Computer News Middle East October 2015

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35 years in 60 minutes

Editorial Group Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevan.thankappan@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5678

This year marks the 35th anniversary of GITEX Technology Week, and my tenth attending the show. During this time, I have had the privilege of watching one of our region’s biggest shows grow to become one of the leading IT exhibitions in the world.

In this age where most prominent tech trade shows, barring the exception of CES and CeBIT have become antiquated and subsequently disappeared, GITEX continues to grow bigger every year and stay in-touch with the IT community. Amidst lingering uncertainties surrounding the economy that have kept IT spending down both on enterprise and vendor sides, GITEX is expected to attract around 140,000 ICT professionals and 3,500 companies from 55 countries this year, showcasing the future of Internet of Things solutions.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how much business is done at trade shows as the ubiquity of the Internet means buyers no longer feel the need to attend events in-person to find out what’s on offer. No matter how you feel about trade shows, what’s for sure is that shows Some of you might such as GITEX offer a platform for people to build consider GITEX relationships, discuss trends and exchange ideas, and too big and glitzy to see where vendors are going with their products. to be worth your Some of you might consider GITEX too big and time. But, unlike glitzy to be worth your time. But, unlike other shows other shows, it that have become sprawling, unfocused events that has stuck to the don’t meet the expectations of buyers and sellers, basics to emerge GITEX has stuck to its basics to emerge as a gathering as a gathering that focuses on enterprise IT buyers and draws a that focuses on better class of visitors. enterprise IT buyers As ever, I am looking forward to this year’s and draws a better show, to find out what the burgeoning ICT class of visitors. industry has to offer this time. With the vast amount of news generated at the event, our team of editors painstakingly scours and collects all the latest developments for ’60 Minutes,’ our hourly GITEX publication.

Grab a copy to save yourselves the bother of sorting through the scores of marketing messages on offer. Enjoy the show.

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Jeevan Thankappan Group Editor

Editor Annie Bricker annie.bricker@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 1643 Deputy Editor James Dartnell james.dartnell@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5684 Online Editor Adelle Geronimo adelle.geronimo@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5683 ADVERTISING Commercial Director Chris Stevenson chris.stevenson@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5674 Group Sales Director Kausar Syed kausar.syed@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 1647 Sales Manager Merle Carrasco merle.carrasco@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5676 Circulation Circulation Manager Rajeesh M rajeesh.nair@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5682 Production and Design Production Manager James P Tharian james.tharian@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5673 Designers Analou Balbero analou.balbero@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 375 5680 Neha Kalvani neha.kalvani@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 3751644 DIGITAL SERVICES Web Developer Jefferson de Joya Abbas Madh Photographer Charls Thomas Maksym Poriechkin webmaster@cpimediagroup.com +971 4 440 9100 Published by

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Our events

EDITORIAL

Hear me now “Can you hear me now?” Infamous former US intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, used these words as his first tweet this month as he made his debut on the social media site. Snowden, in Russia for the foreseeable future after being granted a three-year residence permit, followed the NSA’s Twitter handle, and then quipped with renowned scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. The move was inarguably bold, and has made headlines throughout the world.

I’ll not opine on Snowden and the NSA here, but instead, address the medium. Snowden left the US in 2013, and although he has appeared in numerous conferences via video-link since his departure, his social media presence has been all but non-existent, and for good reason. If you are trying to hide, social media presence is the first thing to be axed.

However, if you are trying to get someone’s attention, social media is invaluable. Recently, I had a poor experience with a retailer, and upon recounting the story to my peers, they all suggested the same move – “blast them on Twitter” is the new battle cry. Certainly, a poor experience such as this does not hold a candle to issues between Snowden and his home government, but The life and death the medium is the same – the dreaded Twitter call-out.

This generation of consumers is simply not going of a company, particularly an SMB, to waste time sending letters to the editor, or wait in long holding queues to voice their complaints via may lie in the way phone. Even an email is a bother - we don’t trust the that social media is issue to be resolved or even addressed for that matter. addressed.

For us, public humiliation is the only recourse.

IT departments, particularly of large organisations and agencies, need to be aware of the conversation that is going on about their services on social media. Turning a blind-eye and allowing publicly aired grievances to go unresolved is certainly inadvisable. In the world of social media, not only can injured parties address a large, public audience, but they can circumvent the process and go straight to the top – holding the ear of the CEO or, perhaps, key stakeholders.

This is where the CIO need especially take note. When the complaint’s origins are in the IT user-experience, the life and death of a company, particularly an SMB, may lie in the way social media is addressed. CIO's need to be proactive in creating a social media plan with their communications departments, and ready to address these online conversations head-on when the conversation turns to IT-related user-experiences. CIOs needs to be able to perk up and say, “Yes, we hear you.”

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Contents

Strategic ICT Partner

Strategic Technology Partner

Strategic Innovation Partner

ISSUE 285 | october 2015

36

Emirates NBD's Vp of IT security & innovation Naimish Shah

31 42

CARREFOUR Middle east

Dubai's RTA IT DIRECTOR Abdulla Al Bastaki

16 The future is here

72 Losing IT

26 Rack by rack

78 Eyeing top spot

CNME gives you a sneak peek of what to expect from some of the big players at GITEX 2015.

We bring you the highlights from CNME’s Data Centre Build roadshow that reached Riyadh, Doha and Dubai.

38 Paper purge

IT Manager Chadi Eid recalls how BATCO Group rid itself of its reliance on paper.

50 The powerhouse

46

King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah introduces one of the most powerful systems in the region as a teaching and research tool.

60 Striking a balance GULF PRECAST concrete

www.cnmeonline.com

How can CIOs ensure that their companies' internal technology needs are satisfied while delivering value to the customer?

With the unprecedented opportunities in data also comes risks for data loss.

Oracle SVP and Chief Communications Officer Bob Evans talks about the company’s cloud game plan.

84 The public Internet of Things

IDC's Mohamad Twaishi shares insights on enterprise mobility's impact on the public services sector.

94 Staying at the edge

George Mulhern, CEO, Cradlepoint, speaks to CNME about what his company brings to the table.

110 Bottom line in mind

Pete Lorenzen, General Manager, Networking Services, IBM, discusses network infrastructure cost optimisation.

october 2015

7

70 %

of businesses say their biggest cause of downtime is moving data between different physical, virtual and cloud environments

80%

of respondents are concerned about how to migrate to online services securely

of IT procurement professionals remain dissatisfied with SaaS contract language and protections

CLOUD technology:

THE NUMBERS

76% of businesses say they feel at risk as a result of...

]BYOD

[

BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE

Spending on data security will rise by

1/3

in the next two years

DOUBLE

Population & Internet growth will result in a

20x INCREASE

in the number of HACKERS around the world

80%

of security threats are from redirects, mostly from legitimate sites that have been

HACKED

Investment in document security will

in the next year

TRIPLE

Spending on social media security will more than

in the next year

By 2016, 40% of enterprises will make proof of independent security testing a precondition for using any type of cloud service

44% of businesses want adaptable, "burstable" bandwidth to support new technologies & applications

Source: www.silverlining.com

Architect

Brought to you by HP & Intel®.

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Gain insights for your infrastructure to accelerate opportunity and take your business further, faster.

Visit us in Gitex Technology week at the HP & Intel Booth in Hall 6/Cloud.

© Copyright 2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

James Dartnell Deputy Editor, CNME

Column

‘The Internet future of everything’ W

hat exactly does that mean?

Once again, in its 35th edition, the perennial GITEX Technology Week comes back to Dubai World Trade Centre for five days of discussions, developments and discovery.

Most of the Gulf’s CIOs and IT Directors won’t attend the whole show, so exhibitors have a tight window to make their mark.

But what can we look forward to that may catch your eye?

The most striking name on the show's agenda is Estonian Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas, who, even at the tender age of 36 will be able to offer invaluable vendor-independent insight into the power of modern technology.

The Middle Eastern IT community should certainly be enthused that such a high-level figure appreciates the value and potential of the industry. www.cnmeonline.com

The inclusion of tech giant SAP’s Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Becher in the speakers roster is an interesting one. With Gartner claiming that as many as 25 percent of organisations will employ a CDO by 2017, is this prediction a realistic indication for this region or a false prophecy?

And so we come back to ‘The Internet future of everything’.

Realistically, how far away is this future for the Gulf? Let’s assume that this concept is not a straight reiteration of Cisco’s ‘Internet of Everything’, but a blend of the IoT, digitalisation, cloud, mobility, Big Data… the list goes on.

Either way, it’s certainly advisable for IT decision-makers to take what is said at GITEX with a pinch of salt. Yes, vaguely looking forward, digitalisation is inevitable for businesses who want to survive. But by the same token,

there is work to be done in the region, and a large amount of patience in line with clear strategy is needed for this to become a reality.

Regardless of their vertical, CIOs need to deliver these ambitious objectives at their own pace and not get washed up in the hype. You need to decide if the IoT poses risk to your business. You need to opt for the cloud solution that suits you, and decide which channels will get through to your customers.

While it is undoubtedly useful to meet the finest technology players on the market at this prestigious gathering, it may well pay to seek out less wellknown players who could provide niche technologies in years to come.

Anyway, I wish you all and enjoyable and successful week. Let's see what the future really holds. october 2015

11

{

CIO Soundbites How will digitalisation impact the regional job market?

}

Esam Hadi, Senior IT Manager, Alba Akshaya Gaur, CIO, Mashreq Bank Digitalisation is inevitable. Organisations will seriously lose out in the marketplace if they do not move in that direction. I do not believe there will be a significant impact in the regional job market but there will be a huge positive push to customer service. Customer service driven organisation growth will create alternative opportunities in the marketplace.

12

october 2015

Moving to digital business creates a great demand for IT professionals to develop, maintain and support the applications and hardware that are the core of digitalisation technology.

ICT providers are changing their business models to provide digital services with cloud, Big Data, social media and the Internet of Things.

This also creates a big market for IT professionals and experts to deliver and support their growing businesses.

Prasanna Rupasinghe, Director of IT & AV, Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates “Large organisations have been operating with the model of digitalisation in mind for some time now. The management of e-commerce has increased, particularly through the activity of digital and social media teams.

Typically in the hospitality sector, marketing managers would take care of everything, but this is no longer the case.� www.cnmeonline.com

short takes

Month in view

US, China reach cyberespionage agreement

The US and China have reached their first ever cybercrime and cyberespionage agreement, however, details of the deal and how it will translate into actions are still under wraps.

Leaders of both countries announced the deal in Washington after two days of talks.

“We have agreed that neither the US nor the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyberenabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage,” said US President Barrack Obama, at a White House news conference.

Throughout the event, where Chinese President Xi Jinping was also present, it became apparent that the main thrust of the agreement could be about looking into governmentsponsored cyberespionage that is being used for the economic gain of public and private companies.

The deal also seeks to improve cooperation between law enforcement in both countries on cyber investigations. The two governments also said they would work together to try and establish international “rules of the road” for conduct in cyberspace.

14

october 2015

Apple to grow its $25 billion enterprise business During a keynote at the BoxWorks conference held recently in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cook highlighted that the company aims aim to give more focus to its enterprise business and grow the segment to surpass the current $23 billion revenue that it brings.

As he often does, Cook reiterated that Apple is just getting started in the enterprise.

"This is not a hobby, this is a real business," Cook said of the enterprise market, which drove roughly 13 percent of Apple's revenue from 20142015. “However, that number is a very small amount compared to what the opportunity is," he said.

Cook further underlined that while Apple has made significant leaps in the enterprise this year, there’s still plenty of room for growth. "We don't have deep knowledge of all the verticals that the enterprise deals with," he said. "We needed that expertise on the enterprise side, and so we've partnered with people to do that."

The partnerships Cook referenced include wide-ranging deals with enterprise mainstays such IBM and Cisco, but Apple's expanding mobility partners programme also includes smaller players, such as Box. By partnering with other tech companies, Apple will unlock huge

opportunities to help people transform its businesses and improve the ways it works, he said. "If you're a CIO, you want to do business with someone who's a part of an ecosystem, not someone that's on an Island somewhere. The Island days are gone."

Apple recently launched a number of new products, including the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, and the new iPad Pro, a device that is focused on the enterprise.

A VMware study on digital transformation highlights that only 53 percent of today’s UAE workforce believe that they can fully use their digital skills within their organisations due to restrictive policies. www.cnmeonline.com

Intel and Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority have announced the inauguration of Intel’s Ignition Lab for Internet of Things innovation for the MENA region. Located in Dubai Technology Entrepreneurship Centre, the lab aims to promote IoT developments and focus on the pillars of Smart Cities and Smart Transportation.

BlackBerry confirms Androidpowered Priv phone As part of the company’s quarterly earnings announcement released last month, BlackBerry recently confirmed the rollout an Android phone in late 2015. The company did not provide any further significant details such as specs, pricing, or carrier partners, but the firm did say the phone will be called Priv - with privacy in mind.

Company CEO John Chen said in a written statement, “Priv combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity with the expansive mobile application ecosystem available on the Android platform.”

Gartner forecasts increased government IT spending in MENA Governments in the Middle East and North Africa will spend $11.4 billion on IT products and services in 2015, according to Gartner.

The forecast includes spending on internal services, software, IT services, the data centre, devices and telecom services. The term 'government' comprises state and local governments and national government.

The analyst company also identified that telecom services, which include fixed and mobile telecom services, as the largest overall spending category throughout the forecast period within the government sector. It is expected to be at $4.7 billion in 2015, with mobile network services being the largest sub-segment with $3.1 billion in spending.

Anurag Gupta, Research Vice www.cnmeonline.com

President, Gartner, said, “The software segment, which includes enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, customer relationship management, enterprise application software, infrastructure software and vertical specific software (VSS), will grow by 2.8 percent over 2014 spending, to reach $1.2 billion in 2015.

“VSS will grow nine percent in 2015 to reach $454 million. In the government sector, VSS includes software that focuses on agencyspecific processes and domain areas, such as revenue and tax, case management,” Gupta added.

Furthermore, Gartner highlighted that investments in citizen-centric services that provide consumer-grade convenience under Smart City plans will be the driving force for government ICT in advanced states.

Chen’s statement makes clear that BlackBerry’s Android experiment is all about combining BlackBerry’s core appeal of security-focused apps and services with the popularity of Google’s consumer app catalogue.

BlackBerry also reaffirmed its commitment to BlackBerry 10 and highlights that it will continue to ‘develop and enhance the BlackBerry 10 operating system.'

Several months ago, the thinking was that BlackBerry wanted its own Android phone to show how the company's enterprise servers can manage crossplatform devices.

HP announces more job cuts Hewlett-Packard has announced it is cutting between 25-30,000 jobs in its enterprise division due to revenue declines.

According to reports, most of the personnel cuts will be in its enterprise services unit, whose employees often work directly with HP corporate customers. The cutback comes as HP is due to split into two firms, when it separates its enterprise and PC divisions which will take effect on 1st November.

The company has reported a steady decline of profits and revenue. In its most recent quarter, its revenue was down eight percent to $25.3 billion. However, it is expecting to make some new hires to offset this reduction as it “reshapes” its workforce.

The expected job cuts will result in a charge of about $2.7 billion, beginning in the fourth quarter. HP had 302,000 employees as of last October, the end of its previous fiscal year. october 2015

15

Preview Gitex 2015

The future is here GITEX Technology Week is on the horizon. Celebrating its 35th anniversary, the event will return to Dubai World Trade Centre from 18th-22nd October.

With the theme ‘The Internet future of everything,’ the mega technology event is set to gather more than 143,000 ICT professionals from 150 countries, and as with every year, promises to provide Middle East visitors with the latest exciting developments in the ICT industry. We give you a glimpse of what to expect this season.

A glimpse into some of the big players at Gitex 2015

Manish Bhardwaj, Senior Marketing Manager, Middle East and Turkey, Aruba Networks

Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, MENA, Brocade 16

October 2015

Aruba Networks Aruba Networks will demonstrate its wireless and switching portfolio at GITEX Technology Week. Exhibiting under the theme, ‘How tomorrow moves,’ the company’s presence at the event will centre on the emergence of #GenMobile.

The networking vendor will showcase its ClearPass Access Management System and Meridian mobile app platforms that enable venues to create mobile apps or improve existing apps with features such as turn-by-turn directions within venues.

Manish Bhardwaj, Senior Marketing Manager, Middle East and Turkey, Aruba Networks, says, “Aruba, together now with HP, is upending the traditional top-down, vendor-defined approach to networking. GITEX is a key event for us every year; participating in the show is not just a great branding exercise, but we also get a lot of good business leads and it gives us opportunities to showcase our market-leading capabilities to senior IT decision-makers. It also gives us a chance to network and strengthen our ties with the channel community.

“Every year the event just keeps getting bigger and better - this year with the focus on the Internet of Everything, we hope to see a lot of exciting technologies that will revolutionise the world as we know it today.”

Brocade Brocade has announced that their overarching theme at GITEX will be ‘The New IP’. Industry research analyst IDC says the ICT industry is undergoing an accelerating transition to the third platform of innovation and growth. Today, the third platform is being built on technologies such as mobile computing, social networking, cloud and Big Data analytics, and are significantly linked to ‘The New IP.’ According to the company, last year’s edition of GITEX was focused more on the concepts and possibilities of various trends www.cnmeonline.com

Preview Gitex 2015

like Big Data, SDN, NFV, cloud and IoT. However, this year visitors can actually get to see demonstrations of technologies in these areas.

Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, MENA, Brocade, says, “GITEX is an excellent platform for us to understand the dynamics and requirements of the local market, exhibit our broad range of industry-leading innovations and expose our brand to a wide audience. As for the visitors, it will be exciting for them to witness all the futuristic technologies in the IoT space.”

Brocade will also be demonstrating for the first time its recently launched SDN Controller 2.0, and two new software-defined networking applications - Topology Manager and Flow Manager.

Ghassan Lababidi, Head of Marketing, Middle East and Turkey, Cisco

Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHosting DataFort

Habib Mahakian, Vice President, EMC Gulf and Pakistan

www.cnmeonline.com

Cisco Cisco will be showcasing its Smart City technology solutions across the themes of Smart+Connected Communities, Smart Government, and Smart Tourism and Hospitality.

The firm will demonstrate ‘real life’ Smart City scenarios including a full demo of an augmented reality city as well as a government transportation demo. The company will also showcase how physical and cybersecurity solutions can work intelligently together to protect the networks, devices, applications and data that make up the ‘Internet of Everything.’ As well as launching ‘Network as a Sensor and Enforcer,’ presenting how the network can be used as a security monitoring system to provide visibility into the network and everything that is connected to it.

Ghassan Lababidi, Head of Marketing, Middle East and Turkey, Cisco, says, “At its core, digitisation is the process of planning, and ultimately building, a sophisticated and forward-thinking IT network ecosystem that will allow for greater connectivity, productivity and security to drive this positive impact. At GITEX, we hope to drive this message of digitisation to organisations in the Middle East.”

Cisco’s stand will be at Zabeel Hall, Stand: Z-B40.

eHosting DataFort eHDF will showcase its enhanced managed hosting, cloud infrastructure and disaster recovery services, as part of its presence at GITEX. “We will showcase enhancements made to these services,” says Yasser Zeineldin, eHosting DataFort CEO. “These enhancements include data centre upgrades, technology refreshes and new network, security and storage technologies that augment and support these services. Demonstrations and presentations on the stand will aim to provide visitors with a deeper understanding into these robust and reliable IT solutions.”

According to Zeineldin, GITEX is a very important networking platform for the company to meet existing customers, strengthen relationships and gain potential long-term business partnerships and customers. The trade show draws many SMEs and large enterprises from around the region seeking IT solutions, and eHDF’s participation is aimed at enabling the company to share its latest service innovations with the market. eHDF will be at Hall 6, Stand: CLD-19.

EMC EMC’s presence at this year’s GITEX will focus on demonstrating the power of the Federation, with an emphasis on Big Data, converged infrastructure and flash solutions like XtremIO, as well as solutions like the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and the Federation Business Data Lake.

