EC-MEA May 2022

Global CISO Forum

ANNUAL GCC SECURITY SYMPOSIUM 2022

25+ speakers and panelists and over a dozen vendor partners participated in the sixth edition of the Symposium.

A month of developments

Cloud has disrupted legacy business models and legacy business applications. And while vendors and distributors claim to be incentivizing channel partners to move towards elastic and agile sales models, this movement has been slow. Now HCI and cloud solutions vendor, Nutanix has announced some truly innovative changes to its partner programme.

Christian Alvarez at Nutanix points out legacy sales methods and incentive models are quickly becoming a thing of the past.What is more important than the initial sale is the lifetime value of a customer. Nutanix has moved away from a traditional tiered partner programme to a 100% competency-based programme.

Nutanix has spent the past two years shifting resellers away from legacy compensation models, and the Elevate programme accelerated this.The Elevate program emphasises expertise and capability over size and pays on a recurring-revenue basis.

Nutanix has introduced a concept called disaggregating the incentive stack that motivates partners to sell more and keeps them in better touch with their customers.Nutanix could reward partners with premium incentives along the lifetime of the customer’s journey.Nutanix thinks that disaggregating the incentive stack will create more sustained value for customers.

According to Alvarez, another transformative approach in the Nutanix partner programme, is the sell-out of hardware products from OEM partners. Scaling a business and sustaining profitability requires partnerships that give customers a simpler way to drive their digital transformation.These alliances will be driven by not only customers of today, but the customers of tomorrow.

Nutanix has forged strategic relationships with Red Hat and Citrix which have both proved to be of great value.Nutanix continues to support VMware ESXi and Horizon View, to enable customer choice. Nutanix partners with AWS and Microsoft Azure because cloud is no longer a destination but a collection of capabilities.

The threat of cyberwar features in this issue once again. On 30 March, Amit Yoran, Chairman and CEO of Tenable, presented a written Testimony to US House Committee on Homeland Security. In his testimony, Yoran points out that ransomware against critical infrastructure providers is incredibly profitable for cybercriminals. Ransomware is also a flexible weapon, demonstrated by Russian-attributed malware BlackEnergy and CrashOverride.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency identified 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the US. While differences can be found in security readiness of individual banks, the overall sector is resilient as a critical infrastructure. There is no singular defence paradigm that could effectively be applied across all the sectors

Inside the US, financial services and energy sector, average about the same number of critical vulnerabilities per device. Healthcare and manufacturing, average twice as many critical vulnerabilities per device.

Turn these pages to read more about Global CISO Forum’s annual GCC Security Symposium 2022; Arcserve and The African Institute; Logitech’s disruptive approach to collaboration; And why business performance and IT stack visibility are interlinked; along with all the latest monthly news in channel, products, real life announcements, amongst others.

Happy summer learnings! ë

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Multiple vendors may be responsible for a single customer experience

BRILLIANT OP TICS. AMA ZING DESIGN.

Increase in video meetings in 20201

Information workers who rarely or never use video in meetings3

Growth of UC meetings with video from 2019 to 20202

Information workers who use video at least once a day3

ADVANTAGES OF R ALLY BAR

Superior Audio and Video: A video bar engineered for midsize rooms, featuring a motorized PTZ lens, adaptive beamforming mics, support for two

Flexible Deployment Options: Run meetings in appliance mode without a computer for Microsoft Teams, Zoom, GoTo, Pexip, or RingCentral Or, connect to a computer or laptop and use with any software.

Simple Setup and Cable Management: Place on a table or credenza, or add a wall or TV mount for a sleek space-saving set up Integrated cable management keeps connections tight.

Easy to monitor, manage, and support: Stay informed and ahead with metrics like people count.

MAKE EVERYONE LOOK AMAZING.

Medium room solution with Logitech Tap for Microsoft Teams Rooms.

CONTENTS

CHANNEL STREET

28-31

Nutanix: Transforming channel partners to success partners

INNOVATION

32

du: Integrating AI, multi-cloud services for CISOs

REAL

50-52

25+ speakers, panellists participate at Global CISO Forum’s annual GCC Security Symposium 2022

The Africa Institute: Student enrolments drives migration to scale out systems

RESEARCH

58-61

Full-stack observability: Why business performance and IT stack visibility are interlinked

GUEST COLUMN

65-67

Amit Yoran: Securing US critical infrastructure against Russian cyber threats

68-69

MSSPs need to use XDR for shared-information system

70-71

How open source can help enterprises withstand shocks

TOP THREE CONSIDERATIONS FOR BUILDING AN AI ARCHITECTURE

While UAE could see AI activity make up as much as 14% of its economy, the largest impact in the region, not every organisation is as AI-ready as the next.

We often talk of the culture changes necessary to become a digital business, but first, stakeholders need to consider where they are in terms of data architecture. Is it agile? Can it cope with rapid changes? Can it evolve with the enterprise’s data ambitions? Are your data professionals considering all the possible consumers of data down the transformation-journey highway, such as applications, APIs, and websites?

Here are three important recommendations in building the data architecture that is right for your organisation.

#1 CLOUD VERSUS CENTRALISATION

Larger organisations tend to have multiple warehouses for data, and waste precious time trying to distil these stores into a single, central source. They believe governance is a prerequisite for value when it comes to data and AI initiatives, and that data quality needs to be addressed before procuring data-science tools or machine-learning platforms.

For some organisations, especially older companies with a lot of historical data, it may not be practical to wait until cloud migration has completed before adding value with AI. Data migration to the cloud can carry inherent risk and may be more expensive than advertised if project managers insist on moving every datapoint collected over decades.

We tend to an organisation with, 60 to 80% of their data in an analytics platform and the rest sitting somewhere else. Cloud migration for data should always be for a predetermined business reason. The designers of data architectures should require it to fulfil some specific use case; otherwise, it may be wasteful and expose the organisation to unnecessary risk.

#2 DEMOCRATISATION OF DATA

It is a common misconception that all data can be unified in a single platform automatically. In fact, the enterprise-wide homogenisation of data is subject to several factors, and only really possible with the involvement of human judgement. Instead of obsessing over unification, the overarching goal should be the expansion of the number of people within a business that can independently derive insights and value from data.

The architecture strategy should create conditions under which nontechnical staff can gather data themselves, even from multiple sources, and merge it into something useful. Meanwhile, the data platform should be able to report clearly on who is using data so that costs and regulatory compliance are addressed.

#3 BUSINESS USE CASES

Making technical decisions in advance of, or in isolation of, business considerations is an age-old mistake in the IT world. Indeed, the emergence of some shadow IT can be traced back to this upsidedown approach, as department heads try to work around the architecture to add value through data on their own terms.

The nature of the business and a comprehensive inventory of the data on hand should be the principal deciding factors in formulating use cases. You should always be asking what the business objective is for collecting and storing data. You may even sell it. But if you choose to use it, you need to understand how you will use it before specifying and selecting a platform for the job.

WAY FORWARD

A central, controllable environment that can adapt to a range of user profiles, from low-code analysts to no-code contributors, is the foundation for a business. While control is centralised, it is important that the platform not require data storage to be centralised. The platform’s ability to add value quickly will ensure acceptance by all stakeholders, which is an important step in the culture change that must follow if the business is to gain an advantage through AI.

Because of the centralisation issues previously discussed, the platform should ideally be capable of on-premises or cloud-native operation and have broad availability on, and compatibility with, major hyperscale providers such as AWS and Microsoft. This will ensure organisations can leverage scalable systems such as SQL databases, Spark, and Kubernetes. ë

JAD KHALIFE

Sales Engineering Director Middle East, Dataiku.

Data migration to the cloud can carry inherent risk and may be more expensive than advertised

MAPPING YOUR ORGANISATION’S BUSINESS WITH CYBERSECURITY THREATS

The vision of a business will drive its innovation, whilst its baseline ofsecurity practices will help to protect the organisation as it moves forward.

Major cybersecurity attacks and their impacts are being reported daily by global media. However, many of these attacks, are often a consequence of a series of operational lapses and oversights at the targeted enterprise.

INNOVATION AND SECURITY PRACTICES

The vision and strength of a business will drive its innovation forward, whilst its baseline of investing and building security practices will help to protect the organisation as it moves forward. However, most organisations struggle to balance these two worlds. Or in other words, struggle to effectively balance innovative business operations with security safeguards needed to protect them.

A typical forward-looking discovery process would be the classification of an organisation’s crown jewels, foot printing their visibility, and further identifying the surface and landscape through which they are the most vulnerable to internal and external attacks.

CROWN JEWELS, DATA, AND ASSETS

Moving forward, innovative business practices are generally always built around the core competence of an organisation, typically referred to as the crown jewels of an organisation. It is therefore vital to identify these crown jewels in terms of tangible assets and information that matter the most to the business and its customers so that they can be protected and safeguarded.

These are identified and pinpointed by involving business heads to validate the assets and data that matter, the operational processes that create this data and embody the assets, and acceptable levels of business risk around these data and assets. They are also the assets that are most critical for the accomplishment of an organisation’s mission. Once these assets and data are identified, knowing their significance for the business, they will be of value to an attacker, and if compromised will have a business impact.

DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS

Further to the identification of the crown jewels’ assets and data, the next step is to give them digital footprints. The process of creating digital footprints consolidates all assets, internal and external, known and unknown,

into a manageable mapped inventory. Since they have been mapped, their security vulnerabilities are exposed and therefore profiles can be built on the basis of relevance, context, and capability.

Digital footprints find areas such as expired domain names, expired SSL certificates, forgotten cloud servers or buckets, demo web services left running, exposed services, and ports. A digital footprint gives visibility beyond the network boundary into areas that may create data loss. This process consolidates Internet-exposed assets, both known and unknown, into a manageable inventory.

ATTACK SURFACE, THE THREAT LANDSCAPE

Amongst the suggested measures to reduce the attack surface are to limit the amount of code running; cut down entry points for untrusted users; shut down services requested by only a few users; eliminate services identified that may not be required. However, reducing the attack surface does not lower the amount of damage an attacker can inflict if a vulnerability is found.

The threat landscape is an assessment of risks and exposure based on a specific organisation and industry. It is meant to be less technical and to support high-level decision-makers through reports and briefings. The strategic intelligence should provide patterns in threat actor tactics and targets, and geopolitical events and trends. ë

DAVID BROWN

Security Operations Director from Axon Technologies.

A digital footprint gives visibility beyond the network boundary into areas that may create data loss

MAKING 1% POSITIVE IMPROVEMENT IN TRANSFORMATION

It is tiny improvements that make incredible change and 1% compounded every day for over 365 days will finally amount to 38 times performance jump.

In his #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, Author James Clear talks about incremental shifts for massive outcomes.It is the tiny improvements, he says, that are not even noticeable at first, that create incredible change. He goes on to prove that 1% better every day for over 365 days will compound to nearly 38 times better. The opposite of which, that is remaining stagnant or becoming 1% worse every day, will get you closer to zero.

This seemingly simple but profound concept can have a far-reaching impact when applied to the realms of workplace transformation, particularly now as massive technological advancements sweep through the region. However, while digital transformation signals new beginnings and better growth opportunities, the rapid change could be daunting to some, leaving them unsure of when or where to begin. Thankfully, even though change is constant in today’s business, it need not happen overnight or instantaneously.

For decision makers and IT manager, this is the ideal time to look at new technologies for result-driven changes. If there is one step that organisations can take for business continuity, it is to make an incremental shift in their approach to adapting to the digital era. Encouragingly, this is a change we already see in action across the region.

This means by making small changes, without major overhauls, organisations can rely on a single provider to take care of all their IT needs at one monthly price with no upfront investment while maintaining performance, security and reliability over the lifetime of that system.

Workforce transformation and improving the employee experience is another area we expect organisations to continue to monitor, embrace and invest in the coming year.In an era of hybrid work, seamless transitions between devices and locations will set the foundation for great remote work experiences.

Augmenting PCs with technologies like Cloud, 5G and AI to offer smart, personalised and collaborative experiences is the future. It will provide organisations with the opportunity to pause, rethink, alter and amplify employee experience, as and when needed. In other words, in a world of stunning product designs and powerful technology innovations, simple and intentional will be the new definition of premium.

Looking ahead, more emphasis is expected to be placed on supporting a company’s biggest assets - its people, and how they work best. IT departments will be looking for ways to ensure that their technology and services are tailored to diverse teams.

The promise of hybrid work will go beyond productivity, as we believe the pinnacle of an excellent hybrid work experience will achieve balance and will require both a culture shift and advancements in technology. As the region moves towards a knowledgebased economy, decision makers need to create a future-ready infrastructure that empower new talent, amplify employee experience and supports a culture of innovation, collaboration and productivity.

As we look at the future of work, incremental improvements will drive the big changes. It represents a new chapter in business operations, and enabled by extraordinary technology advances, it has the potential to change the way we live, work and collaborate with one another.

In the last two years, we have transformed the way we work, virtually overnight. Now is the time to think long-term and make the shift to welcome an experience-focused nimble, connected and flexible workforce – even if it is by one percent, because by the power of compounding, a gradual but consistent effort guarantees a minimum of 37.78 times impactful outcomes. And that is a small step for a big change. ë

MARK PROSSER Senior Manager, Product and Solutions Sales, Client Solutions Group UAE, Dell Technologies.

More emphasis is expected to be placed on supporting a company’s biggest assets - its people, andw how they work best

HOW IS STORAGE AS A SERVICE DIFFERENT FROM HARDWARE LEASING

Storage capacity and performance should be underwritten by SLAs, and when more hardware is required, it should be delivered and deployed non-disruptively.

The public cloud’s gravitational pull is immense, and we live in an age in which it drags data towards it and away from the customer datacentre. But while the lure of the cloud is undeniable, many of its attractions come at a cost. The cloud promises flexibility in capacity and performance, with the ability to scale up — and down, in theory — and with pay-as-you-go pricing that make it an Opex running cost rather than a Capex spend.

However, the reality can often prove less rosy. Costs can spiral out of control; SLAs have to be monitored in hawk-like fashion and performance cannot be guaranteed as it can on-site. For these reasons many prefer the predictability of their own datacentre. Another option has emerged, a potential best-of-both-worlds, Storage-as-a-service, STaaS.

STaaS is the consumption model of storage procurement, which allows customers to deliver the capacity and performance they need, on-premises, in cloud or any other combination and paid for on an as-a-service basis.

Consumption models of storage purchasing turn the procurement of on-site capacity in block, file and object storage into a pay-as-you-go transaction. That’s in contrast to the traditional ways of on-premises hardware purchasing, where new products were bought on a three-year cycle to replace equipment bought during the preceding refresh three years before. And so on.

Consumption models try to do away with that by turning storage procurement into a service-like experience.Treating storage as a service has the big benefit of being potentially more flexible in terms of scalability and the ability to add more capacity or performance.

Meanwhile, being deployed in the customer datacentre means storage performance can be better than it would in the cloud and nowhere near as susceptible to suffering any degradation over the wide area network.

Also, bills and usage are likely to be more predictable, especially without costly cloud peculiarities such as egress charges, which can mount up unnoticed and result in huge bills. Concerns about security that go with the cloud are also mitigated.STaaS can also be filed as an Opex cost and so can be offset against tax.

To sum up, consumption models of storage procurement potentially offer flexible and scalable capacity and performance operated on-site but billed as if it were a service, with the potential to link to the cloud as an

extension of the datacentre. And all treated as an Opex cost.

So, what should customers look out for in STaaS offerings? Core to consumption model offerings is the ability to deploy storage capacity on-site and be billed for consumption.

Key to watch out for here, however, is that the service is being truly delivered as a service. In other words, levels of capacity and performance should be underwritten by SLAs, and when more hardware is required to meet those, it should be delivered and deployed non-disruptively.

Most vendors offer something that is more like a leasing agreement, in which their products are deployed on a three- or five-year cycle with forklift upgrades at the end. By contrast, the best StaaS offerings work to guaranteed service levels with automated upgrades to meet performance and capacity guarantees without extra cost and which are triggered by AI-based monitoring and telemetry.

Customers should also check the storage supplier’s ability to deploy file and block access storage as well as fast file and object storage in the same hardware, with tiers of performance defined by input-output speed, throughput and capacity. That way, all workloads are covered, from rapid transactional block access, via unstructured file data, to the rapid throughput performance needed for analytics and restores from backup data.

Monitoring software should give the customer an easy-to-read view of capacity usage and performance across on-prem storage infrastructure and the cloud, that shows how things are matching up to SLAs. It should also allow the ability to provision storage. AIdriven tools should enable prediction of future usage and be part of the process of triggering performance and capacity upgrades. ë

OMAR AKAR

Regional Vice President, Middle East and Emerging Africa, Pure Storage.

STaaS is the consumption model of storage procurement, which allows customers to deliver the capacity and performance they need

INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE CAN BOOST AUTOMATION, TIME TO MARKET

Source code is a way to break away from bottlenecks of manually configuring infrastructure, applications, cloud, security, virtual machines.

Infrastructure as Code can modernise manual processes in security operations, removing silos and delivering value. A leading benefit of Infrastructure as Code is its ability to transform processes that operate infrastructure. The tools and approach that development teams use to solve engineering challenges has an impact across business.

Infrastructure as Code is popular for cloud environments. It provides a way to describe infrastructure and can be used to automate infrastructure in private or public cloud.

Infrastructure as Code enforces immutability. This means each component of the infrastructure architecture is managed using an exact configuration. This approach reduces the possibility of infrastructure shifting into another set of configurations and away from the desired configuration.

