Cameron’s Indian deal exposes outsourcing security failings
Posted: February 21, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: APTs, BPO, cameron, cyber security, hacking, HCL, india, information security, Infosys, Mahindra, outsourcing, prime minister, targeted threats, Wipro Leave a comment
Earlier this week David Cameron signed a deal designed to elevate the Indo-British relationship to an “unprecedented level of co-operation” on cyber security issues. It came as part of the PM’s three day trade mission to India and is certainly to be welcomed, but the agreement also implies some rather worrying things about the cyber readiness of the country’s big outsourcing firms.
The deal will essentially mean two things. Firstly, UK technical know-how and expertise in the cyber security sphere will be shared with Indian outsourcers, essentially to help protect the vast amounts of data from UK consumers and businesses which are now held on servers in the country.
Secondly, the agreement will see the two countries share relevant threat intelligence in order to thwart attacks on their systems, whether they’re coming from the UK, India or elsewhere.
Now, as mentioned, any kind of international co-operation on cyber threat protection is a step in the right direction, and Cameron certainly can’t be faulted for his assertion that “other countries securing their data is effectively helping us secure our data”.
My surprise is that big name outsourcers like Wipro, HCL, Mahindra and Infosys – firms which have built their business presumably on the quality (and security) of their BPO offerings – need an extra hand.
Any CIO worth his salt would surely relegate to the scrap heap a potential outsourcing provider who could not satisfy his or her list of pre-determined security requirements.
Sure, the smaller outsourcers will benefit most from this deal, but the big boys too?
Well, yes, according to Forrester’s New Delhi-based analyst Katyayan Gupta.
“Even larger Indian firms like Infosys, TCS, etc. will also benefit because now they will have an additional layer of security against cyber criminals,” he told me.
“This is not to say that these firms do not have good security right now. But the question really is – is it enough to keep all attackers out? Probably not.”
Now I know in this age of APTs and highly targeted attacks no firm can claim to be impervious, but it’s slightly worrying when those with huge resources – in an industry where reputational damage following a data breaches could hit hard – are apparently getting expertise flown in from the UK that they haven’t obtained anyway.
Also, as Gupta argued, the deal will still do nothing to stop perhaps the biggest threat to UK data residing on these firms’ servers: corrupt insiders.
It may be time to revisit those SLAs.
Most of China’s tech producers die in their teens
Posted: February 7, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: china, electronics, forrester, idg, lenovo, manufacturing, pearl river delta, shenzhen Leave a comment
An interesting bit of research cropped up on one of the few English language sites covering Chinese news in this region, Taiwan’s WantChinaTimes, claiming the average lifespan of a Chinese electronics manufacturer is a shade over 13 years.
Now this sounded pretty low to me, not having anything to compare it to, but it struck as an interesting stat which serves to illuminate a lot of the pressures Chinese manufacturers are facing today, and where the country wants to be in a few decades time.
The research itself came from a Chinese manufacturer called Global Market Group, which interviewed over 1,000 firms in the economic zones of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. It’s not a huge sample, given the sheer size of the industry in the PRC, but it’ll have to do.
The first thing to note is that 13.2 years is much longer than the average for survey respondents of 11.1 years – the report argues that this could be because electronics makers are forced to adapt quickly to changing tech to keep afloat.
More generally, though, 13.2 years doesn’t seem like a long time for a firm to be in business. But it does illustrate the rapid pace of change in the tech industry – where many fall by the way side in time because they simply can’t keep up with the latest trends.
It also shows, as Forrester analyst Dane Anderson told me, the intense pressure on Chinese manufacturers burdened with rising labour and energy costs and competition from other low cost suppliers in Asia.
US politicians and loathsome right wing media outlets often make out China to be the bad guy – taking American jobs by offering brand owners by far the lowest cost of production. However, increasingly it’s becoming a more complex picture than this.
“The perception in the West is often that the manufacturing industry in China is a bullet-proof juggernaut, but this view is inaccurate,” said Anderson. “It is a dynamic and highly competitive sector squeezed by thin margins and demanding customers.”
