How New Technologies Have Brought a Change in Your Industry

Roland Cloutier, VP, CSO, ADP

As the Chief Security Officer of a human capital manage­ment technology and ser­vices provider, I understand very clearly that innovation and technology development are the life blood of our success and operational sus­tainability. From advanced products that simplify processes for clients, to critical tools that ensure implementation success and a great client experience, technology has changed the way we deliver, op­erate and manage our business.

"Innovations in the security industry enable us to advance our cyber, risk, and privacy capabilities which create opportunities for our business"

Innovations in the security in­dustry enable us to advance our cy­ber, risk, and privacy capabilities which create opportunities for our business that otherwise may not be possible because of critical se­curity con­cerns. Advancements in threat management, security intelli­gence, transaction surveillance, and analytics have catapulted our capabilities exponentially in recent years.

The greatest advancements that technology has afforded us fall into the areas of global defense, consumer capabilities, and fraud prevention. From a global defense perspective, advance­ments in security intelligence platforms including data aggrega­tion, advanced analytics, and data management has enabled us to create an ecosystem of interconnected security technologies that allow us to extend our defensive and response capabilities into existing and new geographies. This centralized technology services model allows our business to enter new markets confidently and reduces the total cost of security while ensuring consistency of service delivery and sustainability of con­trols compliance. These mass data intel­ligence aggregation platforms also help create a clearer picture of active threat and security issues across all of our operating units by allowing the collection of business, secu­rity, IT, and intelligence enrichment data in a single instance. This new broad view reduces time to incident discovery and containment, and ensures a significantly faster root cause analysis and remediation effort reducing business down time, im­pact costs, and liability concerns.

From a consumer support perspec­tive, technologies in the area of identity assurance, advanced authentication, and encryption have allowed us to extend access, previously only available to hu­man capital management practitioners, directly to the millions of users of our cloud platform. These same technologies have paved the way for new mediums, created consumer driven changes to our go-to-market strategy that reduce complexity and give our cli­ent’s employees personal choice, finance and career development tools, and most importantly, access to their information wherever and whenever they need it.

As a company that moves trillions of dollars per year and is responsible for the financial assurance of millions of pay slips in over 100 countries, we are con­stantly looking to advance our capabili­ties in detecting fraudulent access to pro­tected data and financial processes. The same technologies that have extended our global threat management and consumer support abilities have also accelerated our ability to detect, deter, and mitigate fraud.

Specifically, these advancements have given us an extensive data collection and processing capability across complex business transaction applications and environments. These capabilities enrich our ability to identify suspect transactions, reduce our false positive rate, and automate the prevention of fraud as it happens. Additionally, these same advancements have provided digital planning and investigative abilities not previously available which afford us look-forward and look-back capabilities to model what could happen, as well as active fraud discovery and remediation by modeling newly discovered criminal tactics and schemes against previous transaction data sets.

The impact to our business model is evident from how we go to market to how we engage our clients. Technology used to defend, detect, and remediate security, risk, and privacy issues has provided us with confidence to continue innovat­ing for the businesses and economies we serve around the world, and do so with a sense of speed and agility not previously available to us. That speed and agility is a byproduct of the integration of new security and business defense intelligence integrated as a core decision support component for all aspects of our business. Transparency, data simplification, and actuated risk measurements, previously only available or understood by security practitioners, are now available to corporate executive committees, boards, and business deci­sion-makers ensuring that security is a fundamental part of how we design and deliver our products and how we operate our business.