CXO Insight Middle East - Ready for the new normal - October 2020

ISSUE 24 \ OCTOBER 2020

READY FOR THE

NEW NORMAL A CIO’s perspective on how your business can navigate through Covid-19

Automation: Hype or Reality Automated Security Testing in Software Development

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CONTENTS

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12

PRODUCTS

A CIO’S PERSPECTIVE ON HOW YOUR BUSINESS CAN NAVIGATE THROUGH COVID-19

READY FOR THE NEW NORMAL

16 THE FUTURE 16

OF CITIES 20 MAKING MULTI

CLOUD WORK

42

OPERATIONS

26

FIGHTING FRAUD

PUBLISHED BY INSIGHT MEDIA & PUBLISHING LLC

NEWS

SUPPLY 28 UNLOCKING CHAIN VALUE WITH AI GETTING A GRIP 30

ON DATA

INNING STRATEGY FOR A THE LONG HAUL 22 WMULTI-CLOUD 32 WORLD WHY AI IS KEY FOR 25 MANUFACTURING

6

SELLING DIGITAL 36 TRANSFORMATION

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WHEN GOOD JUST ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

ADNOC AND GROUP 42 LAUNCH AI JOINT VENTURE COMPANY AIQ TEZOS BLOCKCHAIN RECEIVES SHARIAH CERTIFICATION NIT ACADEMY, SAP TO SUPPORT EMPLOYMENT IN SAUDI ARABIA’S ICT MARKET

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EDITORIAL

THE PATH TO SMART

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ecently, at its annual user conference, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger remarked that 5G would ultimately displace WiFi in enterprises, which has sparked a debate in the industry. Will the fifth generation of cellular technology replace our ubiquitous WiFi? While the jury is still out on that, the general consensus is that two technologies will co-exist in the foreseeable future. Though 5G, with its increased speeds and low latency, makes for a compelling value proposition, WiFi still has an edge if you make an apples-to-apples comparison. 5G doesn’t measure up well against WiFi, which has many advantages in terms of TCO, ease of deployment, and in-door coverage. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get your enterprise ready for 5G that promises to supercharge your business. Use cases are emerging, and it is expected to make some disruptive applications possible.

One such use case is smart cities; 5G is going to be a key enabling technology for IoT, which is said to be the key to developing smart urban areas. In this issue, we have featured some of the essential technologies needed to build smart cities, and how smart city technologies are playing a key role in tackling the coronavirus crisis. The Middle East is getting seriously smart about its smart cities, with many projects underway. In Saudi, NEOM is getting built, and this will be the largest smart city in the world and a hub for innovation. Dubai is inching closer to realising its vision of becoming a smart city by 2021. Not very far away, Egypt is building a new capital- the size of Singapore – with the strategic vision of being a smart city. Around 54 percent of the world population lives in urban areas, and smart cities will undoubtedly have a transformative impact on our daily lives. In fact, digitally-infused intelligent cities seem to be the only way to transition into an environmentally sustainable future.

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While the publisher has made all efforts to ensure the accuracy of information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors

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NEWS

ADNOC AND GROUP 42 LAUNCH AI JOINT VENTURE COMPANY AIQ

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he Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has announced the launch of AIQ, its Artificial Intelligence (AI) joint venture (JV) company with Group 42 (G42), an Abu Dhabi-based AI and cloud computing company.

The completion of the formation of AIQ follows the signing of the JV agreement between ADNOC and G42 in November 2019 with ADNOC holding a 60-percent stake and G42 a 40-percent stake in AIQ. AIQ will focus on developing and commercialising AI products and applications for the oil and gas industry.

The partnership brings together G42’s expertise in AI modeling, supercomputing and its world-class team of data scientists and software engineers with ADNOC’s world-class oil and gas industry know-how, domain experts and its vast amount of data.

The Chairman of the AIQ Board of Directors is Abdulmunim Saif Al Kindy

TEZOS BLOCKCHAIN RECEIVES SHARIAH CERTIFICATION

Tezos Gulf was established to foster ecosystem development in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for the Tezos network, an open-source public blockchain for assets and applications. In accordance with that mission, Tezos Gulf has announced the assignment of Shariyah Review Bureau (SRB) as its Sharia Advisor.

Shariyah Review Bureau has reviewed the Tezos blockchain’s governance mechanism, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, 6

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(ADNOC), with Peng Xiao (G42) Mansoor Ibrahim AlMansoori (G42), Ahmed Al Kuttab (ADNOC) and Alan Nelson (ADNOC) being appointed as Board members.

ADNOC’s partnership with G42 represents one of several digital transformation initiatives to embed cutting-edge technology across its entire value chain. Other digital initiatives include its AI and big data-driven “Panorama Digital Command Center,” its smart data analytics “Thamama Subsurface Collaboration Center,” its use of big data modelling tools for value chain optimisation, computer vision technologies, predictive maintenance machine learning technologies and use of blockchain for hydrocarbon accounting.

Dr. Alan Nelson, ADNOC Group Chief Technology Officer, said, “We are excited about the launch of our AI joint venture with G42 as it enables us to accelerate ADNOC’s adoption of advanced technologies and further digitalise our value chain to enhance efficiencies, performance and agility. The joint venture is testament to ADNOC’s drive to partner with local technology players to help grow the UAE’s innovation ecosystem and to drive long-term and sustainable value for the nation.”

Peng Xiao, Group CEO, G42, said, “This partnership with ADNOC offers the potential to create the AI tools for the oil and gas industry of tomorrow and we look forward to leveraging our state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure and specialised team of AI experts to help develop these new cuttingedge solutions. The use of AI, combined with G42’s supercomputing capabilities, as well as ADNOC’s industrial expertise and breadth of data, will unlock efficiencies across the entire value chain, inspiring new approaches to exploration, production, transportation, processing, distributions and sales.”

AIQ has started work on a number of key AI projects across the oil and gas value chain such as drilling performance, reservoir modelling, corrosion detection, and product quality. The scope of projects will be expanded to other areas as the JV progresses.

and formal verification techniques and issued a Sharia certificate marking the platform’s compliance with Sharia principles.

Tezos’ platform is backed by a global community of validators, researchers and builders. It is considered one of the first pure proof-of-stake blockchains. The Tezos blockchain has been utilised by numerous issuers of digital securities but mostly on the conventional side of the financial market.

“The engagement marks Tezos first step in promoting our open-source protocol to Islamic financial institutions in the GCC and South-Asia pacific region,” said Waleed Rassuli, Head of Tezos Gulf.

“We see potential for Islamic financial institutions seeking to explore blockchainbased options for digital securities issuers and who also wish to issue securities on a platform that is compatible with the Sharia compliance ecosystem. We hope our blockchain will foster a vibrant version of the digital asset-class which will move the Islamic industry forward.”

The Sharia certification was conducted

by Shariyah Review Bureau, a global leader in providing product Sharia certification, investment advice in light of Sharia standards and Sharia audit services. As a trusted partner, Shariyah Review Bureau is recognised by major national and international financial institutions which it has been serving for over 15 years.

Shariyah Review Bureau provides endto-end Sharia advisory solutions to banks, insurance firms and asset managers around the world. Over the last few years, it has been actively advising and certifying entities and their offerings in the blockchain and fintech sector. SRB’s services are centrally deployed, and offer Sharia supervision, functionality, and quick turnaround in product certification. This has become an attractive option for fintech establishments. In addition to reducing Sharia scholarly overheads, this approach helps clients centralise their firm’s Sharia certification and Sharia audit administrative and operational tasks.

UAE TO SPEND $73 MILLION ON AI IN 2020

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he UAE is set to spend $73 million on artificial intelligence (AI) systems in 2020, the highest in the Middle East, boosted by the UAE government’s digital innovation drive, industry experts announced recently.

Thanks in part to the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, AI is being embedded into every sector – from government e-services and smart traffic, to the current healthcare environment, to enforce lockdowns and support contact tracing.

As a result, the UAE’s AI spending on AI systems is set to grow by 19.7 percent from 2019, reaching $73 million in 2020, according to a recent report by IDC. The UAE AI spending leads the region and accounts for about one-fifth of the total in the Middle East and Africa, which is set to reach USD 374 million in 2020.

“The UAE’s government-led AI strategy is delivering major benefits in e-services that can be accessed in the social distancing era, and help residents and businesses to save time and money,” said Praj Calthorpe, Deputy General Manager, Condo Protego.

“Thanks to the strong results of the country’s AI deployments, Abu Dhabi and Dubai are continuing to lead the Middle East in AI projects in Smart Cities.”

Abu Dhabi and Dubai have moved up in global Smart Cities rankings, now in the top 50 Smart Cities worldwide, and the highest in the Middle East and North Africa, according to The Institute for Management Development’s Smart City Index 2020.

Additional Emirates – Ajman, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah, Umm Al Quwain — are investing in smart government and Smart Cities plans to enhance daily lives.

As AI progresses from plans to implementations, the Smart Dubai AI Ethics Advisory Board recently convened to identify bias, to ensure fairness and data privacy, to bring accountability in explaining complex algorithms, and to highlight cybersecurity.

Still, successful AI projects need more than the high-level view – they also require knowledgeable and experienced channel partners. Partners should be aligned with technology vendors that are AI leaders and have experience in deploying AI projects.

NIT ACADEMY, SAP TO SUPPORT EMPLOYMENT IN SAUDI ARABIA’S ICT MARKET The National Information Technology (NIT) Academy and global technology company SAP have Majed Al-Ghassab, NIT joined hands to develop Saudi talent for the workforce of the future, supporting Saudi Vision 2030 and the Kingdom’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector.

In this partnership, the NIT, a not-forprofit training institute, has joined SAP’s flagship digital skill build initiative, the Young Professional Program, as part of its aim to provide Saudi nationals with advanced and accelerated training programs to develop a “job-ready” talent pool.

“Our strategic partnership with SAP through its Young Professional Program is supporting digital skills development, and bridging the gap between supply and demand of information and communication technology talent by

increasing job opportunities through training on the latest technologies for Saudi nationals,” said Majed Al-Ghassab, NIT Executive Director. “Through this initiative, Saudi talent will be empowered to meet the requirements of the current and future job market.”

The NIT was established by four founding stakeholders: Saudi Aramco, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), Technical and Vocational Training Corporation (TVTC), and Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC).

Building on the success of the Young Professional Program in Saudi Arabia since its launch in late 2012, NIT is joining forces on the upcoming edition of the program in the Kingdom.

The Young Professional Program is a three-month training and development opportunity for unemployed or underemployed local university graduates that teaches technical and functional knowledge of the latest technologies, along with soft and future skills.

Participants graduate as SAP Certified

Associate Consultants with globally recognised certifications, ready to kickstart their careers within the company’s ecosystem of customers and partners.

With 77 percent of the world’s transaction revenue touching an SAP system, the program helps its participants to gain a competitive edge in the job market and at the same time it supports organisations to find sought after skilled talents to satisfy their hiring demand.

The upcoming program will be the first of its kind in the Kingdom, including training and certification in data science, along with analytics cloud and predictive analytics.

The Young Professional Program has become a global best practice that supports the immediate employability of young talents in technology through collaboration and partnerships.

The program has, since its launch in 2012, trained and graduated more than 2870 talents across 25 countries globally with over 580 from Saudi Arabia, therefore created sustainable work opportunities for the new digital economy.

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ORACLE’S SECOND-GENERATION CLOUD REGION IN THE UAE GOES LIVE Oracle has announced the availability of the first of two planned second-generation Cloud regions in the UAE. The addition of the Dubai Cloud region marks the availability of 26 Oracle Cloud Regions worldwide. The opening is part of Oracle’s aggressive plan to have 36 Cloud regions by July 2021. Located in Dubai, the new Cloud region will offer all Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud Applications.

“The contribution of digital economy to the UAE’s GDP stood at 4.3 per cent in 2019, and His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, has set a target to double this contribution by enhancing the country’s digital readiness. Oracle’s second-generation cloud region in Dubai will help accelerate the digital transformation initiatives of organizations across the UAE’ government

entities, large enterprise and SMEs, thus directly supporting the country’s economic vision,” said Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice President, Technology, MEA & CEE, Oracle.

Etisalat, one of the leading telecommunication operators in emerging markets, is the telecom partner for the Oracle Cloud region in Dubai.

“With this strategic announcement, Etisalat will be part of Oracle’s growth path on bringing the next generation of cloud to the region. During this unprecedented period, global markets are looking at enhancing digital services availability and adding new capacities for businesses and the entire community. The partnership with Oracle further complements the existing

DUBAI GOVERNMENT HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENT PARTNERS WITH MICROSOFT As part of its broader efforts to empower Emiratis, drive forward employee skilling in the H.E. Abdulla Ali Bin government and Zayed Al Falasi, DGHR achieve central goals of the Dubai Strategic Plan, the Dubai Government Human Resources Department (DGHR) has partnered with Microsoft, bringing together their respective skilling programmes. A virtual online ceremony saw an MoU signed

by H.E. Abdulla Ali Bin Zayed Al Falasi, Director General of DGHR and Sayed Hashish, General Manager, Microsoft UAE. The Riyada program aims to empower the Emirati workforce and equip them with technical, behavioural and professional competencies. Microsoft will provide support under one of its pillars of its Tomoh Emiratization programme , which aligns well 8

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in delivering central aspects of Riyada, offering internship and secondment opportunities at Microsoft to UAE nationals. The practical applications will include training and equipping Emiratis with worldwide on the job skills by shadowing professionals within Microsoft as well as offering them professional certification courses to accelerate their careers.

