XDR

How Trellix is shaping the future of security operations

THE GREAT INNOVATION SURGE

Last month was one of the busiest for us here at CXO Insight ME, with two major awards programmes and the biggest ever Gitex on record. Our ICT and GovDX Leadership Awards were a big draw among the whole IT ecosystem in the region. While selecting the winners, I was surprised at how deep-rooted digital innovation has become in enterprises here – be it the private or public sector.

The cloud has become a significant differentiator for the private sector. Some of our award winners have even shut down their corporate data centers to move lock, stock, and barrel to cloud environments. Cloud adoption has reached new heights and has become the de facto solution for companies modernising their infrastructure to launch innovations. Though cloud migration can be a complex process, many of our winners have easily moved legacy applications to the cloud. In addition, they are now using multiple clouds to deliver enterprise applications.

Though the public sector continues to shy away from cloud computing, mainly due to regulatory reasons, the use of AI is rampant among government agencies, which was the common theme among the winners of our GovDX awards. Forced to put more emphasis on speed and performance as a result of the pandemic, many public sector entities are turning to AI and ML to improve the decision-making process and keep costs down. As a result, AI will undoubtedly play a crucial role in the public sector in the near future, and we can expect to see new cases emerging from our region. And with the emergence of sovereign clouds, many of these public sector agencies now have a compelling business case to invest in the cloud and reap its benefits.

We have details of winners of both these awards in this issue, and we will feature some of these success stories in our magazine in the forthcoming issues. This will explain why the Middle East is now a bubbling cauldron of IT innovation. So keep an eye out.

ZAINTECH PARTNERS WITH ORACLE TO ACCELERATE TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION

ZainTech has selected Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer to introduce new technology services to create business advantages for its customers across the Middle East. With Exadata Cloud@ Customer, ZainTech will now provide in-country cloud hosting services for an organisation’s Oracle Database across its operating countries, starting with Jordan. This will be a first for the kingdom and will help ZainTech customers meet strict data residency and security requirements.

Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer combines the world’s leading database technology and Exadata, the most powerful database platform, with the simplicity, agility and elasticity of a

cloud-based deployment. It runs the same Oracle Exadata Database Service and Oracle Autonomous Database Service operated in the Oracle public cloud but is located in customers’ own data centres and managed by Oracle Cloud experts. This enables a consistent Exadata cloud experience for customers – whether on-premises, or in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) data centres.

Commenting on the agreement, Andrew Hanna, Chief Executive Officer, ZainTech, said, “ZainTech provides end-to-end multi-cloud capabilities across advisory, professional, and managed services. Through our network of data centres, significant investments in automation, and partnerships with innovative global players like Oracle, we will drive strong transformational results for enterprises in the MENA region.”

“With Oracle Exadata Cloud@ Customer, ZainTech has laid the foundation for an advanced technology infrastructure that can help the company scale quickly by offering new innovative services to its customers,” said Nick Redshaw, senior vice-

president – Cloud Tech, Middle East and Africa, Oracle. “Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer is the simplest way to move an organisation’s business-critical Oracle Database workloads to the cloud. It can simultaneously run Oracle Exadata Database Service and the automated and fully managed Oracle Autonomous Database Service inside customers’ data centres and behind their firewalls to help meet strict data residency and security requirements. I am confident that the Oracle Database customers of ZainTech will appreciate this new offering.”

ZainTech’s collaboration with Oracle is a strategic initiative as the company prepares to launch Oracle Database hosting services to its customers across the region.

ZainTech’s cloud business supports organisations in regulated and non-regulated industries across its footprint in leveraging the power of the cloud to deliver transformational IT outcomes. ZainTech’s cloud business brings customers highquality cloud capabilities with flexible pricing that helps optimise and reduce their total cost of ownership.

CONSTELLATION ENERGY CHOOSES AVEVA SOLUTION TO ENHANCE DATA ANALYSIS

increased employee satisfaction (45%), and continued competitiveness with other companies (44%).

Industrial solution providers can add their own proprietary data into AVEVA Data Hub as well, to establish a common location for data sharing within a trusted community, saving members the time and expense of setting up and maintaining other data transfer methods.

“Compared with what we previously did to share data with third-party analytic vendors, AVEVA Data Hub is much easier to configure and manage and requires far less involvement from our internal IT resources,” said Jay Gasner, Regional Operations Manager at Constellation. “We were able to quickly integrate data from our on-premises PI System into AVEVA Data Hub. It’s very simple to invite AVEVA Data Hub users from other organisations into a community and share information with them.”

AVEVA announces a partnership with the U.S.’s prominent provider of carbon-free energy to give third-party analytic vendors secure access to select real-time data from Constellation’s operations.

Constellation will implement the latest release of AVEVA Data Hub, a cloudbased data management SaaS solution, which will help the company accelerate collaboration with trusted analytic partners and implement learnings more quickly, increasing the return on its analysis projects.

Currently, industrial operators, who are focused on data-driven solutions and decision-making, use a variety of methods to make real-time data available to internal and external teams. These methods are time-consuming to develop, maintain, coordinate, and some of them introduce security vulnerabilities that increase business risk. With IT staff in short supply, companies find themselves unable to respond quickly to new data requests or test out new solutions.

Constellation (formerly Exelon

Energy), a long-time user of AVEVA PI System, decided to expand their data management solution into the cloud to easily share wind turbine data with a third-party analytics vendor. The company uses AVEVA PI System to collect, enrich, store, and manage sensor and time-series operations data in realtime. It then transfers that data natively to AVEVA Data Hub, a SaaS solution, where they can set up and manage select data sharing with authorised users, applications, and analytic tools both inside and outside the company. The new cloud-based addition to their data management solution is ready to use immediately; users can begin analysing and processing data to achieve deeper insight in hours, rather than days or weeks.

Nearly half of executives (45%) in a 2022 AVEVA survey say information sharing with trusted partners is among the top digital initiatives with the greatest potential to impact profitability and sustainability at their organisation. Executives see direct gains from information sharing withgreater efficiency and innovation (48%),

AVEVA Data Hub is delivering other benefits in the rapidly transforming energy industry. A California-based energy ecosystem of renewable power producers, an energy consultant, and utility companies is using it to share real-time data from energy assets.

Kevin Coffee, Vice President of Electric Operations at ZGlobal, said: “It’s a big deal to be this transparent. We now have the same data as our clients which we can look at together at the same time. This helps to differentiate us from competitors. Using the tools AVEVA provides has given us the insight to flag things that aren’t working which is very valuable.”

Rónán de Hooge, Executive Vice President, Cloud Platform Business at AVEVA, said, “Creating a hybrid information management solution let’s customer access and share critical data with decision-makers across the company and external partners, to unlock new ways of working. The benefits are clear – companies can break down data silos, work collaboratively, drive transparency, and deliver actionable insights that enable them to work in a smarter and more connected way.”

MANAGEENGINE NAMED A CHALLENGER IN THE 2022 GARTNER MAGIC QUADRANT FOR IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS

which has been positioned in the Magic Quadrant for the third consecutive year, was evaluated alongside 10 leading ITSM platform vendors for its completeness of vision and ability to execute.

“As work disruptions and economic headwinds persist, I&O leaders look to deliver resilient IT and enterprise services. At the same time, they must review software spending while not losing out on key business-critical capabilities that they have come to rely on,” said Kumaravel Ramakrishnan, director of marketing for ITSM at ManageEngine.

eight capabilities that differentiate the ITSM offerings from each of the 10 vendors mentioned in the report.

ManageEngine has been named a Challenger in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms.

The Gartner report can be viewed online at mnge.it/gmq-itsm-22.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant profiles vendors in the enterprise ITSM platform market to help infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders with objective insights into the business and product strategies of the vendors. ManageEngine,

PROVEN RECEIVES ISO 27001

CERTIFICATION

“What can be a key differentiator in these times is a value-oriented platform like ServiceDesk Plus offering deep enterprise workflows and unified IT management capabilities. The recognition by Gartner, we believe, is a testament to our persistent efforts in helping enterprise IT leaders demonstrate value through their service management initiatives.” ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus was also recognised in the 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for IT Service Management Platforms. The Critical Capabilities research complements the Gartner Magic Quadrant and analyses

processes, and technology by ensuring that they are protected from cybercrime threats. The certification aims to aid the company, its employees, partners, and clients meet their business needs safely and effectively.

“Our IT service delivery models around the globe, in 22 countries, depend on the complete suite of ManageEngine applications, including ServiceDesk Plus.” said Jay R. Shell, director of global IT services and governance at DexKo. “ServiceDesk Plus allows us to deliver compliant, measurable, and effective solutions to resolve our IT request and incident workflows. And by integrating with other ManageEngine solutions like ADManager Plus and OpManager, we have been able to support customised task workflows and ensure maximum uptime of our key systems that our users require to keep DexKo rolling and growing.” he added.

This latest recognition by Gartner marks ManageEngine’s fifth Magic Quadrant recognition in 2022 for a specific technology market. The other recognitions include Application Performance Monitoring and Observability, Privileged Access Management, Security Information and Event Management, and Unified Endpoint Management Tools.

demonstrated its dedication to safeguarding private data and the environment and continually providing clients, partners, and employees with quality outcomes”, mentions Rami Ismail, IT Manager, PROVEN.