Habib Mahakian, Vice President, EMC Gulf and Pakistan, says, “At GITEX, EMC will put special emphasis on its unique Smart City platforms that deliver the speed, performance and scalability needed to build hyper-connected, data-driven cities. Made of three critical layers, the Smart City platform is delivered by the EMC Federation of companies bringing together best-of-breed technologies from EMC II, VMware, VCE, Pivotal and RSA to achieve the goal of becoming an optimised city that is agile, well-integrated and provides citizens with a better quality of life.”

During the event, the company will also showcase products and solutions that will enable customers to accelerate their transition to a cloud-based form of computing. These solutions include the Federation Business Data Lake (FBDL) and Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (FEHC).

EMC’s stand will be at Hall 3 Stand: B3-3.

october 2015

17

Preview Gitex 2015

Ray Kafity, Vice President, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, FireEye

Ali Hyder, Group CEO, Focus Softnet

Alain Penel, Regional VP Middle East, Fortinet

18

FireEye Cybersecurity products and solutions firm FireEye will be focusing on three core elements - technology, intelligence and expertise during its participation at GITEX. As the company aims to introduce customers to the tools they need to cope with the evolving threat landscape, FireEye’s stand will showcase six demo stations, which will be networked to live products and solutions, recreating real and recognisable environments.

Ray Kafity, Vice President, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, FireEye, says, “With this year’s theme being ‘The Internet future of everything’, the focus will be on the increasing integration between people and objects. We are gradually moving more towards a world in which everything is connected, calling for a change in the way we perceive cybersecurity. Considering how rapidly the region is becoming urbanised and with the idea of Smart Cities slowly coming to fruition, I think that GITEX 2015 will be an unprecedented opportunity for the cybersecurity industry to address the challenges of an increasingly digitised society.”

FireEye’s stand will be in Hall 1, Stand: B1-5.

Focus Softnet Focus Softnet will be showcasing product enhancements in its new flagship product, Focus 8, during its presence at GITEX. In addition, the company will highlight its other solutions such as the Focus CRM Suite, with sales and service, facilities management, and property management solutions. It will also be announcing new cloudversions of some of its solutions as well as mobile apps at the event.

The solutions provider also sees GITEX as an ideal platform to promote its managed services, HR and recruitment services, and business process consulting and implementations services to customers across the region.

Ali Hyder, Group CEO, Focus Softnet, says, “Ever since Focus Softnet set up base in the UAE in 1992, we have not missed participating in a single edition of GITEX. The event is very important for Focus Softnet as it provides us with an opportunity to meet customers, partners and potential partners. GITEX brings together enterprises from across the GCC and Africa, with that reach we can increase the awareness of our brand, products and services to a larger audience.”

Focus Softnet will be at Hall 7, Stand: D7-20.

Fortinet With their theme, ‘Breaking the kill chain,’ Fortinet’s participation at this year’s GITEX Technology Week will focus on advanced threat protection.

Visitors of the event will get a chance to see live demonstrations of Fortinet’s APT solutions, which are aimed at enabling businesses to protect themselves against known and unknown threats.

In addition to showcasing their APT solutions, during the event, the company will also launch its latest software-defined network security framework and advanced threat protection aimed at securing modern agile data centre environments.

Alain Penel, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Fortinet, says, “Through our presence at GITEX 2015 we hope to educate organisations and end-users on the gravity of today’s threat landscape. We aim to inform them on how we can help protect their organisations from these sophisticated cyber-threats. Our focus on ‘Breaking the kill chain’ calls for a holistic approach to security, and by relying on Fortinet’s APT framework, businesses can be protected from known threats, can detect unknown threats and mitigate intrusions. We also hope to drive a wider awareness of our industry leading product portfolio, support and services.”

Fortinet’s stand will be at Hall-2, Stand: B2-1B.

october 2015

www.cnmeonline.com

Preview Gitex 2015

Trevor Dearing, EMEA Marketing Director, Gigamon

Nat Pisupati, Regional Sales Director, Identity and Access Management, Middle East and Africa, HID Global

Aaron White, General Manager, Middle East and Pakistan, Hitachi Data Systems

20

Gigamon During its participation at the 35th edition of the GITEX Technology Week, Gigamon will be putting the spotlight on security.

The network visibility solutions company will shed light on how security delivery platforms are becoming foundational building blocks of cyber ecurity strategy. Gigamon’s offering at the mega technology event this year is the Unified Visibility Fabric and an expanded set of solutions within Visibility Fabric.

The company will also showcase GigaSECURE at the event, a security delivery platform that connects into physical and virtual networks, and can be configured to deliver traffic to all of the applications that require it.

Trevor Dearing, EMEA Marketing Director, Gigamon, says, “We are excited about the opportunities that the Middle East and this year’s GITEX Technology Week hold for us. The event will create a great opportunity for Gigamon to demonstrate how the Visibility Fabric can give us visibility that can enable tremendous collaboration across the silos of the IT organisation to the various security tools that keep our organisation, and the data we keep, safe.”

HID Global With the theme, ‘Your Security Connected,’ HID Global’s involvement at GITEX 2015 will highlight its identity and access management (IAM) solutions which include smart applications, smart devices and smart technology.

The company’s participation will also see the demonstrations of its security solutions that are designed to address enterprises, banking, and the government sector.

Nat Pisupati, Regional Sales Director, Identity and Access Management, Middle East and Africa, HID Global, says, “For 2015, we believe conversations will revolve around mobility, wearables and the Internet of Things. These topics are connected on multiple levels, and one of the unifying concerns is security. We aim to leverage GITEX to showcase solutions including ActivID Tap Authentication for Microsoft services.”

As interest in mobile access is growing, HID Global will also demonstrate its HID Mobile Access solution, which leverages Bluetooth Smart and NFC to open doors via smartphones and other smart devices.

“This is our fifth consecutive year of participation at GITEX, and we aim to create broader awareness of the advanced solutions that we have to offer. Security and identity access management are hot topics today, and we are eager to help organisations address any requirements or challenges they may have,” Pisupati adds.

HID Global’s stand will be at Hall 2 Stand: B2-4.

Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) will be introducing and linking its Big Data analytics solutions through the application of advanced data analytics, connected intelligence from IoT devices, and operational technologies for the very first time during GITEX 2015.

As part of their presence at the exhibition, HDS will be highlighting the build-up into social innovation solutions. With a number of recent acquisitions such as Pentaho, the company will be unveiling a unifying element that will pave the way for such innovations. It will also be demonstrating a wide selection of business-oriented solutions such as software-defined storage, converged architectures for popular business applications and on-premise file, sync and share.

Aaron White, General Manager, Middle East and Pakistan, Hitachi Data Systems, says, “GITEX has been an important fixture in HDS’s marketing calendar for the last three years now as it has not only given us the opportunity to reach a wider audience from the GCC and the growing African market.

“HDS hopes to showcase its new and expanded technologies and solutions to its existing and potential customer database. In addition, this year we hope to discuss our digital transformation strategy and position ourselves more as an information and data analytics company.”

HDS will be at Hall 6, Stand: MAC 6 -35.

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Preview Gitex 2015

Charles Yang, President, Huawei Middle East

Monzer Tohme, regional Manager, Middle East and africa, Infor

Cherif Sleiman, General Manager, Middle East, Infoblox

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Huawei Huawei will be showcasing its growing portfolio of technologies including innovations in the domain of IoT and software-defined networking as well as its eLTE for critical communications and 5G connectivity technologies at GITEX. The company will provide demos of solutions across the three core lines of its business that serves telecom operators, enterprise and government entities, as well as consumers throughout the region.

Charles Yang, President, Huawei Middle East, says, “As the biggest technology exhibition in the Middle East and Africa, GITEX provides a platform to showcase our latest solutions to the region and an opportunity to further strengthen our relationship with top regulators, channel partners, service providers and customers from around the globe.”

A line-up of regional and global Huawei experts will also descend on the exhibition to share insights about how the development of the Internet of Things and Smart Cities will prove fundamental in improving the quality of life of citizens and businesses in the Middle East in the decade ahead.

Huawei’s stand will be at Zabeel Hall Stand: Z-E20.

Infor As a second time participant at GITEX Technology Week, Infor aims to leverage its ability to deliver business applications in the cloud. During the event, the company will be showcasing its Infor CloudSuite, a set of cloud-enabled, industry-specific applications.

Monzer Tohme, Regional Manager, Middle East and Africa, Infor, says, “We will showcase our CloudSuite solutions for five key verticals – healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, office of the financial officer and technology. CloudSuite lets customers choose the best option for deploying their data, providing options that help make the information both portable and secure.

“GITEX is the most important event for us in terms of building brand awareness. Given the hundreds of thousands of visitors that attend the show, there is no better event or platform for us to showcase our industry-leading solutions and meet with both current and new clients and partners.”

Infor’s stand will be at Hall 7, Stand: B7-30.

Infoblox Infoblox has announced that it will be using GITEX as a platform for educating regional IT decision-makers about its credentials in providing end-to-end DNS security and defence against DNS-based attacks.

According to the company, the event will also see the launch of a number major security enhancements to its offerings in the DNS and analytics space. GITEX visitors can also get a firsthand look at the Infoblox DNS Traffic Control, the solution that adds global server load balancing to enterprise-grade DNS appliances.

There will also be live demonstrations of Infoblox’s latest innovations in DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management, secure domain name system (DNS) and of cloud network automation technology which was introduced early this year.

“We essentially have three goals for GITEX 2015,” says Cherif Sleiman, General Manager, Middle East, Infoblox. “Demonstrate our industry-leading solutions in the cloud and DNS Security space; educate and help organisations learn about the latest innovations that can help them respond to the security challenges and reduce their risk; and participate with other partners and vendors to form an ecosystem of trusted solutions that can help simplify IT architectures and the deployment process”

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Preview Gitex 2015

Lee Miles, General Manager, Middle East and Africa, Red Hat

Harish Chib, Sales and Channel Lead, MEA, Sophos

Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC, Veeam Software

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Red Hat Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, will demonstrate its open, hybrid cloud technologies for bare metal, virtualisation, private cloud and public cloud deployments at GITEX Technology Week.

Keeping up with the umbrella theme ‘Internet Future of Everything,’ Red Hat will be highlighting a number of its IoT deployments and implementations. Hybrid cloud is also another focal point of the company’s participation, as it highlights the cornerstones of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions and Platform-as-a-Service portfolios.

In addition, the firm will also showcase the Red Hat Access Insights, an operations analytics service, which was unveiled earlier this year.

“The Middle East IT industry is on a healthy growth curve as enterprises leverage technology to enable their businesses,” says Lee Miles, General Manager, Middle East and Africa, Red Hat. “As the region’s largest ICT trade show, GITEX gives us direct exposure to some of the industry’s most influential business decision-makers. We intend to engage with top level IT decision makers to help them understand just how open source software is transforming everything from cloud and mobile to Big Data and the Internet of Things.”

Sophos Sophos will put the spotlight on its concept of communication between its IT security solutions for the endpoint and network during its participation at this year’s GITEX Technology Week.

At the event, the security hardware and software firm also plans to showcase the latest version of its UTM hardware series. Visitors can also take look at the most up-to-date versions of the company’s Sophos Cloud, End-user Protection Bundles and SafeGuard. Also on display will be Cyberoam’s network security with its range of next-generation firewalls and UTMs. Harish Chib, Sales and Channel Lead, MEA, Sophos, says, “GITEX continues to evolve with changing milieu in ICT. This edition is set to catalyse fresh and broader perspectives on ICT, security and allied areas as it discusses Internet of Things as the central theme. The Middle East is a very important market for Sophos, and GITEX, being the largest technology exhibition in the region, is an ideal platform for us to showcase our best-in-class security solutions portfolio, meet with regional customers and partners at a single venue and strengthen our channel network.”

Veeam Veeam, the provider of data centre availability solutions, will be highlighting its commitment to helping Middle East enterprises meet the requirements of the always-on business during its participation at GITEX. The company will use the technology event as a platform to showcase the Veeam Availability Suite, a solution that delivers recovery time and point objectives “of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.”

Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC, Veeam Software, says, “GITEX is the place to be this month – it offers a great platform for vendors, partners and customers to get together and share ideas. Over the past five years we have used GITEX as an opportunity to showcase our products and capabilities and to meet with both existing and prospective clients and partners. I can attribute much of our success to the relationships we have built and fostered at the event and I expect this year’s edition to be no different.”

Veeam’s stand will be at Hall 7, Stand: CLD24.

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EVENT

DCB

Rack by rack Back once again for its third annual outing, CNME’s Data Centre Build roadshow reached Riyadh, Doha and Dubai, drawing in scores of IT decision-makers and industry figureheads to reflect on how to design and optimise the vital foundations of IT infrastructure. We report from the Dubai leg of the conferences. he data centre constitutes the base layer of any reliable IT infrastructure.

However, the age when top-notch hardware sufficed in powering IT infrastructure is on its way out. As the appearance of software becomes increasingly pervasive within the data centre, and as cloud and mobility drive business agility, CNME kick-started the Middle East event season with a forum on how to get the best out of those all-powerful racks.

Starting things off was Mazen Arawi, Internet of Things Senior Architect, SAP, to discuss how the power of the IoT would necessitate fresh data centre strategies. “Only once

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you know how to integrate data into the business can you really add value to an organisation,” he said. “In this day and age it’s essential to simplify and reimagine businesses through optimising data centre infrastructure and services, and by transforming business models.”

Jude Pereira, Managing Director, Nanjgel Solutions, followed up by highlighting one of the most important trends in any modern data centre – security. He advocated automated threat response as a means of streamlining IT operations. “Security was not a priority a few years ago, but now there is pressure to be agile and secure in the data centre,” he said.

“The reality is that although we have not been able to address the current challenges of data centres, a new breed is coming, with more than 50 percent of data centres set to be cloud-based. No matter how advanced your firewalls and other security software, if you don’t get real-time data, you remain vulnerable. If your systems are automated, however, securing data centres and deploying new servers and applications can be a less tedious and daunting task.”

Third on stage was Gulftainer’s IT Manager Vinay Sharma. Sharma began with an outline of Gulftainer’s business – operating ports across the UAE, Lebanon and even as far-reaching as Brazil – and the critical importance www.cnmeonline.com

of IT to the organisation. He went on to discuss how once the company began expanding its operations beyond the Middle East, senior management demanded an overhaul of the company’s IT infrastructure. The foundations of change began in the data centre.

“The support of key figures in the organisation is important when implementing a data centre transformation strategy,” he said. “You face a range of challenges including CAPEX investment, reducing risks and doing more with less. The data centre plays a big role in the transformation process. An organisation’s ability to adapt with changes in the IT industry is key to seamless data centre transformation.” Sharma went on to describe how following a vast overhaul of the data centre and its processes, encompassing a range of fresh technologies, Gulftainer’s operations have become crisper and had less interruption.

Next up was Ramih Mahmoud, Network Engineer, Business DNA, who described how disruptive technologies are changing the data centre landscape.

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“The reality is, that although we have not been able to address the current challenges of data centres, a new breed is coming, with more than 50 percent of data centres set to be cloud-based.”

“Data centre infrastructure has undergone major changes as Big Data and mobility have progressed,” he said. “At the same time, virtualisation adoption is among the key priorities of IT leaders for their data centres.”

Wrapping up proceedings was Mike O’Hara, Senior Technology Consultant, Hitachi Data Systems, who discussed the potential of the ‘converged data

centre’ and the journey to private cloud.

“Consolidate, virtualise, automate and be flexible – these are the key steps in achieving success in private cloud," he said. “The need to control rising management complexities and operating costs has created a need for advanced data centres. Data growth, technology complexity and infrastructure refreshes have been game-changing.”

Speakers from the Riyadh leg of Data Centre Build included: Mahmoud Ahmed Abdelhaleem, SAP Business Analytics Solutions Consultant, SAP; Javed Abbasi, Director, Gisba Group; Yaser AlKhateeb, Head of Services Marketing, and Omar Zahnan, Senior Solution Engineer, Data Centre, Huawei Middle East; and Ahmad Enaya, Technical Manager, KSA, Aruba Networks.

The Doha speakers were: Mubarik Hussain, Head of IT, Petroserv Limited; Chris Leahy, DirectorTechnical Facilities, MEEZA; and Maher Farraj, North Gulf Sales Manager, Hitachi Data Systems.

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HCC

sphere of influence Huawei Cloud Congress was held in Shanghai on 18th and 19th September with the theme, "Make IT Simple, Make Business Agile." CNME reports from China.

ith over ten thousand participants in attendance, the Shanghai Expo Centre was abuzz with talk of Huawei’s new products, milestones and projects.

At the first keynote speech, Eric Xu, Huawei’s Rotating CEO, set the tone for the event and for Huawei’s cloud roadmap. "We will create a cloud ecosystem with business cooperation at its core," he said, "and technical partnership and talent development as its foundation. This ecosystem will enable our partners to jointly expand the industry size and achieve mutual success."

William Xu, Chief Strategy Marketing Officer, helped to outline the future of the company’s cloud ecosystem, “Alongside our partners, we will create an open cloud ecosystem to achieve coexistence," said Xu, "In addition, we will make box products more agile and platforms more open." He went on to highlight a sentiment that was frequently echoed throughout the event. "We will not work on applications on the upper layers.

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Neither will we touch data on the lower layers." Later, during a media roundtable, Xu clarified, “Huawei does not own the data of its customers.”

The talk of the event was Huawei’s new FusionSphere 6.0 enterprise-class cloud operating system. The product offers open source at the component, architecture, and ecosystem levels.

With this level of open source capability, this latest offering aims to be flexible enough to adapt to each customer’s unique needs.

Joy Huang, VP, Huawei IT Product Line, said, “FusionSphere is designed to help enterprises overcome challenges encountered during different IT transformation stages, making enterprise business and workflows agile enough and efficient to deal with changes in the markets, lowering investments on IT assets and human resources.”

Also at the congress was the announcement of Huawei’s new data centre-oriented data service platform, OceanStor DJ. Through the unified management of storage resources, OceanStor DJ aims to automatically provide data services on a business-

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driven basis to boost data centres' operating efficiency.

Beyond new offerings, Huawei executives also addressed upcoming trends, most notably the company’s role in the future of the Internet of Things. At a discussion that included both media and custumers, Kevin Ichhpurani, EVP, Head of Business Development and Strategic Ecosystem for SAP gave us insight into their partnership with Huawei. “We are starting to expand our relationship with Huawei, and co-innovating in the IoT space in particular,” he explained.

Safder Nazir, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Smart Cities and IoT, Huawei, provided regional insight on the company’s role in the future of a more connected Middle East. “Businesses in the Middle East, including the ICT sector, have every reason to be optimistic about the future of IoT,” he told CNME in an interview in Dubai prior to the event in Shanghai.

Huawei stands to provide much needed leadership and support to IoT globally and in the region. “As cellular networks are key to providing the IoT connectivity the higher bandwidth applications will require standardisation of 5G and the LPWA market will also require bodies such as GSMA and 3GPP to define industry standards along with contributions from technology leaders such as Huawei,” explained Nazir. “As an example, in order to address the current and future demands of IoT usage, Huawei is innovating new technologies such as 5G with investments of over $600 million to enable mobile connectivity speeds beyond our imagination.”

Huawei executives also noted that the educational and government sectors in the Middle East would be growth areas for the company in the coming year.

“Huawei has certainly focused on growth in the education sector in the Middle East,” said Redfox, Huawei's General Manager of Server Product Domain, “and we will continue to support these initiatives going forward.”

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Spotlight

The daily compute

Abdulla Al Bastaki has been an ever-present in Dubai's Smart transformation. RTA's Director of IT has been a mainstay of public sector technology, from the emirate's e-Gov to Smart City phases, and has learned the value of customer satisfaction en route.

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What is success?” asks Abdulla Al Bastaki. The IT Director for Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority does not believe that conventional definitions in the business world suffice. “Most people will tell you that a project’s key parameters are cost, quality and time taken, but they’re no longer enough,” he says. “What it ultimately comes down to is customer happiness.”

Born and raised in Dubai, Al Bastaki recalls his initial interest in technology stemming from after-school programming classes.

“Like every boy, I was interested in gaming,” he says. “Our school managed to acquire some PCs and create a lab. One of our teachers offered us courses after hours, and that planted my seeds of interest.”