“This partnership with Microsoft is focused on delivering world-class training to enhance the performance of UAE institutions,” said H.E. Abdulla Ali Bin Zayed Al Falasi, Director General, DGHR. “We are confident that this agreement will serve to further elevate the Emirates as a global innovation center. The training and expertise provided to Emirati talent will enhance the skills of a future generation, cementing the UAE’s status as a diverse digital hub of creativity and innovation.”

“Our organisation is committed to supporting the UAE future vision of a digital nation. The Tomoh programme will equip Emirati youth with globally recognised skills

capabilities of Etisalat which brings flexibility and availability for the private and public sector through the deployment of Oracle’s next generation of cloud services,” said Salvador Anglada, Group Chief Business Officer, Etisalat Oracle has a unique dual region strategy that enables customers to deploy resilient applications in multiple geographies for disaster recovery and compliance requirements – without having sensitive data leave the country. Customers that want to run critical systems of record in the cloud need fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes with multiple sites in the same country to meet data residency requirements.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a secondgeneration security platform, conceived and architected on security-first design principles. Innovations like isolated network virtualisation and pristine physical host deployment, enable customer isolation from other cloud tenants and from Oracle personnel as well as reduced risk from advanced persistent threats.

– a key pillar of the National Agenda and aligned to Vision 2021, thereby driving the nation’s digital transformation and global competitiveness,” said Sayed Hashish, General Manager, Microsoft UAE. “We seek to deepen our contribution to the Emirati community throughout the 21st century, by empowering the next generation of young talent.”

The Tomoh programme has been carefully designed based on research looking at the current and future needs of the UAE job market. It is aligned with the objective of deepening collaboration with Emiratisation initiatives and focused on three core pillars: ‘Learn at Microsoft’ – that offers internship and secondment opportunities to UAE nationals and involves learning of globally recognized skills. ‘Work at Microsoft’ – an opportunity for Emiratis to pursue careers at Microsoft, either through direct hiring of experienced Emirati professionals, or under the ‘Microsoft Aspire Experience’, designed for fresh graduates.

And Skill-Up Digitally – that enrolls students, job seekers and entrepreneurs into a powerful digital skilling programme, enabled by the Microsoft Cloud Society.

SAUDI BUGSHAN COMPANY TRANSFORMS BUSINESS OPERATIONS WITH IBM CLOUD

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audi Bugshan Company (SBC), in collaboration with its technology arm Brmaja Commercial Company (Brmaja), has selected IBM Cloud to host its IT infrastructure. This transition aims to support SBC’s business growth plans and meet its critical need for infrastructure performance and enterprise-grade security, while accelerating the company’s digital transformation.

SBC is the holding company of one of the largest conglomerates in the Middle East and North Africa region and has its headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

It comprises 47 companies in various sectors, including food and beverage, distribution and trading, healthcare, real estate, hospitality, education and automotive.

With its diversified portfolio of operations, SBC needed a secure and flexible cloud environment to be able to meet the requirements of each industry

it serves and address their unique set of challenges.

As a result, it selected IBM Cloud for its interoperability and now has the flexibility to deploy and run different industry-specific solutions from IBM and other technology vendors, as and when the need arises.

As part of the agreement, Brmaja and IBM Services worked closely to consolidate and migrate SBC’s mission-critical workloads and overall IT infrastructure, which were running across multiple physical and cloud environments, to a single IBM cloud. Today, SBC does not only benefit from enhanced business continuity and uninterrupted operations but is also able to rapidly meet its computing resources demands, without having to invest in additional hardware or physical infrastructure.

AUTOMATION ANYWHERE UNVEILS THE FIRST DIGITAL ASSISTANT AT WORK Global leader in robotic process automation (RPA) Automation Anywhere has announced AARI (Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface) – a smart digital assistant designed for a new era of work that brings consumer experiences to the enterprise.

Available via Automation Anywhere’s cloudnative RPA platform, Enterprise A2019, AARI makes it easy for anyone to participate in the automation of day-to-day business tasks, through business friendly user interfaces.

Like the popular digital assistants Siri and Alexa that have become ubiquitous in our personal lives, AARI provides an easy-touse, bot-to-human interface that oversees various business processes. AARI enables all users to further simplify everyday tasks, improve collaboration between teams, and provide best-in-class customer service – either on-premises or in the cloud. Now, every employee can participate in the

automation economy from the device or application of their choice – from data lookups across multiple systems to complex escalation scenarios.

AARI represents a dramatic departure from any other automation technology available today by simplifying tasks, like reporting and staying on top of urgent requests, collaborating with colleagues, apps and bots, automating escalations and approvals to speed up requests, as well as increasing customer satisfaction with a faster call resolution.

“AARI completes our vision to ‘automate automations’ by creating a digital assistant for the new era of work – enabling anyone to automate from anywhere at any time

Dr. Hatem Bakheet, Group CEO of Brmaja, said, “To address the ever changing needs of the industries in which SBC operates, Brmaja and IBM joined forces to transform the company’s IT landscape and enable it to benefit from a secure and flexible cloud environment.”

Increased regulatory and compliance requirements are driving the need for improved security and resiliency. Through its cloud adoption as well as IBM and Brmaja’s support, SBC now benefits from market leading data and app protection and open source innovations to some of the world’s largest and most enterprises as they protect sensitive data.

IBM Cloud also offers access to higher value technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Thing (IoT), allowing SBC to build and develop new innovative cloud-native applications and solutions to support its business.

Tarek Zarg Al Aioun, Country General Manager, IBM Saudi Arabia, said, “SBC’s adoption of IBM Cloud to harness its true potential is a testament to the company’s commitment to innovation and to lead the market by example.”

with a simple interface that can manage automations,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-founder, Automation Anywhere. “This technology democratises RPA so that anyone in an organisation can participate in the automation process, moving humanity closer to the full promise of a digital workforce where enabled by bots, we can achieve more than it was ever possible before.”

AARI will further democratise RPA in the enterprise by empowering every employee to trigger and interact with bots from any app, anytime, anywhere. When combined with Automation Anywhere’s Discovery Bot – the company’s integrated process discovery solution with auto-creation of bots – AARI increases the ability for all users to participate in automation, resulting in faster business outcomes, lower operating costs, and better employee experience.

AARI is available worldwide with pricing starting at $35 per user per month. Other platform components must be purchased separately.

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ELITSER TECHNOLOGIES ANNOUNCES NEW BRAND IDENTITY

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litser Technologies (Elitser), a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company has unveiled its new logo and announced a new corporate brand identity – right from the company website, social media platforms and messaging; signifying its evolution and enthusiasm to grow in the digital era.

This marks a significant milestone in the company’s journey, providing an opportunity to reflect on everything that the original Elitser brand stood for and everything that it now aspires to become as the solutions provider moves forward into an exciting future.

Jignasu Rathod, CEO, Elitser Technologies, said, “It is not just our logo that has changed.

We’ve transformed our website, our social media, our messaging and our focus to better reflect the way we help our clients to be more effective with their IT modernisation, transformation initiatives and success measurements.”

The new logo represents the way Elitser delivers its end-to-end solutions and services

to its enterprise clients across industries by integrating technologies and domain expertise.

Each color in the logo represent ideas, insights, technologies, industries and geographies. The arrow between the colors symbolises Elitser’s commitment to deliver integrated solutions to various industries across different geographies. The black color text creates a sense of power, authority and sophistication.

Along with the new identity, Elitser has also rearticulated its core values: Respect Everybody, Work with Honesty & Integrity, Deliver Quality, Adopt Change and Learn & Share the knowledge.

Rathod added, “Our mission is a refined version of what we have always known best about ourselves: ‘To evolve into a leading IT company providing cutting edge solutions to our clients by integrating technologies, practicality and aesthetics’.”

Since its inception in 2003, Elitser has experienced tremendous growth. The company became a trusted partner of global top-notch software vendors in the ITSM

and Infrastructure Management software space and a leader in providing solutions and services for its esteemed clients.

“Our approach of providing consultingled strategies and technology-led solutions have enabled our enterprise-level customers to direct their IT transformation initiatives towards business agility, innovation and growth,” Rathod said. “Behind the new look we are still the same company and same team, dedicated to providing you the best possible services and solutions.

We’re incredibly proud of the work that we do at Elitser and thankful to our dedicated employees, committed partnerships and satisfied clients that have accompanied us in our growth story.”

With a fresh new corporate identity, Elitser Technologies aims to continue its campaign and growth to be a preeminent provider of IT solutions and services to global clientele.

MCAFEE ANNOUNCES SAAS-BASED SUITES • MVISION Premium: Comprehensive endpoint and data protection, with AI-powered Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP Endpoint), to more completely defend devices and data from advanced attacks.

• MVISION Complete: Unifies McAfee’s full endpoint security portfolio with MVISION Unified Cloud Edge, that combines McAfee’s award-winning Secure Web Gateway (SWG), advanced DLP and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) to deliver complete deviceto-cloud protection. MVISION Complete enables organisations to better safeguard their digital transformation efforts and distributed workforce, with unified threat and data protection across all threat vectors – endpoints, web and cloud.

Kathleen Curry, McAfee

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cAfee has announced the expansion of its MVISION portfolio with three all-inone software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution offerings – McAfee Device-to-Cloud suites. These suites are designed for customers who are adopting a cloud first stance and desire a simplified portfolio approach for device-to-cloud protection.

Available immediately, all three suites include McAfee MVISION Insights, the industry’s first proactive and actionable threat posture capability that prioritises risk, predicts the success

of countermeasures and prescribes remedial actions, said the firm. The solutions will be showcased as part of MPOWER Digital 2020, McAfee’s free, virtual event taking place October 29 through November 13.

McAfee Device-to-Cloud suite options include: • MVISION Advanced: Proactive endpoint threat prevention that includes next-gen defense mechanisms and rollback remediation to protect against ransomware and other advanced malware.

The release of these newly designed suites bolsters the McAfee MVISION portfolio and provides security that spans devices, network and cloud.

Simple cloud management with better visibility and control; automated responses and updates that increase staff productivity; and unified policies on endpoints, web and cloud all help lower total cost of ownership at a time where many organisations are looking to trim budgets.

“McAfee is committed to providing new and updated security delivery models that make security easier to buy and manage, and help drive businesses forward in any environment,” said Kathleen Curry, Senior Vice President, Global Channels, OEM and Strategic Alliances, McAfee.

“The Device-to-Cloud suites were built with our partner community in mind. At inception, we had discussed with partners their needs to ensure we got it right—from pricing to implementation services, which will all be partner driven. Together, we will deliver a premium experience to our customers.”

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COVER STORY

READY FOR THE NEXT NORMAL MUBARIK HUSSAIN, DIRECTOR OF IT, BLOOM PROPERTIES, SHARES TIPS ON HOW REGIONAL ORGANISATIONS CAN RISE UP TO THE CHALLENGES OF COVID-19, ENSURE BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND SEAMLESSLY TRANSITION INTO THE DIGITAL AGE

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he ongoing COVID-19 pandemic drove organisations to accelerate their digital strategies and initiatives to avoid disruptions to day-to-day operations. This meant doubling down on technological investments and utilisation and empowering the workforce to transition and be efficient in the digital era.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic drove organisations to accelerate their digital strategies and initiatives to avoid disruptions to day-to-day operations. This meant doubling down on technological investments and utilisation and empowering the workforce to transition and be efficient in the digital era.

The impact of the pandemic reverberated across all industries, affecting businesses of all shapes and sizes. We speak to Mubarik Hussain, Director of IT, Bloom Properties, to learn his thoughts on how companies can thrive in this new normal

What are some of the main challenges regional businesses have to address during these difficult times?

Some companies had internal transformation projects lined up for 2020 while many hadn’t embarked on the digital path yet. As a company, our priority has always been on how we can digitally enhance ourselves and what kind of innovative solutions we can add that would help us to cater to our customers more effectively. Those firms that already had a digital mindset were able to make the transition easier than those who didn’t. However, companies who had these digital projects planned also relied on physical aspects such as people being present at certain locations, infrastructure hardware, etc. At the time, none of us could anticipate that requiring physical equipment and operational logistics would be a challenge. The biggest impact and challenge for

COMPANIES CAN SUCCESSFULLY GROW IN THESE TIMES AND CONTINUE TO GROW EVEN AFTER THE PANDEMIC BECAUSE THE BUYING, LEARNING, TEACHING, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WILL HAVE ALTERED CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR GOING FORWARD WITH THE SHIFT FROM PHYSICAL TO DIGITAL.

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COVER STORY

all companies was to move their operations to a complete digital model.

The next challenge was ensuring the new platforms and technologies were being quickly adopted, expanded and effectively utilised so that activities could be conducted remotely.

The sudden shift to working from home throughout the COVID-19 outbreak was very challenging.

Overnight organisations had to enable staff through IT cloud application accelerations, ensure VPN connectivity for data centre applications and make sure remote IT support was available securely.

Businesses had to increase security and monitoring of environments, ensure identity and access management were controlled and avoid rushing new applications into the new environment.

Additionally, every new integration had to be security checked and complaint rather than based on user demands.

