IT Firms to Cut 3 MIllion Jobs by 2022 due to Automation
As automation takes place at a much faster pace across industries especially in the tech space, domestic software firms that employ over 16 million people are set to slash headcounts by a massive 3 million by 2022, which will help them save a whopping $100 billion mostly in salaries annually, according to a report from Bank of America.
The domestic IT sector employs around 16 million, of them around 9 million are employed in low-skilled services and BPO roles, according to Nasscom. Of these low-skilled services and BPO roles, 30 percent or around 3 million will be lost by 2022, principally driven by the impact of robot process automation (RPA).
“TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra and Cognizant and others appear to be planning for a 3 million reduction in low-skilled roles by 2022 because of RPA up-skilling,” says the report.
Roughly 0.7 million roles are expected to be replaced by RPA alone and the rest due to other technological upgrades and upskilling by the domestic IT players.
According to the report, faster automation is driven by the shrinking talent pool of high-skilled jobs in developing economies, the need for which will only jump, but the global high-skill talent pool is shrinking and exposing outmoded immigration systems.
The report goes onto warn that emerging economies mostly India and China face the most risk of technology driven disruptions.
Fifty One Percent of Millennials Overlook Security for Online Ordering
IBM Security has announced the results of a global survey examining consumers’ digital behaviors during the pandemic, as well as their potential long-term impact on cybersecurity. The study found that preferences for convenience often outweighed security and privacy concerns amongst individuals surveyed – leading to poor choices around passwords and other cybersecurity behaviors.
As per the results, surveyed individuals created 15 new online accounts during the pandemic on average, equating to billions of new accounts created around the world. With 44 percent reporting that they do not plan to delete or deactivate these new accounts, these consumers will have an increased digital footprint for years to come, greatly expanding the attack surface for cybercriminals.
The surge in digital accounts led to lax password behaviors amongst those surveyed, with 82 percent of respondents admitting to reusing credentials at least some of the time. This means that many of the new accounts created during the pandemic likely relied on reused email and password combinations, which may have already been exposed via data breaches over the past decade.
Further, more than half (51 percent) of millennials surveyed would rather place an order using a potentially insecure app or website vs. call or go to a physical location in person. With these users more likely to overlook security concerns for the convenience of digital ordering, the burden of security will likely fall more heavily on companies providing these services to avoid fraud.
NTT and Tokyo Century Collaborate on Data Center Business in India
NTT Corporation is collaborating with Tokyo Century Corp. to further expand its data centre business in India.
As part of the deal, NTT Global Data Centers Holding Asia (GDC HC) will divest 75 percent of its shares in NTT Global Data Centers Holding Asia BOM8 (SPV) to Tokyo Century and will jointly own the data center’s assets currently held by NTT Global Data Centers Holding BOM8 (BOM8), a 100 percent subsidiary of the SPV.
Tokyo Century will be the first joint investor in NTT’s data center business.
GDC HC established BOM 8 to hold assets related to the data center business in Mumbai through an SPV newly established in Singapore in 2020. This SPV is developing a 9-story data center with a total building area of over 310,000 square feet (approximately 29,000 square meters) and Critical IT load of 24 MW.
The data center is expected to be completed in February 2022 and will accommodate large-scale cloud service providers.