Al Bastaki studied for a degree in Business Information Technology at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Dubai, graduating with a distinction mark, including honours. He joined Dubai Municpality’s IT Department in 1996, initially working as a technician tasked with end user support for two years. “I spent a lot of time handling customers,” he says. “A lot of older employees were only just starting to use Microsoft Office products and desktop PCs back then. This presented a challenge, but it taught me how to engage with a range of users.”

Al Bastaki relished the prospect of working with a range of exciting technologies for the time, including products from HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Following his initial grounding, Al Bastaki was entrusted with greater responsibility within the organisation, undertaking Internet infrastructure development projects in a systems

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engineer capacity.

He recalls how HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s announcement of Dubai’s e-Government initiatives ushered in a new era of ICT development.

“It represented a major shift for everyone in the industry, and certainly in terms of my career,” he says. “My role shifted to handling the network, and I worked largely on the next generation of e-services and an organisational portal. The projects that were initiated opened doors to new challenges, and I was exposed to new technology.”

The changes brought a new dimension to Al Bastaki’s abilities.

Now entrusted with more project management tasks, he learned a series of valuable lessons.

“Beforehand, I had implemented technology without project management skills, but now I was managing a team,” he says. “The nature of e-Gov was about improving the quality of services - reaching out to the customer - and not just working with the back end systems. I now had an obligation keep both my team and the customers satisfied.”

Al Bastaki says the evolution of the Internet was a game-changer for the demands placed on IT. “Internet infrastructure needed 24/7 monitoring,” he says. “If there was a server issue at 1am it had to be resolved, and outages had to be kept to a minimum to ensure a high availability of services.”

Al Bastaki believes the groundwork that he was part of has set a precedent for better initiatives today.

“Government services have come a long way since then, but the work we did helped lay the foundations for Smart Gov and Smart City programmes,” he says.

“We developed the infrastructure for Internet services, which was a hugely transformative task.”

Al Bastaki joined the RTA’s IT department in 2006, less than a year after the organisation had been established. Its IT and processes were in a transitional phase. “The IT department was initially small,” he says. “Systems were being migrated from other government entities, and I found myself tasked with managing the different technologies and environments.” Al Bastaki relished the prospect, which would have daunted many. However, he concedes that there were a number of vital components that needed careful management. “Once I’d started building my team, the first thing we had to focus on was standardisation of IT processes and environment,” he says. “Integration was the biggest challenge of all at the time. Looking forward, we also had to plan for a state-of-the-art infrastructure to support the RTA’s future business growth. We had to grow at the same rate as the business.”

Red, yellow and green squares adorn the whiteboard that sits in the corner of Al Bastaki’s office. To

“Most people will tell you that a project's key parameters are cost, quality and time, but they're no longer enough."

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CIO

Spotlight TIMELINE Government to Smart Cities,” he says. the side of the vast, multicoloured “His Highness Sheikh Mohammed chart that maps dozens of the RTA’s been a major factor in this. He keeps current IT projects, reads a quote. “A asking what more Dubai can do, plan without action is a daydream, which keeps pushing us forward.” action without a plan is a nightmare.”

Al Bastaki also names Steve Jobs as This mantra underpins everything his greatest inspiration within the Al Bastaki does when it comes to technology industry. He is grateful for project management delivery. “Any having a role which has allowed him to transformation project needs clear work in management, engaging with vision and direction; you need to internal employees. know what you “Throughout my want to achieve,” I’ve been he says. “Granted, "Internal users need career lucky to have moved in the context to be part of plans, across different of a one-year roles,” Al Bastaki roadmap, things not only so that says. “Dealing can be achieved, they’re engaged, with end users has but a two to but also so that been the biggest three year plan is essential when it they don’t become driver in helping me understand comes to project siloed in separate their pain points, interdependency. projects by the time and the importance Every quarter, targets need to a problem arises a of the customer Quite be objectively year down the line." interaction. often, technical evaluated.” The people fail to importance of understand a team ethic in customers, and I think it’s very driving this is not lost on Al Bastaki. important not to fall into this trap.”

“Treating internal users as customers Closer to home, the RTA is is a recipe for success when it comes currently backing the ‘Innovate to their use of technology,” he says. your app’ initiative for students, in “They need to be part of plans, not which they have to use open API’s to only so that they’re engaged, but design an organisation app. This is also so that they don’t become siloed only the tip of the iceberg for what in separate projects by the time a the RTA has on its technological problem arises a year down the line.” horizon. “We’re looking to innovate Al Bastaki is one of a small clutch of through the use of Big Data,” Al people who have been at the forefront Bastaki says. “We want to gain a of Dubai’s public sector progress in better understanding of the best terms of IT. His participation in the ways we can innovate to provide emirate’s technological transition better services for customers via over the last 20 years has given him the analysis of structured and an admiration for those who are unstructured data. For myself and the driving key decisions. “I’ve seen Dubai RTA, that’s what success is all about, move from e-Government to Smart delighting customers.”

Government, and then from Smart 32

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1996 Graduates from Higher Colleges of Technology in Dubai

1996 Joins Dubai Municipality as Technical Support Officer

2000 Promoted to Systems Engineer role

2006 Joins RTA’s IT team

2007 Made RTA IT Director

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Apple Newton MessagePad

In 1993, Apple launched what would be the beginning of a mobile era of computing for the company, the Apple Newton MessagePad. Rather dated in terms of size and speed by today’s standards, the MessagePad was the first series of personal digital assistant devices developed for the Newton platform.

Similar to today’s Apple products, the MessagePad 100 used proprietary serial ports and round Mini-DIN 8 connectors. In contrast to its competitor - the Palm Pilot - all Newton devices were equipped with a standard PC Card expansion slot, which allowed native modem and Ethernet connectivity. It took four AAA batteries to power the MessagePad, which was eventually shored down to two AA batteries with the release of the Apple MessagePad 110. The display was black and white with a span of 336x240cm. The sizeable handheld weighed in at 410g .

The MessagePad made its commercial debut on 2nd August, 1993 at the Boston Macworld Expo. It was arguably the hottest item at the expo and sold 50,000 units in its first three months, despite its whopping $900 price tag. The MessagePad was featured albeit through a critical lens - in the comic strip Doonsebury, as well as the long-running television show The Simpsons. In both of those instances, the handwriting recognition trumpeted in the marketing campaign was criticised for being laughably inaccurate.

However, this issue didn’t seem to slow down sales or popularity. The device became so popular that a dedicated chain of Newton-only stores called “Newton Source” were launched, and operated between 1994 and 1998.

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IDEAS GET THROUGH. NOT HACKERS. system protects against the broadest range of threats.

Visit us at Gitex 2015 to learn how to free your teams to innovate with 速 Palo Alto Networks in Hall 1 at Stand B1-6.

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CXO Corner

Productive paranoia To many, Naimish Shah’s job title may seem a foreign concept. Emirates NBD’s Vice President of Enterprise Architecture, Information Security and Innovation has to balance two key top-line agendas which are in constant conflict with one another.

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ecurity and innovation.

One is about limiting the threat of toxic hazards to an organisation, the other about taking calculated gambles for contemporary business performance. Risk versus reward.

Naimish Shah’s role may seem a paradox to some.

The concepts of security and innovation appear to be at complete odds with each other, but Emirates NBD's senior management team have decided to entrust him with the stewardship of both. How does he marry the pair? “We think combining the leadership of the two portfolios achieves a certain balance,” he says. “My security hat won’t let us take undue risk, so if the innovation aspect of our work goes wrong, the buck stops with me. It’s certainly a unique structure, but it achieves an effective, transparent compromise.”

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Although Shah is in no doubt that he has the backing of Emirates NBD’s senior management, he nonetheless concedes that his role brings a number of inevitable challenges.

“There is always one question that I dread when dealing with key stakeholders,” he says. “’Are you secure?’ has no easy answer. You can’t tell them we are or aren’t, or that we don’t know, so all I can ever say is that there’s no such thing as 100 percent guaranteed security. There are always unknown factors, but the best we can do is be prepared in our processes, response capabilities and in the skill of our team, as well as having effective mitigation plans where we are ready to kill the chain. It’s important to remain calm in these situations.”

In spite of the tight security net that Shah casts, he is nonetheless alarmed at what he perceives as widespread complacency in the region. “People fall into the trap of looking at past statistics regarding security breaches in the Middle East – which are reasonably favourable,” he says. “This is totally misleading.

The reality is that security attacks are inevitable and we are not as well prepared as we need to be. Data from more developed markets, such as the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific is an indication of what is to come here.

We need to use that data to take a proactive approach.”

With the Middle East – and the UAE, in particular – having come on in leaps and bounds in terms of overall infrastructure development in recent decades, Shah believes it is only a matter of time before full-scale assaults hit home. “The UAE is still yet to fully feature in the limelight,” he says. “This country has become a hotspot – a trade and travel hub that is the Middle East and North Africa’s equivalent of Singapore – and along with the Expo 2020 announcement

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ensure his team remains mentally and all the other progress the country fresh in order to keep up their has made, it has become a honeypot motivation and vigilance. “It’s for attackers.” easy for bright security pros to get The impending threats that the bored when they sit in front of a region stands to face have convinced screen for eight hours and nothing Shah that IT security must be taken happens,” he says. As part of his more seriously by executive figures. innovation work, Shah encourages “We don’t believe that the senior his employees to think outside of management of most organisations – the box. “We tell them to focus on especially banks – view IT security as creative solutions around ten percent a topline agenda topic. They should,” of the time. We want them to think he says. “We believe that security is as of new concepts and objectives in important as digitalisation; security terms of processes and technology; enables digitalisation, and digitalisation ideas for new implementations in will power businesses in the near our department. We make an effort future. They are two inextricably to retain staff by giving linked pillars.” However, them the right training Shah remains optimistic “Security and job motivation. I that the role of the is as important believe the culture CISO is bound to as digitalisation; within Emirates gain prominence security enables NBD is a big factor in the coming digitalisation, and in our employee years. “I certainly think the CISO will digitalisation will power retention.”

In terms become an adviser businesses in the of fulfilling his to the CEO across near future. They innovation mandate, industries. In the last are inextricably Shah is driving three or four years linked.” initiatives on several within Emirates NBD, fronts for Emirates NBD, Information Security has had including in retail and corporate a seat within the steering committee, banking and the company’s operations. and the information security The company is also aligning with the committee has become a mandatory UAE’s upcoming Innovation Week, monthly meeting.” due to take place from 22nd to 28th In order to keep his staff on November. “We’re planning our their toes in their security-related Innovation Day for the occasion,” he work, Shah insists on a mindset of says. “We’ve created a platform for ‘productive paranoia’. “Complacency employees to pitch a prototype for is a CIO’s worst nightmare,” he says. an idea to our IT panel. The top three “There may not be a panic or a fire ideas will be implemented.” right now, but it’s safest to always Shah also believes that Big Data think something is wrong. Shallow is will inevitably impact his role, waters run deep. I always say to my and will force new approaches. “In team that on a daily basis, they need the next three years, the Internet of to think like hackers - to consider Things and the vast amounts of data, the moves they would take, or would will necessitate proactive mitigation,” have taken in any given situation.” he says. “It will need a combination of As the IT security industry faces passion for the industry and the right a worldwide shortage of end-user mindset – productive paranoia.” professionals, Shah is determined to october 2015

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case study

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Paper purge

Any firm specialising in construction and engineering work needs rock solid business processes to match its concrete end products.

Unfortunately for BATCO Group, a reliance on paper documents left the firm with serious problems. IT Manager Chadi Eid sought an enterprise content management solution as a remedy.

t’s easy to rely on paper. Those of a certain generation have known nothing else when it comes to creating or storing basic information, while most of us – however tech savvy – do, at some point, go analogue in our day-to-day routine. However, for BATCO Group, the lack of organised workflows and use of paper documents had left the senior management torn.

BATCO’s services have become increasingly diversified over time.

Initially specialising in construction and engineering, the company went on to add solid waste management and water treatment services to its portfolio. The firm’s construction and design specialties encompass a broad range of projects, including roads and highways, bridges and tunnels, water dams, marine works and solid waste sanitary landfills.

The firm’s notable work includes the Wadi Adai interchange in Muscat, Oman, and a selection of pedestrian bridges in Abu Dhabi.

Its operations aren’t limited to

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the Middle East, however. BATCO has offices in Italy, Nigeria, Oman, Romania in addition to its UAE offices and headquarters in Lebanon. The Group has 4,000 employees in its ranks, and their reliance on paper-based processes was creating needless work for the IT department.

A few years back, BATCO was running into a range of difficulties through basic admin

"A large number of paper documents were simply not reaching their required destination. You can imagine the problems this creates for an organisation."

failures. “A large number of files were simply not reaching their required destination,” Chadi Eid, Group IT Manager, BATCO Group, says. “Quite often, people didn’t take action in delivering paper documents.

You can imagine the problems this creates for an organisation.”

Eid says this posed the company serious issues in its dealings with clients. “If a contractor fails to submit a claim from a client, not only could the company be penalised, but we risked losing their business altogether.”

BATCO has also recently entered into an increasingly processdriven phase, largely powered by IT enhancements. “In the last two years, it’s become more and more important for the company,” Eid says. “IT is no longer just there for network support or Microsoft Office assistance; our department is becoming a business enabler. We implemented SAP Business One as our ERP solution a couple of years ago, and we needed a solution that could complement this change for october 2015

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our document management.”

Introducing change was never going to be easy in the midst of a company culture that favoured technology-light processes. “Senior management recognised the need for an overhaul of this aspect of our processes, but, on a personal level, a number of them were not so keen on the idea,” Eid says. “For them, working with paper was easier, and was what they were used to. People at any level in any organisation have a comfort zone, where they will do the job the way they want to. That’s human nature.

However, they ultimately realised that something had to be done.”

Eid set to work on selecting a vendor to instigate the changes needed to upgrade BATCO’s workflows and document management, a process which he says had begun before his arrival at the company four years ago.

Following the evaluation, Eid and his team decided that Laserfiche’s Rio 9 enterprise content management (ECM) system was the strongest option available. He had been swayed via BATCO’s rivals’ use of the solution. “A number of our competitors in Lebanon had opted for it, which reinforced the idea that it was also best for us,” he says.

At the start of 2015, BATCO finally began work on implementing the Rio ECM system.

Following its completion several months later, the solutions have seen fast-paced and widespread adoption across company departments, and have already begun to increase collaboration within the company. “The legal team are its biggest users,” Eid says. “It’s also very popular with our tendering, business development, operations and banking and treasury teams.

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“The next stage for us has to be giving our external clients access to our portal and archiving and software tools, which will be a big step for all parties.”

Following the fast rate of uptake with these groups, we’re sure that this number will only increase very soon.”

Eid ensured the solution was customised across departments, with each having their own specific workflows and eForms. He believes interdepartmental collaboration has been enhanced as a result.

“Departments need to decide what they want from each other,” he says. “The solution has facilitated that process.” Furthermore, the implementation stretches across the UAE and Oman, meaning these office branches can also send through documents to the Lebanon head office. “The main benefit of using Laserfiche is being able to follow up on communications with employees,” Eid says. “Employees were initially worried about receiving too many emails but they’ve found that the opposite is true, their working lives have been made easier.”

In the face of continuing opposition from staff, Eid and the IT department have made inroads to achieving widespread acceptance for the solution. “A large number of employees are innately stubborn, and continue to reject the idea of change, even though things are running much smoother than they were,” he says. “Older users in

particular are skeptical and can be especially difficult.”

Although Eid has encountered resistance from employees across the company, he is nonetheless confident that solution will have a widespread impact on the business in the near future. “I do believe that within a year, Laserfiche’s use will be linked to every department,” he says. “It may take time for users to fully embrace the solution but I do think it will have a knock-on effect and will benefit them once they begin to digest certain concepts regarding its use.”

Eid was also satisfied with the post-implementation he received from Laserfiche. “When we needed additional support, they provided it,” he says. “They gave our end users several training sessions which has been very useful.”

Moving forward, Eid believes the Laserfiche solution has laid the foundations for a range of other initiatives within BATCO. “In the long term I certainly think we stand to benefit from eForms and improved workflows,” he says.

“Being able to control documents from one place has been a key value add. The next stage for us has to be giving our external clients access to our portal and archiving and software tools, which will be a big step for all parties.”

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays June 2015. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Savvy shopping

Shoppers at the global grocery chain Carrefour come in for the savings, and leave laden down with the week's shop. What they don't see are the piles of paperwork it takes to keep things running smoothly. The potential for data loss when working with a paper-based system was simply too high for Ihab Damouri, GM of HR , Carrefour Middle East, to abide. He turned to technology for a solution.

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CARREFOUR

arrefour has long been a staple for savvy shoppers in the Middle East. From electronics and appliances to, of course, groceries, Carrefour’s many locations in the region strive to provide the best quality and most diverse selection of household goods available. Globally, Carrefour is one of the largest hypermarket chains in the world, boasting 1,452 stores at the end of 2011. In 1995, Carrefour first opened its UAE business, which operates as a joint venture with Majid Al Futtaim.

With the brand experiencing healthy expansion in the Middle East, it was inevitable that certain back-end procedures would have to be readdressed and adapted to fit the needs of a growing workforce.

One such issue was paper. The daily volume of documents created by the company was not yet an issue. In 2010, however, Ihab Damouri, General Manager of HR, Carrefour, saw the potential for troubled waters in the future. “The process of filing these documents by hand was simply taking too long,” he says, recalling the tedious, time-consuming tasks of filing and scheduling when he took on his new role in the Dubai offices.

Damouri realised that the company operations in Dubai needed to centralise and streamline some of its paper-based processes. “Payroll,

case study

C

Ihab Damouri, General Manager, HR, Carrefour Middle East. in particular, was an issue at the time,” he says. “We had over 9,000 employees and the process was a pain point for our administrative staff.”

In addition, the company needed to digitise documents to store and protect company data. Finally, Damouri and his team of 12 said ‘enough’. It was time to address the paper problem head on.

At first, the solution seemed simple – at least when it came to storing digital copies. “We bought a scanner,” he says “and began scanning documents to store them.” According to Damouri, this was the first step they took to determine if paper processes

"Payroll, in particular, was an issue.

We had over 9,000 employees and the process was a pain point for our administrative staff." www.cnmeonline.com

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could be simplified. It quickly became apparent, however, that the volume of documents was just too much for an in-house solution. “Daily, from each store, we receive around 30 documents. If one accounts for every store in the UAE, that is around 400 documents per day. It was just too much,” he recalls.

“I was in an Aramex office when I heard about InfoFort,” says Damouri.

InfoFort, an information management solutions company owned by Aramex, has been offering document management and other services in the Middle East since 1997. The company now serves organisations in the region ranging from SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. “I found out that InfoFort was part of Aramex and that it uses digitalisation to manage documents. I liked that it was a local company, and that it was part of Aramex - a company that we knew well,” says Damouri. It seemed like InfoFort could provide the solution that Carrefour needed.

No stranger to the challenges that Damouri and the HR staff at Carrefour faced, InfoFort currently digitises around 500 million documents per year. To put it in perspective, if InfoFort laid all of the documents they manage on top of one another, the stack would be almost twice the height of the Burj Khalifa and would cover an area twice the size of Monaco.

It was at the end of 2010 when Damouri called on InfoFort, and the push to unbury the staff – both in terms of workload and physical paper – began. First on Damouri’s plate was convincing Carrefour’s management team. “It was actually a fairly easy sell,” he recalls. “As soon as I outlined the cost and time savings, everyone was on board.”

From the beginning, InfoFort made themselves fully available to Damouri 44

october 2015

“Daily, from each store, we receive around 30 documents. Accounting for every store in the UAE, that is around 400 documents per day. It was just too much." and his staff. “We began with weekly meetings,” he says, commenting on InfoFort’s hands-on approach. “As they began to understand our needs, and we became more comfortable with the system, those meetings became less frequent. However, they always remained within reach for troubleshooting.

“We had a very detailed filing system,” says Damouri, “with clusters within files and more.” In addition, as the nature of human resourcesrelated documents is often private, data security was paramount. To address and support the filing system that was already in place, InfoFort offered Carrefour a customised filing solution. It was a two-sided approach, explains Damouri – InfoFort needed to create a system that addressed Carrefour’s existing system, and the staff at Carrefour needed to adjust their existing filing processes to merge with the new system.

