Big Data Management

Expansion of KPMG Master of Accounting with Data and Analytics Program will strengthen firm's diversity efforts and develop next generation auditors

KPMG | July 01, 2022 | Read time : 3 min

KPMG
KPMG LLP, the U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm, announced it is expanding its KPMG Master of Accounting with Data and Analytics (MADA) Program to drive practical use of the latest analytics technology and meet its vision of making KPMG the employer of choice where underrepresented talent can build thriving careers.

The award-winning, collaborative, first-of-its-kind program prepares students to hit the ground running in today's data age by providing specialized skills for practical use of the latest analytics technology needed in the current data-driven accounting environment.

KPMG is adding seven universities to the MADA program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The firm will provide more than $7 million in scholarship funding over three years to the universities participating in the MADA program to encourage underrepresented individuals to pursue a graduate education.

This expansion aligns with the firm's Accelerate 2025 commitments and is one of several ways KPMG is creating pathways for underrepresented future leaders to build their careers in the profession and with KPMG as an employer of choice. The firm will continue to explore relationships with Hispanic Serving Institutions and Tribal Colleges and Universities, along with other universities to invest in a diverse, sustainable pipeline.

"Expanding the master's program will help close the gap between academic preparation and accounting career readiness," said Scott Flynn, KPMG Vice Chair – Audit. "Importantly, our HBCU-focused investments will support underrepresented individuals and diversify our profession, better enabling us to deliver quality and innovation long-term."

The firm has deepened its relationships with HBCUs. In FY21, hires from HBCUs have increased more than 40% over the previous year. At the end of the 2020-2021 school year, there was a 13% increase in three-year retention rates of professionals from HBCUs and a 19% increase in the five-year retention rate of the firm's HBCU alumni.

The universities newly added to the program are:
  • Alabama State University's Percy J. Vaugh, Jr. College of Business Administration (HBCU)
  • Bentley University's McCallum Graduate School of Business
  • Florida International University College of Business
  • DePaul University Kellstadt Graduate School of Business
  • Howard University School of Business (HBCU)
  • North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (HBCU)
  • Prairie View A&M University College of Business (HBCU)

Additionally, the firm plans to continue to collaborate with universities that have been central to the success of the MADA program for the past several years.

"We have more than 300 graduates of our Master of Accounting with Data and Analytics Program who are using their expertise to bring our clients greater insight and productivity in how we ingest and analyze data," said Becky Sproul, Talent and Culture Leader – Audit. "For audit professionals, comfort with both D&A and automation technologies is a core capability that we invest in through our MADA Program."

Since its launch in 2017, the KPMG MADA Program has been a collaborative effort with pioneering business schools across the United States. By continuing the curriculum-focused initiatives, KPMG aims to set the tone for academic innovation and influence the broader academic community to pursue an advanced curriculum that includes D&A and technology.

About KPMG LLP
KPMG LLP is the U.S. firm of the KPMG global organization of independent professional services firms providing audit, tax and advisory services. The KPMG global organization operates in 144 countries and territories and has more than 236,000 people working in member firms around the world. Each KPMG firm is a legally distinct and separate entity and describes itself as such. KPMG International Limited is a private English company limited by guarantee. KPMG International Limited and its related entities do not provide services to clients.

Spotlight

User Entity and Behavior Analytics (UEBA) is a cybersecurity technology and approach that focuses on analyzing the behavior of users and entities (such as devices, applications, and systems) within an organization's IT environment. By using advanced data analytics, machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence, UEBA aims to detect and prevent cyber threats by identifying anomalies, deviations, or patterns in user and entity activities that might indicate potential security risks.


