BrazilDeloitte releases latest edition of Middle East thought leadership magazine
Deloitte has released the Spring 2019 edition of its Middle East Point of View magazine – with technology firmly in the spotlight.
Professional services firm Deloitte has released the latest edition of its seasonal cross-sector thought leadership publication, Middle East Point of View (ME PoV). Subtitled ‘On mastery’, the 2019 Spring issue has its gaze on the intersection of technology and human, covering topics such as machine learning and autonomous vehicles while asking the question, what does it take to truly master one’s subject?
The issue opens with a look at the security of cloud services – with demand for these services, led by the likes of tech giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, expected to continue grow to over $400 billion by just 2020. Written by Deloitte Middle East risk advisory professionals Tamer Charife and Mohamed El Nems, the pair encourage organisations considering adopting cloud services to first educate themselves on the associated risks.
“Despite the benefits that adoption of Cloud services can offer (cost effectiveness, reliability or flexibility), organisations need to be aware of the associated risks and work on mitigating, or reducing them to an acceptable level commensurate with the overall risk appetite of the organisation,” write the authors, pointing to data security and privacy concerns, the loss of control over data, and a high dependency on the internet as among potential disadvantages.
Following up on the subject of risk, Collin Keeney, Deloitte Middle East Director, Financial Advisory, writes on the subject of risk exposure to third parties, noting that a company’s business relationships in high-risk emerging markets can have a direct and critical impact on the brand value, as well as the bottom line. Short-term thinking, Keeney states, “should never outweigh long-term brand considerations.”
Elsewhere, Keeney’s Financial Advisory colleagues, Adnan Fazli (Director, Energy, Resources and Industrials Leader for Financial Advisory), and Niraj Bachani (Manager, Financial Advisory), dive into the changing dynamics of the contemporary oilfield services sector following its rebound since the 2014 down cycle, with investor confidence buoyed by expectations that the Middle East will continue to push into the upstream oil and gas space.
Deloitte International Tax Senior Manager Amir Mayo meanwhile contributes with ‘Automatic for the people’, an article on the future of regional immigration and government interfacing – arguing that, while automated immigration systems will certainly expedite a laborious process, removing the ‘human touch’ for certain groups of people may well be more harmful than beneficial – particularly with respect to automated profiling.
Other articles include an exploration of the Middle East co-working market and a look into the corporate benefits of workers’ welfare, with the Spring edition closing with ‘a reality check’ on advanced vehicle technologies. Here, the authors outline the precarious interplay between public demand and the deepening investments into advanced vehicle technologies – described as like “high-stakes poker where the players are all in, and the outcome is largely undetermined, though unlikely to favour everyone at the table.”