“The company came in and implemented a filing system that not only kept our current documents in order but also allowed new documents to be organised correctly,” says Damouri. Each document was coded on its bottom edge. These codes indicated exactly where the document needed to be stored in the new filing system. This way, the time it took to locate a document was significantly reduced.

The results were immediately apparent. Most notably, the removal of physical documents from the office created more space and gave staff peace of mind. “We were no longer worried about misplacing a document and having to spend valuable time searching for them,” says Damouri. “Everything was searchable within the document management solution.” In addition, digitally filing documents went from a daunting daily task for the team, to an act that took just a few minutes.

“In fact,” says Damouri, “I estimate that each staff member saved around 180 minutes per week with the new system.” Time such as that adds up and allows the staff to concentrate on improving the core processes of the department. Payroll and scheduling time was also remarkably reduced, and the department was able to generate monthly reports, which had a more accurate snapshot of their data.

The project has been so successful, in fact, that Carrefour plans to roll out similar implementations throughout the region.

As for the everyday customer, we likely won’t see a direct change the next time we go shopping. However, with processes in the back of the house significantly streamlined, the benefits of a digitised, secure and highly organised filing system are sure to benefit shoppers and staff alike.

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GBM is the region’s number one provider of IT solutions

GBM brings the power of the world’s most renowned technology providers, IBM from its outset and the addition of the Cisco portfolio in 1999. GBM today holds both the Master Collaboration and the Master Security Specializations from Cisco, the only partner across Gulf to be awarded these distinctions.

GBM’s 1,200 industry experts work across a broad range of market sectors, including: Government, Banking and Finance, Telecommunications, Retail and Oil & Gas. GBM lives the ever-evolving culture of the local IT landscapes in which it operates, continually investing in training and development to ensure its experts can fully understand and interpret the growing needs of their clients. As a result, GBM is always well-equipped to address the ever-evolving, industryspecific IT demands in every market. www.gbmme.com ABU DHABI • BAHRAIN • DUBAI • KUWAIT • OMAN • PAKISTAN • QATAR

case study

gulf precast

set in concrete

With a lack of sufficient processes to ensure timely delivery of its product, Gulf Precast was suffering. Mohammad Shahzad, ICT Manager, Gulf Precast Concrete, implemented an enterprise-wide ERP solution which has vastly improved operating processes and had a huge impact on the company's bottom line. ulf Precast is a household name – the precast concrete company creates the building blocks and elements that make up many of the villas and households in the GCC. The firm is one of the oldest companies in the UAE. Building on more than 30 years of experience, Gulf Precast has expanded beyond its original boarders of the UAE, and out into the larger GCC with operations now active in Saudi Arabia. With six fixed manufacturing factories - four in Abu Dhabi and two in Dubai - the company can produce up to 1,240 m3 per day, the largest precast capability in the UAE. The company is also behind a great deal of the physical infrastructure of the region.

Precast concrete is a construction product made by casting concrete in a reusable mould or 'form' which is then cured in a controlled environment, transported to the construction site and lifted into place.

The process of creating these pieces, as well as storing and shipping them, is all about tracking and

G

Mohammad Shahzad, Information & Communication Technology Manager, Gulf Precast Concrete

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timeliness, says Mohammad Shahzad, Information and Communication Technology Manager, Gulf Precast Concrete. “If the precast material arrives too early, then it takes up room on the construction site, and can potentially cause problems,” he says. “If it arrives too late, then crews are waiting on site and costing the business time and money.” All pieces need to arrive on time and in excellent condition.

Achieving the twin goals of quality and timeliness was a difficult task just a few years ago. “Before 2010, our IT systems were quite siloed,” explains Shahzad. “Finance was using one IT system, and manufacturing was using another. Each department had its own way of doing things, and their IT systems were simply speaking different languages.” In addition, the company had no proper data system, and much of their tracking process was still paper-based. Also, while the company was creating a wealth of data, it was not being analysed or utilised.

Gulf Precast turned to Ramco Systems to deliver enterprisewide ERP solutions throughout the www.cnmeonline.com

Precast Gulf environment. The team at Gulf Precast, along with Ramco and systems integration partner Primavera, created a phased rollout plan, and Shahzad joined Gulf Precast shortly thereafter. “To describe everything that was changed would take hours,” quips Shahzad.

“It has really been a comprehensive adjustment to all of our systems.”

Shahzad saw the solution not as a patchwork of systems, but as one, comprehensive overhaul. “We wanted everything to work on the same system so that we could all be on the same page.” With more than 25 modules, and nearly 300 end-users, the brief was anything but small.

The management of Gulf Precast was a critical support, says Shahzad.

With the top brass behind the project, it was only a matter of implementing the new systems, and bringing all of the end-users on board. “Ramco provided regular training sessions for users of the new portals,” says Shahzad. However, in truth, he says, the software was user-friendly enough that training was not a major issue.

"The goal was a completely integrated end-to-end system," Shahzad says. This would allow Gulf Precast to track its products. "For example, we have put QR codes on all of our products and vehicles," Shahzad highlights one of many IT projects, “With that QR code, we can scan the precast product and know its corresponding storage area, who checked it for quality and when it is scheduled to be delivered to its project site."

What makes this overhaul truly unique, is that the entire infrastructure is on one system. “The same system that governs the product tracking, governs our HR department, www.cnmeonline.com

our finance department and more,” says Shahzad. The resulting infrastructure means all departments are now speaking the same language.

Further, they are able to manage most processes via their smartphones. “For example,”

says Shahzad, “our vehicles can be scanned with a smartphone to reveal important transport information.” Gulf Precast wanted to make information accessible to the employees that need it, at the exact time that they need it. october 2015

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“To describe everything that was changed would take hours. It has really been a comprehensive adjustment to all of our systems.”

The revamping of the overall system has resolved hundreds of issues, says Shahzad, as well as providing a significant return on investment. “By using smartphones for field operations, rather than other handheld devices, we have saved $375,000.” In addition, the Gulf Precast financial period closing time has been reduced from one month to six days, and project cost collation has reduced from 15 to just two days. This allows the company to avoid billing discrepancies and bill their customers in a timely manner.

Internally, the overall financial period close time has gone from 25 48

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days to seven, and payroll processing time has been cut from 25 days to only two. With funds flowing in and out in a timely manner, and fewer discrepancies in billing and payroll, both employees and customers are more satisfied.

With the new systems nearly complete, Shahzad is looking to the future. “Our IT security is sound and our ERP system is functioning with almost no downtime,” he says.

“Now we are looking into analysing the data that these new systems create.” As the data created only flows through all the data flows through one system, there is

almost no possibility that it can be tampered with due to human error between its creation and its arrival at the Gulf Precast headquarters.

This may be an enormous opportunity for the company to improve its processes further in the future.

It was, indeed, a daunting project that Shahzad undertook, but he is adamant that the credit not go to him alone. “I have to share this ERP deployment accomplishment with my team. Their contributions were invaluable, and continuous support from our top management is truly what made this possible.”

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towards the right direction...

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case study

KAU

Governor of Jeddah Prince Meshal Bin Majed inaugurates the HPC

THe powerhouse

King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah has a vital new research tool. Not just any new system, its High Performance Computer has been rated as the 360th most powerful supercomputer in the world. Dr Iyad Katib, Director of the High Performance Computing Centre, discusses the current and future uses of the behemoth.

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s one of the most powerful systems in the Middle East, much rests on King Abdulaziz University’s (KAU) High Performance Computer (HPC). With 497 servers and 10,000 core processors, the recently completed HPC is just beginning its journey to becoming an incredibly potent tool in the advancement of knowledge and research at the University. Dr Iyad Katib, Director of the High Performance Computing Centre and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, is extremely encouraged by the impact that the new installation has already made. “It’s added enormous value for us,” he says. “We can now analyse data in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Ranked as the 360th most powerful supercomputer in the world by key index ‘TOP500’, KAU’s HPC stands as one of the Middle East’s most important technology

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investments. Funded by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance, KAU initially submitted a series of scientific proposals to gain the necessary funding for the HPC. Following a series of discussions, it didn’t take much to convince MoF of the merits in backing the ambitious project.

“With the vast amount of important research being undertaken here, our students and professors need answers that only technology can provide,” Dr Katib says. “Scientific fields in particular demand high computing power and memory, and the processes they undertake can demand months and even years of their time. We needed to accelerate the pace at which they could find game-changing solutions and advance KAU’s research.”

It’s not hard to imagine the complexity involved in the planning and design of such a vast system. Dr Katib points to several key factors that posed the greatest difficulties prior to the HPC’s installation. “In terms of integrating the HPC with our infrastructure at the time, that was not too much of a problem,” he says. “The real challenges arose from physical, rather than technical, issues. For instance, finding space for the racks required two years’ prior planning. Power necessities were also a main issue.

The HPC requires huge quantities of electricity.” As if those concerns weren't enough to occupy Dr Katib, cooling the designated facility presented a sizeable hurdle.

In the POC stage of the project, Dr Katib and KAU’s IT department evaluated proposals from HP, IBM and Fujitsu, eventually opting for www.cnmeonline.com

the latter’s offering. Collectively, they decided that the HPC would consist of Primergy CX250 servers and 2PB of the firm’s Eternus storage, as well as Eaton Williams’ pressure sensor fan speed controllers for cooling.

Although KAU initially faced a three month delay due to problems in the transfer of machines - which were manufactured in Germany - installation began in September 2014, and by June 2015, the facility was complete.

At first glance, it’s easy for bystanders to get carried away at the seemingly endless possibilities of what could be achieved with

“With the vast amount of critical research being undertaken here, our students and professors need certain answers that only technology can provide. ”

such a powerful system. However, for now at least, the HPC has been designed with the intention of enhancing KAU’s broad research capabilities, initially for use by only a certain number of faculties.

In the short to mid-term, the HPC has the mandate of benefiting KAU’s - and Saudi Arabia’s -

scientific community. In 2009, severe flooding affected Jeddah and Saudi Arabia’s west coast, killing over 100 people. It is precisely these types of incidents that KAU’s professors and academics are working to prevent. “The Kingdom faces a range of weather problems,” Dr Katib says. “Our climate research facility is growing, and we are always interested in developing new models of analysis. Ultimately, our aspiration is to improve forecasting guides, and anticipate disasters before they happen.”

That’s not all the University is working toward. KAU’s Faculty of Medicine and Centre of Excellence in Desalination Technology are expected to be major beneficiaries of the HPC. The University is currently undertaking a large number of projects in genomic research and the processing of sea water. This work will directly benefit from faster data processing.

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a dozen or so senior academics currently accessing the machine, the University is doing all it can to ensure its widespread usage.

The Computer Science course is currently conducted via the HPC’s use, and KAU is offering classes educating students on how their research could be enhanced via a subscription for usage of the HPC. KAU students are able to sign up for an HPC account via a simple process. All they need do is submit and have approved an academic project proposal, and, provided they have a basic knowledge of Linux, are free to use the system.

“The HPC can also be accessed via a VPN and on campus,” Dr Katib says.

Projects on heat transfer and evaporation are already making good use of the system, as is one on the spread of disease. “Our scientists are now able to scale breakouts of a virus on a level that we previously could not achieve,” Dr Katib says.

“This is a major step forward from a research point of view.”

Dr Katib has already noticed a marked impact on the ability of those using the HPC to draw meaningful conclusions from their research. “It’s already providing 52

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“It’s already providing us with extremely advanced research processing. Its ability to perform trillions of operations per second via parallel processing allows us to obtain solutions that simply couldn’t be achieved before." us with advanced research processing,” he says. “With its ability to perform trillions of operations per second via parallel processing, it allows us to obtain solutions that simply couldn’t be achieved before.” The immense power of the HPC is evident, with thousands of processors working simultaneously to search for resolutions across a multitude of academic conundrums. “Issues that previously may have taken years now take hours,” Dr Katib says.

Although the benefits of the HPC are yet to be fully realised, Dr. Katib is already happy to tentatively discuss his vision for its future. “Although it is still in development, quantum computing has the power to transform the

HPC,” he says. “This is an entirely new approach and will require our input to evolve the HPC to fresh demands.”

Looking ahead, the HPC’s initial status as a learning support tool for KAU will inevitably change. Dr. Katib is mindful of the system’s immense potential in driving widespread benefits for Jeddah and Saudi Arabia.

“In the long term, the project hasn’t been designed with the sole intention of benefiting KAU’s researchers,” he says. “The HPC will be able to reach out to government agencies who may need it, will be a powerful tool for a variety of training courses and will benefit the city of Jeddah as a whole. It stands to have a profound impact on our society.” www.cnmeonline.com

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Telecoms World Mobile payment

The colour of money Mobile payment services offer lucrative opportunities for regional telecom operators looking for new revenue streams.

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in association with

pplications that allow money transfers and payments over mobile phones are some of the most important in the industry today. Mobile money transfers top the list, leaving behind location-based services, search and browsing. Money transfers are already popular in a number of emerging markets, and continue to attract more users.

In developed countries, mobile payments are usually an extension of an existing payment infrastructure, but in developing countries users can combine mobile payments with mobile banking to pay bills more conveniently and to gain access to loans and other financial services that were not possible before.

The rapid adoption of new mobile technologies such as NFC and other physical mobile payment methods are beginning to offer consumers a viable alternative to cash, credit cards and debits cards, supporting increasingly mobile lifestyles.

The field of mobile payments has been steadily expanding in the Middle East, riding high on the ubiquity of the mobility

A

“Migrant workers represent a large chunk of the population in the Gulf, especially in the UAE and Qatar, where expatriates account for as much as 87 percent of the total population, and nearly 84 percent in the UAE. These migrants make regular remittances to their families back home.”

Srinivas Nidungondi, Senior VP and Head of Mobile Financial Solutions, Mahindra Comviva

www.cnmeonline.com

wave. According to GSMA, currently there are 15 mobile money services available in the region, with around 38 million registered mobile money accounts.

There is a combination of factors fuelling the growth of mobile payments in the region. First is the sizeable amount of migrant workers.

“Migrant workers represent a large chunk of the population in Gulf, especially in the UAE and Qatar," says Srinivas Nidungondi, Senior VP and Head of Mobile Financial Solutions, Mahindra Comviva.

"Expatriates account for as high as 87 percent of the total population in Qatar, and nearly 84 percent in the UAE. These migrants make regular remittances to their families back home. By leveraging this opportunity, mobile operators in countries such as Qatar are partnering with several money transfer operators to offer mobile remittance services."

Another factor in the growth of the mobile payment market is large unbanked populations. According to the World Bank’s most recent Global Findex, which reveals regional differences in financial inclusion globally, approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide do not have a bank account. The same report estimates that only 18 percent of the adult population in the Middle East and North Africa has formal bank accounts. In parallel, the wide majority of those unbanked already have access to a mobile phone, and clearly stand out as key enablers for financial inclusion. Many regulators recognise the role that mobile money can play and the difference such technology can make in fostering both financial inclusion and economic growth.

“Mobile money services do not just inject added convenience for those who already have bank accounts by october 2015

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Telecoms World Mobile payment

enabling them to make transactions in a few clicks whenever, wherever," says Christelle Toureille, Marketing Director for Banking and Telecom Solutions, Gemalto. "These services also present the unbanked with the opportunity to have a prepaid comprehensive digital wallet which introduces an array of payment services and functionalities such as bills and merchants payment, peer-to peer payments, international remittance payments as well as cash-in and cashout, replacing ATMs in the most remote locations, thanks to a wide network of MNOs, outlets, and agent shops."

Gilles Ubaghs, Senior Analyst, Financial Services Technology, Ovum, offers another perspective. “Interestingly, less mature payment markets such as MEA and AsiaPacific show much higher interest in mobile payments than more mature established card markets in Europe and North America.

In essence, people are less stuck in their ways and are more willing to try something new. With less established infrastructure in place, mobile services can grow very quickly to enable a wide range of financial services activity, including reaching underbanked and remote.”

The increase in the usage and adoption of mobile money services has thrown open new opportunities for telecom operators looking to find new revenue streams to offset the decline in ARPU. “Many of your

“Mobile money services do not just inject added convenience for those who already have bank accounts by enabling them to make transactions in a few clicks whenever, wherever. These services also present the opportunity to have a prepaid comprehensive digital wallet which introduces an array of payment services and functionalities.

Christelle Toureille, Marketing Director for Banking and Telecom Solutions, Gemalto

“Interestingly, less mature payment markets such as MEA and Asia Pacific show much higher interest in mobile payments than more mature established card markets in Europe and North America.”

Gilles Ubaghs, Senior Analyst, Financial Services Technology, Ovum 56

october 2015

clients are generating more than five percent of their revenues from service charges on mobile money transactions,” says Nidungondi.

Toureille agrees and says mobile money services are growing at a steady pace with a total of 255 mobile money services launched worldwide and now available in 46 percent of the MENA markets.

“Technology such as this responds to a strong need in the market and mobile operators are well positioned to help realise these opportunities; adding mobile money solutions to their value-added services portfolio is a great opportunity for mobile operators and can help them recruit new customers, reduce churn and generate new revenue streams,” she says.

However, to succeed in mobile money services, operators must remain sensitive to the evolving nature of mobile payment opportunities and harness key success factors.

Christian Bartosch, Associate Director, BCG Middle East, says this requires a well-crafted strategy specifically tailored to the location, situations, current market environment, and applicable laws and regulations. “In most markets where operators play a significant role in mobile www.cnmeonline.com

Telecoms World Mobile payment

Cracking the market

In a recent study, EY has listed out five key success factors for operators to thrive in the diverse and expanding mobile payments landscape: 1. Leverage established strengths and reputation in security and customer insight: Operators have trusted consumer brands in terms of security – and this a vital competitive advantage in a fast-evolving service environment where security concerns hinder customer take-up.

2. Improve and align payments-related competencies within the organisation: This is needed to achieve the necessary blend of flexibility and focus, and should be supplemented by external hires with experience in payments and marketing. Design and development of payments services should be linked and integrated with other emerging competencies in cloud, big data and customer analytics to sustain and grow long-term differentiation.

3. Engage with customers, suppliers and stakeholders in new ways: Engaging in new ways with a widening set of ecosystem partners and stakeholders is essential to ensure that value chains are incentivised. Engagement with merchants and vendors can strengthen service creation — while greater focus is needed on the end user experience.

4. Consider targeted investments to improve time-to-market: Targeted acquisitions may prove invaluable as operators ramp up their service portfolios and may help them get to market more quickly with compelling services in high-potential areas like insurance and customer loyalty solutions.

5. Reinvigorate partnerships and joint ventures to grow capabilities and improve credibility with end users: Partnerships will remain the lifeblood of successful mobile payments and related propositions, particularly as operators look to differentiate their offerings with more sophisticated functionalities. In this light, robust partner screening and alignment are essential, as is leadership buy-in from organisations looking to partner.

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payments, they have actually acquired banks, provided payment services, which did not require a banking licence or participated in national partnerships as infrastructure providers.

“But with most models, operators do not have access to the actual transaction data, nor do they own the merchant or consumer relationships. In general, operators have not succeeded in building genuine mobile payment revenue streams in markets with strong financial service regulations.”

Ubaghs adds that no one has really cracked the mobile money game completely.

“I would say that one of the keys many people miss is they need to focus on the overall customer experience, and not just the customer interface. That means it’s more than just creating a card on a phone, but tying that into other services, such as loyalty and rewards, ticketing and account management in a user friendly experience, which creates real value. That also means making sure you have the right partnerships in place, especially to push real-world users, and a fully functional back end.”

To make their business models sustainable, mobile operators launching mobile money services are also turning to more interoperable solutions. “In many countries, regulatory barriers and a lack of cooperation have limited mass-scale deployment and adoption.

Active inter-stakeholder engagement between telcos, banks, regulators and other service providers will definitely better support mobile payment and help these solutions reach new levels.

In more and more countries, regulators are acknowledging the benefits of the work done by telcos to bring financial services to the masses and address financial inclusion, and have reviewed regulations to extend financial services licensing and authorisation framework to non-bank providers,” Toureille says. www.cnmeonline.com

solutions World Business-IT alignment

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Striking a balance

The concept of business-IT alignment is a top priority for most CIOs around the world. But it presents a conundrum. How can CIOs ensure that their efforts satisfy a company’s internal technology needs as well as delivering value to the most important stakeholder – the customer?

ttend any IT industry conference in this day and age, and one of the hardest-pushed topics will always be the idea of ‘business-IT alignment’. The message is clear: CIOs must ensure their technology-related initiatives are supporting the business’ needs, and driving operational efficiency and bottom line. They need to ensure their work strikes a chord with marketing and finance needs. Their initiatives needs to keep their customers – and internal users – happy. Their roadmap needs to be in line with the overall vision of the organisation.

