Deloitte also announced its recognition as the first global systems integrator with the Google Cloud Ready (GCR) – Sustainability designation, a program that validates Google Cloud-aligned organizations with business-ready technology to help customers achieve their sustainability goals. As part of the program, Deloitte is harnessing the power of its vast industry and domain knowledge, combined with Google Cloud’s market-leading technology and platforms, to help public and private organizations transition to a sustainable future.

Accelerating the transition to zero emission vehicles

Deloitte and Google Cloud are working with clients around the world to help create an economic pathway to zero emissions.

Deloitte’s Electrified Fleet solution, the first of many offerings soon to be available on Google Cloud, helps companies with the end-to-end electrification of their vehicular fleets. Joint customers will be able to utilize an interactive dashboard to help easily map out their entire electrification journey — encompassing the integration of global fleet telematics data, resource optimization and ongoing impact monitoring.

The Electrified Fleet Solution has already helped Purolator, a leading integrated freight, package and logistics solutions provider in Canada, to become a leader in net-zero transportation. In 2022, the company set a goal to reduce its absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions by 42% by 2030 and put Purolator on a path to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. In order to achieve these goals, Deloitte developed a strategic roadmap, assessing vehicle types and usage patterns, and energy and infrastructure options. As a result, Purolator is on track to meet its emissions reduction goals and electrify 60% of its last-mile delivery vehicles by 2030.

“Deloitte’s Electrified Fleet solution has been a tremendous asset to Purolator as we identify ways to reduce our emissions in the near-term and fuel our long-term success by contributing to a better and more sustainable tomorrow,” said Cindy Bailey, corporate sustainability officer at Purolator.

Mitigating climate risk in financial services

Deloitte and Google Cloud have also joined forces to leverage Google Earth Engine and their ecosystem relationships to support financial services companies around the world in using the power of geospatial analytics to bring improved visibility and new insights to climate risks across lending and investment portfolios.

National Westminster Bank (NatWest), a major bank in the United Kingdom, recently worked with Google Cloud, Deloitte and Climate Engine to utilize Google Earth Engine and help NatWest leverage geospatial data to capture climate-related data points across its commercial banking portfolio — with the first use-case focused on agriculture customers. For example, geospatial technology provided new data points and insights to assist NatWest with its climate reporting obligations — e.g., the EU Taxonomy and Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) — as well as support for their customers’ own climate and nature data collection. This information will also allow farmers to build a tailored picture of the challenges facing them, such as flood, drought, fire and biodiversity risks, all at a field-specific level.

Tackling the biggest climate challenges

Moving forward, Deloitte and Google Cloud’s sustainability, climate and equity-focused global initiative will help clients tackle major challenges. These include transitioning to zero emission energy sources, tapping into sustainable capital markets, scaling sustainable products and services, accelerating regenerative agriculture, decarbonizing digital business models and building sustainable and equitable communities.

“We are excited to be working with Google to take purposeful action to help mitigate climate risks, unlock the value of sustainable products and services, build green communities and green jobs and accelerate our progress toward a global net-zero future,” said Jamie Sawchuk, partner and global sustainability leader for the Alphabet Google alliance, Deloitte Canada.

“Through this program, Deloitte and Google Cloud can leverage our unique roles to help bolster the momentum to address climate change with cloud-based technologies and AI,” said Justin Keeble, managing director for global sustainability, Google Cloud. “We’re eager to work alongside Deloitte and our clients to accelerate action on climate in this urgent decade of delivery.”

For more information visit the website here.

Related News:

Deloitte AI Academy Collaborates With Renowned Universities

New SSDL Offered by Deloitte and Palo Alto Networks Alliance

The post Deloitte and Google Cloud Announces New Sustainability Initiative appeared first on Digital IT News.

