Tech News
STARKEY MARKS ‘BETTER HEARING MONTH’ WITH CALL FOR PROACTIVE HEARING CARE ACROSS MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA
As the world observes Better Hearing Month this May, Starkey Middle East and Africa is reinforcing a message that is both urgent and deeply personal: hearing loss is one of the fastest-growing health challenges of our time, and early action is the single most important step anyone can take to protect it. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1.5 billion people worldwide currently live with some degree of hearing loss, of whom over 430 million have disabling hearing loss requiring rehabilitation. By 2050, that number is projected to rise to 2.5 billion, with over 700 million experiencing disabling levels. Unaddressed hearing loss already costs the global economy nearly US$1 trillion annually in lost productivity, healthcare costs, and reduced quality of life Giscard Bechara, Director, Starkey Middle East and Africa, said,
Better Hearing month is a moment to pause and ask a simple question – when was the last time you had your hearing checked? Most of us monitor our eyes, our teeth, our blood pressure. But hearing, which is fundamental to how we connect with the people and the world around us, is consistently overlooked. At Starkey, we believe hearing care should be part of every adult’s routine health check, not something people only think about when the damage is already done.
The challenge is particularly acute in the Middle East and Africa, where approximately 30 million people are affected by hearing loss and the prevalence stands at around 7.2% of the population. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 40 million people live with hearing loss, and that figure is projected to reach 97 million by 2050. The WHO estimates that hearing aid provision in low- and middle-income countries covers just 3% of actual need.
The hidden cost of untreated hearing loss. The consequences of untreated hearing loss extend far beyond difficulty following conversations. A landmark 2024 update of The Lancet Commission on Dementia identified hearing loss as the single largest modifiable risk factor for dementia from mid-life, reinforcing a growing body of evidence linking untreated hearing loss to accelerated cognitive decline. A 2026 study published in Cell Stem Cell further established a causal relationship between hearing loss and cognitive decline, demonstrating through controlled laboratory research that auditory deprivation directly affects neurological function.
A generation at risk
The WHO estimates that over 1.1 billion young people aged 12 to 35 are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss due to unsafe listening practices, including prolonged use of earphones and headphones at high volumes and attendance at loud entertainment venues. Research published in BMJ Global Health found that approximately 24% of young people using personal listening devices and 48% attending loud venues regularly exceed safe sound exposure levels.
In 2025, the WHO and ITU (International Telecommunication Union) jointly released a new global standard for safe listening in video gameplay and esports, reflecting rising concern that gaming environments represent an additional, underappreciated source of hearing damage, particularly among younger demographics.
“In our region, we have a young, connected population that spends hours every day with earphones in, often at volumes that would surprise them if measured. Add to that the ambient noise of our rapidly growing cities, loud social gatherings, and a cultural tendency to see hearing loss as something that only affects older people, and you have the conditions for a public health challenge that is building quietly but relentlessly,” said Giscard.
How modern technology is changing the hearing care conversation
For those already living with hearing loss, Starkey’s latest innovation, Omega AI, launched in October 2025 and now available across the Middle East and Africa, represents a significant leap forward. The platform’s DNN 360 Directionality system, the world’s first deep neural network-powered directional hearing system, continuously analyses the wearer’s sound environment and adapts in real time, delivering up to 28% improved speech intelligibility and up to an 8 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio compared to previous Starkey technology.
Omega AI also introduces industry-first health and wellness features through the My Starkey companion app, including automatic respiratory rate monitoring, guided balance exercises, fall detection with caregiver alerts, and TeleHear AI, a generative AI-powered tool that helps users troubleshoot hearing issues in real time with 93% predictive accuracy.
“This month, we encourage everyone in our region to take one meaningful step toward better hearing. Book a hearing evaluation. Talk to your children about safe listening. Ask your employer about noise exposure in the workplace. These are small actions that can have a profound impact on long-term health, relationships, and quality of life,” concluded Giscard.
Tech News
Redington Brings 400 Technology Leaders to Singapore as a Technology Ecosystem Orchestrator
Redington Limited, a technology ecosystem orchestrator, today announced Global NEXT 2026, its flagship, invitation-only leadership summit, taking place from 2–4 September 2026 in Singapore.
The three-day forum will bring together approximately 400 leaders representing global technology companies, channel partners, enterprise customers, independent software vendors, innovators and policymakers from across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
More than a technology conference, Global NEXT is designed as a working ecosystem-connecting the organisations creating breakthrough technologies with the partners who can localise and implement them, the enterprises seeking measurable outcomes, and the leaders shaping the future of high-growth markets.
