protect yourself in a world with no parameters Cloud & Datacenter Delivering and securing applications in the digital world Accelerating digital initiatives through DevOps solutions Panel Discussion: Securing the cyber frontier of Digital India Staying One Step Ahead vis-a-vis Evolving APT Enabling 16 years of Digital India Big data analytics and relevance to GoI Exide Power Discussion ESDS Power Discussion Gemalto Power Discussion

Keynote Address: Democracy thriving with technology Creating an ideal security framework for Digital India BSNL IDC – Powering Digital India PURPLE TEAM TACTICS - Staying One Step Ahead of Attackers Delivering effective e-governance services Panel Discussion: Emerging technologies for effective egovernance Emerging Trends in Cyber Security Odisha: A preferred destination for IT/ESDM investment Digital 3D Cities and Urban Planning Panel Discussion: Fulfilling the vision of Smart cities Agile Lab Power Discussion Checkpoint Power Discussion How Surat is trying to be a smart city SEPTEMBER, 2016

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Vol 27. No. 9. September, 2016 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Sr Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Editor Srikanth RP* Delhi Mohd Ujaley, Ankush Kumar, Rashi Varshney Mumbai Jasmine Desai, Abhishek Raval DESIGN National Design Editor Bivash Barua Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rekha Bisht Layout Vinayak Mestry, Rajesh Jadhav Photo Editor Sandeep Patil MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West and East Prabhas Jha - North Marketing Team Shankar Adaviyar Ranabir Das Ajanta Sengupta Amit Tiwari Mathen Mathew Navneet Negi Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Ashish Anchan PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia

MUMBAI Shankar Adaviyar, Ranabir Das The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division 2nd Floor, Express Tower, Nariman Point Mumbai- 400 021 Board line: 022- 67440000 Ext. 527 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com Ranabir Das Mobile No. +91 9820097606 Email: Ranabir.das@expressindia.com Branch Offices NEW DELHI Prabhas Jha, Navneet Negi The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, Express Buliding, B-1/B Sector 10, Noida 201 301, Dist. Gautam Budh Nagar (U.P.) India.

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Board No : 0120 6651 500, Ext:270 Direct No : 0120 665 1270 Fax No : 0120 4367 933 Mobile : 91-9899707440 Email id: prabhas.jha@expressindia.com JAIPUR Prabhas Jha The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, Express Buliding, B-1/B Sector 10, Noida 201 301, Dist. Gautam Budh Nagar (U.P.) India.

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Express Computer® Reg. No. REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, RNI Regn. No. MAHENG/49926/90 Printed for the proprietors, The Indian Express (P) Ltd. by Ms. Vaidehi Thakar at Indigo Press, (India) Pvt. Ltd. Plot No. 1c/716, off Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027 and Published from Express Towers, 2nd Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021) Editor : Srikanth RP (*Responsible for selection of News under the PRB Act.) Copyright © 2016 The Indian Express (P) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, electronic or otherwise, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited.

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SEPTEMBER, 2016

COVER STORY

ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN CIO, APOLLO HOSPITALS

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ealthcare consumerism is directly driving the health systems to ensure that patients are engaged in a meaningful manner, so that the state of their health is kept under constant 8

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monitor without having adverse impact.

When one looks at patient engagement from our perspective, we want to ensure that we are able to demonstrate the level of empathy which helps us in finding solution to the problems which meets the need of the patient both in the short and long term.

This creates a possible culture of patient engagement. Presently, there are multiple trends in technology which is exciting. The space of healthcare devices like glucometer, digital stethoscope, pulse oximetry, blood pressure measuring apparatus etc. is making healthcare monitoring very easy. There are no special skills required to operate these devices. This space of medical devices integrated with mobile devices creates a powerful eco-system

of continuous care management. This creates a very efficient model between health systems and patient and small social surrounding of patient as well as health system.

One concern when it comes to future of patient engagement is that people try finding more about symptoms on Google rather than seeking expert help. The right information has to be consumed by people. There should be education imparted on how to interpret it and who to go to interpret. If understanding of parameters is not correct one can start SEPTEMBER, 2016

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TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTHCARE: ACXO PERSPECTIVE The healthcare industry is in the midst of a huge technology shift. Rapid adoption of electronic records in hospitals, embedded medical devices, analytics and the growing use of cloud and mobile technologies is changing the face of Indian healthcare. Jasmine Desai spoke to leading CXOs from the Indian healthcare industry to get a perspective of how emerging technologies are impacting the way hospitals deliver services

making unwanted decisions and get into an unhealthy cycle of treatment. The major threat to the future of patient engagement is not accepting and reacting to patient engagement models. One part of the patient engagement is change management.

It comprises of change management coming from health delivery models and change management happening in patient perceptions.

Today there are several engagement techniques. Patients have to be open to newer models of health engagement.

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Opening up to new models of delivery Health systems also have to be open to new models of delivering it to patients and not merely by traditional methods of physical meetings. It also may not be the most effective to deliver when there are other options available. Change management towards the effective use of technology to have higher level of patient engagement in order to deliver higher levels of positive outcomes is what I would consider the biggest threat. While we are using technology, we definitely need skilled people to interpret that information and translate it in the right manner at the right time.

Lack of such skilled people is also a big risk.

Another aspect of it is cost. While lots of options are available, the cost has to be controlled in a manner that is suitable for the consumer and the

economy under which the consumer is operating. Such technologies should also have high levels of reliability. There has to be governing standards so that reliability is not misinterpreted from a hospital perspective. We have to have constant analytics to see disease patterns and various outcomes. It enables engaging with patients who have chances of encountering the disease, and people who have been treated for it, to make sure that the disease does not come back. Health systems have to pay a lot of attention to their service models. We need to ensure that we are providing the service that customers actually need. Perspective from others is extremely helpful in articulating a particular service.

Patient engagement ensures that right treatment models are delivered to patients.

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COVER STORY

ROHIT M A MANAGING DIRECTOR, CLOUDNINE HOSPITAL

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ll our systems and mechanisms are developed and aligned to bring high amount of predictability. We have always invested heavily in technology since our inception in 2007. Over the years, we have changed multiple partners and providers but our requirement has remained the same which is to drive deeper collection of data. We have a long term key partnership with Microsoft. We leverage its platform for all our technologies at Cloudnine. We leverage Microsoft Dynamics to reconcile accounts, closing our books etc. We leverage Microsoft CRM for patient engagement. With this no matter what the touchpoint is (someone may have contacted us online, or physically visited us or called us), data related to all the people who are involved right from the counselor to other teams get enveloped through the CRM. The CRM then provides specific mapping points.

Each customer is on a journey with us.

Somebody maybe in their ninth month of pregnancy and due next week and reaching out to us, somebody could be in initial stages and accordingly, we start mapping their experience from there.

This has taken around a year of planning and implementation and has gone live in all our 12 units. We have been able to clean up lot of data and how we manage patient engagement. This is not yet an outward facing engagement platform i.e.

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customers cannot directly engage with this platform. It is purely an internal tool for senior management who are delivering the service. We will put a platform where customers can directly engage whether through an app, self-help kiosk, web etc. They will be able to figure out as to where they are in their life-cycle journey with us. It helps us get a deep understanding of customer behaviour, which doctor is providing better engagement, are they unfamiliar with certain processes etc.

We track net promoter’s score, which is a standard across various measures of taking feedback or any form of engagement. We have seen a steady curve of acceptance from patients after tracking it for past 3-4 years.

Future of patient engagement Future of patient engagement will be digital. A very clear roadblock today is clean and easy availability of data and information exchange. Clinicians need to appreciate data in the way that they are used to. In an ideal world medicine is all about data. One looks at parameters, one looks at variations and trends. One of the things which needs to increase in our country is for physicians ability to use technology to go up. It is a tech project for us at our hospitals too. We have been good at it but need to improve to get 100% accuracy in terms of all our clinicians being able to input data digitally. We are more educated about disease management or lifecycle management in our segment which is pregnancy. Nobody knows better than the mother of the change she is going through. Digitally empowering a would be mother is the way to go.

Leveraging analytics Our analytics is split into clinical and non-clinical. In terms of non-clinical there are bills generated, appointments made and various such touch points happening. Earlier the customer had to reach out to make appointments. It has

been observed that during the early and later stages of pregnancy, the customer has more intense engagement. But now since all stages are mapped out, our people get in touch with the patient asking if they would like to schedule any appointment. We have been able to bring lot of pro-activeness on this front. After 4-5 years of collecting statistical data, we would like to do more analytics on it to do IoT etc.

The next phase for us to is to launch the customer app which will be a very unique proposition from our side. This will also help us to look at next wave of clinical data and how it can help in clinical patient outcomes. The app will help them manage their pregnancy, network with pregnant women in the same stage of it etc. Presently, we deliver around 800-900 mothers every month across the country.

In a quarter that is around 3000 mothers who are in the same stage of pregnancy.

They can socially engage with each other.

Socially there is lot of opportunity to drive engagement through this.

Hurdles faced In healthcare as a system, there are hardly any rules. Now the government is coming up with EHR guidelines etc. What it means is today any healthcare establishments or any IT provider is free to use their own sets of standards for generic data. That messes up the entire system. The entire IoT application is nice in theory but how to use it practically?

Applications are still very limited. For example, any device connected to the Internet will have a way of capturing data. However, hospitals in the country today including us, do not know how to use it optimally.

You cannot expect clinicians or physicians to look at multiple sources of data and then give a proper outcome to the patient. IoT is popular because in developed countries, guidelines have been there for ages. The data outcomes and data outputs which have to happen in the system are very streamlined.

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DR VIJAY D’SILVA MEDICAL RESEARCH OFFICER, ASIAN HEART INSTITUTE available to all clinicians.

When it comes to patient relation, we are using SurveyMonkey for keeping in touch with them. It is used for relationship management. Our other major initiative is patient health monitoring. When patients are moved out of critical care units, they are put on health monitoring. Even when they are in the ward, their ECG, blood pressure, oxigenation, blood sugar, weight can be monitored from home. Patients are given this digital device with bluetooth and data is streamed on a continuous basis or weekly basis. More apps are being designed and tried out. These apps are being developed in collaboration with other companies.

We also have a digital library. We have made all medical books available digitally.

Gradually, there will be no need for a library as such, as more and more systems are getting shifted to the cloud.

Data security is a challenge due to lot of confidential patient data.

The importance of wearables

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n terms of patient engagement, from the time the patient enters, the demographic data of the patient and the clinical history is entirely digtized.

We have PAC system and we already have an existing HR system which has digitized lot of processes here like billing, patient engagement etc.

We are currently using SRAP system of Religare., which is under upgradation.

Due to data migration issues, it was delayed but we are going to shift to a new HR system. On this platform, the whole EXPRESS COMPUTER

medical record is digitized. The old records are also getting digitized. When it comes to clinical data, the whole prescription and disbursement of medicine is electronic. The doctor writes it digitally and it automatically goes to the chemist, who disburses the medicine accordingly. As far as integration is concerned, we have PAC system of GE for imaging of ultra-sound, MRI etc. Now the clinician can give it anywhere in the hospital. The images are available on the network of PAC system which is easily

There is huge scope in wearable technologies. For example, Google glass can be used in operating room or students can use it to learn by direct visualization of what is happening in the operating room instead of seeing it in a gallery. Doctors can also view patient records on it.

Healthcare is now very open to using AI, although cost of it can be a roadblock.

Platform revolution is an upcoming trend which can revolutionize healthcare. It is integrating different data from different platforms. This way doctors can get multiple data from multiple sources on one platform and accordingly give diagnoses and treatment. 3D printing is being used to print heart tissues and blood vessels, skin,bones, cartilege.

Printing of cancer cells can be also done to study them. Micro-chips can also be a platform for researchers to investigate, as they can use these chips for clinical trials instead of using animals or humans.

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COVER STORY www.expresscomputeronline.com

SATISH SINHA HEAD-IT, FORTIS providers: there is a huge escalation of physician’s report that they use a smartphone or a tablet in their practice.

Mobile apps can help them diagnose and monitor patient conditions by gathering patient information

Leveraging IoT

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ringing patients into the digital health world is splendid yet thoroughly underutilized competency. Growing health IT use among patients and providers controls the potential of supporting patient engagement. Health IT includes electronic health records (EHR) and other electronic (eHealth) or mobile electronic technology (mHealth). These show potential for improving care coordination, providing provider-patient communications channels, increasing access to information and making it easier to track health and wellness goals, resulting in increased access to customized information and support for shared decision making, improved communication between providers and patients, greater acceptance of active and healthy lifestyles. ultimately improves health outcomes.

The stimulus for the use of health IT for patient engagement stems from a variety of converging trends, including increased consumer access to IT; increased dominance of EHRs and mobile technology use among clinicians; and implementation of a federal strategy to encourage use of consumer eHealth.

Moreover, health care is viewed as having the highest potential in the consumer products industry, with higher rates of new growth in mobile business activities expected over the next five years. The use of mobile technology extends to 12

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IoT is hot and emerging trend which is supported by technological innovations and advances. Within the healthcare space, there exist abundant devices such as blood pressure monitors, blood glucose monitors, weighing scales, thermometers, pulse oximeters, body composition analyzers, ABG, patient monitoring, syringe pump, wrist bands and so on, which help measure and track key health parameters. IoT provides a unified link for these devices to manage a continuous automated flow of information.

The power of home-use medical devices and mobile healthcare software/applications that make up the IoT has been progressively felt in the healthcare market. besides from their utilization in managing health, they have also been used for disease prevention and fitness campaign. Few of the applications of IoT are chronic disease management, remote clinical monitoring and assisted living, wellness & preventive care etc.

This can be used principally for patients who have to follow a regime but have no visibility into their health status until they meet a physician or health coach the next time. Centralized remote clinical monitoring members of assisted living groups and senior care settings is fast evolving as a trend.

IoT provides the capability to remotely monitor the care being delivered to such patients and make constant course rectification as desired.

Elimination of manual data captured processes has a boon to the operations, automation of information captured and processing has reduced faults, making remote monitoring a smart way for both providers and users.

Excellence in automation enables providers to transfer the tasks of routine monitoring and field supervision to remote monitoring personnel, enables in cost efficiency. Also, remote monitoring has facilitated in minimizing member move-out rates, and increased staff efficiency. In order to maintain a competitive advantage, organizations will have to leverage the potential of IoT and adopt IoT driven systems and processes.

This model of healthcare, which heavily relies on patient participation, and subsequent data analysis by processing, is set to change the way health services are delivered. This customer centric transformation is being powered by the need for innovation and disruption in healthcare. IoT will continue to evolve fast, leading to impactful and positive changes towards all stakeholders in the healthcare industry.

Currently Fortis is offering several key initiatives on cloud as PACS, Doctor Appointment, EHR, Patient services request, critical back up and so on. PACS is a critical part of any healthcare organization, since all radiology reporting done via PAC software. Now all images are pushed to VNA on daily basis so that patient/consulting doctor can view his images/report online from any part of the world. Patient doesn’t need to carry the radiology images and reports, the images in VAN will be stored in cloud for years. Login credentials are shared with the patient unique identification number.