PROVEN announced that it has been awarded the ISO 27001 certification, which is the leading international standard for information security management. Receiving the ISO 27001 demonstrates that PROVEN has invested in its people,

“We are pleased to achieve the milestone ISO 27001 certification. This means we can offer a more secure environment for internal and external stakeholders from cyber criminals and data breaches caused by internal forces,” says Uzma Mohsin, Business Excellence Lead, PROVEN. “As such, our company informational management system is compliant, and our customers and business contacts will be able to acknowledge the legitimacy of our risk assessment expertise and information data responsibility.”

“By fulfilling the stringent requirements of these standards, PROVEN has

Achieving ISO 27001 confirms PROVEN’s constant drive to develop market-leading services, measured against global standards of industry excellence and adhering to best industrial practices. ISO is known as one of the world’s most stringent and well-respected standards.

Additionally, ISO 27001 is one of the most extensively used and highly regarded information security standards. It defines how we maintain and handle information securely, including the necessary security controls, and identifies the objectives for an extensive Information Security Management System (ISMS).

EMAIL CYBERATTACKS ON ARAB COUNTRIES RISE IN LEAD UP TO GLOBAL FOOTBALL TOURNAMENT: TRELLIX RESEARCH

Global eyes are now on the first global football tournament being held in the Arab world, which kicked off on Sunday, November 20, but malicious actors kicked off their World Cup-themed cyberattacks, ahead of the tournament. Email security researchers from the Trellix Advanced Research Center have found attackers to be leveraging FIFA and football-based campaigns to target organisations in Arab countries and consequently, the volume of malicious emails in Arab Countries was observed to have increased by 100% in the month of October.

“It is common practice for attackers to utilise important/popular events as a part of social engineering tactics and particularly target organisations which are related to the event as they are far more promising victims for an attack,” commented Daksh Kapur, Research Scientist at Trellix. “As the hostcountry and the affiliated organisations prepare for and manage the event, attackers take advantage of employee’s busy schedules which increases the chances of human error and the victim interacting with the attack vector. The aim of such attacks can be anything from financial fraud, credential harvesting and data exfiltration to surveillance and damage to the country’s/organisation’s reputation.”

Trellix Advanced Research Center researchers caught various emails utilising the football tournament as an initial attack vector. The following are cases of samples found in the wild:

• Sample 1: Pretends to be from FIFA TMS helpdesk, and the email body shows a fake alert notification regarding the de-activation of two factor authentication and contains a hyperlink which redirects the user to a phishing page.

• Sample 2: Attempts to impersonate David Firisua, the team manager for Auckland City FC, and seeks confirmation of a payment made to

the receiver’s account in reference to FIFA. It also contains a hyperlink to a customised phishing page of trusted brand.

• Sample 3: Impersonates the FIFA ticketing office and conveys a payment issue for the victim to urgently resolve. It also contains a html attachment which redirects the user to a customised phishing page.

• Sample 4: A fake legal notification informing the recipient about a ban implemented by FIFA from registering new players to create a sense of urgency. It also contains a html attachment which redirects the user to a customised phishing page.

• Sample 5: A fake file notification set in the WeTransfer’s template. It attempts to impersonate the Players Status Department and send victims a legal notice regarding delayed legal fees. It contains a link which redirects the user to a malicious website either delivering malware or hosting a phishing page.

• Sample 6: Snoonu, the official food delivery partner of the World Cup is spoofed, offering fake free tickets

to those who register. It contains a malicious xlsm attachment. The usage of such trusted organisations’ names and their templates makes the user fall for such attacks easily.

In terms of malware, Trellix solutions have identified several malware families being used to target Arab countries but the five most used malware families are Qakbot (40%), Emotet (26%), Formbook (26%), Remcos (4%) and QuadAgent (4%).

“As the much-awaited football tournament gets underway, cybercriminals are expected to leverage every opportunity they get to capitalise on news trends, ticket demands, human errors due to the busy schedule and more, in order to deliver a cyberattack. We anticipate these attacks to continue through January 2023 and would advise everyone to stay vigilant of any attack vectors. The organisations which are directly related to the event are advised to stay extra-vigilant as they would be the most promising targets for such attacks,” added Sparsh Jain, Research Scientist at Trellix.

HUAWEI SIGNS GLOBAL ITU PLEDGE TO DIGITALISE REMOTE AREAS

Huawei has signed a global commitment to join the International Telecommunication Union’s Partner2Connect digital alliance, which will bring connectivity to about 120 million people in remote areas in more than 80 countries by 2025.

Liang Hua, Chairman of Huawei, announced the decision at the company’s 2022 Sustainability Forum, Connectivity+: Innovate for Impact. The forum explored how ICT innovation could unleash the business and social value of connectivity and drive sustainability in the digital economy era.

Speakers at the event included senior leaders from the ITU and United Nations, telecom ministers and regulators in Cambodia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and business leaders, partners, experts, and customers from China, South Africa, Belgium, and Germany.

“It is clear connectivity alone is not enough. It must be affordable, the content must be relevant and in the local language, and users must have the skills to make best use of it,” said ITU Deputy Secretary-General Malcolm Johnson. “Thank you to Huawei for their support of the Partner2Connect (P2C) Digital Coalition, and for their announced P2C pledges in the key areas of rural connectivity and digital skills.”

Siddharth Chatterjee, United Nations Resident Coordinator in China, called for “multi-stakeholder partnerships” of policymakers, the private sector, academia, and civil society to close “the sobering reality” of a digital divide which excluded a third of the global population.

“Our dynamic world urgently needs improved digital cooperation to capitalise on the transformational potential of technology to create new jobs, boost financial inclusion, close the gender gap, spur a green recovery and redesign our world to be more prosperous and inclusive,” he said. “Now is the time to act”.

In his keynote address, Dr Liang stressed that access to a stable network was a basic requirement and

right in the digital age. For many who remain unconnected, access to reliable connectivity would mark the first step towards transforming their lives.

“Connectivity will be more than just a tool for convenient communications,” he said. “Together with digital technologies like cloud and AI, connectivity will help bring everyone into the digital world, and provide them with access to more information and skills, better services, and wider business opportunities. This will, in turn, drive further social and economic development.”

Cao Ming, President of Huawei Wireless Solution, said: “As an enterprise with the most complete ICT capabilities, Huawei integrates the full-technology innovation potential of equipment, sites, energy, transmission, and antennas to address the difficulties faced by traditional site deployment, such as high costs, restricted transportation, lack of power, and maintenance challenges. We have continuously upgraded the RuralStar and RuralLink solutions to extend quality coverage to remote areas, enabling more people, community hospitals, schools, local governments, and small- and medium-sized enterprises to enjoy the same high-speed broadband connectivity experiences as those in cities”.

The RuralStar series solutions have provided connections for more than 60 million people in remote areas in more than 70 countries.

The construction of optical broadband networks offers another important route to realising a universal service. Huawei has proposed an innovative AirPON solution for areas with low population density, including remote areas. This solution continuously reduces the footprint of equipment rooms, optical fiber installation costs, and network power consumption, while ensuring the rapid deployment of local communication networks.

In Africa alone, Huawei has laid more than 250,000 kilometers of optical fibers, enabling 30 million households to access high-speed broadband. User experience

has seen constant improvement. The average speed of home broadband already exceeds 30 Mbit/s, bringing smarter, faster, and smoother home network experience.

As ICT infrastructure continues to evolve, innovative technologies like cloud and AI are allowing those in rural and remote areas to enjoy the convenience of a digital world. Huawei Cloud has proposed the Everything as a Service strategy and made Huawei’s more than 30 years of technical expertise and digital transformation experience available through cloud services. This means that access to Huawei’s digital infrastructure capabilities on the cloud is now just as easy, affordable, and sustainable as water and electricity.

Digital transformation, digital talent, and new business models are all essential for balanced development in remote regions. Huawei previously announced that by 2025, with the improved ICT infrastructure, the company will work with partners to enable 500 million people to enjoy digital financial services and 500,000 people to enjoy inclusive education.

In Cambodia, the ITU’s first P2C partner country, Huawei will work with government departments through the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and universities to provide 10,000 training opportunities for ICT professionals in the next five years.

Huawei is committed to inclusive development. Through its ongoing technological innovation, Huawei is contributing to a higher level of digitalisation in remote regions, enabling everyone to enjoy the convenience of a digital life, and promoting the balanced development of the global digital economy.

DYNAMO SOFTWARE EXPANDS TO THE MIDDLE EAST

or maintain (41%) their allocation to alternatives.

“Led by the UAE, the Middle East market for alternative investments has transitioned from emerging to established in recent years,” explained Ghannoum. “The Middle East has seen an unprecedented level of financial businesses relocate or open offices in the region for its tax and regulatory advantages. Even as the market matures, it is still relatively underserved from a FinTech standpoint. Delivering Dynamo’s advanced alternative investments platform to GPs and LPs in the region will help them scale their operations through much-needed automation.”

While expanding into the Middle East, Dynamo will continue to invest in strategic operations and growth throughout North America, Europe, and APAC.

