Cybersecurity Archives | 麻豆原创 News Center /tags/cybersecurity/ Company & Customer Stories | 麻豆原创 Room Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:16:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.4 10 Questions Board Members Should Be Asking About Security and Compliance /2026/10/10-questions-board-members-should-be-asking-about-security-compliance/ Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:15:00 +0000 /?p=248443 Major security incidents can quickly affect enterprise value, operational continuity, regulatory standing, and reputation.

Securely access cloud services, meet compliance goals, and build customer confidence

As organizations become more dependent on connected infrastructure, cloud services, AI, and third parties, weaknesses in one part of the ecosystem can cascade across the business.

A Board is not expected to make technical decisions. Its role is to exercise informed oversight: set expectations, test whether accountability is clear, require evidence of resilience, and ensure that management integrates security and compliance into strategy, investment, operations, and crisis preparedness.

The following questions are designed for a Board of Directors and its relevant committees. They broaden the original cybersecurity focus to include compliance, privacy, data governance, third-party assurance, regulatory change, and demonstrable control effectiveness. 

1. Are security and compliance roles, decision rights, and escalation paths clearly defined?

Treating security or compliance as an isolated specialist function weakens governance. Accountability should extend across executive leadership, business operations, technology, legal, risk, privacy, internal audit, and the security organization. The Board should understand who owns material risks,鈥痺hat is the risk appetite鈥痺ho can accept them, and how significant incidents, control failures, vulnerabilities, or regulatory concerns reach the appropriate committee or full Board.

Evidence to request:

  • Does the security and compliance leadership team have direct access to executive management and the Board?
  • Are material risks escalated before they materialize into鈥痑ctive incidents?
  • Do responsibilities cover prevention, detection, response, recovery, regulatory obligations, and assurance?

2. Are security and compliance built into strategy, investment, and transformation decisions?

Security and compliance should shape strategic choices from the beginning, not be added after commitments have been made. Major investments, cloud programs, acquisitions, new products, AI initiatives, and supplier selections should be assessed alongside聽security and compliance聽considerations.聽Early involvement helps identify structural risk while decisions are still practical to change.聽

Evidence to request:

  • Which strategic decisions require a documented security and compliance review?
  • What risks or control requirements influenced the final decision?
  • Are funding and accountability aligned with the risk created by the initiative?

3. Do we have a transparent, decision-ready view of security and compliance risk?

Boards need more than technical activity reports. Management should translate important threats, vulnerabilities, control gaps, legal obligations, and business dependencies into clear enterprise risk scenarios. Reporting should show potential operational, financial, legal, and reputational consequences, as well as the residual risk that remains after controls are applied. 

Evidence to request:

  • Which scenarios could materially affect our strategic objectives?
  • How are likelihood, business impact, and control effectiveness assessed?
  • What residual risks have been accepted, by whom, and for how long? 

4. Is our compliance strategy prepared for regulatory change?

Compliance聽should be managed as a continuing capability rather than a periodic response to individual requirements. The Board should assess whether regulatory developments are聽monitored, interpreted consistently, assigned to accountable owners, and translated into controls, technology roadmaps, evidence, and reporting. This includes requirements affecting security, privacy, data sovereignty, operational resilience, AI, and third-party services.聽

Evidence to request: 

  • Which emerging requirements could materially affect the business?
  • How quickly can new obligations be translated into operational controls? 
  • Can management demonstrate compliance consistently across regions, business units, and technology environments?

5. Are legacy systems and technical debt creating unacceptable security or compliance exposure?

Systems that are no longer fully supported can accumulate security weaknesses, limit monitoring, complicate recovery, and make compliance evidence harder to produce. The Board should view aging critical systems as an enterprise risk and investment issue, not just an IT lifecycle matter. Where modernization is delayed, management should document compensating controls, ownership, and a time-bound plan. 

Evidence to request: 

  • Which critical systems are out of support or approaching end of support?
  • What business processes and regulatory obligations depend on them?
  • What is the modernization plan and how is interim risk independently validated?

