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for digital transformation success from the CIO of Dubai Investments

We think like hackers and identify the exploitable loopholes to improve the security posture of your organization.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

As curtains fall on 2022, it’s time to pause and reflect on the lessons we need to take from this year and what we can do to prepare to make 2023 a better year. We have seen the IT sector limp back to normalcy after a brief pandemic-induced lull, and digital transformation initiatives started yielding rich rewards for companies of all sizes. However, on the flip side, the threat landscape evolved equally fast, with damaging ransomware attacks keeping IT executives awake.

Amongst the much-hyped technologies, AI has finally come out of the oven and promises to transform every aspect of our lives. We have seen how this tech works in games like the recently held FIFA world cup, and interestingly enough, the public sector is leading in the adoption with many new cases. However, there are many concerns about increasing automation and algorithmic AI bias. In this edition, we have a feature on tackling this bias and implementing ethical AI with fairness to empower businesses.

Another tech trend that dominated the headlines was the metaverse, which is being heralded as the future of the digital world. Many enterprises, especially in retail and real estate, have already launched metaverse projects but these are still early days for this virtual replica of the real world. Though we can’t predict if this is a fad, one can expect to see a lot of discussion around digital identity and data engineering in the years to come. We will be tracking this space with keen interest and reporting real-world use cases.

We at Insight Media and Publishing had an exciting year as well. We launched a channel magazine to cater to the ever-enterprising partner community in the region and an awards programme to recognise digital innovation in the public sector. Needless to say, it was great fun to return to in-person events after two years of doing them online. There is more to come from our stable next year, so watch this space.

Happy holidays and a wonderful new year.

ARAB NATIONAL BANKS TAPS CONFLUENT TO ADVANCE COLLABORATION

experiences, and proactively collaborate with the Kingdom’s new breed of agile FinTech companies.

a collaborative approach with the aim of positioning ourselves as the banking arm of FinTech businesses in Saudi Arabia,” explained Naif Alharbi, CIO at Arab National Bank.

Confluent today announced that Arab National Bank has successfully leveraged the Confluent Data Streaming Platform to unlock the power of its operational and customer data. This is enabling the bank to introduce innovative new services that enhance customer

As a wave of digitalisation has been sweeping the banking sector in Saudi Arabia, a recent YouGov survey reports the vast majority (91%) of Saudi residents now prefer online/app banking to traditional alternatives. Consequently, in the first quarter of 2022, the Saudi Central Bank revealed that 13 bank branches and 81 ATMs were closed across the Kingdom. Recognising these rapidly evolving customer preferences, Arab National Bank embarked on its digital transformation journey several years ago and recently partnered with Confluent to capitalise on new opportunities for growth.

“One of the main drivers of our transformation was the disruption being caused by agile FinTech companies. Unlike other banks that are threatened by these organisations, we have embraced

MICROSOFT LAUNCHES VIVA SALES

Microsoft Middle East & Africa (MEA) has announced the regional launch of seller experience business application, Viva Sales. The product was announced during Microsoft’s Customer Experience Reimagined event, which brought Microsoft customers from across the UAE and the wider MEA region together to unpack the latest trends and best practices shaping Customer Experience.

Viva Sales helps sellers focus on selling and removes the time spent on manual data entry. The tool leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically capture insights from across Microsoft 365 and Teams so sellers don’t have to enter data manually, and simultaneously delivers AIdriven recommendations and reminders to sellers – all while staying in the flow of work. It streamlines the seller experience by surfacing insights with the right context within tools salespeople already use, saving sellers time and providing the

organisation with a more complete view of the customer.

Speaking at the event, Michel Diab, Director: Business Applications at Microsoft MEA described why Viva Sales is a gamechanger for businesses. “It’s not uncommon for sellers to have customer information and deal

By Implementing Confluent’s platform, we are able to harness the power of real-time data. Given the scale of our operations, we are able to use this to offer actionable insights to our FinTech partners. The value this provides is evidenced in the fact that we now support 65% of the FinTech ecosystem across the Kingdom,” Alharbi added.

Equally important has been the Bank’s ability to create compelling new offerings for Its customers. One of these has been a service that simplifies and streamlines savings by analysing transactions in real-time, and automatically transferring funds to a customer’s current account based on their predefined savings criteria.

Arab National Bank is also utilising the real-time transaction insights made possible by Confluent’s data streaming solution to implement a new loyalty program.

insights saved across Outlook files, Excel spreadsheets, Teams chats and more. Ask any seller and they will tell you that capturing all of that information manually into their CRM system is a time-consuming and meticulous task,” he said. “With Viva Sales, not only is this time reduced, but the rich insights it delivers helps sellers understand overall sentiment of their engagements, measure KPIs and completely revolutionise their overall selling experience.”

Viva Sales provides a level of customer engagement data that was not available previously. As sellers are working, they can tag customers in Outlook, Teams or Office applications like Excel, and Viva Sales will automatically capture it as a customer record, layered with all relevant data about the customer. This data can easily be shared with team members while collaborating in Office and Teams without retyping or looking it up in a CRM.

IT IS LEADING THE BUSINESS INNOVATION IN UAE: MANAGEENGINE

comes to making technology decisions. This autonomy relates to not only purchasing software (64%), and devices (47%), but also to hiring tech talent (62%).

2. Leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) against cyberattacks.

• Around 91% of all respondents say AI and ML technologies will play a significant role in strengthening their organisation’s IT security framework.

• Nearly all (95%) BDMs say that their organisation has invested in AI and ML technologies and are doing so for more than one use case, on average. A notable proportion of BDMs report that they are using AI to prevent cyberattacks (52%).

• IT and security teams are held responsible when it comes to defending against cyberattacks.

ManageEngine announced results from its IT at work: 2022 and beyond study.

This newly released data, involving IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs), examines the democratisation of IT and the ability of IT teams to influence business decisions in large and enterprise-sized organisations in the UAE.

According to the study, there is increased collaboration between IT and other teams within organisations, which may have contributed to non-IT employees possessing more knowledge about IT now than they did before 2020. IT structures within organisations are being increasingly decentralised, and non-IT departments now enjoy autonomy when it comes to technology decisions.

However, any concerns over the role of IT teams being diminished are dispelled as the study found that they are pivotal in building tomorrow’s enterprises. Around 76% of ITDMs expect IT to play a greater role in setting the organisation’s overall strategy in the next 5 years. This is 11% higher than the global average.

The success of the IT team in playing its role has a significant bearing on the organisation’s success, with over 91% of all respondents pointing to a direct correlation between both. Furthermore, IT professionals are increasingly expected

to be innovators, with more than nine in ten (91%) respondents agreeing that IT is more responsible for business innovation than ever before.

“Professionals are keen to gain new perspectives from industry peers in order to stay updated and advance in their career. Through this study, we hope to facilitate the sharing of knowledge among stakeholders in the UAE. These insights also help ManageEngine in its constant endeavour of evolving as a comprehensive and effective IT management platform,” said Rajesh Ganesan, president at ManageEngine.

Key findings from the study:

1. Increased collaboration leading to tech autonomy for non-IT teams.

• The vast majority (90%) of respondents report that collaboration between IT teams and other departments has increased during the past two years.

• More than four-fifths (84%) of respondents agree that non-IT employees in their organisation are more knowledgeable about IT now than they were before 2020.

• Around 44% of organisations have already decentralised their IT structure, with another 49% currently attempting to do so.

• Nearly all (98%) BDMs say their department has autonomy when it

Around 73% of decision makers (both ITDMs and BDMs) say it is the responsibility of IT and security teams to protect organisations.

3. Development of skills and talent retention.

• Two-fifths (41%) of ITDMs in the UAE say they are actively looking for a new job, while pretty much the same number (45%) say they feel less loyal to their current employers than than they were two years ago.

• When it comes to what ITDMs want from their role in the next five years, these were cited as most important: the potential to learn new skills (55%), the ability to step into a more senior role (49%), and the ability to guide change within the organisation (48%).

• Around half of ITDMs say that they would be driven away from their organisation if their pay did not at least stay current with inflation (54%), if there were no potential for advancement/promotion (52%), or a flexible work model (50%), or any of several other existing benefits cited, were taken away.

ManageEngine commissioned independent market research agency

Vanson Bourne to survey 200 decisionmakers across IT and other key business functions from a range of private-sector organisations in the UAE.

OMANTEL TOPS 5G UTILISATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST REGION

After three years of relentless efforts across the nation, Omantel’s 5G now accounts for more than 60% of the total wireless access traffic on its network – making it the first operator in the Sultanate of Oman to reach such figures in 5G deployment and have positioned the company as a leader among the best 5G network operators in the region.

Commenting on the achievement, Eng. Aladdin Bait Fadhil, Chief Commercial Officer at Omantel, said, “Our sustained efforts are bearing fruits and I am glad that more people throughout the Sultanate of Oman are now connected through our stateof-the-art 5G network. We are keen on accelerating our progress to take 5G deployment miles ahead, and we

KELVIN STRENGTHENS EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM

Kelvin has bolstered its executive leadership team with strategic hires and internal promotion. The company is delighted to announce that Suhail Jiwani has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer; Sheena Chandra has been appointed Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer; and Citalouise Geiggar has been appointed Vice President of Marketing. The strategic appointments represent a key element of Kevin’s strategy to capitalise on the momentum to serve and broaden its customer base.

The senior appointments aim to advance Kelvin’s position in the market and enable it to continue partnering with global enterprises to solve unique industrial customer challenges by allowing companies to connect, create, and scale control applications across their operations, with market-leading solutions including Kelvin Carbon Maps and Kelvin Copilots.

are getting future-ready by bringing the most advanced technologies to the nation.”

Omantel was the first operator in the Sultanate of Oman to commercialise 5G services, after leading the commercialising of the FWA and eMBB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband) services, significantly expanding

all basic 5G outdoor coverage in major cities of Oman in 2022.

Omantel is proud of its leadership of the 5G market in the Sultanate of Oman and for being one of the leading regional 5G operators.

Omantel is engaged with vertical industries and partners to expand the industry’s digital transformation. During last year’s GITEX, Omantel along with Hutchison Ports Sohar and Huawei collaborated to successfully launch the use case of 5G smart port in the Sultanate of Oman. This was the first 5G application in the field of ports in the Middle East region.

“The

Kelvin’s executive leadership team. With their years of extensive experience and vast achievements in prior roles, they are well-proven appointments that give us the ability to build further on the impressive momentum we’ve built with Kelvin over the last few years. Together, the expansion of our team boasts diverse and strong expertise that will thrust Kelvin into the next phase of

“We look forward to working with global enterprises and delivering industrial intelligence via our marketleading collaborative control solutions. Our solutions have proven themselves across energy and manufacturing sectors, empowering businesses to achieve their net-zero goals, find and fix issues across their entire production process, with automation and closed-loop control.”

right talent is vital to Kelvin’s success, so it gives me great pleasure to welcome Suhail, Sheena, and Citalouise to

its global growth,” said Peter Harding, Founder & CEO of Kelvin.

TREND MICRO JOINS FORCES WITH SCCC ALIBABA CLOUD

Trend Micro recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC) Alibaba Cloud to protect the enterprises of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from the evolving threat landscape and to promote the localisation of cybersecurity solutions in Saudi Arabia.

During a special ceremony at the inauguration of Trend Micro’s MEA HQ in Riyadh, SCCC Alibaba Cloud’s Chief Executive Officer, Eng.Talal Albakr, and Trend Micro’s Area Vice President and Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa, Dr. Moataz Bin Ali, signed the agreement in the presence of His Excellency Haytham

Alohali, Vice Minister, Ministry of Communications, and Information Technology.

In 2022, Alibaba Cloud became the world’s first hyperscale cloud provider to enter the Saudi Arabian market, offering its services through Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC). SCCC Alibaba Cloud and Trend Micro will collaborate to provide cutting edge solutions that benefit the customers of both companies. Together, they will share cybersecurity best practices, insights and explore opportunities for hosting Trend Micro’s innovative data lake in Saudi Arabia. The data lake will allow Trend Micro and its partners to offer advanced threat defense solutions from inside Saudi

Arabia. The two organisations will also work together on the localisation of cybersecurity solutions and practices across the kingdom.

“SCCC Alibaba Cloud is committed to enhancing collaborations with partners in various markets to provide tailormade cloud solutions that will empower businesses across industries and help them to thrive in the digital age,” said Eng. Talal Albakr, Chief Executive Officer, SCCC Alibaba Cloud. “With the advent of technology and accelerated digital transformation, our partnership with Trend Micro will go a long way in supporting enterprises across Saudi Arabia in navigating the evolving threat landscape.”

SOPHOS LAUNCHES MDR SERVICE

Sophos has announced the general availability of Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) with new industry-first threat detection and response capabilities. Sophos is the first endpoint security provider to integrate vendor agnostic telemetry from third-party security technologies into its MDR offering, providing unprecedented visibility and detection across diverse operating environments. Sophos also introduced the Sophos Marketplace and $1 million Sophos Breach Protection Warranty.