Too true.
But as China looks to move up the stack, away from being a land of contract manufacturers mass producing at low prices in incredibly competitive market conditions, things might change, according to IDG’s senior research manager William Lee.
“The electronics industry is typically a high clockspeed industry, meaning the average product lifecycle time span is shorter than say automotive, aerospace, industrial equipment. So electronics manufacturing companies’ lifespan is typically shorter than other companies in other industry,” he told me.
“However when the manufacturing industries mature and many of these companies begin to evolve to brand owners, the average lifespan will increase.”
With China still some way behind Taiwan, South Korea and other countries, it will be a while before this happens, but it surely will, as this is the direction the Chinese government wants it to go in. It recently announced ambitious plans to create eight super-companies in the tech space each the size of Lenovo ($100bn in revenues per year), which would have globally recognised brands.
When that finally happens, and the sweat-shops move out to Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere, maybe the US will have to invent another bogeyman.
ZTE in 2013: do smartphone designers dream of electric sheep?
Posted: February 1, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blade runner, CES, china, Chinese new year, FBI, Grand S, hagen Fendler, HD, hong kong, huawei, Iran, shenzhen, smartphone, telecoms equipment, zte, ZTE Grand Memo Leave a comment
I popped down to ZTE’s pre-Chinese New Year lunch for journos in Hong Kong earlier this week to see what the world’s fifth largest smartphone maker had to say for itself.
It’s not been an easy year for it or Shenzhen rival Huawei, who were both named as a national security risk in a US congressional committee report released at the tail end of 2012 in the bi-partisan hubbub typical of pre-election months.
In addition, ZTE has been under lengthy investigation by the FBI on suspicion of selling embargoed US-made tech to Iran and then covering it up when found out. Then there were the false rumours of swingeing job cuts at the firm and a $5bn cash injection from the Chinese government.
Despite its problems, however, ZTE remains on the move in the smartphone space, an innovator in telecoms infrastructure with its LTE offerings and has plans to grow the enterprise business despite the kind of government roadblocks put up in Australia, the US and now India.
Head of handset strategy Lv Qian Hao battled manfully with the flu to show me the firm’s latest high-end handset, the 5.7in Grand Memo (no pics I’m afraid). It comes across as a smallish version of Huawei’s massive six-incher the Ascend Mate and probably benefits from not being quite as large – in other words I could just about use it as a phone without looking daft.
In the rapidly developing smartphone space, specs like 13 megapixel camera, quad core 1.7Ghz Snapdragon processor and a 720p screen – specs which might once have elicited gasps of awe from the assembled masses – are now pretty standard at the high-end.
This is no criticism of ZTE but it certainly makes its job of climbing up the smartphone rankings and a goal of 50 million shipments this year that bit harder.
So where can it differentiate? Well, with high-end specs almost commoditised now, design is obviously one key area. With the best will in the world ZTE is not know for its beautiful design, but it’s hoping to change that with Hagen Fendler on board.
Pinched from cross-town rival Huawei, Fendler’s appointment and a new design centre in Shanghai certainly serve to highlight the firm’s vaulting ambitions in this space.
Fendler explained that his job is to create a design DNA which can be seeded throughout the firm’s handsets to help create a brand identity. It got off to a flyer with the launch at CES of the Grand S, an HD handset which at 6.9mm is currently the world’s thinnest.
It won’t be an easy job creating handsets that are both beautiful and distinctively “ZTE” but with 400 staff working on design alone, they’ve as good a chance as any.
It can be a frustrating time for a journalist talking to a designer, because so many of the concepts they tend to reference are abstract, ethereal and emotive rather than the nuts and bolts practicalities of engineering.
However, Fendler did reveal that much of his design inspiration comes from outside the immediate environs of the smartphone space – from books, magazines and films.
1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner was singled out for particular praise for sparking interesting ideas about “how humans interact with the technology around them”.
Just don’t expect to see the ZTE Blade Runner phone anytime soon. Actually, Google already got there with the Nexus, didn’t it?
phil muncaster 