“The surge in popularity of Generative AI is driving a need for skills in this emerging area. In addition to the theory and the science of AI, we’re offering practical, hands-on experience to help our practitioners understand the context in which AI is applied, how it’s applied and where it’s applied,” said Mike Luk, managing director and U.S. AI Academy dean, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “This expansion is delivered through the Deloitte Technology Academy, part of Deloitte’s $1.4 billion Project 120 investment in learning and development.”

By teaming with these institutions, Academy learners have access to esteemed faculty on the topic of AI, along with research, innovative ideas, concepts, hands-on exercises and intellectual property, as well as domain and industry knowledge from Deloitte, a combination not readily available elsewhere.

“Virginia Tech is skilled in research AI knowledge adoption, with our faculty and students at the forefront of developing this cutting-edge research. Our collaboration with Deloitte AI Academy allows us to apply our findings to real world business developments and help shape the way Deloitte provides curriculum on this transformative technology,” said Laura Freeman, deputy director, Virginia Tech National Security Institute.

“Our collaboration with Deloitte started with a vision to revolutionize how organizations and academia work together to bridge the AI talent gap and mold our future leaders to be highly proficient in AI,” said Professor Millie Pant, head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing and joint faculty at Mehta Family School for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, IIT Roorkee. “Today, we’ve seen the success of our combined vision to develop curriculum that will digitally empower the global economy, and will continue to grow with the expansion of the AI Academy.”

There is a range of courses, for all levels of professionals, from basic Generative AI fluency to deeper technical skills like advanced prompt engineering techniques and fine-tuning, and advance certifications for technical professionals, in collaboration with tech companies to upskill in key priority areas focused on cutting-edge data and technologies. For example, Deloitte offers education on Generative AI and other accelerated technologies through a curated selection of courses developed by NVIDIA Training.

For more information visit the website here.

Related Articles:

The Good and Bad of Using AI in Education

New SSDL Offered by Deloitte and Palo Alto Networks Alliance

The post Deloitte AI Academy Collaborates With Renowned Universities appeared first on Digital IT News.

SSDL is a modular orchestration platform powered by Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud and Cortex XSOAR that enables shared clients to reinforce their cloud environments with enhanced security measures from code to cloud. This helps them to mitigate risks and promote a secure development and deployment lifecycle that adheres to their unique cloud security and compliance requirements. The platform helps clients address cybersecurity requirements from design to tactical build/deploy, as well as manage ongoing cloud observability and optimize operational efficiency. SSDL can be efficiently integrated as an overall solution or integrated into an organization’s existing Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, cloud security infrastructure and compliance ecosystem — and scales across all major cloud platforms.

“Our new Secure Software Development Lifecycle solution helps organizations address cloud security complexities with confidence,” said Kieran Norton, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory’s transformation and emerging technology leader and principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “As our strategic alliance with Palo Alto Networks expands, we’re excited to continue to help our shared clients achieve their cloud and business goals by driving successful cybersecurity outcomes.”

Deloitte and Palo Alto Networks shared clients can leverage the platform for streamlining account provisioning, enabling secure build and deployment processes, implementing robust logging and monitoring mechanisms, enforcing custom security guardrails and auto remediation.

“Organizations today need help securing constantly changing, cloud-native applications and infrastructure from development to deployment,” said Prem Iyer, SVP Global Ecosystems, Palo Alto Networks. “We are pleased to further expand our collaboration with Deloitte by offering clients a transformative solution that provides continuous security across the software development lifecycle, helping them address compliance requirements and increasing efficiency with embedded security and automated remediation.”

The existing alliance between Deloitte and Palo Alto Networks focuses on jointly developing and offering integrated, end-to-end Zero Trust and multi-cloud cybersecurity solutions to their mutual enterprise and government customers.

For more information visit deloitte.com.

Related News:

Netwrix MSP Sector Report Finds Data and Network Security Top Priorities

Trend Vision One Announced for Optimized Security for Endpoints

The post New SSDL Offered by Deloitte and Palo Alto Networks Alliance appeared first on Digital IT News.

