Insight by Computernews Middle East

INSIGHT OCTOBER 2015

New Style of Business Best practices and use cases for digital transformation

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MANAGEMENT NOTE

The Idea Economy

Is your industry ripe for disruption?

Alaa Alshimy VP of Enterprise Group and Managing Director HP Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa (MEMA)

A great idea alone is no longer enough – business success today is defined by the ability to turn ideas into value faster than your competition. We now live in an ‘idea economy’. Never before have the tools required to turn an idea into a new product, business – or even a new industry – been more accessible or easy to deploy. The ultimate winners are those companies – be they startups or huge established businesses – that understand how to use the power of IT to unlock the full potential of their ideas. Opportunities and challenges In the idea economy, no industry is immune to disruption. Tools like cloud computing, mobile technology and Big Data analytics enable new ways

of doing business and creating new customer experiences. However, most organizations have been built with rigid IT infrastructures that are costly to maintain and make it difficult to implement new ideas quickly. This landscape favors the entrepreneur with no baggage. Today, anyone with a good idea has access to all of the infrastructure and resources traditionally only available to a Fortune 500 company. They can rent compute on demand, get an SAS ERP system, use PayPal or Square for transactions, market using Facebook or Google, and have FedEx run their supply chain. This has given rise to a new class of entrepreneurs. Bigger, established players risk missing market opportunities and being usurped by new ideas and business models if they cannot match this agility. There’s some good news here for established businesses. The same technologies that make it easy for new companies to get started are also available to enterprises, but they need a partner to get them there. Smart Cities and providing better services to citizens In the same way that these solutions can be applied to transform businesses, so they too can be used to enable smarter cities that drive greater quality of life and efficiencies. Innovations are being driven by citizen expectations as well as resource challenges. The four pillars of the new style of IT – Big Data, cloud, mobility, and security - make what was previously impossible a reality. All these innovations allow cities to be much more efficient, agile, and resilient, and help improve quality of

life, drive economic growth, and create sustainable communities to be ready for an ever-changing future. Technology drives seismic shifts in the fabric of cities Around the globe, cities are recognizing the importance of how technology can provide added value for local citizens. Dubai is a clear example of a city where technology is already doing this. We are still in the early days of connecting the analog world to the digital world. You won’t see the Internet of Things everywhere all at once, but the signs are all around you. There are already cars with prototype navigation and sensor systems that have driven themselves safely for more than half a million miles. Our homes are connecting, with thermostats that can be controlled with a cell phone. Our bodies and clothing are connecting, with biometric sensors, watches and wearables. Securing the future of cities In this hyper-connected world, no city can thrive without being a part of the regional, national, and global fabric – over communications networks for the movement of people, goods, and information. They also need to offer superior government services in education, healthcare and social services. As emerging megacities – many of them in the developing world – vie for increasing influence and economic share, those cities that have invested in the necessary tools and have the right infrastructure will be the ones that reap the rewards. The time to act is now.

Emirates transport

Virtual Vehicle Emirates Transport was making in-roads to business success. As its operations multiplied, the company needed a solution to streamline its IT - and turned to virtualization.

holly owned by the UAE Government, Emirates Transport covers the entire country with 33 offices and 19 business centres. The organization’s work is vast – with roughly 15,000 vehicles and a similar number of employees, the country’s infrastructure relies heavily on Emirates Transport. The company’s services encompass technical, logistics and support services, as well as transport rentals and school transport. Founded in 1981, the company has come on in leaps and bounds since then. Its IT department wasn’t established until 1998, initially consisting of five members of staff. As was always going to be the case as technology evolved, that number quickly grew, and now the IT staff stands at 34 people. As expected, the expansion of the IT department happened in line with that of the organization as a whole. Operations expanded, and Emirates Transport’s need for technology increased. Ahmed Hassan Mohammed Yaqoot, IT Department Manager, Emirates Transport, recounts how they outgrew their existing hardware. “We had a wide variety of technoloies to serve our different types of businesses but the main challenge surrounded