Other News
Big Data Management

Congruity360 Delivers Intelligent Data Migrations and Storage Tiering

PR Newswire | September 27, 2023

Congruity360, a leading unstructured data management and risk mitigation provider, announces the addition of data mobility in Enterprise Insights. As unstructured data grows at the annual rate of 55% to 65% and accounts for more than 80% of all enterprise data, businesses must find a way to identify, classify and move data intelligently and automatically during its lifecycle. As enterprises grow, their valuable data must mature with their business. This may require a journey to the cloud, SLA changes which optimize storage costs, classification to mitigate risk, and moving the right data to additional key AI platform initiatives. A simple, scalable, high-performance data classification engine, Enterprise Insights delivers next-generation data lifecycle management for storage optimization, security and risk optimization, and IT business optimization. Enterprise Insights Approach to Successful Data Optimization: Identify – Securely analyze PBs of unstructured data across on premises (NAS & object) and cloud (files/objects & SaaS) sources by harnessing the power of the platform's rapid insights and auto-discover technologies, which can reduce data identification times by 1,000%. Classify – Quickly identify key client data attributes for cost savings, risk mitigation, and business impact with simple to consume dashboards and drill down capabilities. Review – Confidently create and take actions by leveraging the comprehensive search engine to quickly find and preview data for movement without ever leaving the platform. Remediate – Seamlessly take action (migrate and tier) on classified data to ensure it's properly protected, optimally stored, and most effectively serving the business. Enterprise Insights offers three use case-driven insight analysis modules: Storage and Migration Optimization – Insights into over 35 file data attributes including systems' aged, stale, obsolete, redundant, trivial, and types of systems files. Business Optimization – Insight into and classification by business units' or cost centers' aged, stale, obsolete, redundant, trivial, and types of files. Data Security and Risk Optimization – Insights into files containing PII and SPII, financial, legal, security, and risk data, as well as open shares and other network & storage security vulnerabilities. By leveraging Enterprise Insights, clients can classify data for simple and secure migration both on premise and in the cloud. Equally important is Insights data tiering capabilities, enabling users to match data storage costs to data usage. Powered by the Classify360 Platform, Enterprise Insights' secure hybrid approach to data analysis scales capabilities to exabyte levels at unmatched speed. Enterprise Insights is the industry's most powerful weapon to tackle the costs, time, and complexity of cloud migration projects, backup modernization, storage tiering, hardware refresh, and security posture management. By providing users with dashboards highlighting their existing storage costs and risks, Enterprise Insights frees clients from hidden, legacy, CapEx and OpEx expenditures, performance, and scalability bottlenecks while discovering and acting on sensitive and risk data. Unstructured data insanity is treating all data equally with zero insights into its business impact, said Brian Davidson, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Partner of Congruity360. Enterprise Insights is the first step in implementing optimized data lifecycle management. With historically high data growth and new business uses for unstructured data, it is essential to attack the costs and risks inherent in unmanaged data. Our customers have realized 7-10x returns on their data lifecycle management implementations while reducing risk in an auditable compliance framework. As AI continues to gain steam, don't overpay by moving useless data to your expensive AI platforms. The Classify360 Platform is comprehensive, simple to implement, scale, and operate. Businesses leverage the Classify360 Platform for unstructured data discovery, classification, business workflows, remediation actions, and insightful reporting. Congruity360 continues to tackle additional data governance challenges through innovations to the Classify360 Platform to continue delivering revolutionary data governance and classification, at scale, to the enterprise world. ABOUT CONGRUITY360 Congruity360 delivers the only data life cycle management solution built on a foundation of classification, by expert data storage engineers alongside expert data privacy consultants. The Classify360 Platform is easy to implement, requires no outside consultants, and quickly analyzes your data at the petabyte scale in days, not weeks or months.