REDUCING MANUAL OPERATIONS

In the past, setting up IT processes have required long lead times due to the manual approach being adopted.

Infrastructure as Code on the other hand, allows technology teams to setup the required infrastructure in much shorter times, usually in a matter of minutes, and a few keystrokes. And if the environment needs to be modified, duplicated, or scaled, this can be done by amending the source code within.

Operational tasks using infrastructure are defined by code that can trigger automated processes, which continuously cross check runtime configuration and the required actions.

Infrastructure as Code is now a key technology for cloud environments, where application scaling is required to be automatic.

MANAGING COSTS AND RISKS

Across the end-to-end application lifecycle, there are places where unplanned manual processes can create additional delays.

Flexibility to change cloud resource configurations are limited to manage costs and to control security risks. IT teams that manually operate and setup infrastructure are trained to work within defined cost policies. Similarly, security teams need time to triage findings from assessments and penetration tests. Infrastructure as Code can provide benefits for these processes as well.

Infrastructure as Code captures infrastructure, including instance types, configurations, security groups, relationships between resources, network accessibility and more.

Prior to Infrastructure as Code, the only other reliable source was the

configuration of the runtime environment itself. And if bugs were not fixed before this provisioning stage, then a business would need to bear that cost or the associated risk.

Infrastructure as Code now creates an opportunity to analyse these complex systems before they are actually provisioned. Processes such as architecture review, cost analysis, threat modeling and security assessment can be performed earlier.

POWERING INNOVATION

Modern software development is leveraging automation extensively, and this trend is only accelerating. Manual operations and security checks during development can significantly slow down and even interrupt the innovation workflow. Infrastructure as Code can enable automation of processes during development, helping to eliminate development and innovation bottlenecks.

Codifying infrastructure and configurations in the source code repository create a single source of truth for the application and enables more codification. Infrastructure as Code can help to automate cloud infrastructure.

Tools such as Policy as Code can also help to improve the integration of Infrastructure as Code by analysing cost policies, configuration policies, security policies, while moving manual controls to automated ones.

While improving the efficiency of the development team, Infrastructure as Code also delivers benefits to the entire organisation in the form of faster innovation, better control over costs and improved security. ë

MAHER JADALLAH Senior Director Middle East and North Africa, Tenable.

In the past, setting up IT processes have required long lead times due to the manual approach being adopted

PREDICTING PERFORMANCE DEGRADATIONS BEFORE THEY HAPPEN

The answer lies in Asset Performance Management, a set of technologies that can monitor assets to identify, diagnose, and prioritise equipment problems.

The industrial sector is in the midst of its biggest disruption in decades. It is critical for organisations to reduce production loss while extending equipment life – efficiencies that can help businesses achieve operational excellence.

But how can this be achieved? The answer lies in Asset Performance Management, APM – a set of technologies and practices that can monitor assets to identify, diagnose, and prioritise impending equipment problems – continuously and in real time.

Well-executed APM empowers organisations to reduce unscheduled downtime, prevent equipment failures, reduce maintenance costs, improve asset utilisation, and identify underperforming assets to support overall business objectives.

At the heart of APM is the concept of maximising profitability by balancing risk, cost, and performance of the plant, of the assets, and of the people that are operating all those things.

In the last two years, many companies have undergone digital transformation to foster corporate agility and resilience amid an increasingly dynamic business landscape. As such, the concept of APM is also evolving.

The intersection of Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet of Things IIoT, and technologies such as AI, predictive maintenance, cloud, big data, and mobility, are bringing assets to the forefront of the business. By leveraging APM 4.0, assets can be transformed from cost centres into powerful drivers of revenue and profitability.

APM 4.0 is predicated on proactive asset performance management, enabled by predictive alerts and prescriptive analytics.These types of technologies can lower costs, while optimising labour usage and equipment performance. Through the use of predictive and prescriptive analytics, companies can implement strategies that avoid unplanned downtime for their most critical assets – while also deciding which preventative or corrective asset strategy is the best course of action to take for their less vital equipment.

APM 4.0 creates a single integrated digital thread across the complete asset lifecycle. Two key factors play a pivotal role in the implementation of an effective APM strategy:

l First, there must be connectivity among assets and workers.

l S econd, decisions that are informed by sensors and intelligent data must be able to be executed in real-time.

In stark contrast to the widely used – and typically lagging – indicators that report failures only after they occur, today’s APM 4.0 systems can use sensor data to predict performance degradations and component failures before they happen.

Predictive and prescriptive analytics have the power to utilise sensor data to make better decisions – creating significant opportunities to improve asset performance.

However, it’s also important to understand that it is not always feasible to invoke predictive strategies to mitigate asset risks or optimise performance.

For some assets, it might not be financially feasible to apply predictive strategies because the cost of the cure might be more expensive than the value of the benefit – such as planned downtime.

In order to implement an effective APM 4.0 solution, the owner operator should utilise predictive and prescriptive analytics within a wider asset risk management strategy.

While companies are close to achieving APM 4.0, others may not be quite sure where they should begin their adoption journey. It’s important to remember that embarking on the transition from reactive maintenance to a more proactive or predictive strategy is a process.

In many cases, the organisation’s culture is the biggest obstacle to overcome. In a reactive environment, firefightingmaintenance is valued, but in a proactive environment, the strategy should focus on preventing fires from erupting in the first place. ë

MATT NEWTON Director, Artificial Intelligence and Optimisation, AVEVA.

At the heart of APM is the concept of maximising profitability by balancing risk, cost, performance

TRANSFORMATION IN SECURITY

TRANSFORMATION IN NETWORKING

TRANSFORMATION IN BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

TRANSFORMATION IN IT & COMPUTING

du, Huawei partner to offer internship programme for UAE graduates across 6-8 months

du, from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Huawei to foster development, enhance skillsets, and accelerate efforts to drive talent progression in the UAE through three core development programs.

In partnership with Huawei, the du-Huawei internship programme is a unique learning pathway that will support UAE graduate trainees over a period of 6-8 months, where participants will engage with simulated customers’

business scenarios through online and onsite learning, case sharing, and practice-based training. The first learning phase will run for five months under a technical specialist programme and revolve around 5G education, 5G industry application, and basic IT knowledge.

The second training phase of the programme will run for five days for an executive leadership programme in the UK and Germany in partnership with prestigious business schools and Huawei for participants to become acquainted

Kaspersky opens office in Riyadh, now operating in 30 countries through 34 offices

Kaspersky announced that it has added Saudi Arabia to its ever-expanding worldwide network of offices. Operating in 200 countries and territories with 34 offices in more than 30 countries. The new office will be located in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia ranked first in cybersecurity readiness in the Middle East and North Africa region according to the Global Cybersecurity Index. Adding to the efforts to build a strong cybersecurity infrastructure, the Kingdom also introduced a National Cybersecurity Strategy. with several similar

initiatives underway to ensure future readiness with a digital-first approach, adoption of technologies like 5G, IoT and artificial intelligence by the Kingdom will potentially increase cybercriminal interest and provide new avenues for targeted attacks and cyberthreats.

In 2021, Kaspersky detected and blocked approximately 124 million threats in Saudi Arabia. Establishing this new office in Saudi Arabia is a milestone in Kaspersky’s roadmap to protect over 400 million users and 240,000 corporate clients worldwide.

with 5G opportunities against the tide of digital transformation through collaborative leadership and agile approaches.

A seven-month period of du-Huawei run Emerging Technologies Webinars will also present an overview of business use cases. Upon completion, graduate trainees, technology professionals and senior level professionals will receive certifications from Huawei for 5G, cloud computing, and the overall programme.

In 2021, du and Huawei held the first Huawei Internship Development Programme for graduate trainees in Technology, focusing on topics such as 5G and Cloud. This year, different stages to this learning partnership will be deployed, starting with the Joint Annual Training Plan Consulting, to support du’s HR effort in strengthening the talent transformation process.

MOHAMAD HASHEM, Country Manager, KSA and Bahrain at Kaspersky.

Help AG forecasts, secure cloud, application security, identity security, service edge as top priorities

The service-centric transformation of the cybersecurity industry is proceeding at full speed, with 90% of security requirements expected to be fulfilled through a service model three years from now, according to the State of the Market Report 2022 by Help AG, the cybersecurity arm of e& enterprise formerly Etisalat Digital and the region’s trusted security advisor.

DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks continued their upward trajectory in 2021, with 149,753 attacks detected in the UAE last year, amounting to a 37% YoY increase. This indicates that attackers are strategically targeting UAE organisations, particularly in the government target of 37% of DDoS attacks, private 34%, healthcare 8%, financial 6%, education 5%, oil and gas 4%, and hospitality 4% sectors.

Cloud Box now Dell Technologies’ Titanium partner through high sales, pre-sales, implementations

Cloud Box Technologies announced the achievement of becoming a prestigious Titanium Solution Provider within the Dell Technologies Partner Programme. CBT is an upward evolving organisation with extensive understanding of the technology landscape and best practices followed regionally and globally. To reach this top tier level, CBT demonstrated inherent high level of sales, pre-sales and implementation capabilities.

The CBT and DELL partnership stands witness to the company’s alignment and focus on Dell Technologies business objectives and the brand’s forward strategy. With deep focus on the Enterprise segment, CBT aims to be the leading SI for DELL.

CBT has internally allocated additional investments within core business areas with an objective of partnering with existing and

The attacks continue to increase in scale, with the largest one observed in the UAE last year and measured at 145.9 Gbps. In fact, DDoS attacks with a volume of over 40 Gbps have become the norm in the UAE ever since the pandemic began.

DDoS attacks are also increasing in duration. The longest recorded attack in 2021 lasted for a duration of 44 days and 19 hours, and over 14% of observed DDoS attacks lasted more than 60 minutes. Additionally, 58% of DDoS attacks observed in the UAE in 2021 were multi-vector in nature, and UDP Flood, IP Fragmentation, and DNS Amplification were found to be the top attack types.

Ransomware

Ransomware attacks also continued to increase in frequency last year, largely thanks to their high rates of success, which can be attributed to their relative simplicity and their significant, immediate impact on an affected business, as well as the fact that many organisations still end up paying the ransom, thus encouraging threat actors to continue utilising this attack method.

Apart from increasing in number, ransomware attacks are also becoming highly sophisticated as attackers become more professional than ever. The danger posed by ransomware is being exacerbated by the proliferation of ransomware-as-a-service, which has turned ransomware into a profitable business model wherein ready-made malicious code is sold to cyber attackers.

Top Vulnerabilities

The year 2021 saw a 9.3% increase in the total number of detected vulnerabilities, with a total of 18,378 identified as per the NIST National Vulnerability Database NVD. The number of vulnerabilities found in core applications also increased, and worryingly, core security controls were found to be missing in most cases.

Medium and low risk vulnerabilities rose in number, whereas fewer high severity vulnerabilities were detected compared to 2020. In order to help regional businesses, stay abreast of discovered vulnerabilities, Help AG released 130 threat advisories throughout 2021, which included recommendations for organisations on how to stay protected.

Managing Director, Cloud Box Technologies.

new customers on their digital transformation journeys. The company has also broadened its alliances to widen its portfolio and remains focused on major verticals of Health, Education, Retail, Medium Enterprise and Power accounts.

RANJITH KAIPPADA,

(Left to right) Nicolai Solling, Chief Technology Officer at Help AG; and Stephan Berner, Chief Executive Officer at Help AG.

Azure Purview, Arc, Communication, Machine Learning, now hosted on

Microsoft

UAE Cloud region

Microsoft announced the availability of a new wave of digitally transformative services on its Azure UAE Regions. These latest services mean that regional Microsoft Cloud customers now have access to almost all of Azure’s tools, allowing them to leverage the full versatility and power of the trusted, intelligent Microsoft Cloud to accelerate their digital transformations.

Azure Purview is a unified data-governance solution that allows organisations to manage the use of their on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service SaaS data. The service enables the creation of a holistic, up-to-date map of the entire data landscape through automated data discovery. Stakeholders can impose policies on sensitive data by formally classifying it and maintaining an audit trail of its use.

Azure Arc is a suite of technologies that unites the security of Microsoft Azure with its cloud-native services to bring rich, secure functionality to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Azure Arc enabled servers enables management of Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure, onpremises, or other cloud providers. This management experience is designed to be consistent with how Azure VMs are managed, using standard Azure constructs such as Azure Policy and applying tags.

Azure Communication Services is a set of rich communication APIs – including those for video and SMS – that allow the deployment of applications on any device or platform. Each API allows

Redington Gulf to distribute

custom integration with Microsoft Teams, which means app developers can deliver rich video, voice, chat, text-messaging, and telephony experiences to anywhere their end-users may be, across applications, websites, and mobile platforms.

Azure Machine Learning allows enterprises to build business-critical machine-learning models at scale. Data scientists and developers can collaborate on the development, deployment, and management of responsible, high-quality models while accelerating time to value, by leveraging industryleading MLOps machine learning operations, open-source interoperability, and integrated tools.

Azure Purview, Azure Arc enabled servers, Azure Communication Services, and Azure Machine Learning are all now available through Microsoft’s UAE Cloud Regions. All four services are leaders in their category in the enablement of leading-edge digital solutions.

SugarCRM, provider of the award-winning AI-driven CRM platform, announced a strategic distribution partnership with Redington Gulf, whereby Redington will distribute the full SugarCRM AI-driven solution portfolio for sales, marketing and customer service to businesses in the Middle East.

As a world-class provider of top enterprise technology solutions globally, Redington will help Sugar extend its CRM platform to

businesses across the region through its extensive network of 34,000 resellers and over 70 sales offices around the world, with over 15,000 customers in the Middle East alone.

Redington gains access to Sugar’s market-leading portfolio of AI-driven solutions that make the hard things easier for sales, marketing, and customer service professionals. Sugar also offers choice for cloud and on-premises solutions so customers can select the best option for their business. This is a key benefit as most other CRM providers offer their solutions exclusively in the cloud, making them unviable for customers in the Middle East.

NECIP OZYUCEL, Director, Azure Business Group Lead, Microsoft UAE.

SugarCRM’s AI portfolio for sales, marketing, customer service in ME

SAYANTAN DEV, President, Redington Value.

Omnix announces offering with TeamViewer for remote troubleshooting and management

Omnix, an end-to-end digital solutions and services pioneer, announced a joint offering with TeamViewer, a global provider of remote connectivity and workplace digitalization solutions, to simplify business processes and streamline remote troubleshooting and management.

The collaboration will enable both companies to build a strong partner alliance for new innovative solutions and support Omnix’s ethos of driving regional business as a trusted digital solutions provider. Both companies aim to improve business operation models and boost productivity with TeamViewer’s advanced remote access, remote IT management and specialized Internet of Things and Augmented Reality solutions.

Omnix specializes in analysing IT infrastructure and business needs, deploying digital transformation solutions and covering aspects such as people, processes, technology, governance, data and

analytics. Through its partnership with Omnix, TeamViewer will have access to quality resources, a dedicated and experienced team, and localized support.

The company will utilize its in-depth knowledge of the global markets to promote TeamViewer by engaging sales channels, and running demand led marketing campaigns to raise awareness among the GCC target audience. Omnix will also set up an experience centre head office in Dubai, where customers will get to see the benefits of the technologies and know more during interactive in-person workshops.

TeamViewer has been installed on over 2.5 billion devices and operates in almost all countries globally. Aligning with Omnix’s goal of harnessing latest technologies to advance businesses processes and enable digital progress, the partnership with TeamViewer represents an ideal fit to optimize long-term business performance for regional customers.

(Left to right) Saed Habash, IoT and AR Regional Channel Director MEA at TeamViewer; and Simran Bagga, Head of Engineering at Omnix International.

Ajman Free Zone is now partner in AWS Activate programme for growth of start-ups

Ajman Free Zone announced it has become an AWS Activate Provider. This means that start-upsaffiliated with the AFZ who are building or about to start building on Amazon Web Services can apply for the AWS Activate incentive programme and receive free AWS credits, technical support, training, resources, and more.

Inclusion in AWS Activate differentiates the AFZ programme and benefits it as a solution that is important to the growth of the start-ups building and scaling their companies on AWS.

AHAD partners with YesWeHack, Europe’s Bug Bounty and Vulnerability Disclosure platform

AHAD, a cybersecurity, digital transformation, and risk management company, announced partnership with YesWeHack, Europe’s leading Bug Bounty and Vulnerability Disclosure Policy platform. Ongoing cyberattacks raise the stakes for organisations to quickly detect and respond to threats across their entire IT ecosystems, identify and remediate risks, and close gaps in their security postures. At the same time, few organisations have the in-house resources and expertise to manage their security programs effectively.

YesWeHack offers organisations a unique approach to cyber-defence. Its Bug Bounty platform provides customers with a virtual pool of more than 35,000 ethical hackers across 170 countries. This community of experts can be mobilised to search vulnerabilities in websites, mobile apps, and IT infrastructure and report their findings through a secure workflow.

Organisations can either privately select the ethical hackers with the

Through the AWS Activate incentive programme, AFZ will now be able to offer a wide range of programs with unique benefits directed toward boosting start-ups. The AWS Start-up Activate programme offers grants up to USD 25,000 to qualified start-ups, as well as offers of exclusive credits, discounts, and software service access. In addition, qualified start-ups can obtain credits and partner funding, along with a business support plan credits of up to USD 5,000, through the AWS Start-up Migrate programme.

skills that best fit their use case or publicly submit their scopes to the entire YesWeHack community. YesWeHack also offers a tried-and-tested VDP Vulnerability Disclosure Policy fully managed service, which is a safe and transparent framework for anyone to report vulnerabilities. VDP is part of ISO29147 and ISO30111 and is encouraged as a best practice by international bodies such as NIST, ENISA, CISA, and OECD.