The need for MDR services and specialised defenders has never been greater, as shown in today’s new research, “LockBit 3.0 ‘Black’ Attacks and Leaks Reveal Wormable

Capabilities and Tooling,” from Sophos X-Ops, the company’s crossdomain threat intelligence unit. The research analyzes tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by LockBit, one of today’s most prolific ransomware gangs, that are similar to BlackMatter, and explains how the latest version of the ransomware, LockBit 3.0, adds wormable capabilities and uses legitimate pentesting tools to evade detection.

In a second article, “Detection Tools and Human Analysis Lead to a Security Non-Event,” Sophos X-Ops details a recent Sophos MDR use case involving credential theft, another technique that allows adversaries to impersonate legitimate users. In this case, the

Sophos MDR team combined its threat hunting intelligence with information from the customer’s third-party security appliance to thwart an attack.

“The only way to reliably detect and neutralize determined attackers who increasingly combine the use of pentesting tools, stolen credentials and other stealthy tactics to maneuver undetected is with 24×7 eyes on glass, operating on signals from a diversity of event sources and employing actionable threat intelligence into real-time attacker behaviors,” said Joe Levy, chief technology and product officer at Sophos. “Organizations are struggling to keep pace with well-funded adversaries who are continuously innovating and industrializing their ability to evade defensive technologies alone. Sophos MDR can discover and intercept these steps before they result in a data breach, ransomware or other type of costly compromise. Sadly, ransomware persists as one of the greatest cybercrime threats to organizations, as evidenced in the Sophos 2023 Threat Report. We’re raising the industry standard for how critical MDR services can be delivered to broaden visibility for better, faster detection and response.”

Sophos claims it is the first leading endpoint security provider delivering MDR across both its own product portfolio as well as end users’ existing security deployments. To support this effort, Sophos launched the Sophos Marketplace, an open ecosystem of more than 75 technology integrations, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Check Point, CrowdStrike, Darktrace, Fortinet, Google, Microsoft, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Rapid7, and many others. Expanded visibility across these integrations and diverse operating environments enables Sophos MDR experts to better detect and remediate attacks with speed and precision, regardless of customers’ existing security solutions.

MIMECAST REPORT HIGHLIGHTS RANSOMWARE RISK

Mimecast has released its latest State of Ransomware Readiness 2 report, revealing that ransomware has become a primary threat to organisations worldwide, with Middle Eastern companies not spared from the devastating impact of ransomware attacks.

The report found that 59% of cybersecurity leaders in the UAE have seen the number of cybersecurity attacks increase or stay the same over the past year, with 39% saying they’ve experienced significant downtime due to a ransomware attack.

Mimecast’s State of Ransomware Readiness 2 report is based on insights from 1100 cybersecurity decision-makers in Australia, France, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordics, Singapore, South Africa, the UAE, UK and US.

According to Werno Gevers, cybersecurity expert at Mimecast,

business and security leaders see ransomware attacks as virtually inevitable. “Seventy-five percent of businesses in the UAE reported they experienced a ransomware attack in the past year, ahead of a global average of 64%. The consequences can be devastating: a third of UAE cybersecurity teams have experienced an increase in the number of absences due to burnout following an attack, while 23% have seen changes in the C-suite due to a successful ransomware attack.”

The report further found that 44% of UAE organisations have experienced a loss in revenue due to a ransomware attack in the past twelve months. This may partly explain why nearly half (46%) of cybersecurity professionals in the UAE are considering leaving their role in the next two years due to stress or burnout, with 73% of cybersecurity leaders in the region saying their role gets more stressful every year.

Gevers says the research also found that 94% of global cybersecurity leaders believe more budget is required to combat ransomware, with 24% of UAE organisations seeking an increase of 11% to 20% in their annual cybersecurity budgets.

“Cybersecurity leaders need to focus on proactively reducing the chances of a ransomware attack causing disruption. Organisations need integrated security tools to improve threat detection capabilities and relieve pressure on busy security teams. Good fundamental security practices must be in place to reduce vulnerabilities, and security teams need to evaluate crisis planning to understand the real consequences of an attack. It is also essential that leaders acknowledge that cyber risk is business risk, and not leave the financial and personnel resource burden to only IT teams.”

HOW TO USE THE POWER OF DATA TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR BUSINESS

DATA-DRIVEN SOFTWARE HOLDS THE KEY TO TRANSFORMING AND OPTIMIZING INDUSTRIAL OPERATIONS, WRITES RÓNÁN DE HOOGE, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF INFORMATION, AVEVA

In the last two years, businesses around the world have had to act quickly and nimbly. As companies reached out to serve customers and optimise performance in new ways, shared data networks revealed themselves as the dynamic engines of corporate performance.

Accurate, timely data – and the ability to organise and analyze it – has never been more important to reshaping how your company operates.

During the pandemic, transforming data insights into guidance for higher operational performance was revealed to be critical for success. In a recent whitepaper from Harvard Business Review Analytics Services (HBRAS) commissioned by AVEVA, ‘The Data

Dividend: Achieving Performance Intelligence with data-driven industrial software’, the authors highlight how the pandemic exposed gaps in supply chains – sharpening the drive to use data to achieve new business heights

According to Gartner, companies that effectively share data throughout their ecosystem will achieve 50% higher growth than those with a siloed approach. The pandemic was a reallife test bed for these theories: the last two years has proven the benefits of company-wide leveraged data intelligence.

Industries are transforming

It’s no secret that data-led innovation is transforming how workers perform

critical tasks. Whereas they once focused on tedious operational tasks, workers are now tapping data to simulate and visualise opportunities, reinvent strategies with agility, and collaborate more effectively.

Digital-first models are rapidly becoming standard operational benchmarks. Industries are finally beginning to realise the promises of digital transformation as they unlock higher performance through collaboration between connected businesses and individuals.

Unlocking new capacity

The data-sharing revolution is important because it unlocks new ways of working. It is called “performance intelligence”:

the capacity to harness data-led insights, enabling people to maximise sustainable value across assets, processes, locations, and organisations.

Organisations that want to position themselves for success in uncertain times need the help of robust software and the ability to combine it with data analytics to better engineer processes, optimise operations, and maximise performance.

Performance intelligence is based on utilising a state-of-the-art software portfolio that connects the power of AI, which is rooted in real-time and historical data, with human intelligence to drive strategic insights. Embracing a dataled approach drives profitability and sustainability in equal measure because you can more efficiently optimise engineering and operations, and the materials, energy and processes that they encompass.

A fitting example is US power leader Dominion Energy, a leader in renewable power. The team there gathers and shares data from across its North American grid network using performance intelligence solutions. While the primary driver for unifying the data was initially to manage renewables intermittency and ensure efficient operations, the cloud-based approach has allowed Dominion’s team to turn power grid data into a new source of revenue.

Dominion’s energy source and performance data lets Dominion’s customers track their power sources individually, and provides a data-trail that proves each company is using energy from low-carbon sources. This, in turn, enables Dominion’s customers to provide proof of their own netzero commitments to investors and environmental, social and governance auditors. As a result, Dominion is now able to share the data at a price with customers, who see huge value in receiving real-time updates that can validate their own net-zero performance. For Dominion, this new

source of revenue is also helping to accelerate the low carbon energy transition in North America.

The HBRAS report discusses how information sharing of this kind is helping industrial companies use data to reimagine how they approach production, allowing them to set new goals when it comes to efficiency, productivity, sustainability, and employee well-being.

The study also shows how leaders are freed up to think and act boldly – using advanced industrial software to predict the next big opportunity.

Creating an enterprise-wide view

Today’s industrial software systems are often comprised of individual applications that frequently function in isolation. There’s limited interaction from one stage to the next when it comes to the software tools used among research and development, manufacturing, quality control, and design.

This deficiency is important because what manufacturers are looking for is integration, analysis, and contextualisation across the whole company—an end-toend system that would lead to an enterprise-wide view.

An integrated strategy that connects all the industrial pillars helps create an enterprise-wide view and realises new and transformative corporate capabilities. Having such a view, for example, could inform a company about how an issue with maintenance can impact business. Such data can also help a company successfully accomplish its strategic goals, including sustainability targets.

Achieving performance intelligence

For a factory to deliver optimal results and meet strategic corporate goals, people who work there need access to industrial data analytics as it flows across processes, assets, locations, and the whole organisation. Such a smart factory also needs to be part of a modern supply chain that is an integrated, connected, end-toend network that’s “always on.” To make that happen, the data-driven information needs to flow throughout all parts of the operations and supply chain, including the factory floor.

Achieving this data-driven performance means you need systemspecific industrial software that is driven by real-time and historical information, integrated with other applications, and powered by AI and ultimately directed by human insight.

As the HBRAS paper shows, industrial leaders from pharmaceuticals and manufacturing to energy and infrastructure are using data-sharing models to create these new operating paradigms, and unlock higher levels of success.

The benefits of data-centric thinking radiate beyond operations and reshape how the wider organisation collaborates and grows. This is performance intelligence in action, expanding the limits of what industries can achieve, unlocking new ways to drive sustainable competitive advantage.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be at the forefront of the next industrial revolution.

FAIR PLAY

THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICS IN AI AND WHY IT MATTERS

With AI rapidly moving from pilot projects into production, it has become imperative for enterprises to address the issue of ethics in this fast-evolving technology. Though AI has spawned many new cases, it is also plagued by potential issues, including algorithmic bias. Ethical AI places importance on transparency and development of fairer AI practices with clearly stated guidelines on the legitimate uses of AI.

Recently, a report by the MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group Worldwide in

that we have moved from building systems that make decisions based on human-defined rules to systems trained on data. It is now possible to build AI systems with no ethical considerations. An unconstrained AI system will be optimised for whatever its output is.

For example, a system designed to approve loans may unfairly penalise particular demographics that are underrepresented in the training data. This clearly has a negative impact on members of those demographics and potentially on the service provider. It may also place the provider in violation of organisational or industry guidelines or, in some cases, even the law.

2020 found that spending on AI is expected to hit $50 billion this year and $110 billion annually by 2024. Needless to say, AI is essential across a vast array of industries, including e-commerce, health care, banking, retail, manufacturing, and more. With the use of AI extending beyond simply automating repetitive tasks and to more sophisticated issues such as strategic decision-making, areas of ethical concern become more complex.

“AI presents three major areas of ethical concern for society: privacy and surveillance, bias and discrimination, and the role of human judgment,” says Stephen Gill, Academic head of the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University Dubai. “Debates about privacy safeguards and about how to overcome bias in algorithmic decision-making in sentencing, parole, and employment practices are by now familiar. Evidence has already emerged that algorithms tend to have embedded racial and gender biases. For example, a few smartphone applications have been called out for withholding financial services advertising from female users.”

Additionally, facial recognition technologies have been found to

disproportionately misidentify people of colour. Therefore, ethical AI management is essential for decisionmaking and to ensure that such biases are not perpetuated, he says.

Zayed Abu Alhaj, the Regional Vice President, Middle East, at Cloudera, says advances in AI have meant

“While organisations are leveraging data and AI to create scalable solutions, they are also scaling their reputational, regulatory, and legal risks. Ethical AI systems should be designed carefully,” Alhaj says.

Kamal Nasrollahi, Global Director of Research at Milestone Systems, says Ethical AI follows righteous policies concerning fundamental values. These include personal rights, privacy, non-prejudice, and integrity. Traditionally, we have discussed ethical AI as part of a discussion about collecting and using data without bias. Ethical AI is vital because it helps ensure that AI is developed, sold and used as responsible technology that is fair, transparent, and accountable.

Sid Bhatia, Regional VP and General Manager, Middle East & Turkey at Dataiku, says we need to broaden the conversation beyond ethical AI to responsible AI as many negative outcomes in AI can come from the best of intentions. “Responsible AI must encompass both intentions and accountability. Responsible AI refers to the practice of designing and implementing such systems to enhance societal impact and minimise prejudicial and negative outcomes.”

Zayed Abu Alhaj

Stephen Gill

How can organisations develop and use ethical AI?

Despite the benefits of AI and in some cases, its indispensability to businesses, companies must address the ethical issues that come with storing massive amounts of data, especially data used to train AI modules. Without these checks, companies can risk their reputations and their customers’ loyalty. However, the issue is complicated as there are no legal frameworks in place yet.

“Additionally, some companies are concerned that the increased regulation of AI may inhibit innovation. The best way to find a balance is for companies to tailor AI solutions according to their values and needs. This includes assessing current data availability and the company’s technical capabilities. In addition, the use of AI largely depends on industry needs. For example, some companies may need to use AI for behavioural analysis, others would need it to achieve better audience targeting. Therefore, understanding industry needs is essential to monitoring the use of AI and lessening the likelihood of falling into ethical quandaries,” says Gill from Heriot-Watt University.

Finally, companies should have a team in place that works on

developing ethical standards for the company. Such experts should have a background in AI solution development as well as software engineers and product managers, he adds.