The summit comes at a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence. Enterprises, SMBs and Public Sector are moving beyond experimentation and asking a more consequential question: how can AI be deployed securely, governed responsibly and scaled to deliver meaningful business, economic and societal impact?
At the centre of the programme will be the Global NEXT AI Summit, addressing sovereign AI, national technology infrastructure, data governance, cybersecurity, enterprise adoption and the partnerships required to build locally relevant technology capabilities at scale.
From Fragmented Innovation to Orchestrated Outcomes
The next phase of AI adoption will require much more than access to individual technologies. Infrastructure, cloud, data, cybersecurity, applications, skills, services, financing and implementation capabilities must work together around clearly defined outcomes.
Redington’s role as a Technology Ecosystem Orchestrator is to make those connections work-linking global innovation with local market intelligence, specialised capabilities, partner reach and execution across more than 40 markets.
V.S. Hariharan, Managing Director and Group CEO, Redington Limited, said:
“The next chapter of technology will not be shaped by one product, one platform or one company. It will be built by ecosystems.
“Customers need infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, software, data, skills and specialised partners to come together around the outcomes they want to achieve. Redington’s role is to orchestrate these capabilities-reducing complexity, connecting global innovation with local execution and creating a clearer path from possibility to adoption.
“This is especially important across high-growth markets, where ambition is immense but access to technology, capabilities and skills can remain fragmented. Global NEXT brings the ecosystem together to turn that ambition into secure, scalable and measurable progress.”
Participants will experience this orchestration model through technology demonstrations, enterprise use cases, leadership exchanges and visits to centres of excellence in Singapore, including the Redington AI Launchpad.
The programme will also showcase emerging technology companies and specialist ISVs across AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data infrastructure and enterprise applications. Redington’s wider ecosystem-including its AI Exchange, digital platforms, skilling capabilities and partner enablement programmes-will demonstrate how innovation can be discovered, evaluated, localised and taken to market more rapidly.
Creating New Pathways to Growth
For global technology companies, Global NEXT provides direct access to enterprise priorities, partner capability and growth opportunities across diverse markets.
For partners and ISVs, it creates pathways to new technologies, skills, use cases, customers and routes to market.
For enterprises and governments, it brings together an ecosystem through which complex technologies can be evaluated, secured, financed, implemented and scaled.
Puneet Chadha, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Redington Limited, said:
“Global NEXT is where global innovation meets local ambition. It puts the people shaping technology, building capability and solving real-world problems in the same room.
“The measure of this platform will not simply be the conversations it hosts, but the partnerships it starts, the use cases it advances and the opportunities it unlocks. We want participants to leave Singapore with more than inspiration-with new connections, actionable possibilities and a clearer path to what comes next.”
The Global NEXT programme will combine strategic conversations with practical engagement, including technology demonstrations, enterprise success stories, ecosystem panels, leadership exchanges and visits to technology centres of excellence.
Discussions will span artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, cybersecurity, software-led business models, responsible technology adoption and the evolution of routes to market. Together, these sessions will explore how the technology industry can move from selling individual solutions to orchestrating integrated outcomes.
With operations across more than 40 markets, relationships with 450+ technology brands and a network of over 70,000 channel partners, Redington sits at the intersection of global technology innovation and local execution.
Through Global NEXT 2026, Redington aims to strengthen that intersection-creating a platform where technology providers, partners, innovators, enterprises and policymakers can collectively shape the next phase of technology adoption across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Tech News
NETSCOUT EXTENDS ADAPTIVE DDOS DEFENSE PROTECTION TO ADDRESS THE RISING BUSINESS COST OF WEAPONIZED BROADBAND AND IOT DEVICES
NETSCOUT® (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of observability, AIOps, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, today announced an extension of its Adaptive DDoS Protection (ADP) solution enabling service providers to automatically detect and mitigate outbound DDoS attack traffic. By extending protection from the attack target towards its source, NETSCOUT helps operators prevent compromised subscriber devices from disrupting their own networks, consuming costly capacity and attacking customers and organizations across the internet.
Consumer broadband routers, cameras and other IoT devices are increasingly being weaponized by Turbo-Mirai class botnets capable of generating multi-terabit attacks. These outbound attacks have already caused costly service outages, reputational damage and customer loss, and damage to peering relationships risking a large increase in transit costs at service providers around the world. By detecting and mitigating malicious traffic generated by compromised device populations before it leaves their networks, service providers can reduce abuse complaints and infrastructure costs while protecting their own networks and services and helping lower subscriber churn and regulatory risk.