During the past 12 months, 34.5% of polled executives report that their organizations’ accounting and financial data was targeted by cyber adversaries. Within that group, 22% experienced at least one such cyber event and 12.5% experienced more than one.

“Accounting and financial data is the lifeblood of organizational operations — and often meant to be kept confidential outside of highly regulated public disclosures for publicly traded organizations,” said Temano Shurland, a Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory principal in finance transformation, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “While there may not have been much need for accounting, finance and cyber teams to work closely in the past, recent years have shown that’s no longer the case. We strongly recommend that these teams try to ‘learn each other’s languages’ and tighten their working relationships across silos.”

Looking to the year ahead, 39.5% of respondents expect to increase the amount of collaboration between their finance and cyber teams. Currently, the majority (42.7%) of polled leaders say their organizations’ finance and cyber teams only work together as needed with inconsistent closeness and consistency, while 11.1% do not work together at all.

“As cyber incidents increase in frequency, size and complexity, adversaries target nearly any data obtainable and by leveraging system vulnerabilities,” said Daniel Soo, a Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory principal in cyber and strategic risk, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Implementing financial security operations — something you could call FinSecOps — means protecting financial data.  Asking finance, accounting and security functions to team closely to manage FinSecOps is one preventative step we’re seeing leading organizations take, so that they are agile enough to mitigate threats to financial data and help enable business growth.“

About the online poll
Over 1,100 C-suite and other executives were polled during a recent Deloitte Center for Controllership webcast, titled “Cyber’s growing role within the finance organization to enable transformation,” on Oct. 26, 2022.  Answer rates differed by question.

For more information on Deloitte, visit our website here.

Image licensed by FreePik

Related News:

Financial Institutions Findings from Netwrix 2022 Cloud Security Report

Risk Modeling in AI and Machine Learning by SAS Experts

The post Expected Rise in Cyber Events to Target Accounting and Financial Data appeared first on Digital IT News.

The Deloitte Oracle MyCloud ERP bundled subscription offering allows organizations to access Oracle Cloud products as well as Deloitte implementation and support services for a consistent monthly fee. This enables companies that are focused on growth to manage their cash flows and to continue to allocate their limited time and resources toward expansive activities.

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to use Deloitte intellectual property and knowledge to serve growth and private clients as they scale and drive their businesses forward. This offering demonstrates our commitment to this market and our desire to assist the leaders of tomorrow,” said John Steele, U.S. Oracle offering leader and principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

For those interested in exploring Cloud ERP further, the starting place is a TruNorth Assessment. A quick, collaborative and effective approach that takes approximately three weeks. Deloitte helps prospects to envision the desired future state, identify transformation opportunities, and develop strategies and roadmaps for the journey.

Experience Deloitte’s MyCloud firsthand
Deloitte is pleased to be the Global Sponsor of Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas, Oct. 17-20, 2022. This new global conference will bring people together to share ideas, develop in-demand skills and learn about cloud infrastructure and applications. Connect with Deloitte professionals at the CloudWorld Hub and attend a theatre presentation on MyCloud ERP enabled by Oracle Cloud. Learn how Deloitte’s approximately 415,000 people worldwide connect for impact at www.deloitte.com.

Image licensed by pexels.com

Related News:

Google Cloud and Mandiant Completes Partner Acquisition

Modernize Workloads in Regulated Industries with VMware and IBM

The post Oracle MyCloud ERP Offering Launched by Deloitte appeared first on Digital IT News.

The number and complexity of cyber threats grow constantly, making maintaining a strong security posture with manual assessments or even semi-automated penetration testing a challenge. At the same time, regulations pertaining to organizations’ cyber and data protection capabilities are evolving and proliferating. To more effectively integrate, orchestrate, and utilize their existing security controls, many security operations teams are turning to tech enablers, such as SafeBreach’s BAS.