Providing the infrastructure and services needed to keep things ticking over will no longer suffice.

A large part of this stems from the drive towards digitalisation. The idea that products and services are increasingly purchased online, through a variety of channels, puts IT

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at the fore of this change. However, it’s all well and good talking about this ‘alignment’, but what can CIOs really do to ensure this takes place, and isn’t just another buzzword?

The first step for the CIO is being conscientious in achieving a balance between strong technical competencies and all-round business and vertical-focused acumen. Deciding which should come first is a conundrum for any IT decision-maker.

Christian Bartosch, Associate Director, Boston Consulting Group Middle East, appreciates that it is a tough call, but one facet ultimately takes precedence. “If there needs to be a tradeoff between in-depth knowledge of technology trends and a comprehensive understanding of key business verticals, then vertical expertise should be given higher priority,” he says.

“Vertical knowledge prowess is an essential requirement today, as most businesses are shifting to digital platforms. The CIO must october 2015

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play a key role in this process, act as a trusted adviser, and spearhead the business’ digital transformation.”

Mubarik Hussain, Director of IT, Petroserv, is in agreement. “My view is that although advanced and up-to-date technical acumen is important, a more effective CIO is one who has stronger knowledge of their specific vertical or business,” he says. “As a CIO, time will be spent discussing strategy and business with the CEO, CFO and business unit heads so understanding the business model and how to enhance it will make the CIO’s contribution more valuable to the business leaders and increase engagement with them.”

Although the majority of CIOs find themselves in a daily struggle to find an equilibrium between ‘keeping the lights on’ and growth projects, sage financial planning is needed to ensure business goals are satisfied. In order to achieve this, interdepartmental collaboration is needed, says Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner. “Methods for capturing business needs early in the cycle include having business involved in the IT budget approval process along with the CFO, and the building of joint teams, which helps identify new business processes and maps technologies to enable them,” he says. “CIOs who create and champion business capability models - the ways in which enterprises combine resources,

“As a CIO, time will be spent discussing strategy and business with the CEO, CFO and business unit heads so understanding the business model will make the CIO’s contribution more valuable to the business leaders.”

Mubarik Hussain, Director of IT, Petroserv

“CIOs have a unique vantage point. They have all the resources to see how business is being conducted, which function is doing what kind of jobs, how the different functions interact with each other and how customers interact with the organisation.”

Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner

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competencies, information, processes and their environments to deliver consistent value to customers - can improve their interactions with stakeholders and provide the clarity and insight that senior leaders need to produce fact-based strategic plans.”

Against this backdrop, it is essential for the CIO to play to their strengths. While issues such as IT security can easily act as a hindrance in terms of business innovation, it is important not to lose sight of the innate advantages that IT leaders hold. “CIOs have a unique vantage point,” Mahapatra says. “They have all the resources to see how business is being conducted, which function is doing what kind of jobs, how the different functions interact with each other and how customers interact with the organisation. CIO’s can easily use all this information to suggest many changes to all functions to make the entire system more efficient. They have the power to become the eyes and ears of the business, which is a huge responsibility.”

The concept of aligning IT’s initiatives with the business’ strategic objectives requires frequent and concise communication with the right partners across the organisation. These relationships and interactions are pivotal in achieving objectives. Hussain believes the foremost stakeholder who must be consulted is the most senior figure in the organisation.

“The CEO is most important in terms of www.cnmeonline.com

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solutions World Business-IT alignment

consultation, as he or she is the one who has the strongest business knowledge and vision for enhancing the business,” he says.

Dr. Jassim Haji, Director of IT, Gulf Air, believes the CIO’s executive peers have the power to best advise on effective decision-making, and provide broad and comprehensive perspectives on the business’ needs. “The COO, CMO and CFO are the most important stakeholders in delivering true business-IT alignment,” Haji says. “The COO can provide insights on how to improve operational efficiency, increase productivity and achieve cost reductions. The CMO can give insights on how technology can help in designing the best service or products for the customer to achieve economies of scale or scope, which will strengthen the companies’ market offering. The CFO, meanwhile, tracks and measures the return on investment and financial benefits that companies can achieve, which can lower financial risk, and help companies to obtain more attractive borrowing rates to fund future projects.”

Bartosch believes the head of the finance function constitutes the CIO’s most important ally. “Due to the capital-intensive nature of most industries, a close relationship with the CFO is necessary to make the right investment decisions – and ensure that they are based on well-substantiated business cases,” he says. “Strategic business unit leaders make up the second most important stakeholder group. Third in line is the CEO, a key stakeholder and one that requires full transparency when it comes to how well IT solutions support the business.”

In order for the region’s CIOs to fully satisfy the mandate of true business-IT alignment, it is undoubtedly useful to assess other markets in terms of their progress on this issue. While agile and scalable IT infrastructures develop in the Middle East, it is only natural that IT leaders in this part of the world experience some growing pains in fully satisfying customers. Just how far along is the Middle East on its journey to pleasing all parties?

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“Technology events targeted at the CIO’s level in this region show that the focus has started to shift, but these events are not truly lined up with the different business areas or domains like you see in the US or Europe.”

Dr. Jassim Haji, Director of IT, Gulf Air

Haji draws on his international experience to place the Middle East in a wider context. “CIOs in the Middle East are partially in-tune with business needs but there is still more to be desired,” he says.

“Technology events targeted at the CIO’s level in this region show that the focus has started to shift, but these events are not truly lined up with the different business areas or domains like you see in the U.S or Europe.

In these markets, focused events for one specific business domain - such as banking or aviation - take place between the CIOs and their counterpart executives.”

Mahapatra, meanwhile, acknowledges a widespread need for improvement, but realises that the current transitional phase is promising. “Like in any market, we have both kinds of CIO in the Middle East,” he says. “Some are very much in-tune with their business while some are very operational and tactical. If you look at the maturity of organisations in the Middle East, they are a little bit lower than the global level as IT departments have remained either as back offices or the data centre in the corner of the building. However, changes are happening, and will happen at a faster pace as organisations adopt digital and smart technologies. So, in a nutshell, the majority of CIOs in the Middle East are not in-tune with business but that is rapidly changing.”

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network World High speed Ethernet

faster fabric Although impressive, 10 gigabit Ethernet faces stiff competition. Network architects need to brace themselves for the impending arrival of 25G/50G Ethernet technology, which promises to redefine the data centre networking landscape in enterprises.

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Strategic Innovation Partner

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ith advent of cloud, Big Data and the deployment of megascale data centres, enterprises are faced with the challenge of reconfiguring and evolving their networks to meet bandwidth requirements. This has led to the development of new technologies and standards designed to cost-effectively increase and optimise network capacity, security and flexibility.

For enterprises, the emphasis is on building out networks that can scale according to changing business needs, and balance performance optimisation, while maintaining the lowest possible capital and operating expenditures.

“One way to accomplish these often-conflicting goals is by transitioning to higher-speed Ethernet technologies such as 25G/50G,” says Nicholas Ilyadis, VP and CTO, Broadcom, Infrastructure and Networking Group.

Industry experts predict that the largest cloud operators will shift to 100G Ethernet fabrics while costefficient 25G and 50G will remain the workhorses for enterprises. The 25G/50G Ethernet Consortium has its 25G and 50G Ethernet specification open to all data centre ecosystem

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vendors – royalty free – to create and deploy compliant, interoperable product implements. The standard is expected to expedite the widespread deployment of 25G and 50G Ethernet ports that will coincide with the rollout of 100G for cloud fabrics.

“A 25G/50G standard may seem like a step backwards, because 40G and 100Gbps Ethernet already exist, but it’s all about the need for more costeffective speed, specifically from servers in cloud data centres," Ilyadis adds. "For example, 25Gbps cabling is about the same cost structure as 10G at 2.5x the performance. Similarly, 50G is half of the cost of 40G with a 25-percent increase in performance."

Twenty-five gigabit Ethernet and 50G Ethernet are touted as natural migration conduits to 100G because the signaling

“The 25/50G specification enables the most costefficient scale-up of server and storage bandwidth beyond 10G, while coupling optimally with 100G uplinks to the rest of the data centre network. This is a natural progression with relatively minimal incremental cost and an excellent re-use of existing infrastructure.”

Samer Ismair, Network Consultant, Brocade Communications

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and single-lane technology for 25G was developed during the 100G Ethernet process, which is four lanes of 25G. “When server access networks are at 10G, typically the data centre core is designed to be at 40G speed," says Oussama Bachour, Systems Engineering Manager, Juniper Networks. "One of the advantages of 25G is found with the infrastructure and cabling compatibility with 10G. Elsewhere, 100G cabling and infrastructure speeds are compatible with 40G. Going to 25G provides an easy path for customers without the need to invest upfront on infrastructure upgrades while providing 2.5x bandwidth and performance improvements in the data centre."

Some analysts believe 25G could be the second highest Ethernet server connectivity technology sold and shipped in the next five years, behind 10G; and vendors like Cisco and Dell have recently announced 25G-capable switches based on Broadcom's Tomahawk chipset.

Is 25G/50G really the best choice for server connectivity in data centres?

Samer Ismair, Network Consultant, Brocade Communications, believes so.

“The 25/50G specification enables the most cost-efficient scale-up of server and storage bandwidth beyond 10G, while coupling optimally with 100G uplinks to the rest of the data centre network," he says. "This is a natural progression with relatively minimal incremental cost and an excellent re-use of existing infrastructure.”

The dynamics and economics of the server access layers in any data centre are the top factors in the designer's mind when architecting the overall network design. Most of these dynamics stem from the applications and services hosted in the data centre. This, coupled with CAPEX/OPEX constraints, dictates data centre-specific economics that

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VISIBILITY INTO NETWORKS HAS NEVER BEEN MORE CRITICAL...

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THE MEAN NUMBER OF DAYS FROM INITIAL INTRUSION TO DETECTION*

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OF ORGANISATIONS HAD ACTIVE COMMAND & CONTROL (C&C) COMMUNICATIONS**

*Trustwave Holdings, Inc. “2015 Trustwave Global Security Report.” 2015. **FireEye. “MAGINOT REVISITED: More Real-World Results from Real-World Tests.” 2015.

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network World High speed Ethernet

lead to the final decision of server access technology.

“In such environments where keeping a tight lid on CAPEX and OPEX is a top priority to ensure profitability, technology such as 25EG/50G can be considered the right choice for server access,” says Bachour.

The availability of multiple new data centre Ethernet speeds is also expected to lead to a much stronger server networking upgrade cycle than seen over the past decade, according to Crehan Research. The firm expects that the impending arrival of 25G and 50G products, in combination with existing 10G and 40G products, will result in more than two-thirds of total server networking ports migrating to highspeed Ethernet within three years.

The different speeds will appeal to different market segments, Crehan says. For example, 25G will see a strong initial ramp from deployments by cloud network operators, an area of the market where 10G server networking is currently prevalent. Meanwhile, 40G is starting to ramp significantly as the most current attractively priced data centre Ethernet speed. Networking bandwidth demands were so strong in some market verticals that these customers could not wait to evaluate impending 25G and 50G options, Crehan reports.

Now, the question everyone seems to be asking is whether the 25G standard, which is yet to be ratified

by IEEE, can unseat 40G as the next logical jump from 10G in enterprises.

Market trackers believe 25G will drive better cost-efficiencies than 40G, saving enterprise data centres capital and operating expense. These efficiencies, plus the endorsement of 25G by large cloud providers such as Google and www.cnmeonline.com

"Going to 25G provides an easy path for customers without the need to invest upfront on infrastructure upgrades while providing 2.5x bandwidth and performance improvements in the data centre."

Oussama Bachour, Systems Engineering Manager, Juniper Networks

Microsoft, might be enough to knock 40G down a rung as the next most deployed server access port.

While the adoption of 10G has been rather slower than anticipated, 25G is expected to see an accelerated demand if average selling prices are attractive.

“The adoption of 10 Gb Ethernet in the enterprise has been slower than expected and surely slower than anyone wants, but I think that, if the price is right, adoption of 25G/50G and maybe even 100G on the switch could be faster than many expect,” says Ismair.

With the increased competition among data centre switch vendors and the availability of low-priced white box, and merchant silicon and operating system offerings, the costs are declining for 40G and 100G as well, and soon enterprise IT managers will be spoilt for choice when it comes to Ethernet bandwidth options to boost capacity and performance of their data centres.

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Security AdvisEr Data loss

Losing IT Highly publicised events have demonstrated that it is now more difficult than ever to protect an organisation’s internal data.

Advances in technology and productivity tools have made collaboration in the workplace easier, while also creating new vectors for data to leave the organisation.

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is now part of

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s with any frontier, the increasing fluidity of data presents unprecedented opportunities for growth and expansion. However, with these opportunities come new potential for data loss. In order to protect data in the burgeoning landscape of Big Data, cloud computing, social media and BYOD, enterprises must pinpoint potential problems and leverage loss prevention solutions.

According to Guurprit Ahuja, Director, Middle East and Africa, Acronis, these leaks in data are on the rise. “Over the last two years the volume of enterprise data loss has increased by 400 percent,” he says.

This alarming rate is a clear indication for IT enterprises to take action in order to protect their data.

In short, companies must find the holes through which their data is leaking. “Data breaches caused by malicious actors make headlines,” says Ahuja, “but companies must also be aware of risks that come from within. Often, these risks derive from wellintentioned employees who accidentally delete or misplace valuable data.”

Whether from inside a company or from external influences, intentional or not, data loss most commonly takes place via the Internet. Patrick Grillo, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Fortinet, points out, “Email, phishing websites, social media and cloud computing are the most common vectors for data loss companies face.”

The Internet is not the only source of data loss, however, and enterprises must take care to protect against data transfers through flash drives and mobile devices.

With BYOD a growing trend, data can even be lost by something as unintentional as a misplaced personal mobile device.

Simon Mullis, Global Technical Lead, Strategic Alliances, FireEye, recognises the uphill battle enterprises face with data loss prevention. “Information

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security is an inherently asymmetric fight,” he says. “The house we are trying to protect has ten thousand doors, and the attacker only needs to sneak through one of them. A determined attacker will choose the most appropriate vector to steal data from you, and therefore companies need to be vigilant across all vectors of potential data loss.”

In order to mitigate data loss, many companies look to building a comprehensive security policy. According to Grillo, “A security policy effective against data loss must encompass the entire network from the endpoints, to the data centre and everywhere in between.

The policy,” he says, “should focus on three key areas: detection, prevention and mitigation.”

In terms of prevention, Mullis points out the resurgence in content-aware DLP solutions in the last year. “If a company is looking to protect against theft or leakage of structured data, than this can be a useful approach,” he says. “However, it is clear through countless examples, that corporate data of all shapes and sizes can be easily encoded, obfuscated, encrypted and stolen by simple malware toolkits. Many of these malware toolkits have become adept at avoiding detection.”

The sophistication of malware presents a difficult obstacle for companies to mitigate with most DLP solutions.

“The problem,” Mullis explains, “Is that most DLP technologies often require enterprises to classify all of their data in order to appropriately detect and prevent unauthorised leakage, but this classification process is a massive undertaking for most companies. In addition to classifying data, a company must manage the DLP system including the influx of false positives that are inevitably going to be reported, and advanced attackers have developed innovative techniques for circumventing some of these solutions anyway.”

contacts-ae@exclusive-networks.com

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Security AdvisEr Data loss In order to truly initiate an effective data loss prevention solution, Mullis suggests a combination of the right technology mixed with the intelligence and expertise of a well trained workforce and IT department.

Ahuja reminds enterprises not to forget the basics in their fight against data loss. “Regular data backups,” he explains, “especially using cloud computing, allow for a faster recovery time in the event of a data loss incident.” He also reinforces the notion of a workforce well trained and educated in the importance of DLP. “Give employees practical strategies to avoid common mistakes, like opening unknown email attachments or downloading apps from unknown sources,” he suggests.

There are a number of DLP technologies currently on the market, each offering their own steps in the continuing dance of protecting important data. Grillo suggests enterprises consider a layered approach, combining multiple systems, for effective DLP. “Network firewalls with complementary security services, web application firewalls, secure email gateways, sandboxes - breach detection systems - and endpoint protection software should all be components of any security structure and some elements, such as the secure email gateway can also have distinct DLP technology inside,” he says.

Even with all of these systems in place, it is important for enterprises to realise that they are not “safe” from the threat of an attack. According to Grillo, “DLP technology will not reduce the risk of an attack but can increase the odds of successfully minimising the damage from a

“No single technology can prevent an attack from being successful, but of the multiple technologies working collaboratively across the network, sharing common threat intelligence is the optimum approach to defending a network.

Patrick Grillo, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Fortinet

“Information security is an inherently asymmetric fight. The house we are trying to protect has ten thousand doors, and the attacker only needs to sneak through one of them.

Simon Mullis, Global Technical Lead, Strategic Alliances, FireEye

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network breach or a deliberate effort to extract data from a network. No single technology can prevent an attack from being successful, but of the multiple technologies working collaboratively across the whole of the network, sharing common threat intelligence is the optimum approach to defending a network and minimising the chance of a hacker successfully breaching the network.”

Arming a serious cache of DLP solutions is certainly an important strategy in keeping enterprise data secure, even in the event of inevitable attack. Another effective strategy is reducing the area available to attacks and accidents alike. Ahuja suggests companies make the effort to classify data in order to aid in DLP. “For the sake of DLP, an enterprise should develop a set of data classification standards to identify data that is critical for day-to-day operations and ensure this information has the highest restoration priority in the event of a loss,” he says. “Access is another way to protect your data: Ensure that only employees and executives directly tied to a project have access to pertinent information — the fewer points of compromise, the less likely a breach or loss.”

Another way for a company to protect its data is by implementing some basic, easy-to-follow policies. This may seem like a rudimentary step when one considers the amount of research and development that goes into DLP solution software, however, it is often errors in the endpoint user that lead to most incidents of data loss and security breach. A well-trained and educated workforce with good DLP habits can be an effective tool in the fight against data loss.

“One example of such basic, yet significant policy is the 3-2-1 rule,” explains Ahuja. “If you’re backing something up, you should have www.cnmeonline.com

Security AdvisEr Data loss at least three copies, in two different formats, with one of those copies off-site,” he says. “This rule is used to eliminate single points of failure, leverage the backup on different types of media storages, and always keep a copy of this data offsite on the cloud or on tape.”

Grillo agrees with implementing easy-tofollow procedures for employees to help DLP. He even encourages companies to be proactive in the testing of these policies to make sure they are being followed. “Once policies are in place and employees are well educated about DLP strategies and threats, companies should periodically launch their own phishing campaigns to make sure that employees do not become complacent in their actions,” he says.

He also points out the need for an enterprise to have policies in place for what to do after an attack has been made. Grillo suggests, “Companies should also implement a set of policies and procedures that employees can follow in the event that they do fall prey to a

“If you’re backing something up, you should have at least three copies, in two different formats, with one of those copies off-site."

Guurprit Ahuja, Director, Middle East & Africa, Acronis

phishing email. The employee should have a non-punitive recourse to fall back on, informing the organisation of their actions, giving the IT department a 'heads up' that there may be a potential intrusion.”

The battle for the protection of data will only continue to grow more complex as technology develops new ways to share information in faster and more innovative ways. Companies must stay abreast of the latest DLP solutions, but always remember that a few basic policies are also invaluable tools for preventing data loss.

INTERVIEW Bob Evans, Senior VP and Chief Communications Officer, Oracle

Eyeing top spot Oracle is targeting the cloud market with a wide array of services, including Big Data and the IoT. Bob Evans, Senior VP and Chief Communications Officer, Oracle, talks about the company’s cloud game plan.

O

racle has been a little late to come to the cloud party. Are you playing catch up now?

No, that is not the case. Oracle has been working on cloud projects for 10 years now, and unlike other companies we’re not developing only a few bits of our product line into the cloud; we are, instead, taking everything to the cloud, from database to middleware, up to the applications.