Read More

Big Data Management

Ocient's Report Reveals Surge in Hyperscale Data's Impact on Firms

Ocient | September 25, 2023

Ocient, a renowned hyperscale data analytics platform, has recently announced the release of its second annual industry report, titled "Beyond Big Data: Hyperscale Takes Flight." The 2023 report, which is the result of a survey conducted among 500 data and IT leaders responsible for managing data workloads exceeding 150 terabytes, sheds light on the escalating significance of hyperscale data management within enterprises. It also underscores the critical requisites of time, talent, and cutting-edge technology necessary for the effective harnessing of data at scale. Building on the foundation of Ocient's inaugural Beyond Big Data survey, the 2023 report delves into the minds of IT decision-makers, seeking to unravel the challenges, investment priorities, and future prospects occupying the forefront of their agendas for 2023 and beyond. The report offers valuable year-over-year comparisons, drawing on trends identified in 2022 while also presenting fresh, timely insights that mirror the immediate concerns of enterprise leaders in the United States. Among the pivotal insights featured in this year's report are the following: Immediate Emphasis on Data Quality: Organizations committed to leveraging their hyperscale data for critical business decisions are placing paramount importance on ensuring the highest data quality standards. Data Workload Growth as a Driving Force: Data and IT leaders are increasingly recognizing data warehousing and analytics as pivotal elements of their IT strategies, a sentiment vividly reflected in their budget allocations. AI Readiness at the Forefront: Leaders are eager participants in the AI revolution, yet they grapple with concerns surrounding security, accuracy, and trust. Innovation Hindered by Talent and Technology Gaps: Many leaders continue to struggle with the challenges of optimizing their toolsets and scaling their teams swiftly enough to meet the demands posed by hyperscale data volumes. Stephen Catanzano, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, commented: It's clear enterprises are investing in data analytics and warehousing, especially given their costs are being driven up so high with older systems that can't handle the data that's being pushed to them. [Source – Business Wire] Chris Gladwin, Co-Founder and CEO of Ocient, stated that data was not slowing down, and he emphasized that the results of the 2023 Beyond Big Data report confirmed the significance of hyperscale data workloads for enterprises across various industries. He also noted that data volumes were on the rise, as was the importance of comprehending one's data. Nevertheless, the challenges related to data quality, the proliferation of tools, and staffing constraints persisted and were impeding progress in the industry. Furthermore, Gladwin mentioned that the frontier beyond big data had arrived and that Ocient's annual report illustrated the challenges and opportunities that were shaping the enterprise data strategies of the future. About Ocient Ocient is a pioneering hyperscale data analytics solutions company dedicated to empowering organizations to unlock substantial value through the analysis of trillions of data records, achieving performance levels and cost efficiencies previously deemed unattainable. The company is entrusted by leading organizations around the globe to leverage the expertise of its industry professionals in crafting and implementing sophisticated solutions. These solutions not only enable the rapid exploration of new revenue avenues but also streamline operational processes and enhance security measures, all while managing five to 10 times more data and significantly reducing storage requirements by up to 80%.

Read More

Business Intelligence

Dremio Launches Next-gen Reflections Redefining SQL Query Acceleration

Dremio | September 15, 2023

Dremio, a renowned easy and open data lakehouse solution provider, has recently introduced its next-gen Reflections technology, marking a transformative milestone in SQL query acceleration. Dremio Reflections facilitate sub-second analytics performance across an organization's entire data ecosystem, irrespective of data location. This groundbreaking technology is redefining data access and analysis, ensuring that valuable insights are derived efficiently and swiftly, all while reducing costs to merely one-third of a typical cloud data warehouse. Reflections represent Dremio's innovative SQL query acceleration technology. Queries that leverage Reflections exhibit performance gains ranging from 10 to 100 times faster than their non-accelerated counterparts. This latest release introduces the Dremio Reflection Recommender, a pioneering feature that empowers users to accelerate Business Intelligence workloads in a matter of seconds. The Reflection Recommender automatically evaluates an organization's SQL queries and generates recommended Reflections to accelerate them. Tomer Shiran, founder of Dremio, commented, Dremio Reflections accelerate SQL queries by orders of magnitude, eliminating the need for BI extracts/imports and enabling companies to run their most mission-critical BI workloads directly on a lakehouse. With automatic recommendations and next-generation incremental updates, we've made it even easier for organizations to take advantage of this innovative technology. [Source: Business Wire] Reflection Recommender eliminates the need for labor-intensive manual data and workload analysis, making the process of obtaining the fastest and most intelligent query results effortless, requiring only a few simple actions. The user-friendly nature of the Reflection Recommender puts advanced query acceleration capabilities within the reach of all users, significantly saving both time and expenses. Dremio has also refined the process of refreshing Reflections to further bolster query performance and drive cost efficiencies. It now intelligently refreshes Reflections on Apache Iceberg tables, promptly capturing incremental data changes. This innovative approach obviates the requirement for complete data refreshes, resulting in speedier updates and reduced compute expenses. Dremio Reflections eliminates the need for data teams to export data from the data lakehouse into BI extracts or imports for analytical reasons and overcomes performance bottlenecks for BI dashboards and reports. In addition, Reflections negate the necessity of creating precomputed tables within the data lake or data warehouse to achieve sub-second performance for BI workloads, reducing the workload and complexity for data teams. About Dremio Dremio is a leading, easy and open data lakehouse solution provider, offering organizations the versatility of self-service analytics coupled with the functionality of a data warehouse and the flexibility of a data lake. Dremio's platform empowers users to harness the lightning-fast SQL query service alongside various processing engines, all on the same dataset. The company distinguishes itself through a pioneering data-as-code methodology akin to Git, which facilitates data experimentation, version control, and governance. This innovative approach enhances agility and empowers organizations to explore and manage their data resources with unprecedented efficiency. Furthermore, Dremio offers a fully managed service that expedites organizations' entry into analytics, allowing them to commence their data-driven journey within minutes.

