Coursera, Inc. (NYSE: COUR), one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, today released a new study that examines the pandemic’s impact on skills and learning trends among women. The Women and Skills Report compares pre-pandemic enrollment and performance data with trends observed on the Coursera platform since the onset of the pandemic through June 2021. The new study found that women in the UAE are learning online at higher rates compared to pre-pandemic, with the share of STEM course enrollments from women increasing from 32% in 2019 to 37% in 2021. 

One of the key objectives of the Dubai Plan 2021 is to create an ‘inclusive and cohesive society’. The country as a whole has closed 71.6% of its gender gaps to date according to the 2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, advancing 48 ranks in the gender gap index in just one year, from #120 rank to #72 globally. The UAE is also identified as the most-improved country in the world for women in parliament.

This aligns with Coursera’s findings in the report. The overall share of Coursera for Government learners in the country is nearing parity with 45% of government learners in the UAE being women. The Abu Dhabi School of Government (ADSG), which partners with Coursera to upskill its entire government workforce, for example, is championing online learning among women. In 2020, women accounted for 43% of overall course enrollments in ADSG’s learning initiative, up from 39% in 2019.

“It’s promising to see how the gender gap in online learning has narrowed since the pandemic”, said Anthony Tattersall, Coursera VP of EMEA. “We are particularly encouraged by how women in the UAE are embracing online learning in the field of STEM. This can help accelerate their return to work, bolster economic growth, and foster gender pay parity.”

Key UAE insights from the Women and Skills Report include:

• Women are turning to online education at higher rates than pre-pandemic. The UAE has 220,000 registered women learners on Coursera. In 2020, a peak of 47% new registered UAE learners were women. While this share is at 44% in 2021, it still represents an increase from 42% in 2019. Forty-five percent of female learners in the country also use mobile to learn.

• More women in the UAE are enrolling in STEM courses and entry-level Professional Certificates. The share of overall course enrollments from women increased from 38% in 2019 to 42% in 2021. For STEM courses, the gender gap narrowed from a share of 32% of enrollments from women in 2019 to 37% in 2021. Women’s enrollments in entry-level Professional Certificates have also gone up in the country from 26% in 2019 to 32% in 2021. These certificates, from industry leaders such as Google, IBM, and Facebook, are designed to prepare learners without a college degree or technology experience for a wide range of high-demand digital jobs.

• Top skills among UAE women show a strong inclination towards business leadership. Top skills UAE women have developed over the past year include communication (110,000 enrollments from UAE women), leadership and management (100,000), and entrepreneurship (80,000). Women are also investing in STEM skills, like probability and statistics (70,000), data analysis (60,000), and machine learning (50,000). The most popular courses among women in the UAE teach job-relevant and personal development skills, including The Science of Wellbeing from Yale University and English for Career Development from the University of Pennsylvania.

• Businesses, governments, and campuses can play a key role in reducing gender gaps in learning. In 2021, programmes where Coursera is used by various governments and campuses in the UAE saw the share of women registered learners was nearing parity, standing at 45% and 48% respectively. Better gender share is likely to contribute to more diverse talent pipelines for employers. Among businesses, women now constitute 36% of UAE learners.

Key global insights from the Women and Skills Report include:

• Women learners enroll more than men in courses taught by women instructors. Instructor representation is one of the most important factors contributing to increases in women’s enrollments. Forty-nine percent of enrollments from women learners are in courses with women instructors, compared to 38% for men learners. The most popular women instructors on Coursera include Laurie Santos (The Science of Wellbeing, Yale University), Seung Hae Kang (First Step Korean, Yonsei University), and Dr. Rosa I. Arriaga (Introduction to User Experience, Georgia Institute of Technology).

• Product innovations help grow women’s participation in online learning. Factors contributing to enrollment increases from women include adding practice quizzes before challenging assessments (+12% increase in share of lifetime enrollments from women), listing most common mistakes for peer-reviewed assignments (+16%), and distributing assessments throughout a course (+8%).

“I earned my computer science degree with only a handful of women alongside me, and while a great deal has changed since then, we still have important work to do to increase women’s representation in technology and leadership,” said Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer at Coursera. “Access to flexible, job-relevant education can help women learn the new skills they need to enter high-demand roles and achieve better gender balance in the workforce.”

With over 87 million learners and 5,000 courses on the platform, Coursera has one of the largest data sets for identifying and measuring skill trends. The Women and Skills Report includes data from 40 million new learners who registered during the pandemic between January 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.

By Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Vice President, Global Field CISO at Fortinet

Industry Perspectives

Of all the changes brought on by the pandemic, remote working as a standard business model is probably the most transformative. The result for some was improved work-life balance, as 90-minute commutes were replaced by more exercise and breakfast with the kids. But this massive shift, including the shift from trusted computing to untrusted networks, also introduced new cybersecurity threats. With many employees no longer protected by company firewalls and security protocols, new risks were introduced, especially around cloud migration and endpoint proliferation. 

Protection encompasses the entire cyber-physical environment of your data, data centers, carriers, users, critical infrastructure, and ecosystem, including partners, manufacturing plants, research and development centers, offices, and, most recently, remote workers. The pharmaceutical industry is not immune to these new challenges, with both large and small pharmaceutical companies being targeted by threat actors. Pharma also faces significant cybersecurity challenges brought on by the increased enablement of remote and distributed work within the pharmaceutical industry.

What’s Valuable is a Target within the Pharmaceutical Industry

Cybercriminals are capitalizing on the expanded attack surface and “reversed” networks, caused, in part, by the increased number of remote workers within the pharmaceutical industry. With everyone distracted by remote work, cybercriminals see opportunities to attack and steal valuable research and intellectual property. One of their most well-known tactics involves distributing ransomware designed to freeze organizations and interrupt or steal research and developments. 

The Pharmaceutical Industry Faces the Challenges of Maintaining Security for Remote Working

Recent data breaches within the pharmaceutical industry have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost proprietary information and pharmaceutical research. The increasing array of endpoints that come with remote working opens doors to potential security breaches especially with increased cloud migration and device proliferation. Additionally, expanding partnerships, including R&D partners, represent a potential critical point of entry to malicious actors as they target bigger pharmaceutical businesses through weaker access points within their wider ecosystem. Without a holistic, end-to-end security solution, it is likely only a matter of time before becoming a target. 

Despite the reality of this risk-filled environment, there are many challenges for pharmaceuticals looking to implement advanced security measures. Perhaps the greatest challenge and threat is the enablement of distributed remote working, globally and at speed, as it adds risk and makes huge demands on security systems. Mass remote working may have become obligatory for many pharmaceutical workforces, but the need to integrate vulnerable legacy operational technology and the rising value of pharmaceutical intellectual property has seen the industry identified as a vulnerable and lucrative target. 

Last, but not least, of the operational challenges are the inconsistent attitudes and perceptions of risk and how those two factors can influence leadership’s appetite to protect vulnerable legacy operational technology. An increasingly digital pharmaceutical value chain demands a broader security framework to protect valuable data as it moves between a complex network of remote workforces and partners using disparate network, cloud, application, and mobile environments.

“Workforce mobilization has expanded the threat landscape dramatically, requiring organizations to evaluate and implement Zero Trust to protect all users and devices across the entire healthcare life science cyber edge.”  Troy Ament, Fortinet Field CISO Healthcare Life Science

Solutions for Remote Security in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Digital transformation and the rise of software-defined enterprises has created a persistent and growing cyber risk across a widening cyber-physical landscape. Pharmaceutical companies are focused on maintaining integrity across increasingly remote-based working environments. The key to integrity for remote workers is securing endpoints and access to distributed computing resources. Protecting this increasingly virtual and collaborative ecosystem, regardless of device or network, through the visibility of data and control of credentials is critical. Multi-Factor Authentication alongside actionable intelligence is a necessity for remote work security. Next-generation endpoint security provides real-time automated endpoint protection, detection, and response, while platform and firewall capacity enable safe throughput and processing of IP publicly identifiable information.

Beyond offering encryption of data in transit, via a VPN, a number of other features can help pharmaceuticals secure their cloud migrated remote workforce. Utilizing Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is essential for teleworking executives with frequent access to important and sensitive customer and operational data.¹ Additional advanced threat protection involves analyzing malware and other suspicious content within a sandboxed environment before it reaches its destination to help prevent breaches.² It’s critical for pharmaceuticals to provide secure wireless connectivity and access at remote work locations with full integration and configuration management.³

Convergence

“The pandemic has created higher demand for additional internet-based connectivity into the sensitive supply chain, R&D, and OT networks, creating a need for IT and OT infrastructures to collaborate. OT cybersecurity has started to depend on more traditional IT facilities like patching, cloud-based threat intelligence, protection mechanisms, VPN and remote access; a clear sign that organizations need to start integrating OT cybersecurity into everyday cybersecurity considerations.” Zhanwei Chan, Global Head of OT/IoT Practice, NTT Ltd.

Looking Back and Ahead in Pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical industries can only succeed and grow through the secure flow of data across connected IT and OT environments within complex, evolving ecosystems. Cybercriminals are targeting pharmaceuticals due to the increased focus on cloud migration and a recent increase in remote workers. These knowledge workers are indeed lucrative targets, often handling intellectual property worth billions of dollars. With global brand reputations and groundbreaking R&D on the line, speed and the pressures of non-disruption cannot come at the expense of security. These are challenges that should not sit solely on the shoulders of IT. 