ROHAN DANIEL NAIR, Chief Operating Officer of AHAD.

Epson launches Graduate Programme in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt with placement

Epson announced regional launch of Epson Graduate Programme, an initiative designed to give young professionals a head start in their careers by enabling them to gain valuable experience and skills in various departments across the company. With a 6-month to 12-month training period, the programme will offer fresh graduates seeking a job in United Arab Emirates,

Saudi Arabia or Egypt an opportunity to enter the corporate world with roles in Epson’s HR, logistics, marketing or sales departments. With this initiative, Epson aims to equip young graduates with experience and skills for a career while enabling them to play a part in creating a technologically smart and sustainable future for everyone.

Freshworks enhances partner programme for 500+ resellers, 20+ SIs, 1,100+ marketplace apps

Freshworks announced the launch of an enhanced partner programme and the appointment of Hervé Danzelaud as Vice President of Global Channel and Alliances to lead the growth of the company’s partner ecosystem. Danzelaud previously served as the head of Channels and Alliances for North America.

The enhanced Freshworks partner programme builds on its industry-leading enablement, marketing and lead generation benefits making it easier than ever to partner with Freshworks while adding value to joint customers. A new partner relationship management system offers greater visibility into deal registration, pipeline, commissions, sales and marketing assets, and market development funds. Free enablement and supporting certifica-

tion alignment with sales, pre-sales and implementation roles.

Programme Tiers and Certifications

l Three existing tiers for our resellers and

solution partners include: Preferred, Authorized and Registered.

l New certification framework for systems integrators offers a more consistent and delightful customer experience.

l Dedicated in-region resources for Preferred partners to grow joint business

l Collaboration with account executives in the field to drive expansion and collaboration in mid-market customer segments.

Partnerships are an extension of the Freshworks promise to deliver modern and easy-to-use software for customer support, IT, sales and marketing teams. AWS, Pink Elephant, Device42, Flycast Partners, i4 Asia Inc., B-TRSNFRMD and more have partnered with Freshworks to enhance and extend the Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales and Freshmarketer product lines to their customers.

HERVÉ DANZELAUD, Vice President Global Channel and Alliances at Freshworks.

The Epson Middle East team engaged with students at a three-day career event to launch the Epson Graduate Programme at Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University in Riyadh.

Synology partners with Redington for Saudi Arabia

Synology announced partnership with Redington MEA, a provider of end-to-end IT, telecom, and digital lifestyle product supply chain solutions. “We look forward to working with Redington in Saudi Arabia and are confident that our partnership with Redington will expand business even greater,” said Joanne Weng, Sales Director at Synology.

“At a time when business continuity and sustainability is crucial, Synology is committed to delivering our industry-leading NAS solutions to businesses of any size that are in need of advanced storage and networking solution, to help organizations gain more agility and streamline their office workflow,” Joanne Weng said.

Redington has already started shipping Synology solutions and providing consultancy services through its trusted partners in Saudi Arabia.

South Africa’s Far South Networks and Bits Secure IT, partner to provide IP telephony solutions

Bits Secure IT Infrastructure and Far South Networks announces they have entered into a strategic partnership, combining Bits Secure IT’s domain expertise in the field of information and communications technology along with Far South Networks’ designing and manufacturing of IP telephony platforms. Jointly, both these companies will work to better gratify their clients by offering combinations of ingenious, exclusive, and unified communication solutions through 3CX IP PBX and VoIP gateway product ranges.

With technology playing an increasingly vital role in every aspect of business, companies recognize the need to accelerate the development of ICT to ensure they remain competitive. The Bits Secure-Far South partnership will offer affordable and distinctive unified communications ‘One box’ PBX solutions in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia region, thus adding value to its customers.

BITS Secure IT can provide its customers with the world-leading 3CX PBX solution integrated within a competitively priced CPE device that supports Telco and VoIP services, thanks to Far South Networks’ innovative products. The basic 3CX bundle includes PBX, unified communications, mobility, and video conferencing, while the advanced packages include predictive dialler, call back, and agent assessments along with CRM integration.

(Left to right) Grant Broomhall, Managing Director of Far South Networks; and Mohanbabu Murugesan, Business Head of Bits Secure IT.

JOANNE WENG, Sales Director at Synology.

Huawei Cloud working with partners to provide Everything as a Service says President, Frank Dai

At the recently concluded HUAWEI CLOUD Summit Middle East and Africa 2022 in Dubai, UAE, Huawei reiterated the cloud’s integral role in accelerating the region’s digital transformation and inspiring innovation across its industries.

Last year, HUAWEI CLOUD launched the Abu Dhabi Region, and this year the company is building a cloud region in Saudi Arabia, with plans to expand to other markets. Hosting of the HUAWEI CLOUD region in the Middle East will boost local businesses and governments’ ability to access more robust and secure cloud services from Huawei and create new social and economic value in the region.

HPE GreenLake supporting 50 cloud services, available indistributor online marketplaces

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, announced significant advancements to HPE GreenLake, the company’s flagship offering that enables organizations to modernize all their applications and data, from edge to cloud. Now, HPE’s market-leading hybrid cloud platform just got stronger, with a unified operating experience, new cloud services, and availability of HPE GreenLake in the online marketplaces of several leading distributors.

“HPE was among the first to deliver a cloud platform that enables customers to manage and extract insights from their data from edge to cloud, and our continued innovation is driving growth and furthering our market leadership,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “In the hybrid cloud market, HPE GreenLake is unique in its simplicity, unification, depth of cloud services, and partner network. Today, we are furthering our differentiation, boldly setting HPE GreenLake even further apart as the ideal platform for customers to drive data-first modernization.”

HPE GreenLake supports multi-cloud experiences everywhere – including clouds that live on-premises, at the edge, in a colocation facility, and in a public cloud – and continues to drive strong demand worldwide. In Q1 2022, HPE reported Annual Recurring Revenue of $798 million, and increased as-a-service orders 136 percent year-over-year.

The HPE GreenLake platform provides the foundation for more

During the summit, Sara, Huawei Cloud’s first digital employee, made her debut in the region through holographic projection. The summit also showcased Huawei Cloud’s Spark Programme 2022. The programme will support local start-ups in building their cloud capabilities.

Looking ahead, HUAWEI CLOUD will continue to expand the global data centre and network layout and is committed to providing customers, partners, and developers with one global network with a reliable experience. Currently, HUAWEI CLOUD has 27 regions worldwide, providing 220+ cloud services and 210+ solutions for 170+ countries. Huawei collaborates with 20,000+ partners to contribute to digital transformation.

ANTONIO NERI, President and CEO, HPE.

than 50 cloud services, including electronic health records, ML Ops, payments, unified analytics, and SAP HANA, as well as a wide- array of cloud services from partners.

As a leading provider and expert in delivering comprehensive edge connectivity networking solutions, HPE is building out its network as a service NaaS offerings with HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking. The eight new services simplify the process of procuring and deploying NaaS and allow customers to align network spend to usage needs, while ensuring that the network is always ready to support business objectives.

The new services are also optimized for channel partners looking to satisfy growing customer demand for NaaS, to operate in a resale or managed service provider model. Covering a full span of customer use cases – including wired, wireless, and SD-Branch – the new services provide unprecedented levels of velocity and flexibility, accelerating time to revenue.

KEN GOETZ, Vice President, Enterprise Customer Success and Business Management, Red Hat.

Red Hat training previously available to customers, now open to partners with no fees

Red Hat announced that Red Hat Training and Certification is expanding its offerings for partners in order to advance their skills journey with open hybrid cloud technologies. Red Hat partners can now access Red Hat Training self-paced online courses at no cost in order to develop critical skills around Red Hat solutions in key areas such as cloud computing, containers, virtualization, automation and more.

Since 2013 Red Hat has provided enablement for partner organizations through the Red Hat Partner Training Portal, a training and accreditation platform designed to empower partners and supply them with the reliable guidance needed to support sales, improve customer service and deliver Red Hat-related service engagements. Based on feedback from partners, Red Hat is extending enablement materials for partner associates acting as customer-facing IT support, consultants, solutions architects, system administrators and developers. Red Hat Training courses previously only available to customers, are now open to partners with no fee required.

Keeping pace in an industry that demands constant innovation means organizations must rely on a skilled workforce to support digital transformation, technology development and customer services. Red Hat Training and Certification offers a curriculum of self-paced learning and hands-on labs to help IT professionals broaden competencies and validate skills with Red Hat technologies.

In fact, a Red Hat commissioned IDC study found that organizations using Red Hat Training courses can achieve a three-year return on investment of 365% and increase productivity by enabling associates to learn at their own pace through online modules and labs.

The initial Red Hat Training offerings that are open to partners include

17 courses, available in eight languages, accessible through the Red Hat Partner Training Portal and paving the way for future skills development through accreditation and certification. With these courses, partners are better positioned to accelerate skills development and achieve Red Hat Certification.

Partners have access to some of the most popular courses for administrators to build foundational knowledge around industry leading solutions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, including:

l Red Hat System Administration I

l Red Hat System Administration II

l Red Hat Enterprise Linux Automation with Ansible

l Red Hat Openshift I

l Red Hat Openshift Administration II

l Red Hat OpenShift Administration III

Developers can also take advantage of Red Hat Training courses such as:

l Red Hat OpenShift Development II

l Red Hat Cloud-Native Microservices Development with Quarkus

l Developing Advanced Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat plans to release additional Red Hat Training courses for partners throughout the year. In addition to the above self-paced free offerings, partners can choose to purchase instructor-led training, Red Hat Learning Subscription and Red Hat Certification exams at a discounted rate.

Alteryx revamps partner programme with new tiering, enablement, benefits, engagement

Alteryx, announced its updated partner programme powering its partner-centric growth strategy focused on maximizing customer value. The expanded partner programme is a key driver towards Alteryx’s mission to democratize analytics across organisations; it enables partners with both deep technical knowledge and business domain expertise to help their customers achieve business breakthroughs.

This new programme allows customers to inject analytics into everyday business processes with a complete set of partner capabilities, including professional services and custom solutions powered by Alteryx, to make datadriven decisions.

The programme establishes mutual benefits with the Alteryx partner ecosystem including unique benefits for each partner type: solution providers recently including value-added resellers and distribution partners, global system integrators GSIs, technology partners, and original equipment manufacturers OEMs.

Joint customer success, technical expertise, and new customer acquisition are incentivized by the programme. Partners at each tier – Registered, Select, and Premier – are rewarded with progressive benefits as they achieve milestones within the programme, including within a tier.

Key changes to the programme to support Alteryx’s growing investment in its partner ecosystem include:

l Benefits: As partners progress through the programme, they are awarded additional benefits with each achievement. Benefits and requirements are now segmented regionally rather than at country levels. Increased incentives are offered for customer projects that are initiated and driven by partners.

l Partner Enablement: New role-based training curriculum and certifications are available for partners that are an extension of the Alteryx sales and services go-tomarket team enablement.

ITQAN will include Proofpoint security and training in its cybersecurity portfolio

Proofpoint, announced its partnership with ITQAN Al Khaleej Computers, a systems integrator and solutions provider in the UAE and a subsidiary of Yas Holding. With this partnership, ITQAN will strengthen its cybersecurity portfolio for organisations and institutions in the region, with Proofpoint’s email security, information protection, and cybersecurity awareness training solutions.

Organisations in the UAE face an evolving threat landscape. Proofpoint data shows that over two-thirds of CISOs in the UAE feel at risk of suffering a material cyberattack. The types of attacks causing concern for CISOs in the region at present are insider threats 29%, phishing 28%, Business Email Compromise attacks 25%, supply chain attacks and ransomware 22% each; the majority of which include a human element. To address these threats, organisations in the UAE should adapt security strategies that combine people, process, and technology.

ITQAN plays a critical role in securing UAE organisations’ and government institutions’ IT infrastructure & data. By partnering with key solutions providers like Proofpoint, ITQAN is able to offer world-class services and resources, delivering value addition to their customers.

l Tiering System: Registered, Select, and Premier partner tiers, offering new standard discounts, and partner-initiated discounts.

l Global Rules of Engagement: Alteryx released an official set of global guidelines, including best practices that will help partners optimize results within the programme.

EMILE ABOU SALEH, Proofpoint Regional DirectorMiddle East, Turkey & Africa.

AMIYA RANJAN, General Manager of ITQAN Al Khaleej Computers.

BARB HUELSKAMP, SVP, Global Partners and Alliances, Alteryx.

Lenovo 360 channel partner framework provides easier access to devices, infrastructure, services

Lenovo announced the UAE launch of “Lenovo 360”, a new, first-ofits-kind global channel partner framework designed to provide easier access to the entire Lenovo portfolio across devices, infrastructure, and services and solutions. The new Lenovo 360 framework comes at a time when many small businesses and large enterprises alike are increasingly moving toward the “Everything-as-a-Service” consumption model. Lenovo 360 helps partners capitalize service-led and solutions-based opportunities with their customers and drive additional revenue streams.

Designed in collaboration with Lenovo channel partners, Lenovo 360 brings together the core elements of people, programs, and tools. The framework details more unified global channel team structures and introduces eight solutions enabling greater workforce productivity and collaboration, infrastructure flexibility, sustainability improvements, and industry specific solutions to address common business challenges.

Rebate accelerator programs like the “Better Together” and “TruScale Accelerator” initiatives offer partners the opportunity to increase earnings up to 30% or more on sales across Lenovo’s portfolio of products and solutions, and sales through as-a-Service.

Launching in the UAE this month, Lenovo 360 follows the company’s reorganization of three core business units in April 2021; Intelligent Devices Group, the core PC and IoT business, Infrastructure Solutions Group and a new Solutions and Services Group focused on verticals and services. Aligning partners’ need to easily expand their sales footprint, the framework helps partners to expand their Lenovo offerings.

In addition to ensuring the simplification of Lenovo’s overall partner process, the Lenovo 360 framework offers the company’s channel partners specific activations such as training, certifications, and channel marketing playbooks.

emt Distribution extends partnership with CertNexus offering certifications, micro-credentials

emt Distribution, announces extending its strategic partnership with CertNexus to offer on demand emerging technology certifications and micro-credentials globally.

“We are so excited that we expanded our agreement with CertNexus as a strategic partner to be able to play

bigger role globally, we are going to also introduce special in country offer for the governments to ease the process of educating their staff on emerging technologies like Artificial intelligence, Data Science, IoT as well as Cybersecurity,” said Mo Mobasseri, CEO at emt Distribution, META.

(Left to right) Mo Mobasseri, CEO at emt Distribution, META; and James Varnham, Managing Director at CertNexus EMEA.

ALAA BAWAB, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group ISG, Middle East & Africa.

SHASHANK SHARMA, Executive Director and General Manager, Lenovo Intelligent Devices, Middle East, Turkey and Africa.

Evanssion enhances regional API security through partnership with Noname Security

Evanssion, a value-added distributor specialized in Cloud Native and Cyber Security across Middle East and Africa, has announced that it is strengthening its partnership with Noname Security, a leader in API Security, to ensure the region is well-equipped to defend against API attacks.

There is a massive gap in the visibility on the API layer from the perspective of consumption and exposure of information through the API. This leads to lack of governance and posture management of APIs. Hackers have tapped into these vulnerabilities and are actively targeting these APIs due to misconfiguration and anomalous behaviour of the API.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, “less than 50% of enterprise APIs will be managed, as explosive growth in APIs surpasses the capabilities of API management tools.” Securing APIs has thus become a pressing issue to address for CIOs, CISOs, and decision makers as they continue to protect data in this evolving threat landscape.

Last year in October 2021, Evanssion signed up an exclusive distribution agreement with Noname Security, headquartered in California, USA, to allow adoption of its API security platform in the Middle East and Africa region.

Noname Security delivers the most powerful, complete, and easy-touse API security platform. The company finds and inventories all APIs; detects attacks, suspicious behaviour, and misconfigurations using AI-

based behavioural analysis; prevents attacks and integrates with existing remediation and security infrastructure; and actively validates APIs before deployment.

Unlike other solutions that only monitor API traffic, Noname analyses API traffic as well as application and infrastructure configurations to provide better API security posture management, API runtime security, and active API SDLC testing. Only Noname Security can find all shadow APIs and API misconfigurations before the company is impacted.

Together with the API security leader, Evanssion is working with some of the largest banks in the financial industry and airline providers in the country to make API Security a reality for the Middle East and Africa region. The past five months has seen tremendous growth for Evanssion and Noname in the EMEA region.

Veeam Software announced the winners of the Veeam ProPartner Awards for 2021. The awards are held annually to reward the outstanding success and the commitment of Veeam ProPartner Value-Added Resellers VAR and Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners, who took their customer support with their know-how and experience to the next level to establish Modern Data Protection in increasingly complex IT environments, so that the most diverse workload types, data, and applications are protected cost-effectively while keeping them available for all business purposes at all times.