infrastructure,” he says. “Our data centre was too small, and in 2007, once the business started growing, we found that it would be difficult to live with the data center we had.” The main challenge that Emirates Transport would face in delivering a new data centre would be ensuring that no extra space was consumed by hardware, and that the business would experience minimal downtime in the process. In the midst of Emirates Transport’s evaluation process, Yaqoot decided that the selection of the right system integrator partner could make a key difference in the effectiveness of the project’s delivery. He recalls one recommendation that helped make up his mind. “We did the benchmarking for infrastructural capabilities, and we got feedback on service level of Emitac Enterprise Solutions (EES) from the UAE General Civil Aviation Authority,” he says. “We wanted a skillful and a reliable partner who understood our requirements thoroughly, advise us with the right solution and help us move faster. But that was not the only factor for selecting Emitac, it was about the solution also. We wanted to go for the right solution and not the one which we liked,” says Yaqoot. EES’ consultation and services would play a pivotal role in ensuring the timely and accurate deliver of the transformative

project. “Emirates Transport had a very siloed IT environment with multidimensional management requirements,” says Mohanasundaram Jagadeesan, Manager, Enterprise Servers and Storage, Emitac. “We studied their existing environment scientifically, and proposed either enhancements to their existing setup, or a revamp of their infrastructure with minimal downtime. To ensure a seamless transition from physical to virtual servers, we identified their applications and dependencies, then grouped and moved them together to avoid downtime.” After evaluating a number of technology vendors and potential partners – including the likes of EMC, Fujitsu and Dell – Yaqoot eventually opted for the use of HP technologies, with EES as its SI partner. Beginning work in 2013, Emirates Transport deployed a full HP solution including its BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure with 10 blade servers, its all-in-one 420 for backup

storage, HP 3PAR, and Veeam for back-up of cloud. It also included the transformation of all physical applications to a virtual environment as virtualization was done for 65 servers. Completed in a five-month timeframe, the transformation has proved a huge boon for the company. Emirates Transport previously had eight racks of servers, and the number has now been reduced to just two. “The challenge was to move all the applications to the virtual environment and also to upgrade our domain of the exchange,” Yaqoot says. “We couldn’t allow ourselves to interrupt the business. Ultimately, we were successful.” The changes have introduced great sharpness to the organisation. “Earlier, it used to take 2-3 months to ask for the procurement of a server, today they are ready within five minutes, as they are virtualized,” he says. Yaqoot says the project has not only benefited the organization as a whole,

but has also been hugely educational for Emirates Transport’s IT team. He also gives a glowing reference to system integrator partner Emitac. “The project taught us a lot in terms of technical risks, and the mutual relationship with Emitac has grown ever since,” he says. “A lot of projects have been delivered to this corporation by other partners, but the support was not up to the mark. That was one of the main criteria we were looking for in the chosen partner. Emitac had the experience needed, had strong experience in the delivery of similar projects and have been extremely good at support.” Emirates Transport is currently in the midst of delivering its investment roadmap for 2014-2016. The plan focuses on five main investment opportunities in the market through developing its initiatives, expanding the services of logistic transportation, private school transportation, technical services of light vehicles, technical services of heavy

vehicles, and the abroad expansion of the services of school transportation. On the back of its virtualization deployment, Emirates Transport’s IT team has been freed up to consider a range of new technology initiatives, which can support the business’ overarching goals. “We will build our private cloud. We are expanding beyond the country and we need a highly secured channel to connect through the Internet,” Yaqoot says. Emirates Transport is also looking into building its own disaster recovery site, and is also in discussions to virtualise its desktops and introduce an organizationwide mobility solution. “We are going to the mobile space with a bigger approach because we have a lot of e-services. It’s also important to do so, keeping in mind the mandate of HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum of providing a worldclass e-government in Dubai,” Yaqoot says.