Fortis has recently launched Fortis App for doctor appointment. The patient can book his appointment and patient preference can be selected as location & specialty to view who all doctors are available with their qualification & specialty. As per appointment schedule timing & availability they can book the appointment with the doctor.

The implementation of EMR in ICU has aided the doctor significantly, in accessing patient history and thus taking critical decisions.

SEPTEMBER, 2016

COVER STORY www.expresscomputeronline.com

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS INFLUENCING THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY Health is right at the cusp of change where and it is only a matter of time before technology entirely changes the face of this industry. Jasmine Desai spoke to enterprise industry majors and startups, on how technologies such as IoT and Big Data are changing the face of the healthcare industry

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GENIUS WONG PRESIDENT, GLOBAL NETWORK SERVICES, CLOUD AND DATA CENTRE SERVICES, TATA COMMUNICATIONS

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earable technologies, mHealth applications and more sophisticated drug delivery devices are empowering patients like never before, with intelligent technology infrastructure enabling the next level in healthcare. The data produced by wearable devices has tremendous potential for the medical industry - whether that's creating a bespoke profile for a single patient based on medical data collected in real-time or accurately tracking the performance of treatments for patients with ongoing conditions. As connectivity becomes more globally ubiquitous, the prospect of using technology to complement existing healthcare provision has exciting potential for saving lives and democratizing healthcare the world over.

To improve and democratize healthcare with data analytics, there needs to be a focus on improving connectivity, scalability, mobility, data privacy and security in medical institutions as well as throughout the healthcare ecosystem. This includes the need for networking and connectivity solutions to ensure that high quality virtual healthcare services are consistently available.

Not only does a purpose built connectivity infrastructure enable data collected by mobile devices to be transmitted accurately, a cloudbased infrastructure can help institutions store, manage, secure and access the data at their disposal. However, the cloud-based services required to take on a challenge of laying the foundations of healthcare democratization need to be uniquely scalable - giving healthcare IT departments the ability to expand and adapt quickly to rapidly accelerating demand.

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COVER STORY

SAI PRATYUSH

RIZWAN KOITA

PRODUCT HEAD, MANAGED SERVICES, ENTERPRISE BUSINESS, TATA TELESERVICES

CEO, CITIUSTECH

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he following areas will witness further developments and benefits for both the industry as well as patients: ● Outpatient Monitoring: Outpatient monitoring and telemedicine applications are introducing the healthcare industry to newer ways of interaction with patients and enabling them to not only monitor patients on a continuous basis but also to respond more quickly to situations that need their attention. ● Wearables: Activity trackers, smart watches, health monitors, and pedometers — are being used to track the activities of patients after they are discharged from the hospital. It is now possible for physicians to be alerted based on anomalies detected in vitals such as blood pressure and glucose levels. ● Remote Monitoring & Rural Healthcare: Remote consultations are making it possible for patients in villages and geographically disadvantaged areas to consult specialist doctors in cities. Video consultations are also serving as avenues for second-opinions and follow-up consultations for patients in urban areas. ● mHealth: India’s extensive mobile technology infrastructure will continue to drive mHealth (mobile health) adoption enabling healthcare workers to send vaccination reminders, monitory patient recovery, manage nutrition and health of new born infants, etc. ● Location Based Services: From enabling emergency services, running ambulances to everyday applications which help patients connect with doctors, location based services continue to make a big impact on the healthcare industry. Tata Teleservices is working with partners to develop scalable Information & Communications Technology (ICT) and Internet-of- Things (IoT) solutions across various use cases including the healthcare value chain which includes hospitals, their vendor ecosystem and doctors.

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he Indian healthcare industry is growing at a rapid pace.

While there have been significant enhancements in the technology infrastructure, Indian healthcare delivery is far from being truly technology driven. The lack of readily available patient health information and a centralized system to store medical records have the potential to increase health risks and overall costs. While more matured markets across the globe have already employed and adopted Electronic Health Records (EHRs) that can safely, securely and accurately store and share patient information, the majority of hospitals and clinics in India still rely on paper-based systems. Implementation of a stringent and holistic regulatory system to ensure high quality of care is still lagging.

Though efforts are on, India needs to make a concerted effort via ‘Digital India’ to establish standards and incentives to make this happen. In order to increase the momentum and shape up the industry for better care delivery, the regulators at the minimum need to (1) truly embrace digitized clinical information, (2) establish common national standards for storage, classification and transmission of this healthcare information (applicable to both public and private agencies) to ensure data is interoperable across various healthcare systems, (3) give a fixed time frame for adoption and roll out newly announced healthcare reforms and (4) ensure patient engagement that can enable consumers to take control of their own health.

SEPTEMBER, 2016

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HARI THALAPALLI CEO, CALLHEALTH

CHANDRASHEKHAR PRAKASHRAO SECURE POWER, SALES, IT BUSINESS, APC BY SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

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ith technology, there is a tremendous opportunity for all partners in eco-system. For example, for doctors, with rapidly evolving e-health support infrastructure, our doctors are able to connect or diagnose their patients at any given point of time. Analytics will help doctors to keep a track record of the medical history of patients which saves a lot of time while treating. A patient who is not technology savvy can also take consultation from a doctor through video call, or deliver sample collection for diagnostic tests at his preferred time.

Technology is giving a major boost for young budding entrepreneurs like us to explore and avail opportunities in various segments. It is bridging the gaps of time and space to make everything available now – this instant.

Technology has allowed us to partner with the leading healthcare service providers like doctors which bring years of experience with them, specialists, hospital and more. We are reversing the traditional approach of health care delivery which is enabling us to cater to a larger number of patient requirements. Soon technology will enable CallHealth to access 450 million customers in India alone, within 5 years.

Technology is surely giving CallHealth an opportunity to work in unison to ensure speed, precision, results and accelerate growth.

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ith 57% of Fortune 50 companies connected to the health industry, the Healthcare sector is today growing faster than the world’s GDP. The increasing need for special healthcare services, digitization of patient records and rapid technological developments are driving growth in hospitals with respect to patient care capacity and information processing.

The changing hospital landscape is today seeing the influence of Hospital Information Systems. Labs have greater access to patient data and doctors can view a patient’s condition and vitals via real time data anytime, anywhere. The ability to make this data accessible to multiple departments and different devices throughout the hospital system drives the needs for more storage capacity, faster network response time, and an increase in the data center infrastructure capacity. This need to expand data centers makes it essential for healthcare companies manage their physical infrastructure smartly.

Schneider Electric views the healthcare vertical as most appropriate to chip in its expertise. The rising data volumes in hospitals today call for a need for additional data centers and infrastructure, but lack of space is a major challenge.

Prefabricating the data center infrastructure off-site and delivering it as a complete solution within a robust, weatherrated structure, eliminates the need for a dedicated space or building. This provides a viable solution for healthcare facilities needing to add capacity that is cost effective and simpler.

Prefabricated modules can be place indoors or outside and provide a functional data center that mimics typical rack layouts and space found in traditional server rooms.

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FEATURE

HEALTHTECH

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HOW INDIAN STARTUPS ARE TRANSFORMING HEALTHCARE IN INDIA 16

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Startups in India are constantly finding new ways to supply smart gadgets, new mobile apps, web platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) and other new age digital solutions in the healthcare space

BY RASHI VARSHNEY

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oday, we wear health bands to track our health realtime, we schedule a doctor appointment over a mobile app, get reports online, can consult a specialist over a video conference, make use of telemedicine, and conveniently carry our reports and medical history in a smartphone. These technological advancements makes healthcare approachable and accurate. Otherwise, if you see state of healthcare in India, we have acute shortage of doctors with around 1 doctor for every 1,700 patients, as against the WHO prescribed ratio of 1: 1,000. And, the technology has all the powers to not only fill this gap but also transform this space completely.

In healthcare, technology has completely changed the way doctorpatient interact with each other. A lot of these changes can be attributed to startups, as tech savvy new players are finding novel ways to tap lucrative opportunity for digital offerings to change the dynamics. These startups are constantly finding new ways to supply smart gadgets, new mobile apps, web platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) and other new age digital solutions in the healthcare space.

Adding to the same, Gowtham Jayaram, Chief Technology Officer, Medwell Ventures says that ubiquitous computing (data & computing available anytime and everywhere) is the primary innovation driver in the healthcare industry. “This spectrum of solutions ranges across (simple to sophisticated); Booking healthcare services over the web; Getting & sharing your medical records on your mobile; Wearables measuring your blood pressure regularly and alerting your doctor & next of kin.

Ubiquitous computing coupled with major improvements in Clinical accuracy & miniaturization of medical devices will make omnipresent health monitoring a reality in the next 2-3 years," he added.

Medwell Ventures, is a home healthcare startup founded in 2014 by Vishal Bali (ex CEO Fortis) and Dr Ferzaan Engineer (ex CEO Quintiles) and Lalit Pai. Medwell is basically a healthcare delivery system for chronic

diseases in the out-of-hospital space.

Jayaram further added that technology is the guide-rails on which companies can organize consistent, measurable healthcare services at scale.

Here’s how these startups are leveraging technology with an aim to change the healthcare landscape in India.

Smartphone can now be a hearing aid

According to a recent WHO study, less than 1% of the 6 crore people in India who need hearing aids actually have or use them. There are multiple reasons for this: firstly, there are less than 2000 practicing audiologists in India, with most of them clustered in metros and Tier 1 cities. As a result, a large percentage of people who live outside the larger cities do not have access to qualified healthcare. Secondly, decent quality hearing aids cost upwards of Rs 30,000 each. And most people need two aids- one for each ear. This is beyond the reach of the common person. Lastly, there is still huge stigma related to hearing aids, and many people, even those who can afford aids avoid them for fear of standing out. Recent medical studies have shown that untreated hearing loss not only causes social isolation and loss of productivity, but can also be linked to higher risk of depression, dementia, accidents as well as other health issues.

A healthtech startup Quadio Labs, was listening to all the problems of hearing impaired people. The startup has launched a free hearing app Q+, which turns a contemporary smartphone into a hearing aid by harnessing the phone's processing power and using the phone's mic and wired headsets for delivering the sound to the user, processed as per the user's hearing loss.

With inbuilt hearing tests, adaptive sound processing and controllable listening experiences, the Q+ app is intuitive, affordable, easily available on smartphones, and provides multiple listening settings for different sound environments (quiet and noisy). Most free apps only amplify sounds, while Q+ the app is designed to reduce feedback SEPTEMBER, 2016

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and background noise.

"We started off by manufacturing high quality, low cost hearing aids in Pune. We looked at the smartphone revolution and wondered- a smartphone today has more processing power than any electronic hearing aid in the market today. This led to us building and launching India’s first and only Hearing Aid Mobile app that does not require a traditional hearing aidjust your smartphone and the headphones that came in the box," told Neeraj Dotel, CEO, Quadio Labs.

Besides the Q+ app, the startup also provides digital hearing aids; and also an internet-enabled remote audiometry and hearing aid fitting framework 'Net dispensing', which allows the company to break the physical barriers of an audiologist’s clinic and reach millions of hearing impaired individuals wherever they are- even at home. Once the audiologist has completed a hearing impaired person’s diagnosis, they can recommend possible solutions- these could be prescribing or fitting a traditional hearing aid, or even helping them download and use the hearing aid app.

Dotel told that to serve more hearing impaired people, Quadio Labs opened Hearing Care clinics in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns in Maharashtra and Gujarat. “To reach out to more people, we sent our Audiologists out into villages and conducted free hearing camps. We soon realized that Brick and Mortar was not the way to go, and a unique 'telemedicine' approach was required.

Hence we combined internet and communications technology with medical expertise to build our innovative and proprietary 'Net Dispensing' solution that can convert any location into a virtual 'hearing clinic”. Today, our Net Dispensing solution is in use at leading Hospital chains, ENT Doctors’ offices, EyeCare centers, even NGOs,” he added.

Video consultation ATMs in Rural India

DoctorInsta, a video-medicine consultation platform which allows round the clock medical consultation over video through smartphones & web is 18

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Miniaturization of medical devices will make omnipresent health monitoring a reality in the next 2-3 years

eliminate cognitive process based bias errors from every stage of the blood transfusion process. Safetrans is embedded with indept transfusion medicine rule engine.

SafeTrans is available on-premises license version and is used by around 75 blood banks across India enabling , some 20 lakh blood components, screening more than 10 lakh donors. The software has so far identified more than 60,000 mistakes and has saved 10377 lives. In 2015-16, 3.5% of entire components issued in India were through Safetrans.

New age patient-doctor interaction going to settup ATM for video consultation across India. To target the rural patients, the startup is in talks with local general physicians and plans to set up 500 kiosks (Health ATMs) across rural areas and small towns in phases in coming months. The kiosks will focus on psychology, psychiatry, sexology, dermatology, gynaecology, diet, nutrition and chronic diseases such as diabetes. In these ATMs, patients can drop by to consult specialist doctors over a video link. In the initial stage, DoctorInsta is planning to launch these services in villages across Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar where health scenario is grim and lately will target outskirts of Delhi and slum dwellers in Mumbai. The startup intends to establish world’s biggest virtual medical clinic to ensure better access to healthcare.

Blood bank software Blood transfusion is a complex system with multiple rule based outcomes leading to high percentage of errors bcause of the human factor. Paying heed to risks of errors, a Aurangabad -based startup Strides has build a SaaS-based platform, Safetrans. It is a blood bank software, configured employing indept transfusion medicine rule engine, to support good transfusion practice.

Safetrans tracks, records and acti on each step of the blood transfusion process, right from donor selection to the blood component being transfused to the patient, tracking the entire cycle.

SafeTrans enables blood banks to

Digitisation and tech penetration can also bring in transparency and more awareness among patients and result in better quality treatments. Mirai Health, a connected healthcare startup is leaveraging technology powered solutions to improve doctor and patient experiences, especially to the middle class segment in India. "Our focus is to equip outstanding doctors with the tools they need to provide sustained high quality patients experiences." said Aakash Ganju, co-founder of the startup.

Mirai Health’s 'technology powered touch' platform allows doctors to manage patient needs for scheduling, records, queries and ongoing clinical care before and after they visit a clinic. The web and mobile based platform is a multichannel healthcare platform, integrating cloud telephony, secure chat, web, voice and mobile app platforms with medical practices. The multichannel interface is designed to cater to the diverse technology adoption of patient population in India. Integrating remote patient experiences with their in-clinic records provides insights that allow our doctors to provide a well-informed care experience to their patients.