Trainings had to be conducted to make sure employees were acquainted with the new technologies in place. All of this was easier said than done. But the urgency of the situation helped propel these initiatives across most businesses. Digital transformation strategies that would normally take years to implement were being done in a matter of weeks.

How did it help those companies who already had a digital-first mindset to make the transition faster?

Organisations that had business continuity built into its IT landscape and technology solutions found it easier to deal with these challenges than those who didn’t. These kinds of situations are unpredictable, and this is why it is so critical to have business continuity plans in place – an aspect most companies ignore or don’t get around to it because of day-to-day targets. The first step to getting on the digital movement is to have cloud-based solutions architecture. With software and cloud-led solutions and technologies embedded into an organisation’s IT environment, it becomes much easier to scale and evolve. Making the 100 14

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MAKING THE 100 PERCENT TRANSITION INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD QUICKLY ACROSS ALL OUR BUSINESS LINES WAS DEFINITELY CHALLENGING BUT HAVING A CLOUD-BASED ARCHITECTURE MADE IT A LOT EASIER FOR US. percent transition into the virtual world quickly across all our business lines was definitely challenging but having a cloudbased architecture made it a lot easier for us.

It was critical for all companies to digitalise, otherwise they risked not just being left behind but locked out from the market. Industries that were purely relying on physical contracts have been gravely impacted over the past few months because they suddenly find themselves unable to communicate with their clientele. This is because they were too reliant on customers coming into

their premises. These firms are finding it challenging to adapt to this increasingly digital environment we find ourselves in.

Do you expect the trends that have been brought about by the ongoing pandemic to continue for the foreseeable future?

I certainly believe that the trends that have emerged from the pandemic such as remote work models, contactless payments, automation, social distancing policies, reduced contact points, less physical interactions, and so on, will continue to see a long-term effect and therefore, regional businesses have to urgently boost their digitalisation drives.

How do you see the regional business landscape shaping out over the next few quarters?

Businesses are seeing the returns and rewards on digital technologies. Digital companies are able to continue to grow, expand and reach their customers.

As more people have adopted digital channels in the past few months, the potential to reach additional customers is now wider. Companies can successfully grow in these times and continue to grow even after the pandemic because the buying, learning, teaching, customer experience will have altered customer behaviour going forward with the shift from physical to digital. We are excited to continue to offer unique solutions and quality services across our business units to offer customers genuine value-adds.

FEATURE

THE FUTURE OF CITIES HOW COVID-19 CRISIS COULD SPEED UP THE CREATION OF SMART CITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

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he pandemic has become a catalyst for the development of cities around the world.

Many cities are now leveraging their existing digital infrastructure to tackle the spread of the virus in urban areas, and experts argue the pandemic could provide the final push in how technology is used in smart cities. For example, South Korea and Singapore are using the power of smart city technologies to conduct contact tracing, using data from surveillance 16

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cameras and sensors to halt the spread of the coronavirus. Closer home, Abu Dhabi’s flagship smart city, Masdar City, built a high-volume testing facility within weeks as part of the Emirate’s pandemic management programme.

Though the global economic slowdown will have an adverse effect, IDC expects global smart cities expenditure to reach $124 billion this year, and KMPG estimates the Middle East and African smart cities market to touch $2.7 billion in another two years.

Large investments are going into technologies that enable smart cities, especially IoT and 5G, which are expected to accelerate the drive towards a smarter, digital world.

“About 55 percent of the global population lives in urban areas and this number is expected to increase to 66 percent by 2050 according to a UN report in 2018. Overseeing the assets and operations of numerous large cities can only be economical and efficient only if they are automated and connected – and

Adrian Pickering

this is the underlying principle of smart cities. The development of smart cities relies on an integrated, intelligent, and interdependent network of a few essential smart city technologies, which include IoT, AI and 5G connectivity,” says Talal Shaikh, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University Dubai.

Osama Al-Zoubi, Chief Technology Officer, Cisco Middle East and Africa, concurs that central to creating a smart city is the Internet of Things. “Whether we consider real-time air quality updates, autonomous vehicles and traffic monitoring, or more collaborative, digital learning environments, devices must be connected to the network and have the ability to constantly communicate with one another. In doing so, not only do these devices provide information, but also analytics upon which necessary actions can be taken to improve outcomes.”

Cisco’s Annual Internet Report (which predicts evolving trends in the digital landscape), anticipates that by 2023, there will be 2.6 billion devices and connections in the Middle East and Africa (MEA). This is up from 1.7 billion in 2018. And within 2.6 billion, machine-to-machine (M2M) modules will account for 30% of all networked devices.

“IoT drives the exchange of copious amounts of data as a network of connected physical devices and creates opportunities to converge physical appliances with digital capabilities through data analytics – elevating efficiency,

Marwan Zeidan

Lucky La Riccia

CISCO’S ANNUAL INTERNET REPORT (WHICH PREDICTS EVOLVING TRENDS IN THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE), ANTICIPATES THAT BY 2023, THERE WILL BE 2.6 BILLION DEVICES AND CONNECTIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA (MEA). THIS IS UP FROM 1.7 BILLION IN 2018.

AND WITHIN 2.6 BILLION, MACHINE-TO-MACHINE (M2M) MODULES WILL ACCOUNT FOR 30% OF ALL NETWORKED DEVICES. providing economic benefits, and improving quality of life,” says Adrian Pickering, EMEA regional manager at Red Hat. “Of course, the influence of IoT goes way beyond smart city development – the technology is essential to functionality and sustainability when development is completed. Besides linking smart energy, smart transportation, smart devices, and smart infrastructure, to name a few, IoT impacts every layer of a smart city,

utilising IoT sensors, actuators, and other technologies to connect all components.”

With the increased volume and variety of data generated by IoT sensors and other advanced data collection methods, the need for high-capacity analytics tools is greater than ever before, according to Anas A. Abdul-Haiy, Director and Deputy CEO, Proven Consult. “Big data can be utilised to analyse data collected by finding patterns that are reflective of trends within cities. Big data is also used to find the causes of such issues and plan remedial actions. Thus, big data is a critical decision-making aid to Smart city governments,” he says.

Another critical piece of the smart city puzzle is 5G, which offers faster connections and bigger capacity at lower costs. Marwan Zeidan, Real Estate and Healthcare Segment Director, Middle East and Africa, Schneider Electric, explains why: “Connectivity is one of the core components in a smart city, as we have massive amounts of data that needs to be sent quickly and efficiently, to be analyzed and allow actionable insights.

While wired connectivity could be prevalent in a smart city, 5G gives much more flexibility to deliver more services with devices that are in locations difficult to wire, or even to add new services that were not initially thought of. 5G also opens the door for bandwidth-heavy services that are required on the move, without limitation to speed and latency.”

Lucky La Riccia, Head of Digital Services at Ericsson Middle East & Africa, says

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FEATURE

Talal Shaikh

the biggest smart city infrastructure development this year is the commercial deployment of 5G, which will be the platform for tomorrow’s smart cities. 5G supports a high density of connected devices, extended coverage, mobility and delivers better energy efficiency comparable to today’s wired broadband.

Owing to the rise of IOT, the emergence of autonomous vehicles, the need for more efficient buildings, the number of endpoints in metropolitan areas is set to grow exponentially from millions to billions of connected devices.

Since many of these devices will be embedded in difficult to reach, often dangerous locations, wireless connectivity will be key in enabling flexible design and on-the-fly reconfiguration.

“Meanwhile, systems like driverless cars and drones will increasingly depend on real-time telemetry to function. 5G is more than the cellular network that provides connectivity to this plethora of technology – it is the connective fabric tying it all together, allowing operators to mine vast datasets for actionable and predictable insights that will be crucial in achieving sustainable urban growth,” Riccia from Ericsson adds.

Khaled Al Melhi, CEO of Injazat, opines all emerging technologies are essential in building the city of the future. From Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, Virtual Reality (VR), Cloud and Cyber Security, the interplay between them all will make smart living possible.

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Osama Al Zoubi

“One of these technologies in isolation is not enough to build a smart city, which is why it requires orchestrators to bring all these technologies together and build industries that subsequently enable entire countries such as the UAE to enter the Digital Economy. One of our smart cities’ initiatives, Hassantuk, successfully leverages an interplay of these emerging technologies to provide smart monitoring equipment for buildings across the UAE, offering AI-enabled maintenance and emergency services,” he says.

Homegrown standards Though Dubai and Abu Dhabi figure in the index of top 100 smart cities in the world, many smart city frameworks are predominantly European. How can we adapt it to suit Middle Eastern countries?

Prem Rodrigues, director for the Middle East, Africa & India/SAARC at Siemon, thinks some cities in the Middle East are at par or not too far behind Europe.

“Although Europe and the Middle East are different from each other, they have similar needs that can be tackled best through a common approach. The focus could be on areas where ICT, energy, and mobility overlap, and on offering solutions that can be transferable to other cities.

Case studies from Europe will be much helpful, which will allow us to learn from their experiences. Developing a digital platform that integrates tools and enabling technologies as well as planning tools could help with the sustainable future development of the cities,” he says.

Prem Rodrigues

Shaikh from Heriot-Watt University says the Middle East is greatly invested in the digital age, especially amongst consumers.

Building on a history of innovation, the region has the chance to transform itself into a leading digital economy—and to realise significant economic benefits—if it can rally stakeholders together to focus on developing the region’s governance, industry, investment, and talent.

“Few Middle Eastern governments, including those of the UAE and Bahrain, have already begun implementing key digitisation initiatives. Other countries in the Middle East also have huge aspirations and are making significant progress.

Though, in their attempt to encourage innovation and propel the public sector’s adoption of digital to the next level, they are facing implementation challenges, that include an inefficient governance structure for instance,” he says.

Al-Zoubi from Cisco believes that technology is the ultimate enabler and unifying link, which makes people’s ambitions a reality. “However, in the context of a smart city, a city can only be classed as ‘smart’ if it truly works for its people. Top-down approaches to smart city planning often do not consider the idiosyncrasies, which may occur on a more granular, grassroots level. This is a mistake. A smart city requires constant iteration between its leadership, technology providers, end-users, and the wider public to create improved outcomes which can benefit the masses,” he says.

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INTERVIEW

MAKING MULTICLOUD WORK RICHARD MUNRO, DIRECTOR, GLOBAL CLOUD STRATEGY, VMWARE, EXPLAINS WHY THE MULTICLOUD ERA IS HERE TO STAY.

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o you think this global pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the cloud among enterprises?

The lasting impact of Covid-19 is just an acceleration. In most cases, it’s things that everyone knew they needed to do, and we knew we needed to do for a long time.

But now, in the current situation, it’s been put to the top of the pile, because the pandemic and certain other factors all conspired to change the state of the market. Every organisation needs to adapt to that.

Everyone’s completely having to rethink everything they do about their business, from what their supply chains look like, to their various routes to market. Whatever you’re looking at in that world, these concepts of digitalisation, digital transformation, and anything you want to do, you immediately start looking to leverage your technology 20

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capability to provide more digital revenue streams or use digital to reduce cost. So they all automatically drive a desire for the cloud.

Now, at the same time, that’s actually only half the story. The drive to cloud is normally because people are thinking, “Oh, well, I just need to be a bit faster to get these things done, or I need to reduce my cost because I’m out of cash constraint, or I need to scale up these services that previously were small, but now everything’s being done online, so scale them up.’’ But there’s also another side, which is the applications. People want to do brand new things. How do you do it?

Well, you build or buy applications.

Those applications that are coming in need to be deployed, built, managed, and secured simultaneously as you have all your existing applications. So, we’ve got this world where we have multiple application stacks that we urgently need to be able to innovate

with. Guess what? Modern application structures, particularly when you want to integrate them with existing things, drives multi-cloud as well. So multi-cloud and the modernisation of applications are both key business imperatives, but actually, they’re just two sides of the same coin. They both basically decide that we need a multicloud reality, and we need it urgently.

The latest stats suggest that the percentage of enterprises that have moved workloads to the cloud is still below 50 percent, significantly lower than the earlier projections. Has cloud computing really achieved mainstream adoption?

Stats are always interesting, but what is interesting is how you define the cloud. You genuinely can, very easily now, particularly with the announcements that we made at VMworld 2020. You cannot actually operate a genuine cloud service from

your own data centre, one that’s seamlessly integrated with cloud environments in AWS or Azure or one of our cloud providers. Sometimes people conflate these numbers, but I find it absolutely true that there is a very significant up-shift in people who want to rapidly move large portions of their workloads into the state of clouds. That’s because they need to do things with it.

When it comes to cloud migration, is lift-and-shift the best strategy or do you need to re-platform, and re-factor your workloads for better performance?

That is a great point. This speaks to this reality that we’ve come to find. If you think about the people’s applications, there’s just going to be a bunch that they don’t need to do anything with. They’re operating just fine, but maybe they want to improve resilience, security, or improve cost efficiency. Then actually, there are many people who want to take advantage of cloud-like capabilities, even though the application is absolutely fine. We have lot of customers who want to scale up for short periods. They want to use DR capabilities in the cloud, or scale down to provision new capacity; all those things that people want to be able to use cloud-scale for and at the same time, making their IT resources far more consumable.

A case in point is Abu Dhabi Digital Authority. They’ve a lot of security compliance, and they’re not going to rush headfirst into native rewrites.