6. Are AI security, compliance, and governance embedded in the operating model?

AI introduces security, legal, privacy, data, ethical, and operational questions that require coordinated governance. Whether AI is developed internally or obtained from a third party, management should know what data it can access, how outputs are used, which decisions聽remain聽subject to human review, and how systems are tested and聽monitored聽as they change.

Evidence to request:

  • Who is accountable for approving and monitoring AI use cases?
  • What controls protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized use?
  • How are legal, ethical, security, compliance, and human-rights considerations evaluated and evidenced?

7. Are identity and access management strong enough for our risk profile?聽

Compromised credentials and excessive access can allow attackers or insiders to reach critical systems and data. Identity and access management should be treated as聽a business聽control, not simply an administrative technology process. Strong governance connects employee, contractor, third-party, and system identities to reliable business records and removes access when it is no longer required.聽

Evidence to request: 

  • Are strong authentication and least-privilege access applied to critical systems?
  • How quickly is access changed when roles, employment, or supplier relationships change?
  • Are privileged and non-human identities monitored, reviewed, and time-limited where appropriate? 

8. Does our culture measurably reduce human and conduct risk?

Policies and technical controls depend on people making sound decisions. A mature program goes beyond annual training by addressing role-specific exposure, leadership behavior, phishing and social engineering, secure ways of working, speak-up channels, and consequences for repeated noncompliance. The Board should seek measurable evidence that behavior and risk are improving. 

Evidence to request: 

  • Which roles face the highest security and compliance exposure?
  • What do simulations, incidents, training results, and behavioral indicators show over time?
  • How visibly do leaders reinforce expected behavior and accountability?

9. Are third-party and supply-chain risks continuously assessed and governed? 

Security and compliance obligations do not stop at the enterprise boundary. Critical suppliers, cloud providers, software dependencies, advisers, and other partners can create operational, regulatory, data, concentration, and geopolitical exposure. Third-party risk should be integrated into enterprise risk management and monitored throughout the relationship, not treated as a one-time procurement exercise. 

Evidence to request: 

  • Which third parties are critical to operations, data, or regulatory obligations?
  • What independent evidence supports their security, compliance, and resilience claims?
  • How are concentration, subcontractor, geographic, and exit risks managed? 

10. Are we prepared to detect, contain, disclose, and recover from a major incident? 

Prevention alone is not enough. The Board should understand whether the organization can identify significant events early, contain their impact, make timely legal and regulatory decisions, communicate credibly, restore priority services, and learn from the event. Readiness should cover ransomware, account takeover, data compromise, fraud, third-party disruption, and other plausible business scenarios. 

Evidence to request: 

  • When were crisis, incident response, business continuity, and recovery plans last exercised together?
  • Are decision rights clear for regulatory disclosure, law enforcement, ransom demands, customer communication, and service restoration?
  • What gaps were found in recent exercises or incidents, and are remediation actions closed?

From reactive oversight to demonstrable resilience 

These 10 questions help a Board move the discussion from technical activity to governance, accountability, evidence, and business outcomes. Effective oversight requires an ongoing dialogue with management, constructive challenge of assumptions, and decisions that reflect the organization鈥檚 risk profile, regulatory obligations, and digital maturity.

Modernization can be an important governance lever when it improves standardization, transparency, control automation, resilience, and the ability to produce reliable compliance evidence. Responsibility, however, remains shared across leaders, business owners, technology teams, security, compliance, legal, risk, audit, employees, and critical partners. 

Board takeaway

Security and compliance are not separate from business strategy. They are essential to continuity, lawful operation, stakeholder trust, and long-term value protection. 


Marielle Ehrmann is chief security officer and a member of the Supervisory Board of 麻豆原创 SE.

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Note: This piece has been adapted from the German article 鈥淐ybersicherheit 鈥� Zehn Leitfragen f眉r den Aufsichtsrat鈥� by original authors Dr. Friederike Rotsch and Sebastian Lange alongside Marielle Ehrmann.

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Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Data Insights Without Sharing Data /2024/03/fully-homomorphic-encryption-insights-without-sharing-data/ Thu, 28 Mar 2024 12:15:00 +0000 /?p=223900 Carbon footprint calculation, patient privacy, and machine learning based on sensitive data 鈥� thanks to advanced encryption methods like fully homomorphic encryption.