MICT QATAR

High Stakes MICT Qatar delivers enhanced e-government services with HP solutions.

stablished as the nation’s ICT policy and regulatory body, the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology (ictQATAR) supports Qatar’s ambitious vision to achieve social and political change while advancing global competitiveness. The State of Qatar’s Council of Ministers decreed an e-Government project to enable electronic access to essential governmental services. Hukoomi, the Qatar e-Government Portal, was built and managed by ictQATAR to serve as the official online gateway to Qatar’s government services. The portal supports a growing range of integrated services, such as letting users apply for visas and driver’s licenses, pay utility bills, renew healthcare cards, and settle traffic violations. To maximize the value delivered by their IT services, ictQATAR required management software tools to provide comprehensive and centralized monitoring capabilities. The HP Solutions Division of Mannai Trading Co., an HP Software Platinum Partner, assisted ictQATAR designing a roadmap that would start by establishing their Operations Bridge with HP Network Node Manager i software, HP Operations Manager i software, as well as the IT Service Desk with HP Service Manager software. Hukoomi’s launch heralded the start of a larger technology journey: to improve

inter-government collaboration via a shared infrastructure platform. Today, ictQATAR supports most of the Information Technology needs of several Qatari ministries through offerings which range from infrastructure services to information security to applications development and support. As ictQATAR prepared to build on Hukoomi’s success for the project’s intergovernment collaboration (Government) phase, the need to implement more robust IT management governance and controls became vital. “In Hukoomi’s early phases, we focused on infrastructure and network monitoring,” notes Mohammed Abdeen, project manager, ictQATAR.

To continue pursuing their vision of delivering state-of-the-art governmental services, ictQATAR had to ensure its platform and infrastructure met necessary standards in availability and performance, while also driving internal efficiencies. Continuing down the roadmap, ictQATAR implemented a state-of-the-art business services management using HP Business Service Management software to immediately realize gains in service availability as well as better visibility and clarity of key performance indicators. Deploying HP Business Service Management As the infrastructure grew in size and

MICT QATAR

complexity, ictQATAR decided to deploy HP Business Service Management to improve IT operational efficiency, service levels and user satisfaction. “When we began functioning as an IT services provider, we needed a tool to support a business services view of availability and performance,” Abdeen explains. “We also needed to become more proactive in our approach to detecting and addressing issues. HP Business Service Management was a natural evolution from the HP infrastructure and network monitoring solutions we already had in place.” Mannai was again on hand to assist ictQATAR with the HP Business Service Management deployment. “The BSM deployment was phase two of the EMS roadmap,” notes Mohammed Abdelgaber, manager, Enterprise Management Software, HP Solutions, Mannai Trading Co. “Evolving from infrastructure management to HP Business Service Management (BSM) was a key phase of the roadmap. We developed collaboratively during the first phase of the e-government project. Once we moved into the next phase, we worked closely with ictQATAR to realize the benefits of the project.” KPIs, diagnostics and the user experience Once HP BSM was implemented, ictQATAR immediately began to leverage the technology for three primary purposes. First, HP BSM allows ictQATAR to track the performance of the Government environment, including the Hukoomi portal and mobile portal environments as well as the government shared services environment, against key performance indicators (KPIs). Tracking KPIs such as Systems’ Availability, Applications’ Availability, Applications’ response time, and end user transactions’ response time ensures ictQATAR meets its service level agreements (SLAs). And because the KPIs are tied to the business needs of the ministries ictQATAR supports, HP BSM

“The HP BSM deployment at ictQATAR has helped us transform from a reactive to a proactive IT Operations function, providing improved service delivery and enhanced user experience for our external customers. Furthermore, HP BSM enabled us to continuously improve our operation and monitoring activities by depicting the holistic view and the linkages between business and technology.” Walid Galal, Government Infrastructure Operations Department Manager

also ensures the ministries achieve their respective objectives. “Our HP BSM and Service Health Dashboards translate technical information about our environment into terms that management can access and use,” explains Abdeen. “We’ve created customized dashboards that allow business users to check availability and performance of critical services. It’s all presented through gauges. Business users are quickly realizing the benefit from the tool.” On the application level, HP BSM allows ictQATAR to diagnose any applications