The current bear market is creating ample opportunity for investment firms to refocus on technology as a business enabler. In fact, Dynamo’s recent research indicated the ability to better enable internal teams to manage new investment structures will be a top priority for LPs in 2023.

Dynamo Software announced further growth of its already established EMEA presence by expanding into the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The company has opened an office in Dubai and appointed Tarek Ghannoum as Dynamo’s Regional Director of the Middle East.

To further build its UAE presence, Dynamo will sponsor the leading alternative investments management conference, AIM Summit, in Dubai, on November 21 and 22, 2022.

Globally, alternative investments continue to attract investors in regions like Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. According to the 2021 EY Global

Wealth Research Report, the Middle East Alternative investment usage level is the second highest globally, surpassed only by Latin America. Data and analytics firm Preqin estimates that the total alternative assets under management will reach $17.2 trillion by 2025. That’s a 320% increase from $4.1 trillion in 2010. Dynamo research conducted in September 2022 further underscored these growth intentions. According to the Dynamo Frontline Insight Report, alternative investments are expected to remain a key strategy for LPs and asset allocators moving into next year. Ninety-six percent of decisionmakers participating in the survey said they will either increase (55%)

Additionally, Dynamo’s research uncovered that LPs are increasingly interested in systems that keep critical investment data in one centralised location. This may be due to the unprecedented employee turnover many asset allocators have experienced since 2020.

“With our launch into the Middle East, we are able to further support a broader range of clients while capitalising on the increased demand for the management of alternative assets by Middle Eastern investment firms,” said Dynamo’s CEO Hank Boughner. “We’re excited to welcome Tarek to our team and look forward to substantially growing our presence in the region. We’re building a talented team committed to fueling new opportunities and enhancing the Dynamo experience globally.

BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

SHERIFA HADY, VICE PRESIDENT -CHANNEL, EMEA AT ARUBA, A HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE COMPANY,

ON THE EMERGENCE OF NETWORK AS A SERVICE AND ITS POSITIVE IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT

While digital transformation has undoubtably helped businesses gain a competitive edge, increase profitability and enrich customer experiences across the globe, we cannot ignore technology’s contribution towards the world’s carbon footprint. As climate change continues to dominate conversations amongst businesses and consumers alike, we need to commit to reducing technology’s environmental impact.

After all, if the IT industry were a country, it would be the fifth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. What’s more, around fifty million

tonnes of electronic-waste (e-waste) is generated globally every year, and this figure only looks set to rise.

Tackling this environmental crisis requires a collaborative effort across the entire technology ecosystem, from vendors to consumers themselves. From a channel perspective, partners must now play a crucial role in helping their customers navigate sustainability challenges. In fact, with environmental considerations increasingly driving many customers’ tech purchasing decisions, channel analyst Canalys recently stated that for partners, “Being able to position sustainability as a part of your ITas-a-service offers is going to be

key to your resale success.” Canalys also confirmed that for partners the environmental accountability of IT investments will be one of customers’ top priorities within the next two to three years.

But what exactly does a sustainable IT-as-a-service offer look like? Networkas-a-Service (NaaS) is a great place to start. Recent research from Aruba has shown a clear appetite for this new network consumption model amongst end-users across EMEA. Already recognised by potential customers as a key enabler of financial flexibility and business agility, here’s how NaaS can also pull those all-important sustainability levers.

Optimising energy consumption

NaaS provides end-customers with innovative and sustainable networks that they can ‘rent’ from the experts on a subscription basis. By partnering with an experienced NaaS vendor, channel companies can combine their unique understanding of their customer’s business with the vendor’s depth and breadth of product and solution knowledge to provide a network configuration that optimises energy consumption. To further reduce the customer’s carbon footprint, modern network vendors like Aruba also help deliver greener IT by sourcing electricity from renewables and utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML)-based models to bring down power consumption.

Of course, a solid and sustainable NaaS offering should be underpinned by an environmental approach to networking across the entire IT supply chain. Channel partners need to reassure their customers they are working with certified sustainable vendors to ensure climate-conscious initiatives are embedded at the very top of the value chain. NaaS players such as HPE GreenLake for Aruba are already working towards their climate goals, with HPE seeing a 53% reduction in operational greenhouse emissions from 2016 levels and a 30x increase in the energy performance of its product portfolio, from its 2016 baseline.

Reusing hardware

Today’s NaaS offerings are increasingly accompanied by IT assed disposition (ITAD) services, a practice built around reusing, recycling or disposing of unwanted IT equipment in a safe and environmentally responsible way. In fact, 77% of businesses view ITAD assistance and e-waste services as an essential element of a NaaS offer according to IDC.

By factoring asset decommissioning strategies into their NaaS offering, channel partners can enable customers

to participate in the circular economy, ensuring the life cycle of products is extended for as long as possible and reducing waste to a minimum.

On top of this, with digital transformation pressures rising, purse strings on IT budgets tightening, and technology lifecycles shortening, organisations can add value back to

their business through this model of consumption. Upcycling and remarketing idle equipment can give functional assets a second useful life, and in turn provide money back to the business for customers.

Choosing pre-owned equipment where appropriate can help to expand budget for innovation projects where new technology is paramount.

Delivering data

As sustainability requirements increase, and with the eyes of the world watching, organisations will be challenged to deliver more sustainability and environmental reporting than ever before. But with networking skills a scarce resource and existing IT teams stretched to capacity trying to deliver against the continued demands of digital transformation, help is desperately needed to deliver back the necessary data.

With NaaS, organisations can again buy in this expertise – and rely on their channel partner to provide them with key metrics around power usage, carbon emissions, and end-of-life disposal.

In recent years, sustainability has soared to the top of the business agenda for most organisations. Channel partners have an important role to play in connecting the dots between sustainable vendors and customers seeking to deliver green IT.

A solid NaaS offering should reassure customers that an environmental approach to networking is being taken across the entire IT supply chain. The subscription-based model delivered through the channel allows customers to enjoy the benefits of sustainable network practices, enables them to reduce the amount of IT equipment needed and operate their existing equipment at higher levels of utilisation, offset environmental damage through hardware reuse and technology refreshes, and help report back on their environmental progress.

TO FURTHER REDUCE THE CUSTOMER’S CARBON FOOTPRINT, MODERN NETWORK VENDORS LIKE ARUBA ALSO HELP DELIVER GREENER IT BY SOURCING ELECTRICITY FROM RENEWABLES AND UTILISING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)/ MACHINE LEARNING (ML)-BASED MODELS TO BRING DOWN POWER CONSUMPTION.

FUTURE OF BANKING

HOW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES ARE TRANSFORMING BANKING IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Banks in the Middle East are leading the pack in IT infrastructure modernisation as they focus on delivering services through digital channels.

Faced with increased competition from fintechs and big tech firms, traditional banks are now turning to digital innovations to gain a competitive edge. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital banking, and evolving customer expectations further provide the impetus for change.

For traditional banks, the stakes are really high now. According to a McKinsey survey, about 80 percent of consumers are willing to consider shifting at least a portion of their

holdings to a bank that offers a compelling digital-only proposition.

So what are the trends shaping innovation in digital banking?

“Firstly, the competitive landscape is changing as new entrants and fintech enter the market, and in parallel, many players from nonbanking industries start expanding into financial services – we see this mainly with e-commerce, retail, and telco players. This is partially allowed by Open Banking which makes it easier to expand the customer base and access relevant customer-level data,” says Bhavya Kumar, Managing Director & Partner, Boston Consulting Group.

He adds that many new players are positioned as product specialists rather than traditional universal banks. As a result, the landscape is becoming much more fragmented, with monoliner players specialising and disrupting single-product areas, especially in payments, investments, and personal finance management, among others.

“Thirdly, recently, we see a shift in strategic priorities of new players within digital financial services. After years of generous venture capital investments prioritising growth over profitability, the focus is now shifting toward bottom-line improvement rather than pushing acquisitions at all costs. This has a direct impact

on product portfolio choices as well as go-to-market strategies. Finally, all of the above is enabled by rapid technology landscape innovation – led by cloud transformation and Banking As a Service (BaaS) offerings that allow lower setup costs and faster time-to-market,” says Kumar.

Helal Lootah, Co-founder of Lune, points out consumers have become a lot more aware of how they interact with banks and expect their banks to not only provide them with basic services but also to take a key role in helping them shape their financial lives.

“Consumers expect their financial institutions to provide them with a seamless experience that goes beyond the basic functionalities (viewing raw transaction data and transfers) and provides them with insights on how, where and what they’re spending on. This can be easily done through personal finance and budgeting features that help customers actually take control of their finances.

He adds banks are becoming platforms rather than sole applications. Banks have previously taken an approach where they’ve centralised as much as possible and have focused on creating solutions in-house. However, given the speed of innovation in financial services, along with the complexity of operating in banking environments, banks have started branching out.

“By leveraging SaaS solutions, APIs and other solutions provided by fintechs, banks are able to streamline their operations and focus on their core business. These have shown multipliers that reduce costs and increase revenues, delivering benefits to team members, clients and shareholders,” adds Lootah.

Are digital-only banks a threat to brick-and-mortar?

