EMC And Irish University Launch Digital Research Centre For Regulated Industries

EMC and University College Cork (UCC) have partnered to develop the first industry-led research centre to enable regulated businesses ensure they become innovative while remaining compliant with industry regulations.

The centre, officially opened by Minister Dara Murphy at an event in UCC today, will focus on IT business systems integrity, risk analysis, including cybersecurity, and innovation in regulated industries.

Rolling out new tech

It aims to help companies in industries such as financial services, biopharma, health services, telecoms and indeed ICT when rolling out new technologies, such as cloud and mobile.

The new centre, named the Boole Business Labs, is located in the O’Rahilly Building in the Cork University Business School (CUBS) at University College Cork and will be run by a team of researchers at UCC.

Donagh Buckley, senior director of EMC Research Europe and CTO of EMC Ireland Centre of Excellence, said: “In today’s digital world, keeping pace with technological advancements and compliance standards poses serious challenges for highly regulated industries such as financial services and insurance.

“Many of these businesses depend on highly complex, monolithic systems to handle data. This makes them difficult to manage effectively and slow to respond to new developments in technology.

“The Boole Business Labs allows international businesses, industry bodies, regulators and government to come together to understand and develop solutions to the shared challenges and risks they face in the areas of data governance, risk management and cybersecurity.”

A number of multinational and indigenous companies are already engaged and contributing to the Boole Business Labs project.

Bob Savage, VP and MD of EMC Centres of Excellence EMEA and head of EMC Ireland, said the Boole Business Labs is a “fantastic example of the power of collaboration between industry and academia.”

He added: “Using the combined expertise of EMC and UCC, we have developed a multidisciplinary solution to the challenges of digital transformation for regulated industries. Leveraging the power of the EMC Federation, we can provide comprehensive tools for data storage, cloud development and cybersecurity.”

Professor Ciaran Murphy, head of the Cork University Business School (CUBS), said: “The labs bear the name of our most famous academic – George Boole – a professor who besides being the inventor of Boolean logic, which sits at the heart of all computer systems, made an enormous contribution to our understanding of risk through his pioneering work on probability.”