Transparency is key, according to Alhaj from Cloudera. When algorithms make decisions, users may need to realise AI is in charge. The public doesn’t know how algorithms work, so when technology acts unexpectedly, it frustrates users. This could be addressed by explaining

how technology works and how machine learning engines get better at their tasks by being fed gobs of data. A chatbot that relies on canned answers becomes more precise.

“This doesn’t exonerate technology companies from applying ethics to development. When developing ethical AI systems, the most essential part is intent and diligence in evaluating models on an ongoing basis. Sometimes, even if everything is done to deliver ethical outcomes, the machine may still make predictions and assumptions that don’t abide by these rules. It’s not the machine’s fault. After all, machine learning systems are inherently dumb and require a human in the loop to ensure the model remains healthy, accurate, and free of bias,” he says.

Nasrollahi from Milestone says deploying AI, then monitoring it with the intent of either retraining or replacing it – to constantly make it a better – you could say – is a responsible and stronger ethical approach to using AI. “At Milestone, we have adopted a concept for deployment, monitoring, retrain called ModelOps. This responsible technology approach is a better training strategy to continuously improve AI.”

Bhatia from Dataiku sums up: “Responsible AI systems must be secure, but they also must be transparent. Non-technical people must be given the means to interrogate a result from an AI system, be it an automated action, a recommendation, or an alert. Decision makers and developers must be empowered with the correct tools and best-practice training to deliver technically sound and auditready AI systems. Integrating the elements of responsible AI requires taking astute action at every point in the development pipeline. Constant communication between stakeholders will also be necessary to flag any potential issues so all relevant parties can assess them against the responsibility framework.”

Sid Bhatia

Kamal Nasrollahi

DESPITE THE BENEFITS OF AI AND IN SOME CASES, ITS INDISPENSABILITY TO BUSINESSES, COMPANIES MUST ADDRESS THE ETHICAL ISSUES THAT COME WITH STORING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DATA, ESPECIALLY DATA USED TO TRAIN AI MODULES.

The cyber-risk is real, but not always visible

.

With ColorTokens’ award winning Zero Trust micro-segmentation framework you can find and fix the evolving risks that threaten your business.

ColorTokens’ SaaS-based, cloud-delivered approach ensures fast and easy segmentation, effectively blocking the spread of ransomware and other threat actors inside your network. Learn more about how ColorTokens can prevent cyber threats from becoming a full scale attack on your network. Write to info@colortokens for an exploratory demo. www.colortokens.com

NURTURING TECHNOLOGY

INNOVATION

region participating in the Gitex exhibition. In addition, the joint exposition under the ‘Made in Moscow’ brand included companies that have already adapted its product to the Middle East countries.

For example, Smart Engines - the developer of a secure face recognition system without transmitting data to third parties, suitable for use in Islamic countries, has a recommendation letter from Muslim Tour. DroneSolutions, which produces unmanned aerial vehicles, released an all-weather model, especially for the UAE market, with engines adapted for flights according to the region’s rules. ISS company, a developer of a MaaS application for tracing city routes, is also actively negotiating with the UAE city structures.

Moscow is the leader among Russian regions in providing IT innovations abroad.

Exports of Moscow’s telecommunications, computer, and information services in 2021 reached AED 18 billion, with an additional AED 4.5 billion accounting for the export of rights for the use of the intellectual property.

The Middle East is one of the key regions Moscow IT developers are actively working with. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain are already using software and products from Russian companies in their operations. For example, the Dubai Police purchased software from Elcomsoft’s Moscow team, which develops computer and mobile forensics products. The company creates a line of software for extracting information from mobile devices, recovering passwords for a wide range of applications, and also for restoring access to encrypted data. In addition, Cognitive Systems supplied robots to work with clients in the UAE.

Many Russian IT companies were also spotted in the Middle East during Expo

2020, including Pattern Digital Buro. “We became partners of the Russian pavilion at Dubai Expo and made an AR application for the organisers. There onsite, we also received from Arab partners the order for an AR case for an exhibition in Abu Dhabi at the stand of Abu Dhabi Maritime,” revealed the Pattern Digital Buro team.

Strengthening business ties between Moscow and the Middle East IT community

Many Moscow companies managed to find partners in the Middle East market thanks to the support of the Moscow Government, in particular, of the Moscow Export Center – an official structure designed to ensure the development of trade and economic relations with foreign partners. Furthermore, the MEC implements a wide range of projects to support businesses ready to collaborate with foreign markets. Since 2018, more than 100 Moscow companies, with the support of the Moscow Export Center, have presented technological developments and IT solutions to the audience of the MENA

It was possible to facilitate negotiations with partners from the Middle East during these business missions. The Moscow Export Center organised IT companies’ business meetings in Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo, Tehran, and other cities of the MENA region, as well as reverse business missions in Moscow with buyers from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. Software developers adapt their products and work out strategies for entering foreign markets, counting, among others, on the GoGlobal accelerator, which MEC is implementing together with the Foundation for the Development of Internet Initiatives.

In addition to local business support, the Moscow Export Center actively cooperates with foreign companies interested in partnership with the Russian capital.

“The Middle East partners interested in finding an IT company to collaborate with can contact the Moscow Export Center, which is open to direct interaction with foreign partners and has a wide pool of IT services exporters. MEC selects the most suitable offers in the market free of charge and provides complete and up-to-date information about suppliers from the capital of Russia,” said Vitaly Stepanov, Head of the Moscow Export Center.

The development of the IT industry is one of the key tasks for Moscow. To strengthen business ties with the Middle East region, the MEC will continue organising joint events, including exhibitions, onsite stands and business missions, and the launch of acceleration programs with a focus on the MENA region.

ORGANISATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST ARE INCREASINGLY WORKING WITH MOSCOW IT COMPANIES FOR ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS VR PLATFORMS, SECURE FACE RECOGNITION, AND ROBOTS.

FUTURE TRENDS IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

ACKERMAN, AREA VP FOR MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, AT SERVICENOW, LISTS OUT FOUR MACRO TRENDS THAT WILL SHAPE THE REGION’S DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN 2023

Another year of digital transformation in the region and where do we find ourselves? Much as we do at the end of any year — lessons learned and challenges ahead. For the past 30 months or so we have been grappling with change so deep and broad that it is bringing about dramatic cultural shifts from boardrooms to the enterprise front line. Faced with the very real possibility of market irrelevance, organisations across all industries are adjusting relationships with their workforces, looking into new business models, and experimenting with new technologies to compete and thrive.

In 2023, we should expect regional business leaders to demand more ROI

on technology investments. Inflation rates may be lower in the GCC than they are in the Americas or Europe, but they are still of concern. The right digital investments could have a corrective impact on the bottom line. It is already hard to imagine a modern business that is not, to some extent, digital. And as we wade ever deeper into the Fourth Industrial Revolution (yes, it’s still with us), businesses should be prepared to address a range of issues, from the employee experience and its association with technology procurement to the ongoing pressures of regulatory compliance and ESG.

Here are four trends that will shape the region’s digitisation stories in 2023.

1Employee expectations regarding flexible working

In May this year, multiple media sources in the UAE were abuzz with the finding in a Cisco survey that 90% of the nation’s workers preferred remote or hybrid work and that 61% would be less likely to look elsewhere for opportunities if their employer implemented flexible work schedules. Collaboration tools, and the plethora of supporting platforms that governed, monitored, and scheduled work from afar during pandemic lockdowns were not wasted investments. The technology foundation is there to accommodate the relatively young workforces that span the Middle East and Africa.

MARK

The good news is that businesses have already seen the productivity benefits that go along with homebased work. Far from the feared slow delivery and stale service that stopped pre-pandemic moves to remote-work models, we have seen staff morale and productivity receive notable boosts. Flexibility and automated workflows are recruiting badges, attracting young, driven professionals with much to offer. Firms will have a choice — deliver flexible work or try to get by with a stale unmotivated workforce.

2Talent sought, but where?

This issue compounds the first in that the very talent that is expecting enhanced work experiences can afford to make such demands because it is also in short supply. As time goes on, companies that do not respond to such trends will be hit by talent drains that will impact operations and service levels. At the same time, these same elements will be enhanced at enterprises that offer more alluring environments to their staff.

A recent survey by PwC showed that 47% of Middle East companies were addressing talent gaps by upskilling their workforces. Meanwhile, some 32% had opted for automation, including automation that enhanced the employee experience. This digitisation taking place side by side with upskilling is the ideal environment for today’s young professionals, as it gels with their outlook and ambition. So, in 2023, tools and training that empower each employee to innovate independently while working flexibly will be critical.

3AI and business intelligence In crisis, everyone looks around for reassurance. Businesses look around for ways of getting through the crisis and becoming immune to the next one. “Resilience” has been the word of the day for countless months. It remains so because of the aftershocks of the pandemic — supply-chain issues and inflation being just two examples. AI-powered analytics does not just allow real-time insights into the efficiency of processes and the profitability of business models; it clears the way for predictive analyses that show a path to long-term success.

When technology stacks include mechanisms for extracting meaningful, useful data from structured and unstructured sources

and categorising it for presentation and review, decision makers get access to valuable knowledge. In 2023, we expect to see an innovation cycle, as the positive ROI from these technologies encourages yet more investment.

4The continued ascendancy of ESG Environment. Social. Governance. Everyone everywhere now expects more from brands. There is no escaping it. Care for the planet; care for the communities you serve; and care for your employees and the major issues taking place around the world. Customers care about it, employees care about it, partners care about it. Investors and shareholders care about it.

In 2023, as ESG pressure reaches critical mass, regional businesses will start to form strategies and focus groups. When complying with government, industry, and market expectations, it will help to have the right talent in place. Conveniently, digital natives share an affinity with environmental and social matters. They will also be better placed to effectively use the technology platforms that produce ESG insights and drive progress in these matters.

Reach, and keep reaching Nautical metaphors are common in the digital world. In that spirit: Technology has always kept us afloat. Even when we felt pushed below the surface, it had the power to bring our heads above water and, in some cases, make us soar above — high above — the waves. Those highflyers are always easily identified. They are the ones that spot trouble ahead of time. They are the ones that leverage the right technology at the right time in the right way to get the lift they need.

In 2023, they will be the ones that digitise workflows, look after employees and communities, and futureproof themselves against the crises to come.

IN 2023, AS ESG PRESSURE REACHES CRITICAL MASS, REGIONAL BUSINESSES WILL START TO FORM STRATEGIES AND FOCUS GROUPS. WHEN COMPLYING WITH GOVERNMENT, INDUSTRY, AND MARKET EXPECTATIONS, IT WILL HELP TO HAVE THE RIGHT TALENT IN PLACE.

TRANSFORMING YOUR BUSINESS

Why should enterprises move ERP to the cloud?

The onset of Industry 4.0 has brought in a wave of changes that simply cannot be ignored. Customer demands are rapidly evolving, supply chain processes are moving towards total automation, and round-theclock interconnectivity has become an indispensable asset for any forward-thinking enterprise. In this transformative era, it has become imperative for organisations to enable smart systems across their business processes to keep up with the market.

One way to achieve this is through an Enterprise Resource Planning system on the cloud. The low startup cost and reasonable subscription fees make cloud-based ERP a highly accessible solution for startup businesses, allowing smaller and midmarket organisations to gain access to the same enterprise resource planning features of large corporations. The significant hike in productivity resulting from a cloud ERP is an accumulation of unlimited geographic accessibility, uninterrupted focus on in-house core competencies, real-time decision-making capabilities, and easy scalability, and the likes. It thus becomes effortless for an enterprise to devote more time and resources in other areas for improvement and growth while the cloud takes care of the business.

How do you support your customers in their digital transformation journeys?

At Azentio Software, we are consistently striving to create truly innovative software products that cater to banking, financial services, insurance providers, and midmarket enterprises across the Asia, Middle East and Africa regions. Our mission is to

help our clients deliver world-class services to their customers in the most competitive, productive, and compliant way possible. Our world-class suite of products is continually being refurbished and streamlined to keep our clients attuned to the large-scale digital transformation happening in key industries across the globe.

Our newest launch, ONEERP Industry Cloud, is a fully integrated and collaborative system collaging the digital manufacturing and SCM components that address dynamic conditions in the industry value chain and shifting customer demands. The focus of ONEERP Cloud is to have capabilities to integrate diversified processes in the industry and systems to enable smart systems. This is managed by connected devices with supporting data being collected and collaborated with decision making at appropriate stages. This integrated smart system also utilises the capabilities of other code and no-code systems through integrations to support and extend its functionalities.

What are the key benefits of your ONEERP Industry Cloud solution?

Technically reverberant, the ONEERP Industry Cloud solution works with multiple cloud platform-agnostic considering OCI, AWS, and other cloud platforms.