For example, Dr X is a leading diabetologist, with practices across three different locations. He serves over 2000 patients annually, many of them from outside Mumbai. While Dr X is consulting with a patient in his clinic, there are potentially 1999 patients outside that need access to varying degrees of his care. Dr X does not have the tools to SEPTEMBER, 2016

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capture or serve the needs of these patients outside the clinic. The absence of these tools raises the barrier for Dr X’s patients to approach him. Though he is a great doctor, Dr X has been unable to provide a sustained, consistent, predictable healthcare experience to his patients outside the clinic. With the Mirai Health multichannel platform, Dr X has dropped the barrier for his patients to access him. They can now access their doctor’s expertise 24x7 independent of his availability and location. Patient needs are addressed smoothly, while the interactive communication platform ensures analytics and reporting for Dr X around the patient experience.

Ambulance, a tap away Technology is not only capable of providing opportunities, but also is capable of reducing the costs, increasing efficiency, improving access and raising quality of care. For instance, there are likes of Practo and Credihealth. The online-medical assistance startup Credihealth provides complete digital medical assistance for hospitalisation needs. The startup recently launched Ambulance service via the Android app which helps users in gaining quick access to an ambulance during the wee hours.

While you ‘ask-for’ medical assistance, an ambulance nearest to your home will be coordinated- through a more efficient backend system.

The popular healthcare platform, Practo provides a singular platform that helps consumers with all their healthcare requirements. Practo also makes software products that help healthcare providers ranging from clinics to hospitals digitize. Such as Practo Ray, a SaaS software for clinics that helps doctors digitise and is available in 10 regional language in India.

Tech for Womenhealth Doc N Me, which is a cloud based patient collaboration and practice management software exclusively for Gynecologists and Obstetricians. With a skewed doctor to patient ratio, and the delicate condition of women’s healthcare in this country, doctors could use assistance in EXPRESS COMPUTER

dealing with their existing patients effectively and reaching out to more patients at the same time. Since its launch in January 2016, the startup has acquired over 60 doctors and 11 thousand patients. Doc N Me was also selected as one of the few Nasscom 10000 Startups in Hyderabad.

Most physicians complain that the current EHR systems do not function in sync with their workflows and increase their workload rather than decreasing it, which is a major reason for physicians to stick to the conventional pen and prescription pad. Addressing this pain point, Doc N Me provides a technologybased real time tool to the doctors in the consulting room. The patient data was traditionally lost between misplaced reports and prescriptions, is stored on cloud. Therefore, the doctor has a better picture of her patient’s conditions before implementing any treatment protocols, and the patient’s health is placed into her own hands. With Doc N Me, the patient does not require to maintain her own information, like a personal health

record. The information is stored and updated by their doctor in real time. Doc N Me delivers its solution via desktop and mobile based applications for doctors, patients and doctor’s assistants.

Medical conference over app While sharing knowledge does not sound a fancy thing in tech world. But sharing leads to quality. A startup, DailyRounds is an academic network of Doctors. Medical Doctors share their best cases in the DailyRound app. Over 300,000+ Doctors share interesting cases and learnings in the app. Over the last one and a half years, DailyRounds has become the highest rated medical app globally. In medical industry, knowledge and case sharing and discussions used to happen in conferences or expensive medical journals. The startup leveraged technology to bring it outside these closed walls. The DailyRounds app is a free, light and open networking app for doctors. rashi.varshney@expressindia.com

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OPINION ROHIT MA CLOUDNINE GROUP OF HOSPITALS

HOWMHEALTH IS IMPROVING MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH OUTCOMES Mmobile health technologies (mHealth) are making the process of providing care more efficient,solving some of the challenges facing healthcare and improving clinical outcomes worldwide.

The Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) is a public-private partnership that delivers vital health messages to new and expectant mothers in developing countries via their mobile phones 20

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e are now entering an era of connected health in which digital technologies including mobile health technologies (mHealth) are making the process of providing care more efficient, solving some of the challenges facing healthcare and improving clinical outcomes worldwide.

Today, healthcare providers are using mobile health technologies to access clinical information, collaborate with teams, communicate with patients and peers, monitor patients in real-time and provide health care remotely. At the same time, patients are using mobile health technologies to track their own health, access their medical records and communicate with their healthcare providers.

In maternal and child health specifically, mobile technology has made it so much easier for women to manage their pregnancies. There are a host of applications that allow women to track their ovulation cycles, track their baby’s growth milestones, calculate due dates, set appointment reminders, receive health tips and access information on nearly all aspects of pregnancy and child birth like nutrition, prenatal and postnatal classes, medications and breastfeeding, to name a few. There are also apps through which you can directly send a message to a doctor or a pregnancy expert and have your queries addressed without having to physically go and see your provider. mHealth has also made it possible to reach vulnerable women living in inaccessible and underserved areas who were earlier difficult to reach. It is a simple, low-cost solution to deliver important health messages, evaluate and monitor quality of services provided at the primary healthcare level and

improve reporting mechanisms. This is especially important in a country like India where maternal, newborn and child mortality is so high.

Frontline workers (FLWs) like ASHAs, Anganwadi workers and auxiliary nurse midwives are being trained to use mHealth to monitor the nutritional status of women and children like tracking whether mothers are taking their iron and folic acid tablets and monitoring their weight especially during pregnancy. The Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) is a public-private partnership that delivers vital health messages to new and expectant mothers in developing countries via their mobile phones. Under BBC Media Action’s Kilkari project (part of the Ananya programme), a mobile voice message service delivers weekly messages to families in Bihar about pregnancy, family planning, nutrition, childbirth and maternal and child care.

Continuum of Care Services (CCS) is a collaborative effort of CARE India, Dimagi, and Grameen Foundation under which FLWs use mobile applications to monitor patients during the critical 1000day window from the beginning of pregnancy through the child’s second year of age and deliver messages according to the needs in different stage of pregnancy, delivery, post-delivery and newborn care. Last year, the government of Uttar Pradesh launched a mobile app M-Sehat in the state to record maternal and infant data in real-time. And more recently, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare launched an application called ANMOL that allows ANMs to enter and update data for beneficiaries of their jurisdiction. This will ensure more prompt entry and data updation.

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also poses certain concerns we need to be careful about. From a provider perspective, protecting patient privacy becomes more difficult with mobile technologies. Several apps allow users to post information anonymously and not all the information out there is credible or factually correct. There exists a risk of users self-diagnosing, self-medicating, overlooking symptoms or panicking over minor symptoms, all of which can be harmful and even fatal.

To protect themselves, app users must not rely solely on the information being provided on mobile apps and must consult with their healthcare providers before starting on a treatment regime or making any changes to their existing regime.

Mobile and internet penetration is burgeoning in India. The number of people who own mobile phones here is greater than the number who own personal computers. In 2013, there were 525 million mobile phone users in the country and this figure is expected to rise EXPRESS COMPUTER

to 813 million by 2019. With the set up of the government’s digital infrastructure to facilitate adoption of mobile internet, decreasing handset prices and affordable data tariff plans, the growth of mobile internet is expected to increase over the next four to five years. In rural India specifically, majority of active internet users use mobile phones as the main access point for internet. According to a

From a provider perspective, protecting patient privacy becomes more difficult with mobile technologies.Several apps allow users to post information anonymously and not all the information out there is credible or factually correct

report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International (a market research firm), the number of active rural mobile Internet was 80 million in October 2015, and was expected to reach 87 million by December and 109 million by June 2016.

While the exponential growth of mHealth is transforming healthcare, its full potential has not yet been realized.

According to WHO’s second global survey on eHealth, in the South East Asian region, the top four barriers to mHealth implementation were lack of eHealth policies and legislation, lack of knowledge concerning the possible applications of mHealth, lack of technical expertise and high operating costs. We have now been presented with an opportunity to overcome these barriers in the implementation of mHealth and ensure that its benefits reach all those in need.

– By Rohit MA, Managing Director, Cloudnine Group of Hospitals SEPTEMBER, 2016

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INTERVIEW VENKATARAMAN SUBRAMANIAN COLUMBIA ASIA HOSPITAL

WE ARE EVALUATING A CLOUD AND MOBILE FIRST APPROACH Over the last couple of years we have been looking at evaluating a ‘cloud-first’, ‘mobile-first’ kind of an approach to ensure that we are able to turnaround IT projects quickly and harness the power of cloud effectively, says Venkataraman Subramanian, CTO, Columbia Asia Hospital, in a conversation with Ankush Kumar Please tell us about the global footprints of Columbia Asia and your association with the institution?

This is the 20th year of Columbia Asia in Malaysia and we also have presence in other countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and India. Our current count of hospitals is 28 worldwide. I have been with Columbia Asia from March 2012. I had joined Columbia Asia India initially and currently I am working out of the Headquarters in Malaysia (Corporate office in Malaysia). I work closely with the CIO and chief of infrastructure services here.

What are the IT trends that are gaining popularity in the healthcare sector? What is your institution's IT strategy?

If you look at the larger trends in IT, there are three major areas that I would like to reiterate - information security, analytics and adoption of cloud. Now in all these three areas we have invested time and money as we aim to keep improving in each of these areas. Everything that we do in IT, either directly or indirectly, makes a difference to the patient’s experience at the hospital. Whether it’s putting together an IT system that allows paperless movement throughout the hospital or one single bill for every encounter that we have at the hospital or even if it is the implementation of a barcode.

Coming to some of the things that we have managed to do, we have engaged on platform re-modernization for IT which will allow our customers to have more seamless access to their hospital records 22

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and also helps them to book appointments. Over the last couple of years, we have been looking at, evaluating a ‘cloud-first’, ‘mobile-first’ kind of an approach to ensure that we are able to turnaround IT projects quickly and are also able to leverage or harness the power of cloud.

What are the futuristic plans in terms of expansion or investment in technology enabled services?

Our core IT system is managed and built in-house. We have adopted a 4th generation on-premise software that runs our operations and it keeps on evolving in terms of upgrading to a SEPTEMBER, 2016

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better database versions. We are working with Microsoft and our partner organizations to revamp our platform modernization as this is going to be our major focus in the coming years.

How do you see the impact of cyber threats in the healthcare sector? How secure is your healthcare institution?

As of today, whatever we run is purely accessible only within the enterprise network, but that is possibly one measure of protection that we have since the software is built and maintained by us.

Our ability to spot any potential trap doors are also higher, specially when we are building this new modern application for our IT system. We build security by design, as many-a-times what happens is software is brought or built and then security comes as an after-thought that usually resolves in exposing weak areas.

Security is not a one time project and cannot be relied only on security assessments.

In the last couple of years we have done security programmes within the organization, making sure it has our baseline in place and then adding on to subsequent layers of security that we have to take care. But, yes the threat is there and threat has always been there, the thing is that when some of it manifests then there is a larger narrative around it. Therefore, no software is perfect and all software do come with some element of risk in it. The question is, we will have to keep a continuous eye on it and address it as early as possible.

Security is not one department’s responsibility, it’s everybody’s responsibility.

While technology can help in reducing costs for providing healthcare services, we see that the healthcare cost is very high in India. Please share your thoughts?

Now there are various levels at which medical technology exists. I would like to make a distinction - there is information technology and then there is medical technology. Few years ago, possibly of doing MRI was very difficult even it was expensive because you had only few places where you could actually do an EXPRESS COMPUTER

We build security by design, as many-a-times what happens is software is brought or built and then security comes as an afterthought that usually resolves in exposing weak areas.

Security is not a one time project and cannot be relied only on security assessments.

MRI. Today, by the virtue of technology being more affordable more and more centres are able to make it available.

First is the question of availability then is the question of affordability. Now, when mobile phones came into existence they were expensive. More use of technology, automatically brings down the costing further.

We talk about telemedicine - here I would say ‘cloud’ has been a real blessing.

If I had to put an expensive software, buy my own hardware the initial cost would itself pinch my pocket; but with cloud there are so many things I can do with a pay-as- you-go model. If I have more and more people subscribing to the services I am offering, I don’t have to do an upfront investment. So the cost will automatically get offset. If the same question was there before the cloud era, probably the cost would have to be passed until the critical threshold/ critical mass was achieved.

But today, there is very good possibility, and this is what all the cloud providers are talking about – its consumption economics. These open source technologies have made it possible for companies to think about big data.

Earlier it was only meant for select few who could afford that kind of money, today it’s not the case. The ability to process large amount of data, today I would still say the real data explosion has not happened. Once internet of things really comes in and that wave hits is then we will see the real data explosion and that point it will be humanly impossible to work with the data, it has to be machine driven.

That’s when we will see the value provided for the price is pretty high. People have taken humble steps, they have taken four or five pair machines and created a cluster and installed big data engine out there and processed information, and they actually been able to do wonders!

Is there any real, significant difference in the role of a CIO or CTO in the healthcare sector?

That is an interesting question. Needless to say that these roles in today’s world totally overlap. But, if I were to kind of split hair, I would say the role of a CTO has come into resurgence because information security, which was possibly an add-on role has become big enough to warrant a separate role to be put in place.

So that would be a person not talking about information security, and not take on ISO stand - saying here is a list of standards that we shall follow, rather to look at information security objectively, as to what does it really mean for a business and what is the impact of data breach on the business and what can we do about it, address it.

CIO is more actually being able to articulate the value of technology introduction in the difference it is making in business process and outcomes. It can be either monetary return or on technology investment or it can be return in terms of value. CTO would probably look at - what’s happening out there, is there a possible case for us to bring the technology, how can I sample something, how to do a little proof-of-concept on what will work and will not work, the overall technology fitments. There is lot of overlap but there is also some element of individual framework to it. ankush.kumar@expressindia.com

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CASE STUDY

RUBY HALL CLINIC

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HOW RUBY HALL CLINIC ACHIEVED A MAJOR LEAP IN PRODUCTIVITY Ruby Hall Clinic, one of Pune’s largest hospitals adopted Citrix XenApp, which has enabled the organization to improve productivity and efficiency, provide the power of mobility to its users and reducing app management cost by 90%

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ealthcare is at a cusp of change wherein immediate diagnosis and treatment are becoming almost a staple requirement from patients’ side. With 550 inpatient beds (including 130 intensive care beds), a staff strength of 150 consultants, 500 panel doctors and 1400 paramedical staff, Ruby Hall Clinic is one of the oldest and most reputable hospitals in Pune. As a large hospital, Ruby Hall had certain personalization, performance and mobility requirements across the organization. Doctors were finding it challenging and limiting to access reports and patient records only on a traditional desktop infrastructure.

Aligning efficiency with the current healthcare demands made Ruby Hall’s IT team look towards technology.

“Our main issue was accessing our applications anywhere and anytime. Ours is a legacy software developed in DB. It cannot be accessed outside the premises

of the hospital, and due to which doctors cannot view the report of the patient immediately if they are on the move,” says Anand Patil, GM – IT, Ruby Hall Clinic. As a result the hospital decided to implement Citrix Xenapp. The hospital through XenApp published its application on it which could be accessed anytime outside the hospital premises.

“Doctors regularly want to check diagnostics of the patient, MRI scans, lab reports etc. The management also wants to access our MIS software. Our software is in-house built. We are using it for pharmacy, nursing station application, customer feedback, material management system, lab information, archiving etc. In such a scenario having an uninterrupted access becomes extremely crucial,” explains Patil.