“The combination of higher-speed broadband connectivity and vulnerable IoT devices has been weaponized by a new class of massive DDoS botnets,” said Patrick Donegan, founder and principal analyst, HardenStance. “Source-side mitigation, or attack suppression as it’s sometimes known, is a critical part of the equation. NETSCOUT’s approach, backed by its ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) and ASERT analysts, gives service providers the tools they need to detect and stop attacks before they have an impact, protecting their customers and the broader internet from the large-scale DDoS attacks we have seen.”
Using AI-powered threat intelligence and automated detection and mitigation, NETSCOUT’s ADP solution, an addition to its Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System:
- Automatically detects and mitigates ever evolving attacks through dynamic detection, intelligent redirection and adaptive mitigation.
- Extends these capabilities to outbound traffic, combining enhanced, customized detection with comprehensive threat intelligence tailored for each ISP.
- Uses NETSCOUT’s proprietary AI/ML-powered DDoS detection to analyze massive volumes of outbound internet traffic to uncover attacks designed to hide within legitimate flows.
- Draws on unique global real-time intelligence of DDoS activity covering approximately half of all internet traffic to rapidly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and pinpoint the responsible, compromised devices.
“We are extending DDoS defense from the target to the source,” stated Darren Anstee, CTO, Security, NETSCOUT. “By using our internet-scale visibility to derive localized threat intelligence for our customers, NETSCOUT can identify and precisely suppress attacks at their origin, before they cause problems locally or at their target. This capability gives our customers a new level of comprehensive defense across their peering, transit, cloud and customer edges.”
This expansion of capabilities demonstrates how NETSCOUT is applying its global threat visibility and proven ADP solution to meet emerging service provider challenges. By extending an established inbound DDoS workflow to outbound and cross-bound threats, NETSCOUT enables operators to improve network-resilience, cost-controls and revenue protection through its proven Arbor Sightline and Arbor TMS solutions.
Tech News
Illumio Named Leader and Customer Favorite in Forrester Wave for Microsegmentation
Illumio Inc., the breach containment company, today announced it has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026 report. Illumio received the highest scores among all evaluated vendors in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories and was named a “Customer Favorite” for its outstanding customer feedback among evaluated vendors. According to the report, “Repeat customers indicate their satisfaction with the consistently high quality of technical support, regardless of the personnel assigned to their account.”
The report evaluated 10 microsegmentation providers against a comprehensive set of criteria covering product capabilities, strategy, innovation, and customer experience. Illumio received the highest scores possible in 10 evaluation criteria, including areas related to visualization, host-based enforcement, product security, vision, and innovation. According to the report, “Illumio excels at essential microsegmentation functions.”
“Illumio was founded on a simple belief: breaches are inevitable, but cyber disasters are not. We have been singularly focused on one objective — reducing lateral movement and attack surface, and increasing resilience in every organization,” said Andrew Rubin, CEO and Founder of Illumio. “Being named both a Leader and a Customer Favorite reflects to us the strength of our technology, vision, and even more importantly our ability to deliver real outcomes and risk reduction, which is the foundation of the trust our customers place in us every day. In the model threat world we are all now entering, defense must be coupled with resilience. Recovery is the new defense — and the new cyber.”
According to the Forrester Research report, “Organizations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio.” The report also recognized Illumio for:
- “Illumio has articulated a vision for microsegmentation as a core element of security operations.”
- “Illumio is bridging the gap between its traditional users and other parts of the security organization by delivering agents mapped to personas from other teams.”
- “Its UI provides easy access to information that supports both access control and incident response use cases.”
The recognition follows continued innovation across the Illumio Platform, including Network Posture, which helps organizations understand security posture based on real-world traffic and prioritize risk reduction efforts. These capabilities support the growing need for visibility, cyber resilience, and regulatory readiness across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Designed for operational simplicity, the Illumio Platform combines Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation to help organizations identify, assess, and contain cyber risk across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Security teams can uncover high-risk exposures, visualize potential attack paths, and implement segmentation policies from a single platform to contain threats and improve cyber resilience.
The platform is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations, including BNP Paribas, eBay, and Microsoft, the latter of which has deployed Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation across its entire corporate IT environment. Igor Tsyganskiy, Global CISO of Microsoft, said: “When we needed to bring these capabilities into Microsoft, Illumio was the only segmentation solution that would work at the scale of Microsoft and deliver in our environment.”
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