issues. If the responsiveness or availability of an application encounters issues, the team uses HP Diagnostics to perform root cause analysis. The team then presents its findings to the applications developers, so that they can generate fixes. ictQATAR also uses HP Real User Monitor to trace the associated user experience on the Hukoomi portal and e-Services. This enables ictQATAR to understand how the Government infrastructure performance affects the user experience. The team can then focus its resources on resolving issues and enhancing its performance to deliver the most impact in terms of end-user value and satisfaction. Robust service management ensures success of program objectives One of the most important benefits of using HP BSM is ictQATAR is now more proactive in its infrastructure management. “We often discover and fix issues before they are reported,” Abdeen notes. “This significantly reduces the risk that users’ access to e-government services will be compromised.” The improved proactivity and diagnostics provided by HP BSM has allowed ictQATAR to quickly raise the availability of their infrastructure platform from 94 to over 99 percent, and expects to drive further improvements in the near future. A broader, but no less important benefit of HP BSM is that ictQATAR can now confidently support SLAs and meet the standards necessary for even the most highly visible and essential Government services. In this way, HP BSM is a critical enabler to the Government initiative as a whole. “Our vision with Government is to make Qatar a world leader in the field of e-government service provision,” Abdeen says. “By giving us state-of-the art business service management capabilities, HP BSM plays an integral role in achieving that vision.”

Quick pulse

On the Road to a New Style of Business New research shows that infrastructure modernization is helping businesses build an IT culture optimized for rapid, continuous innovation.

ritish banker Lawrence Childs introduced the first printed checks in 1762, and for roughly the next two and a half centuries depositing one usually entailed a visit to your local branch. Then in 2010 a major financial institution became the first major U.S. bank to let customers deposit checks via their smartphone, setting off a mad scramble among financial institutions to create “remote deposit” apps of their own—immediately. “The other banks realized that they quickly needed to have that capability,” says Jay Lyman, Research Manager for cloud platforms at 451 Research LLC, an

analyst firm headquartered in New York. “They couldn’t wait a year.” So it goes these days in the business world. Fueled by cloud computing, mobility, real-time analytics, and social media, profitable new markets are appearing and evolving at an unprecedented clip; anyone who wishes to remain competitive has little choice but to keep pace. That ruthless imperative has more and more companies striving to adopt a “DevOps” IT approach in which developers and IT operations work hand in hand to create and deliver innovative new services with maximum speed, flexibility, and efficiency. Yet an exclusive new survey

of technology decision makers from IDG Research makes clear that the chronic shortages of money and time that have long plagued IT departments are standing in the way of that quest. Indeed, when asked about the barriers preventing them from capitalizing on today’s new style of IT, 49 percent of respondents to that study listed lack of budget and 36 percent cited an IT staff already spread too thin. Further results from the new survey, however, show that IT leaders increasingly see a path out of that trap. Investing in infrastructure convergence, they’re finding, frees up resources they can use to fund further steps toward creating a faster, more agile environment that today’s cloud, social, mobile, and analytics solutions demand. Speed and efficiency Evidence from the new IDG Research study under- scores just how strongly IT executives covet the speed, efficiency, and security that the latest technologies make possible. In fact, fully 81 percent of survey participants voiced at least some desire to embrace the faster, more flexible model of IT associated with those solutions. When asked about their top priorities, moreover, 54 percent of respondents named both enabling realtime insights and keeping their business secure, while 49 percent specified on-demand delivery of applications

Quick pulse

and services and 42 percent identified supporting a hyper-connected workforce. A solid foundation Needless to say, implementing DevOps principles isn’t easy, but infrastructure convergence is a good place to start. Virtualizing, consolidating, and integrating IT resources helps companies eliminate silos and reduce complexity. It also enables them to decrease capital costs by improving hardware utilization and lowering operating expenses by simplifying management. It is no wonder 61 percent of IT leaders polled by IDG Research call convergence an important or very important priority. “Convergence creates the organized, efficient infrastructure foundation that a DevOps culture needs,” observes Jason Newton, senior director of marketing and strategy in the enterprise group at HewlettPackard. It also frees up time and money that companies can use to further promote DevOps by investing in hybrid cloud computing. Hybrid cloud architectures combine the scalability and costeffectiveness of public clouds with the security and efficiency of private clouds,