The following Veeam ProPartners and VCSPs were awarded:

l S outh Gulf Partner of the Year: Alpha Data

l North Gulf Partner of the Year: Qatar Datamation Systems

l Saudi Partner of the Year: Dimension Data

l Levant Partner of the Year: PRO TECHnology

l Egypt Partner of the Year: Systems Engineering of Egypt SEE

l Middle East Top Partner of the Year: National Computer Systems Co. Natcom

l Middle East Fastest Growing Partner of the Year: Almoayyed Computers

l Middle East Service Provider of the Year: Oman Data Park

l Middle East Top Distributor of the Year: Ingram Micro

Veeam announces winners of annual Pro Partner Awards for 2021

l The Veeam ProPartner Network is a global ecosystem of partners that work directly and indirectly with one another to build, market, and sell Veeam-powered services and solutions. ProPartner VAR and VCSP partners have access to customized programs, tools and resources designed to enable them to become more profitable and drive growth according to their business models and objectives.

AHMAD AL QADRI, Chief Executive Officer, Evanssion.

DIRK MARICHAL, Vice President EMEA, Noname Security.

Tata Consultancy Services

announces launch of flagship goIT programme in UAE

Tata Consultancy Services announced the launch of its flagship goIT programme in the UAE, aimed at demystifying computer science and assisting students in gaining the skills and confidence required to pursue STEM careers.

goIT is an experiential, immersive programme that gives young people access to hands-on technology education and design challenges. It introduces students to design thinking, digital technologies and the agile methodology to develop and prototype solutions that improve their own communities or support the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

The engaging curriculum includes the innovation lifecycle, product prototyping, and industry relevant entrepreneurial skills. TCS employees will mentor students and provide industry context and real-world connections.

The first such programme was held for grade three students of JSS International School in Dubai. At the two-day-long event, students had the opportunity to learn from TCS’ skilled technol-

Sanad, subsidiary of Mubadala, and Thales sign MoU for air traffic, avionics systems

Sanad, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Company, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Thales to explore areas of collaboration in the fast-developing domains of industrial services for airport security, air traffic and avionics systems. The MoU was signed between Mansoor Janahi, Group CEO

SUMANTA ROY, Regional Head, Middle East & Africa, TCS.

ogy professionals and flex their IT skills. The company will soon expand this programme to include more schools across the country. goIT is TCS’ flagship student engagement programme that began in 2009. In FY 2021, the programme reached more than 54,000 beneficiaries and expanded to 33 countries, becoming one of the most successful and popular international STEM programs. Earlier this year, TCS launched India’s largest annual inter-school IT quiz competition, TCS IT Wiz Quiz, in the Middle East.

of Sanad and Bernard Roux, CEO of Thales in the UAE.

This announcement follows the launch of Sanad’s new industrial services strategy, which focuses on expanding its business beyond the aerospace sector to drive the UAE’s sustainable industrial future by leveraging synergies with international partners. Knowledge exchange will be a key focus under the terms of the agreement, and Thales will serve as a partner in diversifying Sanad’s business portfolio towards industrial services in Air Traffic, Airport Security, and Avionics Systems.

As part of the agreement, Sanad and Thales will work collaboratively on regional and international projects, wherein Sanad would lead on providing cutting-edge industrial systems, working alongside Thales who will spearhead the design and build.

Automation Anywhere recognises 2022 top channel partners across Americas, EMEA, APJ, India

Automation Anywhere, announced winners of its Global Partner of the Year Awards that were presented this week at the company’s annual Virtual Partner Summit.

The annual awards recognise Automation Anywhere partners demonstrating excellence and commitment to customer success, innovative solution development, and deep investments in building technical expertise to support customers. Awards were presented to partners in the Americas; Europe, Middle East, Africa; Asia Pacific and Japan; and India.

Partner award categories and winners include:

l Digital Workforce Partner Award for partners recognised for their outstanding success in selling Automation Anywhere intelligent automation solutions and enabling customers to transform their businesses.

l Accenture, Americas

l Intellect Design, EMEA

l S oftbank Corp., APJ

l ITC Infotech India

l Services Partner Award for partners recognised for their significant and continual investment in building capability to successfully implement the Automation Anywhere digital workforce platform.

l BP3 Global, Americas

l ShinyBlueBox LTD, EMEA

l System Support, APJ

l Coforge, India

l Cloud Sales Partner Award for partners who have achieved exceptional success positioning, selling, and delivering Auto-

mation 360 cloud products.

l Advanced Network Management, Americas

l Parplex, EMEA

l IT One Company, APJ

l BOT mantra, India

l AARI Solutions Partner Award for partners who have achieved exceptional success positioning and selling Automation Anywhere AARI solutions.

l Deloitte, Americas

l Tata Consultancy Services, EMEA

l KSTEC, APJ

l Lauren Information Technologies, India

l Renewal Partner Award for partners who drove significant bookings in renewals of Automation Anywhere products to clients.

l Accenture, Americas

l S oftwareONE AG, EMEA

l Hitachi Solutions, APJ

l ITC Infotech, India

l Migration Partner Award for partners who have demonstrated skill with customer success in migrating customers to Automation 360.

l Cognizant, Americas

l Cognizant, EMEA

l Accenture, APJ

l Tata Consultancy Services, India

Uniphore announces Unite App Alliance Partner Programme allowing cross selling for ISVs

Uniphore, announced its Unite App Alliance Partner Programme. A major pillar of the global Uniphore Unite Partner Programme, the App Alliance programme enables value-driven collaboration and cross-selling for participating Independent Software Vendors. Participating ISVs will have greater access to and involvement in shaping the direction and strategy of tomorrow’s conversational AI, automation and supporting CX technology innovation.

Launched late last year, Uniphore’s Unite Partner Programme is a comprehensive programme that provides end-to-end support to the partner lifecycle, allowing partners to benefit from Uniphore’s market-leading conversational AI and automation technology to offer more robust support to joint customers. The Unite App Appliance Partner Programme takes this offering a step further by allowing expanded collaboration and complementary co-selling among participating ISVs.

Benefits of the Uniphore App Alliance Partner Programme include:

l Greater opportunities to expand market share through access to cross-selling

l Exposure on Uniphore’s website with partners’ logos and a solution webpage

l Joint marketing activities, including press release and joint collateral

l Campaign planning, with joint messaging and positioning, supported by the Unite global marketing agency

l Unite Partner Helpdesk access

l Unlimited access to the Unite Partner Portal and all the sales and marketing resource

RNS Technology Services announces strategic partnership with IronNet

RNS Technology Services announced a strategic partnership with IronNet that will enable organizations to hunt, identify, share and collaboratively stop cybersecurity threats. RNS is a prominent cybersecurity value-added reseller and system integrator renowned for its Managed Security Services, Identity Governance, Network & Cloud Protection, Applications & Endpoint Protection, as well as Detect & Response.

IronNet is an innovative leader Transforming Cybersecurity through Collective Defense and has received significant industry recognition for its ability to give companies better awareness of global cyber threats and the ability to address them collectively.

As an IronNet partner, RNS is expanding its cybersecurity offerings to the Middle East and various places across the globe. IronNet’s cybersecurity platform, called Collective Defense, enables security operations centre SOC analysts to not only be better prepared for potential cyber-attacks, but also be able to confirm that their enterprise network is protected and safe.

Together the two companies will collaborate to establish best-in-class security guardrails. A key highlight from the partnership is to deliver turnkey network security solutions. Allowing IT leaders to proactively identify and remediate security vulnerabilities. In today’s security landscape, they are enhancing the overall resilience and business continuity capabilities for organizations.

JAFAR SYED, SVP, Global Head of Channel Alliances & Partnerships at Uniphore.

SAMIR CHOPRA, Founder & CEO at RNS Technology Services.

TRANSFORMING CHANNEL PARTNERS TO SUCCESS PARTNERS

Nutanix has made a large number of changes to its channel programme including incentivising partners along the complete relationship life cycle.

IT decision makers, service providers and channel resellers are dealing with an industry shift to subscription billing models from traditional sales, leasing or licensing models. “The channel really needs to move faster to everything as a service. They need to adapt really quickly to subscription, because customers are asking for this,” says Christian Alvarez, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels for Nutanix.

Enterprises are building the future of their businesses on hybrid multi-cloud IT operations, which blends private and public cloud services. That requires interoperability and automation, across different technologies and services. “This shift in customer expectations and cloud acceleration is leading service providers into new partnerships,” says Alvarez.

CHRISTIAN ALVAREZ Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels for Nutanix.

Channel partners cannot do this alone. Scaling a business and sustaining profitability requires partnerships that give customers a simpler way to drive their digital transformation. That involves consulting, design, new products, integration, customisation and 24x7 support.

ELEVATE SERVICE PROVIDER PROGRAMME

Partnerships can provide the expertise needed to promote, sell, design, integrate, customise, deploy and support new applications on-premises, in the public cloud or in hybrid cloud architectures. They allow providers to expand their offerings to include services like managed security, IoT solutions and analytics to differentiate themselves.

That is what is behind the Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Programme. It helps providers pursue partnerships that can improve customer experiences, competitiveness and profitability. There is no minimum commitment or cost to service providers to join the programme, which allows partners of all sizes to participate.

Many customers are making their on-premises IT capabilities work with different public cloud services. The partnerships are critical for ensuring interoperability and reliability, which are essential to IT teams, especially as they move to hybrid multi-cloud operations.

Business-customer transitions from IT capital expenditures to subscriptions and consumption-based operational costs are blurring the lines between system integrators, software vendors and service providers. Multiple vendors may be responsible for a single customer experience.

Going forward service providers and resellers will be redesigning their sales, post-sales and support approaches to address cloud and distributed enterprise solutions, especially as customers have had to embrace more

distributed architectures to reach remote-work employees.

Partnerships are proving especially useful to customers moving to the cloud for the first time. By working together, partners can give customers confidence that they will be supported by a broad array of professionals working together to uphold clear service-level agreements, in the cloud. Partner ecosystems can also help customers sort through the complexity of what applications, networks, cloud services, storage solutions and other IT components they need.

ELEVATE DISTRIBUTOR PROGRAMME

“The Elevate Distributor Programme is going to significantly enhance the resellers experience, not just with us, but also with the distributors,” says Alvarez. Also, with distributor’s ability to have enhanced incentives by ticking all the right boxes - showing growth, leveraging performance-plus deal registration that is all built around trust, alignment and growth — distribution can go back and enhance their own incentives model back into the reseller program.

DISTRIBUTOR CHAMPION

Nutanix is also investing a significant amount of money, along with its distribution partners, in order for them to become a Distributor Champion, which is the highest tiered level and has the highest earning potential. “These distributors have to be integrated with us and have a tight secured B2B integration via API’s,” says Alvarez.

Nutanix resellers will now be able to point and click to get a quote or get a renewals quote with the highest level of accuracy and speed. “This B2B integration is about time, accuracy and velocity,” points out Alvarez.

SNAPSHOT

• Scaling a business and sustaining profitability requires partnerships that give customers a simpler way to drive their digital transformation.

• Many customers are making their on-premises IT capabilities work with different public cloud services.

• The partnerships are critical for ensuring interoperability and reliability, which are essential to IT teams.

• Business-customer relationships transitions from IT capital expenditures to consumptionbased costs are blurring the lines between system integrators, software vendors and service providers.

• Multiple vendors may be responsible for a single customer experience.

• Partnerships are proving especially useful to customers moving to the cloud for the first time.

• Partner ecosystems can also help customers sort through the complexity of what IT components they need.

• Nutanix has spent the past two years shifting resellers away from legacy compensation models, and the Elevate programme accelerated this.

• Legacy sales methods and incentive models are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

• The Elevate program emphasises expertise and capability over size and pays on a recurringrevenue basis.

• Nutanix has moved away from a traditional tiered partner programme to a 100% competencybased programme.

• Nutanix has introduced a concept called disaggregating the incentive stack that motivates partners to sell more and keeps them in better touch with their customers.

• What is more important than the initial sale is the lifetime value of a customer.

• Nutanix could reward partners with premium incentives along the lifetime of the customer’s journey.

• Nutanix thinks that disaggregating the incentive stack will create more sustained value for customers.

• Alliances will be driven by not only customers of today, but the customers of tomorrow.

• The technology landscape will drive innovation and also more complexity.

• Future-minded channel organisations are actively looking at DevOps as one of the next practices to drive differentiation and growth.

• Low code, no code development methodologies will transform solution delivery.

• Nutanix forged strategic relationships with Red Hat and Citrix which have both proved to be of great value.

• Nutanix continues to support VMware ESXi and Horizon View, to enable customer choice.

• Nutanix partners with AWS and Microsoft Azure because cloud is no longer a destination but a collection of capabilities.

CHANNEL AUTONOMY

“Channel Autonomyis one of our key objectives when it comes to our channel program. Nutanix wishes to empower our channel ecosystem so that they can independently drive our business with minimal involvement from our sales team,” says Alvarez.

Nutanix has spent the past two years shifting resellers away from legacy sales and compensation models, and the Elevate programme launched last September has accelerated this. The program emphasises expertise and capability over sizeand pays on a recurringrevenue basis.

Nutanix has moved away from a traditional tiered partner programme to a 100% competency-based programme that will help channel partners drive more profitability. Nutanix has introduced a concept called disaggregating the incentive stack that motivates partners to sell more and keeps them in better touch with their customers.

What is more important than the initial sale is the lifetime value of a customer. From that perspective, Nutanix could reward partners with premium incentives along the lifetime of the customers journey — at point of sale, at activation, at renewal, at expansion, or at another point. The goal is basically assuring that the customer is going to get the most value out of their investments. “This is an incredible way for partners to potentially earn more incentives,” stresses Alvarez.

Legacy sales methods and incentive models are quickly becoming a thing of the past. As customers move to consume IT products as a subscription service rather than a one-time purchase event, vendors will face pressure and opportunity to align partner incentives with that of the customer’s lifetime journey.

Nutanix thinks that disaggregating the incentive stack will create

more sustained value for customers. Nutanix is exploring how we can incentivise partners throughout the full lifetime of a customer’s engagement with us.

VENDOR ALLIANCES

Nutanix anticipates that the alliance landscape will see even more examples of vendors finding common ground as demand grows for more complete, multi-technology solutions. Alliances will be driven by not only customers of today, but the customers of tomorrow as the technology landscape drives innovation but also more complexity.

This is not a new trend - Nutanix forged strategic relationships with Red Hat and Citrix which have both proved to be of great value to partners with solutions that are certified and supported together. Nutanix continues to support VMware ESXi and Horizon View, to enable customer choice.

Nutanix partners with AWS and Microsoft Azure because cloud is no longer a destination but a collection of capabilities that customers want to work together seamlessly as a hybrid environment.

NEXT LEVEL OF SKILL SETS

Future-minded channel organisations are actively looking at DevOps as one of the next practices to drive differentiation and growth. Low code, no code development methodologies will transform solution delivery - slashing engagement time and costs, and thus providing a significant competitive edge.

Those organisations that build these practices will not only gain new customers but will attract the next wave of digital-native channel professionals entering the workforce embracing these new approaches. This will become a new source of vibrancy, innovation, and growth for organisations. ë

INTEGRATING AI, MULTI-CLOUD SERVICES FOR CISOs

The telco provides cloud management, data centre solutions, enterprise connectivity, AI, increasing agility, reducing risk and simplifying the ecosystem.

In a world that is constantly changing, du’s product portfolio enables clients to digitise customer journeys, make rapid and precise decisions with artificial intelligence, and automate more of their internal processes. This enables clients to gather and refine data, move with greater agility and scale faster to capture new opportunities. The telco helps clients bridge the silos of innovation in their organisation and deliver customer experiences that are personalised, connected and trusted.

du’s AI solutions help to future-proof operating models and support business challenges, ensuring maximum value generation in clients’ AI adoption journey.du’s local experts in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments help CISOs to develop and execute on their cloud strategy and maximise the value of digital transformation in their organisations.

The telco provides cloud management, data centre solutions, enhanced enterprise connectivity and infrastructure as a service that increases agility, reduces risk and simplifies a complex ICT ecosystem. The clients can then reduce their cost base while scaling up to serve new demand with a secure and consistent experience, du helps them migrate to cloud and manage their digital infrastructure with a purpose-built model designed to be seamless and secure.

du’s cybersecurity solutions enable organisations to manage risk, take a proactive approach to security, and adopt digital solutions with confidence. Its security experts design, build and manage solutions covering Network Security, Workload Security Applications Data Security and Access Management.

The telco’s cyber security solutions are managed by in-country cybersecurity defence centre to keep pace with the latest security technologies, compliance requirements and trends that impact enterprise security. Companies gain instant access to the expertise, technology and scale you need to protect your digital enterprise and accelerate growth.

While the rise of smart devices and the Internet of Things IoT is transforming Industrial control system ICS networks, increasing usability, efficiency, and productivity in ICS environments, they also have a significant impact on ICS security.

du’s Cybersecurity Defence Centre brings

MARTIN TARR, Chief ICT Officer, du

together 24x7 security operations centre and response services. It uses an integrated approach, encompassing people, process and technology to address cybersecurity risks in even the most complex environments. du offers

24x7x365 security monitoring that enables early, effective detection with integrated intelligence services.

du’s mission is to deliver security capabilities, enabling clients to improve and scale the protection of public, hybrid and private cloud infrastructure. Clients benefit from its integrated, multilayered security platform purposely built for the cloud and delivered as a service ensuring highest level of security for their most critical assets.

The telco offers 24x7 security monitoring and management and its cloud security services are PCI DSS-ISO 27001:2005, powered by leading global technology partners.