But they get a huge amount of benefit by automating their environment and creating a self-service catalogue for the public, which is essentially cloud characteristics. For that, lift and shift is absolutely fine.

The biggest shift actually is hybrid apps. In hybrid apps, let’s just think of a really simple example. Let’s say, I’ve got a database of my customers, and I’ve got some applications that hover around that database. And I

MODERN APPLICATION STRUCTURES, PARTICULARLY WHEN YOU WANT TO INTEGRATE THEM WITH EXISTING THINGS, DRIVES MULTI-CLOUD AS WELL. SO MULTICLOUD AND THE MODERNISATION OF APPLICATIONS ARE BOTH KEY BUSINESS IMPERATIVES, BUT ACTUALLY, THEY’RE JUST TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN.

really want to leverage a new artificial intelligence service that’s running only in Azure.

My problem statement is, do I rewrite all of that to get it into Azure, just so that I can use the artificial intelligence? That will take years and is risky. Or, shall I recreate that environment, lift and shift inside the Azure data centres with native integration, and just run the IO service over it. I can do that in a week. So that’s the reality of where these things are coming up.

It might be easy to move workloads to the cloud, but many CIOs are finding it difficult to migrate back. How are you helping companies to move workloads back to the enterprise?

That is what we refer to as a hybrid cloud, which is the core of the VMware cloud foundation. It’s available in your data centre, and in edge locations as a service. It’s available in AWS, Azure,

Google, Oracle, Alibaba, and in IBM. You can seamlessly move workloads back and forth as you need. There’s absolutely literally no downtime, no changes. So that solves that huge dynamic where people are concerned about repatriation from the start. Now what about the modern workloads, which operate slightly differently?

Firstly, most workloads are moving – this is where Kubernetes is actually so important because it effectively is a standard that can be deployed on multi-cloud environments.

Is Kubernetes now the de-facto platform for managing multi-cloud environments now?

It’s the default platform for how we build multi-cloud native applications.

I didn’t decide that, VMware didn’t decide that, everyone decided that.

That’s why it’s become the de-facto platform. The issue it had is that it was complex as it was built for applications developers. What we’ve been able to do is integrate that with all the enterprise operations to make it simple to deploy consistent management across multiple-clouds.

That’s what we’ve been delivering with Tanzu portfolio and yes, I think it’s done. I don’t think there’s any more debate. It has become the standard, and it’s where all the innovation is happening.

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FEATURE

WINNING STRATEGY FOR A MULTI-CLOUD WORLD HOW NOT TO STUMBLE ALONG THE PATH TO MULTI-CLOUD SUCCESS

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or CIOs in the Middle East, the question is no longer whether to move to the public cloud or not, but to decide how to leverage many cloud services available in the market.

It is becoming increasingly common for enterprises to use various cloud service flavors – SaaS, IaaS and PaaS – from a myriad of cloud service providers. It is easy to see why many organisations are heading in the direction of a multi-cloud strategy and hybrid IT environment. It helps CIOs to avoid vendor lock-in, and take advantage of the unique functions and capabilities of different service providers.

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The research firm IDC says by 2022, over 90 percent of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of onpremises/private cloud, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. IDC expects 2021 to be the year of multi-cloud, with the vast majority of enterprises deploying combinations of on-premises, off-premises, public, and private clouds as their default environments.

“Accelerated by COVID-19, we continue seeing a trend in which companies are migrating to the cloud,” says Khaled Al Melhi, CEO of Injazat.

“Even organisations who once were reticent are realising the importance

of shifting costs from CAPEX to OPEX and, particularly, the numerous benefits of multi-cloud solutions. Firstly, multicloud solutions allow firms to choose from many public cloud providers based on the service they really need and best fits their product. It allows them to ’shop around’ and choose the provider with the best offer. One that makes commercial sense to them. Secondly, it reduces the dependency on one provider and mitigates the risk of having all data compromised in a single breach.

Lastly, it allows a more flexible approach to create a highly individualised IT infrastructure that responds to the needs of each client.”

Paulo Pereira, Director, Systems Engineering - Emerging Markets and Eastern Europe at Nutanix, says cloud maturity is growing with most customers using more than 15 cloud services as part of their cloud consumption strategy, reflecting high maturity and adoption of the cloud.

“There are many reasons for organisations to choose a multi-cloud environment. Each benefit associated with a multi-cloud approach can prove instrumental in establishing or maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s digital economy. A solid management tool helps simulate migrations and provides the visibility needed to ensure a seamless inventory, security, migration, and change management,” he says.

While multi-cloud adoption has been gaining momentum, IDC’s META CIO survey 2020 shows not all businesses are sufficiently prepared to implement cloud roadmaps due to migration and skills-related challenges. Just under 30 percent of medium-to-large organisations responding to the IDC survey highlighted migration as a key a challenge, and 39 percent cited a lack of skills as the main hindrance to their cloud strategies.

Melhi from Injazat agrees that navigating a multi-cloud environment can be very complex and seem daunting even to the most seasoned IT professionals. “Faced with dozens of providers that are based around the world, ill-informed decisions can have a negative impact on the company’s infrastructure for years to come. As a long-standing provider of managed services and data centre resources, we not only understand the difficult environment our clients operate in, but we see it as our role to advise and offer guidance to find individualised solutions that work best for our clients,” he says.

As most companies start to use more than just one cloud for their workloads, what does it mean from a data security perspective? Ensuring data protection and compliance across multiple cloud environments can be tricky, and it also

Khaled Al Melhi

Paulo Pereira

gives a larger attack surface to hackers.

The security posture of major cloud providers is as good as or better than most enterprise data centres and security should no longer be considered a primary inhibitor to the adoption of multi-cloud services, according to Pereira.

“However, it is not as simple as moving on-premise workloads to the cloud.

Security teams should look to leverage the programmatic infrastructure of public cloud IaaS. Automating as much of the process as possible removes the potential for human error — generally responsible for successful security attacks. The critical driver for success in the cloud world where digital assets are ephemeral can also get provisioned and de-provisioned on demand. Keeping track of security controls needs to be programmatic for ensuring complete cloud compliance,” he says.

Melhi says though public cloud providers have a big interest in keeping their cloud environments safe from threats, a hybrid cloud solution can be a better option if data is important.

“One advantage a hybrid-cloud solution - which is a bespoke blend of public, private, remote, and on-premise cloud offers vis-a-vis the multi-cloud solution is that highly sensitive company and customer data can be stored within the organisation. But again, it all depends on

the individual needs of an organisation and the data they are handling. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to an organisation’s journey to the cloud,” he says.

IT decision makers operating multicloud environments also need to make critical budgeting and investment decisions about their cloud investments because it can easily spiral out of control. This requires a smart cloud cost management strategy, which provides a holistic view of current and forecasted consumption to avoid unwanted billing surprises.

“While public cloud providers offer some level of cloud cost visibility into the projected spend on public cloud services, a similar costing view for data centre or enterprise cloud operations would require accounting for multiple components that are scattered across disconnected data sources. Without a standardised way to provide a single view into current and future data center operating costs, key stakeholders are unable to verify if their cloud environments are running in a cost-efficient manner,” says Pereira from Nutanix.

However, strategic thinking, careful planning and mapping cloud spend against business challenges that need addressing can help you squeeze the most of your multi-cloud environment.

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KEEP ADVERSARIES OFF YOUR ENDPOINTS

VIEWPOINT

WHY AI IS KEY FOR MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS BOB DE CAUX, VICE PRESIDENT OF AUTOMATION AT IFS, ELABORATES ON HOW AI CAN TRANSFORM AND ENHANCE OPERATIONS IN THE MANUFACTURING SECTOR.

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FS predicts that half of manufacturers will be using some form of artificial intelligence (AI) by 2021. But according to a study released in January by Plutoshift, manufacturers are struggling to adequately adopt AI across their business.

Sixty percent of respondents said their company has been unable to come to a consensus on a focused, practical strategy for AI implementation, while 72 percent said it had proved harder than expected to setup the technical and data infrastructure necessary to make the project viable.

Role for ERP One factor contributing to the difficulty is that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software running their business has not previously been capable of facilitating their AI journey. Many of the manufacturers that have had success with AI tools have done so by solving specific problems in isolation, such as demand forecasting, supply chain optimisation, schedule optimisation or natural language processing (NLP)-driven customer service bots.

However, ERP tools with comprehensive AI capabilities embedded within them, can collate and analyse data from every facet of a manufacturing organisation, helping them to accurately plan ahead, optimise processes, and reduce waste. Using ERP as the vehicle for AI, manufacturers can reinvent their business around digital-first processes and disrupt their market.

The AI-enabled ERP allows manufacturers to optimise or automate end-to-end processes rather than just specific tasks —streamlining a quote to cash value chain or sales order capture to shipping. By combining classic ERP datasets such as

maintenance history with streaming data from assets and external data such as economic and weather indicators, companies can forecast and optimise margin from operating diverse asset portfolios like power grids or offshore oil rigs.

Manufacturing use cases While it is challenging, some manufacturers are already making progress with AI for predictive and prescriptive maintenance, resulting in less unplanned downtime, more efficient operations and better compliance with health, safety and environmental (HSE) regulations.

The key to predictive maintenance is determining which data, collected from machines in operation, can be used to predict future events. Everything from vibration to heat to power draw data may be used as the raw material upon which AI algorithms and stochastic methods can build, predicting breakdowns, diagnosing issues and enabling advanced reliabilitycentered maintenance (RCM). In addition, by modelling and simulating processes through a digital twin of a production facility or piece of equipment, companies can get improved visibility over a variety of scenarios and leverage AI to receive recommendations for how best to handle them.

Technical and non-technical hurdles Even the most elegantly-designed AI algorithms need data—and a lot of it—to learn from. Many manufacturers may

struggle to supply enough to build their own models, particularly if their historical data is stored in distributed or siloed environments with different data models and conventions. An ERP system can facilitate this process for customers through sound master data management, as well as providing models pre-trained on large data sets that can help drive value for end users right out of the box.

Before even reaching this stage, the manufacturers must overcome nontechnical hurdles, including identifying which business problems, data and algorithms are meaningful, and determining if these factors will continue to be significant in the future.

Selling AI to the C suite can also be a challenge, as senior business leaders may not immediately understand its full potential. The focus must move past immediate cost savings to new and transformative ways of driving value that were not possible without AI. In order to do this, companies need “bilingual citizens” who can understand the business problems to be solved and act as the “glue” between the business and more technically-oriented data scientists Seeing the future together Once a strategic direction is identified, the focus must be on change management.

Employees will need to understand and own their role in the AI transformation, while customers and other stakeholders must be educated and mentally prepared for what is to come. Stakeholders may have different fears—a loss of human contact with their vendor, diminished employment opportunities or, in the case of senior management, endless investment with no firm payback.

Employees need to see that once AI takes on mundane tasks, they can be free to concentrate on higher value responsibilities, while customers need to know these newly liberated employees will be able to spend more meaningful time with them. Finally, senior management must lead the change by finding ways to measure the value that is brought by this new technology, using AI-driven ERP to update standard metrics, KPIs and ROI calculations to reflect the new business reality.

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EVENT

FIGHTING FRAUD CXO INSIGHT ME IN ASSOCIATION WITH SHAPE SECURITY A PART OF F5, ORGANISED AN EXCLUSIVE ROUNDTABLE EVENT FOR ORGANISATIONS IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA TO DISCUSS HOW THE TRADITIONAL APPLICATION SECURITY PARADIGM HAS SHIFTED AND WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE FUTURE PREVENTION TOOLS, PROCESSES, AND RHETORIC OF APPLICATION FRAUD AND ABUSE.

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he stage for discussion was set by Larry Venter, VP of customer success and solutions engineering at Shape Security, with a short presentation on application security beyond effective bot mitigation. “One of the things we have to concentrate on is not just fighting fraud but getting an understanding of how we can effect best business outcomes in our struggle against fraud. When you think about how we have tackled fraud in the past and how we’d need to tackle it in the future, we are starting to tease out a few ways of looking at things differently. When you talk of application security beyond bot mitigation, two notions have come out – exponential outcomes and playful platforms.”

He added: “If you think about exponential outcomes, this is really where you can take a single outcome, study it, and then use it to influence second and third outcomes, etc.

Though point solutions are effective, none correlate or persist that learning through the fight against fraudulent activity. This has led to the idea of using platforms to fight fraud. We all grew up with the notion of platform as a base configuration to plug additional capabilities into. While that is still true, the idea of modern platforms is a single, collective way of tying exponential outcomes together to create the best business benefits that you need at run time.”

Demystifying playful platforms, Venter said the idea behind it is to figure out how you play with the various outcomes produced at run time in the platform to achieve the best business outcomes.

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Larry Venter

Describing what tomorrow will feel like, he said most customers tackle fraud in three definitive ways: they build things in house to defend against security breaches, invest massively in creating fraud teams and identity, which is starting to emerge as a cornerstone to everything.

“But, the problem is none of them produce a correlation and is very siloed today. We are now starting to see the emergence of this idea of how we pass data and persist learnings from security teams to fraud and identity teams. We started noticing this trend 18 months ago when some of our customers would bring into conversations with us not just security professionals but their fraud and identity professionals as well,” he said.

He pointed out another trend in fraud detection is humans acting like machines.

“It is no longer about detecting and mitigating synthetic or bot traffic but about the journey towards legitimizing users.