Most have been in this situation before: one of the providers or services we use is a victim of a data breach and we want to determine if our personal user data has been impacted. This is where fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) comes into play. With FHE, the encrypted, personal password is compared against the data set of stolen user data and potential matches are identified without ever revealing the user鈥檚 password.

Use cases for this type of privacy-enhancing technology (PET) are numerous. They range from applications in medicine, where third-party service providers can analyze health data without compromising a patient鈥檚 privacy, to performing machine learning and AI algorithms on encrypted data, allowing organizations to derive insights from sensitive data sets without exposing the data to potential breaches or privacy violations.

How It Works

Fully聽homomorphic聽encryption聽allows calculations to be performed on encrypted data without having to decrypt it first. Confidentiality is maintained, as even the results are encrypted and can be viewed only with the appropriate decryption key. Further techniques for processing encrypted data are multi-party computation (MPC) and trusted execution environments (TEE).

Mathias Kohler, research manager at 麻豆原创 Security Research, outlines the differences: 鈥淲hile FHE is the most known of the encryption technologies, MPC is the ideal candidate if working with several parties exchanging encrypted data across company borders. And it can be substantially faster than FHE.鈥� While both are software-based technologies, TEE is hardware-based, which makes it the fastest choice. The downside: TEEs, unlike MPC and FHE, require decrypting the data for processing. While decryption happens in a trusted hardware environment isolated from the operating system, it can allow data leakage via side-channel attacks. Notably, PETs do not need to be considered in isolation and can augment each other. For example, MPC can encrypt and distribute an FHE decryption key, protecting the FHE key and ensuring no single party can decrypt everything.

麻豆原创 protects businesses鈥� applications and data by building, running, and maintaining more-secure operations

Why It鈥檚 Relevant

There is a demand for this kind of technology. By 2025, 60% of large organizations will use at least one privacy-enhancing computation technique in analytics, business intelligence, or cloud computing, according to .

Fully homomorphic encryption has numerous applications, especially in scenarios where privacy and security are paramount, such as secure computation in the cloud, privacy-preserving data analysis, and secure outsourcing of computations. As long as one party is performing the data processing centrally, FHE is the encryption method of choice. FHE enables organizations to share encrypted data with partners or third parties for analysis or monetization purposes while maintaining data confidentiality. This is particularly relevant in industries such as advertising and market research.

Interesting use case scenarios from 麻豆原创鈥檚 perspective could be secure benchmarking and predictive maintenance.

Secure Benchmarking

Companies often assess their competitiveness relative to industry peers and compare business-relevant KPIs, such as automation rate or return rates, with peers and even competitors. With fully homomorphic encryption, all participating parties can share encrypted KPIs without revealing individual data. As a result, they learn about relevant statistics, such as averages or medians, to assess their relative competitiveness and decide where to improve and invest.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance is a machine learning technique to forecast demand for maintenance or spare parts based on historical data. “In certain industries, required data, such as usage patterns and failures, is considered sensitive and is not easily shared with data scientists or maintenance operators,鈥� says Anselme Tueno, senior researcher at 麻豆原创 Security Research. By computing on encrypted data, however, no sensitive information is revealed while still allowing for the required insights to be gathered for prediction tasks.

Carbon Footprint Calculation with Multi-Party Computation

While it is early days from a product availability perspective, 麻豆原创 is working on potential use cases with customers and partners. One key example is calculating carbon footprints of products.

Prime examples for complex collaborations are today鈥檚 supply chains, intricate networks that encompass various levels of suppliers, manufacturers, and processed goods. Unfortunately, there is often a lack of comprehensive visibility across the entire process 鈥� either for technical reasons or because businesses are often reluctant to share sensitive data across supply chains that often include direct competitors.

However, to accurately assess and disclose a product鈥檚 carbon footprint, sensitive production details and associated carbon costs for production-relevant parts and materials are required. Here, MPC can reveal only the required carbon footprint without disclosing associated, proprietary manufacturing details with other supply chain participants.

Currently, 麻豆原创 is working with Bosch on cloud-native software for secure multi-party computation called .