By: Chris Martin, Channel Leader for EMEA and APAC, A10 Networks

2020 was an extraordinary year and, if nothing else, the last 18 months have certainly accentuated the importance of digital resiliency. Now, as we move into a recovery phase post pandemic, our own research, undertaken earlier this year, highlighted that the workforce won’t return to pre-COVID working practices, and that we should expect a hybrid approach to the office environment. The research analysed how senior IT professionals in communication service provider organisations will adapt to a post-COVID-19 world, and the challenges they face with a more distributed workplace. It found that 67% believe their customers will continue to operate with employees working from home even post-pandemic.

Certainly, the consumer shift online is here to stay, whether that be for public services, retail, entertainment, or healthcare. Again, while some will return to shopping on the high street or going into the civic centre to pay their council tax, others will continue to enjoy the convenience that online delivers.

Technology Trends Fuelling Demand

Despite the disruption of the last year and a half, business has continued to evolve, and our channel has continued to grow as a result of five key trends.

The first is the acceleration and proliferation of IoT. In 2020, there was a noticeable shift in the types of businesses adopting IoT, which is now becoming mainstream as enterprises move from experimentation to deployment across global operations.

The second and probably most notable trend is the shift to the cloud as organisations continue their digital transformation journeys. In fact, cloud services spend was already growing much faster than on-premises IT spend at the beginning of 2020, and this momentum has only increased during the pandemic.

Thirdly, 5G deployment and the associated security issues is very much front-of-mind, which was also reflected in our research. When it comes to 5G, just under one-third of respondents (31%) we surveyed stated that maintaining a quality service and avoiding service outages were top security challenges. While 21% said unpredictable subscriber usage with changing patterns on the network was a top challenge. And certainly, we see channel partners helping customers with cloud migration and the adoption of 5G as they address concerns around network security and the current lack of agility and visibility throughout the IT infrastructure.

Overcoming Operational Complexity

 This brings me to the fourth trend which is around operational complexity. As organisations, regions and countries go in and out of lockdown and need to scale up or scale back certain initiatives, it has created significant IT challenges. In today’s digital business environment, you’ve got to stay agile and innovative to compete, grow, and thrive. In fact, even facing an uncertain economic outlook over the past year, 70% of businesses planned to maintain or increase digital transformation spending during the pandemic. As a result, we have seen high demand for solutions like A10 Thunder ADC and Harmony Controller, which empowers businesses to deliver secure application services across traditional data centres, and private, public and hybrid cloud environments. This solution underpins our vision to help businesses become more secure, responsive and agile as they bridge traditional and cloud-based application environments.

Finally, as ransomware attacks, DDoS, and other threats grow in sophistication, and enterprise environments become more distributed and dynamic, cyber security and compliance become critical challenges. Again, our research showed how important it is for organisations to protect against such threats. Forty-three percent stated that DDoS protection service for enterprise customers was a top security priority in 2021, while 39% of respondents said ransomware protection services for enterprise customers was their highest priority.

Focused Programmes that Support the Channel

All these trends have created demand for our products and services and have remained focus areas for both A10 Networks and our channel partners. To address these trends, we introduced five key channel initiatives at the start of 2021 in order to focus support and resources in these key areas:

• Deal registration is paramount; we have had deal registration incentives running since the beginning of the year to ensure partners register leads in line with our areas of focus and business growth.
• Distribution underpins our channel strategy and we have continued to recruit new partners across the region to ensure that we are well represented in all territories.
• Building our ecosystem and partner network is key to our ongoing success. Our focus here is on partnering with players who are strong in key verticals and can bring talent and expertise to our customers.
• Partner enablement: we launched a new technical ambassador programme, through which our technical team are mentoring our partner’s technical teams.
• Finally, the Lead the Way initiative, which utilises our partner network to develop leads and marketing initiatives via our partner portal.

With channel front and centre to all our programme activities, we renamed our partner tiering model to: Member, Advanced and Elite, and we launched our Elevate to Elite programme designed to help accelerate our partners’ growth and enable them to fast track through the various partner levels.

Building a Bigger Footprint

Our channel strategy encompasses APAC, EMEA and South Asia and provides us a unique perspective across a large segment. This allows us to consolidate and coordinate our channel strategy to an ever-greater degree while also allowing for flexibility to manage customer and channel needs across individual countries and regions. But, above all, we appreciate that some countries will be emerging at a different pace to others, as lockdowns and restrictions are enforced and relaxed. Therefore, our overriding priority is the security and safety of our partners and customers around the world; we’re committed to working with them to achieve this.