Through e-Procurement, du is connected with suppliers and business partners electronically on 24x7 basis. du’s specialized teams for Network, IT, Commercial Sourcing and Procurement Operations are at the forefront of building vendor partnerships.

du has designated employees to offer coordination and support on du processes and procedures as well as providedu Sourcing System training and support to SME suppliers whilst working closely with the government procurement team to identify the best SME partners. ë

du’s AI solutions help to future-proof operating models and support business challenges

ANNUAL GCC SECURITY SYMPOSIUM 2022

25+ speakers and panelists and over a dozen vendor partners participated in the sixth edition of the Symposium.

On May 17, the sixth edition of the GCC Security Symposium and CISO Awards 2022 presented by Global CISO Forum and GEC Media Group was successfully held at Conrad Hotel Dubai, UAE. The annual mega event continued its tradition of recognising outstanding individuals and companies in the field of cyber security. The event witnessed participation of top IT leaders and decision makers who exchanged critical knowledge on the modern-day vulnerability landscape.

The cyber security threat environment is aggressive, well organised, and constantly changing. Experts predict that in the next three years IT will continue to prioritise cyber security by taking an economically sustainable, risk-based approach. Governments are also playing a greater role facilitating collaborations and intelligence and knowledge

sharing to increase the cyber security capabilities of organisations.

The sixth edition of the GCC Security Symposium and CISO Awards 2022 was inaugurated by Ronak Samantaray, Co-Founder and CEO, GEC Media Group and Anushree Dixit, Global Head, GEC Media Group where they have welcomed all the honourable guests and speakers with utmost gratitude for joining him in-person.

GCC Security Symposium and CISO Awards 2022 official event partners were Cloud Box, Human, BeyondTrust, Cohesity, Infinite Blue, Digital Track | Paesslar, Cloudsek, Multipoints | HCL, RNS, Checkmarx | Cyberknight, Atos, Finesse, Help AG, Valto | Accops, Redington | DigiGlass, and Cybereason.

GCC Security Symposium 2022 featured inspirational keynotes, panel discussions, and round table conferences.

Ronak Samantaray, CoFounder and CEO, GEC Media Group welcomed all the honourable guests at The GCC Security Symposium 2022.

Anushree Dixit, Global Head, GEC Media Group welcomed all the honourable guests and speakers at the GCCSS 2022.

Dr Marwan Al Zarouni, Director of Information Services Department, Dubai Electronic Security Centre, UAE.

Brigadier Barakat Alkindi, Digital Transformation and Information Security Specialist.

Mark Phillips, Vice President, Solution Architecture, International Markets, HUMAN Security.

Ian Mckay, Vice President of Global Security Transformation, People 2.0.

Gregg Petersen, Regional Director Middle East and Africa, Cohesity.

Shaytel Patel, VP Technology Audit DP World.

Rajeev Dutt, General Manager – EMEA and APAC, Infinite Blue.

Hesham Saad Aly, Sr. Regional Cybersecurity Specialist, Microsoft.

Hanadi Al Yafei, Director of Child Safety Department, Child Safety Department, Sharjah.

Panel Discussion on Individual Cyber Security - Empowering to Resist Spear Phishing to Prevent Identity Theft and Ransomware Attacks was joined by Robert John Lourenco, Senior Sales Engineer, Cybereason; Amit Bhatia, Head of Information Security-Middle East, Asia and Continental Europe, Maximus Gulf; Hafiz Sheikh Adnan Ahmed, Chief Information Security and Data Privacy Advisor, Premier Real Estate Group; Shahab Uddin, Group IT Infrastructure and Security Manager, Ittihad International Investment; Arun Tewary, Strategic Advisor and Director, FINESSE; and moderated by Alessandro Bassano, Principal Cyber Security Researcher, Technology Innovation Institute.

Shabir Bhat, Regional Sales Director, Middle East Checkmarx.

Vijender Yadav, CEO, CTO and Co-Founder, Accops Systems.

Panel Discussion on Cloud Security in 2022 was joined by Srihari Upadhya, IT Security Assurance Professional; Jeevan Badigari, Director of Information Security CISO DAMAC Properties; Dr Fene Osakwe, Information Technology and Business Advisory Professional; Rahul Sasi, Executive Chairman and Founder, CloudSEK; Amit Roy, General Manager and Head of Cybersecurity, Middle East Turkey and Africa, Atos; and moderated by the Kuldeep Bhatnagar, Former CISO, EAD, Abu Dhabi Government.

Panel Discussion on Innovation and Future Security in BFSI Sector was powered by Help AG and joined by Hussein Shafik Bahgat, Regional Information Security Risk Officer, Standard Chartered Bank; Hussain Al Khalsan, CISO, Zand; HariprasadChede, CISO, National Bank of Fujairah; and moderated by Nicolai Solling, Chief Technology Officer, Help AG.

ServiceNow announces San Diego release adding RPA, hyperautomation, workspaces, industry solutions

ServiceNow announced its Now Platform San Diego release. With an upgraded, more modern visual design and new Robotic Process Automation capabilities that deliver on the promise of hyperautomation, the latest version of the Now Platform is designed to help organisations

address the most pressing challenges facing every industry, in every region, and transform businesses for a new economy.

Organisations are grappling to find more agile and employee-led ways of working to keep their people productive and engaged. The Now

Platform San Diego release helps customers across all industries drive productivity, accelerate the value of hyperautomation, and create better, smarter experiences for a new world of work, all on one platform for digital business.

With the introduction of Next Experience in the Now Platform San Diego release, ServiceNow is streamlining the experience for the 70M+ annual active platform users, who use ServiceNow every day to get their work done. Platform users will see all their most important work at their fingertips, across all their applications, so they can quickly dive into what’s important. Next Experience delivers a modern, streamlined navigation that brings every application together under one consistent experience, and elevates Favourites and History so that people can jump back into their most important work.

Next Experience delivers an upgraded, modern visual design, including a completely redesigned component library, new iconography, typography, and illustrations. The experience delivers enhanced personalisation, such as accessibility preferences, information density and layout preferences, and a choice between light or dark mode.

Riverbed’s eCDN Accelerator delivers corporate video to office and remote workers 70% faster

Riverbed | Aternity announced Riverbed eCDN Accelerator, a new enterprise content delivery network solution that vastly improves video performance and availability on an enterprise scale. Riverbed eCDN Acceleration is now integrated with leading live video applications Microsoft Teams and Stream, video event platforms like ON24 and video on demand platforms that include Brightcove, Kaltura and Qumu. Riverbed eCDN joins the industry’s leading acceleration portfolio – which already speeds the delivery of any application over any network to users, anywhere by up to 33X. The new norm is hybrid, and hybrid workstyles and workspaces are core to the distributed enterprise. The network has also grown more distributed in recent years, with an even greater reliance on cloud and SaaS delivered apps and video. While this hybrid and distributed model results in many benefits for the digital enterprise, it also creates greater challenges for ensuring productivity and providing a seamless and consistent end-to-end digital experience. Riverbed’s one-of-a-kind portfolio of acceleration software already enables remote, mobile, and on-premises workers to leverage the full power of their apps running across Cloud, SaaS, Internet and MPLS networks at peak speeds with up to:

l 50X faster cloud to data center flows

l 10X faster SaaS apps M365, Box, Salesforce, etc.

l 33X faster application performance Oracle, SAP, etc.

l 75X faster downloads SharePoint, etc.

l With up to 99% bandwidth reduction

JOHN ANTANAITIS, Vice President, Product Marketing for Acceleration Solutions at Riverbed | Aternity.

The new Riverbed eCDN Acceleration delivers corporate video to office and remote workers up to 70% faster while reducing up to 99% of the bandwidth consumption normally required by video apps. This is an important performance boost, as slow and unreliable applications and poor video quality were noted by 32% and 29% of business leaders, respectively, as impacting hybrid work efforts according to the Riverbed | Aternity Hybrid Work Global Survey. Riverbed eCDN Acceleration provides optimised delivery of bandwidthintensive content such as live and on-demand video. Content delivery bottlenecks are removed, and bandwidth is saved by intelligently managing how content is distributed to devices on the corporate network. eCDN Acceleration is offered with both agent-based and no-touch, browser-based delivery options for the flexibility to handle the uniqueness of each network and the delivery needs of each user.

Intel launches 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900KS, fastest processor for gamers, priced at $739

Intel announced full details and availability for the new 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900KS, the world’s fastest desktop processor. It delivers up to 5.5 GHz max turbo frequency — in spec with Intel Thermal Velocity Boost and features Intel Adaptive Boost Technology to provide the ultimate gaming experience.

The unlocked i9-12900KS processor is the ultimate processor for enthusiasts and gamers who want the fastest processor available. With 16 cores eight Performance-cores and eight Efficient-cores and 24 threads, and up to 5.5GHz max turbo frequency, 150W Processor Base Power and 30MB Intel Smart Cache for even more gaming power and performance.

Key features and capabilities of the i9-12900KS include:

l Up to 5.5 GHz max turbo frequency with Intel Thermal Velocity Boost.

l Intel Adaptive Boost Technology for improved gaming performance by opportunistically allowing higher multi-core turbo frequencies.

l 16 cores eight P-cores and eight E-cores, 24 threads, 150W Processor Base Power, 30MB Intel Smart Cache, and PCIe Gen 5.0 and 4.0 support.

l Up to DDR5 4800 MT/s and DDR4 3200 MT/s support.

l Chipset compatible with existing Z690 motherboards with latest BIOS recommended for the best gaming experience.

The i9-12900KS processor allows gamers and overclocking enthusiasts to take performance to the next level.

This special edition processor will be available beginning April 5th with a recommended customer price starting at $739. It can be found at retailers worldwide as a boxed processor and integrated into systems from Intel’s channel and OEM partners.

AMD announced availability of AMD Instinct ecosystem with expanded system support from partners including ASUS, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro, the new AMD Instinct MI210 accelerator and the robust capabilities of ROCm 5 software.

Altogether, the AMD Instinct and ROCm ecosystem is offering exascaleclass technology to a broad base of HPC and AI customers, addressing the growing demand for compute-accelerated data centre workloads and reducing the time to insights and discovery.

The AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators are designed to power discoveries in exascale systems, enabling researchers, scientists and engineers to tackle our most pressing challenges, from climate change to vaccine research. The AMD Instinct MI210 accelerators specifically enable exascale-class technologies for customers who need fantastic HPC and AI performance in a PCIe format.

Powered by the AMD CDNA 2 architecture, AMD Instinct MI210 accelerators extend AMD performance leadership in double precision FP64 compute on PCIe form factor cards. They also deliver a robust solution for accelerated deep learning training offering a broad range of mixed-precision capabilities

An open software platform that allows researchers, scientists and engineers to tap the power of AMD Instinct accelerators to drive scientific discoveries, the AMD ROCm platform is built on the foundation of numerous applications and libraries powering top HPC and AI applications.

With ROCm 5, AMD extends its software platform by adding new hardware support for the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators and the AMD Radeon PRO W6800 professional graphics card, plus Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 support, increasing accessibility of ROCm for developers and enabling outstanding performance across key workloads.

AMD Instinct providing expanded support for ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro

Aruba Central NetConductor now includes agile networks, Zero Trust, SASE security policies

Aruba, announced significant advancements to Aruba ESP Edge Services Platform, with new functionality in Aruba Central to enable organisations to keep pace with rapidly changing business requirements. The new Aruba Central NetConductor allows enterprises to centralise the management of distributed networks with cloud-native services that simplify policy provisioning and automate network configurations in wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructures.

Central NetConductor enables a more agile network while enforcing Zero Trust and SASE security policies. Aruba also revealed the industry’s first self-locating indoor access points APs with built-in GPS receivers and Open Locate, a proposed new industry standard for sharing location information from an AP to a device.

To help customers accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, Central NetConductor uses AI for management and optimisation, implements business-intent workflows to automate network configuration, and extends Aruba’s industry-leading built-in security with cloud-native Network Access Control NAC and Dynamic Segmentation for fabric-wide enforcement.

Because Central NetConductor is based on widely accepted protocols such as EVPN, VXLAN and BGP, it can be adopted in a seamless manner that preserves investments based on the ability to operate with existing Aruba networks and third-party vendor infrastructures.

Aruba Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E APs use a combination of built-in GPS receivers, Wi-Fi Location support for fine time measurement and intelligent software to enable highly accu rate, automated WLAN deployments. Aruba’s self-locating WLAN APs provide zero-touch

determination of AP location, continuously validate and update location, and provide a set of universal coordinates that may be transposed on any building floor map or web mapping platform.

Accurate location of the WLAN infrastructure creates an anchored reference that is shared using Open Locate. Businesses can use the universal coordinates and anchored

Pure Storage issued its inaugural ESG report, which provides visibility into the company’s current metrics and sets commitments for making meaningful progress toward a better future for the global community. As part of this ESG report, Pure conducted a product life cycle assessment of its portfolio, specifically the FlashArray products, which found that Pure customers achieve up to 80% reduction in direct carbon usage by data systems compared to competitive products.

Building a sustainable technology infrastructure is necessary to mitigate global warming and the worst impacts of climate change. Pure is leading the way by designing and building products and delivering services that allow customers to dramatically decrease their own environmental footprints.

Expanding on the energy and emissions-savings that Pure brings its customers, Pure’s unique Evergreen architecture and Pure as-a-Service subscription deliver further environmental benefits by significantly minimising e-waste, extending the service lifetimes of equipment, and reducing underutilisation of storage. As a result of these programs, 97% of Pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service.

CHARLES GIANCARLO, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage.

Pure Storage customers achieve 80% reduction in carbon usage compared to competitors

Oracle releases Autonomous Database with Multiple-VMs running in Exadata Cloud@Customer

Oracle announced Oracle ME, a complete employee experience platform to help organisations increase employee engagement and ensure employee success. Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management, Oracle ME enables HR and business leaders to streamline communications across the organisation, increase productivity by guiding employees through complex tasks, and improve talent retention by developing a more supportive and trusted environment at work.

The events over the past two years have changed the game for the global workforce – people’s expectations for what they want and need from their employers have evolved. According to the most recent Oracle AI@Work study, 85% of the global workforce are not satisfied with their employer’s support for their careers, and 87% believe their organisation should be doing more to listen to the needs of its workforce.

This has put increasing pressure on organisations to prioritise the employee experience, but without truly understanding the needs of individual workers, it’s difficult for HR and business leaders to design workplace experiences that support their employees through their careers and help them thrive personally and professionally. Personal priorities are driving professional decisions and workers are looking for guidance on how to succeed in their careers

while balancing personal demands.

Oracle ME delivers a better way to work by providing contextual and guided experiences that strengthen workplace relationships and allow employees to provide continuous feedback with their managers. Oracle ME also enables managers to track and act on real-time employee sentiment, while helping HR teams deliver personalised employee communications and support their entire workforce with direct access to the tools they need, when they need them.

Oracle ME is an open platform that extends across the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite. It also connects to and automates processes with third-party systems and works across multiple channels such as email, SMS, web browser, collaboration tools, and video conferencing. HR teams and business leaders can easily manage changes within Oracle ME to adjust to the changing work environment without the need for IT support, making it easier to deliver employee experiences that reflect a company’s unique culture.

IFS Cloud makes first updates in 2022 to help end customers deliver Moments of Service

IFS, the global cloud enterprise software company, announced the release of its first of two updates to IFS Cloud in 2022. This latest release is now generally available.

Central to this release of IFS Cloud is enabling a fast-tracked adoption of digital capabilities to achieve higher levels of productivity, business agility, and operational excellence so that customers can consistently deliver amazing Moments of Service.

The new features announced in this release will help customers create business value in three areas:

l Accelerating intelligent insight and automation across the organisation

l Elevating the ability to shape and deliver service to their customers

l Unlocking new levels of user experience and productivity for their people

l The IFS Cloud April 2022 release delivers improved predictive capabilities and simpler, more intelligent analytics for faster time-to-insight. The heightened automa-

tion delivered in the release will require fewer human inputs, allowing employees to focus on high-value activities as well as reduce the risk of human errors.

l Specific analytics enhancements include:

l Ready-to-go analytics for faster time to value: pre-built content with advanced analytics reports that can be tailored

l New analysis models for EAM, CRM, HCM, and Manufacturing and self-service analytics to improve visibility and provide a better user experience

l Extended asset performance prediction: Combined sensor data and historical maintenance records can be used to train ML models to support the decision-making process of operators

New service functionality in the release reinforces the connection between the field and the front and back offices.New capabilities will enable companies to serve customers faster, more accurately and consistently against agreed service levels. Enhancements include:

l Introduction of a powerful service request capability, including support for quotation management – enabling an enhanced customer experience through more accurate service work scoping and pricing

l Ability to set geo-positions for assets from mobile devices, record one-off locations for jobs, and update job locations. This reduces the time to locate service equipment and service locations for faster

YVETTE CAMERON, Senior Vice President of Global Product Strategy, Oracle Cloud HCM.

CHRISTIAN PEDERSEN, Chief Product Officer, IFS.

IBM z16 released with Telium processor, AI accelerator, for credit card, healthcare, financial transactions

IBM unveiled IBM z16, next-generation system with an integrated on-chip AI accelerator—delivering latency-optimised inferencing. This innovation is designed to enable clients to analyse real-time transactions, at scale -- for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare and financial transactions. Building on IBM’s history of security leadership, IBM z16 also is specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that might be used to crack today’s encryption technologies.