while dramatically improving flexibility. “A hybrid environment is ideal for DevOps, because it gives you much more flexibility over where you position workloads,” Newton says. For example, developers can quickly move a new application into a temporary test environment hosted in the public cloud and then just as quickly move it back into a private cloud when it’s ready for deployment. Later, IT managers can use public cloud resources to augment the solution’s capacity automatically during periods of peak demand. Deeper automation With a hybrid cloud in place, companies can make additional progress toward a DevOps model by equipping their infrastructure for software-defined capabilities. Software-defined IT environments can more dynamically create, move, and delete compute, storage, and networking resources in response to fluctuating requirements. “You get a deeper level of automation that’s perfect for DevOps, because it helps eliminate process bottlenecks,” Newton says. Ultimately, the goal of a software-defined infrastructure

is to give applications direct control over your IT environment, he continues. For example, an application could automatically provision itself with needed resources and then add or remove them on the fly as its requirements change, all without assistance from administrators. For IT, a software-defined infrastructure’s rewards include even greater efficiency, even lower operating and capital expenses, and even more time and money for innovation. Business leaders, meanwhile, gain even more ability to identify and seize new opportunities. That powerful vision is grabbing the attention of IT executives in rising numbers too. According to the IDG Research study, some 27 percent of them call pursuing a software-defined infrastructure an important or very important priority. That number is sure to climb in future years as the link between infrastructure modernization and Dev Ops becomes increasingly undeniable. The road ahead is clear already, however, and it leads from convergence to the hybrid cloud and software-defined infrastructure to a more successful adoption of the new style of business.

Raising the Bar

du secures network resources, optimizes organizational efficiency, and enables growth. Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution from HP. With over six years of maturity, du is now involved in setting up SOCs as well as offering managed SOC services for enterprises and government institutions throughout the UAE.

s a rapidly growing mobile and fixed line service provider, du was faced with protecting its growing network and IT infrastructure while controlling costs and efficiently managing IT operations. By deploying HP ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager, du has been able to automate security and compliance monitoring to costeffectively support corporate growth while improving efficiency and transforming Big Data into actionable intelligence. As a company’s size and reliance on technology increases, so does the volume of logs it needs to collect, store, and analyze. This has been the case for du,

which generates terabytes of security, network, operating system, database, and application log data each quarter. Since its inception, du has consistently maintained a challenging strategic roadmap of supporting sustainable security initiatives. The company also established a Technology Security and Risk Management (TSRM) organization to ensure that du would be able to maintain its leading edge not only in providing superior security initiatives internally, but also in extending its best practices to support the delivery of managed security services. TSRM set up a Security Operations Center (SOC) with a Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) in 2008. The core of du’s SOC is a Security

Building scalable SOC infrastructure As du began building out its SOC, it evaluated best-of-breed products to secure its IT infrastructure. The company selected HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention Systems to improve visibility into network traffic and benefit from real-time intrusion protection. TippingPoint platforms were deployed in-line in 2008 to protect du from cyber threats targeting applications, networks, and critical data. “We immediately gained detailed visibility into security threats that help us continuously remain aware of online risks and protect against fraud, viruses, and malware,” said Marwan Bindalmook, Senior Vice President of Technology Security and Risk Management for du. The next step was to replace a SIEM solution that lacked the performance and scalability necessary to support du’s business objectives. “We needed to secure fast-growing infrastructure, and that meant our SOC needed the ability to collect, correlate, and report on security information from a diverse range of devices and applications, including security devices, database management systems, and telecommunications equipment,” Bindalmook explained. “Our data volumes