The answer is yes, according to Jane Harvey, CEO, and co-founder at Savii. “There is no denying that FinTech startups and digital-only banks have put pressure on traditional brick and mortar banks, but there are still segments of the population who don’t yet trust the security of digital banking. For example, seniors and arguably a significant percentage of baby boomers still like ‘high-touch’ services and want to sit down with a banker or relationship manager to discuss their options.

“In contrast, millennials, Gen-X and Gen-Zers turn to Google (or their friends) when they have a question and they prioritise a simple, fast (digital) customer experience over a hundredyear-old legacy. The real opportunity for brick and mortar banks is to invest heavily in, and partner with, fintechs to develop digital propositions that appeal to the younger demographics.”

The challenge that digital banks bring to the banking industry is real, as investments in this new sector are booming, says Talal Sabih, Director - GBM Abu Dhabi. However, this can also be seen as an opportunity for banks to explore, at a faster pace, the benefits of offering digital financial services supported by the banks’ solid foundations in financial reliability and long history of services.

“Consumers today expect fast, contextually aware, 24x7 services

Helal Lootah

Jane Harvey

Bhavya Kumar

ACCORDING TO A MCKINSEY SURVEY, ABOUT 80 PERCENT OF CONSUMERS ARE WILLING TO CONSIDER SHIFTING AT LEAST A PORTION OF THEIR HOLDINGS TO A BANK THAT OFFERS A COMPELLING DIGITAL-ONLY PROPOSITION.

from their banks, so banks are addressing this by focusing on enhancing their customer experience and engagement through shifting to digitally smart banking. Those financial institutions that innovate rapidly, while retaining their customers trust, will gain a significant competitive advantage, and thrive in the digital future,” he says.

Benefits of AI for the finance sector Artificial intelligence is one of the clearest examples of how tech innovation offers a number of opportunities for the financial services sector.

Martin Blechta, Principal, Boston Consulting Group, says AI will further drive innovation in the banking sector mainly in two areas. Firstly, AI allows personalisation at scale for retail clients to fully customise and personalise their offerings and customer journeys. This includes highly personalised customer service channels (e.g. Intelligent Chatbots can effectively tackle most commonly accessed tasks, such as balance inquiry, accessing mini statements, fund transfers, etc). Secondly, several internal bank processes are also being improved by leveraging AI - a self-learning credit risk engine can be an example.

“FSI has always needed one of the most precise forms of computing systems in place for myriad purposes.

As far as AI and ML are concerned, the FSI sector relies heavily on the systems powered by these technologies to detect fraudulent transactions and pave the way for a safer and more secure online transactions. For the last few years, the focus of players in the banking industry has been on client life-cycle management. When it comes to gaining comprehensive insights into their customers, banks are ahead

of the curve as compared with any other industry. Customer analytics in banking helps banks gain granular insights on current and upcoming requirements of their customer base,” says Sid Bhatia, Regional Vice President & General Manager for Middle East & Turkey at Dataiku.

Sabih from GBM agrees that AI and ML applications will transform future banking by offering more personalised banking experiences to customers, through analysing behaviours, trends, and patterns and by customising online and mobile banking. Moreover, with the introduction of voice recognition, facial recognition and other similar biometric data, AI can allow for more finetuned personalised and secure offerings.

Lootah from Lune sums up: “Artificial Intelligence is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days and I don’t believe we are fully there yet in terms of using full-blown AI to automate every interaction or analysis in an application. However, I do believe that AI is playing, and will continue to play, a major role in areas such as fraud detection, AML, transaction enrichment, credit scoring and customer recommendations. I see these as the main use-cases of AI to help automate experiences, drive customer engagement and serve as a catalyst for internal teams to speed up processes.”

Martin Blechta

Sid Bhatia

Talal Sabih

WHEN IT COMES TO GAINING COMPREHENSIVE INSIGHTS INTO THEIR CUSTOMERS, BANKS ARE AHEAD OF THE CURVE AS COMPARED WITH ANY OTHER INDUSTRY.

LEADING WITH TRUST

The push to become the most prominent digital economy in the region has fostered fintech innovation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. New government initiatives such as SAMA’s regulatory sandbox are bringing rapid change, leading to a wave of fintech startups in the country. A case in point is the public savings platform Circlys, which was set up with a mission to enable the digitally savvy population of Saudi Arabia to access online savings products and secure their money.

This digital ROSCA (rotating savings and credit association) platform was initially launched as a paper-based company in 2015 and subsequently digitised its platform in 2017. It was licensed by SAMA in 2020 and since then has been serving a large chunk of the population in KSA.

Traditionally, the ROSCA practice for savings has been widespread in Saudi society. However, it was often plagued by many issues such as poor record keeping, reliability and inability to offer long term savings. Now, the digital version mitigates many of these concerns and allows users to join savings circles easily and transact digitally.

“We target the underserved segment of financial institutions with guaranteed payment and protection from fraud. We offer savings plans up to SAR 60,000,” says Khaled Hassoun, CEO and cofounder of Circlys.

Circlys, a smartphone-based app available on Android and iOS platforms, currently has around one million users in Saudi Arabia. Anyone with a digital ID, bank account, and good credit score can join this collaborative savings platform. “We are very inclusive and have savings circles ranging from SAR 500 to 5000 monthly installments, aimed at all segments of the society – from low-

income groups to housewives to salaried individuals,” says Hassoun.

The CEO says the company vets all its members with a robust risk assessment framework before onboarding them.

“We are connected to multiple eKYC providers through APIs to ensure the ability of members to be part of our circles and compensate from our end if anyone defaults.

“We also provide a smooth user experience with a presence across multiple channels. For example, we are using SMS and WhatsApp as customer touchpoints and to enable speed in transactions.”

The communications platform, provided by Unifonic, is critical to Circlys’s customer experience strategy. “We rely on SMS for user authentication, transaction alerts, and to push marketing campaigns. We selected Unifonic after a stringent evaluation process. We were looking for a cloud-based, easily scalable communications solution with all the features. They provide a robust communications platform with best-inclass APIs and enterprise-grade softwre,” says Hassoun.

Circlys has a strong in-house development team, which gives it a competitive advantage in the market. “We provide customer support through social media channels, aggregated on a platform developed in-house. We are also using chatbots from Unifonic to answer common questions people ask about our service. Cybersecurity is also paramount because SAMA governs us, and all our digital assets are hosted in the cloud. We have put in extra security layers to ensure safety of money and customer data protection,” says Hassoun.

Circlys has recently raised $1.3 million through crowdfunding to expand its team and foray into new geographies. “We plan to start operations in the rest of GCC, North Africa, and East Asia. This is where Unifonic comes in handy because they offer global coverage with a single platform,” he concludes.

CIRCLYS, A SMARTPHONE-BASED APP AVAILABLE ON ANDROID AND IOS PLATFORMS, CURRENTLY HAS AROUND ONE MILLION USERS IN SAUDI ARABIA. ANYONE WITH A DIGITAL ID, BANK ACCOUNT, AND GOOD CREDIT SCORE CAN JOIN THIS COLLABORATIVE SAVINGS PLATFORM.

A PROACTIVE

APPROACH

RAYASAM,

CHIEF

PRODUCT OFFICER AT TRELLIX, ON HOW THE COMPANY IS SHAPING THE FUTURE OF SECURITY OPERATIONS WITH ITS AUTOMATED XDR PLATFORM

Which are some of the top new-age cyber threat vectors that you see?

Ransomware continues to be the thing that’s malicious and insidious and keeps everybody, including us, on our toes. We also see a rampant rise in phishing emails of late, and these are emails that would

not flag your email security because there is nothing attached for download but comes with links that look legit. At the same time, supply chain attacks continue to elude organisations. What is interesting is how relentless and sophisticated these attacks are and how you detect an attack also needs real sophistication now.

XDR has become a buzzword and means different things to different people. Can you define what it is and what it is not?

There are indeed a lot of vendors and buzz around XDR, but not all XDR vendors are created equal. So I do think it is incumbent on us to demystify what XDR actually is and set the record straight. Your traditional siloed security solutions, which can only detect by default, are inadequate. What XDR is a couple of things – it extends not only your detection algorithms but your response strategies as well. So naturally, that implies that your detection strategies should include multiple vectors. If you are only detecting based on endpoint data or network data, your solution is, I wouldn’t say obsolete, but not all the way there.

The right XDR solution must do a few things. Firstly, it must have all the vectors that matter most to organisations; it must have an endpoint solution because your detection and response should be seamless. The other one is it must also acknowledge the reality of the world- there are a lot of solutions out there, and XDR must be able to consume data from other third-party solutions, not just their own. And more importantly, it must be able to correlate and provide synthesised intelligence across all

APARNA

of these. If you look at our portfolio, we are very strong in endpoint, and it is the cornerstone of our strategy. With the merger between FireEye and McAfee, we have very complementary endpoint technologies and strong partnerships. We have over 600 integrations in our product, so we know how to integrate with thirdparty solutions. And with some of the innovations that we are working on right now, we can provide a single pane of glass with the XConsole that ties back everything that you are doing into a synthesised playbook that details the anatomy of an attack and the steps you should be taking to mitigate it. In many ways, XDR is a natural evolution of where the industry was.

Since the merger of FireEye and McAfee, have you been able to rationalise the product portfolio and smooth the overlaps?