鈥溌槎乖� participates in this open-source project and supports the development of Carbyne Stack’s storage and processing services and the deployment of Carbyne Stack on Amazon Web Services (AWS),鈥� Kohler explains. 鈥淔or Bosch, Carbyne Stack is a type of cloud-native operating system for MPC workloads that manages resources to run as efficiently as possible in multi-cloud deployments.鈥� This effort can help 麻豆原创 in the long run to integrate MPC as technology into 麻豆原创 solutions and services while running in a cloud-native environment.

What鈥檚 Next?

Despite all the benefits around processing data, encryption introduces significant computational overhead due to the complexity of performing operations on encrypted data. Slow processing speeds, especially for complex operations and large data sets, makes fully homomorphic encryption impractical for real-time applications or large-scale data processing. Although the performance of FHE has greatly improved in recent years, its practical adoption is still limited due to the processing overhead and performance considerations. Ongoing research is focused on the design of FHE-specific hardware accelerators.

鈥淧ETs for computing on encrypted data have the power to amplify data-driven business collaborations and reshape the future of cloud computing,鈥� explains Jonas B枚hler, senior researcher at 麻豆原创 Security Research. By safeguarding data, they enable access to previously untapped information while minimizing privacy risks and thwarting data breaches. The future of computing is encrypted.


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Cybersecurity a Top Priority at 麻豆原创, Early Talent Program Recognized by U.S. Government /2023/09/cybersecurity-top-priority-sap-global-early-talent-program/ Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:15:00 +0000 /?p=212012 This October will mark the eighth annual celebration of cybersecurity month at 麻豆原创 and the 20th annual in the U.S.

This cybersecurity month is especially noteworthy because the Biden-Harris administration recently recognized 麻豆原创 in its newly announced . Developed with companies, academia, non-profits, and U.S. government bodies, the NCWES aims to reinforce cybersecurity as a top priority and address short- and long-term cyber workforce gaps. The cybersecurity industry is not only important to upholding national security, but to leading in a digital economy where our increasing reliance on technology will only foster a more complex cyber threat environment. 

Persistent Pipeline Problem 

Why is cybersecurity so important today?

As noted in a explaining the new strategy, the U.S. has a persistent cyber talent pipeline problem that has continued to grow 鈥� with more than 750,000 cybersecurity jobs vacant in 2023. And it鈥檚 not just the U.S. that faces such a talent gap. According to , there鈥檚 been a 350% increase in cybersecurity job vacancies globally from 2013 to 2021. In 2023, the number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs lands at a whopping 3.5 million globally. And the disparity between the workforce supply and demand is predicted to remain through at least 2025. 

It’s a crisis, confirms Nora Clark, program lead for the Global Security Early Talent program at 麻豆原创. 鈥淭he need is there鈥ttacks are always happening though people may not realize because they鈥檙e going on in the background鈥very employee is a cybersecurity defender and can influence company security and compliance.鈥� But for young professionals, it can be nearly impossible to start a career in cybersecurity, she explains. Many positions require years of prior experience. Not many universities offer degrees in cybersecurity, and there鈥檚 a large learning curve that鈥檚 hard to overcome without support. 

That鈥檚 why Clark was charged with the task of creating a program at 麻豆原创 to fill the need for early talents in the cyber space.聽

Global Security Early Talent Program at 麻豆原创 

Inaugurated in June 2022, the two-year offers young professionals entry into the cybersecurity space at 麻豆原创 through rotations with company security divisions such as Global Cyber Defense and Design, Physical Security, and Risk and Compliance; team workshops; and mentorships. Candidates who successfully graduate from the program are offered placement on a permanent team at 麻豆原创. 