were exploding, and we needed a higherperformance SIEM solution that could scale with our business growth and provide timely and relevant intelligence to help us quickly detect and respond to any security breaches.” After a careful evaluation, du selected HP ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), which provides a Big Data analytics approach to security, transforming Big Data into actionable intelligence that can reduce the costs of a breach and help minimize risk to a business. Using device and application connectors, ArcSight ESM provides a central point for the analysis of daily operations. Armed with all this data, the real-time correlation capabilities of ArcSight ESM can detect unusual or unauthorized activities as they occur. The visualization and reporting capabilities of ArcSight ESM support dashboards and on-demand or scheduled reports for the SOC team. Developing customized use cases In addition to the out-of-the-box use cases profiling threat conditions that are available with ArcSight ESM, du continuously develops and refines use cases to identify threats. ArcSight ESM is used to identify the relevance of any given event by placing it within the context of who, what, where, when, and why that event occurred, and it assesses the impact of a threat on business risks. It also provides the real-time monitoring, historic analysis, and automated response necessary to manage higher-level business risk events. The organization has now developed over 550 custom use cases based on its business and risk profiling methods. A comprehensive security management program typically develops and matures over time, and du has been using ArcSight ESM for the last six years. The architecture, packaging, and out-of-the-box features of ArcSight ESM meant that the solution is uniquely capable of scaling both from capacity and feature perspectives and it could meet du’s logging, monitoring, and analysis needs with a single solution.

The du infrastructure continues to grow, and ArcSight ESM scales to support the growing needs of the company. The SOC is currently leveraging ArcSight ESM to collect more than 30,000 Events Per Second (EPS) and submits about 5,000 EPS for correlation.

“By implementing the ArcSight SIEM solution, we’ve been able to not only improve operational efficiency but also reduce our security and situational awareness expenditures by about 85% over the last three years.” Marwan Bindalmook, Senior Vice President of Technology Security and Risk Management ArcSight’s logging format, Common Event Format (CEF) has become the defacto logging format for almost all device vendors, and out-of-the-box ArcSight ESM supports hundreds of products and its ecosystem is still growing. Using ArcSight’s FlexConnector SDK, members of the SOC team develop custom connectors. “We’ve already developed 62 custom connectors using the FlexConnector SDK,” said Tamer El Bahey, Senior Director of Security Monitoring and Operations for du. “It takes a single developer only about two weeks to build a new connector, and we consider the FlexConnector SDK a major advantage because of the diversity of devices it allows us to capture event information from in real time.”

Accelerating resolutions with fewer resources ArcSight ESM is helping du improve operational efficiency through the automation of manual tasks and optimizing staff efficiency. Successful threat mitigation depends on being able to quickly identify the critical incidents so that they can be handled before they can cause a major negative impact. Reduction in the critical incident rate was crucial for SIRT to effectively respond to incidents. ArcSight ESM helps du filter out the incidents that were resulting in high IT and business risks and act on them more effectively. Before the deployment of ArcSight ESM, du had to analyze 7,000 alerts per month. As a result, a sizeable security team was required to process the alerts. To help bring the critical event volume under control, du used ArcSight’s correlation and rule-building framework to optimize its security alerts. With the appropriate correlation rules and alerts, ArcSight ESM was able to remove false positives and redundant alerts. TSRM was able to create over 550 custom correlation rules that analyze about 30,000 EPS received in real time from about 1,500 log sources. According to El Bahey, “Three years ago we had 72 correlation rules and now we have over 550. ArcSight makes it easy to create custom rules, we’ve written them all internally and they allow us to dramatically improve our workforce productivity.” TSRM has also created more than 30 customized filters to parse events from non-traditional IT solutions and telecommunications equipment to gain increased visibility. ArcSight ESM has helped du to gain the threat visibility it needs by increasing the percentage of its incident-totrue positive value by more than 400%. By fine-tuning the priorities of critical events, security analysts can see the most important items first and the SOC can provide better service levels. The SOC has been able to reduce the security alerts that

FUTURE CITIES

A Smart Lifestyle HP is empowering Smart Cities with its new technology offerings. P’s vision for Future Cities is one that is a selfsustaining ecosystem that allows efficient and effective utilization and management of resources like energy and water. HP’s vision focuses around a citizen and community centric approach that calls for open and collaborative systems allowing transparency and public access to data. Eventually, leading to: citizen empowerment, effective e-governance and economic growth. HP will be focusing on: Health, Education, Citizen Services, e-governance, Security, Transportation and Utilities Infrastructure.

