PNY is pleased to announce the establishment of a strategic partnership with METRA, recognized as the region’s fastest-growing IT Value Added Distributor.

With a dynamic team of over 500 regional employees, METRA collaborates with a network of over 30 distinguished vendors, as well as 6500 partners and resellers. Their focus on delivering exceptional value-added services and regional expertise has propelled their rapid growth and positioned them as a trusted leader in the industry.

PNY is proud of this new collaboration. The company will bring its extensive expertise and the power of NVIDIA AI solutions, from AI workstations to data centers, to this partnership.

Providing cutting-edge solutions such as NVIDIA Professional Visualization, NVIDIA TESLA, and NVIDIA DGX solutions, PNY helps improve the creativity, productivity, and performance of users. PNY’s technology partnerships are constantly evolving to stay up to date with the latest innovations. PNY proposes a full spectrum of high value-added solutions in HPC and Artificial Intelligence environments.

Through this collaboration, PNY and METRA aim to leverage their combined strengths to offer advanced technology solutions that meet the growing demands of the IT and AI sectors. This partnership marks a significant step forward in delivering unparalleled value and expertise to customers across the region.

By Karl Escritt, CEO of Like Digital & Partners

As someone who works in the digital world, I am all too familiar with the toll technology can take. It’s a constant issue I see with my clients and colleagues. The barrage of notifications, the pressure to reply instantly, and the endless scroll of social media information overload us all and can be detrimental to our mental health. In fact, ‘digital burnout’ is more widespread than ever, with a significant rise likely due to the pandemic years, often blurring the lines between our personal and professional lives.

What is digital burnout?

Digital burnout is the mental and emotional exhaustion caused by spending excessive time on digital devices and online activities. Fatigue, anxiety, disengagement, and apathy are all symptoms of this, but it can also prompt physical effects like chest pains and long-term sickness.

During the workday, for example, our brains are constantly bombarded as we flit between tasks across multiple devices. This creates a state of urgency and fuels our adrenaline. We’re ‘always on’, whether that’s attending Zoom calls, responding to emails and messages, or keeping up with industry news on social media. Switching off just isn’t easy in our hyper-connected age.

Searching for dopamine

Have you ever reached for your phone on autopilot, clicked on an app, and suddenly found yourself mindlessly scrolling for what feels like hours? You’re not alone. According to a McKinsey Health Institute Survey in 2023, over one-third of Gen Z respondents said they spend more than two hours each day on social media sites. However, Millennials take the crown for most active users, with 32 percent stating they post either daily or multiple times a day.  This constant social media engagement fuels our desire for dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward.

Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are designed to be dopamine factories.  “Likes,” notifications, and new content alerts all create a sense of anticipation and reward, keeping us glued to our screens.  This triggers a ‘dopamine loop’ where the initial pleasure of social media use fuels the desire for more, leading to compulsive checking.

As Anna Lembke explains in her New York Times Bestseller, ‘Dopamine Nation,’ these platforms tap into our intrinsic need to connect with other humans. But by manipulating our dopamine pathways, they can turn this healthy desire into an unhealthy dependence.

Tips to reduce your screen time

We should all set boundaries when it comes to how much time we spend on digital devices and here’s how:

1. Set boundaries

Setting some solid rules around phone usage is a practice many people could benefit from. Whether it is leaving your phone in a different room at night and using an old-fashioned alarm clock to wake you up in the morning or experimenting with setting time limits for social media use (a good starting point might be 30 minutes or an hour). Frequent breaks are the key to cutting down on the amount of mindless content you might be absorbing. 

• Curate your feed

Have a look at who you are following, who is following you and what you are seeing on your ‘Explore’ page. You can control all of these facets easily and sometimes, a clear-out of uninspiring follows is a great mental refresh. Remember you can also select a ‘close friends’ list on Instagram and choose who to share your content with.

• Elminate distractions 

While we would probably all love to switch our phones off for a few hours or even days, it’s not realistic when we rely on our devices for so much of our lives. Instead, you can use tools such as ‘Focus Mode’ on the iPhone which allows you to disable certain functionalities at different times of the day. With social media, there are a whole host of settings you can change to streamline what you see and have access to. This includes limiting direct messages from strangers, and managing notifications for likes and comments, or even consider turning them off entirely for a more drastic approach.