This trailblazing solution is built for clients of different sizes with a capability to provide exclusive tenancy for each of their application and database needs and ensure their privacy and security. Through ONEERP Cloud, we can connect to various omnichannels and deliver a seamless digital experience for customers. The data is facilitated by mobile, cloud-based solutions. Our extensive network of channel partners

assists in the implementation of ONEERP as a system integrator for the organisation, being responsible for the project schedule encompassing the onboarding, execution, and delivery. The ONEERP Solution Manager effectively delivers pre-configured process, SDK/reporting tools to personalize the application, and facilitate the effectiveness of the partner-led implementation. In addition, ONEERP Cloud features a refreshing new look, and refined role boards with KPIs and workflow that ensure a powerful UX, which helps track organisational performance to take total control of the business.

How does it support Industry 4.0?

ONEERP Cloud has been developed on the key aspects of Industry 4.0. It can be integrated with diverse partners to provide relevant data from different IoT devices, and thus, the ERP system can use it. Its APIcentric architecture helps unlock business and technical usage, warrants the easy access to data to increase collaboration, bridges the technology gap, manages the resources, mitigates the risk, and increases the integration speed. This also facilitates the adoption of the platform economy, digitisation, automation, and ensures the distribution of the developed code and services across channels, devices, and interfaces. This further enables application integration with external business-tobusiness and within an enterprise itself. In closing, the intelligent ONEERP Cloud software expertly elevates business processes by means of ultramodern technology, software fortification, bestin-class scalability, and much more to keep businesses one step ahead of the competition.

ANISH KANARAN, VICE PRESIDENT ERP, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA AT AZENTIO SOFTWARE, EXPLAINS WHY A GOOD CLOUD ERP SYSTEM IS ONE OF THE PILLARS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.

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CHANGE AGENT

Dubai Investments embarked on a digital transformation journey a few years back, and digital innovation has been one of this transformation’s cornerstones.

As an organisation, we realised that to have a sustainable business model and drive growth in our various business segments, we need to embrace the innovation culture internally and in our thinking.

Creating awareness on all fronts and raising it among different levels, starting with the Board, was imperative for this program to get off the ground and succeed.

It is important to speak to different stakeholders and get their views on where they see their businesses in a few years. One thing that unanimously all of them said to us was to be able to manage the new customer demands in the digital age. So for us to move forward, we created awareness in the corridors of our organisation, and

How are you driving digital innovation at your company?

people started speaking of this or at least asking about it.

We also recognised that we needed someone to drive our company’s innovation culture, so I was tasked to drive digital innovation. We also realised very quickly that we might not have the desired skill set and bandwidth to manage this massive project, so we enabled our partner ecosystem and spoke to wellknown global names in the industry and collaborated with them on this journey.

One of the first things we did was sit with them and come up with a digital landscape by identifying opportunities and then picking a couple of quick wins for the organisation, thereby creating momentum. It was important to do this since transformations, as we all know, are long-drawn and challenging projects, and for people to stay motivated, we realised we needed to demonstrate some quick wins.

We also put process and change management right upfront since

they are critical for a thriving digital innovation culture.

What is the secret to getting digital transformation right?

Your customer needs to be the main ingredient in your sauce and one single approach to your digital transformation may not be the right thing.

Having said this, you must realise and recognise that the path is long and winding - and at the outset, it is impossible to know when a digital transformation will end. Hence, remember that digital transformation is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing program that the organisation should always have on its agenda.

Let me start by stating the pitfalls. Starting with technology as a focal point is a recipe for failure. As CIOs and tech leaders, we must avoid falling into the ‘technology trap’.

Digital transformation needs to be focused on the customer and the customer alone. Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind about this. A digital transformation that does not have customers as the center point of its transformation journey is heading toward a brick wall.

I have seen quite a few organisations focus on new and emerging technologies for transformation. While this may not be wrong, focusing on it as the starting point is not right. Look at your organisation’s business and the goals you want to achieve at the end of your phased transformation journey. Once you crystallise this thought, the rest of the elements can then be brought into play.

Your organisation’s leadership needs to re-think the business for the digital age. As a C-suite leader, you must be also part of this discussion. This is important since you must articulate your digital transformation strategy in alignment with the organisation’s goals.

People, process, and change management are Key ingredients to this sauce so that the taste is palatable to the organisation and goes down well. However, please consider the

importance of having formal business processes in place for your respective functions and a Key person to be accountable for each function.

Technology will also play a key role in ensuring that your solution is the right fit for your organisation.

However, we also were clear that since we are a very large, complex, and diversified conglomerate with several industry segments, one size will not fit all. So we decided to proactively adopt a multimodel digital transformation programme.

How do you see the CIO role evolving in the future?

A Chief Information Officer’s role has always been critical, the way I have seen it and played it, as I have been one for several years with global multinationals. A CIO plays a very crucial role in the growth of an organisation by helping the company realise benefits from effective technology implementations.

As I have said before, it is not enough for the CIO to be just technically competent, he or she needs to have enough business acumen to be able to have an effective discussion at the roundtable. In fact, I am part of organisations where technology was viewed more at a strategic level and focused on business performance.

With over 75% of companies looking at deploying the digital-first strategy over the next 3-5 years, a CIO’s role becomes even more centerpiece. Of course, with the increased advancement and embracement of technology by organisations, a CIO will also be required to play the role of a CDO or a CTO combined into one.

Building effective partnerships, a collaborative ecosystem, leveraging on industry relations, and being a thought leader are some of the key competencies that a CIO will need to possess or Imbibe. As we advance, think of our role as more transformative in nature. Remember that as transformation agents, or catalysts, our actions and initiatives for the business with the technology vehicle will result in revenue growth.

A CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER’S ROLE HAS ALWAYS BEEN CRITICAL, THE WAY I HAVE SEEN IT AND PLAYED IT, AS I HAVE BEEN ONE FOR SEVERAL YEARS WITH GLOBAL MULTINATIONALS. A CIO PLAYS A VERY CRUCIAL ROLE IN THE GROWTH OF AN ORGANISATION BY HELPING THE COMPANY REALISE BENEFITS FROM EFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATIONS.

THE RISE OF OBSERVABILITY

Historically, SolarWinds has been focused on on-prem solutions. Is the focus now shifting to the cloud?

Why do enterprises need observability today?

If you look at any IT organisation, you’re running your business services and applications. For example, if you’re a financial services company, you have different finance applications that you expose to your customers. Then you will also have applications and services for your internal customers. First and foremost, you want to ensure these applications and services are always available and performing, and their security posture is good. You want to manage all the aspects of application and service lifecycle. It would help if you had visibility to understand what’s happening across your application and service stacks.

Is it a full-stack visibility platform?

Yes, we have created a full-stack visibility platform. We call it observability because we can monitor your network infrastructure, applications, databases, cloud services, and the integration surrounding it. We can monitor the whole distributed IT estate and see how they are interconnected as a service.

We are trying to cover on-prem and public clouds as an entire data estate. In the traditional world, applications were on either on-prem or private cloud. So we were only monitoring that. Now applications are distributed across public and private clouds. Sometimes, you have the database in a private cloud, while the app tier is hosted in a public cloud. All sort of combinations exists today. What we’re doing with our SaaS strategy is ensuring we cover the entire public cloud and private cloud estate together so customers can decide where their applications and business services are, and so on.

Is this observability platform available on all public cloud environments?

We have launched our first version on AWS and another version on Azure, both natively available. The reason is that our retail customers may want to run only on Azure, not on AWS, because of competitive reasons. Or if you already have contractual agreements with other cloud providers. So we want to support the cloud of their choice so that their consumption becomes easy and the purchasing process becomes easy. We also plan to launch our version on Google Cloud in 2023.

Many enterprises have invested in monitoring tools over the years. So why would they want an observability solution?

Customers can solve point problems with these monitoring tools. For example, if you ask a customer about network or database performance, they might have an answer. But when there is an outage in a business service, it becomes tricky to find the root cause. Typically, when

troubleshooting an outage, the DevOps team will start triaging and figuring out it is an application problem after two days. Then, the application team may find it is a database problem and reach out to the database team. So this navigation of multiple products and tools makes diagnosing root causes very difficult and time consuming.

What we can do with our observability solution is in a single pane of glass, you can see how the entire service stack is performing. And when there is an outage, you can drill down and find out which node is causing the problem in almost real-time and remediate it automatically because we are leveraging AI/ML technologies.

So you are leveraging AI/ML in this platform.

This is an AIOps-driven platform. Essentially, we have created a unified data telemetry platform, meaning we can ingest logs, metrics, traces, different types of queries, and configurations. So we can consume lots of data across networks, infrastructure, databases, applications, and cloud services into a common platform. Then we start correlating the data by leveraging AI and ML to get to the root causes quickly.

Is this based on elastic pricing?

One thing we did as part of the launch was to make pricing available on our website and it is based on the type of service. You can purchase application observability per app instance or database observability based on how much data is stored and so on. But if you want to have the whole service observability, it is a different price point. We made this flexible because every customer is trying to determine where they want to start the journey on observability.

ROHINI KASTURI, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER AT SOLARWINDS, TALKS ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY’S RECENTLY LAUNCHED CLOUD-NATIVE OBSERVABILITY PLATFORM CAN HELP TACKLE RISING IT COMPLEXITY

Welcome to the next generation of partnership.

Introducing the SolarWinds Transform Partner Program, designed to accelerate SolarWinds partners’ ability to drive digital and IT transformation for customers with powerful tools, resources, and increased profit potential.

Email partner-emea@solarwinds.com to learn more.

A SMART FUTURE

for end users that can take advantage of the latest advancements in data management.

The video imaging and security sector is undergoing a period of intense transformation, driven by rapidly increasing demand from a broadening range of end-users, including banking and finance, retail, media and entertainment, and local governments. Underlying these shifts are big, global changes: the UN predicts that 68% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, while increasing numbers of industries are seeking to reap the benefits of introducing digital technologies into their ways of working.

This is all a huge opportunity for the video security industry. All these trends have a need for video analytics. Smart cities rely on video for traffic management and safety enforcement; smart retail needs video to track purchases and deliver AR/VR experiences; smart manufacturing needs video analytics to promote safety and efficiency on the factory floor. As a result, according to one report, the industry can expect a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10% through to 2026.

More video analytics means more data, and the industry is hardly alone in that respect. According to Rethink Data, a Seagate report with research by IDC,

projected enterprise data to increase at a rate of 42.2% between 2020 and 2022, with 68% of this data being unused by businesses due to difficulties accessing and using it effectively.

This all begs the question: is the security industry ready for its postpandemic growth spurt? Outdated, on-premises infrastructure risks holding back progress. With more data being produced than ever, the way we build video imaging and analytics systems needs to change. A mix of on-site and cloud storage infrastructure is going to be the key to making the most of all this data and unlocking new growth opportunities.

The data dilemma

More video analytics means more data needed to store the footage. This growth is being driven by three main factors: increasing number of video recording end-points, increasing variety of endpoints, and the increasing image quality that those end-points are recording.

Gone are the days where CCTV systems would be recording five black and white frames per second: today’s video systems are increasingly full colour, HD, and at a much higher framerate. Video footage is being produced not just from static cameras, but body cams, vehicles, drones, and in new settings such as smart cities, hospitals and factories. All these developments have their obvious benefits in terms of new features for users, however they do come at a cost: all this video requires both much more space for data storage, and a more advanced system for making sure that the data is available where and when the user needs it.

Opportunities in the cloud

It would be wrong to see this increase in video data as just a burden to be mitigated – it is also a huge opportunity

Most end users have already made heavy upfront investments in existing storage infrastructure, and upgrading this infrastructure is expensive, especially if done frequently. Adopting a hybrid approach to data management can help keep costs under control while opening up opportunities to innovate.

A hybrid system uses a combination of both traditional, on-premises data storage systems such as hard disk drives, with newer types of mass-capacity private or public cloud storage. This enables businesses to store their video data both locally and in the cloud, depending on the type of data and the business need.

For example, if you have a data set that you need quick easy access to, then that data can stay on on-prem storage where it’s readily available. However, the business may also have much larger archival data sets that aren’t needed to be readily accessed so frequently, however they do need to remain searchable and indexable for use in business analytics. In this use case, private or public cloud environments offer clear advantages over on-prem in terms of costs and feature sets.

Hybrid systems using both on-prem and cloud networks offer end-users new options to extend their video storage capabilities without the expensive prospect of expanding the hardware footprint. It can also help drive costs per TB of storage down, and offer additional layers of security compared to on-prem storage alone.

This isn’t to say that on-site storage of video data is going away any time soon: it isn’t. As long as data is being generated by end point devices like cameras, there will be a need to store that data locally for easy access. However, cloud is set to become more and more popular as the economics changes and makes it a more cost-effective and simple option for bulk storage. As the industry continues to expand with new end-users and innovative applications of video analytics technology, the vendors and installers that recognise this potential today will be the ones to reap the benefits in the coming years.