Clark chose to have the program span two years because cybersecurity has many applications and the knowledge may not transfer across teams. Two six-month rotations allow candidates to gain their footing and one 11-month rotation consists of completing a project with a cyber team at 麻豆原创. 鈥淭his is why our program is designed differently than other programs,鈥� she says. 鈥淧eople say it鈥檚 really hard to gain the knowledge and then apply it in a short amount of time. That鈥檚 why we provide the Global Security Early Talent candidates learning opportunities, mentorships, and more to support them in their cyber career journey.鈥� 

See for yourself why the Global Security Talent Program at 麻豆原创 is so unique

As a real testament to the initiative鈥檚 mounting success, candidates now have 43 different rotations to choose from. 鈥淚’ve thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to rotate across various security teams, which has allowed me to delve deep into different security topics and build out my network,鈥� Jacob Winemiller, Global Security Early Talent program participant, says. 鈥淎s an early talent in this program, I鈥檝e had the opportunity to work on interesting projects and contribute to meaningful initiatives. From day one, my experience has been nothing short of amazing.鈥�

But the program is about more than just gaining the technical knowledge to survive in cybersecurity 鈥� it also focuses on developing soft skills like storytelling, presentation skills, and networking. 鈥淲hen we talk about the program, we鈥檙e not just talking about being technically skilled in cyber. We鈥檙e also looking to see if they are going to be our next leaders, the next experts in the security industry,鈥� Clark explains. Adam Santilli, Global Security Early Talent program participant, confirms: 鈥淎s trainees, we are encouraged to develop both our soft and hard skills. The opportunity to do that while being a part of three different teams has given me a unique view on security issues today. I have also formed personal and highly valued relationships throughout this process. They have helped me expand my comfort zone and develop my interpersonal skills.鈥� 

Setting an Industry Standard 

When designing the program at 麻豆原创, Clark struggled to find information about early talent cybersecurity programs at other companies to learn from. 鈥淲hen we started this program, there were seemingly no other early talent cybersecurity programs out there. This type of cybersecurity program for people coming fresh out of college is unique.鈥� Indeed, 麻豆原创 was the only foreign entity recognized in the Biden-Harris administration鈥檚 NCWES announcement.  

Clark hopes that with the recognition from the U.S. government and more information about the Global Security Early Talent program out there, more companies will establish early talent cybersecurity initiatives and work together to combat the industry鈥檚 workforce crisis. 鈥淚n security, it only works if we communicate with each other,鈥� she says, talking about both the many security teams across 麻豆原创 and the cyber industry at large. 鈥淲e all have the same issues and we all want to tackle the same thing. [With the program at 麻豆原创] we want to make sure the next generation of security experts have a tight-knit community where they can reach out to each other.鈥� 

Diversity is just as important as communication. It fosters fresh ideas in any industry, but in cybersecurity specifically diversity helps when addressing threats. Clark explains: 鈥淭here has to be diversity because our adversaries are also diverse and we don鈥檛 know where they鈥檙e coming from or what their background is.鈥� Likewise, the NCWES stresses the importance of empowering those currently underrepresented in the cyber workforce. 

As a large, global company, 麻豆原创 has a responsibility to prioritize cybersecurity 鈥� for itself and its ecosystem. When you add in the workforce crisis and the need for early talents to that equation, it becomes a no-brainer. 鈥淲e鈥檙e continuing to build our program and support the cyber force,鈥� Clark says. 鈥淯ltimately, we want to see how we can also help others.鈥� 


Gillian Hixson is an integrated communications specialist at 麻豆原创.

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Zero Trust for the Highest Level of Data Protection, Security, and Privacy in the Cloud /2023/03/zero-trust-data-protection-security-and-privacy-in-cloud/ Thu, 02 Mar 2023 13:15:31 +0000 /?p=203194 When Rihanna sang some of her greatest hits suspended on a platform that hovered 15 to 60 feet above the stadium at this year鈥檚 Super Bowl, trust in technology was of utmost importance. On the same note, trust is crucial when it comes to an organization鈥檚 security on every platform it operates.

Data privacy, risk management, and cybersecurity remain key priorities for businesses in 2023 to ensure continuous high performance and to catapult to new heights. In a recent , 43% of survey respondents said that they plan to upgrade IT and data security to reduce corporate risks. That includes security and data protection measures to keep their data safe. This becomes even more important when moving to and operating in a cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment to drive continuous innovation. In the same CIO survey, 12% of the respondents said that they are planning to accelerate the move to the cloud as a service.