Governments around the world partner with HP to radically transform what they do and how they operate, to shift from an output-based paradigm to a citizen-centric government focused on results and public value.

The 6 areas of Focus for a Future City External research as well as our experience in working with cities indicate that cities must address six areas that are very closely interrelated. These six components of a Future City form a tightly integrated whole, and all six must

be considered when designing the next generation of services. Each segment has a profound implication on the others (for example, a city that has a very high crime rate would find it hard to attract new businesses), and therefore, addressing one without considering the impacts on or of the others leads to less than optimal outcomes. The six areas a city must focus on are as follows: liveable city that enhances the 1 Aquality of life - Underlying elements

include public safety, affordable housing, clean and green environment, requisite infrastructure (safe food and water), culture and recreation (creative arts, museums, sports facilities, etc.).

ready - The ability of 2 New-economy the city to attract new jobs and retain

businesses. Ease of starting businesses. The necessary infrastructure (business parks and incubators, investment firms and financial services, etc.,), the talent pool to attract and retain businesses.

connected city - In today’s hyper3 Aconnected and global world, no city

Citizen-centric governments put their customers—citizens and businesses—at the focal point of all key decisions, from budgeting to service design to channel for service delivery.

can thrive without being a part of the regional, national, and global fabric—both physically and over communications networks for the movement of people, goods, and information. In addition to the physical links and multimodal transportation networks to link the city to others, the city must also have a very efficient and effective internal network.

FUTURE CITIES

government services 4 Superior Residents and visitors to the city must have access to high quality government services: education, healthcare, social services, etc. Leading cities are efficiently managed and are very proactive in engaging with the citizens in designing and delivering services. Public value—with its four pillars of efficiency, quality, equity, and trust— becomes a key factor in decision-making. and resilience - We live in very 5 Agility turbulent times, and each city must be prepared to handle and bounce back from the unexpected. These shocks can range from economic downturns to terrorism to public health crises. Most cities are creating capabilities and the needed redundant capacity to create resilience. In addition, agility—the speed with which a city responds to new opportunities or challenges— is becoming a very important factor. innovation - Cities are 6 Collaborative very complex social systems, and a

multitude of players need to participate in a continuous cycle of innovation. Collaboration and co-creation is critical for success. An environment needs to be created and sustained that brings together many stakeholders which include, among others, multiple levels of governments—city, state, and central; businesses, both large and small; players in the not-for-profit sector; social entrepreneurs; and citizens, both individuals and advocacy groups. Each entity has something of value to contribute to the ongoing evolution of the city, perhaps an idea, a solution, or even resources where the value of the whole far exceeds the sum of the parts. In this journey toward Future Cities, we find that they typically face two challenges. The first is in developing a holistic and integrated vision of the future. We believe that our six-segment model provides a valuable framework to develop and articulate the vision, understand the

The Technology Components The 4 pillars of the New Style of IT—Big Data, cloud, mobility, and security — are fundamental in the design of a Future City Framework

CLOUD Cloud drives improvements in efficiency and accelerates access to resouces and expertise as well as innovation.

MOBILITY Mobility opens up completely new ways of addressing the “last mile” challenge to help create new CITIZEN experiences

interlinkages so that adequate measures (such as policy, process, technology, and resource prioritization) may be taken to drive the most effective outcomes. The second is in executing the vision where the discussion inevitably centers around three fundamental areas: Where does one begin, what sequence should be followed, and how can technology be a “force multiplier” of scarce resources? It is here that the New Style of IT becomes the critical enabler in the execution of the vision. Most, if not all, cities face an environment where resources (budget, talent, and time) are tight. City managers need to strike a balance between a range of alternate objectives: • Resource allocation: Keeping the current operations going as well as investing in the future. • Investment in infrastructure: Upgrading existing investments to extend their life and maximize their value and/or build new infrastructures. • Services: Deliver new services to underserved segments and/or improve the quality of services that are already being delivered, making the tough choices between new services as shifting or shutting down some others. City administrators need to make a range of difficult decisions. Executing the vision

ANALYTICS Big Data allows us to develop a very detailed understanding of constituent, to identify trends and to taret services to citizens when they need them.

