"Passion meets Innovation" - Our 44th Trivadis TechEvent TechEvent will take place in Regensdorf near Zurich, Switzerland, on September 15. One of the largest IT events in the German-speaking countries, it will bring together high-profile guest speakers and an expected 500 IT experts. The renowned British innovation researcher and author Nigel Barlow agreed to give the keynote. We asked him about his thoughts on innovation and digital transformation, and why it pays off to give technology a "human face":

In the age of digitalization, data protection and security are becoming even more important than they had already been before. According to a recent Accenture study among 2,000 IT security professionals in 15 countries, protecting customer data and ensuring operation are the central goals of the IT security strategy. Still, one in three cyber attacks is successful, finds the study. With 81 percent of respondents who are responsible for IT security stating that they feel well equipped to thwart attacks, some questions come up: Do experts feel too safe handling sensitive data? Are they protected at all against dangers from the web in digitalization projects? Which security and data protection aspects should be taken into account for these projects?

Using Shadow IT is a security risk for the German economy, according to the recent Security Report 2016 by eco - Association of the Internet Industry. The alarming result comes from a survey among 580 IT experts in German, mostly medium-sized companies. Shadow IT is a catchword for unauthorised hard and software as well as cloud services that exist independent from an organization`s IT and endanger sensitive corporate data. Around one third of the surveyed experts believed that there is Shadow IT being used in their companies, 23 percent think this happens on a considerable scale. Only 16 percent said there was none. But what makes applications that seem to make sense for the user so dangerous for companies? And how can more companies go from the shadow to the sunny side of IT?

The energy industry misses out on digitalization, is the eye-catching result from a recent Ardour Consulting survey among 61 industry board members and executives published in late 2016. The energy companies that took part in the survey confirmed that digitalization is explosive and necessary – so the danger has been recognised. It is, however, still to be avoided: 90 percent said that they do not follow a digital strategy. For Switzerland, statistics portal DeStatista paints a similar picture: Only 16 percent of the Swiss energy providers that took part in its survey considered their digitalization degree high. Is the energy industry really behind on digitalization?