Ruby Hall decided to deploy Citrix XenApp in 2015. The time taken for deployment was very less around ten days. It has been deployed on a server at SEPTEMBER, 2016

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Ruby Hall’s datacentre itself. As a POC is a must in such implementations, a pilot for one month was carried out. The benefits of the implementation were very immediately apparent among the Ruby Hall staff. Firstly, the deployment of the solution has simplified the entire process.

In the ICU and CCU, all doctors are using it to give reports at the bedside of the patient. Presently, there are around 20-30 doctors in Critical Care Unit utilizing this. Overall users are around 50-60. “Doctors can now access the application on any kind of device. We have given them iPads to use it within the premises. However, outside the hospital, they can access it on their personal device. The application is going through a firewall for security purpose. From the server side, all security precautions are already taken,” elaborates Patil on the implementation.

Due to this application, doctors can take patient related information instantly.

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The critical care areas have seen special improvements with productivitygoing up byas much as 30%.

Anand Patil General Manager - IT& Tele communication,Grant Medical Foundation,GMF,RubyHall Clinic

From a patient perspective, its usefulness cannot be underestimated. According to Patil, even from a management perspective, they can access any facts and figures and take decisions immediately. “It is deployed on Windows server, but it can be deployed even on Linux,” he says. Ruby Hall is planning a new hospital at Hinjewadi where the IT team is planning to use Citrix XenApp as well.

Emphasizing on how impactful is this technology in healthcare, Patil says, “The deployment of Citrix XenApp has proved to be a game changer for Ruby Hall, as it allows us to access applications from anywhere and deployment of applications is also much easier. The results have been wonderful and have improved the overall productivity and efficiency of the organization. The critical care areas have seen special improvements with productivity going up by as much as 30%.” jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

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OPINION KAUSTAV GANGULI ALVAREZ & MARSAL

FUTURE OFPATIENTENGAGEMENTIN INDIA’S HEALTHCARE SYSTEM In view of the recent global advancements in the field of healthcare technology and analytics,patient engagement in Indian healthcare system is all set to transform itself inspite of certain gaps

Given the increasing acceptance of corporate brands in Indian healthcare and the marginalization of nursing home-driven models,there will emerge integrated care systems for select,leading healthcare brands 26

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Gaps in Patient Engagement When one looks at healthcare delivery models in India, there are four specific gaps that become immediately apparent with respect to patient engagement – especially in view of the recent global advancements in the field of healthcare technology and analytics.

The first gap lies in how patients and doctors connect in India today and when in the patient lifecycle this connection happens. Patients in India, across rural and urban contexts, are largely driven to service providers by recommendations or “references” provided by doctors or general practitioners (GPs). This translates into patients’ choices being driven by doctor opinions and often by vested interests rather than by a clear, objective view of the relative quality of service providers. There is also an issue with respect to when patients approach service providers. Far too often, patients approach service providers very late in the disease cycle – leading to poor treatment outcomes and higher cost burden. For a country that has a very high chronic disease burden, much of the care delivery continues to be episodic where service providers treat “footfalls” instead of patients.

The second gap lies in the fact that India’s healthcare delivery largely uses a “one size fits all” approach where experience, rather than evidence related to the individual patient condition, guides diagnosis and therapy. It does not take into account the importance of evidencebased analytics in personalizing and customizing care for different individuals.

The third gap stems from the fact that most, if not all, of India’s care delivery is concentrated in hospitals. That is catastrophic for a country where the

demand supply inequality in healthcare is so stark. This also leads to late prognosis and treatment for most cases including chronic ones that could have benefited from a non-hospital, disease management model.

The fourth gap in patient engagement relates to disjointed care coordination across the patient lifecycle. There is hardly any information sharing across primary care, hospital-based care and post-hospitalization care. Each delivery unit works blindly with no context or appreciation of care services provided by other units in the eco-system. Needless to say, this leads to poor treatment outcomes for patients.

Addressing the gaps First, patients’ choice of service providers could become more objective, less doctor-dependent and hence less biased by individual doctor interests. One should not expect an overnight transformation on this aspect and definitely not across all care contexts.

However, the recent advent of marketplace models is an indicator of how patients could use independently available information to make their own unbiased choices on providers. The potential success of this shift in choice, from being doctor-driven to becoming independent and information-driven, is directly correlated to the volume of people using marketplace platforms in the future to drive their choice and thereby exerting pressure on providers to compete on aspects related to quality and reputation with consumers.

We also believe that improved population health analytics and risk analytics by payors and by the government could lead to potential patients or disease outbreaks being SEPTEMBER, 2016

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identified much earlier in the disease cycle. We are beginning to see insurance companies working with third-party providers to collect data in order to identify health risks in advance. While state governments in India are still largely focused on creating the bedrock of hospital information system (HIS) infrastructure, there are some very interesting pilots being undertaken by some states to understand how population health analytics can help decide on timely interventions. The result of this transformation is patientprovider engagement much earlier in the disease cycle leading to improvement in health outcomes.

The second gap in therapy being driven by blanket experience rather than by evidence and protocols is also likely to get addressed in the future, albeit only in pockets of the healthcare system at first.

Some of the leading hospital chains in India have started developing clinical decision support models that would draw upon analytics on evidence and provide personalized advice to the patient, given his specific condition and history. Why is this important? Simple – it makes care more personalized and scientific, leading to better outcomes for the patient.

Clinical decision support would not completely take away the importance of judgment but will make decision-making more rational and accurate.

The issue of care being solely concentrated in hospitals is not likely to continue forever – not in a country where hospital infrastructure development over the next decade and in the near future will still not nearly address the growing demand. The solution is likely to lie in adoption of technologies and care delivery models that will decentralize a large part of non-acute care and chronic disease management away from the hospital. Some of this decentralization is likely to lead to self-management of some disease conditions, again, aided by adoption of retail patient monitoring technologies and by disease management solutions that will help patients regulate their condition more effectively on an ongoing basis. Adoption of these EXPRESS COMPUTER

solutions will be driven by payor incentives, given that payors will incentivize the usage of solutions that will keep a lid on their pay-outs over a patient’s life. All this could help drive the growth of the home care space. Home care models today, unfortunately, are very human resource-centric and leverage very little technology. The future though, could be a different story.

The fourth issue of disjointed patient view across different care delivery units would be the most difficult to solve, given that different care providers across the care ecosystem do not have any incentives or drivers for sharing data. Data flow, integrated patient view and care coordination are therefore likely to be achieved only in select care settings. We now have several examples of hospital groups in India diversifying into primary care, diagnostics and home care. Given the increasing acceptance of

corporate brands in Indian healthcare and the marginalization of nursing home-driven models, there will emerge integrated care systems for select, leading healthcare brands. This is far from a perfect solution to disjointed care models – but better than what India has on the ground now.

The next five to 10 years could be absolutely transformational in Indian healthcare. The digital revolution could alter patient decision-making, drive protocol-driven, quality service delivery, decentralize care delivery to various settings beyond hospitals and see data being shared across disparate formats in branded set-ups. In short, this transformation may bring about a metamorphosis of patient engagement models as we know today.

– Kaustav Ganguli, Healthcare Lead, Senior Director with Alvarez & Marsal SEPTEMBER, 2016

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INTERVIEW SANJAY DESHMUKH VMWARE

NSX COULD BE POTENTIALLY THE NEXT VSPHERE FOR VMWARE In 2015, VMware’s End-User Computing business grew over 30% year-over-year, bringing the total annual bookings run rate to over $1.2 billion. India represents one of the top growth markets for VMware when it comes to End User Computing. With over 63,000 customers, including over 1,300 of Global 2,000, 9 of top 10 deals contained some component of End-User Computing. The company saw its strongest contribution coming in from the Asia-Pacific region with India being a key growth market.

In a detailed conversation, Sanjay Deshmukh, Vice President, End-User Computing, Asia Pacific & Japan, VMware, shares VMware’s mobile strategy, which has a huge focus on India, given the increasing adoption of enterprise mobility as a work norm.

The company recently announced that it sold over a million licenses of its VMware AirWatch Mobile Device Management solution to enterprises in India for helping them manage the mobility needs of their workforce. Some notable wins in India include Air Works, Axis Bank, Fullerton, ICICI Bank, IDFC Bank, Mindtree, OYO Rooms, Wipro, and Zomato.

Some edited excerpts from the interview: 28

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How have you seen VMware evolve with the trends?

VMware has innovation in its DNA. It continues to drive innovation in every single sector of the business including my business. Individual computing as an umbrella term at a very high level has got 2-3 kind of individual technologies within that. So, first is the desktop virtualization technology, which we offer under a brand called as Horizon.

This is a traditional VDI opportunity for application virtualization. Our net new revenue that we add in terms of customers and licenses is much more than any other company. So, and this change that has happened in the last 2-3 years from being a relatively new entrant to a market leader is clearly what I would say is innovation. That is the number one reason that we are in this position. So, our innovation has happened both organically as well as inorganically. Organic means how I make this workload efficient on my datacenter infrastructure.

I will give you a classic example. We launched vSphere 6.0 and with that we were able to leverage a feature in our Horizon solution, we call it the just-intime Desktops. It is such a relevant feature to the customer, because it helps them improve the cost efficiencies of the implementation, as everything is provisioned just-in-time and you don’t need to keep everything ready for the users and so on and so forth. Cost efficiencies are very good with this.

What is the impact with respect to security?

The security paradigm also gets addressed with this feature. Let me give you an example on how the security impacts corporate site, which is a standard thing. Somebody somewhere will open an email and it will be email sent by some wrong sources and it will have some software code – it will get downloaded on the local machine and it will stay dormant. It will either ping or wake up after what weeks, months, years whatever and start spreading itself across the datacenter and start EXPRESS COMPUTER

impacting the other assets. This is the standard modus operandi of any attack.

We have seen that in many corporates.

The beauty of this feature is that once the user logs out, the session is destroyed, the desktop is destroyed. So, it doesn’t matter whatever code the person has downloaded however malicious that is. Because the desktop is destroyed there is no concept of the code sitting dormant there and waking up after few weeks to impact the other assets. So, then a lot of our customers don’t realize it – this is a feature which is a combination of Horizon, our desktop

So,and this change that has happened in the last 2-3 years from being a relatively new entrant to a market leader is clearly what I would say is innovation. That is the number one reason that we are in this position. infrastructure technology and vSphere 6.0 the underlying hypervisor technology. Because we are able to spin out – so let’s say you are a user, you are trying to login to your office infrastructure- when you are trying to login, a VDI desktop will be created for you. You will not be assigned a dedicated desktop – it will be created for you.

So, let’s say a Windows 8 machine will be spun out. Your apps will be plugged into that desktop at runtime level. Your user environment settings that you have set, which means my background, my browser shortcuts, history, bookmarks, whatever that is, all those preferences, my printer settings, all those will be

plugged in and then the desktop will be served to you. So, from a user standpoint you get a brand new desktop every time they connect. But what is new here is the fact that the desktop is going to get destroyed after you logout.

And your apps will go back in the app stack; the user environment will go back and sit in the user environment study.

The next time you login, it will be again assembled and served to you. So, it brings in a lot of cost efficiencies on the infrastructure side and it also helps you sell the security paradigm.

Will this be a standard feature of every VDI deployment?

This will be part of any standard VDI deployment, but the value of this is very high to anybody who is concerned about security, efficiency and cost effectiveness. So, yes companies in sectors such as financial services, IT services will appreciate the feature more, but having said that anybody who does a deployment of VDI using our architecture they will benefit from this.

But yes, anybody who is considered about cost efficiencies and security will appreciate the feature more than others.

So, the reason I gave this example is to drive home the point that these are the innovations that we did organically.

Some of the other organic innovations are that we have an asset in storage virtualization. The primary problem with VDI deployment has been, even though the technology promise is very good, adoption, relatively speaking, has been slow in the past because of the cost issue. If I buy a physical desktop, I get it for 500 dollars or something in the range of 600-800 dollars. But if I have to setup a VDI infrastructure for the same set of users, the cost was higher in terms of capex.

How much more would it cost than a physical infrastructure?

It was in the range of 30 to 35% more than the physical. But in spite of that customers would invest in it, because of the security value proposition and the business case was always positive when SEPTEMBER, 2016

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you started adding the OPEX cost to it.

Because the way you manage the VDI infrastructure, was very different than the way you manage a physical PC. So, the customers who were not able to justify to the finance organization that even if the CAPEX is 30% higher, I will eventually save 30% in the three years, the Finance didn’t accept that business case many a times.

For customers who use our Horizon solution in combination with our VSAN solution, it reduces the cost of storage by almost 40%. As a result of that, the efficiencies that you get because of the just-in-time desktop and other features what happens in the CAPEX cost of virtual desktop now becomes very close to the physical desktop. So, think about it you as a CIO and there is a department that comes to you and says that they have to refresh thousand machines and if they are able to provide them the same VDI infrastructure almost at the same CAPEX cost and 40% on the OPEX in three years’ time, it is a relatively easier business case.

What are the clear benefits of this approach, besides the costs?

It’s a straightforward business case and because of its security benefit and the mobility benefit, which means you can work from anywhere it becomes an added advantage. So, those are some of the examples of how we have done organic innovations of leveraging VSAN and vSphere. Today, we also have the combination of Horizon and NSX. As you know, NSX is our network virtualization solution. Now customers are looking at an improved level of security on virtual desktops with micro segmentation. So, when you combine the micro segmentation value of network virtualization and the Horizon solution, what you get is pure magic. I’ll give you a classic example. Companies in the IT services and the ITES sector, are trying to create a borderless ODC infrastructure and this Horizon plus NSX becomes the foundation of the borderless ODC infrastructure. We have done this deployment at some 30

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leading companies. Again, if you talk to the CIO he will share more insights with you on what benefits they have got.

Compare the earlier infrastructure where you had an ODC infrastructure dedicated for every customer. If a customer like GE outsources a process, then the service provider has to procure 100 desktops for the GE project. If a Bank of America outsources the process, then 100 desktops will be required for Bank of America. These are Chinese walls between each of these ODC infrastructures. It creates so much of inefficiencies.

What is the maturity level in terms of the customers to accept the different physical network? If you look at the clauses earlier they are specifically saying that the physical network needs to be separate?

Very valid point. So, what that means is that there is a lot of effort required on our part and the IT service provider’s part – I am taking Wipro’s example as a service provider here to educate their customers. The good news is that these customers are the Global 500s and the Fortune 500s. They are already hearing this from us and from analyst so they don’t think of this as, what is this Indian IT company trying to do. They don’t look at it like that. They look at it like, I recognize that these are the new technologies that are there in the market. Our service provider is trying to innovate using those technologies and offer me value. So, they are getting convinced.

The contracts, they are traditional, and are based on the old terminology that you talked about which is physical separation of network, people and everything else. Once we are able to prove to them on the technology front, we will be able to not only give them the same level of security, but more.