Between the two organisations, the number of products and solutions was

quite formidable. Our first goal was to map the use cases and figure out how our products naturally fall into that. I am happy to say that work has been very successful and for the most part, complete.

We have created five major product families within our portfolio. Within each product family, we have started to rationalise to see if we are trying to solve the same problem with two different approaches, in which case, we should pick the right approach and converge. So we are in that stage now, and we’ve done that for a few product families. However, much of the work is still underway for our biggest product families, especially for the endpoint products. You may have heard of our unified endpoint strategy, which aims to bring together our EDR and EPP solutions together. We will have a unified endpoint experience for our users starting in Q1 of 2023. As we continue to rationalise the portfolio, our governing strategy is to make our products simple and create customisable outcomes for our customers.

Is XDR the only way to eliminate security siloes?

XDR is definitely the answer. But, of course, there is work to do as we learn more about how well XDR works for security operations individuals, and there are more optimisations to do next year. So in a world of security siloes between vendors and individual solutions, XDR is the thing that says one plus one can yield more than two.

Is SIEM now a failed technology?

SIEM is a very limited technology, and it is helpful for data storage, data collection, and, in some cases, compliance use cases. But SIEM as a security construct that can drive very powerful orchestrated outcomes across multiple vectors is very limited. I’d say it is an outdated concept and XDR, with its collective intelligence, is the direction of the future.

Are you leveraging AI and ML within your product development strategy? It’s in our DNA. When you are dealing with as much data as we are, the responsibility to ourselves and our customers is to have the best and constantly evolving data science principles. We are staying on top of exactly what we want to do with data science in terms of understanding the models that exist and are effective. So that underpins almost everything we do. The other thing is, as we harness the data and flesh out this concept of XDR, one place where I expect to see a tremendous amount of innovation is the predictability of really what an attack looks like. While AI and ML have been largely used as efficiency tools to understand the fastest way to determine an attack, they will evolve into more predictive technologies.

Can you tell us more about your threat intelligence capabilities and if you share them with the industry?

With our Advanced Research Center, we brought together our teams and doubled down on research. The Advanced Research Center has five major functions. The first one is product research to help our products. The second one is threat intel. The third is adversarial resilience, which is a proactive understanding of the adversary. The fourth is data science, and the fifth is research engineering. We definitely share threat intel with several number of organisations and provide synthesised inputs to our customers. We also share threat data with some law enforcement agencies. For example, we have helped take down some of the recent ransomware attackers with the help of our threat intelligence team. However, there needs to be a larger sharing and a construct between multiple vendors within the security industry where we are sharing on an open platform. Trellix is leading the way, and we are sharing threat intelligence with the organisations interested in participating.

THE OTHER THING IS, AS WE HARNESS THE DATA AND FLESH OUT THIS CONCEPT OF XDR, ONE PLACE WHERE I EXPECT TO SEE A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF INNOVATION IS THE PREDICTABILITY OF REALLY WHAT AN ATTACK LOOKS LIKE. WHILE AI AND ML HAVE BEEN LARGELY USED AS EFFICIENCY TOOLS TO UNDERSTAND THE FASTEST WAY TO DETERMINE AN ATTACK, THEY WILL EVOLVE INTO MORE PREDICTIVE TECHNOLOGIES.

GLOBAL TRADE GOES DIGITAL

we helped Tianjin port in China to build the world’s most advanced, intelligent, and 5G-powered terminal by leveraging our remote-controlled video solutions for the operation of container cranes and autonomous vehicles for horizontal transport.

Today, port operators need an intelligent planning platform to coordinate every aspect of operations because it is nearly impossible to do it manually. This is why we offer an intelligent platform for operational efficiency and resource utilisation of ports powered by Huawei’s OptVerse AI Solver.

Why did Huawei establish this industry-specific business unit?

In most countries, these industries are still largely paper-based. As a significant ICT vendor with 30 years of track record, Huawei offers advanced technologies and solutions spanning connectivity, computing, cloud, artificial intelligence, and Big Data. In our experience working worldwide, we noticed a big room for improvement in facilitating cross-border trade and customs procedures. During the pandemic, we’d seen massive disruptions in the supply chain, and as a result, ships and their cargo had stockpiled in ports and terminals. One of the ways to address this challenge is to improve the physical infrastructure, such as widening yards at ports. However, it requires heavy investment and will take a long time. Even then, it would not solve all the problems. We believe the customs and port industries must adopt ICT technologies to address these challenges, so we have established this business unit to help improve the global trade infrastructure with digital technologies.

What are the main business lines of the Customs and Port BU?

We have a pretty big R&D process in place for the customs sector, and we provide the ICT infrastructure required for management and cargo verification. For example, we offer national cloud DC and national production and office network to digitalise the critical business processes for smooth and seamless customs

clearance and verification. In addition, we provide AI and Big Data-based risk control platform that helps customs authorities to improve their revenues and reduce evasions. We are also working with our global ecosystem partners to provide fullstack solutions to improve operational efficiencies and accelerate the digital transformation of the customs industry.

The scope of our solutions for ports is broader because it includes seaports, river ports, airports, railways, and inland ports. Currently, maritime transport accounts for 80 percent of global trade, which is higher in China. Ports require lower-cost operational efficiencies because of yearround, 24/7, uninterrupted operations. However, in the last 2-3 years, we have witnessed severe congestion in seaports and a surge in shipping costs. The only way to solve this problem in global trade is to make terminals wider and apply automation and intelligent technologies to ports and terminals. For example,

How different is this region compared to the rest of the world?

The Middle East has unique geographical advantages as it connects three continents. It is also an important shipping hub. Huawei has established long-term, sound partnerships with enterprises in the Middle East, with many successful digital transformation cases. Based on Huawei’s years of ICT R&D experience and fundamental technologies, the Customs & Port BU will promote and replicate successful ICT products and scenario-based solutions to support the trade infrastructure — customs and port infrastructure in particular — in the Middle East, achieving modernisation and smart development. In doing so, we can improve port operational efficiency and crossborder trade facilitation.

Can you share some success stories around the world where you have helped customers to go digital in this sector?

Huawei supported planning and design, provided a digital platform, and built the network infrastructure for the Chongqing Lianglu-Cuntan Free Trade Port Area, helping the customer visualise its status, control incidents, and manage businesses.

Another case in point is Shanghai Yangshan Port, which took the lead in applying Huawei’s All-Optical Industrial Network Ultra-Remote Control Solution. The solution shortens end-to-end network latency to less than 1 ms, prevents PLC control signal interruption and video freezing, and enables remote control that feels just like on-site operations.

ROBIN LU, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, CUSTOMS AND PORT BUSINESS UNIT AT HUAWEI, TALKS ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY’S ADVANCED ICT SOLUTIONS CAN HELP TO ACCELERATE THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE CUSTOMS AND PORT INDUSTRIES.

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What are some of the trends shaping Industrial Digital Transformation

Predicting digital trends is continuous as technology evolves and improves. Leaders must scan the horizon and identify the most critical areas to pay attention to ensure their companies are fit for the future. Today, more than ever, there is a demand for higher productivity and efficiency, ever-shorter product life cycles, mass customisation, and increasingly stringent safety and environmental protection standards.

Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics have been touted to be the key value drivers behind digital transformation. It collects, contextualizes, and converts operational, engineering, and information technology data into actionable insights to support decisionmakers at various organisational levels.

Another key trend is fully autonomous operations. This can include functions like advanced process control that handle multi-variable controls to steer the process to the most optimal setup. One could employ autonomous machines to operate in hazardous environments. Assistive technology such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for remote operations has been available for some time; however, many companies still need to adopt and prepare for it.

Holistic energy management is far from new, but the objectives and optimization models are changing fast. Sustainability is changing from a Buzz word to reality.

In the future digital enterprise, everything is connected. Data flows seamlessly between operational and business systems, enabling new capabilities for Data-driven decisionmaking. As the degree of connectivity

increases, it is imperative to implement an in-depth cyber security strategy. Companies, like ABB, with vast OT experience and a proven track record of cyber-attack resilience, can help to define and implement cyber security strategies pragmatically.

And that brings me to the most crucial point, a healthy digital culture calls for a new mindset. The most challenging aspect of digital transformation is not the technology. It is about organisational change management. We need to nurture a mindset around distinct goals, such as reducing CO2 emissions, fostering a culture of knowledge retention, and driving holistic visibility. Equally, we must communicate how this ever-evolving digital toolbox will help get us there and why our people are mission-critical.

Can you give us some practical examples of Analytics and AI in manufacturing?

The recent advent of technologies, computing, and networking innovations, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), is fueling new ways to address industrial complexities and better use the power of data. This phenomenon allows us to apply AI to industries by combining it with specific industrial domain expertise (for example, in cement, food & beverage, metals, mining, pulp & paper, etc.) for safer, smarter, more efficient, and sustainable industrial operations. Using the potent combination of specific industrial domain expertise, contextual data, advanced technologies, and AI algorithms, one can extract far greater value than the individual silos would ever be able to generate.