Adopt a Zero Trust Security Approach for the Cloud

To secure data and operations in a hybrid work environment, companies have been adopting a zero trust approach. defines zero trust as an 鈥渋nformation security model that denies access to applications and data by default. Threat prevention is achieved by only granting access to networks and workloads utilizing policy, informed by continuous, contextual, risk-based verification across users and their associated devices.鈥�

According to 2022 global survey data published by , 39% of companies have already begun to roll out a zero trust solution and 41% of companies have plans to adopt a zero trust strategy and are in the early phases of doing so.

My principle in life is to trust people and systems until I am provided a reason not to. The zero trust principle is the exact opposite of this.

The zero trust approach has three key principles: all entities and users are untrusted by default until authorized, the least privilege access is enforced, and extensive security monitoring is in place. In short, no connections to corporate networks and systems should be trusted at sight. All users, devices, and systems need to be authenticated, reverified, and continuously monitored when accessing networks, systems, and data.

Adopting this approach to cloud transformation has become the leading industry standard to keep operations and data safe across the entire virtual and physical network infrastructure.

Here are some best practices for putting an enterprise security plan in place that utilizes zero trust concepts to run operations safely and securely in the cloud.

Define Clear Security Roles and Responsibilities

First and foremost, ensuring security is always a shared responsibility between companies and their cloud transformation partners. It is a common goal and commitment that is independent of the type of cloud path companies take.

Like with any shared responsibility, the best way to approach it is by defining the roles and responsibilities up front. This process starts by asking these key questions: who is managing the cloud, how will everyone work together to secure the cloud, who is responsible for which part, and where are dependencies?

This will ensure that there is a clear strategy and plan to monitor and implement security policies and measures.

Keep an Eye on Users, Devices, Network, Applications, and Monitoring

Based on our experience at 麻豆原创 Enterprise Cloud Services, another best practice is to focus the zero trust security approach on five pillars: users, devices, networks, applications, and monitoring.

Eighty-seven percent of organizations consider the application layer as being the front door for data breaches. Most data breaches through cyberattacks happen because users fail to keep their credentials safe or fall prey to false identities. In addition, the number of remote users with their own devices has significantly increased in enterprise networks as well as the number of cloud-based assets that are not located within an enterprise-owned network boundary.

By regulating and monitoring user access to devices, networks, and applications, companies can protect all their resources, including assets, services, workflows, and network accounts. For example, identity management systems can manage privileged user authentication and access at a very granular level. This includes keeping administrative accounts separate from corporate accounts and applying encryption to several layers in the IT environment. Data classification makes it possible to associate the security levels with specific types of data, regardless of where that data resides 鈥� in the cloud, at endpoints, or in owned data centers.

Scaling Security Needs Faster with the Cloud

While managing the complexity of security needs for cloud transformations can be daunting, here is an added merit: companies can scale their security needs much faster in the cloud, according to research. Benefits include better automation capabilities as well as higher storage and data capacity in the cloud. Companies can push infrastructure as code and fix a security problem in real time when operating in the cloud. Automation also helps in increasing the maturity of identity management and security management systems. recommends embracing cybersecurity as a differentiator to promote greater stakeholder trust and better use of cloud-native solutions that take advantage of the cloud鈥檚 full potential.

In other words, you can shine like a diamond on your cloud platform of choice with a zero trust security approach for the cloud.

For more information, visit the site and read this chief security officer for 麻豆原创 Enterprise Cloud Services.


Peter Pluim is president of 麻豆原创 Enterprise Cloud Services and 麻豆原创 Sovereign Cloud Services.

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Clarifying the True Meaning of Innovation Drives Meaningful Business Value /2022/09/true-meaning-of-innovation/ Tue, 27 Sep 2022 11:15:28 +0000 /?p=199571 With so many challenges to solve and little time to wait, innovation is usually prioritized above any other business growth initiative. But if you compare a handful of these strategic projects side-by-side, it’s clear that organizations are aspiring to deliver groundbreaking innovations. They want to create that really big splash.

Breakthroughs happen less often than most people are inclined to believe. Instead, I often find that most innovations are incremental in nature. Admittedly, a slow-building approach doesn’t grab the spotlight like more daring alternatives do. Still, it’s no less important 鈥� driving countless small improvements that add up to massive transformations and huge gains down the line.