In the workplace

If you work from home, even if it’s only for part of the week, take a critical look at your work-life balance. If it doesn’t feel right, speak to your manager and see how you can improve the situation. Remember, reaching the point of digital burnout can be detrimental to your well-being. Mental health is extremely important, and any good manager will be happy to help you manage your time and stress levels more effectively. You can also speak to a professional such as a doctor or psychologist to discuss any concerns and check up on your overall wellbeing.

As a CEO, I believe it is incredibly important to lead by example. I want my team to enjoy their time away from work in the evenings and weekends and to be able to switch off. I strive to model this behavior in everything I do. It’s mainly about offering autonomy – empowering our employees with a degree of flexibility and ownership over their work. For instance, we offer flexible work schedules and trust employees to manage their workload effectively. We also value and support their boundaries by discussing clear ‘off-line’ hours, so they’re not expected to respond to emails after a certain time.

Across society, whether in the workplace or at home, whether for children or adults, balanced tech usage is the key to preserving mental wellbeing. Take a few minutes today to change your settings, switch off or mute notifications, and you’ll instantly feel lighter.

By Alain Sanchez, EMEA CISO, Fortinet.

Cyber risk is business risk. Anything that threatens IT threatens the company. We have become extremely dependent upon our digital assets. As a result, business leaders need to realize the magnitude of the change. The essence of what visionaries have shared with me in the last couple of months shows how much cybersecurity is now a permanent topic of discussion among chief information security officers (CISOs) and their corporate leadership.

Assessing Cyber Risks

Perhaps the most crucial role of the CISO is to rank cyber risks by order of actual impact.

Part of this assessment requires understanding the priorities inside the organization’s value chain and securing them accordingly. The second challenge is to look beyond the organization and see how outside forces may impact it. And among these external forces, we find the compliance framework. These new laws and regulations are necessary.

This very duality, good and complex, challenges many IT departments. They must ask themselves: How do we integrate legal considerations into what used to be a pure technological battlefield? The solution is to start from the top. The board of directors should always have this duality in mind. The more directors know about cyber risks and government regulations, the better. Consider the European Union’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA). This legislation is focused on the European banking and financial system.

Mitigate Risks

In the past, resilience was more of a technical concept. It was about bringing back the servers. Today, it is a legal requirement documented by an auditable plan. We have moved from a series of technical steps to a contractual re-establishment of critical services.   

Four types of considerations underpin these plans:

• • Prioritized recovery: A very delicate ranking that can only be established through a regular exchange between the board and the operations team. The board’s sign-off is crucial here. Otherwise, who would ever qualify their own activity as noncritical? However difficult to establish, this ranking is truly a fascinating exercise that brings the CISO and team to the heart of the business.
• • Defending strategies: Assessing the right combination of products, services, staffing, and processes is crucial. Less is more in this matter. After years of accumulation, cyber officers have realized the hard way that a maelstrom of products and vendors was not very efficient. The next era of security will happen via convergence, not addition.
• • Offer options: This is about providing information and an array of solutions in which, ultimately, the board makes the call. It is part of the CISO’s job to offer scenarios as a series of documented steps: investment 1, timeline 1, benefits 1, and risk 1. Then, the CISO can suggest a second and a third sequence of the above. Choosing how to proceed is the board’s job. This way, the CISO becomes an empowered execution lever for a consensual decision instead of being pinpointed as the only one to blame for the results.
• • Executive leadership: The CISO needs to report directly to the CEO, otherwise the job is a “widow maker.” The consequences of unclear or diluted support go beyond the discomfort of the position; the survival of the company is at stake. In 2024 and beyond, submitting cybersecurity to any other consideration than the company strategy is a major governance mistake. Like the Titanic shipbuilders who traded rescue boats for rooms on the sundeck.

Cybersecurity is not only about avoiding icebergs. It is a holistic approach that embraces all the active and passive security dimensions into one integrated platform. Holistic here does not mean monopolistic. Legacy, old-school, best-of-breed, and point solutions are facts of life. However, the number of technologies, vendors, processes, and the magnitude of digital transformations call for simplification. Too often, this maelstrom turns into major incidents that operate as wake-up calls. Then the question is not about the 1 million dollars we did not spend, but about the 100 million dollars we just lost.