JERMAINE CAMPBELL EMEA SURVEILLANCE SEGMENT LEAD, AT SEAGATE, ON WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR THE VIDEO SECURITY INDUSTRY

THREE TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS FOR 2023

FRED LHERAULT, FIELD CTO, EMEA & EMERGING MARKETS AT PURE STORAGE, WRITES 2023 WILL BE THE YEAR OF SUSTAINABILITY AND ESG.

The last three years have seen a lot of upheaval and change. Technology — the cloud in particular — has helped us a lot since then, enabling organisations to drive adoption of remote-working capabilities at scale, and reinvent business models to cope with the demands of regulators and home-based customers.

The Arab Gulf has a famously young population, so the region’s businesses must continue to cater to digital natives and their predilection for online mobile-first experiences. Meanwhile, enterprises must also allow for the rise of ESG, which is, somewhat paradoxically, largely driven by the same consumer base. In 2023, we expect vendors, service providers, and customers to become locked in a cooperative dance of sustainability, negotiating fiercely over who should shoulder the costs of inefficiency. What follows are three key predictions for the year ahead for the regional technology market.

Businesses will make technology choices based on sustainability

With sustainability being a priority for many organisations, efficient technologies which use less energy and have a better carbon footprint will be on many board’s agenda. Today’s businesses are much more environmentally conscious, but volatile energy costs have forced the issue in many countries around the world and in the next year we will see green and sustainability credentials at the tip of the spear in conversations

between vendors, service providers and customers. Many groups within organisations will develop a much greater understanding of sustainability metrics and methodologies and will start applying them when making technology choices.

Containers will be the key to cloud neutral infrastructure designs — beating lock-in While historically large enterprises have worked with different cloud providers for different use cases, this creates cloud lock-in which customers are sick and tired of. Next year we will see an increase in customers building cloud neutrality into their design to avoid this lock-in even if it’s only to prepare for the future. To do so, companies will rely heavily on containerising applications, making them portable across private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure, regardless of the cloud providers at play. There will also be a push to consolidate management

of applications through Kubernetes platforms with all the flexibility, speed, cost effectiveness and security needed to ensure success in a cloud neutral environment.

Hiring IT specialists will become harder: organisations will hire more generalists

Every organisation is struggling to find Kubernetes, data analytics and machine learning specialists as these are some of the most in-demand skills in IT at the moment. However, companies don’t actually want to hire people who are good at only one thing — they are looking for people with a breadth of skills. As a result organisations will need to hire more generalists and fewer specialists, even in critical roles, and train them in areas where skills need to be developed. This will be far more efficient for the IT organisation in the long run, as specialists tend to serve as a bottleneck if they are the only personnel who can solve specific problems.

Challenges promote innovation Organisations across the region will survive by taking wisely considered leaps into new paradigms. The technology is there, and even if the skills are not readily available, there are costeffective ways of solving this issue, such as training existing employees. External issues such as inflation will continue to pose challenges but given the region’s track record (much of it occurring in the past three years) of overcoming obstacles, I think we are on track for an innovative 2023.

HOW TO FIX THE PATCH MANAGEMENT PROBLEM

TAREK NAJA, SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT, QUALYS, ON WHY WE NEED TO RETHINK PATCH MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

The region’s relationship with the digital realm can be described as a series of benefits that come with caveats. On the one hand, cloud computing brings agility and cost-effectiveness, but it also leads to complexity. On the one hand, remote work led to keeping employees safe during a pandemic and delivering flexibility to them now, but at the cost of complicating the management of shadow IT. There are probably a few more examples, but you get the gist — great business benefits accompanied by great surges in responsibility and workload for IT and security teams. More shadow IT and increased

complexity are welcome mats for threat actors, and the region’s attack surface is growing as a result. When asked by PwC to name the top negative impacts from IT complexity, UAE respondents commonly cited the ability to recover from a cyberattack. Cloud migrations are splitting legacy solutions to have one foot in the cloud and one on premises, which gets in the way of identifying, classifying, prioritising, and remediating vulnerabilities.

Report after report shows a cybersecurity crisis in which organisations around the world are struggling to keep pace with exponential increases in the number of exploits and the number of tools deployed, as well as

an industry skills gap that refuses to go away. The problem can be summed up as solutions fatigue meets siloed teams. We see a vast array of cloud, on-prem and WFH tools, managed piecemeal by disparate, non-collaborative departments across the IT and security disciplines. This chaotic environment is being hit by threats that are more sophisticated and greater in number than ever before, leading to longer resolution times.

Enterprises need more agility in the security function so that threat hunters can do just that — hunt. Instead, many analysts are chained to the daily grind of investigating a few false positives while trying to juggle must-dos such as patch

management. Any security professional will tell you that this situation describes an organisation with a flashing target on its back.

Patch management: an ideal candidate for automation

A way forward would be to remove some day-to-day tasks such as patch management from the plates of security teams. Patch management is a necessary component of the cybersecurity function. But global figures tell us our enemies are exploiting vulnerabilities faster than they can be patched. According to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, the jump in ransomware attacks from 2020 to 2021 was more than the last five years combined. And according to data from Mandiant, zero-day exploits reached a record high in 2021, more than doubling from 2020, which had not seen much of an increase on 2019. Our enemies are also faster to react than we are. The time to weaponise an exploit fell from almost a year (352 days) to just over a week (9 days) from 2018 to 2022, while remediation times have slowed. This is a business risk because it is hard to imagine any operation in the digital economy that can afford to be offline for days at a time.

The plain truth is that unless larger organisations have veritable armies of patch technicians at their disposal, they cannot hope to patch their infrastructures at the current rate at which vulnerabilities are disclosed and exploited. And while smaller businesses may have less patches to administer, they may still lack the staff to do so. Remediation processes are not always straightforward. Some may involve both deploying a patch and changing a configuration. If we factor in due diligence, in which each patch is evaluated for operational impact before it goes live, then we start to see the problem.

Patch management needs an overhaul. It needs to be automated, but in a way that leaves control in the hands of IT

and security teams. Organisations should start with triage. It is important to remember that not all vulnerabilities will require a patch. Patch management platforms must be flexible enough to deploy patches, make configuration changes, and update third-party applications, but with enough granular control to allow assessment of the necessity of the fix.

The idyll, at a glance

In the ideal solution, security leaders should look for one that offers a high

degree of automation, even in the most complex patching scenarios. Policyorchestration capabilities should drive operational efficiencies and improve response times, rather than creating new problems. Organisations must be able to adopt a risk-based approach, where they apply their knowledge of their own unique business requirements to the prioritisation of vulnerabilities and patches. Security and risk managers should ask themselves which threats pose the greatest risk to their specific operational model, based on industry, IT environment, and other factors. Perhaps it will be sufficient to prioritise weaponised exploits that are currently being leveraged by threat actors rather than obsessing over patching all those that have been disclosed. An advanced patch-management solution will offer the ability to include outside threat feeds into each analysis.

Finally, security leaders should work with IT department heads to align priorities and homogenise policies. The best security outcomes start with unified data — a single source of truth — pertaining to assets and their vulnerabilities. No discovery, assessment, prioritisation, or remediation can occur without this step. Executed correctly, data alignment will allow all stakeholders to row in the same direction. The result will be more efficient use of resources, lower costs, and minimised exposure time. Together, these benefits amount to a better risk posture.

While adversaries will still be on the prowl, a semblance of peace comes from a 360-degree view of the IT environment supported by a single data model and real-time dashboards that are aligned to business risk rather than the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Peace is the opposite of chaos, and having tamed complexity and automated humdrum tasks, security leaders will have introduced a measure of calm that empowers their teams to be more efficient threat hunters.

PATCH MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS MUST BE FLEXIBLE ENOUGH TO DEPLOY PATCHES, MAKE CONFIGURATION CHANGES, AND UPDATE THIRD-PARTY APPLICATIONS, BUT WITH ENOUGH GRANULAR CONTROL TO ALLOW ASSESSMENT OF THE NECESSITY OF THE FIX.

TOP 6 KEY NETWORKING TRENDS FOR 2023

DAVID HUGHES, CHIEF PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, ARUBA, A HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE COMPANY, ON WHY NETWORKING IS ESSENTIAL TO TRANSFORMATION

The network now plays an even stronger role, powering the transformation journey that’s needed to thrive during uncertainty and preparing organisations for what comes next in 2023.

1: By the end of 2023, 20% of organisations will have adopted a NaaS strategy

With tightening economic conditions, IT requires flexibility in how network infrastructure is acquired, deployed, and operated to enable network teams to deliver business outcomes rather than just managing devices. Migration to a network-as-a-service (NaaS) framework enables IT to accelerate network modernisation yet stay within budget, IT resource, and schedule constraints. In addition, adopting a NaaS strategy will help organisations meet sustainability objectives since leading NaaS suppliers have adopted carbon-neutral and recycling manufacturing strategies.

2: Built-in security replaces bolt-on Reducing cybersecurity risk has become a core operational concern. Transformation to a more automated security architecture is an IT imperative. No longer can organisations bolton perimeter firewalls around the network to protect against threats and vulnerabilities. Security must be built-in to every aspect of the network infrastructure from Wi-Fi Access Points to LAN, campus and data centre switches, WAN gateways, and extending into the cloud. Zero trust and SASE frameworks will become more intertwined, not only to protect from threats but to apply microsegmentation across the complete IT

stack including users, connected devices, applications, network services, compute, and storage platforms.

3: Location services enable new business models and greater efficiency

Challenging skilled labor markets and recurring supply chain issues will force companies to become more efficient, productive, and resourceful. Pivoting towards achieving situational awareness of assets, inventories, work in process, workers, customers, contractors, and supply chains will enable better control of costs, resources, quality, and intellectual property. This will require merging information technology (IT), Internet of Things (IoT), and operational technology (OT) data with contextual information about the environment. A new focus will be placed on obtaining the accurate location of work activity and assets, the identity of people and machines, the real-time applications being used and by whom or what, and the security posture of every device and machine.

4: IT will consolidate operations onto a single, centralised network and security management platform More diverse digital technology (IoT) is being deployed by enterprises to improve user experiences and to streamline IT operations. At the same time, employees and customers expect a better integrated real life/digital experience no matter what the enterprises’ business model is. These dynamics have added complexity to both the network and security and have made managing the infrastructure more complex. With an intensified focus on end user quality of experience while increasing protection from cyberattacks, IT will look to a single centralised

5: SLA measurements will be based on User Experience not box uptime and link availability

IT must optimise their networks to meet hybrid working requirements. Businesses will have dedicated teams whose priority is to ensure a seamless end user digital experience for employees and customers. Adapting to a clientbased view rather than a network view requires complete end-to-end visibility and application-level insights to know if the quality of experience is meeting end user expectations or not. Tight control of network performance is no longer sufficient. Being able to identify and troubleshoot application response time and performance issues rapidly and remotely will be essential to ensure a seamless end user digital experience no matter where users connect.

6: AIOps shifts from primarily offering insights to delivering automated remediation

With AI, cloud adoption, and access to vast amounts of data now common in enterprise-class network management solutions, automation takes centre stage. Identifying the clustering of similar error symptoms across a full-stack network is leading to orchestrated workflows that will more readily give IT organisations the option to allow solutions to automatically remediate an issue.

management system with visibility across the network and the ability to configure edge-to-cloud QoS and security policies.

HOW THE CLOUD WILL HELP MANAGE UNCERTAINTY IN 2023

MATT WATTS, CHIEF EVANGELIST AT NETAPP ON TRENDS THAT WILL SHAPE THE TECH LANDSCAPE

The multicloud will increase in importance as more services move from on-premises to the cloud. According to research firm Gartner, it’s expected that on premises versus cloud spend will flip by 2025. While this continued migration to the cloud isn’t surprising, I anticipate cloud adoption will continue to accelerate in 2023 because of supply-chain issues requiring buyers to look beyond on premises hardware to ease procurement challenges and the need to pursue aggressive sustainability objectives. The rapid adoption of multiple clouds is even more interesting. In fact, 89% of companies are using multiple clouds to manage IT services, operations, and infrastructure. This seems to be a place some companies have “landed” out of necessity, or even by accident, as they worked to mitigate supply-chain issues by linking to multiple cloud providers who could each help them drive innovation and ensure security, scalability, and flexibility outside their data center. This has brought about unnecessary complexity that companies will look to address through the adoption of common services across clouds.

Skills Gap

More companies adopting multiple clouds means the skills gap will move from fierce competition between employers to retain top talent, which I’d noted would be an issue in 2022, to one where niche skills will be required to succeed. It’s difficult finding talent that can work skillfully within one cloud. Creating teams skilled in managing multiple clouds becomes a significant challenge and can take extended periods to develop. Companies need teams that can innovate and build. If employees are only spending time on operations, they can’t innovate. This

need will only intensify, and companies will need to become more comfortable in hiring for potential over talent, and be willing to provide the team members with the training they need to succeed.