First, you have to determine whether they are human or not, and secondly, figure out if they are good or bad human. Then you need to legitimize that user and bring them back to the system without any friction.”

Participating in the discussion, Majed Alshodari, CISO of Allied Cooperative Insurance Group, observed that cybersecurity teams need to work closely with business teams to build reliable and secure platforms that will help to expand business operations. “You have to think of governance, proper configuration, or solutions and then create awareness to create human firewalls within your organization.”

Mir Dawar Ali, CIO of ACWA Power, said remote work trend following Covid-19 crisis has multiplied risks and endpoint protection has become more important. “We have isolated our critical infrastructure and implemented multiple layers of endpoint and network security with 24/7 monitoring to prevent fraud and other breaches.”

Hazem Awni Jarrar, CTO of King Faisal Foundation, agreed that endpoint protection is critical, especially in a heterogeneous environment where users log in from any location and any device.

“We are enabling this with multi-factor authentication, central traffic monitoring, and IAM technologies.”

Other participants in the roundtable included: Abdullah AlAttas, CIO of SAMACO Automotive; Dr. Mustafa Qurban, IT director of King Fahad Military Medical Complex Hospital; Nouf Aljalaud, IT director of Saudi Ground Services; Sunil MS, IT head of Supreme Foods; and Neil Menezes, IT head of AMAALA Company.

VIEWPOINT

RISE OF THE MACHINES ANAS ABDUL-HAIY, DIRECTOR AND DEPUTY CEO AT PROVEN, EXPLAINS WHY ROBOTICS IS A HISTORIC LEAP AND EVERY-DAY SOLUTION

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n a train of thoughts trailing back to 2002, one cannot help but come across iRobot’s Roomba, a vacuum cleaning robot and one of our first encounters with machines performing human tasks. Since then, robotics has come a long way, with its growth trajectory moving at speeds we never imagined possible. Looking back, we have visited the idea of a robot takeover in science fiction myth, with films and novels envisioning a future where robots could speak, walk, react and even feel. Interestingly, this is a description of the world we live in today; we have arrived at the future poets and writers once equated with fiction. How real is this ‘futuristic now’ in reality? Does the word ‘future’ describe progress or growth, with timelines and deadlines predicting smart cities due within time periods that are not long enough to even be fragments of history?

The future is now; it happens every day. For humanity, technology catapulted the human lifestyle and changed it drastically. For robotics, Artificial Intelligence reduced myths and legends into real physical experiences. Robots have emerged from tech labs onto the forefront of business. We no longer have to wait for the general masses to interact with robots; they do it every day when they perform simple tasks such as calling their bank. In the UAE, popular banks like Emirates NBD have adopted a Chatbot named Eva, automated to respond to repetitive client inquiries, and reducing human workload. This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what robotics is doing for the world.

Robotics falls perfectly into a puzzle of technological leaps we have made in the past twenty years, all leading to new heights for humanity; discovering new depths in the oceans and never-beforeseen territories in space to developing smart cities like NEOM, a planned area in Saudi Arabia set to feature the latest, most jaw-dropping technologies. The city derives its name from a bilingual play meaning “new future.” Its vision and early plans seem to echo the fictional depiction of utopia, further emphasizing the type of change robotics is creating on our lives.

Today, Proven Arabia is in the process of marketing humanoid robots that might be filling in typically human spots. Pepper is a semi-humanoid robot capable of reading human emotions and reacting accordingly.

Pepper’s programmed social skills can place him as a host from spaces ranging from dinner parties to hospital reception

areas. This checks the hospitality box, a field of work that requires years of experience and special skills from a human perspective. The business-minded would have been skeptical perhaps five years ago, but today an opportunity like Pepper can mean a great customer experience and a chance to cut long-term costs like monthly salary and social insurance.

Furthermore, robotics is entering the education field in two very different ways.

As a teacher’s assistant, humanoid robots can co-host classes, engage students and share exciting inputs that might be repetitive from a human perspective.

For example, NAO, a programmable humanoid robot can be incorporated in storytelling, history or geography classes.

This adds excitement and engagement in the classroom. Another way robotics is being incorporated in education is by including it in the curriculum. Robotics is a practical science that students can learn about and apply , as well as grow with. As a school subject, robotics can help educate and inform about an array of fields, such as mechanics, physics, math and engineering; and this one class can develop into a university major given its rapid growth as an industry, providing jobs for millions.

Finance, a fast growing field fueled by the latest technology, is using robotics to provide a digital workforce to match and validate data and submit finalised reports into document management systems.

Other applications are using RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to automatically settle trades and confirm allocation, a time-consuming process formerly performed manually. RPA bots are also found in finance transferring verified data into systems. Verification of licenses and identification has now become a much easier and much more productive process thanks to robotics. The process now digitises documents and uses native optical character recognition to save time and effort.

It is evident that robotics has become part of our everyday lives. From using a simple vacuum cleaner to building a smart city, there has been a massive shift in the way activities are performed, ranging from simple to complex world building.

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VIEWPOINT

UNLOCKING SUPPLY CHAIN VALUE WITH AI JIM CHAPPELL, GLOBAL HEAD OF AI AND ADVANCED ANALYTICS AT AVEVA, LOOKS AT THE BENEFITS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITHIN COMPLEX BUSINESSES

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ver the past four decades, much of manufacturing production world-wide has been organised in what has become known as Global Value Chains (GVCs). COVID-19 has struck at the core of global value chain hub regions, including China, Europe and the US. Now, as production comes back up to speed, companies are scrambling for a means of monitoring the inbound flow of product, to figure out how it can be received, stored and shipped at a time when demand for all but the most critical items has ceased. This has prompted many businesses to review their current supply chain processes and to evaluate how they might build in resilience ahead of any future disruption.

Digitalisation is essential for industry in this current climate, both to increase margins and operational performance in good times and to adapt in the bad.

AI has reached a key juncture where the real-world benefits are instantly recognisable.

Understanding where AI boosts existing processes In the industrial sector, AI application is supported by the increasing adoption of devices and sensors connected through the Internet of Things (IoT).

Production machines, vehicles, or devices carried by human workers generate enormous amounts of data.

AI enables the use of such data for highly value-adding tasks such as predictive maintenance or performance optimisation at unprecedented levels of accuracy. Hence, the combination 28

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of IoT and AI has begun the next wave of performance improvements, especially in the industrial sector.

Furthering this automation, AI uses the historical IoT data to analyse trends which can help in streamlining and improving the supply chain process through cutting-edge solutions such as AI-driven operations scheduling.

This provides recommendations to humans as to the optimal scheduling sequence, substantially reducing error and inefficiencies. Further, this AI learns as it goes and tailors its guidance to particular situations, gaining intelligence the more it runs. In addition, AI-driven robotic process automation removes the human element from repetitive tasks

BUSINESSES NOW NEED TO BE INCREDIBLY AGILE TO MANAGE THE COSTS OF TURNING DOWN PRODUCTION, FOLLOWED BY THE WORKING CAPITAL CONSTRAINTS TO THEN REBUILD PRODUCTION LEVELS AS ECONOMIES RECOVER.

in varying levels of complexity, thus furthering increases in efficiency and accuracy. Through integrated workflows, much of the supply chain process can be intelligently automated. These types of AI-driven capabilities have the potential to redefine the business supply chain process. In certain industries such as oil and gas, these types of operational gains are more important than ever in today’s climate.

Early adopters of AI have deployed these technologies on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and through many types of hybrid architectures. AI itself is not one thing but comprised of several technology types, including neural networks, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, unsupervised machine learning, supervised machine learning, reinforcement learning, transfer learning, and others. These various types of AI are applied in different ways throughout the industrial world to create targeted solutions provided as descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, and prognostic analytics.

Overcoming the fear of automation Beyond deciding where and how to best employ AI, an organisational culture open to the collaboration of humans and machines is crucial for getting the most out of AI. Trust is among the key mindsets and attitudes of successful human-machine collaboration.

Here are some practical steps to consider if a business is looking to explore the implementation of Artificial Intelligence or Machine learning capability into their business process:

somewhat distrustful or fearful of AI. It is critical that companies do everything they can to ensure that the benefits from AI-infused software are translated into the vernacular of the targeted worker.

The benefits provided by AI must be put in context, be useful and actionable. If this does not happen, then much of the value of AI is wasted.

1. Leverage AI to gain significantly more value out of existing industrial software: SCADA (an acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition generally refers to industrial control systems) and other types of control systems have become standard practice in most industrial facilities. Real-time and historical data is typically used for trending, reporting, and HMI visualisation. AI allows companies to get much more value and insight from this historian data through state-of-theart technologies such as multi-variate machine learning and deep learning. By integrating software infused with AI into existing industrial IT infrastructures, businesses can greatly amplify the value and ROI by detecting and solving operational and maintenance issues before they become larger problems that often result in unplanned downtime.

This alone can increase uptime by 10% annually, resulting in substantial avoided costs and efficiency gains.

most out of the resources they have available. Supply chain success is critical to overall business success, and an increase in efficiency can often be the difference between turning a profit or not. AI provides incredible value in this area, and businesses shouldn’t be afraid to leverage its power as an integral part of their supply chain process.

2. Allow AI to integrate into the core of the supply chain to take advantage of cutting edge capabilities: AI-driven operational scheduling and work process automation can eliminate mistakes and allow industrial companies to get the

4. Bridge the gap between AI and humans: In order to glean maximum value from AI, companies must ensure that they bridge the gap between AI and human understanding. A significant portion of the workforce today is

3. Use the cloud to ease the implementation of AI, allowing companies to scale: Artificial Intelligence is fast becoming the brains behind the cloud. Consequently, companies can quickly deploy and access a variety of industrial software capabilities that are driven by various types of AI technology.

The cloud is the delivery mechanism, and SaaS is the commercial model; however, AI drives much of the value gained. Now more than ever before, AI is becoming more easily accessible and more cost-effective to deploy into industrial environments.

5. Be open to continued innovation and change: AI capabilities continue to evolve and improve. Software will become more intelligent through combinations of AI capabilities in order to achieve more sophisticated machine-based thought and reasoning. Amid these changes, companies can reap more and more benefits through deeper insight into cost vs risk decisions, an improved understanding of business processes and associated efficiencies, and better forecasts of future events. By continuing to plan for and incorporate change, companies can take advantage of everimproving AI capabilities and insight.

Time to reflect and evolve Businesses now need to be incredibly agile to manage the costs of turning down production, followed by the working capital constraints to then rebuild production levels as economies recover. We are also seeing a period of distrust and disinformation while global supply chains are disrupted, data is key to traceability and provenance ensuring that drugs and food come from authentic sources. Better visibility allows us to understand where resources such as food and pharmaceuticals are and how we can get energy efficiently to those who need it.

Digital transformation stands to provide an immediate and compelling competitive advantage for those quick to adopt – and to demonstrate provenance. Businesses require intelligent software to address industrial pain points for value creation, productivity improvement, insight discovery, risk management, and cost optimisation. AI is a key differentiator and a propelling force behind improvements in the supply chain.

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VIEWPOINT

GETTING A GRIP ON DATA UNIFIED FAST FILE AND FAST OBJECT STORAGE IS KEY TO ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF MODERN DATA, WRITES ASSAAD EL SAADI, REGIONAL DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST, PURE STORAGE

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f we take a look back at the evolution of enterprise storage, there have been several significant milestones — we can trace the development of block storage to the early generations of computers, file storage emerging alongside the personal computer, and more recently, object storage rocketing to prominence with the take-off of the web.

Each of these storage workloads fulfill important roles. Applications that draw on file storage have grown more demanding, database applications have become more sophisticated, and the web, IoT, and demand for analytics have caused an explosion in the need for object storage.

But as the way in which we use data has shifted, the technical silos typically observed between these 30

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workloads have created challenges which can no longer be ignored. As a result, we are seeing the emergence of a new category of storage to address the needs of modern data — unified fast file and object storage (UFFO).

Driving change A modern data experience — whereby data is easily accessible, commutable and delivered where it is needed instantly — does not respect the technical silos that exist between different environments. In the past, each data workload would largely have resided and been used within its data store. For instance, database applications would have drawn on dedicated block resources; files would have stayed in file stores and web applications would have

depended upon object storage resources.

This is not to say that both file and object data stores have been neglected from innovation. Fast file emerged to consistently deliver high performance within traditional architectures for small or large files, as well as sequential or random file workloads. However, with modern data requiring all of the above at the same time, its limitations are clear.

Similarly, object storage underwent its own transformation. Initially built to house large amounts of nonmission critical data, fast object emerged in direct response to the rise of cloud-native applications. These apps used object as their default storage and so required higher performance levels to process the workloads.

of data and provide the real-time strategic insights without the fear of high latency or downtime.

2. The rise and popularity of fastobject: For real-time analytics, machine-learning or AI applications to deliver a return on investment, their performance needs to be consistently high. Fast-object storage has rapidly grown in demand for its ability to cost-effectively serve both ML and software development workflows.

But what if we could bring both together and unleash their benefits in tandem for enterprises? End users and IT leaders have asked themselves the same questions over again: if we could have multi-purpose, highperformance, low latency storage at a manageable cost from the outset, would we even have storage tiers and different storage types? The answer is obvious — who would want the operational complexity? So we must consider that as technology and economics move on, there will be architectural implications.