Conceptually, If I’m a service provider and my cost of infrastructure was 100 dollars and if I’m doing this at 80 dollars now, and I pass on that 10 dollars to the customer, reduce the price to them and keep 10 dollars with me, my profit goes

up and their cost goes down.

I will give you two areas where the service provider will see immense value.

One is just the simple logic that instead of investing in multiple routers, multiple network infrastructure, multiple PCs and all of that, now you are having a common pool of infrastructure and you are giving the required isolation or security through micro segmentation and virtualization technology. So, that’s the obvious straightforward benefit.

Now whether it is a saving of 30-4050% it depends on the infrastructure that the customer has and how many customers they are serving. The more ODC customers they have there will probably be more benefit. What if somebody had just one ODC customer then the benefits are different. So, that’s why I’m not able to quote a number, but these are the obvious benefits in the first place, which is infrastructure.

The second benefit is in terms of scale out. Imagine this – your outsourcing customer has a new project that comes up, they say ‘I want you to add 100 seats’. In this infrastructure, with this solution the service provider will be able to do it overnight. It’s all about an administrator provisioning everything from one console including the networking part of it. In the earlier world, they could do in terms of storage in the VDIs, but the network and other infrastructure had to follow. Whereas here, everything will be automated. Not just the VDI infrastructure which is one part of it, but everything right from apps to networking to the other infrastructure. So, that’s a second benefit in terms of I would say simply in terms of time to market or agility.

What is the opportunity from the VMware point of view?

The ODC model innovation has come from India. It was never done anywhere else. This model does not exist in other markets. But what we are doing is we are taking this template – I can say the solution template and trying to see if we can apply that to the financial services customers in Japan who are more SEPTEMBER, 2016

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paranoid of security than anybody else.

And I think that is the most exciting part of I would say in my role here that I get to see what the good of one market is and apply that into the other market. So, yes in a way India is helping us be this innovative geography and build innovative use cases. In India, we can see these new deployments and new concepts and apply that in other markets. And this example that I shared with you is a classic example.

We have taken the model as an ODC template, taken out the ODC use case from that and we are trying to apply that in other sectors in different markets.

So, that is a thing that has happened.

Now another important area where India is trying to lead in innovation in the use cases here is the graphic use cases. So, if you look at India as a market there are 2-3 types of companies here - automobile companies, service providers for the automobile markets and the third is this generic category of IT service providers who have practices for this sector. These are the large three consumers segments. Now, between these three segments you have lots of not only automobile sub segments, but also manufacturing. You have a lot of users who are using the graphics application and traditionally they are using it on a desktop.

A graphics desktop – not on a regular one, but a workstation. Now, this has been the traditional way of using it. And why? Because the regular PC does not give the power that a graphic application needs only a workstation can give and this is the VGPU card and the memory .Every customer using it whether it is a manufacturing a company trying to use it in a foreign design firm or automobile companies are the largest consumers of these solutions. They all recognize that this is a highly inefficient infrastructure in their entire organization, because the cost of the workstation is very high. The utilization of this infrastructure when you compare them between the groups of users is extremely low and that’s why it’s inefficient is what I meant. This is EXPRESS COMPUTER

the classic example going back 15 years when we started having server virtualization conversation. You had a server for each application, utilization was low and hence the efficiency was not there. We said why don’t you virtualize it and then you will get the efficiency.

So, graphics use case is another exciting one where we partner with end VDI. And this use case was not virtualized in the past. The primary reason was not that VDI technology wasn’t available – this VGPU technology which is used in the workstation – that was not

India has always been like that in the last two decades or so where every time whether it was manufacturing side, mobile or the ITside,we have adopted the technologies faster. virtualized. Today, what end VDI has done and what we have done on our vSphere infrastructure on the hypervisor we are able to leverage these innovations and virtualize this entire workload. So, this is another area where I will say, I will point out two markets India and Japan are trying to lead. We have automobile companies like Honda in Japan where their entire design center or rather I would say entire graphics user workload is virtualized on the VMware Horizon infrastructure.

Similarly we are trying to do that work in India also. So, that’s some of the innovation.

So, it can be a virtual model everywhere?

This is limited to the imagination of the customers. For example, earlier access

to talent was more in terms of where you have infrastructure and where you have your office is. And you really didn’t think about it as – you had boundaries and here it kind of dismantles all the boundaries. You can take that concept and apply it to rural BPO. You can apply it to healthcare in terms of consultation, and education.

So, I will give you an example of a hospital in Australia where the entire hospital infrastructure is virtualized.

We have integrated our solution with the healthcare service provider’s application. So, what that means is that as a doctor I will have a badge, I get into the facility, I can go anywhere to any endpoint in the hospital. All I do is tap my badge so there is a reader which authenticates me and it brings up a session of my desktop wherever it was. I mean whatever place I have left it right and then I can access my records whether it is survey of X-rays or whatever they are. Give my feedback to the application and just log off. The doctor can be next to the patient or in the administration area or any other place.

Compared to other markets, how fast has India been in terms of other markets?

There are two reasons why India has achieved this faster than others.

Because we have a billion subscribers.

Getting to a million is not difficult if you look at the percentage of that. And second is that this is the nature of Indian companies. When they come across an innovative concept or a technology and it seems to be proven or acceptable their ability to latch on to it and adapt it is much faster than others.

India has always been like that in the last two decades or so where every time whether it was manufacturing side, mobile or the IT side, we have adopted the technologies faster. And I said the momentum and excitement here is huge and what is interesting is that that is also driving the adoption of our Horizon technology. srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

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NEWS ANALYSIS

Netmagic

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NETMAGIC SEES IOT WAVE PUSHING DATA CENTER GROWTH IN INDIA IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time. This is bound to have a big impact on the workloads of data centers

BY SRIKANTH RP

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wo years back, research firm, Gartner had made a prediction that the the Internet of Things (IoT) will have a huge transformational effect on the data center market. Gartner estimates that IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time.

This is bound to have a big impact on the workloads of data centers as enterprises will face a huge challenge in processing large quantities of data in real time.

India is in the midst of a huge digital transformation which is being pursued aggressively by a government which wants to use technology to improve every practical process. In a digital economy, as more devices get connected, one can expect a surge in IoT

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devices such as connected cars, wearables and connect ed industrial machines. This is accelerating demand for service providers such as Netmagic, who is helping enterprises address their capacity management issues with respect to fulfilling their greater computing and storage capacity needs.

“As India gets more and more connected, we are witnessing the rise of new business models enabled by connected devices. Smart meter reading, industrial machines monitored by the makers and provided as a service, and the rise of cars booked by apps, are just some of the emerging business models. As these businesses need to have centralized data processing capabilities, they are taking the help of specialized players like us who can provide them with the capability to run

uninterrupted services as they depend on real-time data,” states Sharad Sanghi, Founder, Netmagic.

Riding on the success of SAP HANA With the popularity of SAP HANA, Netmagic has also found huge acceptance for hosting of the SAP HANA infrastructure for its customers in its datacenters. The firm has already signed close to 9-10 customers, and is witnessing rapid adoption among its client base. A case in point is Consul Consolidated which has selected Netmagic Solutions, to host India’s first SAP HANA implementation.

Another big trend that is responsible for the firm’s growth is the continued rise of R&D centers in India. As some of the firms that are setting up R&D SEPTEMBER, 2016

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As India gets more and more connected,we are witnessing the rise of new business models enabled by connected devices.

Sharad Sanghi Founder,Netmagic

centers in India have global agreements with its parent, NTT Communications company, it is fueling demand for Netmagic’s data center services.

The cloud as a business has been a mainstay for the firm. For example, out of 2,000 customers, the firm has more than 600 customers in the cloud space.

Specialized services like DR-as-aService (DRaaS) are also seeing rapid adoption, due to the economics and value proposition in terms of factors such as speed of recovery, flexibility and reliability.

With the acquisition of Netmagic by NTT, the ticket sizes have more than doubled. Among NTT’s global customers, there is a lot of awareness about Netmagic’s remote infrastructure management capabilities.

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Digital momentum India is at the cusp of a huge transition enabled by digitization, and players like Netmagic have been quick to spot the opportunity. “We have been growing at a CAGR of over 35 percent for the last 5 years. We are confident to sustain this momentum going forward. Also, we have grown more than 50 percent in the last twelve months,” states Sharad.

The company expects to see the e-commerce vertical to contribute immensely to its revenue target growth followed by banking and financial services. e-commerce and IT/ITeS each accounts for about 27-28% of the company’s revenues, followed by BFSI, which accounts close to 11%. srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

The cloud as a business has been a mainstayfor Netmagic.For example,out of 2,000 customers,the firm has more than 600 customers in the cloud space.

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WELCOME ADDRESS Chander Parkash, Minister for Industries and Commerce, Jammu & Kashmir

EXPRESS TECH SABHA 2016 Welcome Address Special Address by Chief Guest From e-gov to m-gov e-Governance and modernization of Transport Platform for co-creating Digital India m-Governance for Digital India Software platform for Government Creating smart Software Defined Infrastructure for Digital India Ease of digital services adoption with new IP NxtGen Power Discussion Plenary Conclave: Technologies for Transforming India EXPRESS COMPUTER

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hander Parkash’s talk was on the potential for IT to bring transformation in J&K, in the backdrop of the severe stress the state has undergone because of terrorism.

He gave a few examples of how technology can lessen corruption. One of them was from Lakhanpur, on the border of Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir. The installation of weighbridge in this border checkpost reined in corruption perpetrated through manual processes.

Strikingly, the deployment of electronic weigh bridge and CCTVs doubled the income of the state’s exchequer.

J&K has taken a number of steps in the direction of ease of doing business and land acquisition. In the power sector, investments under 5 crore can now be

taken by a manager level personnel. As a result, companies like Blue Star, Dabur, Chinar textile, ITC, Eveready, Patanjali have decided to invest in the state.

He also highlighted the role of technology in capturing the existing land records in J&K. It must be noted that a lot of land records have been destroyed in the state in the past.

Traditionally, Bengaluru and Hyderabad are known for their prowess in IT however the power of technology should reach to the villages. Wide ranging reforms will facilitate that.

Technology now enables ubiquitous access of information about any topic. He said that the state has a huge young talent base however there is dearth of opportunities.

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Special Address by Chief Guest J Satyanarayana, Advisor, Government of Andhra Pradesh (e-Governance, electronics and IT)

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Satyanarayana, a member of the committee to review the National Optical Fibre Network (NoFN) in the context of Digital India spoke on the three strategies to realise the vision of Digital India. He highlighted on what the state of Andhra Pradesh has achieved in terms of the digital initiatives undertaken by the state.

He listed out three points - Enterprise thinking, hub approach and IoT. The Enterprise thinking means designing systems as if the state is a company.

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According to the Hub approach, designing the enterprise IT architecture is done centrally but the implementation is decentralised.

Andhra Pradesh has extensively used IoT. The Praja Sadhikara Survey Dashboard provides the single source of truth of any citizen from the state. It is entirely powered by Aadhaar. The citizens are provided services according to the details captured in the dashboard.

The CM has a real time update through the CM Office Real Time

Executive Dashboard (CORE) even to the level for e.g. on the payments of pension to a particular family. It is also enabled by sensors, web services etc. The data on CORE, among others include real time, IoT based updates on the number of lamp posts working in a particular area of the state; irrigation related, sensor based information on the undergoing 17 reservoir based projects in the state. This apart the state is also sitting on quality socio economic data gathered from Praja Sadhikara Survey Dashboard.

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From e-gov to m-gov V K Gautam, Principal Secretary-IT, Government of Maharashtra

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n his keynote, VK Gautam, highlighted how the state’s e-governance policy has gone miles going from eGov to mGov. The Government of Maharashtra made 156 Services online through its newly launched the “Aaple Sarkar” portal. Aaple Sarkar provides a one stop solution to the citizens of Maharashtra for addressing their grievances and engaging them to collaborate with the Government. He said that the government is now trying to integrate two examination boards where the student needs to just give the year of passing and the marks will be shared to the authorized organizations.

Hence, the students do not have to take their certificates while appearing for an examination or interview. The Government of Maharashtra is creating a pan state urban geo portal, and a comprehensive university management system. Gautam said that integration of public, places and procedures will create

new dimensions of governance.

Connectivity is still a huge challenge."

We are trying to create hotspots for rural connectivity but the challenge is how to ensure the quality of Wi-Fi. Earlier this year, we launched five digitally enabled villages where we created hotspots." He further added that we initiated telemedicine and today the per/month per/user download is 50 GB. Optical fiber is being taken to 27900 gram panchayats out of which 11,000 is included in this year’s programme. Maharashtra also launched a major campaign of construction of 50,000 farm-ponds in the state called “Magel Tyala Shet tale” (Farm-pond on demand) to promote water conservation. This was taken up in mission mode across the State in a time bound manner. The State has also taken up GIS based geo tagging survey of the electricity poles of the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company to plan the route for laying optic fibre cable for the same.

e-Governance and modernization of Transport Dr. Chandra Shekhar Kumar, Transport CommissionerCum-Chairman, State Transport Authority, Government of Odisha

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he goal of the Odisha government behind using web technology is to provide citizen services online.

They should be facilitated to access the services without visiting the government offices. It’s the need to physically visit the government office that opens up avenues for corruption. Thus Odisha has already made close to 35 services online and the plan is to bring all of them on the state government website.

The various kinds of permits have been made online. More so, Odisha, with the help

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of technology infrastructure has made possible to conduct learning license camps in colleges. Deliver the license then and there. This is enabled by automated driving testing system.

The state has also set up automated vehicle certification center for renewal of licenses or to test whether the vehicles are fit to ply. The GPS and GIS based route mapping for commercial vehicles is also under implementation. The disaster recovery for RTO services has been build.

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Platform for co-creating Digital India Satish Viswanathan, VP- Presales & Product, NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies

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atish explained the idea of Digital India as how NxtGen sees it. The vision is to transform India into a digitally empowered economy. The role of NxtGen will be to provide a common and shared platform for enterprise, Govt and citizens to create database which can be shared with multiple stakeholders.

The company has build solutions on cloud with a clear focus on security and simplicity. The USP is NxtGen cloud is fully configurable whereas the conventional cloud providers doesn’t provide the flexibility to build cloud, the way the user company wants.

The virtual machines can be created without writing additional code. The

scale up and scale out is also possible with no additional coding requirement.

According to a third party study, NxtGen’s cloud platform is the most competent in all the parameters taken as criteria in the study. The cloud solution makes estimates of performance prediction and also allows the users to make architectural changes on the platform, for which the company has many case studies.

The cloud can also be deployed at the customer location i.e on the customer’s hardware. It provides various benefits.

The siloed portals in an enterprise scenario can be consolidated and can be run on NxtGen’s datacenters as a service.

