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JLL appoints Mikhail Jaura to head Asia Pacific research. Mon, 7th Sep 2026 (Today) JLL has appointed Mikhail Jaura Head of Data Centre Research for Asia Pacific. He will be based in Hong Kong. Jaura joins the property and investment services firm from IDC, where he led the Asia Pacific data centre research practice as Senior Research Analyst. In his new role, he will oversee research strategy across mature and emerging data centre markets in the region and work with operators, cloud providers, telecommunications groups, investors, government bodies and industry associations. The appointment comes as data centre investment continues to expand across Asia Pacific, driven by broader digital adoption, cloud computing growth and rising artificial intelligence workloads. JLL describes the global sector as being in the middle of a USD $3 trillion infrastructure investment cycle. According to JLL's market outlook and mid-year updates, global data centre capacity is projected to rise from 103 GW to 200 GW by 2030. That would represent a compound annual growth rate of 14% over the period, as hyperscale cloud services and AI deployment increase demand for new capacity. Jaura's remit includes developing research initiatives across the region and leading analysts and associates across business lines and markets. He will also help deepen JLL's data centre market intelligence offering as competition for capital and sites intensifies across Asia Pacific. Before joining JLL, Jaura worked on custom consulting assignments, advisory services and regional business development at IDC. He also launched IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Datacenter Facilities Tracker, which benchmarks hyperscale, colocation and enterprise footprints globally across capacity, emissions and non-IT capital expenditure. He has also authored white papers, case studies and market reports focused on deployment strategies for hyperscalers, colocation operators and original equipment manufacturers. JLL said that experience would support its research work with clients navigating a market shaped by rapid infrastructure expansion and shifting technical requirements. Regional focus Asia Pacific has become one of the most closely watched regions for data centre development, with activity spanning established hubs and newer markets competing for investment. Market participants are balancing demand growth against land constraints, power availability, planning hurdles and sustainability requirements. That has made research and advisory work more important for investors, developers and occupiers deciding where to deploy capital. The region includes some of the world's busiest cloud and colocation markets, while also offering newer locations where operators are seeking room to expand. Andrew Batson, Global Head of Data Centre Research & Strategy at JLL, linked the hire to that backdrop. "The Asia Pacific region continues to attract significant investment in data center infrastructure, driven by robust digital adoption, expanding cloud services, and growing AI workloads," he said. "In this diverse region, our clients demand world-class research to navigate this complex and rapidly evolving space. Mikhail brings deep sector expertise and a proven track record of delivering actionable intelligence to the industry's leading players." JLL is one of several real estate and advisory firms building specialist data centre teams as the asset class attracts more institutional capital. Data centres have moved further into the mainstream of commercial property and infrastructure investment as cloud providers and AI-related demand reshape requirements for scale, location and energy access. Jaura will also help build and maintain relationships with a broad set of industry stakeholders while guiding research teams across geographies. That cross-regional role reflects the fragmented nature of the Asia Pacific market, where regulatory structures, utility systems and customer demand differ widely by country. Market pressure Operators across the region are also under pressure to address emissions, efficiency and power sourcing as they add new facilities. Those issues have become more prominent as customers seek larger deployments and governments sharpen scrutiny of energy-intensive digital infrastructure. Jaura pointed to those changes in comments on his appointment. "The data center sector in Asia Pacific is at an inflection point, with AI workloads and sustainability imperatives reshaping infrastructure requirements across the region," he said. "I'm excited to join JLL at this pivotal moment and look forward to building on the firm's strong foundation to deliver the insights and analysis that will help clients make informed decisions in this dynamic market."