Enter UFFO storage These operational challenges have led to the emergence of the UFFO storage platform. Built to combine the capabilities of fast file and object stores under one roof, enterprises can now directly address their modern data requirements and power modern applications that will enable them to innovate fast and move forwards in an otherwise turbulent business environment.

Let’s take a closer look at the five trends that are driving the need for UFFO: 1. The growth of machine-generated data: As enterprises increasingly use data-intensive applications, they require storage platforms that can read, store and action large sets

3. Re-using data across applications: Unlike ever before, the highperformance and data-heavy applications that enterprises rely upon today, be it real-time analytics or AI, requires calling on multiple data sets from multiple applications.

The convergence between fast-file and object is a key facilitator here, allowing for easier data re-use and limiting the performance hit to any one application.

A SINGLE PLATFORM THAT DELIVERS FAST FILE AND OBJECT WITH THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL PERFORMANCE THESE WORKLOADS REQUIRE, AND IS UNDERPINNED

BY A FOCUS ON SIMPLICITY BOTH IN ARCHITECTURE AND MANAGEABILITY, IS WHAT THE INDUSTRY IS CRYING OUT FOR.

4. Desire for reliable and consistent data performance: Emerging technologies like machine- or deeplearning rest upon throughputhungry applications in technical computing environments. With UFFO, enterprises can house massively parallel architecture that can address the speed, reliability and performance issues often found in data-intensive applications.

5. The possible disruption caused by ransomware attacks: It’s no secret that ransomware poses a significant challenge in both the private and public sectors. By converging fast-file and fastobject under one platform, enterprises can rapidly restore information as fast as 270TB per hour, in the event of an attack, from an immutable backup copy of data. This leads to a faster return-tooperations and minimal disruption to business operations.

These five challenges are shaping the future of modern data demands.

Today, many organisations require either fast file or fast object, while some already need both. However, if one thing is for certain it’s that before long most organisations will face a set of challenges that will collectively require both.

A single platform that delivers fast file and object with the multidimensional performance these workloads require, and is underpinned by a focus on simplicity both in architecture and manageability, is what the industry is crying out for.

The ability to consolidate diverse workloads onto a single storage platform provides investment protection by addressing current and future challenges. Eliminating silos via this convergence also delivers efficiency gains both in the data center as well as for staff managing separate data environments, struggling with the complexity this brings. This is why the emergence of UFFO is of fundamental importance, and will undoubtedly power the innovation of tomorrow.

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INTERVIEW

THE LONG HAUL SANJA HORYLOVA, SALES DIRECTOR, ASBIS MIDDLE EAST, INSPIRES CUSTOMERS AND CHANNEL PARTNERS TO ADAPT, SCALE AND STRIVE FOR EXCELLENCE TO GUARANTEE LONG-TERM OPERATIONS EVEN DURING A CRISIS.

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any organisations across verticals were greatly impacted in the wake of the ongoing pandemic. While some businesses accepted the negative impacts and dwelled on discussions inclined towards doom and gloom, others, such as regional distribution giant ASBIS Middle East focused on alternative growth initiatives and how to make the best of the situation. By adapting to the evolving business landscape, ASBIS was able to sustain and grow its operations.

Sanja Horylova, Sales Director, ASBIS Middle East, says, “It was certainly a difficult time, however as a distributor with more than two decades of regional experience, we have stood the test of time and proven our reliability to our customers and partners. Over the past few months, we decided to evaluate our systems, work processes and communications to see how we could optimise them.”

According to Horylova, it has also been a time to reflect and learn.

While we are not out of the woods yet, businesses must support one another to continue growing despite challenges.

“One of the most important lessons that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic is to treat people with respect no matter what. Whether it is your employees, partners, or customers, it is important to understand where they come from and treat them humanely without passing judgments.”

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WE KNOW WE CAN DELIVER DESPITE MARKET CIRCUMSTANCES AND CUSTOMERS CAN RELY ON US BECAUSE OF THE INTEGRITY WE HAVE IN EVERYTHING WE DO AS A COMPANY. She explains that the second lesson the organisation has embraced during this time is around communications – how it is done, with whom and for how long. It is important to regularly engage with stakeholders for successful long-lasting relationships.

“We invited our partners and systems integrators to be open and honest about their challenges during the lockdown. We made it a point to understand their situation. This way we identified the best way to support them. They appreciated the open communication and thereby strengthened their trust in us.”

ASBIS also went the extra mile to introduce new impactful communication tools and invested in training their workforce to be equipped to work in the digital era.

“We are able to undertake a lot more tasks by effectively managing time and being focused. Every company is

responsible for training its employees and help them to upskill continuously.

This way it not only motivates the individual but also enables the company to expand.”

The third lesson that has been reinforced by the current situation is that innovation must be an integral part of every firm’s ethos. The distributor was conscious of letting their end-users know that even during these challenging times, the company’s operations hadn’t come to a complete standstill.

“It had only modified and then transformed – which is a natural process of evolution,” notes Horylova.

ASBIS organised many webinars and hosted open seminars to offer end customers detailed information and help them be aware on how innovative technologies that the company housed could enable them to make the transition to digital environments seamlessly.

“We have learned to be more accessible to our partners and we’ve also proven that whatever our customers require, we’ll be present to fulfil those demands.”

At the moment, the market is vulnerable economically, according to Horylova; however, she expects it to be in a recovery mode over the next few months. “This will happen in different phases for different verticals.”

ASBIS is closely monitoring the market trends and economic developments to continue to be the partner of choice for customers as

they get accustomed to operating in the new normal.

“We aim to take the way we work and communicate to new levels.

Customers will require a partner who can guide and offer solutions to help them make the necessary upgrades in this evolving work environments. We will continue to expand our portfolio to cater to these demands.”

Horylova attributes the company’s vision, integrity and deep market knowledge as factors that have helped ASBIS to stay resilient and grow its business over the past 20 plus years in the region.

“We know we can deliver despite market circumstances and customers can rely on us because of the integrity we have in everything we do as a company. No matter what the situation is, there is always room for innovation, and this is something we follow at ASBIS,” she says.

Over the coming quarters, we will see the regional distributor doubling down efforts on training channel partners and end-users to be more efficient in the new normal with novel cloud-based technologies. ASBIS will also focus on cybersecurity solutions as this is the need of the hour.

She adds, “I believe customers can be successful in today’s business landscape, only be embracing as much technology as possible.

They have to prioritize and invest in digital transformation efforts

seriously. Channel partners must realize that they are a crucial part of the supply chain and invest in skillsets and innovation. ASBIS is here to stay, and our 20-yearlegacy proves that.

We encourage customers and partners to reach out to us and converse with our highly proficient team to understand how together we can shape the future of the regional technological landscape.”

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VIEWPOINT

HOW TO PREVENT INSIDER THREATS RENÉE TARUN – DEPUTY CISO AND VICE PRESIDENT INFORMATION SECURITY AT FORTINET, ON THE NEED TO BUILD A HUMAN FIREWALL TO ADDRESS INSIDER THREATS

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uring the first half of 2020, the FortiGuard Labs team found that evolving work environments and a greater reliance on personal devices presented new opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit enterprise networks. One method that threat actors have heavily relied on as of late is the creation of legitimate-looking phishing emails that can be used to tailor and launch attacks with ease. While this is not a new tactic by any means, these types of social engineering attacks have only grown more sophisticated and damaging as employees continue to work remotely and remain isolated from their teams.

Whether they know it or not, employees can pose a significant risk to the security of enterprise networks and the data they hold. Considering that 68% of organisations feel moderate to extremely vulnerable to insider attacks, as noted in a recent study, it’s clear 34

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just how significant this issue is. In addition to those that are considered malicious insiders, these threats can also be attributed to the group known as the “accidental insiders.” According to this same study, security teams view falling victim to phishing attacks (38%) as the top cause for accidental insider threats, followed by spear phishing (21%), poor passwords (16%), and browsing of suspicious websites (7%).

In other words, opening the door for cybercriminals can be as simple as clicking on a link or downloading a file without taking the time to determine whether or not it is legitimate.

Careless and negligent behaviours can have a lasting effect on organisations, especially in the case of a data breach.

And with more employees working from home, unable to walk over to a coworker’s desk to get their thoughts on a suspicious-looking email, these individuals are more likely to be susceptible to social engineering attacks.

With this in mind, it is more important than ever that CISOs prioritise their employees’ cybersecurity awareness to help them understand the role they play in keeping networks secure, and reducing the insider threat risk.

Creating a Human Firewall Through a Culture of Security Considering employees can be the best line of defense, it is crucial that CISOs protect their organisations by including employee education and awareness in their cybersecurity strategy. By embracing this technique, leaders can ensure the workforce is prepared to face the various threats.

Regardless of job titles or roles, all employees should understand the repercussions of a security event and how it could affect the organisation and them personally. The importance of this enterprise-wide strategic approach was highlighted in a 2019 Forbes Insights survey of over 200 CISOs. When asked

which security initiatives they plan to prioritise in terms of funding over the next five years, 16% of respondents noted the creation of a culture of security.

While this is a step in the right direction, establishing a baseline for good cyber hygiene must begin with CISOs helping their employees take cybersecurity seriously. This can be achieved in the following ways: Prioritise Cyber Awareness Training Social engineering attacks are extremely prevalent across organisations simply because they work. In fact, Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that approximately one-third of all data breaches involved phishing in one way or another. To combat this risk, CISOs must educate their employees about common attacks that could appear in the form of phishing, spear phishing, smishing, or other tech support scams. Whether these lessons are provided through online meeting spaces, video chat, or email, they should be prioritised. Understanding these threats and their associated red flags will be critical in helping employees avoid falling victim to fake emails or malicious websites.

In addition to teaching about common indicators of cyber scams (i.e., the promotion of “free” deals), these training offerings should also feature simulated phishing exercises designed to test knowledge and determine which employees might need more assistance.

Through tactics such as these, employees will be better equipped to know when they are the target of a social engineering attack and can, therefore, act accordingly. Fortinet’s NSE Training Institute offers a free Information Security Awareness training service to educate employees about the increasing risks of cyberattacks and how to identify threats.

Create a Partnership Between the Security Team and Other Departments Cybersecurity cannot fall on the shoulders of the security and IT teams alone, especially as cyber threats

continue to grow more sophisticated and challenging to detect. In addition to ensuring that employees can identify phishing attacks, leaders should also encourage collaboration between the security team and other departments.

This means helping both sides understand expectations. While the security team will be the expert in terms of determining the risk and threats, other departments will be critical in helping to develop user-friendly policies that are easy to follow both in the office and in remote work environments, even for those who are not entirely cyber aware.

Through collaborative efforts, CISOs can ensure that all individuals across the organisation are not only aware of security policies but also understand the impact their actions can have on the organisation as a whole. Helping employees understand safe cybersecurity practices and the ramifications their actions can have should lead to improvements in how these individuals respond when confronted with a suspicious email or website, even while working from home.

When employees know what is expected and feel like they are a part of the team, they are more encouraged to follow best practices and help chip away at the behaviors that cause accidental insider issues, such as forgetting to change default passwords or neglecting to use strong passwords. And as more employees follow suit, the human firewall acting as the first line of defense to the organisation will only grow stronger.

Establish Straightforward Best Practices Even once employees are made aware of what to look for in the case of a social engineering attack, they may still need some guidance when it comes to next steps. While it is easy to ignore or delete a suspicious-looking email, what about those that appear normal that the receiver is still unsure about? In this scenario, CISOs should encourage employees to ask themselves certain questions to help make the right judgment call: Do I know the sender?

Was I expecting this email? Is this email invoking a strong emotion like

excitement or fear? Am I being told to act with urgency?

While these questions should help clear up any confusion in regards to whether the email is malicious, the receiver should still take extra steps to protect themselves and their organzation. This includes hovering over links to see if they are legitimate before clicking, not opening unexpected attachments, calling the sender to verify they actually sent the email, and reporting all suspicious emails to the IT or security team. By explaining these steps to their employees from the beginning, CISOs can avoid negative repercussions down the line.

Final Thoughts on Insider Threats The ability to be cyber aware is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to keeping organisations secure. Whether employees realise it or not, their actions could open the door for cybercriminals to access sensitive information, meaning passivity towards security is no longer acceptable.

By prioritising training and collaboration between departments and the security team, CISOs can lay the groundwork for a strong culture of security. Identifying suspicious behaviors, keeping devices up to date, and practicing safe cyber behavior should be built into the fabric of all job roles to ensure that the human firewall continues to stand firm.

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VIEWPOINT

SELLING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION GINA MASTANTUONO, CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER, SERVICENOW, ON WHY CFOS AND CIOS MUST COLLABORATE ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

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igital transformation should be top of mind for every C-suite executive these days. Why? Because digitising manual processes can drive exponential increases in employee engagement, fierce customer loyalty, better scale, and of course, higher profitability.

COVID-19 has only accelerated this trend. Before the pandemic, some companies got a head start on creating new, digital business models— Domino’s move to a technology-first pizza company, for example. Now, with traditional, physical business just barely emerging from shutdowns 36

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in many parts of the world, these companies are leaning into their digital businesses to bounce back.

Disney is another great example.

They had to close parks and in-person experiences during the pandemic, but grew its Disney+ streaming business to 50 million subscribers as of early April.

