Paul O'Shea. Image: Vitalograph
Vitalograph’s Paul O’Shea on the ‘spectacular’ future of AI and quantum computing, and why our ‘always connected’ mindset is a major security challenge.
Paul O’Shea is the chief information officer at Vitalograph. The medical device company specialises in respiratory diagnostics, producing pulmonary function testing solutions for primary and secondary care along with delivering clinical trial services for pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and research organisations.
Prior to joining Vitalograph, O’Shea was group head of information systems for Shannon Group PLC, where he managed the IT transformation process during the company’s formation and restructuring phases.
In his current role as CIO for Vitalograph, O’Shea leads the company’s IT team to deliver secure, resilient and innovative IT solutions.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape and how are you addressing them?
In my opinion, there are two significant challenges facing IT: security and regulation.
Data security is an ever-evolving, ever-changing landscape that grows and morphs from a complexity perspective as new threats, technologies and threat actors appear. As a result, IT teams are required to continually scout the future to see what the next threat sources are and then determine how best to build your defences to protect against those threats. The appearance of AI, its ever-growing abilities and its ease of use will only further compound this struggle for IT teams. Threat actors will no doubt leverage the power of AI to enhance their delivery mechanisms and IT teams will use AI to mitigate these new delivery mechanisms. However, for the moment, IT teams will be playing catch-up.
Conflicting regulation across the IT sector places increased strain on already limited IT resources to address disparate and oftentimes conflicting control requirements to address current regulatory requirements from the EU, US and other regional or national regulators. Customers want assurance that their data will be held and processed securely – this is now a basic requirement of doing business and providing that assurance typically requires an organisation to demonstrate adherence to specific regulatory requirements through certification or audit.
‘AI is the genie out of the box, and now that it’s free, it’s going to be extremely difficult to manage and control its use’
What are your thoughts on digital transformation in a broad sense within your industry?
To me, digital transformation is one of those IT topics that people talk about as being ‘transformative’, if you’ll excuse the pun. In reality, it means many different things to different people and, as a result, it can be a challenging topic to articulate to the business and, consequently, difficult to deliver on.
Within Vitalograph, digital transformation is a two-pronged process. Firstly, it is a process of systems rationalisation and consolidation, whereby we are looking to optimise our data flow processes, ensuring that our teams have the data they require, when (and where) they require it – and at the same time seeking to minimise the number of actual supported systems or processes required to deliver that data at the infrastructure layer.
‘The trend of forced obsoletion is worrying for sustainability’
Secondly, we are embarking on a process of data consolidation, seeking to wrangle data from our multiple existing data siloes and consolidating that into a platform that provides an effective solution to enable our business to distil that data into insightful and actionable information.
Sustainability has become a key objective for businesses in recent years. What are your thoughts on how this can be addressed from an IT perspective?
I think sustainability within the IT sector is something that needs to be addressed at a larger scale. The consumerisation of almost everything – PCs, laptops, mobile phones and EVs for example – is driving an unsustainable chain of buy, use and replace on ever decreasing refresh cycles. The trend of forced obsoletion is a worrying one from the IT department’s perspective because it drives a continuous (but unnecessary) upgrade cycle which has significant cost implications for the organisation. Yes, there must be improvements in technology to keep pace with both security and consumer requirements, but I believe OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] must also include better extended support for legacy equipment.
What big tech trends do you believe are changing the world and your industry specifically?
The two big tech trends that I see impacting our industry at the moment are AI and quantum computing.
AI is the genie that is out of the box, and now that it is free, it is going to be extremely difficult to manage and control its use. Regulation will come, but that will take time. The ease of use of AI is driving its meteoric adoption. We see AI being used to drive advancements in areas such as materials technology, healthcare and genetics, while at the same time raising concerns around data protection, nation state threats and election interference to name but a few.
Quantum computing is another area that I’m excited to see progressing and to see how this unfolds and impacts our corporate and personal lives, specifically in areas such as cryptography and communications. As the development of quantum computing progresses, so too will the requirements on IT departments to adapt to the new reality of super powerful computing technologies and the impact they will have on corporate IT, data security and in particular, AI.
I think any future marriage of AI and quantum computing is going to be nothing short of spectacular and will have far reaching and profound impacts on our lives.
What are your thoughts on how we can address the security challenges currently facing your industry?
I believe there are several approaches to addressing the security challenges within our industry and across the IT arena in general.
Firstly, software development life cycles need to improve to provide more robust software at release time. How often do we see new software released to end users only for a major security update to be released within a few months? I’m not saying this is a quick fix, it’s anything but, however it does need to start!
‘The future marriage of AI and quantum computing is going to be nothing short of spectacular’
Secondly, the complexity of today’s IT systems and infrastructure naturally lends itself to increased security risks. IT teams manage a wide array of technology platforms, some in-house, some cloud-based, and all the while the business requires data to be accessible to staff across different technologies, different geographies and with the minimum of fuss – all of which can and often do, impact the security of the data.
And lastly, education of staff – both within and outside the IT department – in regard to their responsibilities around data security. Not wanting to sound like a typical Generation X, but today’s ‘always on, always connected’, ‘have your data everywhere’ lifestyle is a problem. When that expectation starts to manifest itself within the organisation – data security risks increase significantly.
Individuals must consider the implications of having personal data and, as an extension, access credentials stored and shared across countless online repositories and devices as a security risk. Not wanting to implement multi-factor authentication on devices – because it slows down the ease of access – is a challenge. The expectation that corporate data should be as accessible as social media data is a challenge. The requirement on IT staff to secure data in these circumstances is a challenge. But, in my opinion, education is the answer.
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