For example, the cement industry faces various challenges in its day-today operations around profitability/cost control, quality vs. throughput, emissions, and environmental Sustainability, etc. Advanced data analytics and smart optimization powered by AI will allow cement producers to hit key performance indicators around Sustainability, process performance, asset performance, connected workers, and operational excellence. Let’s look at Sustainability. AI can be vital in reaching environmental sustainability targets, reducing emissions, and optimizing energy and management.

For instance, ABB’s AI-based system anomaly detection app learns about the plant and equipment’s “normal” states and uses adaptive setpoints to detect unusual patterns and anomalous behaviors. By triggering alerts, it reduces the effort to identify and rectify energy

consumption deviations—no more hassle of setting manual setpoints or alarms, no more notification overload.

Let’s take the Mining Industry for example. ABB is installing its enterprise-grade digital platform ABB Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite to enable Gold Fields’ Salares Norte project in Chile to drive efficient, sustainable, remote operations. With the technology, Gold Fields will gain data insights that will help them to increase industrial productivity and operational excellence while reducing costs. Remote connectivity will help reduce the number of people needed at the actual mine location, thus improving safety.

competencies, engineering tools, architecture approaches, and service capabilities to identify the most performing and cost-effective solution for each process area and site.

The whole energy system is evolving, enabled by Digital. Harnessing digital solutions is fundamental to decarbonizing industry while still delivering on traditional priorities like agility, safety, and overall equipment effectiveness.

real-time optimisation problems consisting of own generation, trading and using of energy in industrial plants and power plants

What are some of the biggest challenges faced in securing industrial control systems?

Industrial systems are usually large and complex, with many products and devices from different manufacturers. These are connected using a range of different protocols and connection methods.

Maintaining overall system security is hard in this large and complex system. It is often challenging to keep an up-to-date inventory of all the devices in an industrial system, the versions of software/ firmware they are running, and how they are connected.

Adding to the challenge of complexity, industrial systems are not static. Changes, updates, and improvements are being implemented every year. These changes must be fully documented. Industrial systems are often operated for 30+ years; not all equipment is updated or modernized. This can lead to many unsupported devices, which may or may not have security issues. With age comes a second cyber security challenge, some devices within the industrial environment were designed and installed before cyber security was a concern for industrial systems. These devices may lack many security controls we take for granted in modern systems and need securing by other means.

Designing, deploying and maintaining the optimal site-wide or enterprise-wide energy management and emission control strategy is a significant engineering and operational challenge, one that requires a wide span of

Industrial software solutions enable a modular approach for deploying a solution for energy management that typically includes monitoring energy usage at plant and process levels with real-time visual displays and data, identifying the best performance of process areas and opportunities for improvement, reporting energy consumption patterns of process areas and production lines, analysing inefficiencies in plant and process areas, forecasting energy consumption schedules for process areas based on production plans and measured consumption and solving economic

With Industry 4.0 and the digital revolution, we are asking for everincreasing amounts of data from industrial systems. If planned properly, it is easier for these new monitoring and analytics systems to become a bridge between the industrial system and the outside world. Malicious actors look for this type of insecure connection to exploit.

Cyber security experts are in high demand these days, and Industrial Cyber Security experts are doubly so. Finding experienced or qualified people to design and maintain the security around industrial systems is often challenging.

3Q) What is the role of industrial software solutions in reducing energy costs and emissions?

DRIVING TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE

Please tell us about your participation at GITEX

Global this year.

Giovanni: From a visibility perspective, we want to present ourselves as solutions and services-focused organisations accelerating our customers’ digital transformation journeys. Of course, the products are the enablers, but at the end of the day, you want to become relevant to your customers and understand the solutions they are looking for. This is why we decided to showcase industryspecific smart solutions at the show.

Are you also focusing on the commercial Metaverse space now?

Alaa: Our focus is on Omniverse, which helps enterprises to design and develop simulations on a digital twin platform. This allows our customers to simulate any use case in a virtual world and understand how it would behave in the physical world. For example, if you take the Smart City scenario, real estate development is crucial. Omniverse gives you the advantage of designing all the elements that support real estate, including infrastructure and connectivity, in a virtual environment and understanding the challenges. Similarly, Omniverse has similar use cases in healthcare, education, transportation, manufacturing, etc. We are getting the best out of this because of the applied AI on top of our platform, which helps users

to understand all the challenges that could potentially happen in real world and minimise them.

How strategic is this region for Lenovo?

Giovanni: This region is ranked number one in terms of growth, investments, and how we deploy products and solutions. We are growing 50-60% in this region year on year, which is becoming a sustainable growth. That’s why we’re investing heavily in this region.

Which market segments are growing the fastest?

Giovanni: The growth is coming from all of our target segments, and that’s good because you don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket. You have to understand which segments are growing, and that’s where we are making the investments. The public sector is a really big segment in this part of the world.

Alaa: We must highlight that we are progressing because of the support from the country’s leadership. They are part of the transformation driving change across all industries. And from that perspective, the government sector becomes a very important cornerstone of our strategy.

Are you eyeing opportunities in edge computing?

Giovanni: When I joined this company three years ago, my title was president of the data centre group. Now, we understand that data will be produced outside the data centre, so we changed the business unit name to the infrastructure solutions group to reflect the growth in edge computing. Etisalat here is a good example of this. They are building what they call solutions in a box for industries using our products because the compute has to be closer to where data is produced, and you will see that going across all industries.

Alaa: I want to add another angle, which is about Lenovo’s end-to-end value proposition. At the beginning of this fiscal year, we announced Lenovo 360, which allows our customers to take advantage of our renewed value proposition through our partner ecosystem. What we are trying to do is to localise the multi-national Lenovo in every country we are in, and the new go-to-market strategy is not edge-to-cloud but device – to- cloud because we want our customers to take advantage of our entire portfolio. Our business is now centered around four main business groups – IDG (intelligent device group), MBG (mobile business group), ISG (intelligent solutions group), and SSG (services and solutions group).

Your data centre and infrastructure business has turned a profit since the acquisition six years ago. How do you plan to accelerate this?

Giovanni: We have been profitable for a couple of quarters now. We now have a $60 billion IDG business, a $10 billion infrastructure business, and almost $ 5 billion in services business. It is very important that all three are highly profitable. We are growing, and we are profitable. In the last six years, we have had to make significant upfront investments to become a market leader in HPC, edge computing, and AI, and now it is all starting to pay off.

How do you plan to become the number one infrastructure vendor?

Giovanni: We are betting on our partner ecosystem to do this. Our go-to-market is 100 percent indirect, and the reason is very simple. Though we produce the best platform in the market, we need alliance partners to build the entire solution stack. And when you do this, you can provide the best-of-breed solutions to your customers. That’s what differentiates us, which is why we are growing exponentially.

GIOVANNI DI FILIPPO, EMEA PRESIDENT AND ALAA BAWAB, GENERAL MANAGER – MEA AT LENOVO INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS GROUP, TALK ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY IS WEAVING THE NEXT PHASE OF BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION.

A NEW BREED OF CHANGE AGENTS

The public sector is leading digital innovation, harness the potential of social, mobile, and artificial intelligence technologies to drive transformation change and make service models that sustainable in the long term.

Be it multichannel citizen engagements, digital government platforms and risk-based security, government CIOs are adopting digital technology innovations and support the mission of their organisations.

According to the latest figures from IDC, governments across the Middle East and Africa spent a whopping 12.8 billion in ICT technologies last years, and this figure is slated to cross the $15 billion mark next year.

This shows the magnitude of digital transformation projects in the public sector as governments across the region look

to become more efficient and effective. The pandemic has sparked considerable interest in digital services and applications provided by the public sector and this interest in digital services is prompting government agencies to rethink what they offer online – and how to make things better.

Today, governments at all levels are undergoing digital transformation to deliver services and programme more efficiently and in a transparent manner and meets the increasing demands of citizens and residents.

The GovDX Leadership Awards was kicked off by Nader Baghdadi, senior regional director of ColorTokens, with a keynote address on the key tenets of Zero Trust security model. “It is an approach to security that at its heart removes implicit trust between people, devices, applications, systems, data and everything in-between,” he said.

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UNDERSTANDING YOUR ATTACK SURFACE

FORGET THE THREAT LANDSCAPE; TO SEE YOURSELF AS THE BAD GUYS DO, LOOK TO YOUR ATTACK SURFACE, WRITES HADI JAAFARAWI, MANAGING DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST, QUALYS

How often do you hear GCC cybersecurity specialists talk about the “attack surface”? Depending on your role, it could be monthly, weekly, or daily. As one of those specialists, I can tell you that we think about it every minute. As cyberdefenders, we can do little about the threat landscape, which just represents the innovation of our adversaries.

Our challenge is to imagine how that landscape might dispatch a threat — how it would get in, and how it might move through our infrastructure and do us harm. That means getting to know the attack surface and devising ways to protect it.

Attack surface management (ASM) has been formalised of late to cover

the ongoing process of asset discovery and classification by risk. Through repeated assessment of all assets, we build an always-current view of the entire technology infrastructure and the degree to which it is protected, thereby presenting a comprehensive map of entry points for attackers. This is of particular importance today because of the dizzying complexity of IT stacks.