Done right, digital transformation can deliver great experiences for employees and customers. Lawless Research conducted a global study of 6,000 workers last year that proves this point. In the research, about 80% of employees in highly digitised companies said automation simplified work processes, enhanced efficiency, and boosted productivity. And 72%

of employees from highly automated companies said digital workflows improved customer satisfaction.

Work after COVID While no one knows exactly what work will look like after the pandemic, I foresee a hybrid future where most companies will need to support customers and engage employees through both centralised and virtual work. Companies that are further along in their digital transformation will be better equipped to manage these evolving experiences.

Digital workflows are the core of any digital transformation model. Let’s be honest, though. Digital transformation

isn’t easy, nor is it free. Companies worldwide will spend nearly $7.4 trillion on digital transformation programs between 2020 and 2023, according to IDC. If you’re a CIO, how can you have confidence in your digital strategy, and how can you advocate for the necessary budget?

When IT met finance That’s where CFOs (like me!) come in.

I believe the CFO-CIO relationship is a critical piece of a successful digital transformation journey. For the 50% of CIOs that report to the CFO, the complexity and criticality of these conversations increase significantly.

The complexity and criticality of these conversations increase significantly.

So, how can you navigate a conversation with your CFO about digital transformation, regardless of your reporting hierarchy? Follow these five tips, and I think you’ll hit on the main points your CFO cares about.

CFOs WANT TO KNOW EXACTLY HOW DIGITISATION WILL BOOST CUSTOMER LOYALTY AND EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY. THE MAJORITY OF US ARE DATA DRIVEN. WHILE COST ALWAYS MATTERS, MEASURABLE BUSINESS OUTCOMES ARE JUST AS IMPORTANT.

Focus on business outcomes CFOs want to know exactly how digitisation will boost customer loyalty and employee productivity. The majority of us are data driven. While cost always matters, measurable business outcomes are just as important.

Solve cross-company problems A CFO wants to see solutions that can help break down departmental siloes and solve problems across the enterprise. If you ask me to fund a digital program that only benefits one business unit, you won’t get more than five minutes of our next Zoom meeting.

Trust me, the conversation will go much better if you propose a crossorganisation platform that integrates with existing software to improve business outcomes.

Integrate advanced tech An important component of digital transformation is the ability to apply machine intelligence to make work, work better. CFOs are more likely to fund digital solutions that leverage AI

and machine learning because they power more intelligent and forwardlooking decisions, which leads to faster and easier solutions. And yes, save money along the way.

These advanced technologies, when integrated into core platforms, accelerate the effectiveness of your digital workflows.

Deliver omni-channel services Companies were shifting to mobile platforms before the pandemic, because employees and customers were increasingly demanding work experiences that match the ease and simplicity of their favourite consumer apps. In the COVID-19 era, companies especially need mobile service delivery because fewer employees are in physical workplaces.

A distributed workforce can still be a productive workforce though, if they have consumer-grade tools to help them get their work done anywhere, anytime.

Mobile in particular offers critical functionality as economies reopen and employers consider a return to physical workplaces. Companies will need to put processes in place that ensure workplace readiness and employee health and safety. Digital workflows can simplify and automate these tasks – which include everything from enforcing physical distancing to contact tracing, office cleaning, and assigning resources like desks, conference rooms, and PPE. Articulate your path to business value I tease our CIO that he channels his “inner CFO” when he talks about the difference between “interesting” and “compelling” business conversations.

CFOs don’t really want to hear about how upgrading some legacy IT tool will make your team marginally more efficient. We care much more about tangible business outcomes, strong ROI, and fast time to value.

How are you improving productivity?

Will there be return we can reallocate?

Can we count on these benefits long-term (at least five years ahead)?

That’s a compelling conversation right there. So next time you’re in a budget meeting with your CFO, figure out how to focus the dialogue on success outcomes. At the end of the day, that’s how your digital transformation project will get funded. More importantly, it’s how you’ll create value for the business.

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VIEWPOINT

WHEN GOOD JUST ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH MARTIN MACKAY, SVP, EMEA AT PROOFPOINT, ON HOW TO BUILD A ROBUST CYBER DEFENCE

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here is a common misconception among organisations globally that having a ‘good’ security posture will keep their allimportant business data safe and cyber criminals out. But what does ‘good’ really look like, and is it good enough?

Today’s threats target people, not infrastructure. So, while technical solutions and controls remain crucial in building a robust cyber defence, they are just one aspect of a broad and deep barrier against the latest threats.

Whether via malicious links, account compromise, or social engineering, threat actors are turning their attention to what, for many organisations, is the last line 38

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of defence. A last line that is often illprepared. Its people.

All it takes is one click, from one employee. No matter how robust your technical systems are, cyber criminals have just found their way into your organisation. In fact, according to Proofpoint’s recent survey of IT leaders in the UAE, 55% of CSOs and CISOs cited human error and lack of security awareness as one of the biggest IT security risks.

It is therefore crucial to have in place an approach that puts people at the heart of cyber defence – ensuring employees are not just able to spot and deter attacks but are acutely aware of their role in keeping our organisations safe.

Navigating a new normal With millions more employees working from home, outside the protections of the office environment, organisations worldwide have had their attack surfaces widen, leaving them more exposed to cyber threats during this global crisis than ever before.

Cybercriminals are all too aware of this fact and have wasted no time exploiting the opportunity.

Using social engineering attacks, cybercriminals trick employees so they can steal credentials, siphon sensitive data, reroute pay checks and fraudulently transfer funds. No matter the technical solution in place, one click is all it takes for a cyber attack to be successful.

Dubbed the most expensive issue in cybersecurity, one method of email attack that has spiked in recent years is Business Email Compromise (BEC).

According to the latest Proofpoint research, 15% of UAE CSOs and CISOs reported BEC as one of the leading methods of cyber attack against their organisation last year. This form of attack is fast growing in popularity for two simple reasons – it works, and it pays.

Building tomorrow’s defences today When it comes to defending against BEC attacks, these exceptional

circumstances have shown many organisations’ cyber defence to be anything but. Large remote workforces, increasingly reliant on email, have exposed a significant weak spot which many are failing to address.

People and email are the attack surface of choice for the modern cyber criminal. Most defence strategies do not reflect this. Despite over 90% of advanced threats stemming from email, just 10% of cybersecurity spending is focused in this area.

Those on the frontline suffer from a similar lack of investment.

According Proofpoint’s UAE CISO Report, 75% of the organisations admitted to training their employees on cybersecurity best practices as little as twice a year or less.

This must change. We cannot expect our people to protect our organisations without equipping them with the tools and knowledge to do so.

Just as cyber criminals have taken this opportunity to hone their attacks, so too must we take this opportunity to hone our defence. We cannot build cybersecurity strategies on the principles of yesterday.

Our strategies must reflect the threat landscape of today and be ready for the attacks of tomorrow.

Putting people at the heart of your defence Email-based attacks were causing devastation long before the coronavirus pandemic and will continue to do so long after.

However, the by-product of enforced mass remote working has presented an opportunity to examine the most common attacks we face – and the controls we put in place to defend against them.

The fact that network and endpoint security remains the primary

THE FACT THAT NETWORK AND ENDPOINT SECURITY REMAINS THE PRIMARY AREA OF FOCUS FOR SECURITY TEAMS, DESPITE BEING FAR FROM THE PRIMARY FOCUS FOR CYBER CRIMINALS, SHOULD CAUSE CONCERN. area of focus for security teams, despite being far from the primary focus for cyber criminals, should cause concern.

It’s past time for a new way of thinking. The old tactic of defending the perimeter is obsolete. There is no longer a perimeter to defend. Our people are mobile, accessing corporate data from everywhere on all sorts of devices, networks and platforms outside of the traditional corporate network. People are at the heart of most cyber attacks. It is only logical to place them at the heart of cyber defence.

Detecting and deterring common threats requires a vigilant, knowledgeable workforce. This is only possible when training goes beyond general awareness of common threats and instils in end users an understanding of how their behaviour can be the difference between a successful attempt and a successful attack.

A ‘good’ cyber defence really isn’t good enough to protect against today’s dynamic threat landscape, as organisations globally continue to find out. Harming your business is the primary aim of cyber attackers. If defending it is not at the forefront of all users’ minds, there will only ever be one winner.

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VIEWPOINT

AN ACTIVE APPROACH TO SECURITY ANTHONY PERRIDGE, VP OF INTERNATIONAL AT THREATQUOTIENT, SAYS CYBER THREAT INTELLIGENCE IS PAYING RICH DIVIDENDS TO USERS.

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n the battle to protect businesses from relentless attempts at infiltration, theft and disruption by cybercriminals, knowledge is power. Over recent years, this fact has been formalised through the growing adoption of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) With the creation of teams and implementation of CTI programmes, organisations aim to build a proactive defence posture and stay one step ahead of adversaries. The 2020 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence survey sponsored by ThreatQuotient, analyses the state of play in cyber 40

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threat intelligence worldwide, indicates that we are entering an exciting period. CTI shows strong signs of maturing and cementing its place in the cybersecurity arsenal. 82% of survey respondents say their CTI activities are delivering value. We are also seeing organisations become more strategic about how they implement the intelligence process and a growing recognition of the value of collaboration with the wider threat intelligence community. The following are my key highlights from this year’s research findings.

CTI is coming of age There were twice as many respondents to this year’s survey compared to 2019 and more respondents than ever before reported that they are operating a CTI programme in their organisation.85% overall said that they had some form of CTI resource, with nearly half (49.5%) having a formal, dedicated team. A further 27% have shared responsibility with staff drawn from other teams, while 9% have a solo CTI analyst. This is a welcome sign that CTI is accelerating as a component of companies’ cybersecurity strategies.

Also encouraging was the fact that the percentage with a dedicated team has risen steadily in the past three years. Investment in headcount is on the rise, indicating that businesses are committing to CTI for the long term.

In-house teams are not going it alone, either. 61% of respondents said CTI tasks are handled by a combination of in-house and service provider teams, an increase of 54% in 2019. This combination of external resources and internal expertise means organisations can better understand and address the threats they face.

Organisations are becoming more strategic about CTI At the start, and the heart, of an effective CTI programme are clearly defined intelligence requirements (IRs).

These identify the specific questions and concerns to be addressed by the programme to ensure the right data is collected and the appropriate focus is placed on the relevant threat areas by analysts. They are critical in providing the business-specific context for CTI programmes so that they deliver the most valuable outcomes for that organisation.

So it is encouraging that this year’s survey found the percentage of respondents reporting that they have clearly defined intelligence requirements has jumped 13.5%, from 30% in 2019 to 44% in 2020. Another positive sign is the growth in the number of contributors to CTI requirements – there was more input from security operations teams, incident response teams and C-Suite executives, showing that a diverse group of stakeholders is helping to drive both the tactical and strategic direction of the CTI programme. The next stage in maturity will be to see more regular and structured reviews of intelligence requirements, as most still review IRs on an ad hoc or unknown basis.

Intelligence sources, automation and management advances - but more to be done When it comes to collecting data to

answer the intelligence requirements, there has been a jump in the percentage consulting both open source feeds and those from CTIspecific vendors. There has also been an increase in organisations producing threat intelligence data in-house to complement externally sourced data – more than 40% of organisations said they both produce and consume threat intelligence data.

With this wealth of data at their disposal, the survey asked how organisations process high volumes of intelligence to gain actionable insight, and the degree of automation used to lift the burden from CTI teams. The survey shows that automation is still some ways off, with the majority of processing tasks completed either manually or semi-automated. While basic tasks such as data de-duping are commonly automated, more complex activities, such as reverse-engineering samples are a manual undertaking for 48% of respondents.

In CTI management, the picture is slightly better with more organisations reporting automation in SIEM platforms and CTI management platforms. As CTI continues to prove its value, we would anticipate seeing more automation and tuning of tools to fit the context, priorities, and specific threats that businesses face. This supports analysts to focus their efforts where human evaluation is most effective and respond more proactively to threats.

Measurement is proving a challenge Another sign that an approach is

maturing is when focus shifts from operational considerations around what tools and teams can do, to measuring the effectiveness of their actions. Here the survey found that there is still some way to go. While a resounding 82% of respondents find value in CTI, only 4% had processes in place to measure effectiveness. However, the growing rigour in identifying clear intelligence requirements can offer a good starting point here. Once these are set, goals can be set based on answering the IRs through the CTI programme.

Collaboration is critical Perhaps the most encouraging finding from the SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence survey is confirmation that collaboration is being embraced as a core component of security programmes. 45% reported membership of an Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (ISAC) which is a high percentage, given that they are not available in all verticals or territories.

The main benefits noted are timely and relevant threat information and the ability to network with contacts at other member organisations.

Now, more than ever, the uncertain cyber and physical environment and new threats emerging out of the disruption of COVID-19 pandemic mean that intelligence analysts need to share best practice data and strategies to overcome threats.

Ultimately, the 2020 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence survey offers robust evidence that CTI is increasing in adoption and is proving its worth to a greater number of organisations than ever before. When threat intelligence is effectively collected, integrated, automated, prioritised and shared between analysts and wider stakeholders, organisations become more agile and effective at addressing the threats they face. We are in an exciting period for the industry, where organisations can see real, measurable impact from their accelerating investment in CTI teams and tools and we look forward to seeing further evidence of success in next year’s survey.