No Capex required.

m-Governance for Digital India Sukesh Jain, Vice President, Samsung Electronics, India

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ighlighting Samsung's current focus, Sukesh Jain said that the entire idea is to see how Samsung can work with various government departments in fulfilling the dream of Digital India. He said that Aadhaar has been the fastest platform to reach the one billion footprint and is among the only three such platforms in the world. He mentioned five key enablers of Digital India; Make in India, Aadhaar, Digitization of Services, Smartphone, and Internet Connectivity. Talking about the mobile revolution, he said that India is currently the second biggest smartphone market with 239 million smartphones and is expected to reach 701 million smartphone by 2020.

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innovative products, he gave the example of Samsung’s integrated echallan system that uses mobile devices with breath analyzer with camera and GPS system, all rolled into one to identify repeat offenders and fines.

Under public welfare, Samsung uses mobility solutions to ensure smooth communication between the department and the field officials.

Android based applications capture data specific to review the construction of rural roads in the state. Under citizen services, Samsung IRIS tablets are being used for Survey Of Slum (SOS) , which is loaded with the survey application. The surveyor carries the Iris tablet to authenticate citizens biometrically with GPS tagging.

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Software platform for Government Sabarish Santhanam, Managing Director, Agile Labs

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abarish Santhanam pointed out that many of the software solutions in the government has now become bloatware. Most of the systems are not meta-data driven, they are programme driven. Apps exist in silos, and not enough thought has been given to data. Santhanam informed that the business word is moving towards software platforms which are revolutionizing things. Software platforms are changing the way business has been done. Youtube has become the largest platform and is now challenging TV channels. Adoption to software platforms has been exponential.

Santhanam also shared few recommendations and takeaways for the government. He also highlighted that apps

are moving away from traditional coding methods to low cost platforms. Platform driven economies are disrupting businesses. Platforms bring consumers and providers together and enable them to exchange goods or services. Single page apps supported by APIs running in heterogeneous environments are the order of the day. Role based app design will be more useful than module based approach. It should focus more on data aggregations and analytics instead of just building modules. Santhanam gave the example of Adur and Worthing councils which are moving away from legacy systems and taking a low-code approach to building digital services. This has helped the local authorities to implement changes faster than most.

Creating smart Software Defined Infrastructure for Digital India S Rajesh Kumar, Tech Lead, Juniper Networks

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nfrastructure is becoming the key.

Today people are talking about how smart and agile they can make infrastructure. In the case of digitization, infrastructure plays a key role. Talking about application driven network, Rajesh Kumar said, “When we define a network, we define certain characteristics and parameters. Today the hosted network is completely virtualized as the data center has completely changed. The traffic inside the data center has increased.” He also talked about the advantages of pro-active security as he mentioned the importance of creating a custom network experience for different types of applications.

Adapting the network to application demands and requirements requires EXPRESS COMPUTER

greater network reliability. He was of the view that an open platform delivers more value. It is scalable to ensure service provider deployment and is built for expansive data capacity. Improved efficacy can be gained through threat scores and tuning. Software defined network is not only coming in the data center but also the wide area network.

Under the network function virtualization, the manageability becomes very easy and one can push any feature to any device from the central location. While concluding his presentation he defined Network i.e N - New & Existing Services, E- Enablement, T- In Quick Time, W- With, O-Orchestration/Automation, R- Redefined, and K- Connectivity.

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Ease of digital services adoption with new IP Swapna Bapat, Director of Systems Engineering, Brocade India

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wapna Bapat began the session by highlighting the fact that there has been a huge transition in the use of technology. She said that the technology industry tends to operate on micro and mega innovation cycles. “Micro cycles happen every hour, day, week, and year. But mega cycles are far less frequent—about every 20 years,” she said, adding that during these upheavals, there is a massive and fundamental disruption that changes not just the technology industry but every other business and industry due to farreaching ripple effects.

Substantiating her views, she presented a brief history of the evolution of technology. She said, “From the mid-

1970s to the mid-1990s, the mainframe terminal and host model provided the platform for business innovation. Twenty years later in the mid-1990s, the next mega cycle began. The platform innovation during this era was the clientsever model, and the network was LAN/WAN. During this period the shift to IP networks began in earnest and the largest and most famous of these shifts was and still is the Internet.”

She further said that over the next 20 years, the Internet would become so popular that it would give life to a brand new culture—the online culture. It would also change, and to some degree transform, almost every industry it touched.

NxtGen Power Discussion

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xtGen covered the company offerings in data center and cloud services. A query pertaining to SAP Hana was asked. Whether NxtGen has the capability to accommodate the special hardware requirements for SAP Hana. The panelist replied saying they already have live customers on SAP Hana with the special hardware requirements catered to.

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Replying to a query on how the security is handled, the NxtGen representative explained the different security models and structured solutions. The users are provided with logical access based on rights to data access and data compute.

There are different models there too, which NxtGen provides. There are threshold alerts fired at the right time.

A panelist from one of the north eastern

states asked on how can NxtGen help the state government on typical issues like connectivity and lack of electricity. The company had a number of examples where they had run an ATM on a boat.

A query was also put forward on what if the connectivity is reliable but the data sets are not consolidated and data analytics is not possible. NxtGen can provide the Hadoop platform and data analytics can be done after the data is pooled together from siloed instances.

The representative said that they are already working with close to 150 government clients.

NxtGen also deploys cloud on the customer’s hardware, basically an on premise cloud. So, what does the company do with the scrap left after the cloud deployment ? The company reuses the hardware. If required, the hardware services can be provided on an Opex and Capex model.

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Plenary Conclave: Technologies for Transforming India

(L-R) Satish Viswanathan, VP- Presales & Product, NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies; Sandip Garg, Commissioner, Income Tax, Maharashtra; Dr. Chandra Shekhar Kumar, Transport Commissioner-Cum-Chairman, State Transport Authority, Government of Odisha; J Satyanarayana, Advisor – eGov, Government of Andhra Pradesh; S C Garg, Additional CEO, REC Power Distribution Company and Ameya Abhyankar, Director - IT, Special Secretary to CM of Goa

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hile starting the panel discussion on the topic of “Technologies for Transforming India” the moderator of the panel, J Satyanarayana, Advisor – eGov, Government of Andhra Pradesh said, “Transformation is a disruptive change in the way things are happening.” He was of the view that this transformation could happen in two ways – by finding the problem and by offering the solution to the problem.

“Today, we have solutions and now we are trying to find the problem, this is the real transformation,” he added. He asked every panelist to share their thoughts on how technologies are transforming their organization?

Ameya Abhyankar, Director – IT, Government of Goa was of the view that access to Internet, awareness about EXPRESS COMPUTER

technology and conviction to use technology are key for the transformation to happen. He advocated of utilising existing technology to remove silos.

Agreeing with Abhyankar, C S Kumar, Transport Commissioner, Government of Odisha said, “Silos are a big problem. He informed that Odisha is using technology in most of the activities but people acceptance to technology has been challenging in the state. “We are doing lot of applications, but we need to ensure that they get used by people,” he said.

Participating in the discussion, Sandip Garg, Commissioner, Income Tax, Maharashtra explained about some of the technologies used in the IT department in order to enhance customer satisfaction.

He gave an example of e-Challan, eAssessment, TDS but said that going forward, a lot more would be done.

Explaining how the Prime Minister's vision of powering all the villages in the country is being monitored efficiently with the help of modern technologies, S C Garg, Additional CEO, REC Power Distribution Company said, “REC is using GARV mobile application and online dashboard to ensure transparency in rural electrification project by providing real time information about the various developments in the project.”

Bringing the perspective of industry into the discussion, Satish Viswanathan, VP – Presales & Product, NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies agreed with Satyanarayana’s views of real transformation. He said, “Transformational examples are few and not very visible.” He gave examples of a few companies who were working at the grass root level to solve rea-l life problems.

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The Cyber Security Issues Ranjan Dwivedi, Ex-DGP, UP and Advisor (Cyber Security), Ministry of Power, Government of India

EXPRESS TECH SABHA 2016 The Cyber Security Issues Reliable Power Back Up Advance cyber security strategy for insider threat and ransomware How to protect yourself in a world with no parameters Cloud & Datacenter Delivering and securing applications in the digital world Accelerating digital initiatives through DevOps solutions Panel Discussion: Securing the cyber frontier of Digital India Staying One Step Ahead vis-a-vis Evolving APT Enabling 16 years of Digital India Big data analytics and relevance to GOI Exide Power Discussion ESDS Power Discussion Gemalto Power Discussion 44

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anjan Dwivedi said that despite the assistance of technology it is the person's own awareness, preparedness and readiness about the cyber world that can help him in escaping to various cyber threats.

Talking about the real issues that are creating havoc in the industry with respect to cyber security, Ranjan said that the philosophy of the Internet is that the connectivity should be seamless.

Inclination towards lucrative applications that may or may not be of good use increases the chances of intrusion. This also happens due to inadequate common threat understanding.

Widespread use of pirated software and lack of regular updates is also very

harmful. The advantage for Indians is that we are not well connected so it gives us time to wake up. He shares that according to a study, the mean time to discover a cyber attack is 219 days. He added that in India, we believe in investing in machines but we don’t invest much on software.

Dwivedi talked about the popular Red October incident which he informs was again reincarnated in 2014 by Cloud Atlas Malware. India was one of the prime countries of the attack. He informed that social media is also bringing in lot of security risks as it is easier to install a malware using this medium. The only way forward would be to ensure a strong institutional hygiene, along with an accurate knowledge of what to share, when to share and how much to share.

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Reliable Power Back Up Dayesh Suvarna, Head Institutional Sales -West, Exide Industries Ltd

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atteries are an invisible component but are immensely important. He says, "When we talk about smart cities where everywhere one needs to collect the data and store it, the key performer is the UPS which is a very critical component. The learning here is the over sizing of the batteries as reliability is an issue. As a car can be a non starter without a battery, the same applies to your power back up system. Battery is the backbone of the uninterrupted power supply of the data centers, CCTV surveillance, solar street lights, security systems, video conference, passport seva offices and smart classes.�

He said that the general practice is that in most of the datacenter, UPS runs at 50% load and standard backup time selections

will be 30 minutes.

However, the issue is that the UPS capacity may have been decided considering future expansions. The battery is grossly oversized and shall last for only 2+ years. Cost has increased almost 6 times. He mentioned that even a single minute dropout is not acceptable.

The battery manufacturer should be evaluated on the three critical factors: Technology experience, Design experience and Manufacturing experience. Sharing the importance of the lead acid batteries, Suvarna informed that world-wide more than 90% of applications use lead-acid. The main reasons are its low cost, application versatility, abundant raw material and a well developed servicing recycling infrastructure.

Advance cyber security strategy for insider threat and ransomware Sanjeev Chauhan, Senior Sales Engineer, Forcepoint

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anjeev Chauhan shared a presentation on advance cyber security strategy for managing insider threats and ransomware.

Ransomware is malware for data kidnapping, an exploit in which the attacker encrypts the victim's data and demands payment for the decryption key.

Experts have estimated that the total amount paid to ransomware authors could be as much as $ 325 million (USD) for some variants of ransomware. He explained that ransomware spreads through e-mail attachments, infected programs and compromised websites. A ransomware malware program may also be called a cryptovirus, cryptotrojan or cryptoworm.

When infected, a victim's data files will EXPRESS COMPUTER

be encrypted using AES encryption and will be told they need to pay a ransom of 1.24 bitcoins or ~500 USD to get their files back. He also shared strategies for protecting against ransomware by organizing internal security programmes, taking continuous security awareness, enforce backup programmes, remove admin rights where possible and implement controls at the network. He also discussed seven stages of understanding cyber security - Recon, Lure, Redirect, Expolit Kit, Dropper File, Call Home and Data Theft. He also shared the relevance of anti-evasion technique of security attack wherein attackers distribute packets at different levels. This is a technique to know the strength of the firewall.

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How to protect yourself in a world with no parameters Ruchin Kumar, Head of Government Business – India, Identity & Data Protection, Gemalto

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e are the security division of Gemalto,” said Ruchin Kumar.

The company’s solutions enable businesses and governments to deliver a vast range of secure services based on two core technologies: authentication and protection. These include mobile identity, online banking, data encryption, transport ticketing, e-government, vehicle telematics, software licensing and much more. “We do this by developing secure software which we embed in devices and objects to authenticate people and things which run on platforms to protect data wherever it's found. We have the agenda to secure data in its entire life cycle from the time when it is generated. Data is changing day by day whether it is structured, unstructured,

IoT or even non-enterprise.”

He shared various threats looming in different areas. For instance, threat to medical devices where bluetooth-enabled defibrillators can be manipulated to deliver random shocks to a patient’s heart or prevent a medically needed shock from occurring; X-rays that can be accessed by outsiders lurking on a hospital’s network; temperature settings on refrigerators storing blood and drugs that can be reset and cause spoilage.

Prison cells can also be remotely opened as researchers have demonstrated a vulnerability in the computer systems used to control facilities at federal prisons that could allow an outsider to remotely take them over, doing everything from opening and overloading cell door mechanisms to shutting down internal communications systems.

Cloud & Datacenter Dr. Rajeev Papneja, EVP & COO, ESDS Software Solution

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he speaker started the session by giving an overview of ESDS’ niche products around cloud and data center and how governments and enterprises could use them to make themselves more efficient and agile. While explaining the benefits of the solutions like eMagic, Dr. Rajeev Papneja, EVP & COO, ESDS Software Solution said, “eMagic is a web based system that is widely used for IT asset management, device deployment, and comprehensive server monitoring and network management in datacenters spread across different geo-locations.”

He further said that eMagic works on a three click concept – build, deploy and 46

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manage. With the three clicks concept, devices of multiple datacenters across multiple geo-locations can be managed easily.

Dr Papneja also spoke about the eNlight 360° cloud solution from ESDS which comes with a full blown hybrid cloud orchestration layer along with a complete datacenter management suite – eMagic (DCIM) and security scanner (MtvScan). He said, “It the most unique offering in the market today. It is a next generation hybrid cloud orchestration software suite and can be setup in the own premises thus, giving them the security of private cloud and the scalability of public cloud.”

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Delivering and securing applications in the digital world Rajesh Jain, Head – Systems Engineer, F5 Networks

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he speaker began his presentation by saying that with the proliferation of mobile applications, delivering and security applications in the digital world

has become important. He informed that F5 provides solutions for an application world. “F5 helps organizations seamlessly scale cloud, data center, and software defined networking (SDN)

deployments to successfully deliver applications to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” Rajesh Jain, Head – Systems Engineer, F5 Networks said. He explained how cloud, IoT, mobility were creating huge security challenges for organizations.

He also informed that F5 solutions broaden the reach of IT through an open, extensible framework and a rich partner ecosystem of leading technology and data center orchestration vendors. “This approach lets customers pursue the infrastructure model that best fits their needs over time. That is why the world’s largest businesses, service providers, government entities, and consumer brands rely on F5 to stay ahead of cloud, security, and mobility trends,” he said.