Unlike “point-in-time” cyber security assessments, SafeBreach enables continuous security control validation in production environments to provide an ongoing and accurate assessment of which tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) pose the greatest risk to an organization. Further, SafeBreach will provide Deloitte clients’ security operations teams and DevSecOps practitioners with custom, automated, and continuous BAS services and remediation guidance to help improve security posture. With step-by-step remediation instructions and an array of technology integrations – including vulnerability management, threat intelligence platforms, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms, Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) platforms and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platforms – SafeBreach BAS can complement and act as a force multiplier for labor-intensive, costly, and manual testing efforts such as penetration testing and red-blue teaming.

“Shifting from a point-in-time, compliance-based cyber approach to continuous monitoring of program effectiveness enables organizations and their security teams to enhance situational awareness of potential weaknesses and prioritize remediation actions that can help reduce risk,” says Andrew Rafla, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory’s Zero Trust leader and a principal in Cyber and Strategic Risk, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Through our strategic relationship, SafeBreach will join Deloitte’s portfolio of alliances that facilitate our delivery of tech-enabled, outcome-driven solutions that can help enhance our clients’ abilities to detect and respond to cyber risks.”

“For businesses, guarding their IT systems and reducing risks has become a top priority in the C-Suite. With this alliance, we can provide a powerful combination of advanced, continuous security validation to understand complex cyber risk with the vast human intelligence and experience that Deloitte brings to the table. Combined, we hope to help quantify and improve security posture for organizations in any sector,” says Guy Bejerano, CEO and Co-Founder of SafeBreach.

SafeBreach’s continuous security validation platform — including its Hacker’s PlaybookTM collection of breach and attack methods, as well as near-real-time prioritization and remediation intelligence for BAS testing — is immediately available to Deloitte clients via multiple engagement models.

As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte & Touche LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

Image licensed by Pixabay.com

Related News:

CREST Launches Remote Audit Facility for SOC Accreditation

Deloitte Introduces ReadyAI Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service Solution

The post SafeBreach Continuous Cybersecurity Validation Platform Joins Deloitte’s Portfolio of Cyber Alliances appeared first on Digital IT News.

The AI market is expected to exceed $191 billion by 2024, growing at 37% compound annual growth rate. As organizations accelerate their adoption of AI, many struggle with challenges such as limited access to specialized talent, slow development cycles, and the resources to continuously maintain AI models. Creating and sustaining AI models at scale typically requires people with capabilities across data science, IT operations and user experience (UX) who work seamlessly towards a common goal. With Deloitte’s ReadyAI, organizations now have access to the services, technology and expertise they need to accelerate their AI journey.

“In the Age of With, human and machine collaboration is taking organizations to new heights. While AI adoption is accelerating, many organizations struggle to scale their AI projects,” said Nitin Mittal, AI co-leader and principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “ReadyAI provides the flexible and scalable capabilities that these companies need to successfully become AI-fueled organizations.”

ReadyAI offers comprehensive service capabilities including:

• Data preparation: Provide data extraction, wrangling and standardization services. Also supports advanced analytical model development through feature engineering.
• Insights and visualization: Design and generate reports and visual dashboards utilizing data output from automations to improve business outcomes and automation performance.
• Advanced analytics: Data analysis for both structured and unstructured data. Creation of rule-based bots and insights-as-a-service.
• Machine learning and deep learning: ML and deep learning model development. Video and text analytics to assist conversational AI.
• Machine learning deployment: Create deployment architecture and pipelines for upstream and downstream integration of ML models.
• Model management and MLOps: Management of model performance, migration and maintenance. Automation of model monitoring process and overall DevOps for machine learning.

“The promise of AI lies in its deployment at scale in a fair, ethical and trustworthy fashion,” said Rohit Tandon, general manager for ReadyAI and managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “ReadyAI helps clients take AI all the way from labs and pilot programs to real-life business integration and adoption.”