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VIEWPOINT

COMPLEXITY IS THE WORST ENEMY OF CYBERSECURITY MULTI-VENDOR SECURITY ENVIRONMENTS AND AN UNMANAGEABLE NUMBER OF SECURITY ALERTS ARE CAUSING CYBERSECURITY FATIGUE IN IT SECURITY SPECIALISTS, AND HARMING ORGANIZATION’S ABILITY TO PROTECT THEMSELVES, WRITES FADY YOUNES, CYBERSECURITY DIRECTOR, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA, CISCO

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eeping up with cybersecurity is one of the biggest challenges facing CIOs today. Managing cybersecurity, and your organization is safe from the latest threats requires investment in skilled resources and time.

Managing cybersecurity is made more difficult by the need to support a complex environment of multiple 42

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security products from multiple vendors.

Today’s businesses need to protect many different aspects of their operations, and getting the best protection for each can require deploying best-ofbreed solutions from different vendors.

Typically, businesses have addressed new threats by adding another solution to their network, whether that solution can integrate with the existing IT environment or not. Managing multiple security

solutions, with multiple sets of alerts, and ensuring there are no gaps in coverage, is a major challenge for CISOs. In Cisco’s sixth annual CISO Benchmark Report, released in February this year, most organizations reported that they found managing a multi-vendor environment to be challenging, with 28% saying it was “very challenging”. Just 17% of respondents said it is easy to manage

a multi-vendor environment down from 26% in 2017.

The report found that while the majority of organizations (86%) are using between 1 and 20 different security technologies, 13% said they are using over 20, and 4% of companies report using a staggering 50 or more different security solutions.

Managing so many different vendors is not just a burden on time and resources for the IT department, but can also become a factor in reducing the effectiveness of cybersecurity protection as well. Dealing with integration issues and a high volume of security alerts can distract security engineers from tackling other challenges they face, such as public cloud issues, mobile device management and dealing with patching and update cycles in a timely fashion.

Failure to integrate multiple security solutions can also leave gaps in coverage, or create a situation where the IT team doesn’t properly understand what protection a particular solution is providing or how it works, impacting visibility and awareness into the true security state of the network.

An overly-complex IT environment has also been identified as a factor in ‘cybersecurity fatigue’. Forty-two percent of respondents to the CISO Benchmark report said they are suffering from cybersecurity fatigue, defined as virtually giving up on proactively defending against malicious actor. Ninety-six percent of those who reported suffering cybersecurity fatigue cited managing a multi-vendor environment as being a cause of their burnout.

It is easy to see how complex environments can easily overwhelm the IT team. From 2017 to 2020, the percentage of respondents reporting that they receive over 100,000 security alerts per day rose from 11% to 17%. Only around one-third (36%) say they get less than 5,000 alerts per day. High volume of alerts is clearly a factor in cybersecurity fatigue, with 93% of sufferers saying they get over 5,000 alerts per day.

Addressing these overly-complex security environments is essential for IT departments that want to take back

REMOVING THE BURDEN OF COMPLICATED MULTIVENDOR SECURITY ENVIRONMENTS CAN REDUCE CYBER FATIGUE, AND GIVE THE CISO THE TIME TO WORK SMARTER, STREAMLINE DEFENSE AND FOCUS ON PREVENTION AS WELL AS DETECTION AND REMEDIATION. control of their security environments.

One of the key trends highlighted by the CISO benchmark is vendor consolidation – since 2017, the number of CISOs saying they are using 20 or less vendors has increased by 7%, and there has been a 6% decrease in those saying they use 21-50 solutions. Reducing the number of vendors can bring clarity to the security environment and help ease the burden on the IT team.

Another strategy for gaining more control over your security landscape

is automation. CISOs are looking to automate security processes such as asset discovery, vulnerability remediation, detecting anomalous activity, and especially managing the volume of alerts and updates. Human intervention is still required to set up and monitor automated processes, but it clearly offers a solution – 77% of respondents to our CISO Benchmark study said that they are planning to increase automation to simplify and speed up response times in their security ecosystems.

To really manage the complexity of IT environments with multiple vendors, CISOs are looking for solutions that can integrate, automate and consolidate their entire estate into one manageable whole. Cisco’s SecureX platform is one such solution, an open, scalable, cloudbased platform, that integrates security solutions from multiple vendors, and enables organizations to add in best-inclass functionalities direct from Cisco to meet new threats and requirements.

A single platform with integrated threat and security management gives the security team full visibility into their IT environment across network, endpoint, cloud and applications, and allows them to work smarter by automating and prioritizing security alerts, to reduce the impact of cyber fatigue.

By integrating all of its security solutions under one platform, including solutions from multiple vendors, a business can preserve IT investment, at the same time as gaining a better understanding of any duplication or unused capabilities, allowing them to eliminate redundancies and optimize usage of existing solutions and further streamline the environment.

Security challenges are not going to get any less complex, but with the right strategic approach, security environments do not have to become more complex. Removing the burden of complicated multi-vendor security environments can reduce cyber fatigue, and give the CISO the time to work smarter, streamline defense and focus on prevention as well as detection and remediation.

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PRODUCTS

Nokia 8.3 5G HMD Global, the home of Nokia phones, has announced its first 5G-enabled smartphone, the Nokia 8.3 5G which will be available in the UAE from mid-October starting at AED 2,099.

Coming with a powerful PureView quad-camera with ZEISS optics, the Nokia 8.3 5G lets users capture it all.

The Nokia 8.3 5G will always be ready for what’s next, covering the highest number of 5G New Radio bands yet, ready for both standalone and non-standalone 5G network deployment combinations that operators around the globe are rolling out. This ensures more people can enjoy the fast, reliable connectivity of 5G for streaming and gaming wherever they are. Debuting ZEISS Cinema capture and editor and bringing low-light video recording and OZO audio recording, the Nokia 8.3 5G is the ideal smartphone for creators. Inspired by Finnish roots, the Nokia 8.3 5G comes in Polar Night – taking inspiration straight from the arctic sky.

HP LASERJET ENTERPRISE 400 SERIES HP Inc has introduced the HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series, delivering an enterprise and managed-class experience in a small footprint for remote working and new office configurations.

HP’s smallest enterprise multi-function printer, the new LaserJet series provides: • HP Sure Start with automatic self-healing that protects, detects, and selfrecovers from vulnerabilities and attacks.

• HP Trusted Platform Module (TPM), providing secure device identity with certificate private keys, strengthening protection of encrypted credentials and data.

• Security features goes beyond just the hardware, including the cartridge, for an end-to-end secure printing system that protects your network and information.

In addition to the new devices, HP also announced a new version of HP FutureSmart firmware – enabling a consistent, secure operational system across HP’s entire enterprise printer series. Launching with the LaserJet Enterprise 400 series, FutureSmart 5 provides customers investment protection, additional security protections, and readiness for advanced cloud-based workflows.

The HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series – available as a single function and MFP, mono and color and in versions adapted to Managed Print Services fleets – is expected to be available worldwide starting in December. HP FutureSmart 5 is expected to be available in December.

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Belkin SOUNDFORM Belkin, the connected things division within the Belkin International and Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), has introduced the SOUNDFORM True Wireless Earbuds, the newest addition to its portfolio of audio products in the UAE. The SOUNDFORM True Wireless Earbuds provide the freedom of true wireless audio connectivity with immersive sound and a comfortable in-ear fit. With one-step Bluetooth pairing, intuitive touch controls, and sweat and splash resistance, these wireless earbuds are ideal for any situation – whether you’re on a video call, stepping out for a quick jog or enjoying a movie. The compact charging case provides an extended charge when you need it, up to 24 hours of playtime.

Key features: • Three sizes of ear tips providing ideal fit, all-day comfort and noise isolation • One-step Bluetooth pairing and disconnecting for ease and convenience • IPX5-rated sweat- and splash-resistant for use without worry • Intuitive touch controls for a true device-free experience • Up to five hours of non-stop playtime; compact charging case provides 24 hours of listening per charge The SOUNDFORM True Wireless Earbuds join the SOUNDFORM Elite Hi-Fi Smart Speaker + Wireless Charger and BOOST- CHARGE Wireless Charging Stand + Speaker in Belkin’s newest portfolio of audio innovations. Belkin’s SOUNDFORM audio portfolio is characterised by premium sound quality, enhanced convenience and timeless style.

The SOUNDFORM True Wireless Earbuds are now available for purchase at leading retailers and e-commerce platforms in the UAE at AED 249.

WD Purple storage Western Digital has announced its expanded family of WD Purple storage solutions, including the industry’s highest capacity 18TB surveillance HDD for DVRs, NVRs and analytics appliances, and the 1TB WD Purple SC QD101 microSD card for AI-enabled cameras. Setting the bar for smart video applications, all WD Purple drives are optimised to help reduce frame loss and pixelation, improve overall video playback and enhance streaming for 24×7 workloads – from ingest to backup and longterm storage – as the industry broadens the use of deep learning and analytics.

The new WD Purple 18TB HDD is designed for NVRs and video analytics appliances as well as GPU-enabled devices that can deliver both real-time and post analytics applications. Offering 28 percent more capacity than the previous generation, the new 18TB drive has room to spare for storing video, reference images and metadata at the edge, to support more effective AI. The WD Purple 1TB microSD card is designed for AIenabled cameras, surveillance cameras and edge devices, serving as primary or back-up data storage. It is based on Western Digital’s advanced 96-layer 3D NAND technology, and delivers a combination of ultra-high endurance with up to 500 P/E cycles and comes in 1TB, 512GB, 256GB, 128GB, 64GB and 32GB capacities.

The WD Purple 18TB HDD will be available in October 2020, and the WD Purple SC QD101 1TB microSD card is expected to be available in November 2020.

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BLOG

NEW VISTAS FOR GROWTH

SUNIL PAUL, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF FINESSE, SAYS THE RECENT PEACE DEAL BETWEEN THE UAE AND ISRAEL HERALDS A NEW DAWN FOR TECH AND CYBERSECURITY LANDSCAPES.

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n August this year, the United Arab Emirates and Israel have reached a landmark accord, which normalizes the trade ties between the two countries. The diplomatic breakthrough between the two nations will see stronger collaboration and cross-border investments across multiple sectors.

The UAE became the third Arab country to open diplomatic ties with the majorityJewish state, after Egypt and Jordan. The Gulf nation has signed an overarching trade agreement with specific deals in aviation, logistics, healthcare, and agriculture, among others in the pipeline. Perhaps, the most important industry that will open up tremendous opportunities on both sides is technology.

The UAE and Israel both share a thirst for innovation and economic diversification through technology.

A report by Israel’s Central Bureau and Statistics and Economy Ministry highlighted that the country’s exports had hit a record of $114 billion in 2019 with the high-tech sector leading the growth. Over the years, Israeli-founded tech firms have made great strides across the business world. Data from the Israel Venture Capital Research Center revealed that the Israeli tech sector has been a magnet for investors even during the pandemic, with VC funding rising by more than $5.25 billion in the first half of 2020.

On the flip side, with the UAE being the Arab world’s second-largest economy and the highest GDP per capita as well as a tech-driven economic vision, investors

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in the Gulf nation are well-positioned to seize the vast opportunities in Israel’s tech ecosystem.

In recent years, Israeli and Emirati businesses have quietly struck up a working relationship, though the ties are indirect. Often, Israeli tech firms rely on headquarters located outside of the Middle East or through third-party resellers. With the normalization of UAE-Israel relations, these partnerships can be more open and fruitful.

The Abraham Accord could also lead to increased mutual investments and collaboration in areas such as agrotech, fintech, healthcare, artificial intelligence, and more.

Cybersecurity is another key area that both nations are planning to heavily focus on. Israeli vendors that specialize in cyber defense such as CyberArk, Cybereason, and Check Point Software Technologies have long penetrated the Gulf market, albeit by indirect means.

With a wealth of tech firms staffed by ex-military hackers, Israel offers worldclass cyber defence technologies and expertise that many UAE businesses are keen to take advantage of.

A welcomed pairing While the treaty is still in its early stages, many UAE businesses and tech funds have already expressed interest in investing and working with Israeli firms and vice versa. A newly created online platform for the UAE-Israeli Business Council has drawn in more than 2,000 members with an influx of inquiries from both sides.

Following the signing of the trade agreement, deals have also immediately started to flow. A good example is Abu Dhabi’s APEX National Investment – the company signed a commercial agreement with Israel’s TeraGroup to research COVID-19 and develop a speedy testing device. Several Israeli fintech firms have also caught the eye of UAE investors. One of them is Salaryo – a fintech start-up that provides financing for small businesses and freelancers, which raised $5.8 million in a new funding round that includes Dubai-based KEN Investments.

Most recently, UAE-based foreign exchange and digital payments firm Finablr, which owns popular remittance house UAE Exchange, has accepted a takeover offer from Israeli-owned technology and software solutions company Prism Advance Solutions.

Building bridges in the Gulf It is also worth noting that during the same month, Bahrain – a country with a booming tech sector – became the second GCC nation to normalize relations with Israel after the UAE. This further amplifies numerous prospects that building ties with Israel bring.

More than mutually beneficial trade partnerships, the UAE-Israel deal could also pave the way for further Israeli-Arab technology cooperation throughout the Middle East and lead to new diplomatic ties. Doing so will lead to greater opportunities for tech entrepreneurs, investors, and channel partners alike.

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