IBM z16 brings together AI inferencing, via its IBM Telum Processor, with the highly secured and reliable high-volume transaction processing IBM is known for. For the first time, banks can analyse for fraud during transactions on a massive scale: IBM z16 can process 300 billion inference requests per day with just one mil lisecond of latency.

For consumers, this could mean reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on their credit card. For both merchants and card issuers, this could mean a reduction in revenue loss as consumers could avoid frustra tion associated with false declines where they might turn to other cards for future transactions.

Other threats including tax fraud and organised retail theft are emerging as chal lenges for governments and businesses to control. Real-time payments and alterna tive payment methods like cryptocurrencies are pushing the limits on traditional fraud detection techniques.

Applying the new capabilities of IBM z16 to other industries can help create an entirely new class of use cases, including:

l Loan approval: to speed up approval of business or consumer loans

l Clearing and settlement: to determine which trades and/or transactions may have a high-risk exposure before settlement

l Federated learning for retail: to better model risk against fraud and theft

In a hybrid cloud environment inclusive of on-premises and public cloud resources, it is critical to protect against today’s threats and posture against cyber criminals who may be stealing data now for decryption later. Building on IBM technologies like Pervasive Encryption and Confidential Computing, IBM z16 takes cyber resiliency a leap further by protecting data against future threats that could evolve with advances in quantum computing.

As the industry’s first quantum-safe system, IBM z16 is underpinned by latticebased cryptography, an approach for constructing security primitives that helps protect data and systems against current and future threats. With IBM z16 quantum-safe cryptography, businesses can future-ready their applications and data today.

With secure boot meaning that bad actors cannot inject malware into the boot process to take over the system during start-up, IBM z16 clients can strengthen their cyber resiliency posture and retain control of their system. Also, with the Crypto Express 8S CEX8S hardware security module will offer clients both classical and quantum-safe cryptographic technology to help address their use cases requiring

information confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation. IBM z16’s secure boot and quantum-safe cryptography can help clients address future quantum-computing related threats including harvest now, decrypt later attacks which can lead to extortion, loss of intellectual property and disclosure of other sensitive data.

With IBM z16, IBM used a highly collaborative, clientcantered approach that deeply engaged hundreds of individuals from more than 70 clients, a practice that is already underway for future IBM mainframe systems. IBM z16 will be generally available on May 31, 2022. For more information, please visit Ross Mauri’s blog.

WAEL ABDOUSH, General Manager, IBM Gulf, Levant and Pakistan.

Qualys announces Multi-Vector EDR 2.0 with additional threat-hunting, risk mitigation

Qualys announced Multi-Vector EDR 2.0 with additional threat-hunting and risk mitigation capabilities improving alert prioritization and reducing the time needed to respond to threats. Security practitioners are inundated with alerts, which burdens them to prioritize the ones that represent the riskiest threats, wastes their valuable time, and exposes their organisations to increased risk.

Yet, traditional endpoint detection and response EDR solutions still focus solely on endpoint activity to detect attacks and incorporate only MITRE ATT&CK techniques – not tactics.

As a result, practitioners are forced to rely on additional tools to improve their cyber risk posture leading to slow and incomplete threat remediation actions. EDR needs to evolve to scale and provide more meaningful threat context, in near real time, to meet the challenges of the modern threat landscape.

The updated Qualys Multi-Vector EDR operationalizes MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques allowing security practitioners to quickly analyse and respond to threats. Additionally, the Qualys Cloud

Platform’s extended prediction and prevention capabilities provide orchestrated access to multiple context vectors including asset criticality, vulnerabilities, system misconfigurations, and recommended patches via a single agent and unified dashboard.

Qualys Multi-Vector EDR’s comprehensive approach prevents future attacks by identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities exploited by malware. Through native integration with Qualys VMDR, practitioners can pivot from a single malware incident, such as Conti, to identifying all assets susceptible to CVEs associated with the malware and then patch via Qualys Patch Management.

Qualys successfully participated in its first year of MITRE Engenuity Evaluations, round 4. Its Multi-Vector EDR detected the simulated adversary throughout the attack chain. Overall, the solution detected 100% of the tested steps and returned 74% visibility into the entire attack chain. The results attest to how Multi-Vector EDR leverages the Qualys Cloud Platform to sift through the noise to surface the data that matters most to the security team while also providing detections throughout the attack.

The Africa Institute

STUDENT ENROLMENTS DRIVES MIGRATION TO SCALE OUT SYSTEMS

By implementing Arcserve’s OneXafe, The Africa Institute can leverage the platform’s scale-out storage architecture to improve scalability, data management.

Established in 2018, The Africa Institute in Sharjah, UAE, is an interdisciplinary academic research institute dedicated to the study, research, and documentation of Africa and the African diaspora. As the only institution of its kind located in the Gulf, The Africa Institute is positioned to expand understanding of African studies as a global enterprise.

The Institute’s curriculum of postgraduate studies is designed to train the next generation of critical thinkers in African and African diaspora studies. Through its programme of international symposia and conferences, visual art exhibitions and artist commissions, film and performance series, community classes and outreach events, the Institute is expanding public understanding of Arab and African exchange.

LEGACY IT SYSTEMS

The Africa Institute used QNAP Systems and HP for their data storage

solution. But with the institute’s futuristic plans of expansion, the team realised the system had limited scalability and incapability to guard against threats such as ransomware.

“Education for The Africa Institute is a sensitive area that needs to be preserved. The Institute holds rare and valuable historical documents and material which must be protected for coming generations”, says Sherif Nour, Head of IT and Academic Computing at The Africa Institute.

The IT department includes two server rooms with three racks, two storage units, four physical servers, two hypervisors and a basic network backbone. A team of three ran this IT department.

However, by 2024, the institute planned to move to a bigger campus and enrol a large number of students for its academic programs. As part of this transition, the organisation began to look for an upgraded IT infrastructure to cater to the demanding operational environment.

To modernise its operations, the institute wanted a new data storage

SHERIF

NOUR Head of IT and Academic Computing at The Africa Institute.

technology that was cost-effective, scalable and flexible with data security features. Hiring plans for an ERP consultant and a service desk were already in place to run these new technologies and software.

SCALE OUT SYSTEMS

Arcserve’s OneXafe was demonstrated at a seminar organised by Looppe Design and Technology, an Arcserve partner. Looppe later helped the Institute install a OneXafe 4412 storage appliance to secure its data.

OneXafe was set up in January 2020 using plug-and-play features. The appliance was configured and needed brief training from Looppe and Arcserve along with troubleshooting at the beginning.

The ability to start with a small storage capacity and grow accordingly made this technology particularly attractive to The Africa Institute. The scale-out storage architecture means that the institute can simply pay-as-you-grow, and the capacity unfolds into the available pool without any configuration changes and without any application downtime.

“Competitive vendors were trying to force us to purchase oversized systems which were not required at this point,” said Nour.

The Institute upgraded from a traditional scale-up storage model to an advanced scale-out object storage technology. All data is now stored in one large repository and distributed across multiple physical storage devices instead of being divided into files or folders as in scale-up systems.

Arcserve’s OneXafe provides scale-out architecture, and ransomware protection to files through snapshots it uses to restoreand recover data. OneXafe also requires minimal maintenance as many of its functions are automated. The management console OneSystem makes it easier to manage.

BENEFITS OF MIGRATION

With Arcserve’s OneXafe, The Institute has leveraged the platform’s scale-out storage architecture to improve scalability, data resilience, and achieve reduction on storage footprint. OneXafe has delivered reliable performance and has met its objective, especially the IO rate.After 21 months of operations, OneXafe’s return-on-investment and performance are visible.

“We are seeing benefits from its speed when accessing shared folders,” he added.

Enhancing the IT infrastructure at The Africa Institute will continue until the launch of its new campus where the first batch of 200 students will join in September 2023. Apart from the physical systems, the institute plans to introduce an Interlibrary System, a cloud-based academic ERP solution for registration and accounting, and a learning management solution.

Going forward, Nour and his team plan to strengthen security by adding another layer of replication. “We plan to add a second OneXafe storage appliance and have multiple copies of data for optimum data security.” ë

SNAPSHOT

• The Institute’s curriculum of postgraduate studies is designed to train thinkers in African and African studies.

• The Africa Institute previously deployed a traditional scale-up storage model from QNAP and HP as their data storage solution.

• The system’s limited scalability and inadequate capability to guard against modern threats such as ransomware was a significant drawback.

• The institute wanted a new data storage technology that was cost-effective, scalable and flexible with data security features.

• Hiring plans for an ERP consultant and a service desk were already in place.

• Arcserve partner, Looppe helped the Institute install a OneXafe 4412 storage appliance to secure data.

• OneXafe was set up in January 2020 using plug-andplay features.

• The appliance was configured and needed brief training from Looppe and Arcserve along with troubleshooting at the beginning.

• The Institute upgraded from a traditional scaleup storage model to an advanced scale-out object storage technology.

• Data is now stored in one large repository and distributed across multiple physical storage devices.

• Arcserve’s OneXafe provides scale-out architecture, and ransomware protection to files through snapshots.

• OneXafe also requires minimal maintenance as many of its functions are automated.

• The management console OneSystem makes it easier to manage.

• After 21 months of operations, the ROI and overall performance are visible.

• With the launch of a new campus the first batch of 200 students will join in September 2023.

• The institute plans to introduce an Interlibrary System, a cloud-based academic ERP solution for registration and accounting, and a learning management solution.

Steel product manufacturer, Galva Coat implements Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP

Infor, the industry cloud company, announced that Galva Coat Industries, a landmark plant in the industrial area of Abu Dhabi that produces a wide range of steel products, has selected Infor CloudSuite Industrial, a cloud-based, industryfocused, enterprise resource planning solution, to enable the digitalisation of the production process and delivery, in its effort to become the

leading producer of lighting poles and guard rails across the region.

Based in Abu Dhabi’s Musaffah industrial area, Galva Coat was founded in 1995 and specializes in the design, engineering and manufacture of various steel products. Galva Coat has been the pioneer and the market leader in the field of lighting poles in the UAE

and Middle East for 25 years. The organisation is widely recognised for its unmatched value system quality and relentless pursuit of excellence. Galva Coat uses highly sophisticated advanced technology, modern production facilities and skilled staff.

Galva Coat has decided to move its ERP forward to the cloud and away from a legacy on-premises version as a crucial part of its digital transformation. After evaluating various options, the company chose Infor CloudSuite Industrial, powered by Amazon Web Services, to enable order management with CRM, planning, shop floor operations, time sheets management, supply chain including vendor portals and customer portals, finance and analytics.

By implementing the multi-tenant Infor CloudSuite Industrial, running on the Infor OS operating services platform and powered by AWS, Galva Coat is aiming to automate and integrate its production control systems and plant maintenance solutions and provide meaningful real-time analytics across operations to its senior management.

The deployment will start in April and is expected to go live before December. ITWare, one of Infor’s long-standing ERP channel partners in the region focusing on Infor’s CloudSuite solutions, worked closely with the Infor team during the entire presales cycle and will be leading the implementation efforts.

277,000 people connected to Cisco’s Wi-Fi network at Expo 2020 on 5 March

The digital network infrastructure at Expo 2020 Dubai delivered impressive results throughout the event, according to newly unveiled data from Cisco, Expo’s official Digital Network Partner. Cisco provided its latest technology innovations to enable the most connected and

digital world Expo in history.

Working with the organisers and other technology partners, Cisco helped connect visitors, exhibitors and Expo staff across three thematic districts, over 200 pavilions, parks and arrival plazas, as well as the Dubai Exhibition Centre.

Close to 3 million unique users connected to the Wi-Fi network during the first five months of the event.

The highest number of connected users fell on March 5th, when more than 277,000 people connected to the network. In addition, ever day over 5,000 Expo employees, media personnel, volunteers and contractors used the Expo workforce network, powered by Cisco.

With over 500 screens throughout the site, the Cisco Vision deployment was the largest of its kind in the region and one of the largest globally, streaming over 230,000 minutes of dynamic signage, high-definition digital content and video. It also helped deliver information and experiences with over 1,520 hours of nonstop live streaming content from various stages like Al Wasl, Jubliee and Dubai Millennium amphitheatre, among others. From merchandise stores to food and beverage vendors, the Cisco network connected over 500 retail units across the Expo site, helping enable payments and invoicing services.

20+ MENA South enterprises recognised for HR transformation at SAP HXM Elite Club Awards

Global technology company SAP’s Human Experience Management arm, SuccessFactors, recently awarded leading organisations in the Middle East for the successful implementation

of SAP SuccessFactors solutions for HR transformations at the SAP HXM Elite Club Award MENA South 2021.

SAP awarded a total of 21 organisations

Juma al Majid implements Commvault’s Metallic Office 365 Backup automating Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams

Juma al Majid Holdings Group, one of the leading conglomerate companies in the UAE, has implemented Commvault’s Metallic Office 365 Backup. The technology helps JAM Group to automate daily backups and recovery for Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams.

With continuous business growth leading to ever-expanding data volume over the years, it became increasingly resource-intensive for JAM Group to manage and maintain infrastructure for multiple Exchange servers within its datacentre. To remedy the situation, JAM Group adopted Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud to reduce its onpremises footprint and accelerate speed to market.

Thanks to eDiscovery capabilities with Metallic Office 365 Backup, JAM Group can also quickly search for, uncover, and preserve Exchange emails for regulatory purposes via a simple keyword query. Metallic’s flexible restore options also streamline granular or point-intime recoveries for Exchange Online mailbox restoration. The IT team no longer needs to rely on a spreadsheet to know which tapes to bring from a remote site to restore the required mailboxes. This has helped to improve the data recovery efficiency response times.

across three main categories: The Largest HXM Transformation category identified the top customers for the largest and boldest transformations in HR; the Innovation Awards category focused on innovations in 2021, and the Tenacity Award category was aimed at those who pushed forward across all challenges.

In the first category, four main organisations were identified for the Largest HXM Transformation. This category saw Qatar’s Civil Service and Governmental Development Bureau, and Power International Holding winning for the Largest HXM Transformation in Government and Conglomerates respectively. Meanwhile, Egypt-based Banque Misr was awarded for the same in Financial Services, and UAE’s Chalhoub Group was awarded for Retail.

The second category for Innovation Awards saw the distribution of a total of 16 awards. UAE based organisations took home many of the awards for various sectors. This included Kerzner International Hospitality, Khidmah Facility Management, Al Habtoor Motors Automotive, Averda International Waste Management and Environmental Services, Magrabi Retail, Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation Utility, Majid Al Futtaim Holding, Pure Health Healthcare, Al Dahra Agriculture, UAE Space Agency Government and Air Arabia Aviation.

Commvault has an extensive customer community in the Middle East, including Emirates Steel, Dubai Police, Dubai Municipality, MEEZA, Bein Sports and Al Jazeera. Commvault also works with leading players in regional Telco, Finance, Government and Education sectors, including Saudi Telecom Company and Jeddah University, Garanti Bank and DenizBank in Turkey as well as Blue Label Telecoms in South Africa.

With Metallic’s unlimited cloud storage and retention, JAM Group can preserve mailbox data based on multiple retention policies – such as keeping particular emails as permanent records for legal purposes.

FADY RICHMANY, Regional Vice PresidentSEEMEA, Commvault.

stc to set up 16 datacentres across Riyadh, Jeddah, Medina with capacity of 125 MW

Building the largest datacentre project in the Middle East, stc aims to enable digital transformation in the government and private sectors through digital economy, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, computing and automation according to KSA Vision 2030. The project consists of 16 datacentres with 17,000 storing units serving 8 parallel sites spread over 6 cities with a maximum capacity of 125 MW.

It seeks to double the current digital capacity to more than 300 MW in a quick response to demand in the local market. The project consists of 3 phases: 3 datacentres in Riyadh, Jeddah and Medina in first phase, 4 in the second and the rest in the third phase to make up a total of 16 centres.

The Group has announced an agreement with Alibaba Cloud to invest $500 million in cloud services. stc has recently received a cloud service provider certificate to be the first globally accredited Saudi company in this field. The Group’s Digital Operations Control Centre in Riyadh is the largest integrated operation centre in the region.

Connected to more than 4 marine cables, the centre operates the largest international portals, with a capacity of more than 8.4 tbps. It contains the latest protection and distribution systems in the world used for the first time in the region to protect company service system in general and the service and solution system for transfer of data and audio services for all customers. The centre also includes the largest

cybersecurity operations centre in the region.

Recently, stc announced creation of datacentres at several Gulf markets. stc Bahrain signed an agreement with the Bahraini Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications to establish the largest datacentre spanning 55,000 square meters as one of the early energy-efficient initiatives. This step can encourage local creators to take a step forward towards the use of renewable energy and push for new horizons for digital transformation. It also helps leverage and diversify the local economy, which is in line with Bahrain’s Economic Vision 2030.

Another initiative announced by stc is MENA Hub, a major digital hub for the Middle East and North Africa MENA region. With an investment of $1 billion, the hub will be created in cooperation with regional and international partners, highlighting the Saudi leadership in the ICT sector and the great potential of stc as the biggest telecommunications company in the Middle East and promoting economy and GDP growth in the Kingdom.

Connecting three continents, the hub is utilising the Kingdom’s strategic location to scale up investments in international communication services and datacentres. Investing in a fibre optic grid, the project entails installation of highly efficient cables to meet the future cloud needs and ensure uninterrupted service.