Deloitte’s recent “State of AI in the Enterprise” third edition study of enterprise AI adopters found that less than half of adopters believe they have a high level of skill around integrating AI technology into their existing IT environment. With a talent pool of more than 3,100 AI professionals, Deloitte can assemble teams that have the right combination of industry, domain and AI technology skills to best suit clients’ needs. These experts include cloud engineers, data scientists, data architects, technology and application engineers, business and domain specialists, and visualization and design specialists. By leveraging the right combination of skills, organizations can quickly accelerate their AI journey.

ReadyAI teams operate as an extension of clients’ teams often for engagements of six months or more. Services are available as a flexible, subscription model, allowing clients to scale resources and capabilities up or down based on business needs and priorities. Learn more on the ReadyAI website.

Image licensed by: Pixabay.com

Related News:

Ricoh unveils Return to Work Security Services to address security and safety needs in physical workplaces

Ascent’s AI Supports Global Financial Regulations

The post Deloitte Introduces ReadyAI™ Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service Solution appeared first on Digital IT News.

Twenty percent of the chief risk officers at financial institutions surveyed identified it as the No. 1 risk they see increasing in importance for their business over the next two years, a plurality among 16 different risk categories. That is a sharp increase from 3% in 2018.

In addition, 62% of those senior executives surveyed by Deloitte said that credit risk measurement will be either an extremely or very high priority for their institutions over the next two years. Credit risk management is the practice of mitigating losses by understanding which potential clients may come at too high a risk and above an institution’s pre-identified risk tolerance at any given time. The areas that are tipped by senior executives as being particularly challenging for their institution to measure include collateral valuation, commercial credit, commercial real estate, unsecured credit, leveraged lending and middle-market lending.

“Financial institutions are seeing more risk from more sources than ever before,” said J.H. Caldwell, a partner with Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory, Deloitte & Touche LLP, and the principal author of the survey. “The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the risk management environment and presents an extraordinary set of new challenges for financial institutions — everything risk-related has been pressure-tested and challenged.”

He notes that 66% of banking executives surveyed believed that credit quality deterioration would be one of three macrotrends having an impact over the next two years.

“The rapid economic downturn, coupled with abrupt changes in consumer and business behavior, may mean that systems, programs and models based on pre-COVID-19 data may no longer accurately reflect the post-COVID-19 reality,” said Caldwell. “Institutions will need strong risk management governance while having the agility and willingness to rethink their traditional approaches in a fundamentally altered business environment.”

The 12^th edition of Deloitte’s biennial survey — titled “A Moving Target: Refocusing Risk and Resiliency Amidst Continued Uncertainty” — gathered the views of chief risk officers or their equivalents at 57 financial institutions globally, including banks, investment managers and insurers. Conducted from March to September 2020, the institutions surveyed have total combined assets of $27.2 trillion; institutions that provide asset management services have a total of $16.1 trillion in assets under management.

Among other findings:

• While almost all of those surveyed rated their institutions as extremely or very effective at managing financial risks — with the single exception of credit risk — the figure dropped to 65% for nonfinancial risks, an area that can have wide-ranging financial and reputation impacts. That number stood even lower for specific types and aspects of nonfinancial risk such as conduct and culture (55%), geopolitical (42%), and data quality (26%).
• Only 61% of respondents considered their institutions to be extremely or very effective at managing cybersecurity risk, and 87% said that improving their ability to manage cybersecurity risk will be an extremely or very high priority over the next two years.
• With growing concern over climate risk, environment, social and governance risk concerns were named by 38% of survey respondents as being one of the three risk types — alongside credit and cybersecurity — that will increase the most in importance for their institutions over the next two years. That is more than any other risk type when the top-three risks are combined — yet only 33% of executives considered their institutions to be either extremely or very effective at managing this risk.
• Most institutions recognize that they have more work to do to improve data management, with 69% of those surveyed saying that enhancing the quality, availability, and timeliness of risk data will be an extremely or very high priority for their institution over the next two years. Only 26% believed their institutions are extremely or very effective at managing data quality, and just 8% of respondents considered their institution to be effective at use and management of unstructured data.
• Institutions are under pressure as the target date for cessation of publication of LIBOR rates (end of 2021 for most cases) approaches. According to the report, financial institutions “may have underestimated the work required and would be well advised to prepare for the transition.” Only 24% of those surveyed considered technology/applications updates and development to be extremely or very challenging, while 22% said the same about processes and controls updates and development.