Sustainability

Sustainability will only become more important to IT buyers, and they will require more data to support claims from their vendors. Vendors will need to show they are working toward (and achieving) greater sustainability throughout their value chains and delivering product features that enable their sustainability. They will have to work harder to increase energy efficiency with their facilities and on-premises equipment and provide improved methods for data categorization that enable buyers to look across their entire data estates and tier data, which is particularly effective in the cloud. When we consider that 68% of data is used once and then never again, we can see how moving this unused data to the cloud, where it can be tiered and moved to cold storage, is beneficial for the planet. Last year, I noted that sustainability was increasing in importance, but it has been interesting to see the level of sustainability specifications and feature granularity that buyers now demand when making purchasing decisions.

Cyber resilience and data protections

The current challenges in terms of health, economy and war mean that cyberresilience is more crucial than ever before. Businesses and organisations will rely more than ever on IT resources to provide round-the-clock protection and quick recovery for their data. This is because the question is no longer whether they will be attacked, but rather when and how often, so we need to address the problem head-on and a small number of small and medium-size companies are still not prepared. Previously, a business’ cyber defence strategy focussed on anticipation of the attack, but today it is more about reacting during the attack and quick recovery after it. Detection, protection and remediation will be the watchwords of cybersecurity in 2023.

Quantum Hybrid Computing

Quantum hybrid computing will start to move from ideation toward practical application, problems such as elements of AI will be broken out and passed over to quantum systems for processing, we’ll start to see a blend of traditional HPC and Quantum to solve some of these most complex issues. This will also force us to better address cybersecurity. Companies need to think about data encryption now more than ever. Criminals are increasingly sophisticated, and companies need to be equally sophisticated when it comes to their security measures. While this won’t happen overnight, the wheels have been set in motion for quantum to be a threat to encryption on sensitive data. For example: Imagine designing and building a military fighter jet, which can take more than a decade; Then it’s in service for 20 years and all the data associated with the plane and its missions remains classified for another 20 years. That data needs to be protected for upwards of 50 years. And a criminal only needs to steal that data once during that protracted timeframe and wait for the necessary Quantum power to decrypt to catch up. We need to be thinking much, much more carefully about how we protect data today, from simple data theft to more advanced kind of encryption and decryption techniques.

THE FUTURE OF CLOUD COMPUTING

EMERGING TRENDS EXPECTED TO SHAPE UAE’S CLOUD TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY IN

2023

As the cloud technology wave continues to sweep across industries regionally on the back of an everevolving digital-centric consumer base, players in the cloud computing space are racing towards adopting value-driven solutions in a bid to grow their market share.

According to hybrid data cloud company Cloudera, this has resulted in a dramatic shift occasioned by emerging consumer preferences and trends shaping markets.

In recognition that technology and innovation, especially in the cloud computing industry, remain pivotal to the growth and success of many organisations, Cloudera has reiterated the need to adopt and integrate emerging trends as part of the organisation’s digital strategy.

“Cloud technology remains a top priority in every organisation because consumers have become tech-savvy and expect solution providers to lead by example. This has, in turn, led to an increase in the adoption of cloud technology for various applications, including data management. Therefore, organisations must keep an eye on new trends and innovations to help them deliver the right solutions across industries,” said Karim Azar, Regional Vice President of Middle East & Turkey.

As the market prepares to usher in 2023, the industry should align its strategies with new trends and consumer preferences in the cloud technology space even as they plan to remain competitive in its respective strongholds; expect the development of the following trends:

1.

Adoption of the Multi-Cloud

The mass adoption of cloud computing is a crucial driver of the most transformative technological trends.

The industry is expected to witness multiple businesses leveraging cloud services to access newer, innovative technologies and build efficiencies in their operations and processes in the upcoming year.

While 2022 has been a great year for Hybrid clouds, 2023 expects businesses to diversify their services across cloud portals. Adopting multi-cloud services enables organisations to expand their horizons regarding agility and security. Moreover, the multi-cloud technology prevents users from getting tied down to one cloud ecosystem.

“Adopting hybrid and multi-cloud services provides several benefits in terms of flexibility, ease of use, and even cost savings,” Karim Azar, Regional Vice President – Middle East & Turkey at Cloudera. Sixtynine per cent of business executives are convinced that their enterprises require a comprehensive data strategy to succeed. However, only 35 per cent believe that their current system sufficiently fulfils their requirements. Industry experts have cited the ability to manage seasonal demands, support special projects, and identify and

organisation renegade workloads as some of the key reasons hybrid and multi-cloud services are necessary for businesses.

2.

Higher Funding For Cloud Security & Durability

Since businesses will be looking to adopt multiple cloud services for their data, security and longevity will be crucial. Although migrating across clouds exposes companies to myriad growth opportunities, it also significantly increases their vulnerability to cyber threats. Businesses will, therefore, need also to shore up their investment in triedand-tested technologies to help them safeguard their data from any potential threats online.

3. Upskilling for digital transformation success and business survival

The global tech industry remains amidst a severe talent and skills shortage, impacting the ability of businesses to see through their digital transformation projects and endangering their survival.

With a restricted pool of graduates with specialist data skills, having individuals with suitable skill sets is crucial. With AI and machine learning (ML) taking over everyday timeconsuming tasks, employees can shift their focus onto complex tasks that require human intelligence.

Going ahead, business investment in upskilling and reskilling programmes will be key to unlocking future growth and development. Complementary to this are prospects who are increasingly receptive to these programmes. Cloudera’s Limitless: The Positive Power of AI report found that most (80%) of knowledge workers were comfortable taking on new roles thanks to advances in AI/ML and data analytics, making their job easier.

4. Digital Transformation to Save Costs

Instigated by cost-cutting strategies, the priority for most businesses will likely be cost-efficient data security strategies. This includes increased use of Artificial Intelligence, and Predictive Technology crafted to identify potential security threats in advance. Finding opportunities for monetary savings offers the benefit of reducing costs, but more importantly, it enables a reallocation of budgets towards innovation projects.

REINING IN CLOUD CHAOS

What does it mean to be cloud smart?

Cloud smart means you can choose where you want to run an application. And some technologies are helping you to accelerate that choice. In order to fully realize that vision, and it is a vision that we need to work through, we will need to enable these high-level services available on-prem, and sovereign clouds - wherever a customer might want to run an application.

Your CEO has commented that ML will be a key tech in the coming years. How are you leveraging ML? There are three ways that we’re supporting ML today. So there are products that support customers running their own ML and have ML built into them to make them smarter. And then how we use ML internally, to optimize our business operations and various things. So the first category is really about the capabilities we provide that enable customers to create ML solutions. vSphere is a great example, and we have partnered heavily with Nvidia to virtualize GPU, making it much easier for customers to run ML-based workloads and other things.

And then the second category, we’re starting to enrich many of our products with ML. A case is vRealize, which is focused on how to enable a system to auto-configure itself. The first use case we targeted was vSAN which has a ton of knobs and dials you can change. But the problem is that it takes a Ph.D. in this stuff to understand how to do that properly. So most customers leave the defaults as is.

However, if you properly optimize vSAN options for your workload, you can get dramatic performance increases. So what this vRealize AI is doing for vSphere vSAN is looking at the behavior of the applications running on it, and then figuring out based on the ML model we have, what are the optimal settings for vSAN for that app.

Another example would be what we’re doing with what we call project Trinidad. So it’s still an internal project that we’re working on within the CTO’s office- we are looking for a service mesh where you have a bunch of pods talking to each other over the network. We can look at that network traffic and do advanced ML analysis to understand behavioral changes in that traffic. If there’s some behavior change, you can take an automated remediation process there. So again, we’re using ML to understand when problems occur.

VMware stated that many of its customers need help with cloud migration because replatforming takes time and is resource intensive. What kind of approach do you recommend?

We are not dogmatic about any one approach and want to support things across the spectrum. For us, it’s about providing more flexibility and choice. So typically speaking, if you want to move an app from on-prem to the cloud, you would have to do some refactoring or replatforming, right? But with us, you don’t have to; you can just do a simple migration. Life and shift that works for some customers may not work for others. So we’re not saying that lift and shift is the

only thing to do it. We are giving customers a toolbox with a set of tools. And these tools give customers more options than they would have otherwise.

Do we need to worry about container security because they are very short-lived?

Some containers last a long time. There are multiple aspects of security - the supply chain security, which is very top-of-mind. If your supply chain has been compromised, you start moving like broken bits. The other aspect is that even if the container is short-lived, it’s very likely dealing with very sensitive data or data that has been covered under various regulatory compliance regulations. So you do want to be able to know, at runtime, whether there’s some problem or not because the security incidents and response are still very much applicable in the container world.

You are a bit late to come to the XDR party, which is already crowded. What makes you different?

You’re right; for us, the XDR space is still evolving. We’re part of the XDR Association, and some other efforts trying to drive standardization. I think the difference is that because we have all these other assets, we can get additional data points and insights that all these other players don’t. With the hypervisor, we live in a very special place where we can get tremendous insights into the behavior and so forth of an application or the underlying virtual hardware, wherever it may be. And so those extra pieces can really help.

AT ITS ANNUAL USER EVENT HELD IN BARCELONA LAST MONTH, VMWARE HAS URGED ITS CUSTOMERS TO ARCHITECT A CLOUD-SMART STRATEGY. KIT COLBERT, CTO OF VMWARE, EXPLAINS HOW COMPANIES CAN MOVE FROM CLOUD CHAOS TO CLOUD SMART.

THE PLANET OF APPS

MODELS

The Middle East is one of the fastest-growing markets for mobile apps, with a burgeoning appetite for digital services in the region. With 91% of UAE organisations now offering customers an app, according to an AppsFlyer report, many are looking at utilising a subscription model. There’s good reason for this too — the demand for subscription models is high, with a phenomenal 6 billion installations globally between January 2021 and March 2022.

However, the big challenge is convincing users to stay and renew for the long term. To do this successfully, app marketers need a smart strategy, strong measurement and deep insights into their users. Only then can they increase reengagement numbers and enjoy ongoing value. There are a number of tools and methods available to support app marketers in creating a profitable subscription model.

PAUL WRIGHT, GENERAL MANAGER FOR WESTERN EUROPE AND MENAT AT APPSFLYER, ON HOW APP BRANDS CAN MAXIMISE SUCCESS WHEN UTILISING

Where’s the value in subscriptionbased apps?

Entertainment, health and fitness, dating, education, and gaming are all prevalent verticals for subscriptionbased apps — and they’re not the only ones. The common theme with these sectors is that users regularly consume content, for example with upgrades and new levels on gaming or education apps, or new workouts and recipes from health and fitness brands. Subscription models need to continually roll out new content to meet the demands of the paying customer.

And it’s the subscriptions that generate most of the revenue for these apps, with over fourfifths coming from subscription payments rather than one offbuys. It’s therefore vital that app brands secure loyalty by providing the content users want, boosting renewals and sign-ups.

The importance of event mapping Event mapping can reveal strong user insights that enable marketers to tailor their strategies and deliver results. In-app events like content views and searches, free-trial details and lapsed subscriptions can all unlock vital information and insights that will help app brands understand their users, gain new subscribers and keep existing ones.

Tracking in-app events like these helps marketers understand how users interact with the mobile app at all stages and identify and address any friction points. For example, if users finish the free trial but don’t sign up, perhaps the subscription process could be smoothed out or streamlined.

Not only that, event mapping can help app brands create bespoke remarketing campaigns. A fitness app might notice that those who do four workouts a week tend to renew their subscriptions, for example. So, they can then focus their advertising on encouraging people to do four workouts as they’re likely to be engaged and renew subscriptions.

The insights that event mapping unlocks allows app brands to boost subscribers and renewal rates.

Personalisation and custom content

It’s vital that app marketers personalise and streamline the user experience wherever possible. There are several tactics that can be used, including paid remarketing, push notifications, and deep linking.

Remarketing campaigns

Remarketing campaigns need to be focused and tailored if they are to be worth running. App marketers need to be crystal clear on their objectives — do they want to re-engage lapsed users or focus on keeping users? What audience segment are they targeting?

App marketers can use insights from users’ behaviours and the type of content that they have viewed in the past. They can then tailor the marketing campaign with similar content, hopefully leading to conversions. Campaigns must be thoroughly tested to ensure spend is targeted effectively.

Push notifications

These are another way to help boost engagement, and increase sign-ups and subscribers. They can bring new content to the attention of users, let them know about new types of content and remind them of goals, like achievement streaks or scores. Push notifications can also help to encourage users to complete a free trial, reminding them about offers that will run out. All of this entices users to spend more time using the app and can deliver better results. But it’s important not to overload the user with too many push notifications, and to make sure you’re giving users something of real value.

Deep linking

Deep linking is another handy tool which helps provide a better, more relevant and personalised user

experience. For example, if someone on an entertainment app follows a link from an advert for a new event, the deep link will take the user directly to the specific event that was featured.

This tool is also helpful for getting recently lapsed users to re-engage. For example, if someone on an educational app is generally active, but hasn’t completed the most recent level, they can be targeted with a campaign promoting this level. If the user clicks on the link, they’re taken directly to the level yet to be completed, making it an extremely easy and smooth experience.