Khazna Data Centers begins construction of 31.8MW datacentre in Masdar Abu Dhabi

Khazna Data Centers, one of the largest wholesale data center providers in the Middle East and North Africa, has kicked off construction of its second data center in Masdar, Abu Dhabi and is set to be completed by Q3 2023. To be named Khazna Abu Dhabi 6 AUH 6, the new 31.8 megawatts of IT power capacity facility will further expand the company’s footprint in the region and address the need for a future-ready digital infrastructure to enhance enterprises’ digital resiliency and digital transformation journeys.

AUH 6 is designed with the aim to meet the highest sustainability and efficiency standards in compliance with international hyperscale requirements. The use of a modular, repeatable design to building datacentres improves construction efficiency, delivers greater performance, increase deployment speed, and ensure smoother operations.

The Middle East is on the path of rapid cloud growth in the coming years. The United Arab Emirates is considered one of the largest data center hubs in the region and up to $2 billion in additional investments are projected by 2026. At Khazna Data Centers we are committed to

Arab African International Bank partners with Liferay for securing access to various touchpoints

In line with its digital transformation and customer-centric strategy, Arab African International Bank announced a collaboration with Liferay. This tie-up is believed to enhance AAIB customers’ digital experience, through facilitating and securing their access to the bank’s various touchpoints, whether internet banking or mobile application.

By implementing Liferay’s latest digital technology on the bank’s website, AAIB customers will be able to access a variety of financial services smoothly and swiftly, via any electronic device. In addition, Liferay solutions will be assisting the bank in achieving its strategic goals of financial resilience, customer focus, and innovation, through the use of new operating system models, data, and digitisation, as the new platform will cater to evolving business and individual needs.

Additionally, AAIB’s digital factory enables it to generate its own solutions, along with custom applications and services, whenever needed. This, in turn, makes the bank more innovative and agile per tinent to attending to the market needs and setting trends on a daily basis. It is also noteworthy that AAIB is one of few Egyptian banks to have established a digital factory of its own.

further enhance the country’s status as an international hub and encourage businesses and organisations to accelerate their digital transformation excursions”.

With Khazna Data Centers’ proven experience, the company now operates a total of 8 datacentres, has 3 datacentres under construction with a further 3 in the pipeline, amounting for a total of 220-megawatt capacity across its sites in the United Arab Emirates and embarked on plans to expand in

HASSAN ALNAQBI, CEO of Khazna Data Centers.

OMAR SHELIBY, Country Sales Manager at Liferay Egypt.

Full-stack observability

WHY BUSINESS PERFORMANCE AND IT STACK VISIBILITY ARE INTERLINKED

With recent expansion of the IT stack across on-premises, cloud, into homes, end-toend visibility and delivering business performance are now top priorities.

Across all industries, technologists know that they need to build on their current application monitoring tools and techniques in order to manage the increasing levels of complexity they are encountering in every corner of their IT estate. They are seeking out solutions which will give them full visibility into legacy on-premises architecture alongside cloud native environments, including the increasing deployment of microservices and container solutions.

96% of global technologists believe that having the ability to monitor technical areas across their IT stack and directly link IT performance to business outcomes, would be important over the coming 12 months.

But the reality is that nearly all IT departments are still relying on multiple, disconnected solutions to monitor availability and performance. Technologists do not have unified visibility across their IT estates, and most are struggling to make headway.

This desire for unified visibility of the entire IT estate is being driven by a need to tackle greater complexity within the IT environment and to meet growing customer expectations for exceptional digital experiences. Technologists know that they cannot afford any slip-ups when it comes to IT availability and performance, and that any disruption to digital services is likely to result in lost revenue.

WHAT IS FULL-STACK OBSERVABILITY

Full-stack observability provides technologists with unified, real-time visibility into IT availability and performance up and down the stack for compute, storage, network and public internet, from the customer facing application all the way into the back end. It enables IT operations, development and networking teams to identify anomalies, understand root causes through dependency analysis, and fix issues before they impact end users and the business quickly and easily.

And when this IT performance data is connected to business outcomes, technologists can rank issues based on their potential impact to the organisation and prioritise actions accordingly.

Technologists recognise that full-stack observability is an enabler for seamless digital experiences that customers and employees now expect.

88% of technologists report that appetite for full-stack observability within their organisation has increased over the last 12 months. 91% technologists state that their organisation now has a defined full-stack observability strategy in place – with 37% already in execution mode, 39% taking their first steps and 15% ready to get started.

A remarkable 90% of organisations will be somewhere along the journey to full-stack observability during 2022. 98% state it is important to connect visibility across all areas of the IT stack.

To date, organisations have tended to weight their efforts marginally more towards increased observability into IT infrastructure. But network infrastructure and applications internal operational and customer-facing follow close behind. Technologists struggle to prioritise one area of the IT estate over another. All areas are of critical importance.

More than a third 37% of technologists state that their organisation has prioritised efforts to generate greater visibility of IT performance within microservices, container and serverless environments over the last 12 months. This trend is likely to accelerate further during 2022.

There is a widespread understanding that the transition from traditional monitoring to full-stack observability can be complex and takes time.

BENEFITS OF FULL-STACK OBSERVABILITY

Many organisations are already seeing positive results from their efforts, with 86% of technologists reporting greater visibility across their IT stack over the last 12 months.

Those that have made progress in the last 12 months report a wide range of benefits, including improved productivity within the IT department, reduced operational costs and ability to deploy IT teams on more strategic work.

With greater visibility into IT availability and performance, technolo-

gists are now starting to be able to identify anomalies and understand the root causes of performance issues more easily. This means they are removing themselves from the constant cycle of firefighting which has characterised most IT departments over the last two years.

Operational costs are falling because availability and performance issues are being addressed earlier and more quickly. Technologists are getting more time to focus on innovation and driving competitive advantage for their organisations.

93% of technologists report that the wider business has been supportive of their efforts to implement full-stack observability, in terms of providing the necessary budget and resources.

Momentum is building in the transition to full-stack observability, and 83% of technologists report some level of confidence that their organisation will reach its observability goals in the next 12 months.

87% of technologists feel excited about the benefits that this technology can bring to their organisation from both an IT and business performance

perspective. And 85% believe that the shift to full-stack observability will be transformational for their business.

There is an understanding that the shift to observability requires a holistic strategy which encompasses new ways of working, with greater collaboration between teams and a willingness to trust in a single source of truth for all availability and performance data.

ROAD AHEAD AND CHALLENGES

Looking ahead, 93% of technologists recognise that there is more work

to be done to deploy full-stack observability within their organisation. 70% are concerned that their organisation is now behind industry peers in implementing observability solutions.

Technologists believe that by linking technology performance with business outcomes and demonstrating return on investment from their full-stack observability programs, they can make strides towards achieving their goals in 2022.

The implications for businesses that fail to build on their current monitoring solutions over the next 12 months are likely to be severe.

95% of technologists point to at least one negative organisational consequence of missing their full-stack observability goals in 2022. These include reduced productivity within the IT department, an inability to innovate and deliver digital transformation, and spiralling complexity as new applications and IT infrastructure are bolted on to the existing technology stack.

80% of technologists accept that organisations that fail to make significant strides in their journey towards full-stack observability in 2022 will face competitive disadvantage versus their peers.

75% of technologists regard skills as a critical factor in achieving their full-stack observability goals in 2022. 57% point to a need to define new practices and 55% believe that it’s vital to identify the right technology vendor.

Technologists are evidently aware that monitoring performance in the cloud requires specific skill sets, particularly due to the shift to OpenTelemetry.

Many technologists are relying on multiple, disconnected tools to monitor IT availability and performance across the IT stack. In most

cases, these existing solutions are performing an invaluable job, enabling technologists to identify issues and take appropriate action within a specific domain. But the issue is often a lack of connection and interoperability between these tools which makes it very difficult to understand dependencies across, as well as up and down, the IT stack.

Elsewhere, some organisations have advanced to a more unified monitoring strategy, but they still have little visibility into the impact of availability and performance issues, and they are unable to link these issues to business KPIs in real-time.

Technologists understand that deployment of full-stack observability is a multi-stage journey that will evolve as IT complexity continues to increase within their organisation. ë

REMOTE COLLABORATION IS THE NEW NORM: TRENDS FOR

2022 AND BEYOND

According to an Economist Impact global survey, over 75% of respondents believe that hybrid, flexible work will be a standard practice in coming three years.

During the first months of 2020, the pandemic lead to lengthy lockdowns from restaurant shutdowns to school closures and many businesses were forced to switch to remote working. To cope with the new working reality, businesses embraced new work models and technology solutions that could allow them to continue to operate efficiently.

As we near the halfway point of 2022, and even after employees began returning back to their offices, there are still many businesses supporting remote working. This trend shows that businesses are redefining the work and collaboration opportunities they offer their employees without this work or collaboration having to take place in a physical office space. In essence, they are reshaping how they operate, organise and communicate with their customers and partners, and even with their teams work together.

But what does this actually mean for collaboration?

Is it really possible to reach a pre-pandemic level of collaboration effectiveness?

The challenge for businesses is to build collaboration strategies that foster engagement, enhance teamwork and improve cross-company communication. Technology already gives us the tools to reach that goal. Collaboration systems deliver a multichannel communications platform for remote employees and partners, including video, voice, file sharing, instant messaging, screen sharing, presentation showing, and shared workspaces.

According to a recent Economist Impact global survey on the state of hybrid work, commissioned by Google Workspace, over 75% of respondents believe that hybrid, flexible work will be a standard practice within their organisations in the coming three years. Given that 70% of respondents said they never worked remotely before the pandemic, it’s clear that

hybrid has become the dominant model for work and that it’s here to stay. The old way of working is changing, and we all need to adapt in order to stay on top.

As the adoption of hybrid work will likely grow in the years ahead, we should keep in mind the following remote collaboration trends:

ASYNCHRONOUS COLLABORATION

2022 seems to be the year of asynchronous collaboration, where teams are now required to work together in real time. However, this type of collaboration asynchronous isn’t tied to a specific time, and employees and teams can contribute to a project or an idea on their own schedule.

This change marks the beginning of a new era of work in which time flows differently for each employee. People from all over the world can work together on projects in different time zones and in different cultures. Some will start their day late in Asia and work until nightfall, while some in the US will wake up at dawn so they can call it a day early.

LOUBNA IMENCHAL Head of Video Collaboration at Logitech for Africa, Middle East, Turkey and Central Asia.

SNAPSHOT

• 2022 seems to be the year of asynchronous collaboration, where teams are now required to work together in real time.

• This type of collaboration is not tied to a specific time, and teams can contribute on their own schedule.

• This change marks the beginning of a new era of work in which time flows differently for each employee.

• People from all over the world can work together on projects in different time zones and in different cultures.

• Asynchronous collaboration can prove to be one of the most effective solutions for maximising productivity.

• It respects the limits and preferences of employees, as it gives them the opportunity to handle their work whenever fits best during the day.

• Defining a specific time in which everyone should be involved in a teleconference, does not sound so productive anymore.

• Collaboration equity is the ability for meeting participants to fully participate regardless of location, device, language, experience level.

• When employees do not participate equally in meetings, productivity suffers.

• To fully participate, members should be seen and heard clearly and must feel personally empowered to contribute to the conversation.

• Participation, when encouraged by leaders and embraced by attendees, has strongest long-term impact on post-meeting behaviour.

• The video conferencing industry is responding and innovating to solve this important problem in a number of ways.

• Smart conference room systems can now use AI and computer vision to auto-frame participants to get the ideal zoomed-in view of attendees.

LOGITECH PRODUCTS ENABLING MEETING EQUITY

Logitech video collaboration solutions are built for the hybrid workforce and encourage meeting equity and equal participation by allowing everyone to be seen and heard clearly. The sophistication of Logitech’s video and AI technology is a key reason organisation equip their meeting rooms with Logitech devices. Built into Logitech cameras and audio solutions, RightSense proactive technologies automate and enhance the meeting experience.

RightSight moves the camera automatically, adjusting the zoom so no one is left out of the picture. RightLight helps all attendees look their best on camera, regardless of lighting conditions. RightSound enhances vocal clarity by suppressing background noise and vibration, autolevelling voices, and focusing on active speakers.

Logitech CollabOS, the unifying operating system running on Logitech video conferencing devices, enables meeting room solutions to operate seamlessly together and with third-party video services and devices, providing a consistent and cohesive experience for meeting organisers and attendees.

Recently, Logitech also announced a major update to the Sync device management platform, built to support the modern, hybrid workforce. Sync now supports personal collaboration devices, such as webcams, headsets, and docking stations, making it easy for IT to manage conference rooms and workstations from a single cloudbased interface.

Asynchronous collaboration and communication can prove to be one of the most effective solutions for maximising productivity. It respects the limits and preferences of employees, as it gives them the opportunity to handle their work whenever fits best during the day.

Given the global issues of stress, different communication styles and the time required for proper preparation, defining a specific time in which everyone should be involved in a teleconference, does not sound so productive anymore. Employees can share their thoughts in the form of posts, files, recorded video or short messages virtually in the same way social media platforms allow users to share. Users are then notified when new content has been posted, to which anyone can respond, thus creating a rich brainstorming environment.

EQUITY IN MEETINGS AND AI

Collaboration equity is the ability for all meeting participants to fully participate -regardless of their location, device, language, or experience level. The hybrid model, though, made things more complicated. Now, meetings include employees working from office, and those working from home. In this case, people naturally communicate in person and the remote employee is not a priority. But when employees don’t participate equally in meetings, productivity suffers.

To fully participate, members should be seen and heard clearly. And they must feel personally empowered to contribute to the conversation. Participation, when encouraged by leaders and embraced by attendees, has the strongest long-term impact on meeting outcomes and post-meeting behaviour.

The video conferencing industry is responding and innovating to solve this important problem in a number of ways. Smart conference room systems can now use AI and computer vision to auto-frame the participants to get the ideal zoomed-in view of attendees. Furthermore, intelligent screen layouts leverage the power of AI to give every participant a closer look at the active speaker, while also seeing the bigger picture.

IMMERSIVE COLLABORATION

In theory, Metaverse has the power to truly evolve the concept of remote collaboration. A conference can become an immersive experience with virtual reality (VR) technology, allowing the participants to communicate better, almost as if they meet each other in person. When sharing a virtual space, a team can visualise ideas more clearly and experience a kind of interactivity as close as sharing the same office. When the essential technology becomes more affordable and easier to use, immersive collaboration could easily skyrocket.

CLOUD BASED COMMUNICATION

If you want to achieve seamless remote collaboration, then finding the best cloud-based unified communication (UC) system is a must. Cloud-based solutions provide more convenience for the hybrid work model, incorporate server-like functionality for uploading and accessing files and allow realtime task updates.

At the same time, they usually offer a centralised hub for communication between office and remote employees. Bringing together voice, text messaging, video meetings, and more, cloud-based UC, or unified communications as a service (UCaaS), improves worker productivity and effectiveness. ë

This content has been sponsored by the vendor.

SECURING US CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AGAINST RUSSIAN CYBER THREATS

All US critical infrastructure sectors continue to undergo digital transformationrepresenting efficiency, but these shifts also introduce gaps in security.

Knowing what the threat is, the impact it could have on your systems and how to respond is far more important than knowing where the threat is coming from.Understanding where the threat is coming from is useful from the perspective of national cyber strategy, defense and intelligence. It can also help determine how to prioritise remediations based onthe motivations of threat actors.

Beyond that, knowing where a threat is coming from has little impact on how an organisation responds. For almost all organisations, cybersecurity risk management practices are the same regardless of whether the

attack is coming from the Russians, other nation states, cyber criminals or other bad actors.

Ransomware against critical infrastructure providers is incredibly profitable for cybercriminals, as demonstrated by the Conti ransomware data leaks. The Conti group and its affiliates reportedly made use of over 30 known vulnerabilities, some of which were first disclosed in 2018. The Conti bitcoin wallet data showed more than $1 billion had been paid, creating a massive funding method for Russian actors.

Ransomware is also a very flexible weapon, as demonstrated by the

Russian-attributed malware BlackEnergy and CrashOverride, both of which were used in attacks against the Ukrainian power gridand were very sophisticated and modular with payloads that could be delivered in near real-time to the victim. Two separate indictments from the Department of Justice were unsealed on March 25, charging four Russian nationals for extensive hacking campaigns against critical infrastructure providers worldwide.

Last week, President Biden warned of the potential for Russian cyberattacks against the United States in response to the economic costs we have imposed following the invasion of Ukraine. He urged governors, private sector partners and critical infrastructure providers to harden their cyber defences immediately.

The White House also issued a Fact Sheet, Act Now to Protect Against Potential Cyberattacks,that called for companies to deploy multi-factor authentication, continuous monitoring and threat mitigation, to make sure systems are patched and protected against all known vulnerabilities, build security into products from the ground up, and use modern tools to check for known and potential vulnerabilities.

Critical infrastructure is not one thing, and most critical infrastructure industries vastly differ. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISAhas identified 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the US, including financial services, energy providers, water and wastewater treatment facilities, and transportation systems.

There is no singular defense paradigm that could effectively be applied across all the sectors. Some critical infrastructure providers have a high degree of cybersecurity preparedness, strong risk understanding and risk

management practices, and very strong security programs. Others are woefully ill prepared.

All critical infrastructure sectors continue to undergo digital transformation, resulting in an expanding cyberattack surface. New technology investments represent great efficiency opportunities, like the move to smart factories and smart cities, but these shifts can introduce real gaps in security. Withoutenhancements to security and resiliency, critical infrastructure providers are left unprepared to address cyberthreats.