How do you plan to take on the competition from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft?

We think there’s a lot of room to differentiate and offer more value to customers. If you are in applications as well as platform and infrastructure, you can give customers a single point of contact for all of those segments for security for all of that segment. And, we can make all these pieces work together at all three different levels, and we believe that that’s going to be our competitive advantage.

When you talk about the best-ofbreed approach and having an integrated stack, does this mean that an organisation needs to buy everything from Oracle?

It doesn’t mean you ‘have to,’ it just means that ‘you can.’ It is very important for us that we are able to present our customers with options. If they want they can buy 78

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pieces of cloud layers from Oracle as well as from other vendors. They can also have systems on-premise as well as cloud if they want. We give our customers a freedom to choose how they want to deploy our systems. That is part of Oracle's core strategy.

Do you think hybrid is going to be the model in the future?

Yes, I think that is a possibility.

Larry Ellison talked about this just recently, and he said even though we see mid and big-sized companies deciding to move aggressively into the cloud, it’s going to take a while before they can fully do so. Also, issues such as security and culture are still prevalent in some companies. Because of these, organisations will still keep some of their data on-premise and move some to the cloud.

You have mentioned that you are the biggest SaaS vendor now. Are these existing customers or new ones?

We are seeing a lot of both. It is evenly spread between existing and new customers.

Data governance is a big issue, especially in the Middle East. Do you have any data centres here in the region? If not, are you planning on setting up one in the near future?

I cannot answer this as for now. But in general, on a global basis we believe this

issue of data governance is critical for our customers. We know that we have to be able to give them the capability to play within the rules, and that will require us to have a wider global presence with our data centres. The security and privacy issues that came about recently are only going to make these issues more prevalent. This is an important matter that we will continue to pursue.

What is your value proposition in the IoT space?

There are a lot of niche players in the IoT space, and perhaps some of them are going to be able to do incredible things.

But, this is going to put users back in the game of integration. They will need to find about 15 different IoT solutions to make up a whole solution, and tie up each of those solutions together.

We provide a scalable infrastructure that integrates all different devices and components of the IoT. Oracle’s approach is to do dirty, difficult, timeconsulting integration projects upfront, so customers don’t have to do all that and get into deep technology integration.

How about the security implications of IoT? Do you think the industry has already figured out how to sort them out?

The whole IoT idea is compelling in a lot of ways; it has a huge amount of potential. Any of those future intelligent devices, if not put together properly, will be at risk of being exposed to cyber threat issues. That’s another scenario where Oracle can be of service. We have been developing security solutions ever since the very first project we developed. This is something we take seriously. So, I think any company that wants to get into the IoT space better be worldclass in security as well, because that’s what we do. www.cnmeonline.com

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Blog Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop

The big transformation O

ver the past half-decade, the Big Data flame has spread like wildfire throughout the enterprise, and the IT department has not been immune.

The promise of data-driven initiatives capable of transforming IT from a support function to a profit centre has sparked enormous interest.

While the Four Vs of Big Data – volume, velocity, variety, and veracity – are intended to serve as pillars upon which to construct Big Data efforts, there’s a fifth V that needs to be included, and that’s value. Every Big Data initiative should begin with the question “What value do I want to derive from this effort?” How a group or organisation answers that question should deeply inform the means by which that end is achieved. To date, however, value has very much been the 'silent v'.

The term “data gravity” was coined

by Dave McCrory, the CTO of Basho Technologies, and refers to the pull that data exerts on related services and applications. According to McCrory, data exerts this gravitational pull in two key ways. First, without data, applications and services are virtually useless. For this reason, application and service providers naturally gravitate toward data, and the bigger the data set, the more applications and services it will attract.

The bigger the data set, the harder it is to move. Generally it’s more 80

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efficient and cost-effective to perform processing near where the data resides.

We’ve seen large companies use cloudbased services for IT operations data.

If the data itself originates in the same cloud, this approach is fine. Even data generated on-premise can be stored and analysed in the cloud if it’s small enough. For large amounts of data generated outside the cloud, however, problems arise.

An example of this problem is threat detection systems, which have been in the news in association with high-profile data breaches. The low signal-to-noise ratio of these systems means that alerts are often ignored altogether, and actual threats are missed amidst the chaos. Finding the signal in all that noise can be hard, and when time is of the essence, cutting through the noise can become missioncritical. If you’re sifting through garbage, the chances of finding what you need in time drop dramatically.

Consider the motion of your data. Is the data you’re trying to analyse at rest or in flight? The answer to this question has a huge impact on how you process, view, and analyse the data, as well as the value you can derive from it.

Most Big Data is at rest and analysed post hoc in batch processes that rely on indexing and parallel processing using techniques based on sharing or MapReduce. At its core, this approach is all about volume and

variety, and enterprises are leveraging multiple frameworks and data stores – such as Hadoop, MongoDB and Cassandra – for a variety of structured and unstructured data. While multiple data sources provide context and insight, this approach is always going to be retrospective.

Recently, greater attention is being paid to data-in-flight as the need for greater agility and adaptability drives demand for higher velocity analysis.

High velocity data-in-flight is of paramount importance. It gives IT the ability to see how systems are behaving in the moment, compare that behaviour to established baselines, and drill down to find the root cause of a problem.

While data-in-flight can provide incredible value, analysis of this data requires a fundamentally different approach based on stream processing and summary metrics. In many cases, the data volume is such that it must be processed in-flight. In other cases, real-time information is more valuable, while old data is less valuable.

It’s important to remember that no single dataset or analytics framework can be all things to all people; most tools that offer a single pane of glass wind up serving nothing more than a single glass of pain. By leveraging multiple datasets as well as analytics and visualisation products optimised for particular data types and goals, IT teams can achieve a complete, correlated, cross-tier view of the environment, enabling them to eliminate waste, create greater efficiency, and maximise scarce resources. This approach spells not only value for IT, but also value for the business as a whole. www.cnmeonline.com

Insight

Richard Kessler, Executive Director and Head of Group Information, UBS

Managing data in a mobile and cloud world A simple strategy for standardising metadata can improve decision-making, data governance and data security.

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obility, cloud and Big Data all promise to help enterprises increase efficiency and productivity, improve decision-making and lower costs. The laudable goal is to make business more competitive, but for IT, legal and compliance teams, these new technologies often lead to increased complexity, loss of control and even increased costs as massive amounts of data now move to an ever-increasing number of endpoints, including mobile devices and third-party hosting services.

These challenges can be overcome with a new approach to standardising information metadata.

If IT doesn’t fully understand what data exists and where various types of information are located, then it can’t ensure that the right people have the right access at the right time, and it certainly can’t adequately secure the data against breaches and theft, or delete private information as required by new privacy laws. E-discovery costs can skyrocket as the amount of data that needs to be collected increases. Even business users can suffer as the information they need for daily activities and the data they want to use for Big Data analytics become harder to find and control, leading to lower productivity and redundant effort, while undercutting the hoped-for improvements in decision-making.

To maintain control over their burgeoning data stores, organisations need to develop insight across all data, no matter who creates it, where it lives, and with whom it’s shared.

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Unfortunately, most companies see this as a hugely expensive and disruptive challenge. However, there is actually a very simple and costeffective way of doing this, as long as there is the willingness to do it over time, which is still far better than not doing it at all.

The strategy is based on applying the same metadata standardisation typically used on structured databases to all other data across the enterprise, on-premise and in the cloud, including all message types - email, text and SMS messaging, social media, etc - documents (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), and even log files. In some regulated industries, such as financial services, metadata standardisation could also be applied to voice communications data, such as recorded conversations and voicemail files.

Let’s say there is a master 'worker' ID database - employees and onboarded external personnel, for instance. Using this ID to tag every document, message and database record with who created it, who revised it and who deleted it would make it possible at various stages in a range of business processes to relate data back to particular people, no matter whether the data makes its way onto cloud storage or takes a number of trips from mobile device to mobile device.

Just this one step could also help make e-discovery processes more efficient and facilitate data protection and privacy efforts. It would also then be possible to identify the complete “data footprint” of every individual across all data sources

- applications, shared services, onpremises and cloud.

Let’s look at another important use case. The migration of data beyond the firewall has exacerbated what was already a major challenge for CIOs: distinguishing valuable information from the approximately 75 percent of enterprise data in any organisation that is useless debris. If one wants to manage data regardless of where it is, and if the goal is to get rid of data centres and efficiently move data to the cloud, then it’s absolutely vital that existing data is identified, what’s important, and what lacks any value. Applying standardised metadata to all enterprise data can dramatically improve the identification of key data in conjunction with business, legal, records, compliance and security value to begin to shine a light on the firm’s dark data.

The number of tags one needs to use to dramatically improve data management and support initiatives around aspects such as e-discovery, regulatory compliance, data debris disposal, and cybersecurity and threat response is not at all insurmountable. As noted above, using employee ID, client ID and product ID might be a great place to start. The key is to establish enough tags to be useful, but not so many that it becomes burdensome to apply them to all types of data in all locations the firm can influence or control.

Also, standardisation should be applied over time, evolving systems and user behaviour, not disrupting them.

One strategy is to evolve with the natural life cycle of IT. Each time an application is changed, platform or server, the standardisation of embedded metadata is required. Eventually the use of standardised metadata should become habitual, systematic and pervasive.

With a disciplined approach to metadata standardisation, companies can be prepared to more effectively take advantage of new mobility, cloud and Big Data opportunities. www.cnmeonline.com

Cisco UCS Mini Success Story The Solution

The Challenge

Needed more agile IT for quick implementations Required more efficient server setup Scalable Solution with Small Footprint

Benefits of UCS Mini

Cisco UCS Mini with B200 M3 Blade Servers& 6324 Fabric Interconnects Cisco Catalyst Switch Cisco ASA Firewall

Outcome

Provided a full solution all embedded within the chassis Delivered enterprise capabilities in a small, efficient form factor Ability to connect both SAN and LAN to the 6324 Fabric Interconnects Provided a unified embedded management interface for both internal UCS B-Series Blade Servers and external UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers

Reclaimed 25 percent of our server and storage rack space in the data center, reducing energy demands Cut server setup time by 98% Enabled easy scalability Simplified backup process by using virtual servers

UCS mini solution was introduced to us by Aptec through a technology seminar held alongside Alan Technology. This was further followed by a one-one training at Cisco premises. The solution design was carefully built by Aptec & Alan Technology, the solution was tailored to our needs.

“

Cisco UCS Mini is a powerful and scalable solution delivering enterprise capabilities in a small, efficient form factor, it provides unified server, networking, and storage capabilities embedded within the chassis with comprehensive management provided by UCS Manager” - Mohammad Al Tobasi Lead Infrastructure Specialist, Amplex Emirates Amplex-Emirates is a multi-disciplinary full service design engineering, technology consulting and construction management company specialized in remote control and management of energy saving solutions headquartered in Abu Dhabi , U.A.E

Aptec – an Ingram Micro Company is the Middle East, Africa, Near East and Turkey’s largest technology ValueAdded distributor and a leading technology sales, marketing and logistics company. Aptec is the only distributor who can offer converged stacks solutions for your Data Center such as Flexpod Versa stack and Smart stack Visit http://ingramflyhigher.com/me to learn more

Analyst view

Mohamad Twaishi, Senior Manager, Telecoms and Media, IDC MEA

The public Internet of Things

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n recent years, enterprise mobility (EM) has evolved from being a simple mobile device management tool into a stack of capabilities that now include identity, application, risk, content, and collaboration services. As part of this evolution, it is branching out to a variety of endpoint interfaces to include cross-mobile platforms and connected things, and its main focus is on provisioning, managing, and securing communication, contents, and data that is shared between people and people, people and ‘things’, and ‘things’ and ‘things’ over mobile 2G/3G/4G, near-field communication (NFC), wired, WiFi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth connections.

EM has converged the business and IT vision, helping to build an enablement layer for the enterprise and government sectors to achieve improvements in operational excellence, customer engagement, and service efficiency. As such, local and federal government entities can now reach more of their employees and citizens with far richer mobile applications and experiences. In turn, citizens and residents can access government services and reach officials more directly in a bid to address their needs. Here in the UAE, for example, Dubai Government is transforming more than 1,000 government services through the innovative use of ICT, including applications for the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA), the Road and Transport Authority (RTA), and Dubai Police.

The mobile interface with government services improves the government-citizen relationship, enhances productivity, bolsters public 84

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Police are also using mobility channels safety, and promotes community to enrich their interactions with the services. At the same time, the UAE’s public. Interfaces such as the force’s well-established 4G/LTE broadband mobile website, mobile applications for infrastructure and extensive public iOS and Android, and smart watches Wi-Fi connectivity is also facilitating are enabling interaction with various and accelerating the usage of smart services. These mobile technologies are apps, social media, and enterprise enhancing public safety and providing apps, enabling consumers and business police response teams with access professionals to seamlessly to real-time data that enables connect to corporate data or them to make quick and public services.

The mobile informed decisions.

Public services The convergence apps such as those interface with of EM and the IoT implemented government is occurring at in Dubai help services improves the an accelerating establish an government-citizen pace, and all engagement relationship, productivity, players in the interface between public safety, and ecosystem – from the government promotes community device makers to and its citizens services. applications developers and residents. The to telecom operators – are DEWA application, collaborating to ensure such for example, has greatly evolution continues. This trend is sure improved the level of interaction to tap into the future wave of industry between consumers and the utility innovation around cognitive machine service provider, with customers now learning and robotics. Indeed, we able to view and pay monthly bills, may see this sooner than you think, as submit complaints, apply for clearance Dubai Police have already proposed certificates, and access advice on a robot that is capable of performing optimising their electricity and water routine inspections, providing consumption. The app also provides customer services, and managing a number of business services, with various tasks from remote locations. users able to view a list of open tenders It is clear that mobility is driving and see the results of those that have a technological revolution across already been awarded. the industry. The application of The RTA app, meanwhile, provides mobility and sensors in the provision a comprehensive portfolio of mobile of public services is enabling a services to the public, including taxi richer citizen-engagement model booking, NOL card top-up, mParking, of government, while the ability to and a confidential channel for reporting embed ‘intelligence’ into ‘things’ is traffic violations. These services all opening up a new era of automated help to enhance the efficiency and actions and the provision of quality of the RTA’s engagement with instantaneous feedback. the public. Not to be outdone, Dubai www.cnmeonline.com

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Fortinet offers a comprehensive, multi-layer solution that uniquely encompasses the three necessary steps of Advanced Threat Protection (ATP): Prevent, Detect and Mitigate. Fortinet’s ATP solution combines a number of different technologies that work together to form a modern and intelligent threat protection to

ensure that users, devices and applications can connect securely to the network. And all of these technologies are backed by the human intelligence of the FortiGuard threat research experts.

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Insight

Jeff Reed, VP, Enterprise Infrastructure and Solutions Group, Cisco

living with SDN in an iot world

S

DN enables the radical simplification of network provisioning with predefined policies for plug-and-play setup of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, automatic detection and remediation of security threats, and the provisioning of the edge computing and analytics environments that turn data into insights.

However, there are a number of challenges ahead. One is the sheer number of devices, which is estimated to reach 50 billion by 2020. Another is the amount of data moving over this network, with IDC projecting IoT will account for 10 percent of all data on the planet by 2020.

Then there is the variety of devices that need to be managed and supported.

These range from network switches supporting popular management applications and protocols, to legacy SCADA devices and those that lack the compute and memory to support standard authentication. Finally, there is the need for very rapid, and even realtime, response.

Given this complexity and scale, manual network management is simply not feasible. SDN provides the only viable, cost-effective means to manage the IoT, secure the network and the data on it, minimise bandwidth requirements and maximise the performance of the applications and analytics that use its data.

SDN brings three important capabilities to IoT. First, centralisation of control through software that has complete knowledge of the network, enabling automated, policy-based control of even massive, complex networks.

Also, abstraction of the details of the many devices and protocols in the 86

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network, allowing IoT applications to access data, enable analytics and control the devices, and add new sensors and network control devices, without exposing the details of the underlying infrastructure.

And finally, the flexibility to tune the components within the IoT to continually maximise performance and security as business needs and data flows change. IoT environments are inherently disperse with many end devices and edge computing.

SDN will make it easier to find and fight security threats through the improved visibility they provide into network traffic right to the edge of the network. They also make it easy to apply automated policies to redirect suspicious traffic to, for example, a honeynet where it can be safely examined.

SDN can provide a dynamic, intelligent, self-learning layered model of security that provides walls within walls and ensures people can only change the configuration of the devices they’re authorised to “touch.” This is far more useful than the traditional “wall” around the perimeter of the network, which won’t work with the IoT because of its sise and the fact the enemy is often inside the firewall.

Finally, by centralising configuration and management, SDN will allow IT to effectively program the network to make automatic, real-time decisions about traffic flow. They will allow the analysis of not only sensor data, but data about the health of the network, to be analysed close to the network edge to give IT the information it needs to prevent traffic jams and security risks.

IT organisations can become key drivers in capturing the promised

business value of IoT through the use of SDNs. To prepare for the intersection of IoT and SDN, you should start thinking about what policies in areas such as security, Quality of Service (QoS) and data privacy will make sense in the IoT world, and how to structure and implement such policies in a virtualised network.

Typically these policies are implicit. SDN will turn this process on its head, allowing IT teams to develop human readable policies that are implemented by the network. IT teams should start understanding how they’ve configured today’s environment so that they can decide what policies should be brought forward.

They should plan now to include edge computing and analytics in their long-term vision of the network. At the same time, they should remember that IoT and SDN are in their early stages, meaning their network and application planners should expect unpredicted changes. The key enablers, again, will be centralisation of control, abstraction of network devices and flexible, dynamic automated reconfiguration of the network. Essentially, isolation of network slices to segment the network by proactively pushing policy via a centralised controller to cordon off various types of traffic. Centralised control planes offer the advantages of easy operations and management.

IT teams should also evaluate their network, compute and data needs across the entire IT spectrum, as the IoT will require an end-to-end SDN solution encompassing all manner of devices, not just those from one domain within IT, but across the data centre, Wide Area Network (WAN) and access. www.cnmeonline.com

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Jamie Longmuir, Regional Director, Software Monetisation, Gemalto

Insight

Mining the gold in IoT Jamie Longmuir, Regional Director, Software Monetisation, Gemalto, gives his insight on how businesses can take advantage of the number of opportunities brought by IoT.

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uch has been written extolling the virtues of the Internet of Things (IoT), which is perhaps the most hyper-connected environment since the Internet itself. We are already aware that the software embedded in intelligent devices, as well as the data shared between those devices, is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity.

While technologists across the board are seeing the inherent benefits in developing innovative new products and services for the IoT, relatively little is known about the actual moneymaking aspect. Along with the need to protect intellectual property (IP) against hackers – a particular concern in cloudconnected environments – software monetisation is the biggest challenge facing players in the IoT. The drive towards Smart Cities in Dubai is being powered by IoT, putting the emirate at the forefront of innovation, with an avant-garde vision for the importance of the IoT industry, which presents plenty of monetisation opportunities in the UAE. For instance, the mobile penetration rate is over 200 percent and there will be more than 16.8 million active mobile subscribers by 2016, while the levels of data consumption generated are expected to escalate by Expo 2020. Nowadays, around 8.81 million are active Internet users, which represents 92 percent of the population. Furthermore, 80 percent of these users access the Internet www.cnmeonline.com

through their mobiles and by 2017 the number of mobile internet users in UAE is expected to reach 90 percent.

Therefore, the regional adoption of IoT will continue to surpass global growth, as governments and enterprises continue to actively invest in Smart City developments across the Middle East. So how can businesses take advantage of this wealth of opportunities?

The age of the intelligent device IoT devices are capable of delivering unprecedented levels of insight to device manufacturers. Data generated by tiny, low-cost sensors that live inside hardware inform device manufacturers which features customers are actively using and which are less popular, so they know where to invest their R&D efforts.

Moreover, it enables them to tap into new markets by offering a wide range of consumption-based pricing models, such as pre-pay and post-pay, to suit every budget and user requirement.

Sensor data is also incredibly valuable in helping device manufacturers optimise the “health” of their devices. Predictive maintenance, as it is known, allows them to anticipate and proactively deal with technical issues before they become a hindrance, keeping maintenance costs low and improving the user experience.