Maximising success

With the app business booming in the UAE, more and more companies will be opting for a subscription model. There are lots of ways for brands to build and keep subscribers, boosting profitability and helping them stay relevant to today’s digital-savvy consumers. The building blocks of success are extensive user measurement and insights. Only then can app marketers successfully personalise campaigns with targeted content, driving engagement and optimising conversions, renewals and revenue.

GCC 5G SUBSCRIPTIONS

GROW 30 PERCENT ANNUALLY

THE NOVEMBER 2022 EDITION OF THE ERICSSON MOBILITY REPORT FORECASTS THAT 5G SUBSCRIPTIONS IN THE GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL (GCC) REGION ARE PROJECTED TO GROW STEADILY AT AN AVERAGE ANNUAL RATE OF 30 PERCENT, FROM 15 TO 71 MILLION UP TO THE END OF 2028, ACCOUNTING FOR 86 PERCENT OF TOTAL CONNECTIONS AT THAT TIME.

Currently, 4G accounts 72 percent of mobile subscriptions in the GCC with 5G at 20 percent of the total mobile subscriptions. With the expected growth of 5G subscriptions, 4G subscriptions are expected to decline from 55 million in 2022 to 8 million in 2028. The monthly data traffic per smartphone in the GCC will almost double from 25 GB per month in 2022 to around 53 GB per month in 2028.

Nicolas Blixell, Vice President and Head of Gulf Council Countries at

Ericsson Middle East and Africa, says: “As communication service providers explore diverse service offerings, 5G is anticipated to be the segment with the fastest growth. The demand for and growth of Fixed Wireless Access is also exceeding our expectations, as depicted by the latest Ericsson Mobility Report. It is worth noting that we have observed communication service providers in the region increasingly building on B2B opportunities as well.”

Global 5G subscriptions remain on track to top one billion by the end of this year, and five billion by the end of

2028, despite current and developing economic challenges in many parts of the world. By the end of 2028, five billion 5G subscriptions are forecast globally, accounting for 55 percent of all subscriptions. In that same timeframe, 5G population coverage is projected to reach 85 percent while 5G networks are expected to carry around 70 percent of mobile traffic and account for all contemporary traffic growth.

On 5G itself, about 110 million subscriptions were added globally between July-September 2022, bringing the total to about 870 million.

As forecast in previous reports, 5G is still expected to reach one billion subscriptions by the end of this year –two years faster than 4G did, following its launch. The statistic reinforces 5G as the fastest-scaling mobile connectivity generation.

Overall mobile subscriptions are expected to top 8.4 billion by the end of 2022, and 9.2 billion by the end of 2028. Most subscriptions are associated with smartphones. At the end of 2022, 6.6 billion smartphone subscriptions are estimated, accounting for about 79 percent of all mobile phone subscriptions.

The report also forecasts global fixed wireless access (FWA) connections to grow faster than previously expected. FWA – the wireless alternative to wireline broadband connectivity for homes and businesses – is one of the major early 5G use cases, particularly in regions with unserved or underserved broadband markets. FWA is forecast to grow at 19 percent year-on-year through 2022-28, and top 300 million connections by the end of 2028.

The latest report also highlights the importance of reducing environmental impact. The telecommunications sector has a key role to play in addressing global sustainability goals, both by reducing its own emissions and through its potential to reduce carbon emissions across other industries.

To reduce the environmental impact, the growing data traffic needs to be managed with smart network modernization combined with a balanced approach to network performance.

5G to drive all mobile data growth

Total global mobile data traffic –excluding traffic generated by Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) – is expected to reach around 90 EB per month by the end of 2022 and is projected to grow by a factor of nearly 4 to reach 325 EB per month in 2028. Including FWA, this takes total mobile network traffic to around 115 EB per month by the end of 2022,

and to 453 EB per month by the end of 2028. The predicted traffic growth up to 2028 includes an assumption that an initial uptake of XR-type services, including AR, VR and mixed reality (MR), will happen in the latter part of the forecast period. However, if adoption is stronger than expected, data traffic could increase significantly more than currently anticipated toward the end of the forecast period, particularly in the uplink – see page 19 for more information. Currently, video traffic is estimated to account for around 70 percent of all mobile data traffic, a share that is forecast to increase to 80 percent in 2028.

Populous markets that launch 5G early are likely to lead in terms of traffic growth over the forecast period. 5G’s share of mobile data traffic is expected to be around 17 percent by the end of 2022, an increase from 10 percent at the end of 2021. This share is forecast to grow to 69 percent in 2028. By then all growth in mobile data traffic will come from 5G.

Traffic growth varying across regions

Traffic growth can be highly volatile between years and can vary significantly between countries, depending on local market dynamics. Globally, the growth

in mobile data traffic per smartphone can be attributed to three main drivers: improved device capabilities, an increase in data-intensive content and growth in data consumption due to continued improvements in the performance of deployed networks.

These differences are reflected, for example, in the difference between the Sub-Saharan Africa region, where the average monthly mobile data usage per smartphone is estimated to be 4.6 GB, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries which will have 25 GB per smartphone by the end of 2022. The global monthly average usage per smartphone is anticipated to be 19 GB in 2023 and is forecast to reach 46 GB by the end of 2028.

In the Middle East and North Africa region, data traffic growth will continue as more subscribers are transitioned to 4G, and 5G coverage expands in the period leading to 2028 with average data traffic per smartphone rising by 24 percent annually.

In the GCC countries, despite modest growth in subscriber and smartphone connections, monthly data traffic per smartphone will almost double to around 53 GB between 2022 and 2028. Emergent use cases for 5G will also yield traffic growth from industries as service providers explore various monetization avenues.

Data traffic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa will be driven by a combination of a higher number of connections, greater coverage by mobile broadbandcapable networks, device affordability and attractive service offerings. Service providers in many parts of the continent are in the process of migrating customers from legacy 2G/3G networks to 4G networks, which will result in average monthly data traffic per smartphone expected to be 18 GB by 2028. Despite it only constituting a small share of the total subscriber base, 5G subscriptions reaching 150 million in 2028 will contribute to data traffic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa.

ACHIEVING CYBERSECURITY READINESS

GREG DAY, CYBEREASON’S VICE PRESIDENT AND GLOBAL FIELD CISO, SAYS IN THE

CYBERSECURITY

As 2023 dawns, Day predicts that security leaders across EMEA will have to deploy a variety of new policies, strategies, and approaches to keep attackers at bay. His predictions are:

Increased cloud credential attacks, unless… The big shift to SaaS has fragmented more than a decade’s worth of work to simplify and consolidate corporate Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems. What’s more, many new SaaS applications don’t integrate with organisations’ existing single sign-on (SSO) solutions, yet organisations continue to accelerate adoption of new SaaS software, even without the security controls of SSO. Consequently, adversaries will increasingly focus on finding these weaker access points (new SaaS applications) to gain access to corporate and personal data, unless IT and Security departments manage to get IAM back under control.

Deepfakes play a larger role in blended attacks. In recent years, we have seen the increased success of blended attacks that combine social engineering tactics with malicious links, for example. With end users becoming more aware of social engineering, we can expect more sophisticated attackers will increasingly turn to deepfakes to trick end users into clicking on malicious links,

downloading infected files, and the like. It won’t be long before deepfakes become yet another common and core element of the blended attacks being used in the cybercrime kill chain.

The fifth generation of ransomware emerges. A recent report by Cybereason found that 73% of organisations suffered at least one ransomware attack in 2022, compared with just 55% in 2021. As the world reaches saturation of ransomware, adversaries will explore new methods to get money from the same victims. This will be the fifth generation of ransomware.

Ransomware will test cloud storage access controls. Cloud storage can give organisations a significant data protection advantage, along with more flexible recovery options. But as ransomware moves from the endpoint to target cloud-only spaces, it creates new risks for organisations, especially those that accelerated cloud adoption during the pandemic and lost sight of where sensitive data lives and who has access to it. This creates weaker credential management, leaving room for ransomware to infiltrate.

Cyberattacks will be transferable between smart devices. The typical cyberattack moves from hacker to device, but 2023 may bring the first cyberattack that jumps between smart devices, including smart cars. We haven’t seen the in-smart environment replication just yet,

but with the pace of innovation, a smart car attack could be riding shotgun to the vehicle next to you.

The risk of a significant attack on critical national infrastructure rises. As both direct and indirect cyber warfare domains grow, so too does the potential for a substantial cyberattack, most likely in an area such as the energy space. This risk is most presently in EMEA, but it’s certainly top of mind among cybersecurity and national defense experts globally.

Burnout will impact cyber resilience. Security teams around the world have been working long hours from home, adapting their organisation’s security posture to support all the shifts in key business systems. In an industry that is still facing a massive skills shortage, we shouldn’t be surprised if burnout impacts security teams’ ability to maintain the round-the-clock coverage required to respond to a crisis in a timely fashion.

Security leaders will need to develop new strategies for supply chain threats. The standard due diligence and security assessments that CSOs have performed on third parties is no longer adequate given the escalating frequency and impact of supply chain attacks. Regulations like the E.U. NIS Directive 2.0 and cyber insurance providers are forcing companies to conduct more frequent and dynamic assessments of their supply chain risk and to better control the access third parties have to their networks.

COMING YEAR

PROFESSIONALS ACROSS THE REGION WILL HAVE TO COMBAT AN INCREASE IN DEEPFAKES BEING USED TO CONDUCT CYBERATTACKS, NEW DEVICE-HOPPING THREATS AND NEXTGENERATION OF RANSOMWARE.

SAVING MONEY, ENERGY AND THE PLANET

AHMED RASHAD, SR. SYSTEM ENGINEER AT NUTANIX, ON SUSTAINABILITY IN THE DATA CENTRE

When it comes to provisioning the IT on which all businesses rely, running costs and energy efficiency have long played a significant role in the decision-making processes. Recently, however, concerns around global warming and soaring energy costs have moved them to the top of the priority list. This, in turn, is causing CIOs across the board to fundamentally rethink the approach they take, particularly when it comes to the datacentre where huge benefits are to be had on both counts.

The size of the problem

Estimates vary but according to the International Energy Agency (and others), data centres and their associated infrastructures account for around 1% of global energy consumption. In EMEA alone that translates to over 90TWh per year, or enough to satisfy the domestic energy needs of a small country. Moreover, this figure carries with it an environmental impact equivalent to running almost 6 million vehicles.

Big numbers whichever way you look at them and which, in turn, mean that any action to reduce energy consumption would not only save businesses money but have a significant impact when it comes to climate change.

Datacentre change

There are lots of ways of tackling this issue with some organisations, for example, abandoning their on-premise data centres altogether and moving to the cloud. That, however, doesn’t necessarily save on running costs. Indeed, many businesses find it more expensive compared to running an on-premise data centre, and with none of the budgetary certainty of an on-premise facility. Neither does it address the climate issues. It just makes them somebody else’s problem.

Of course, the cloud has other benefits besides, but the datacentre looks like it’s here to stay for some time albeit with changes to the operational model to deliver the benefits of cloud computing at a lower cost in terms of energy and emissions. Indeed, that change is already happening with growing numbers moving from traditional 3-tier architectures (servers + storage + networks) towards next generation models, in particular hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) which, most analysts, agree is the best and most expedient way of reducing data centre energy consumption and carbon footprint.

The reason for that assertion is down to the way hyperconverged models work by distributing computing power and storage across low-cost commodity hardware platforms, linking them with software and using virtualisation to provide an easily scaled and managed operational whole. A mature technology with a number of different HCI platforms available, here are the expected benefits in terms of energy consumption and climate change of switching from 3-tier to HCI models:

• Measurable benefits could be achieved across a range of organisations from small businesses through

big enterprises to the large scale hyperscalers and managed service providers

• In comparison to traditional 3-tier IT platforms, next generation HCI architectures could potentially reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint by up to 27% per year.

• Across the EMEA region HCI transformation has the potential to reduce energy consumption by 56.7 TWh and cut emissions by 14.2 million tonnes of CO²e over the period 20222025

• By 2025 a full changeover to HCI across UK datacentres could potentially save 8.1 TWh of energy and 1.8 million tonnes of CO²e, roughly the same as taking 400,000 cars off the road

• By 2025 a full changeover to HCI across datacentres in the Middle East & Africa could potentially save 4 TWh of energy and roughly 2.4 million tonnes of CO²e.

• Large-scale colocation datacentres offer a much lower PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) factor than typical onpremise facilities. Switching these to HCI architectures could potentially boost energy saving towards 30-40%.

• Next-generation colocation datacentres could provide access to renewable energy through long-term Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) and so contribute to an organisation’s climate neutrality goal without having to invest in CO2 certificates.

Working towards climate neutrality It’s important to recognise that the datac entre industry has delivered significant energy efficiency improvements over past decades and is now one of the most advanced in terms of both energy efficiency and decarbonisation. That said it remains a major energy consumer and could do a lot better. Moreover, without significant change future energy demand will continue to rise and result in large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions. The answers to all this lie in innovative next generation data centre technologies, like HCI, which have been proven to work and which have the potential to deliver considerable efficiency gains with a significant impact on energy cost and climate change.