Read More

Big Data Management

iMerit Unveils Innovative Solution for Radiology AI Data Challenges

iMerit | September 07, 2023

iMerit, a prominent player in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) data solutions, has unveiled its latest offering, the Radiology Annotation Product Suite. This innovative suite is designed to cater to the needs of medical AI developers by providing advanced automation, annotation, and analytics capabilities. This new product suite is firmly rooted in iMerit's Ango Hub platform, an end-to-end enterprise-grade technology platform that is specifically tailored to deliver top-notch data annotation tools for AI development teams. Within this suite, a comprehensive range of solutions awaits, including data sourcing, workflow design, cutting-edge data annotation tools, and the invaluable input of human experts, all seamlessly integrated into a single platform. This unique fusion of iMerit's technological prowess and radiology expertise ensures a smooth journey from training data all the way to regulatory benchmarking. A significant hurdle in radiology AI applications is the demand for specialized tools and insights from domain experts to ensure the necessary accuracy and precision in training data. For developers, the Radiology Annotation Product Suite offers a one-stop solution, combining automation, annotation tools, and analytics within a single platform, facilitating the creation of precise data pipelines essential for quick scaling radiology AI solutions into production. Sina Bari MD, Senior Director of Medical AI at iMerit, explained that their suite aims to combine human expertise, data management, and automation in a single solution. Notable features include Customized workflows designed for Radiologists with consensus and multistep capabilities. Diagnostic-level annotation accuracy with multiplanar functionality and 3D volume rendering. Efficient annotation facilitated by smart automation tools and model integration. Stringent data security and regulatory compliance, including CFR 21 Part 11, HIPAA, and SOC2. This solution seamlessly integrates U.S. and offshore experts, including board-certified radiologists, all within a highly secure end-to-end platform, ensuring cost-effective scaling of annotation efforts. Radha Basu, Founder and CEO of iMerit, emphasized the importance of their work, stating that they understand the challenges of developing AI applications and that their suite was built to scale data annotation efforts with high quality, accuracy, and speed. About iMerit iMerit is a prominent AI data solutions company specializing in data services such as dataset creation, image tagging, sentiment analysis, data verification, and content aggregation. It serves Fortune 500 enterprises in various industries and have a global presence, with headquarters in the United States and teams in India, the US, Bhutan, and Europe. iMerit's investors include Omidyar Network, Dell.org, Khosla Ventures, and British International Investment.

Read More

Spotlight

User Entity and Behavior Analytics (UEBA) is a cybersecurity technology and approach that focuses on analyzing the behavior of users and entities (such as devices, applications, and systems) within an organization's IT environment. By using advanced data analytics, machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence, UEBA aims to detect and prevent cyber threats by identifying anomalies, deviations, or patterns in user and entity activities that might indicate potential security risks.

Resources