In order to monetise the IoT, businesses – whether providers of on-premise software, SaaS, intelligent devices, or IoT solutions – must be prepared to adapt their offerings to meet

the changing needs of the market. The best way to do this is by implementing a comprehensive software monetisation solution that allows them to offer flexible license models, track and control usage, and manage user entitlements. Such a solution gives businesses the ability to evolve with the market, ensuring profitability now and in the future.

Monetise like a pro Businesses that choose to build a homegrown solution invariably end up having to shoulder significant upfront and ongoing maintenance costs, as well as the challenges of integrating it with their existing back-office systems. A much more preferable option is to entrust your software licensing and IP protection to a company whose core competency is helping software vendors and device manufacturers maximise the potential of their software. Software monetisation solutions enable you to flexibly control your software at the feature level, while preventing revenue loss through robust IP protection. And with the usage insight you gain from data collection, it’s easier to make business-critical decisions, such as how to package and price your offering for maximum returns.

Just as early prospectors wouldn’t show up to a gold rush without the proper mining equipment, software vendors and device manufacturers must equip their businesses with a proper software monetisation solution that’s capable of extracting the gold in the IoT. october 2015

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Interview Vishal Hariprasad, Threat Intelligence Architect, Unit 42

Mal intent

Vishal Hariprasad has seen two sides of IT security. Formerly a Cyberspace Operations Officer for the US Air Force and National Security Agency, ‘V8’ is now a Threat Intelligence Architect for startup research firm Unit 42, and a member of the Cyber Threat Alliance. He tells CNME about his experience of advanced malware.

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ell me about the Cyber Threat Alliance, who are you and what do you do?

We’re a one-year-old organisation that was founded by Palo Alto Networks, Intel Security, Fortinet and Symantec. We have a strong interest in threat intelligence trends, groups and actors, and our aim is to publish research into cutting-edge malware, and develop the enhancement of the Open Source community.

The Cyber Threat Alliance consists of eight members and is rapidly growing. Every member must share 1,000 samples of malware per day to justify its membership, so in general we have over 10,000 samples arriving daily. This allows us to continually analyse what is out there.

We don’t yet have members in the Middle East but we are always looking for affiliates from all regions. We want global perspectives on research that aren’t geo-specific.

Your background was in the US military. How did you make the jump to Silicon Valley?

As a mathematics undergraduate I got a job in the cyberwarfare office at the NSA, and I saw a unique side of advanced malware. In terms of advanced persistent threats I was always thinking about how they could be stopped. That’s what I was trained for. I gained funding from Silicon 90

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What has working at the NSA taught you about malware and security?

When I was working out in the field in the Iraq War, I really got a chance to see who the attackers we were combating were. Ultimately, at the other end of a connection is a human being. They’re doing what they are because they’re trying to earn a living.

They aren’t just there to mess with us – most are just after money. When it comes to their ability to design iterative malware it gives them an advantage. Credit card details may be worth $1 to them, while social security numbers are worth $10 and health records $50. Even political hacktavists are still human beings, but their malware is probably commoditybased so is less intensely motivated.

One of your specialist subjects is point of sale malware. Can you expand on that?

It’s become much more serious over the last year-and-ahalf. A lot of companies “I gained a hadn’t realised how unique insight similar their POS into our attackers. systems are to the Windows At the other end of a XP systems connection is a human they have at being. They’re doing home – when Valley, and, after a what they are because the Target breach lot of work, was very they’re trying to occurred around fortunate not to be earn a living.”

70 percent of all amongst the 99 percent ATMs worldwide were of startups who fail. running Windows XP Service I was initially skeptical about Pack 0. The three or four pieces of Silicon Valley, and didn’t necessarily commodity malware used in the want to be a part of it. But now I’m Target breach were easily available on there I’m almost indoctrinated by the underground market. Target’s SOC the place. The culture there is one of flagged it up as generic malware, not the aggressive pursuit of ideas; they specifying it was POC-based. That’s have no time for naysayers. On the scary. The detection may be there, but East Coast of the US, if you fail, you’re even a generic alert can’t be ignored. finished. But in Silicon Valley, failure I advocate using as many sources of is almost a rite of passage, and you’re threat intelligence as possible. held in higher regard if you take risks. www.cnmeonline.com

insight

George V. Hulme, Contributing Editor, CSO Online

in the crosshairs Attackers have long targeted application vulnerabilities in order to breach systems and steal data. Recently they’ve been skipping a step and going directly after the tools developers use to actually build those applications.

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nfecting the tools developers use makes for a very juicy target for attackers, as well as a dangerous and significant threat to enterprises. Consider the brute force attacks that targeted the popular source code repository GitHub in 2013. After numerous accounts had been compromised, GitHub banned what it considers weak passwords and implemented rate limiting for logon attempts.

That GitHub attack and the attack on Xcode aren’t isolated incidents. Recently, Apple acknowledged that its App Store endured a significant breach involving thousands of apps. The compromise was made possible when Chinese developers downloaded counterfeit copies of Xcode that were tainted with malware dubbed XcodeGhost. While Apple removed the infected apps, more than 4,000 tainted apps have been estimated to have made it into the App Store.

J. Wolfgang Goerlich, a strategist with IT risk management firm CBI, explains why the recent spate of attacks on Apple’s development tools are notable. “The number of OS X computers continues to rise in the enterprise environment," he says. "Few organisations are considering Macs from a security perspective as the numbers have long been small and most security controls are Windows-based,” he says.

“These types of attacks - infecting the compiler - used to be considered a potential threat by high security governmental organisations. You would be considered paranoid to 92

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present such a scenario as something that could impact the general public.

And yet here we are,” says Yossi Naar, Co-founder of Cybereason.

“From a development perspective, the best practices in continuous integration and deployment would have prevented the attack against Apple’s App Store,” says Goerlich.

Chris Camejo, Director of Threat and Vulnerability Analysis for NTT Com Security, agrees. “This should be obvious, but developers should only use software from trusted sources like a vendor’s website or official app store, or verify that software packages they’ve downloaded haven’t been tampered with by verifying the software’s digital signatures when available,“ he says.

Sri Ramanathan, CTO, Kony, says the same holds true for open source software. “To protect developers, enterprises need to ensure that any software used has been vetted and certified as safe for use,” he says.

When it comes to Kony’s development environment, Ramanathan says that Kony developers working on a product cannot use open source unless its specifically approved, and that every piece of software is dynamically scanned prior to and after being approved for use.

“We also use a battery of internal and external pen tests to periodically certify all our runtimes. And we ensure that any open source software we use originates from a vibrant trusted community, and is actively supported, does not have too many known

security flaws and is well documented,” Ramanathan explains.

For enterprises, it’s important that developers and the software development chain be protected like any other users and assets, perhaps more so in many instances. “For other tool chains, particularly opensource, it is important to verify the authenticity of the software before you use it," says Bobby Kuzma, CISSP, Systems Engineer, Core Security.

"Most open-source projects provide cryptographic hashes that you can use to verify the authenticity of downloaded software. Treating build servers as secure systems, with advanced security controls, similar to what should be used when dealing with sensitive cryptographic materials will help gain control against this type of threat," he adds.

Enterprises need to make certain developers work in a clean environment using separate systems for development from those used in building apps, adds Goerlich. “The build machine is then kept in a secure hardened state, with the compiling automated. Even if the developers download malicious code such as XcodeGhost on their computers, the build computer is kept clean and what is submitted to the App Store is protected,” he says.

“For enterprises, strong network security management that monitors for malware connecting out to commandand-control computers is the first line of defense when identifying attacks like XcodeGhost,” Goerlich adds. www.cnmeonline.com

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INTERVIEW George Mulhern, CEO, Cradlepoint

Staying at the edge Idaho-based Cradlepoint offers 4G LTE wireless and network solutions, and has recently forayed into the Middle East to capitalise on the increasing popularity of LTE in enterprises. George Mulhern, CEO, Cradlepoint, spoke to CNME during his first visit to Dubai about what his company brings to the table.

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radlepoint is a new entrant into this market. What does your company do?

We were founded in 2006, and right from inception our focus has been on wireless, which we knew was going to become an important part of the overall networking scheme. We started off with consumer business, and our first product was a cradle that could be turned into an accept point by attaching a smartphone.

Early on, we realised the bigger opportunity was going to be in the enterprise space with the advent of LTE and 4G. We have been growing over the last three to four years and everything we do is purpose-built for cellular networks. What we do differently is that we take consumer-grade network, and turn it into a highly reliable and high performance enterprise grade WAN. We are focused on what we call distributed enterprises with small footprints such as retail stores, restaurants, branch offices, etc. We have done over a million deployments so far with more than 15,000 customers.

Initially, Cradlepoint was focused on the North American market because that’s where LTE has been growing strongly for the past couple of years, but we are seeing LTE being rolled much more rapidly around the globe, including the Middle East.

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What kind of opportunities do you see in the space you operate in?

There is a big macro technology transition happening now. The move to cloud-based applications, IoT, BYOD and the need for security is putting a lot of pressure on wide area networks.

There is data centre congestion, WAN congestion, and the need for high throughput is very important for enterprises. There is also a new set of services and solutions that enterprises are starting to offer to their customers to help them drive top line and bottom line revenue growth.

Can you tell us a bit about your portfolio?

There are four different areas where we provide solutions – what we call fixed networks, mobile networks, and we do a good business in fail-over and out of band management, and then the IoT. If you look at buses today, in a lot of cases they are providing Wi-Fi, and use digital signage and surveillance cameras. They need to have a persistent connection to the Internet, and require high bandwidth as well.

But, when they are using surveillance videos you can't stream them over a 4G network. Our devices can also use Wi-Fi as a LAN so when a bus pulls into a station, they can use Wi-Fi to download surveillance video.

On the fixed network side, because of WAN congestion, a lot of IT figures are trying to offload non-core applications out of the data centre and offer it on private MPLS type of networks. For example, some of our customers are putting their guest WiFi on a separate air-gapped network using 4G LTE, so that it never touches their corporate network. They do that for security reasons, but also for simplicity of deployment. We have www.cnmeonline.com

customer who are putting their point of sale systems on separate 4G networks so that they don’t have to connect it to other aspects of their networks and cause security problems.

On the failover side, you guys have pretty good networks here and it may not be as big an issue here. But, what I think is relevant in this part of the world is our cloud platform and out of band management solution. If you have a problem with your Cisco or Juniper routers, with our cloud platform you can go right into the port of that router and troubleshoot without sending a technician to the site.

In terms of verticals we are particularly focused on, it is retail, finance, transportation and increasingly we are doing a lot of work with government.

There is a little more to our solution than just providing 4G connectivity.

We have a platform that overlays 4G as well, and it is based on the cloud platform, which is also purpose-built for cellular. For example, most network management solutions use SNMP to do the management. We don’t use SNMP, we use proprietary stream protocol that is real time and bi-directional but it uses much less data than SNMP. So we use much less of the customer’s data plan, and operators like it because we don’t use much of their spectrum either.

What differentiates you from competition?

One of the things that has separated us from lot of the competition as a company is that we are 100 percent focused on LTE and cellular networks. It really takes that kind of focus to stay up. They call it LTE for a reason because it is constantly changing. We are on Cat3 modems right now, at the end of 2015, we are going to see Cat4 modems and that’s going to take the performance up and early

There are four different areas where we provide solutions – fixed networks, mobile networks, and we do good business in failover and out of band management, and then the IoT. in 2016, it is going to be Cat6 modems.

That is going to continue to happen and what that means for our customers is that when they buy a router they are looking to have five to seven years life.

We have a modular architecture on our modems which means you can upgrade from Cat4 to Cat6, or higher, without going through a recall of your routers or reconfiguring them.

A lot of the bigger networking companies will have a solution that supports 4G, but because the change is so rapid and we are so focused on it, we are able to stay ahead of that in a better way than those competitors.

For example, Cisco does a new firmware release typically every 18 months. We have done 20 firmware releases in the last 18 months. These networks are constantly improving and changing, so you have to have very agile development processes and models to keep up. It is kind of what we do, and we spend all the company’s resources to stay in front of this and we do think that in the next two to three years, every enterprise will have a LTE network somewhere in their company, whether it is digital signage, kiosk, failover or for some other application.

That’s kind of our story.

October 2015

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opinion

Michael R. Overly, Partner, Foley & Lardner

A safe hire

Companies should take great care when hiring a party that will be granted access to its most sensitive systems and data. Follow these steps to give yourself the best chance of assurance.

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he exponential rise in security incidents has caused many businesses to look hard at getting their own houses in order before they become the next headline.

All too often, in their rush to move forward with these assessments, businesses fail to adequately address the most fundamental of contract terms.

In some instances, security consultants create more risk than they resolve.

In hiring a potential security consultant, businesses should consider the following best practices: Use an RFP. If timing permits, the use of a request for proposals (RFP) process will aid the business in receiving the most creative proposals, with the best pricing and contract terms. Vendors who know they are in competition with other respondents will be far more inclined to negotiate than those that believe they already have the deal sealed.

Conduct due diligence.

Contacting former and existing clients of the vendor; negotiate as you would with any critical vendor. It is an ugly truth that most businesses simply do not negotiate their security consulting agreements with the same level of care that they apply to other critical vendor agreements. At best, this may lead to serious cost overruns. At worst, this may result in the compromise of sensitive business data.

Appropriate contractual protections should be negotiated in every security 96

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consulting agreement. Key points to address include the following: Define the project. The contract should clearly define the scope of the security assessment – for example, on the facilities, systems, servers and networks - to be conducted. This means a detailed statement of work should be drafted, with the tasks to be performed by each party expressly identified.

Control costs. The contract should contain a clear budget, with all fees stated. The consultant should be precluded from exceeding that budget without the client’s written authorisation. If the vendor is unable to provide a detailed budget because “things will evolve based on the assessment,” consider entering into a more limited initial statement of work to better scope the assignment.

Detail security and confidentiality protections. All too often, security consulting agreements provide little or no detail regarding the security and confidentiality measures to be used. Worse yet, even if those measures are well defined, the consultant has little liability if it breaches those obligations.

Since the consultant will have access to the most sensitive data of the client and highly confidential information about the security of its systems, the contract should clearly define the security measures to be used, detailed confidentiality protections, and, generally, exclude breach of those

requirements from any limitations or exclusions of liability.

Control vendor personnel. Given the sensitivity of the work to be performed, the agreement should include controls over the ability of the vendor to subcontract the work to third parties. The agreement should also require the vendor to do background checks on its personnel, including criminal activities, particularly those involving a breach of trust.

Warranties. While no security vendor can guarantee the security of a customer’s systems following an audit, the security vendor should be willing to warranty that it will comply with all applicable laws and regulations and best practices in the security industry for performance of the assessment.

Liability. Most security vendors strictly limit their liability in the performance of their services. There is nothing wrong with such an approach, but the vendor should not be permitted to limit its liability to such an extent that it has no real responsibility for breaches of confidentiality or its own gross negligence or willful misconduct. In most instances, the customer should expect the vendor to assume unlimited or, at least, very significant liability in those areas.

By being more proactive in the hiring of security consultants, businesses can ensure that they will receive the expert advice they desire, while protecting their systems and data and ensuring that costs are controlled. Businesses should expect these basic protections, and reputable vendors should be willing to provide them. www.cnmeonline.com

opinion

Michelangelo Sidagni, CTO, NopSec

Resilient systems How to avoid the potential pitfalls and prepare for known challenges in vulnerability risk management.

V

ulnerability risk management has re-introduced itself as a top challenge – and priority – for even the most savvy IT organisations. Despite the best detection technologies, organisations continue to be compromised on a daily basis. Vulnerability scanning provides visibility into potential landmines across the network, but often just results in data tracked in spreadsheets and independent remediation teams scrambling in different directions.

The recent Verizon Data Breach report showed that 99.9 percent of vulnerabilities exploited in attacks 98

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were compromised more than a year after being published. This clearly demonstrates the need to change from a “find” to “fix” mentality. Here are three key challenges to getting there: Vulnerability prioritisation.

Today, many organisations prioritise based on CVSS scores and perform some level of asset importance classification within the process.

However, this is still generating too much data for remediation teams to take targeted and informed action. In a larger organisation, this process can result in tens of thousands – or even millions – of critical vulnerabilities

detected. The bigger question is – which vulnerabilities are actually critical?

Additional context is necessary get a true picture of actual risk across the IT environment. Organisations might consider additional factors in threat prioritisation, such as the exploitability or value of an asset, the correlation between the vulnerability and the availability of public exploits, attacks and malware actively targeting the detected vulnerability, or the popularity of a vulnerability in social media conversations.

Remediation process. The second and perhaps most profound challenge www.cnmeonline.com

is in the remediation process itself. On average, organisations take 103 days to remediate a security vulnerability.

In a landscape of zero-day exploits and the speed and agility at which malware developers operate, the window of opportunity is wide open for attackers.

The remediation challenge is most often rooted in the process itself. While there is no technology that can easily and economically solve the problem, there are ways to enable better management through automation that can improve the process and influence user behaviour. In some cases, there are simple adjustments that can result in a huge impact. For example, a CISO at a large enterprise company recently stated that something as easy as being able to establish deadlines and automated reminder notifications when a deadline was approaching could vastly improve the communication process between Security and DevOps/ SysAdmin teams.

In other words, synchronising communication between internal teams through workflow automation can help accelerate the remediation process. From simple ticket and task management to notifications and patch deployment, the ability to track the remediation process within a single unified view can eliminate the need to navigate and update multiple systems and potentially result in significant time savings.

The adage, “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it” is true when it comes to evaluating the success of a vulnerability risk management programme. In general, information security programmes are hard to measure compared to other operational functions such as sales and engineering. www.cnmeonline.com

“While there is no technology that can easily solve the problem, there are ways to enable better management through automation that can improve the process and influence user behaviour."

One can create hard metrics, but it is often difficult to translate those metrics into measurable business value.

There is no definitive answer for declaring success. For most organisations, this will likely vary depending on the regulatory nature of their industry and overall risk management strategy. However, IT and security teams demonstrate greater value when they can show the level of risk removed from critical systems.

Establishing the right metrics is the key to any successful governance programme, but it also must have the flexibility to evolve with the changing threat landscape. In the case of vulnerability risk management, governance may start with establishing baseline metrics such as the number of days to patch critical systems or average ticket ageing. As the programme evolves, new, and more specific, metrics can be introduced such as number of days from discovery to resolution - the time when a patch is available to actual application.

Practitioners can start improving the process by making some simple changes. For example, most vulnerability assessment tools offer standard prioritisation of risks based on CVSS score and asset classification. However, this approach is still generating too much data for remediation teams. Some organisations have started to perform advanced correlation with threat intelligence feeds and exploit databases. Yet, this process can be a full-time job in itself, and is too taxing on resources.

Technologies exist today to help ease this process through automation by enriching the results of vulnerability scan data with rich context beyond the CVSS score. Through correlation with external threat, exploit, malware, and social media feeds and the IT environment, a list of prioritised vulnerabilities is delivered based on the systems most likely to be targeted in a data breach. Automating this part of the process with existing technologies can help cut the time spent on prioritisation from days to hours.

Today, vulnerability management has become as much about people and process as it is about technology, and this is where many programmes are failing. The problem is not detection.

Prioritisation, remediation, and programme governance have become the new precedence. It is no longer a question of if you will be hacked, but rather when, and most importantly, how. The inevitable breach has become a commonly accepted reality.

Vulnerability risk management calls for a new approach that moves beyond a simple exercise in patch management to one focused on risk reduction and tolerable incident response. october 2015

99

opinion

Preston Gralla, Contributing Editor, Computerworld

The cleanest environment

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t’s a mobile-crazed world, and skyrocketing demands are not the only problem. Developers also need to choose the right technologies for building mobile apps. Today, there are three broad choices: building native apps for each platform; building a mobile Web app that can run on browsers, using HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript; or taking a hybrid approach by building mobile Web apps, and then putting them in native wrappers so they’ll run on devices like native apps do.

Native applications Native applications are built to run on a specific mobile platform - iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. Code is written directly for the specific hardware, and can’t be ported directly from platform to platform. Development tools used to build native apps are typically provided by the owner of the platform. For example, iOS apps are typically built using Apple’s XCode. Google’s official platform for Android development is Android Studio. For Windows Phone it’s Visual Studio.