Accelerating digital initiatives through DevOps solutions Prashant Chaudhary, Senior Director & Head Business Development-Public Sector, CA Technologies

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rashant Chaudhary began the session by mentioning that major drivers for digital initiatives are — app development, IT management, security and mobility. Chaudhary said that the vision of offering infrastructure as utility and governance and services on demand is only possible if we can create high speed Internet as core utility and seamlessly integrate government services across departments or jurisdictions. He also emphasized that government should use best of cloud technology and ensure real time

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availability of services both online and on mobile platform.

Highlighting the importance of application, he said, “We are living in app world.” On an average, 44 billion mobile apps will be downloaded by 2016, a device is likely to have 44 applications, and in the next two years, about 25 business apps will be deployed on any device. “It shows that businesses are being re-written by software. That is why from planning to development to management to security, at CA we create software that fuels transformation for companies in the application economy,” asserted Chaudhary.

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Panel Discussion: Securing the cyber frontier of Digital India

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he panel discussion moderated

by Ranjan Dwivedi, Ex-DGP, UP and Advisor (Cyber Security), Ministry of Power, Government of India, on “Securing the cyber frontier of Digital India” broadly covered the various opportunities offered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Digital India project and how the same could turn into a huge challenge if cyber security concerns were not addressed adequately.

In his opening remarks, Ranjan Dwivedi, Advisor (Cyber Security), Ministry of Power, Government of India said, “Recently, there have been cases of hacking in which government websites were either defaced or data were stolen.

These incidents show that how vulnerable India is to cyber security attacks.” He was of the view that the country has to develop better network filters and early warning devices in order to mitigate this challenge.

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Participating in the discussion, Brijesh Singh, Special IGP, Cyber, Government of Maharashtra echoed the concerns raised by Dwivedi and informed that in order to address this challenge, the Government of Maharashtra has set up a separate wing for the cyber security. “This wing will be responsible for overall development of cyber infrastructure in the state. In addition, we are also establishing a Maharashtra Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-Maha),” said Singh. Praising the effort of Maharashtra, Maj Gen Sandeep Sharma, Centre Director, Centre for Communication Technology, Indian Army informed that the army has a very robust mechanism for cyber security.

He said, “Army drafted its cyber security policy much before the government of India did it for civilians.”

Commenting on cyber security in relation to the growing adoption of

modern technologies like cloud, virtualization and mobility solutions, S.Rajesh Kumar, Tech Lead, Juniper Networks said, “Following a standard procedure is important to secure the digital assets. He explained that with the adoption of virtualization in the data center, it has become key to have better visibility inside the data center and proper steps must be taken to ensure security of the network.”

On the challenge of following procedure and policy, Vijay Devnath, CISO, Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) was of the view that relevant procedure and policies are already in place but the problem is in their implementation. He said, “People are not very keen to follow each and every step of policy because tightening security means there could be barriers to ease of access. Therefore, we should aim at balancing security with ease of accessing services.”

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Staying One Step Ahead vis-a-vis Evolving APT Kapil Awasthi, Security Evangelist & Regional Manager (North & East - India), Check Point Software Technologies

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he presentation’s focus was on Ransomware, a threat vector fired as a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attack, wherein the data is available but encrypted and rendered unusable while other adjacent

systems running fine and normal.

Ransomware is a subject of concern because of the increasing number of attacks in the recent past. A hospital in USA had to pay ransom to a hacker because of important patient data being

encrypted. Kapil also characterised how grave the problem of ransomware could be.

Ransomware can be introduced in the victim’s system through attachments like word, PPT files, links etc. These attachments can be stopped using the sandblast extraction technique, which basically sanitises the points where malware can be planted.

It’s an unknown attack which can easily pass through the conventional anti-virus and other security solutions. Sandblast emulation is another technique used by checkpoint. These solutions are used for the broad IT platforms.

Fort endpoint detection and response, technologies like threat emulation, threat extraction, zero phishing, zero ransomware can be used.

The Zero Ransomware solution quarantines the infected solution and recovers the data, which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible by using other solutions in the marketplace.

Enabling 16 years of Digital India Sameer Rawal, VP, Huawei India Enterprise Business

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uawei has a Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) operating out of India. The company also runs a few research centers in the country. The strategy is to align with the Digital India programme and then work together with the government and subsequently with all the alliance partners. Huawei’s recent revenue figures have touched $60.8 bn out of which the APAC has 13% share.

The company runs on a cloud pipe infrastructure providing end to end solutions. The vision is to ‘Make cities EXPRESS COMPUTER

safe first and then Smart’ He shared a few India case studies on working with various government entities for Safe city projects. Huawei is running a PoC with the Andhra Pradesh Government for safe city. For the Interim Government Complex (IGC), Govt of Andhra Pradesh Secretariat.

The North Eastern railway is using Huawei’s video conferencing solution.

The talks are on with the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor. AP based Davangere University is also using the company’s SDN ready security solution.

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Big data analytics and relevance to GOI Rajkishan R, Business Manager, SAS India

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ig data is not only about Volume, variety and velocity but the value derived out of the data. Which is what SAS India strives to achieve for their clients. The speaker also spoke about the SAS High performance Analytics platform. It can be deployed on premise and cloud too.

Some of the customer success stories include HM Revenue & Customs in the US. Using the SAS solution, the agency has been able to determine and manage tax evasion thus recovering $7bn in incremental taxes. The company was also able to save upto 20% on resources by optimizing revenue collection. There are multiple state and central tax agencies in India who are using SAS. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has increased food production and enhanced the capacity to

predict agricultural produce by using the data mining features of SAS platform.

The Fusion centers in USA, who collate and consolidate data from different agencies also work on SAS product to come up with a consistent view of the raw data. 12 out of 17 fusion centers use the product.

One of the states in India is using machine learning and Natural Language Processing to understand citizen issues area wise. It will also help in forming government schemes which fit the requirement of the respective territories.

The data is also shared with the CM, which further helps in socio economic indicators like development policies, improving roads, citizen healthcare, food distribution and managing crime.

The state emergency response in USA analyses 911 calls and leverages the SAS solution to better the emergency response.

Exide Power Discussion

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ayesh Suvarna started by saying that without batteries each and every data center is powerless.

He discussed about the advantages and uses of SLA batteries.

Also known as SLA (sealed lead acid) batteries have many uses in today’s world.

From CCTVs, modern motorcycles, ATVs, home alarm systems, backup systems, workout equipment, generators, these 50

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batteries find a place.

These batteries come in all shapes, voltages, amperages and sizes. Also known as SLA (sealed lead acid) batteries have many uses in today’s world. From CCTVs, modern motorcycles, ATVs, home alarm systems, backup systems, workout equipment, generators and the list goes on.

These batteries come in all shapes, voltages, amperages and sizes. He also

gave an insight about the tubular batteries. Tubular batteries are thought to be advanced variants of batteries that are known for providing durable and longlasting battery performance. It is termed so because it seals the chemical compounds in polyester tubes (known as gauntlets) in place keeping them on the battery plate’s surface.

Talking about the issues on choosing the right battery, Golok Kumar Simli, Principal Consultant & Head - Technology, Passport Seva, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India said that expert advice is important but the specification for the batteries should be fixed. Suvarna later shared a few recommendations for the government department. He emphasized the importance of a neutral body, to ensure proper selection of major components in the system.

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ESDS Power Discussion

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hat kind of inter-operability is needed with different virtualisation solution in data centre and how data centers in cloud be made more agile and flexible— the discussion at this round table began with Dr. Rajeev Papneja, EVP & COO, ESDS Software Solution and Piyush Somani, CEO, ESDS Software Solution

presenting their views on this subject and giving broad contour of solutions from ESDS that could be used to address this challenge. During an hour long discussion, there was an agreement on one point— inter-operability of VM is needed.

The ESDS team said that there is lot of complexity with data centres today. Both government and enterprises have

different solutions from different vendors in their data centres, creating huge challenge of interoperability. However with the use of ESDS solutions, this can be addressed. Somani informed that ESDS is the only company to have a patent on real time detection of resource requirements and automatic adjustments. He said, “ESDS Cloud Solutions and Data Center Services bagged the US Patent for the method and system for real time detection of resource requirements and automatic adjustments. The company happens to be the first IT organization in India to receive such a patent in the field of IT innovation, transforming the traditional commodity based computing to a utility pay-perconsume model.”

Sharing few examples from the recent deployment and proof of concept, Dr Rajeev Papneja gave the RITES example and the recent PoC done with Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).

Gemalto Power Discussion

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he pivotal role of data security in digital India, IoT, cloud and smart cities was discussed.

Informing about the govt projects undertaken, The Gemalto representative highlighted on how Gemalto has provided data confidentiality, integrity to the Aadhaar

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platform. The company has provided the technology to secure the encryption of the Aadhaar data. The way it is done is, the critical data is identified and encrypted, the key to which is shared with the authorised officials.

A case about securing the draft judgement before it’s out was discussed.

The judge’s standalone PC should be secured using a smart card with a digital signature, made by a cryptographic module. Gemalto creates those modules.

Another case of keeping the bid confidentiality intact also came up in the discussion. The bids have to be kept in a private domain until they are open.

A panelist shared the security concern about a soon to-be launched portal to conduct procurement of all government agencies and private players, whose data will be uploaded on the portal.

A Govt official suggested the formation of a Bureau of Indian standards (BIS) kind of a body for recommending generalised specifications for IT products. A suggestion was also put up for setting up a certified lab for testing to ensure the right price for any given IT product.

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Keynote Address: Democracy thriving with technology

EXPRESS TECH SABHA 2016 Keynote Address: Democracy thriving with technology Creating an ideal security framework for Digital India BSNL IDC – Powering Digital India PURPLE TEAM TACTICS - Staying One Step Ahead of Attackers Delivering effective e-governance services Panel Discussion: Emerging technologies for effective egovernance Emerging Trends in Cyber Security Odisha: A preferred destination for IT/ESDM investment Digital 3D Cities and Urban Planning Panel Discussion: Fulfilling the vision of Smart cities Agile Lab Power Discussion Checkpoint Power Discussion How Surat is trying to be a smart city 52

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Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India

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uring his keynote address, Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India illustrated the beauty of Indian democracy and how it has survived over the years. He said, “Initially, people had apprehension about success of democracy in India but today the country is one of the most thriving democracies in the world. He added that India is highly a pluralistic country and the aim has always been to achieve good governance.”

Sharing an anecdote from the year1981, he said, that the country faced huge shortage of food production, but with the help of right technology and policy decisions, the country could overcome it. “Although we have achieved a lot, but access to good education, affordable healthcare and housing are key for the growth and we must focus on

it,” he said, adding that there has been economic growth but they have been a jobless growth and hence the growth has failed to create required prosperity among large section of the people.

Therefore, growth with equity is needed.

On the present condition of economic stress in rural areas, he said that we have not been able to put money into the pocket of rural people. He was of the view that technology can play an importance role in mitigating this challenge. He said, “We have to create competitive good and services. For that we have to improve productivity and technology can play pivotal role in it.” He added that we are in the era of robotics and collaboration is the way to go. He also informed that in order to smoothen the process for business to hire people for work, his department is looking to abolish 44 archaic laws.

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Creating an ideal security framework for Digital India Rudra Murthy KG, Chief Information Security Officer, Digital India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

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udra Murthy KG, Chief Information Security Officer, Digital India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India began by saying that India is good at cyber security but policies of 2013 cannot address challenges of 2016. Rudra Murthy was of the view that an integrated digital footprint created by Digital India and Smart Cities was likely to bring formidable and increasing demand on resources to defend against the multiplying threat levels and entry points.

He said, “While both Smart Cities and Digital India will create new economic and social opportunities, they will also be creating an increasingly large attack surface for criminals to exploit.”

Explaining about the ideal security

framework for government organizations, he said that there are close to three-four frameworks which can be used for creating a cyber security framework. “The Government of India has recently issued National Information Security Policy & Guidelines that could be taken as reference by all the central ministries, state governments and PSUs for developing their own information security and control mechanism,” he said, adding that the organizations need to be flexible in their application of the policy for better results. Quoting figures from a research on security, he said both the government and the private sector need to be vigilant about cyber breaches and a mechanism must be created in order to share the learning in this field.

BSNL IDC – Powering Digital India

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uring the combined presentation

by BSNL and NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies, the speakers presented a broad overview of various services offered by BSNL and NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies and how both of them have come together to power the Digital India programme and EXPRESS COMPUTER

Indian enterprises. Speakers from BSNL informed that in partnership with NxtGen, BSNL IDC, a state-of-the-art data center located at six major locations across India is being offered. “We have DCs at six locations across India: Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Mumbai. Our Data Center solutions enable clients to empower their business

by outsourcing their IT operations in a smart and secure way. We help clients to concentrate on their core business by taking their critical-manage required IT solutions' management responsibilities,” said the BSNL representative.

Representative from NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies addressed the question asked by the audience and informed that NxtGen is an emerging leader in data center and cloudbased services that help in powering businesses to grow by cutting through complexity and saving on cost. “Our advanced solutions can be provided both from our own High Density Data Center (HDDC) facilities or deployed at OnPremise Data Centers (OPDC) that are managed centrally,” said the representative.

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PURPLE TEAM TACTICS - Staying One Step Ahead of Attackers Ramandeep Singh Walia, CEO, QOS Technology (A Cyber Security Company)

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he Purple team tactic employs the skills of both the red team (attackers) and Blue team (defenders) to combine and collaborate and learn from each other.

The conventional norm in the enterprise space, more so inside the Information Security group (ISG) of the CISO, has been that of the penetration testers (pen testers) going all out to launch such an attack that the blue team will not be able to get hold off and cave in under the weight. There is always a kind of politics played around, where both teams want to get the better of each other. However in the course of these exercises, over a period of team, there is no improvement and knowledge built upon the learnings. The teams hardly collaborate with each other.

Enter Purple team tactics Ramandeep advises security teams to take security as a game and not a problem. The idea is to convert the regular pen testing into a simulation.

This results in success of both the attacks and defense tactics.

QoS technology partners with enterprises’ Red and Blue teams and do simulations to win the hackers as a single unit of Red and Blue team. They do a DDoS simulation of upto 100 Gbps, APT simulation cyber resilience consulting.

This way, both teams can learn from each other and graduate over a course of time towards high skills. Rather than get their sense of satisfaction of beating the blue team, which would self gratification but not give an opportunity to improve.

Delivering effective e-governance services Ameya Abhyankar, Director IT, Special Secretary to CM, Goa

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oa has chalked out a strategy to use IT for delivering citizen services. Ameya started off with evaluating the IT preparedness of HR and also that of the other stakeholders in the ecosystem including the external players. The state has also been using WhatsApp group for engaging with the citizens regarding delivery of citizen services.

A digital needs analysis was conducted and certain determinants of successful rollout of the citizen services were fixed easy to access, convenient and affordable were the three points that were decided to be an indispensable part of any service.

Various citizen surveys were done and based on the queries received from the

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people it was found that the number of failed transactions per day were many.