HOW RETAILERS CAN IMPROVE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES

RETAILERS MUST PRIORITISE CLOUD-NATIVE OBSERVABILITY, SAYS JOE BYRNE, EXECUTIVE CTO, CISCO APPDYNAMICS

Key retail dates such as White/Yellow Friday, as well as the seasonal sales that run through December and January, present retailers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a golden opportunity to drive revenues ahead of what is likely to be a tough year end for many brands.

Indeed, soaring inflation and the resulting increase in cost of living means this year in particular, consumers will primarily look for great deals.

At Cisco AppDynamics, we recently conducted global research — across 12 countries including the UAE — exploring online shopping intentions this holiday season. We found that while 93% of consumers across the Emirates say that they typically wait for online shopping dates (such as White/Yellow Friday) and holiday season sales to take advantage of low-cost deals, a staggering 98% admit that it is more important for them to find great deals and cheap prices this year, given rising costs of living and the uncertain economic situation.

Whether it is household essentials, electronics or food and drink for family celebrations, people are having to make their money go further this year. And they will undoubtedly look favorably on any brand that can provide the products that they need at lower prices.

With great deals…must come great digital experiences In response to this heightened demand, retailers need to ensure they are leading with their very best offers this season. They currently have a

tremendous opportunity to attract new customers and drive sales by offering compelling deals.

However, in addition to offering low prices and significant discounts, brands should also ensure that they are delivering seamless digital experiences to customers at all times. Online shoppers have become incredibly discerning about the applications and digital services they use; in fact, 88% of UAE consumers feel that the experience they get when using a shopping app is now just as important for them as the deals that are on offer.

Retail leaders are all too aware of the dramatic rise in expectations around digital experience over recent years. People have come to rely on applications and digital services in almost all areas of their lives and, as a result, their expectations for these services have shot up significantly. They’ve seen the incredible types of digital experiences being offered by some retailers and they’re now wanting this, from every retailer they engage with, each and every time they shop online.

In the current environment, shoppers are undoubtedly feeling under pressure to find cheap prices, and they know that they need to move quickly to secure the best deals. Almost all consumers surveyed in the UAE (99%) state that it is important that shopping applications and digital services provide a fast and seamless experience without any delays or disruption.

Customers are expecting retailers to up their game when it comes to the availability and performance of digital services, from the moment they first use an application, right through to the product arriving at their front door. Indeed, 97% of consumers across the Emirates feel that this year, it’s important for retailers to provide regular updates on the status of online purchases, given ongoing supply chain issues and increased anxiety around receiving holiday gifts on time.

Consumers just aren’t wowed by

amazing deals alone; they simply won’t forgive poor online shopping experiences — they’ll just be left feeling frustrated and angry. In fact, 73% of consumers state that retail brands will have one shot to impress them this holiday season and if their application doesn’t perform as they expect, then they won’t use it again.

Brands must ensure they are ready to deliver optimised application performance

Retailers can’t afford to take any chances when it comes to digital experience, not when the stakes are so high this holiday season. A single slip-up could mean lost customers, potentially forever.

Business and IT leaders need to ensure that their IT teams are able to monitor and optimise IT availability and performance at all times. But the reality is that many IT departments simply don’t have the tools and insights they need to do this.

Across the retail industry, digital transformation initiatives are driving the rapid adoption of cloud native technologies, meaning that IT teams are having to manage and monitor availability and performance across vastly complex cloud native application architectures. But in most cases, they’re struggling to get visibility and insight into their applications and infrastructure running on public clouds.

Modern cloud environments have introduced new levels of complexity, with organisations scaling their IT use up and down based on realtime business needs. And while legacy monitoring solutions have evolved to track both cloud and onprem deployments, most weren’t purpose-built to manage cloud native environments efficiently.

Today’s highly distributed systems utilise thousands of containers, generating an immense volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) telemetry every second. And most IT teams lack the tools to make

sense of this deluge of data and to quickly troubleshoot application and performance issues that span hybrid environments.

This is why it’s vital for retailers to implement a modern, cloud native observability solution which allows their IT teams to manage and optimise increasingly complex and dynamic applications and technology stacks. They need a solution that enables them to monitor the health of key business transactions distributed across their entire technology landscape. With access to quick insights from the business transaction’s telemetry data, technologists can quickly identify the root cause of issues and expedite resolution, leveraging the power of AI and business intelligence to prioritise their actions in the right places.

For brands in the UAE that are able to combine great deals with seamless digital experiences, this holiday season offers them an incredible opportunity to take advantage of current consumer demand. On the other hand, those that overlook the critical importance of application performance and focus solely on price, risk falling behind the competition and arguably more importantly, risk losing customers not only for this holiday shopping season, but possibly for good.

Veeam Backup for Salesforce

Veeam Software has launched the NEW Veeam Backup for Salesforce on Salesforce AppExchange which eliminates the risk of losing Salesforce data and metadata due to human error, integration issues and other data loss scenarios.

This new solution from Veeam — a market leader in Modern Data Protection — enables organizations to deploy a backup environment either on-premises or in the cloud, providing access and control of Salesforce data and metadata. It also provides powerful, rapid-recovery capabilities for IT departments and Salesforce administrators, including granular and bulk data recovery of Salesforce records, hierarchies, fields, files and metadata. This new offering builds on the success of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, extending Veeam’s enterprise-grade platform to another industry-leading SaaS environment.

Whether a mistake with a script, data loader or an integration issue, the simple and easy-to-use user interface (UI) of Veeam Backup for Salesforce helps users resolve issues and retrieve data in just a few clicks — without executing additional backups, running long, full-backup comparisons or causing duplicates.

Key capabilities of Veeam Backup for Salesforce include:

• Salesforce native: Purpose-built to create backups and restore Salesforce data and metadata

• Fast and flexible recovery: Restore Salesforce records, hierarchies, fields, files and metadata

• Secure data: Run a backup environment anywhere — on-premises or in the cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.)

• Custom scheduling: Set granular backup schedules and retention settings at the object level

• Simplified management: Manage several Salesforce instances from one console

•

Incremental changes: Continuously create backups with incremental sync and flexible scheduling for Salesforce data

• Simple and easy-to-use UI: Run backup policies and restore jobs in minutes

• See and compare: See versions of records and metadata and quickly compare with production

• Restore hierarchy: Granularly restore linked objects to any record, including parent/child records

Vertic Liebert XDU

Vertiv has introduced Liebert XDU, a new generation of thermal management systems that supports liquid-cooled servers and enable the control of liquid quality, flow and pressure. The Liebert XDU coolant distribution system enables the deployment of liquid cooled server applications into any data centre environment, from core to edge computing sites.

“High-performance computing applications such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality are growing in popularity at the same time that data centres are working to reduce their energy consumption and pushing the industry to find new, more sustainable solutions,” said Roberto Felisi, senior global director and EMEA business leader for thermal management, Vertiv. “Many colocation providers who have traditionally relied on air cooling are now hosting applications with higher power processors that require

THE NEW RENO8 5G

more efficient heat management solutions like liquid cooling. With the Vertiv Liebert® XDU, our customers can meet the high-density computing demand whilst improving their operational efficiency.”

The Liebert XDU is an innovative liquid-to-liquid cooling distribution unit available in two capacities, 450kW and a model capable of up to 1368kW, circulating water through liquid-cooled server racks and rejecting the heat from the returning warm water. The system uses a closed water loop to avoid any waste, and is capable of capturing heat to utilize it to warm nearby offices, homes or farms, supporting the circular economy. The Liebert XDU utilizes integrated stateof-the-art controls to vary pump speed to optimize supply water temperature and to provide intelligent flow monitoring and alarms. The compact solution can be placed in the row near the rack it is cooling, or along the room’s perimeter.

Vertiv developed the Liebert XDU in close consultation with data centre operators and server manufacturers, who are deploying ultra-high-density, high-performance computing solutions more frequently across many different types of data centres. The company has defined a strategic roadmap to enhance thermal management technologies that enable liquid cooling adoption as part of its increased investments in research and development.

increases image brightness, improves colour expression, and sharpens facial features to bring out the beauty in everything. Shooting portrait videos in scenes with bright backlight has always been a challenge for any camera. The vast difference in brightness between the lightest and darkest elements is no longer an issues with DOL-HDR on the Reno8 5G. When the smartphone detects a high dynamic range in the scene, it will automatically toggle Ultra HDR Video, bringing DOL-HDR into action to process each video frame with enhanced dynamic range and true-to-life colours that guarantee details in videos come out looking bright and clear in both bright and dark areas.

The latest Reno8 series offers imaging power that enables users to capture every memorable moment in life with incredible detail and clarity. The Ultra Night Video algorithm on the Reno8 5G automatically detects ambient light and

The new Reno8 series also gives you pro-level portrait effects to apply to your still images. Anyone who has spent much time shooting photos at night will know that you need more time to take a photo in a dark environment. The Reno8 5G helps solve this by introducing two new features that reduce the time needed to snap a night portrait by 39.7% compared with the Reno7 series. The first of these is the significantly increased light sensitivity of the dual flagship camera sensors, and the second is the industry-leading Turbo RAW algorithm, which can reduce the noise of all three R/G/B channels using an AI neural network.

Now, when you press the shutter, photos appear more quickly without long-waiting times, enabling you to capture sharp nighttime portraits exactly as you see them.

IS AI THE FUTURE OF SPORTS?

SUNIL PAUL, MD OF FINESSE, ON WHY AI IS A GAME

CHANGER

FOR

THE SPORTS INDUSTRY

When the 2022 FIFA World Cup made its debut, it kicked off one of the most significant in-game uses of technology in sports history.

The official match ball, made by Adidas, contained motion sensors that reported precise location data on the ball 500 times per second, helping referees make more precise calls.

FIFA officials also deployed a more enhanced version of their video assistant referees, first tested in the 2018 World Cup, which used algorithms and data points to help on-field referees make accurate calls.

Refereeing is one of the first instances of Artificial Intelligence in sports – one of the earliest examples is the Hawk-eye technology, which has been employed in cricket to determine whether a batter is out or not based. But there is little doubt that AI has a massive impact on sports.

Coaches and players are looking for deeper insights to take their game to the next level, umpires/referees require assistance to make the right decisions in moments that matter and the fans are demanding more personalised experiences and greater connectivity. AI provides solutions to address all these demands.

Wearable sensors and AI-powered cameras make it feasible to gather a wide range of data, which is then processed by ML-based systems to provide coaches with insightful data. Wearables can be used to track athletes’ movements and physical characteristics during practice, detect early indicators of tiredness or stressinduced injuries and monitor the overall health of the squad. California-based AI firm Zone7 has created an algorithm

that can predict sports injuries and is being used by several teams in the NBA, NFL, MLS, and Premier League to detect injury risk.

Coaches can use AI to find patterns in an opponent’s plan, strengths, and flaws before games to craft highly focused gameplans that take advantage of the opponent’s shortcomings.

For example, Cornell Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls has created algorithms that can predict the in-game actions of volleyball players with more than 80 percent accuracy by combining visual data – for example, where an athlete is located on the court – with more implicit information, like an athlete’s specific role on the team.

By analysing data from previous seasons, AI can help coaches identify areas where players need to improve. This information can then be used to create tailored training programmes that help players reach their full potential.

AI continues to power fan experiences in various ways by meeting their cravings for more insights into their favourite teams and players. For example, AI and machine learning can automatically detect formation patterns that could take humans hours to do, allowing sports broadcasters, analysts and fans to find the hidden story faster than ever. Qatar-based Sponix Tech has developed a technology which allows fans to view a match through the eyes of the players on the pitch without having any hardware or camera installation in the stadium.

AI running on IBM Cloud and hybrid cloud technologies have allowed people to register their own match predictions in Wimbledon and compare them with

AI has also been used to improve ticketing systems so that fans can get access to the games they want to see without having to deal with long queues or sold-out tickets.

Because it can make sense of the massive amounts of data produced and has the potential to make reasonably accurate forecasts, AI analytics technology is being used more and more in sports statistics. Models are being used to calculate the likelihood of a sports team winning or losing and evaluate the performance of individual players.

In the US, professional baseball, basketball, and hockey managers use AI to bolster talent scouting and development.

AI has opened endless possibilities for improving the sports experience for players, teams, and fans. Vantage Market Research has forecasted that the global market for AI in Sports is projected to grow from $1.62 billion in 2021 to $7.75 billion by 2028, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.7 percent in the forecast period 2022-28. However, while one must remain cognizant of the fact issues surrounding the use of AI – safeguarding rights, privacy, and freedom from bias – its application in sports is applicable too. There is an important need to establish a framework that sets out how the sports bodies and industry stakeholders respond to these opportunities as well as new and accelerated risks.

predictions generated by Match Insights with Watson and those of other fans.