NSFOCUS named to the 2026 IDC China AI Top 50. On August 18, the "2026 IDC China Artificial Intelligence and Data Summit," hosted by IDC, was grandly held in Beijing, bringing together numerous industry elites and technology leaders. With its solid technical foundation and mature, proven industry solutions in AI security, NSFOCUS was named to the "2026 IDC China AI Top 50" list, joining the ranks of China's leading AI enterprises. Dr. Ye Xiaohu, CTO of NSFOCUS, was invited to attend the summit and the award ceremony. The IDC China AI Top 50 is an authoritative ranking covering the full AI industry chain. Combining quantitative and qualitative evaluation across dimensions such as R&D investment, proprietary technology, real-world deployment, and industry value, it identifies AI companies in China with genuine innovation capability and the ability to serve customers at scale. The list has become a key benchmark for measuring a company's overall AI strength. NSFOCUS's inclusion represents the industry's objective recognition of the company's strategy of "AI for security, and security for AI." Forward-looking Layout in AI and LLM Security With more than two decades of deep expertise in cybersecurity, NSFOCUS made an early foray into AI and LLM security. Building on long-term offensive and defensive research across its eight security labs, the company has accumulated a vast corpus of security attack-and-defense data and a real-world knowledge base, and independently developed the NSFGPT AI Security Capability Platform, a domain-specific SecLLM. Unlike general-purpose LLM vendors, NSFOCUS focuses on two core security needs in the AI era: upgrading traditional cyber defense with AI technology, and building a full-lifecycle security system for LLM and AI applications. In the AI-for-security field, NSFOCUS has integrated LLM and multi-agent technologies across its entire product portfolio, covering security operations, threat detection, penetration testing, and data loss prevention. Leveraging the collaborative power of AI agents, the company significantly lowers the labor cost of security operations while automating alert noise reduction, threat tracing, and incident response. These solutions have been deployed at scale across finance, energy, telecommunications, government, and enterprise sectors, tangibly helping customers improve their security response efficiency. In the AI-native security arena, NSFOCUS has built a complete protection system covering risks across the full lifecycle of large model training, deployment, and business operations. The company has introduced dedicated protection products targeting emerging AI threats such as prompt injection, training data poisoning, model leakage, and deepfakes. It has also contributed to the development of multiple national AI security standards and joined the Artificial Intelligence Security Vulnerability Governance Alliance, continuously strengthening industry-wide security governance. For years, NSFOCUS has driven AI technology iteration with real-world needs, pursuing practical innovation rather than conceptual novelty. Every AI product is refined around genuine enterprise security pain points. Being named to the IDC China AI Top 50 is both a milestone and a new starting point. Looking ahead, NSFOCUS will continue to deepen its focus in the AI security segment, continuously optimizing its security LLM and intelligent protection system, and balancing technological innovation with real-world adoption. With reliable, pragmatic AI security capabilities, the company will fortify the security foundation for the digital and intelligent transformation of industries across all sectors, upholding its long-standing mission as the "Expert Behind the Giants." Post Views: 31

RapidCents named 2026 CIO Awards Canada winner for APPIE, its PCI Level 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 Payment Infrastructure platform. By: TSG Brand Desk Last Updated: August 17, 2026 12:40:08 IST RapidCents Wins CIO Awards Canada Recognition for a Second Consecutive Year, Reinforcing Its Position as Payment Infrastructure Built for Industry-Specific Needs RapidCents Inc. is a Toronto-based payment technology company that builds customized payment infrastructure, rather than one-size-fits-all processing, for merchants across restaurants, retail, healthcare, professional services, and other verticals with distinct compliance and workflow requirements. The company has now been recognized by IDC's CIO Awards Canada program in two consecutive years, first in 2025 and again in CIO 2026, for two different technologies within its stack. Two years, two different wins - one consistent direction. IDC's CIO Awards Canada program recognizes Canadian organizations that demonstrate measurable IT innovation and business value. Being named a winner once can reflect a single strong project. Being named a winner in back-to-back years, for two different technologies, is a different kind of signal - it points to sustained engineering investment across more than one part of the business. 