Native apps can take full advantage of all of a device’s built-in hardware.

Because the apps have been written specifically for each device, they offer high performance are particularly important for games, and also useful for graphics and media apps.

There are drawbacks, though.

Developers with skills for writing native 100

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apps are in short supply, and charge top dollar. Those costs aren’t just for the initial app. Apps need constant maintenance and bug-fixing. They also need to be updated regularly. So the high costs tend to be ongoing.

Web apps built with HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript Unlike native applications, these aren’t downloaded as apps onto mobile devices. Instead, people visit a web page on a mobile browser to run them. These are full-blown apps, with the interactivity and features you’d expect. Web apps can also make use of some mobile hardware such as GPS, although the support tends to be limited for sensors.

They’re easier to build than native apps because they use the same skill set as that for building non-mobile Web pages. It’s easier to find Web developers than it is to find developers of native apps, so there’s a larger pool of talent from which to choose.

There are some drawbacks.

Web apps aren’t always able to take advantage of sensors on every device.

They also don’t have access to a device’s contact lists and other kinds of data.

Because they’re not distributed on app stores, it may be difficult to get new users to find them.

Hybrid applications A hybrid application is a Web page built with HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript, that is then put in a wrapper so that it runs

on a mobile device like a native app.

It can take advantage of most, but not necessarily all, of the sensors and other features built into each platform, such as notifications. Just like a native app, it has an icon on the home screen.

With hybrid applications, you often first build a Web page as you would normally, using HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript. After that, you use a platform such as the open source Apache Cordova or Adobe’s PhoneGap - based on Cordova - to turn the code into a native app. The main benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to hire multiple developers for multiple platforms. One drawback to this approach is that the resulting apps often don’t look like native apps and have the same interface and controls that native apps do.

Making the decision To decide, you need to take a long look at your mobile needs, resources, and timeline, says Forrester analyst Michael Facemire.

For now, native apps are best for companies that are building consumerfacing apps, need their design and interface to stand out, and want top performance, for example, for games.

Web-based apps are best-suited for internal apps, B2B and internal apps.

Hybrid apps take the middle ground between the two, allowing apps to look somewhat like native apps, but are built using Web standards.

www.cnmeonline.com

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Derek Melber, Technical Evangelist, AD Solutions, ManageEngine

opinion

heading in the right direction Derek Melber, Technical Evangelist, AD Solutions, ManageEngine, looks at a range of solutions that could help increase efficiency within enterprise IT administration teams.

E

very administrator needs to deal with the fact that the company they work for makes money based on the data that is produced, altered, maintained, and accessed. If the employees needing to access the data fail to do so, it will cause delays, complications, errors, and loss of revenue. On the flip side, if the incorrect employees are granted access to data, negative outcomes and loss of data, thus revenue, are a possibility. If the only thing www.cnmeonline.com

administrators needed to accomplish was a static list of employees and their access to data, the task would be quite simple. However, this is not the case, as most IT environments and corporations are dynamic.

What makes IT companies dynamic?

There are many factors that cause IT and companies to be dynamic. There is an infinite list of reasons, but the top of the list includes the following:

• Turnstyle of employees – Most organisations encounter constant shifting of employees. This could be due to the employee leaving the company, being promoted, or being released from the company.

It is the responsibility of IT to ensure that new employees have the correct access, promoted employees have altered access, and separated employees no longer have any access. • Changing of roles and october 2015

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opinion

Derek Melber, Technical Evangelist, AD Solutions, ManageEngine

responsibilities – Building on the turnover of employees in general, each department individually deals with employees changing roles and responsibilities. This could be due to promotions, or even just vacations. The IT department must manage these changes to ensure the correct employees have access to data at the correct time.

• Applications, servers, and storage devices change – New operating systems, hardware, infrastructure, security reasons, and other issues can cause changes in the core access to data. This access could be altered if devices change names and/or IP addresses.

• Time restrictions – IT has many tasks to perform each day.

Managing users and groups is an obvious task, but when a server, service, or other resource is unavailable, the priority usually shifts to making it available again.

If IT had workflow solutions, automation options, and delegation of task capabilities, the overall IT management efficiency could be improved dramatically.

Solutions to make IT more efficient Trying to find solutions that take the complexity out of a dynamic IT environment is not hard, especially when the reasons for the dynamic aspects are known. Below are some potential solutions that can make a dynamic IT and corporation more stable, consistent, and efficient.

User creation templates Templates should be complete enough to handle both basic and complex configurations of users, including single sign-on product integration, and even custom properties for user accounts. Finally, these templates should also interact with bulk user creation.

Bulk user/Group creation Bulk user creation options need to 104

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be simple, yet comprehensive. The solution in the first place. HTML solution needs to have complete solutions are easy to deploy, update, documentation for the CSV file and maintain. structure, as well as easy import and Delegation capabilities so verification of the interpretation. people outside the IT department Bulk User/Group modification can complete tasks – Not all tasks – Often, users and groups already need to be completed by the IT exist in Active Directory, but require department. Delegating tasks to the modification. Instead of attempting to key decision makers for each AD and manually update the objects or script user management task can free up a solution, a bulk modification option time for the IT staff. needs to be simple and easy.

Error checking and reporting – AD management workflow Often, scripts and command line tools – Workflow is often required for perform actions that can cause issues management of users and other and errors. Without reporting the AD objects. It is important to have erroneous and successful completion flexibility in the roles associated of tasks, it is time consuming to with the workflow, not determine if all of the to mention reporting tasks defined in the for where tasks are script were actually For an in the workflow completed. An enterprise with process, and efficient solution users in diverse who performed will come with which actions. error checking locations, latency AD and reporting. translates into costly automation Reporting delays and can render tasks – Many of past applications unusable, activities tasks related adding to the cost to users, groups and changes – of operations. and computers Obtaining reports can be automated. on past actions and In addition, automation changes to AD objects tasks need to be comprehensive is essential in efficient and reportable. The scheduling of troubleshooting and compliance these tasks also needs to be flexible reporting. and complete.

AD change monitoring – It is Summary impossible to know when every Dynamic IT environments require object in AD changes. Therefore, dedication, processes, and the correct being informed when objects change tools. User and AD management are via a GUI, or even an email alert, is long term tasks, but the solutions can important for a stable AD. The ability be modern-day efficient tools and to monitor when any AD object solutions. Without a contemporary is created, modified, or deleted is solution, most organisations are left essential for a dynamic, or even static, with archaic and inefficient tools and AD environment. scripting that can waste time on the Friendly graphical interface – management or recovery of errant GUIs need to be easy to understand, scripts and configurations. Modern find tasks in and customise. Without day solutions should cover a wide these options, a GUI can become a range of features and tasks, and “task” itself, which can compromise those features and tasks need to be the efficiency of obtaining the complete solutions.

www.cnmeonline.com

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Insight

The new face of social networking Niche social media brands can easily go unused. Gartner's Managing Vice President for Marketing Leaders Julie Hopkins explored the potential of the lesser-known.

F

acebook may be the 800-pound gorilla of social networks, but a steady growth in Pinterest and Instagram mean that marketers must constantly monitor and experiment with emerging social networks to capture and engage their audiences.

Julie Hopkins, Managing Vice President for Marketing Leaders, Gartner, says social marketers must leverage emerging social networks to both evolve and stay true to their brands.

“You understand what your brand is and how it would interact in various channels. That’s one of the most foundational pieces of information to bring to a conversation on a new social network,” she says.

Experiment and share portions of your story Marketers face continued pressure to stay involved, or at least on top of, emerging social networks.

Consumers expect brands to maintain a presence on three to four platforms, and they take for granted a brand presence on Facebook.

However, this doesn’t mean they’ll hang out with you.

Yet, newer social networks give brands an opportunity to experiment and share specific portions of their brand stories. While all brands should explore a presence on the core networks, brands can explore how leaders use emerging social networks to determine their own opportunities.

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Mercedes on Instagram Mercedes made a bold move on Instagram, ceding control of its channel to five top users to take the wheel and post content for five days. This is an opportunity to make a big impression, engaging a younger audience through visuals and user generated content.

Audi on Snapchat Snapchat garners 1 billion views daily, giving a brand such as Audi a great PR push when it partnered with 'Pretty Little Liars' to sponsor a second screen content shared by Audi in advance of, and during, the programme. This gave the brand access to young, luxuryminded buyers.

BMW and Marriott on Medium, an ad-free, long form blog platform, allows brands to promote thought leadership and prompt community response to gain visibility.

In 2014, BMW and Marriott both partnered with Medium on vertical content. Marriott’s travel section, 'Gone,' included stories “presented”

by the brands. For BMW, the campaign was about design, not auto.

“There are parts of your brand that aren’t about the product you sell,” Hopkins says. “You can bring pieces of your brand story to life in social channels. It’s an opportunity to flex a different part of your messaging.”

NBA on Tumblr Brands can implement visual microblogging in-line with Tumblr‘s irreverent tone. It’s an opportunity to drive traffic to other owned platforms with the availability of paid promotions.

The NBA provides behind-the-scenes content, and during the 2014 NBA finals, offered fans 'mini movies' of each game, along with highlights like team huddles and player conversations.

Paul McCartney on Line, based out of Japan, has a user base mostly in Asia with 170 million active monthly users. It was the birthplace of stickers and enables brands to push campaigns or branded content, but also engage 1:1. In 2013, McCartney launched a programme to support his first Japan tour in 11 years. Through news updates and stickers, McCartney generated 3.8 million fans in 2 weeks.

Overall, Hopkins recommends that brands follow leaders across social networks to see how they use social tools to build connections and tell all dimensions of their story.

“Not all of social media is about campaigns and conversations,” she says. Instead, she suggests that brands explore how to use the communities they have access to for ideas and innovation. But before jumping into a new social network, “Seek first to understand then to be understood.”

In other words, hang out on a social network first. Furthermore, it’s essential to establish an objectivedriven strategy for creating and sharing content. If a brand can’t point to why its content is on a social network, it probably shouldn’t be investing in it. www.cnmeonline.com

Authorized Distributor: TEL: +971 6 5754443, FAX: +971 6 5754449 Email: sales@alhosanime.com www.software-planet.com

INTERVIEW Grant Amos, General Manager, Actifio MEA

Seeing is believing CNME caught up with Actifio’s MEA General Manager Grant Amos, to discuss the challenges his team faces in the Middle East and the importance of effective POCs.

w

hat challenges do you face in this country?

There’s a lot of process.

Compared to the European or US markets, where if you present a justifiable business case then you can sometimes get a quick purchasing decision, in the Middle East we’ve found that although you can create all the right opportunities, companies still need to go through a lengthy procurement process. They want changes to the price and often have to go through lengthy RFPs. One of the biggest issues we face is the length of the sales cycle, which presents problems because things change.

We’ve had many situations where we’ve worked with companies for a long time and then the CIO changes, or strategic or market changes take place midway through a 12-15 month sales cycle.

When you look at mature markets, they have developed complexity over time, whereas in younger markets, they don’t have that and still use a multitude of products. This presents greenfield opportunities so companies can look at one product rather than five or six. As a relatively 108

october 2015

new mover, companies can be skeptical of us but we’re familiar with the question of whether our offerings are ‘too good to be true.’ It’s our job to try and find ways to demonstrate that that isn’t the case. We’re running a lot of POCs which has been made easier with our software-only product.

Our POC is simple – we capture a company’s data and take incremental point in time images of that data and recover it to any environment.

Which verticals are you targeting?

We’re pretty much independent of verticals, but banks are a main target because of the criticality of their data in terms of protection. We want to target the government side of things as well.

How are your products able to combat those constantly changing cycles?

The good thing about our solution is that it can scale. When we started we focused purely on enterprise, and as the product has evolved we now have a software-only variant. That means we can target the mid-range market and point solutions such

as agility around test development and resilience around backup and recovery. These offerings are giving us a greater stretch into the market with the same product, which is totally scalable from hundreds of gigs to petabytes of data.

There’s a lot of competition in the Middle East, which can get messy. We’re looking to identify the sweet spots for our solution. One of them is around test development where we can change the way that people do that across their whole physical and virtual database environment in terms of speed and provisioning, reducing application cycle. Other areas include data growth; the implications of Big Data in database environments is that larger databases are needed in enterprise environments. That means that companies struggling to backup these larger data quantities and meet client requirements. Our technology effectively removes backup windows for any size of data and recover any size of data near instantly.

We’re making jumps into areas where customers have issues with compliance and regulatory control. www.cnmeonline.com

opinion

Pete Lorenzen, General Manager of Networking Services, IBM

Bottom line in mind

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f network infrastructure is not your organisation’s core competency or you have outsourced the environment, you lack control of equipment and transport services and probably struggle with complex pricing and non-standard billing. Worse yet, if your service provider owns either all or some components of the processes, procedures, staffing and tools, it limits the changes you can make.

If that describes your environment, a network infrastructure cost optimisation consultation can help you drive infrastructure costs down, capture the network environment processes, identify systemic issues and leverage best practices.

Take for example the real life case of a major oil and gas company with a complex global outsourced environment with multiple WAN and LAN technologies. An assessment and the implementation of strategic recommendations delivered a 470 percent return on investment, $4 million of savings identified for tactical and strategic network infrastructure planning, risk avoidance by identification and correct location of circuitry and equipment for potential outages, and savings leveraged to fund additional tactical initiatives to enable further cost reduction.

A cost optimisation assessment provides a snapshot of the existing network infrastructure, strengths and areas for improvements – which 110

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helps identify opportunities for planning and recognises immediate cost savings of five to 30 percent.

On average, a technical physical site audit results in tactical savings of five percent to 10 percent for equipment and transport not in use, as well as redundant technology. A complex technical managed services audit results in potential tactical savings of five percent to 15 percent for contract, inventory, redundant technology and incorrect technology mapping to best pricing; and best practices can generate additional productivity and efficiency savings of five percent to 20 percent throughout the entire network infrastructure environment.

A typical assessment begins with a survey and initial analysis of your network and identification of immediate and long-term cost savings and provision of tactical as well as strategic recommendations. Next is a full blown assessment, a deeper dive into your existing infrastructures process, people, tools and so on - to identify root causes of inefficiencies and identification of systemic issues and recommendations for what can and should be removed.

The next three steps which run concurrently are the physical site audits, network contract audits and best practices.

Physical site audits, which can entail having a physical network infrastructure inventory; reconcile

physical inventory with virtual inventory; realise tactical savings and drive invalid costs out; and 'rightsizing' optimisation recommendations with related savings.

Network contract audits ensure deep network infrastructure contract audit to help realise immediate savings and drive costs out of the infrastructure, and reduce infrastructure budget with technology discounts.

Implementation of best practices requires the redesign of such practices, increasing productivity and removal of redundancy within the infrastructure cost of process, people, and tools.

Much has been said about cloud, Big Data and analytics, mobile, social and IT security as significant forces transforming IT and business, but little has been discussed about the impact of these forces on networking - or about the role that networks play when business initiatives are based on them.

On the surface, it's simple: If the network is running efficiently and continuously, so is the business.

But keeping up with cloud, social, mobile and analytics means organisations need a dynamic network infrastructure. Network strategy and optimisation services can help your network become more responsive to shifting business demands and the latest trends on the market.

Every enterprise can surely benefit from saving a few million dollars. This approach to cost savings is the next step in networking. www.cnmeonline.com

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PRODUCT OF THE MONTH

PRODUCTS

Launches and releases

Product: SF1 Brand: Obi Worldphone

Product: iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus Brand: Apple What it does: It is another ‘S’ year for Apple, and earlier this month the company released its latest smartphone offerings - the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. The devices feature 4.7-inch and 5.5inch displays, are available in 16GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities, and are equipped with Apple’s custombuilt A9 processor.

They also sport a rear 12MP iSight camera, which can shoot 4K video, and a 5MP FaceTime front camera. New features such as the 3D touch, which, according to Apple, “add new dimensions to multi-touch and can open up the screen in bold new ways.”

What you should know: While it retains the design of its preceding model, the S phones have always focused on strengthening the inner capabilities of the devices. Siri on the 4S, Touch ID on the 5S – with the new set of features on the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, Apple promises to continue this tradition.

www.cnmeonline.com

What it does: The SF1 is one of the latest smartphones recently unveiled by Obi Worldphone. The smartphone has dual SIM capabilities and a five-inch JDI In-Cell IPS fullHD (1080x1920 pixels) display offering a pixel density of 443ppi. It also comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 for screen protection. The device runs Android 5.0.2 Lollipop with the Obi Lifespeed UI, and is powered by a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor. Obi Worldphone SF1 also has an expandable storage of up to 64GB via microSD card.

The smartphone sports a 13MP autofocus camera with LED Flash, with a 5MP secondary front camera with LED flash also on board. It’s also packed with the Dolby Audio Surround 7.1, and Quick Charge 1.0, for fast charging.

What you should know: Designed by San Francisco-based product studio Ammunition, Obi Worldphone SF1 also comes loaded with Obi Lifespeed, a custom user interface for Android that unifies the software and hardware experience. It’s packed a feature called UbiFocus which can allow users to get creative and capture all-in-focus image.

Product: Resilience Gateway Brand: Opengear What it does: The new Resilience Gateway, according to Opengear, can help ensure uptime at branch offices and remote sites. It is equipped with Smart OBB out-of-bound management, which allows for automated remote troubleshooting and remediation. It can also “optimise infrastructure management” as it can monitor everything including the physical environment to ensure quick detection of faults and ensure faster network recovery.

Users can log audit trails to embedded 4GB local storage for troubleshooting and compliance. The device also promises strong security as it is aptly armed with PCI-DSS, FIPS140-2, SSL and SSH, firewall, OpenVPN and IPsec. It also has an environmental and physical sensor alarm notification via SMS, SNMP or email.

What you should know: The cost of network downtime has never been higher. Businesses are at risk of losing millions of dollars in revenue and having low employee productivity due to a simple network fault.

Resilience Gateway is equipped with failover to cellular for high-speed 4G LTE networks, which promises to improve WAN resilience and business continuity at remote sites, stores, and throughout the enterprise. october 2015

113

Backlog

Signs it's Time to Upgrade Your Campus Network H 2 ow old is the equipment running your campus network? Older than five years? Do you experience recurrent network outages? Do you struggle with poor quality voice and video communications? Do you pay too much to maintain your legacy equipment? Do you have trouble scaling up the network to accommodate new business needs?

If you said “yes” to any of these questions, it may be time to upgrade your campus network. We’ve put together a list of the five telltale signs it’s time to upgrade your campus network.

1

Frequent equipment breakdowns causing network outages As with all electronic equipment, as switches age they are more prone to failure. Power supplies and fans reach the end of their life span, old optical transceivers/links will increasingly fail and require more frequent maintenance. A switch or a link going down can result in network outage in older network architecture lacking redundancy.

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october 2015

Performance can’t keep up with latest campus applications The latest campus applications like web-based video conferencing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), IP-based video surveillance, automated cloud based backup, to name a few often require more bandwidth and lower latency than most legacy networks were designed for, causing users to experience delays and poor application experience.

Additionally, the latest network-powered devices such as high performance wireless access points and Pan Tilt Zoom security cameras require more PoE power than legacy switches can deliver.

3

High maintenance cost Old network equipment is notoriously more expensive to maintain than later generations. Often vendors charge a percentage of the equipment list price as yearly service and support fees, since prices of new network switches have come down over the years, and so have service and support fees. Additionally, vendors tend to increase service and support fees for end-of-life equipment to amortise the cost or maintaining old technology.

Last but not least, many newer network switches include a lifetime warranty reducing the cost of support.

4

High power bills Over the years, customers have become increasingly concerned about energy consumption and cost.

To address their needs, technology vendors has developed more energy efficient products and each generation of new network switches consumes significantly less power than the previous one. Additionally, new technology and standards such as Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) has been developed to reduce the power consumption of idle ports.

5

Too much time spent managing the network.

Older legacy networks offer a limited amount of support, if any at all, for consolidated management and automation.

Typically older switches are either standalone only or offer basic stackablity with limited stacking bandwidth and short stack height. This results in network administrators having to manage each switch individually, spending time replicating network policy changes manually across the network. www.cnmeonline.com

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