The Arab Gulf region was one of the quickest to react to the COVID pandemic, but when mass cloud migration occurred, it was a red rag to every threat bull out there. ASM is the process by which organisations assess themselves as attackers would. This approach is helpful in prioritising maintenance, upgrades, patching, tool procurement, and policy enactment because it forces decision

makers to consider where attackers will hit first. In the multi-cloud and hybrid environments in which regional organisations now find themselves, we must focus on external attack surface management (EASM), as the cloud arena is where the battle now rages. Every application, every port, every server and website, every cloud and container — all this and more must be reviewed, assessed, and triaged for treatment.

Know yourself

Natively integrated EASM allows cybersecurity teams to see the environment at a glance, from onpremises assets to the far-flung reaches of the cloud. The analyst will be able to discover assets and their vulnerabilities before attackers do, even though

they operate in an elastic business environment plagued with shadow IT and constantly changing rosters of technology partners, service providers and other third parties that come and go. The days of siloed asset management must be left behind. Everything from endpoints to development projects might previously have been departmentalised. But now, we must recognise that this plays into the hands of threat actors. Formally managed configuration management databases (CMDBs) give security teams deep, contextual understanding of what each asset does, how it is configured, and which department or individual controls it.

Unfortunately, many of today’s EASM solutions do not include a sufficiently thorough view of assets and therefore do not adequately provide for assessment, prioritisation, and remediation. This shortfall gives way to manual processes that are prone to error, and traps skilled resources in tedious workflows rather than empowering them to innovate and add value. This can lead to a reduction in job satisfaction and lower retention rates of cybersecurity talent. Given the regional shortage of such talent, this erosion of security personnel is, in itself, a risk to the enterprise.

When building a successful cybersecurity team organisations must consider the employee experience just as they must do across all other roles. Analysts and threat hunters must be able to see the external attack surface in its entirety. They must be notified automatically of new assets. They must be able to track asset changes. And they must be able to monitor workloads wherever they run, even on public clouds. IoT sensors and devices, outof-service IP addresses, shadow IT — nothing must escape the watchful gaze of the security team.

Proper EASM

Armed with the right EASM solution, security can work with IT to decommission or reconfigure externally

facing assets when they are no longer relevant to business operations. The best EASM platforms automatically associate assets with business function regardless of location or ownership. These data points help analysts join the dots (as an attacker would) from an externally facing asset to sensitive

information or critical systems.

EASM has a critical role to play in digital asset management. It enables discovery, eliminating the need for vast, time-consuming surveys of assets held on premises, in the cloud, and in the homes of employees and facilities of partners, subsidiaries and suppliers. Proper EASM even allows organisations to get a handle on asset attribution by presenting a path to discovery by attackers on the public Internet, and how this can lead to the compromise of critical data.

EASM enables the undertaking of continuous risk assessment. By gaining context on each asset, including the “when” and “how” of its creation, security teams are armed with actionable information. This information is enriched by monitoring configurations (for example, unsanctioned open ports, unapproved services, or expired or expiring SSL certificates). And through integration with sources like Shodan’s connecteddevice search engine, EASM solutions can allow security practitioners to find potential vulnerabilities via automated lightweight scans and act on them before bad actors can.

Control and order

The combination of EASM with CMDB delivers what today’s cybersecurity professionals need most: real-time visibility of the entire stack. Previously unknown or unmanaged assets come into focus and risk mitigation takes a leap forward. Automated workflows weed out vulnerabilities at scale, which simplifies the previously overwhelming proposition of exhaustive investigation and patching, asset by asset.

The stack may look like a messy mountain right now, but EASM returns a measure of control and order to the chaos. Being able to plaster over the cracks in the mortar before an attacker can slip through is a boon to security professionals. And it has been a long time coming.

EASM ENABLES THE UNDERTAKING OF CONTINUOUS RISK ASSESSMENT. BY GAINING CONTEXT ON EACH ASSET, INCLUDING THE “WHEN” AND “HOW” OF ITS CREATION, SECURITY TEAMS ARE ARMED WITH ACTIONABLE INFORMATION.

DECODING DATA

Pause a moment to consider what it takes to keep an economy growing in the digital era. Let’s take the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for our model. The government here is in no doubt that technology must play a starring role.

The UAE Digital Economy Strategy is focused on doubling the contribution of the digital economy to non-oil GDP over the next decade. And Operation 300bn, which will act as an accelerator for the country’s industrial sector and multiply its contribution to GDP, mentions the words “technology” and “innovation”

several times in proximity within its strategy document, often side by side.

The reason for the emphasis on technology? Insights. Insights make the difference between a bad decision and one that reinvents an entire sector. Insights are the secret sauces sought by every ambitious business leader. And for those insights, we turn to a particular champion within the modern digital business.

Meet the data analyst, also referred to as the business analyst. They love data. They love it so much that they are more content to clean a dirty dataset than

take a bow in front of executives who are grateful for the latest actionable insight. This “Numbers Girl/Guy” is never done digging for gold nuggets. They eschew PowerPoint in favor of Excel, automating as many of their tasks as they can to clear their schedule for the next fascinating data project. And solving the problem is not nearly enough. They must see their solution applied in a way that adds concrete value to their organisation.

Other job titles for this role include “business intelligence analyst”, “marketing analyst”, and “financial

FOUR TIPS FROM SID BHATIA, REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT & GENERAL MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST & TURKEY, DATAIKU, FOR BEING THE BEST DATA ANALYST YOU CAN

analyst”, but no matter the label, the core mission remains the same: Insights, insights, and more insights. And developments in data science, machine learning, and AI ensure that the role will only continue to grow, in scope and importance, in the years to come. If you are a data analyst of any stripe, or wish to become one, here are some tips for success.

1Unchain yourself from spreadsheets

The job is changing. For example, spreadsheets are the perennial comfort blanket of the data professional. But they are becoming increasingly obsolete as issues with data accuracy, siloed work, security, and human error combine with the emergence of big data to bring complexities that spreadsheets alone cannot handle. Today’s analyses are more advanced and require a different kind of data preparation. In the interests of smoother project development, a central location for all analyses promotes transparency and enables collaboration with data scientists, even if the end goal of the project is not a machine-learning model.

2Upskill selectively Lifelong learning is now crucial to remaining relevant in the labor market, and the same goes for adding value to your current organisation. The data analyst works in one of the fastest changing fields around, one that adds new roles — “data scientist”, “data translator”, “analytics product owner” — regularly.

While becoming a citizen data scientist is always a possibility, there are many other in-demand areas that can add value if the right skills are acquired to tap them. New data visualisation skills can make confusing data enlightening. Coding in SQL, Python, and other languages can give people more autonomy to drive projects forward. And even a basic knowledge of AutoML can open doors to new insights without the need for a data scientist. And do not ignore the significance of soft skills.

3Learn the lingo

One example of an important soft skill is the art of storytelling. If you can put together compelling data narratives, you can add value with the stories themselves while inspiring buyin from key allies for future projects. But to do this, you will need to learn how to talk the talk. That does not necessarily mean making the transition to citizen data scientist. It merely means developing a good understanding of the surface vocabulary of data science, machine learning, and AI to allow you to collaborate effectively with more technology-oriented colleagues and build convincing stories for stakeholders with no technical knowledge.

Part of providing great insights means being in the thick of as many projects as possible and understanding how they connect to each other, the business, and its goals. In a successful digital business, everyone is aligned with the data agenda, and that includes analysts.

4Make way for Everyday AI Everyday AI — a culture of data-oriented operations that pervades every department and role — is exactly the vision encompassed by the UAE government and other regional authorities. As data and AI become part of the fabric of business, siloes will evaporate to make way for people across teams and disciplines to be using data and its insights as fundamental tools for work.

Some data professionals may see this new culture as one where others are encroaching on their territory. And they may resist. But Everyday AI helps everyone in the organisation be more successful through the leverage of data. As Operation 300bn recognises, technology and innovation go hand in hand. Restricting access to the former stymies the latter. And in the digital economy, that serves nobody.

Aim high

Be the best data analyst you can be and the business you serve will be the best at what it does. The years to come will make lofty demands of the analyst in all its guises. Data professionals will be instrumental in the progress to come, both inside the business and in the larger economy (digital and other). And now you can aim for the stars and be part of the story.

SOME DATA PROFESSIONALS MAY SEE THIS NEW CULTURE AS ONE WHERE OTHERS ARE ENCROACHING ON THEIR TERRITORY. AND THEY MAY RESIST. BUT EVERYDAY AI HELPS EVERYONE IN THE ORGANISATION BE MORE SUCCESSFUL THROUGH THE LEVERAGE OF DATA.

CELEBRATING DIGITAL LEADERSHIP

CXO INSIGHT ME CELEBRATED OUTSTANDING IT PROJECTS, LEADING VENDORS AND BEST MARKETING PROFESSIONALS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AT ITS ANNUAL ICT LEADERSHIP AWARDS

Digital transformation is no longer a buzzwordvirtually every business today is leveraging new technologies to engage with their customers and accelerate time to market.

Moreover, as we now start talking about the postpandemic world, businesses are convinced that spending on technology will put them in a strong position and plot recovery.