SECURITY Given that Citizen Services would primarily be consumed via Mobile devices and delivered through Cloud, security becomes an important consideration.

requires reducing costs so that savings can be reinvested. At the same time, a very detailed view of the citizen and business needs to be developed so that informed and insightdriven decisions can be made about focus and priorities in resource allocation. New channels need to be exploited to deliver services that are more convenient, cost effective, and aligned with citizen expectations. Platforms need to be created for collaboration, cocreation, and innovation. Key Outcomes The Key outcomes of a Future City ICT plan are: • Improving the citizen experience through portals, mobile applications and “one-stop” • Access to government services; • Transforming services and service delivery of individual departments to improve efficiency and effectiveness; • Addressing back office processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs; • Developing new business models, including usage-based consumption and public/private partnerships to shift from Capex to Opex, gain financial flexibility and drive innovation through a broad ecosystem.

SDN

Smart Networks for Smart Cities The flexible solution to complex networking environments.

he advent of social media, mobile devices and cloud computing is overtaxing traditional networks. While rapid and dramatic innovations in automation and virtualization have exponentially enhanced computing power and storage capabilities, enterprise IT Administrators are often frustrated by delays caused by manual and inflexible network operations. A new paradigm that is addressing this major gap and revolutionizing computer networking in the process is Software-Defined Networking (SDN), an approach that enables network administrators to manage networks services via abstractions of lowerlevel functionality. SDN provides a flexible way to control the network so it can function like virtualized versions of today’s compute and storage capabilities. Through SDN, administrators can design, build, and manage networks that separate the Control Plane – the logic for controlling forwarding behavior such as security policies and routing protocol – from the Data Plane which forwards network traffic according to Control Plane logic. The SDN concept was originally implemented by networking vendors to deliver specific functions by separating the Data and Control Planes. When used as a full-fledged technology, SDN facilitates the programming of an entire network and the provisioning of application program interfaces or APIs

using external systems rather than the conventional route of configuring individual devices. Amar Singh, Head Of Enterprise, Alpha Data, said “SDN is an emerging technology which empowers ITreliant organizations to replace the manual interfaces of their networks with programmatic versions that can automate key tasks such as configuration and policy management and even set the network to respond to specific application requirements on the fly. It is an important evolutionary step in networking that will enable organizations to more easily adapt to the complexities brought about by virtualization, cloud, and mobility through higher degrees of security, scalability, and manageability.” Alpha Data, one of the largest multidisciplined systems integrators in the UAE, now has the capability to deploy SDN as a centralized, programmable network that can dynamically provision to address the changing needs of businesses accordingly. According to the company, enterprises that incorporate SDN into their IT infrastructure benefit from dynamic access control, seamless mobility and/ or migration, a centralized network state, server load balancing, network virtualization, multiple wireless access points, energy-efficient networking, adaptive traffic monitoring, and denial of service, among others. From an economical point of view, Alpha Data notes that SDN reduces capital costs as it reduces the need

to acquire purpose-built, applicationspecific integrated circuit -based networking hardware and instead allows for the adoption of ‘pay-as-yougrow’ models. The technology also drives down operating expenses as it makes network design, management, deployment and scaling easier. Moreover, the ability to automate provisioning and execution maximizes service availability and reliability by reducing overall management time and the possibility of human error. In today’s highly competitive business landscape, SDN offers the added edge of enabling organizations to quickly deploy new applications, services and infrastructure in step with evolving business goals and objectives. In addition, enterprises can tap SDN to drive new types of applications, services, and business models that can generate fresh revenue streams and squeeze more value out of the network. A growing number of organizations – including carrier and service providers, cloud and data centers, and even enterprise campuses – are shifting to Software-Defined Networking to address the enormous network demands spurred by mobility, the cloud and social media. With the Middle East emerging as a dynamic information and communications technology hub and a center for global business, specialists such as Alpha Data will be instrumental to ensuring that the region’s organizations derive maximum value from their network infrastructure amidst a constantly evolving enterprise IT landscape.

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