Forty-five percent of those surveyed expected their institutions’ annual spending on risk management would increase over the next two years. The report highlights, though, that pressure on revenues is likely to intensify efforts to “reduce ever-increasing expenditures on risk management.”

To that end, 50% of those Deloitte surveyed reported that efficiency-focused technology tools will be an extremely or very high priority for their institutions over the next two years. As the survey has found in past years, though, most institutions have not yet implemented these technologies. Cloud computing (46%) was used most often, with fewer institutions saying they use RPA (29%), machine learning (27%) or cognitive analytics (13%).

“There are five things that financial institutions of all stripes are trying to get their heads around when it comes to risk management: talent challenges, remote working, data protection, the shift to digital, and systems and program security,” said Caldwell. “Risk leaders will need the flexibility to respond quickly to volatile economic conditions and changing work practices, while continually monitoring which changes are temporary responses to the pandemic and which are destined to become permanent. The challenges have not been this great in recent memory, especially of such uncertain and dynamic magnitude.”

The report can be found online here: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-services/global-risk-management-survey-financial-services.html/

Image licensed by Pixabay.com

Related News:

CipherCloud Introduces Zero-Trust Remote Access

Oracle Helps Organizations Optimize Logistics Across Global Supply Chains

The post More Risks, On More Fronts: Credit Risk, ESG and Cybersecurity Top Risk Concerns for Financial Institutions -Deloitte Survey appeared first on Digital IT News.

“U.S. 5G bandwidth availability has expanded and accelerated considerably in recent months, offering competitive advantages technologically, financially and otherwise to early adopters,” said Wendy Frank, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory Cyber 5G leader and principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP.  “Of course, with all the technological advancement 5G enables, the cyber threat landscape and attack surface areas expand considerably.  Working proactively to mitigate cybersecurity risks posed by 5G adoption is the hallmark of a well-designed program.”

The biggest cybersecurity concerns for 5G adoption differed by group. For professionals at organizations currently using 5G, talent posed the biggest cyber challenge to 5G adoption (30.1%), as appropriately skilled security professionals will be needed for implementation, maintenance and operations. For respondents from organizations planning to adopt 5G in the year ahead, top cyber challenges were data (26.8%) – due to an increase in the volume and diversity of data created from 5G-enabled segments (e.g., IoT, ERP and sensitive data) as well as data mismanagement risks – and third parties (24.3%).

“For organizations leveraging 5G, cyber risk will mount quickly if challenges — like a lack sophisticated encryption, decentralized operations or security monitoring functioning to the detriment of performance speeds – are not resolved,” Frank said. “Securing the vastly expanded threat landscape resulting from 5G adoption will demand two equally important efforts:  getting the right talent in place or upskilled; and, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate areas like security policy configuration, compliance monitoring and threat and vulnerability detection.”

Pandemic impacts 5G adoption speeds
COVID-19 disruption had mixed impacts on respondents’ organizational plans to adopt 5G.  For those at organizations currently using 5G, 32.2% increased adoption speed.  Inversely, adoption speed decreased as a result of pandemic-driven disruption for 21.8% of those at organizations planning to adopt 5G in the year ahead.

Frank concluded, “The faster movement of data, the creation of new types of data and the ability to develop countless new IoT devices through 5G networks will disrupt most industries.  But, just as with pandemic disruption, leading programs are working to keep security at the fore of 5G adoption.”

Image licensed by Upsplash.com

Related News:

AWS Announces Amazon DevOps Guru

IEEE Computer Society Grades Its 2020 Technology Predictions, Gets a B-

The post With 5G Adoption, Come New Cybersecurity Risks to Mitigate appeared first on Digital IT News.