The second edition of ICT Leadership Awards was held on the sidelines of Gitex Global to honour the outstanding business transformation projects in the region. The event was kicked off by Sebastian Samuel, CIO of AW Rostamani, who spoke about how technology is shaping business and significance of digital transformation in the autonomous era.

END-USER PROJECTS

The Ministry of Health and Prevention, UAE

HSA Group

Al Wathba National Insurance Company

Al Shirawi Group

Government of Sharjah Finance Department

Horizon Terminals

RAKBank

Eltizam Asset Management

Aldar Properties

ALEC

Fakeeh University Hospital

Madinat Jumeirah Resort

Dalma Mall

United Motors Company

Aster Hospitals

Rivoli Group

Tanmiah Food Company

Havelock One

GARMCO Bahrain

Sheikh Nasser AI R&D Center, Bahrain

Automech Group

Emirates Healthcare Group

Western International Group

Fortinet Best marketing team

Rima Ben Salah Trellix

Vivien Lim Checkmarx

Azentio Software

Fortinet Best zero trust security vendor

Logitech Best workspace solutions vendor

Devyani Jethwa Sophos

Mohammed Iqbal Logitech

Sony INZONE

PC and PlayStation gamers in the Middle East and Africa have a wider range of options to enrich their gaming experience with Sony INZONE, which offers the latest audio technology and industry-leading innovation across the INZONE H9, INZONE H7 and INZONE 3 headphones. Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound for Gaming, activated by the INZONE Hub PC software, reproduces 2ch stereo audio signals in 7.1ch surround sound as the game creators intended. The precise target detection with 360 Spatial Sound for Gaming optimises acoustics and boosts spatial awareness, thus enabling the player to precisely hear footsteps and movements. The smartphone app 360 Spatial Sound Personaliser also allows users to optimise spatial sound to their ear shape for truly personalised gameplay. Furthermore, the diaphragms of the INZONE H9 and INZONE H7 both have a unique shape that allow the headphones

to reproduce extremely high frequency sounds with high compliance, as well as authentic low frequencies for an immersive gaming experience. Ducts on the housing of the INZONE H9, INZONE H7 and INZONE H3 control and optimise low-frequency sound reproduction for powerful bass that makes deep sounds seem incredibly real.

The INZONE H9 comes with 32 hours of battery life and INZONE H7 with 40 hours of battery, while INZONE H3 is a wired headset. All three models are equipped with a flexible flip-up boom microphone with mute function, allowing users to communicate effortlessly in-game with squad members. Furthermore, the wide, soft headband cushion spreads the weight evenly across the player’s head for long-term wearing comfort. The earpads are shaped to minimise pressure on the player’s ears by optimising contact with the side of their heads.

GeForce RTX 4080 GPU

The new GeForce RTX 4080 GPU from Nvidia brings a massive boost in performance of up to 1.6x compared to the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, thanks to third-generation RT Cores, fourth-generation Tensor Cores, eighthgeneration dual AV1 encoders and 16GB memory, plenty to edit up to 12K RAW video files or large 3D scenes.

3D artists can now work with accurate and realistic lighting, physics and materials while creating 3D scenes, all in real time, without proxies. DLSS 3, now available in the NVIDIA Omniverse beta, uses RTX Tensor Cores and the new Optical Flow Accelerator to generate additional frames and dramatically increase frames per second (FPS). This improves smoothness in the viewport. Unity and Unreal

Engine 5 will soon release updated versions with DLSS 3.

Video and livestreaming creative workflows are also accelerated by the new AV1 encoder, with 40% increased encoding efficiency, unlocking higher resolutions and crisper image quality. AV1 is integrated in OBS Studio, DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro, the latter through the Voukoder plug-in.

The new dual encoders capture up to 8K resolution at 60 FPS in real time via GeForce Experience and OBS Studio and cut video export times nearly in half.

Qualys TotalCloud

Qualys has announced TotalCloud with FlexScan delivering cloud-native VMDR with Six Sigma Accuracy via agent and agent-less scanning for comprehensive coverage of cloud-native posture management and workload security across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

AXIS ALL-IN-ONE PENDANT SPEAKERS

As business applications and onpremises infrastructure migrate to the cloud, security teams struggle with managing cyber risk across cloud workloads, services, resources, users, and applications. Additionally, teams must deal with a plethora of industry acronym-driven point solutions that provide a fragmented view of risk without context. This approach increases security costs and complexity while leaving cloud applications vulnerable to attacks.

With more than 31 million workloads already secured by Qualys, Qualys TotalCloud extends the accuracy of VMDR with cloudnative FlexScan assessments to unify Cloud Posture Management and Cloud Workload Security in a single view with risk insights. TotalCloud automates inventory, assessment, prioritization and risk remediation via an easy-to-use drag-and-drop workflow engine for continuous and zero-touch security from code to production cloud applications.

Axis Communications has announced two new multipurpose, easy to integrate, all-in-one pendant speakers. Ideal for mounting on high, open ceilings, the visually attractive speakers can be used to make live or pre-recorded announcements and to play background music, improving the customer experience and supporting security and safety.

AXIS C1510 Network Pendant Speaker and AXIS C1511 Network Pendant Speaker are all-in-one speakers that make audio announcements smart and easy. The new speakers are particularly well-suited to retail stores, shopping malls, and other environments where design is of importance, blending seamlessly and elegantly into any surroundings. The pendant speakers can be installed in any ceiling, regardless of height, through simple adjustment of the cable length depending on requirements.

The new smart speakers allow customers to mix live or pre-recorded announcements and commercial ads to suit various needs and increase business efficiency, and also play background music to improve the customer experience.

Like all Axis network audio devices, the new speakers connect to standard networks and use one network cable for both power and connectivity (Power over Ethernet).

PREPARING FOR THE NEXT WAVE OF INNOVATION

SUNIL PAUL, MD OF FINESSE, SHARES THE KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM GITEX GLOBAL 2022

So how did the most significant ICT event in the Gulf region conclude? GITEX Global 2022 didn’t disappoint in terms of the crowd, in the array of new tech innovations on display, and in business development potential. The official numbers are yet to be out, but the fiveday event’s record size and expanded coverage - two million sq. ft., over 5,000 exhibitors from more than 90 countriescould be regarded as markers on how well in-person event world fared this year. Some key macro-to-micro takeaways from the world’s largest tech show would be:

· In 2022, GITEX returned to prepandemic form.

· Country pavilions were out in full strength. Saudi Arabia showcased their digital transformation and smart solutions through their special Saudi Vision 2030 stand. Over 200 ICT companies from India and 50 from Pakistan participated in the event.

· The technology industry has solidified its position as a driver of non-oil economic activity in the region. The UAE government is leaving no stone unturned to make the necessary investment to turn the country into a hub of innovation for the region and the world.

· In step with UAE Digital Government Strategy, Federal and local government bodies showcased their digital transformation journey and adoption of the latest technologies and smart systems, ranging from AI-powered data analysis initiatives from the Ministry of Finance to DEWA’s green data centre to the drone prowess of Dubai Customs.

· The jury is still out on whether Metaverse is the biggest creation since the start of the Internet. As it undergoes iterations, Metaverse will profoundly impact how we live, work and play by redefining how we deal with the Internet. A glimpse was provided by the three-dimensional, hyper-realistic X-VERSE, which hosted 25 industry applications of Metaverse covering manufacturing, gaming, education, healthcare, retail, and work.

· Is Dubai the start-up capital of the region? Possibly so, if one went by the response to North Star Dubai, the world’s leading tech and start-up event and one of the main highlights of GITEX Global 2022. Thanks to the diversity in the cultures of its residents, Dubai was long seen as among the most suitable cities for establishing businesses and expanding to regional and global markets, and this quality is attracting start-ups and unicorns to Dubai.

· It was Cloud all the way as major cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud announced their expansion in the region. With cloud services are accelerating the digital transformation of the region’s public and private sectors, everyone at GITEX had their two pence on the topic.

A subtle theme was the convergence of Cloud, AI, Machine Learning, 5G, and anything else you can throw in the mix. What matters is the opportunities this convergence trend will throw up.

For example, as companies take to the cloud, their security landscape becomes more complex. The way

forward is the converged approach that provides unified visibility across the web, cloud services, and applications.

Seeing the future is an area that GITEX has never failed to disappoint, year after year. This year’s showstoppers didn’t disappoint.

Chinese XPeng X2 successfully completed the first public test flight of its two-seater flying car, while Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) unveiled their new Cruise Origin driverless taxis that will take to the roads in 2023.

Robots are now mainstream if one went by number at GITEX. Notable ones included world’s most advanced humanshaped robot Ameca, food delivery robot Ottobot by Ottonomy, and an industrial surveillance robot by Swiss-Mile capable of carrying up to 100kg, and even work underwater.

There was also a robotic pillmanufactured by the Silicon Valley-based company EndiaTX, the PillBot will allow a doctor to remotely examine the insides of a patient over a virtual call.

GITEX Global 2022 will go down in the annals of history as one of its most successful editions. True to its billing as the world’s largest tech show, the event brought together global and local tech leaders under one roof to ‘empower and enlighten everyone on the metamorphosis of the digital economy.’ On another note, Finesse had its largest-ever presence at the show, sharing knowledge and insights with a record number of visitors to help them get started on their journey to the next digital universe.

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