Certain replies were not done on the same day. The tourism along with the IT organisation worked on the e-registration in tourism. They created a checklist for the form, which if found to be complete, there is no way it can be rejected.

The design architecture of the IT platform was such that it met all the statutory requirements and legal workflow. The reforms were depersonalised in the sense that, nobody can take undue advantage of the system.

Goa soon will go for open APIs, wherein the govt data will be open and can be used by other players to work on them and improve the existing services.

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Panel Discussion: Emerging technologies for effective egovernance

(L-R) Sandip Garg, Commissioner, Income Tax, Maharashtra; Dr. Saurabh Gupta, SIO, NIC, Uttar Pradesh; Golok Kumar Simli, Principal Consultant and Head - Technology, Passport Seva, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India; Amit Sharma, MD, J&K SIDCO, Government of Jammu and Kashmir; Saadut Hussain, CEO, J&K e-Governance Agency, J&K Government; S K Hudda, DIrector, Economics and Statistics, Government of Gujarat and Piyush Somani, CEO, ESDS Software Solution Pvt Ltd

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andeep Garg initiated the discussion talking about how the income tax department is moving from overhauling the backoffice processes to making systems interoperable. Earlier the focus was on back office process automation however now, the focus is on digital identification of every department. They have a separate ID. In many cases the systems are also interoperable with other countries. The potential now is also for creating a master data.

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Saurabh Gupta spoke about the challenge of handling concurrent users and the need for the government to do Business Process Reengineering. He also elaborated on a host of initiatives taken.

The recently held regional elections were conducted on a central enterprise architecture. Interestingly, next year, the Nagar Panchayat election will be conducted where citizens will be enabled to vote online. Under the Pension and fee reimbursement scheme, the government saved 520 crore by online

reimbursement of fees.

Under various other socio economic programmes, the pregnant women are being tracked for progress and the school children are also tracked and attendance is noted accordingly. The department is also working with telecom providers on ‘spoken web’ where the efforts are to even go to the extent of having dialects of the language.

Golok Kumar Simli summarised on how to look towards technology when thinking about citizen services.

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Emerging Trends in Cyber Security Loknath Behera, DGP, Kerala Police

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oknath Behera started his session by saying that the process of using technology is based on mistrust. “We have never thought that digitally we are going to be one. In democracy, the main objective should be that the people should benefit. He spoke about Cyberdome, which is a Centre of Excellence for Kerala Police, to meet long term security challenges in the digital arena of the modern world, by bridging the gap between the latest changes and innovations in the cyber space and the skill set development of Kerala Police, in combating emerging

cyber threats.

It is envisaged as a collaboration centre for both the public and private fraternity to converge and share information, as well as resources that will escalate the safety of our cyber space. “Kerala, being an information gateway, plays a leading role in the digital map of the country. The issues in the cyber world cannot be handled by the police department alone, but we require partnerships from all the stakeholders in the cyber arena, to build a safe and secure cyber world. Cyberdome is a unique public private partnership initiative, in this direction.” said Behera.

Odisha: A preferred destination for IT/ESDM investment Aditya Mohapatra, Deputy Secretary, Electronics & IT Department, Govt. of Odisha

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ditya Mohapatra in his presentation showed how Odisha is offering huge opportunities for everyone. He also shared how the state is slowly being labeled as a knowledge state – once known as a mineral state. He shared that the government has focused more on electronic design and manufacturing. He informed that Bhubaneswar has a large pool of skilled workforce and has excelled in the education space. He showcased Odisha with a very engaging AV. Odisha is leading in metal making with 20 percent of the steel making capacity of India. It provides more than 50% aluminum smelting capacity of India and is also known as one of the power surplus states.

Under the IT/ESDM Sector he gave

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few statistics. Software exports (2015-16) was pegged at Rs 3000 cr (provisional) with 12% growth compared to 2014-15.

The state is ranked among top 10 in the country for IT exports. It also has presence of major players: Infosys, Tech Mahindra, TCS, Wipro, Mindtree with nearly 15,000 IT Professionals. The state also has STPIs at Bhubaneswar, Rourkela and Berhampur & Balasore. (4 more to be set up soon). It is also has leading ESDM companies operating in the state: Semtech, Sankalp Semiconductor, AIMS Technologies ASICzen , PerfectVIP with more than 250 people.

The state is also delivering solutions to global clients like Texas Instruments, Cisco, ADI, Synopsys, TSMC, Cadence and many more.

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Digital 3D Cities and Urban Planning Prasad Pandit, Technical Manager – Government, India & SAARC, Autodesk

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rasad Pandit spoke about how Autodesk’s products are helping in building better cities and smart infrastructure. He presented a very thrilling AV showcasing how his firm was helping governments create energy efficient cities and communicate with citizens in a better manner. He showcased the urban design ecosystem vision of the company.

"We can create a blueprint of digital city which is actually a functional city in real sense. Most of the movies use our 3ds Max software for creating visual effects."

The company has developed a broad range of software for design, engineering, and entertainment as well as a line of software

for consumers. Prasad explained how his firm’s solutions for building information modeling (BIM) helps cities in improving environmental performance, and in designing better transportation and utility networks. With intelligent 3D modelbased design software, governments and construction firms can make better informed decisions for a smarter and more sustainable world. For example, Water Shed Analysis can reveal the real time data of rainfall in a specified region. He also spoke about the company's products such as Flood Simulation, Pavement Drainage System, and Traffic Simulation that can help government departments manage cities in a better way.

Panel Discussion: Fulfilling the vision of Smart cities

(L-R) Prasad Pandit, Technical Account Manager, Enterprise and Government - India and SAARC, Autodesk, M Nagarajan, Deputy Municipal Commissioner and CEO, Smart City, Surat; Kunal Kumar, Municipal Commissioner, Pune Municipal Corporation; Pramod Kalia General Manager IT, Department of Housing & Urban Development, Punjab; Ramyakumar Bhatt, Assistant Municipal Commissioner, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and Shyla Andrews, IT Head, CIDCO, Maharashtra

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efining the smart city concept, Kunal said that while technology has an important role to play in making cities smart, it’s also more about making effective and efficient use of the available EXPRESS COMPUTER

resources and doing more from less.

Vendors tend to back out when asked for providing solutions with global benchmarks. Pune had to extend the bid dates multiple times for three of their tenders just because the city didnt

receive a single bid for three Smart city related proposals. Smart lighting being one of them.

He listed out the metrics of a Smart city - DIT has selected Pune and Vishakhapatnam for studying the metrics - How fast are the services offered; interoperability of the technology platforms; engagement with the citizens Nagarajan spoke about bringing the mindset change of government employees across the hierarchies and the importance of government process reengineering. The Surat corporation is working on launching different payment platforms for citizens. Surat will be the first city to gor for an open data portal.

Technology can also play an important role in the conservation of the heritage buildings. Prasad from Autodesk said, the company is working with the Rajasthan government to digitise the architecture buildings. .

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Agile Labs Power Discussion

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he Agile Labs Power discussion began with a presentation from Sabarish Santhanam, CTO & Director, Agile Labs. He began by highlighting the fact that it is absolutely critical for people in key positions in government and in related areas to have a clear understanding of the data that they hold. It is only through such an understanding that they will be in a position to create an effective policy for the country. With the government adopting mobile applications for various services, he focused on Axpert solution from Agile Labs, which a kind of a platform for 58

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government organizations to digitize their processes.

He said, “Agile Labs provides solutions which assist people in the government to scientifically analyze the data and formulate the policy and thereby plan for future”. Giving an example of judiciary, he said that with the help of Axpert, the judicial fraternity can access and track information about cases, judgments and hearing dates across all the states on a single platform.

Explaining the finer aspects of the Axpert platform, he pointed out that Axpert was an enterprise cloud software platform on which apps can be

built five times faster with only SQL writing skills. “One can build apps for the need of all government departments without writing code. Axpert comes along with an integrated dashboard, government metrics, work flow manager and data exchange server,” he added.

Representatives from government departments enquired about the pricing of the solutions, to which Santhanam said, there are different pricing based on the requirement of a department. “One could use it per user base or a consolidated licence can also be taken,” he said.

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Checkpoint Power Discussion

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apil Awasthi stated that the conventional organisation security norm of having IPS, Firewall, Anti-virus is now moving to identifying unknown malwares using Sandblast, which keeps getting updated on the UTM. If the enterprise dont want the sandblast solution on the cloud model, checkpoint can also implement it on premise.

It includes the traffic moving on the mobile too. The solution identifies all the

files and content into the enterprise system, even in an offline mode.

He showed a mobile conference attack scenario. The attacker’s step 1 was to infect and then attack the system. The slide showed the hacker console which had all the device IDs of the employees infected. This exposed their contacts and other metadata, which can then be used to do all sorts of things with the user’s phone.

Checkpoint provides a solution on

which any application downloaded onto a phone goes through the checkpoint system. It gets downloaded first on their systems, sandboxed, sanitised for any unwanted elements and then a totally clean file is passed onto the user’s mobile device.

In case of web downloads, all the documents are converted into PDF by the checkpoint system. They are sandboxed and cleared of any vulnerabilities before getting downloaded on the user desktop.

How Surat is trying to be a smart city M Nagarajan, Deputy Commissioner, Surat Municipal Corporation

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Nagarajan gave an excellent presentation on how technology can significantly raise the performance. He highlighted the relevance of Virtual Civic Centers. Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) started Virtual Civic Center (online services through website) in April 2012. Some of the services that are offered are Payment of Property Tax & User Charges, Payment of Profession Tax (both EC & RC), Payment of Water Meter Bills, Online Birth Certificate, Online

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Death Certificate, Shops & Establishment Registration & Certificate Renewal, Online Hall Booking, Community Hall Booking and Forms (downloadable free of cost).

Nagarajan highlighted the importance of alternate service delivery channels as there are limitations of physical service delivery channels. Physical delivery channels overlap with working hours of business and offices. They have limitations in terms of the number of citizens that can be SEPTEMBER, 2016

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E-GOVERNANCE CHAMPIONS RECOGNIZED AT THE EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA, PUNE

The Express e-governance awards were given away in honor of government departments or functions that have achieved remarkable progress in improving governance using technology.

The awards function was held on August 5th, and the winners were awarded their trophies by chief guests, Chander Parkash, Hon'ble Minister for Industries and Commerce, Government of Jammu & Kashmir; Dr Chandra Shekhar Kumar,Transport Commissioner-Cum-Chairman, State Transport Authority, Government of Odisha and Ranjan Dwivedi, Ex-DGP, UP and Advisor (Cyber Security), Ministry of Power, Government of India The following e-governance projects were honored for their innovative implementation and execution: Outstanding implementation of mobile application ◗ Project name: Grameen Vidyutikaran Application (GARV) ◗ Organisation: REC Power Distribution Company Limited, Ministry of Power, Government of India Innovative use of technology ◗ Project name: Aerial Survey of Revenue Land using Aerial Photography ◗ Organisation: Department of Revenue and Land Reforms, Government of Bihar

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Innovative use of emerging technology ◗ Project name: IRCTC Next Generation eTicketing System ◗ Organisation: CRIS, Ministry of Railway Outstanding m-governance project ◗ Project name: RTA m-Wallet ◗ Organisation: Transport Department, Government of Telangana Effective use of technology for welfare ◗ Project name: Financial Inclusion through CSCs ◗ Organisation: CSC SPV, DeitY, Government of India SEPTEMBER, 2016

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RSA CONFERENCE APAC 2016

THE DARK SIDE OFTECHNOLOGY The sessions at the three-day conference were split across six dedicated conference tracks: cloud, mobile, & IoT security, eFraud & law enforcement, global perspective and security strategy & data security, threats and threat factors

BY RASHI VARSHNEY

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SA Conference, an information security conference and exposition, kicked off its fourth annual RSA Conference Asia Pacific & Japan in Singapore, on 20 to 22 July, 2016. The conference served as a platform for cybersecurity professionals to stay abreast of fast-evolving changes in the industry and the dark side of technology. The conference started with an opening address from Singapore’s Minister for Home Affairs & Minister for Law, K. Shanmugam. While speaking with close to 6000 attendees at the conference, he spelled national strategy to combat cybercrime by setting out the Singapore Government’s future plans, key principles and priorities.

The opening address was followed by power-packed key note by Amit Yoran, RSA’s President, where he discussed the need to examine perspective on cybersecurity. He calls for perspective change to combat cyber crime across the world. “We process data every second.

We subconsciously filter and categorize things we observe based on what’s important to us, based on our own perspective,” Yoran said.

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conference were split across six dedicated conference tracks: cloud, mobile, & IoT security, eFraud & law enforcement, global perspective and security strategy & data security, threats and threat factors, as well as the newly introduced track this year – learning lab.

During the RSA Conference, there were dedicated sessions spotlighting prevalent Asia-centric cybersecurity issues, such as cybersecurity posture of enterprises, government policies, and how Asian nations are secured from cyber risks and crimes.

To brainstorm over this, there was a panel discussion on day two, “Asian nations are smarter, but are they more secure?” The panelists were, Zulfikar Ramzan, Chief Technology Officer, RSA Security; Hilary M. Wandall, Chairman, IAPP; Paul O’Rourke, Lead Partner, Cybersecurity, Asia Pacific, Ernst & Young; Alex Taverner, Head of Cyber, Commercial Solutions, JAPAC, BAE Systems. The session was moderated by Dr Hugh Thompson, Chief Security Strategist and Senior Vice President of Blue Coat Systems Inc. Thompson is also Program Committee Chairman for RSA Conference USA. The discussion

highlighted cyber security threats and where opportunities lie for businesses in the Asia Pacific region.

The conference was also studded with Sir Bob Geldof and Bruce Schneier. IBM’s Chief Technology Officer, and Security Technologist, Schneier presented an interesting talk about business defense and how to manage the insider threats.

“What is going to happen to the world with the explosion of the Internet of Things, and how do we secure the internet” he questioned the attendees.

Schneier stressed on the importance of out-of-the-box policies that can help in better syncing of technology and how the government functions in today’s internetpowered world. He said that we really need to start making moral, ethical and political decisions about how these systems should work.

Nobel Man of Peace Award Winner, Musician, Businessman, Activist, Geldof concluded the RSA Asia Pacific & Japan conference with his eloquent closing keynote about impact digital obsession of the modern world. In his closing keynote he told that he needs no cyber security as he still does not use a smartphone.

However, he gave technology a credit for its ability to bring good life for people. He also pointed out that there is the huge divide in education and meaningful access in the developing worlds, and urged technology professionals to figure out how IT can bridge that gap.

RSA Conference is a series of global events where the cyber security community talks about technoloogy security, its advances and implications.

The next RSA Conference 2017 Asia Pacific & Japan will take place from 26 to 28 July, 2017. rashi.varshney@expressindia.com

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REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, PUBLISHED ON 28TH OF EVERY PERVIOUS MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 29 & 30 OF EVERY PREVIOUS MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. MAHENG/49926/90