2025: RapidCents was recognized alongside organizations including Bell Canada, IBM, TD Bank Group, Samsung Electronics Canada, Sun Life, and Toronto Hydro for DeFiSentinel, an AI-enhanced architecture focused on security, fraud detection, and operational resilience. You Might Be Interested In 2026: RapidCents is being recognized again,CIO award winner 2026 this time for APPIE (Adaptive Payment Protocol Interoperability Engine), a patent-pending interoperability layer addressing fragmentation between POS systems, payment terminals, and processors. Two wins in two years, in two different technical domains, is the detail worth underlining: it suggests RapidCents' R&D is distributed across its stack rather than concentrated in a single flagship feature. Payment Infrastructure, not a one-size-fits-all platform. A recurring theme across RapidCents' technology choices is that it does not treat merchants as interchangeable. A restaurant taking tableside payments, a healthcare provider handling card-not-present transactions under stricter privacy expectations, and a retailer running a high-volume POS environment all have different fraud profiles, different integration needs, and different compliance obligations. RapidCents positions its infrastructure, APPIE, its smart-terminal architecture, and its fraud-prevention tools, as configurable to those differences rather than applying a single fixed workflow across every industry. That customization is only credible if the underlying infrastructure is independently verified to a high security bar. RapidCents' platform operates under PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, the highest tier of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard certification, reserved for organizations that meet the strictest requirements for handling cardholder data. The company also maintains SOC 2 Type 2 attestation, which confirms that its security, availability, and confidentiality controls are not only designed correctly but have been observed operating effectively over a sustained period, a higher bar than a point-in-time audit. What APPIE solves. Traditional payment integrations often lock merchants into specific combinations of POS systems, terminals, and processors. Adding a new processor, terminal, or software platform can require custom development, testing, and certification, creating significant switching costs. APPIE solves this by acting as an interoperability layer that translates and normalizes communication across POS and ECR environments and connects them to existing payment infrastructure. Through "APPIE on Terminal" and "APPIE on Host," RapidCents can support REST, SOAP, ISO 8583, and proprietary protocols with a more universal integration model. What RapidBridge solves. RapidBridge extends that same interoperability concept into the browser. The smart extension works inside web-based business software, recognizes customer, invoice, and payment information, and lets merchants send payment links, collect payments, push amounts to terminals, issue refunds, and track transaction status without leaving their existing workflow. If a platform is not recognized automatically, merchants can teach RapidBridge where key fields are, helping build a reusable knowledge base that improves compatibility over time. Together, APPIE and RapidBridge are designed to make RapidCents payments work across more systems with less integration effort. Fraud prevention treated as infrastructure, not an afterthought. RapidCents applies the same industry-specific logic to fraud prevention. For card-not-present transactions, including MOTO (mail order/telephone order) sales, common in healthcare and services businesses, manually keyed card numbers offer little assurance that the person entering the data is the legitimate cardholder. RapidCents instead supports secure payment links that let the cardholder complete the transaction remotely, layered with 3D Secure authentication and risk-based fraud controls. Its Chargeback Shield evaluates payment, device, customer, session, and behavioral signals before a transaction is even captured, and the company says its smart-terminal architecture extends similar controls to remote payments and refund fraud, a loss category that gets less attention than card fraud but affects merchants' bottom line just as directly. Built with AI and agentic commerce in mind. RapidCents' engineering roadmap is increasingly AI-oriented: AI-assisted fraud monitoring, real-time transaction analysis, and AI applied to merchant onboarding and AML/transaction-monitoring workflows. The company is also developing Model Context Protocol (MCP) infrastructure to make its payment capabilities accessible to AI systems and software agents, positioning its stack for agentic commerce, where autonomous software increasingly initiates and manages transactions rather than a human clicking "pay." Why this matters. Awards alone don't establish market share or revenue. The more durable signals are adoption of APPIE across POS and processor environments, verified compliance credentials like PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type 2, and a demonstrated pattern - now two years running - of shipping infrastructure-level innovation rather than surface-level features. Taken together, that's the case for treating RapidCents as a Canadian payment infrastructure company building for how different industries actually operate, not a generic processor applying the same template to every merchant. Faq. What is RapidCents? RapidCents Inc. is a Toronto-based payment technology company that builds customized payment infrastructure for merchants across different industries, rather than a single generic processing product. What did RapidCents win at CIO Awards Canada? RapidCents was recognized in 2025 for DeFiSentinel, an AI-enhanced security and fraud-detection architecture, and again in 2026 - its second consecutive year - for APPIE, its payment interoperability engine. What is APPIE? APPIE (Adaptive Payment Protocol Interoperability Engine) is RapidCents' patent-pending technology that lets POS systems, payment terminals, and processors interoperate through a single integration instead of requiring a separate integration for every combination. Is RapidCents PCI and SOC 2 compliant? RapidCents operates under PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, the highest level of card-data security certification, and maintains SOC 2 Type 2 attestation for its security and operational controls. Does RapidCents offer industry-specific payment solutions? Yes. RapidCents positions its infrastructure - including APPIE, its smart-terminal architecture, and its fraud-prevention tools - as configurable to the needs of specific industries such as restaurants, retail, and healthcare, rather than a one-size-fits-all product.