One prime example of incremental innovation鈥檚 impact is the continuous development of mobile devices. The first handheld cellular phone launched nearly 40 years ago. Since then, each new release introduced different sizes 鈥� some smaller and some larger 鈥� and functionalities such as texting, Internet access, context-driven command, touch screens, tracking and tracing, and many more capabilities now considered standard. In essence, mobile device providers allow themselves to experiment with new ideas while generating revenue that is then reinvested into making the product鈥檚 design and purpose more impactful and game-changing in the near future.

Ideas Are Only the Beginning

Ideas are only the start of an innovation journey, no matter how new, novel, or useful. It takes creativity and domain expertise to bring them to life and evolve them gradually by applying the latest lessons learned and scaling capabilities or user experiences to deliver more meaningful value.

As part of 麻豆原创鈥檚 鈥渞einvent鈥� strategy, my team of customer innovation and maintenance experts from within the Customer Solution Support & Innovation organization at 麻豆原创 focuses on turning ideas into valuable solutions for critical challenges. Working with various industries, including agriculture and life sciences, allows us to innovate and deliver sustainable solutions that accelerate business success 鈥� from idea inception and proof of concept to implementation and maintenance.

Customer Solution Support & Innovation offers tremendous industry expertise that can enrich our customers’ growth areas, drive continuous innovation, and deliver prototypes faster to support their transformation into intelligent enterprises. And from our experience, innovations best realize their full value when scaled to add value while they are maintained and developed further to help the world run better and improve people’s lives.

Outcomes Are the Heart of Good Innovation

Our contributions in helping to overcome the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic were one of those moments where we revealed the true value of incremental innovation. Developing innovations in partnership under unprecedented conditions, we designed and rolled out numerous digital solutions more quickly and securely for millions of people.

A prime example is the . In only two months development time, we innovated a digital gateway with T-Systems that provides a standard for valid vaccine certification across the European Union and currently supports 600 million users. By removing the risk of falsified documentation, the introduction of this digital certificate represents an important step toward normalizing the freedom of movement within the eurozone and, as a result, stimulating the economy.

In addition, our team worked with Deutsche Telekom AG and Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health to develop the Corona-Warn-App to help identify infections quickly and notify people of their potential exposure. The mobile app, available for iOS and Android, was developed in open-source mode, and the program code was continuously visible to the public on the development platform 鈥� all without violating data privacy rights.

While the pandemic marked a significant era of innovation for businesses worldwide, our team has produced innovations important for business security. For instance, our work in detecting and preventing security breaches from cyberattacks plays a vital role in many of our customers’ IT infrastructure. Our experts combine the application 鈥� a leading threat detection software 鈥� with 24/7 managed security services. The application is continuously upgraded to help detect cyberattacks in on-premise and cloud solutions from 麻豆原创 as they are happening and analyze the threats quickly enough to neutralize them before severe damage occurs.

More recently, we innovated with climate-focused technology company CHOOOSE to deliver a climate app. As one of the first solution extensions developed with existing capabilities available in and 麻豆原创 Concur solutions, helps neutralize carbon emissions through high-quality compensation projects. As a result, our customers can acquire accurate data from their business flights and discover high-impact ways to offset their carbon footprint 鈥� all in one place.

We are also working on a prototype 鈥� 鈥� that marks the first step toward embracing virtual reality for running business. With the sustainability-focused concept, our experts are experimenting with collaboration with targeted data sharing between competing companies and integrating the virtual environment with open ecosystems such as . In addition, a decentralized peer-to-peer network based on 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform is being created without requiring central persistence.

Innovation That Delivers High Impact

Most companies make the mistake of looking too narrowly at the overall context of their innovation initiative. At Customer Solution Support & Innovation, we are constantly evaluating the 麻豆原创 solution portfolio to find opportunities to adapt and add functionalities that can increase value in ways that can be quickly applied and scaled to meet our customers’ current and future needs.

Embracing the concept of incremental innovation has empowered us to shape a culture that is full of purpose, ingenuity, and discovery. So instead of dedicating all our resources to years-long projects with uncertain outcomes, 麻豆原创 is committed to driving innovation close to our customers’ everyday environmental, social, and governance challenges 鈥� and we will continue to do so in the years to come.


Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at 麻豆原创. Follow him on and .

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