Just this week, a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Trellix, yet again, put this lack of preparedness in writing. The report, based on survey results from 800 IT decision makers from several countries around the world, including the United States, found that 9% of critical infrastructure operators don’t even have a cybersecurity strategy in place, despite the fact that 85% of respondents believe they have been targeted by a nation-state cyberthreat.

Certain critical infrastructure sectors better understand strategic risk assessments and cyber risk management as a discipline. Generally speaking, the cybersecurity practices in these markets and industries have been more highly regulated than others.

For example, the financial services sector has long relied on IT and has built strong cyber risk management processes and practices. Most modern banks realise that, in many ways, they are technology companies. For decades, everything from bank accounts to transactions to data analytics have been digitised, resulting in a culture of strong security practices. These security practices have been encouraged through a high level of regulation and oversight.

Ransomware is also a very flexible weapon, demonstrated by Russian-attributed malware BlackEnergy and CrashOverride

AMIT YORAN Chairman and CEO, Tenable.

While dramatic differences can be found in the security readiness of individual banks, the sector as a whole has strong security and is resilient as a critical infrastructure.

For years, the electric industry operated on voluntary compliance of reliability standards, but following the Northeast blackout of 2003, Congress authorised the mandatory development of reliability standards, which included cybersecurity Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Due, in part, to regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FERC, which oversees the reliable operation of the bulk power system, the electric sector has improved cyber resiliency. FERC certified the North American Electric Reliability Corporation NERC to oversee electric reliability, and as part of its definition of resilience, included cybersecurity as critical. Today, cybersecurity standards in the energy sector continue to be developed and enforced by NERC resulting in improved security and reliability.

As IT and operational technology OT systems become increasingly interconnected, even some well managed critical infrastructure sectors remain at risk. For example, some industries, such as mining, chemical plants and fuel pipelines, already have safety systems to prevent destruction of physical infrastructure and bodily harm or loss of life.

However, as organisations increasingly interconnect their IT and OT systems in the pursuit of improved efficiency, more control settings become digitised. As a result, the effectiveness of some of these safety measures may be brought into question.

Other critical infrastructure sectors have not prioritised cyber and are largely blindsided by cyber as a strategic risk. Some of these sectors have

not historically thought of interconnectivity, access, complexity and digitisation as strategic cyber risk and haven’t been regulated in that way.

For example, many healthcare providers and hospitals have long viewed IT as a cost efficiency play for automation and sharing information when needed to provide better care, not necessarily a strategic asset. Consequently, attackers have caught many healthcare organisations off guard.

A closer look at the data reveals stark differences among critical infrastructure sectors. According to Tenable’s own vulnerability data, financial services organisations and organisations in the energy sector, which encompasses more than the electric sector, average about the same number of critical vulnerabilities per device, showing a relative approximation in the maturity of their cyber practices. Contrast that with healthcare and manufacturing, which average twice as many critical vulnerabilities per device.

The median time for financial services and energy sector organisations to remediate a critical vulnerability is approximately 12 days, while manufacturing and healthcare average 29 and 32 days,respectively. This gap provides adversaries ample opportunity and highlights the sample disparities in the cyber maturity of these sectors.

There are fundamental steps all providers must take, from knowing what’s on their network and how those systems are vulnerable to addressing those exposures, and from controlling user access and privileges to managing critical systems that are interconnected, that will make it harder for bad actors to compromise critical infrastructures. ë

Excerpted from the written Testimony by Amit Yoran, Chairman and CEO, Tenable, given to House Committee on Homeland Security on 30 March 2022.

MSSPS NEED TO USE XDR FOR

SHARED-INFORMATION SYSTEM

For MSSPs their inter-human coordination with partners and customers must come together with XDR capabilities to create a shared-information ecosystem.

Two years on from our planetwide migration to the cloud, the unease experienced by IT and security teams lingers. Consumers demand more and better digital experiences. Employees demand more flexible working conditions. The C-suite demands more value and lower costs. And all of this takes place in an atmosphere of skills and resource gaps.

On top of all this, everyone from the customer to the board expects delivery of their wish-lists in absolute security. But mounting evidence suggests security teams are not confident in their ability to meet these requirements.

In a global report by Trellix, companies revealed how unprepared they were in battling digital predators, especially when it came to the use of shared data. More than 90% confirmed they were in possession of such data but that it was incomplete and often did not give adequate details of attacks or their effects.

This nervousness about the threat landscape can be felt everywhere. A recent PwC report found around 43% of Middle East organisations expected a surge in reportable incidentsin 2022.

Security teams need help from several quarters. First, their organisations must change their culture to accept that cybersecurity is

everyone’s responsibility. And second, IT and business stakeholders must recognise that handling the entire security function in house is no longer viable.

Today, in the age of cloud, managed security service providers, MSSPs are increasingly the answer to under-resourced and beleaguered teams.

MSSPs are also the answer to gaps in strategy. For example, Trellix’s report revealed one in 10 global organisations to be without a security strategy, and many must lean on third-party support to identify the perpetrators of attacks. But it is important to note that these vulnerabilities can extend to MSSPs themselves.

MSSPs in general have been the source targets of supply-chain attacks such as those on Kaseya and SolarWinds. So, if MSSPs are to take their place as the go-to solution for plugging skills and resource gaps, they need to think about their own strategies to contend with an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape. And they need to consider how they will sift through the variety of tools currently vying for the title of cyber panacea.

To be an effective partner for the region’s embattled security teams, an MSSP must be able to independently and automatically identify and react to threats without complex SOAR integration. It must be able to convincingly demonstrate how its own back-office and customer-facing systems are protected from advanced persistent threats.

And it must link to third-party threat assessments that are made available to the end customer. The endpoint detection and responsesystem used by the MSSP must provide actionable directions when threats are found, so customers can take their own timely steps to mitigate the effects of incursions.

Even for MSSPs, the securing of digital experiences against cyberthreats is challenging. In reality, policy and human commitment must come together with next-level technology to create an enterprise-wide environment of living security, where all roles and business units participate in defending the digital estate.

On the technology side, extended detection, and response XDR is the ideal complement to human agency in building a living-security model. It goes beyond EDR to drive automated responses without complex integration into SOAR for many reactions, delving into telemetry and log data from devices, applications, and shared sources.

For MSSPs to add value, their inter-human coordination internally and with partners and customers must come together with their XDR capabilities to create a shared-information ecosystem that can thwart today’s sophisticated threats. To be an effective business partner, MSSPs must be able to offer clients a unified security posture that accounts for post-COVID hybrid setups.

It must allow the organisations it serves to peer into every digital nook and cranny, from the endpoint to the cloud. Security teams that have 4K resolution across their domains will

be better placed to see the previously unseeable and take timely action to prevent damage.

XDR used as part of a living-security environment enables faster, more accurate decisions through automation and correlation analysis across multiple vectors. Security teams can go on the offensive for a change, and SOCs, no longer encumbered by a deluge of false positives, can target their efforts more effectively.

An open, interoperable XDR platform backed by a cooperative hive of human ingenuity allows the integration of the toolsets everyone needs to arm themselves against digital

adversaries. XDR and living security form a hybrid threat posture that learns, adapts, and empowers people to be proactive in their own protection.

XDR has been gaining popularity in the industry. But many organisations that engage with an XDR vendor are left with buyer’s remorse. This is because many vendors sell the technology as a one-shot, unified, integrated platform that can do it all.

For MSSPs, the assumption that a singlepane, catchall sentinel can be deployed to watch over all their clients’ infrastructures is

VIBIN SHAJU Presales DirectorEMEA, Trellix.

erroneous. XDR is still evolving. The livingsecurity approach is one of the best ways to accelerate this evolution. The more data sources and cross-vendor cooperation we cultivate, the more value XDR will be able to add.

MSSPs are on a mission to shield their clients from the cyber battlefield — to fight the fight on their behalf. XDR and living security bring them the right weapons for the job. An end to alert fatigue. Faster, more accurate detection. More effective remediation. Greater visibility and control. XDR and living security are to an ideal MSSP what an ideal MSSP is to its clients — a cost-friendly boon to productivity and effectiveness. ë

A recent PwC report found around 43% of Middle East organisations expected a surge in reportable incidents in 2022

HOW OPEN SOURCE CAN HELP ENTERPRISES

WITHSTAND SHOCKS

Open source enables agility because it is community led and contributors react faster to a crisis than large companies with hierarchies and decisionstructures.

If the last 15 years have taught us anything, it is to expect the unpredictable.

Few people saw the 2009 financial crisis coming, nobody saw COVID coming. Each episode tells us that what makes sense today, may not tomorrow. To paraphrase an often uttered saying of leaders, no plan survives contact with time.

These events have far reaching consequences - on the lives of individuals, on societies, and on business. I want to talk about how businesses can help protect themselves when shocks occur. Or, more specifically, how their choice of technology enhances their resilience.

Shocks are, by definition, unknown. So, if you cannot see what is coming, how can you mitigate its consequences? Speed is often the answer; being able to switch away from the risk before it engulfs you. And choice is how you create that speed.

Any well-run business will already take this approach with its finances. Reserves are often held in a mix of assets and currencies to lessen the impact of any one suddenly losing value, and enough liquidity held to be able to diversify to safer investments. The same with countries and their energy supplies.

Compare this with technology. When an enterprise business is all-inwith one vendor, it is subject to their fortunes. Should something go wrong with the vendor, or the relationship sour, the enterprise has nowhere else to go. Not immediately, anyway. And history tells us it can happen.

A sharp price hike, a security breach, or the arrival of an innovative new player in the market all create the urgency to move. But the more reliant you are on the incumbent vendor, the harder that becomes.

When applications and workloads can move freely between each environment, it allows you to scale up or dial back use as needed. This is why a hybrid approach to infrastructure— mixing on-premises with cloud, mixing private cloud with public, and mixing different public clouds—has become the sensible strategy.

Why is hybrid infrastructure complemented by open-source software. It is not simply that by owning the underlying data you are able to move the application to a different infrastructureor move the data into a new application entirely.

Open source also enables agility because it is community led; and individual contributors often react faster to a crisis than large companies with strict hierarchies and complex decision-making structures.

Thankfully, shocks are relatively rare.

Businesses spend more time thinking about offence, and plan accordingly. The same combination of open-source software and hybrid infrastructure is the perfect play for front foot innovation.

Again, itISthe community of open source that brings value. The logic is simple: in a room of 100 people, would you back one person to always have the best idea, or the collective might of the other 99? Innovation never happens in one place. Open source gives you access to everywhere and everyone—more minds to create, more eyes to check, more people offering support.

Innovation is not about buying the latest stuff. As our CEO recently explained, that is not practical or sustainable. Innovation is about modernisation; taking what you have and improving it. If you are beholden to the vendor’s appetite and capability to innovate, you will always be on the back foot. Open source provides the control and interoperability that enables a continuousbuild it bettermindset, and with that a more proactive approach to chasing new commercial opportunities.

Private technology knows this. Google has Kubernetes and Flutter; Microsoft has Azure Docs and VS Code; AWS and Apple both use Linux. There is no better example of the power of open source for innovation than Bitcoin, which has rocketed to a $800bn market cap, based on the ingenuity and commitment of the community that built it and maintains it.

The more of something you have, the more complex it can become. An on-premises environment, running just a handful of software

programs, is neat and easy to manage. A hybrid infrastructure with open-source software adoption at scale sets out to be elaborate.

Without the right orchestration, things can become confusing and costly.

We know this intuitively. Libraries orchestrate information; cars orchestrate mechanical, navigation and entertainment systems; your phone orchestrates your life. Orchestration removes limits, enabling choice and scale.

So, it is with enterprise technology. An orchestration platform, irons out complexity by ensuring software and individual components of software can interact regardless of where they are running. This is crucial to effective

ROLE OF OPEN SOURCE

A new survey by Red Hat of almost 1,300 IT leaders worldwide illustrates how these arguments are playing out in real life: 95% said enterprise open source is important to their organisation’s overall infrastructure, with greater flexibility 79%, access to innovation 77% and support for a hybrid cloud strategy 77% among the top reasons.

application modernisation, enabling a business to refactor or completely rebuild software with containers and microservices. An automation layer on top ensures the whole thing drives smoothly.

Orchestration is not simply a matter of organising and automating products and policies. Technology is ultimately worthless without the backing of the people. People adopt technology, and people make it productive.

So how do you orchestrate people? And what do we mean by that anyway? The answer to both questions is culture. Or, more specifically, an open culture.

There is no point enabling choice of technol-

ogy if you do not also enable people’s ability to choose. This is what we mean by having an open culture, where trust in colleagues is the default and ideas are judged on their merits, not by the seniority of whoever suggested them. Where silent talent and their ideas are amplified. Where diversity of knowledge and experience is the logical outcome.

If you want the control and agility of hybrid infrastructure and open-source software, you must also embrace an open culture.

A business that is well equipped to ride out the shocks and seize the opportunities will be more successful than one that is rigid. Not adopting open source and hybrid infrastructure is to believe that we are at the end of history; that we have seen all the twists and turns that the world and markets will ever deliver. Look around—the picture tells avery different story. ë

HANS ROTH SVP and General Manager EMEA, Red Hat.

In a room of 100 people, would you back one person to always have the best idea, or the collective might of the other 99?

What’s

What’s trending

EVERY CHAMPION WAS ONCE A CONTENDER THAT REFUSED TO GIVE UP

Natalja is keen on playing a role to promote flexibility at work principles that empower women and men to manage their unique life and work.

Natalja Kissina serves as Vice President, Human Resources for Gulf countries. In her own words, she is fortunate to have built a career that brings with it a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment. It is lucky to be surrounded by colleagues who have encouraged, coached and mentored her throughout her career. She is also proud to have worked in organisations that place gender equality at the centre of their vision and strategic agendas.

Natalja’s ideal work environment is where gender balance is integral to how the organisation conducts business. At Schneider Electric this is a key priority globally and locally.

Embracing and welcoming people from all walks of life, ages and cultures is something Natalja enjoys. She is keen on playing a role to promote flexibility at work principles that empower and meet the needs of women and men to manage their unique life and work.

Upon reflecting on some of the challenges she faced in the past, Natalja realised that she was sometimes setting herself back because of self-imposed internal obstacles, rather than external ones. In these moments, she sought words of encouragement and words of wisdom from family, friends and mentors who have always been there to fuel her confidence, beliefs and faith. She is a strong advocate of the idea that every champion was once a contender that refused to give up.

Schneider Electric prides itself on nurturing an inclusive culture where women are empowered, enabled and visible in the organisation. It recently signed the SDG 5 Pledge to accelerate gender balance in UAE’s private sector, which aims to increase the representation of women in leadership roles to 30% by 2025.

This initiative will serve as a beacon for gender equality and women’s empowerment across the country and beyond.

Globally, the company has progressed on female representation on the board and its Executive Committee. The goal is to have women representing 50% of all new hires, 40% of frontline managers, and 30% of senior leadership by 2025.

It is exciting to see UAE placing gender equality and women’s empowerment amongst the centre of its vision. Some great examples of advancements include labour law changes, which extends maternity leave provisions,

UAE placing gender equality and women’s empowerment amongst the centre

offers equal pay, and includes policies that support greater gender equity in the workplace. The company’s leadership development and people vision are vital to power Schneider Electric’s continuing transformation into a more innovative, inclusive and diverse organisation. ë

It is exciting to see

of its vision

NATALJA KISSINA HR VP for Gulf countries, Schneider Electric.

Mandy Dhaliwal joins Nutanix as CMO, Shyam Desirazu as Head of Engineering

Nutanix announced that it has named Mandy Dhaliwal as Chief Marketing Officer and Shyam Desirazu as Head of Engineering. Each brings more than two decades of experience building and scaling high performing, mission-driven organizations. They will both report to Rajiv Ramaswami, the Chief Executive Officer at Nutanix.

Mandy brings to Nutanix more than 25 years of experience in driving growth and innovation strategies across the cloud and software markets, and building high performing, mission-driven organizations. In this role, she will work closely with the company’s executive leadership team to drive a global marketing strategy that will accelerate the adoption of Nutanix’s enterprise hybrid multicloud solutions.

Most recently, Mandy was the Chief Marketing Officer for Boomi, where she was responsible for leading, planning and executing the company’s global go-to-market, brand presence, product marketing, demand generation, partner marketing, field marketing, customer advocacy, strategic events and corporate communications functions.

Ali Kaddoura will be Country Manager for the United Arab Emirates and Feras Bilto will be Country Manager for Saudi Arabia. The appointments follow the opening of ServiceNow’s offices in Dubai, UAE, last year and reflect the company’s view of the MEA region as a key territory for expansion.

In his role as country manager for the UAE, Ali Kaddoura will build and drive ServiceNow’s go-to-market strategy, working with customers and partners on solving extant business issues with the power of ServiceNow solutions. Key industries for Kaddoura will be energy and utilities, financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, hospitality, telecoms, media, and technology.

Prior to joining ServiceNow, Kaddoura was Regional Director, Emerging Markets, for EEC Services, a rising cloud services and virtualization start-up. He successfully designed and executed the company’s regional GTM strategy, built a sales team from the ground up, and led expansions into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Vectra AI, announced appointment of Taj El-khayat as Managing Director for Growth Markets. Taj has more than two decades of experience bringing high-value technology platforms and solutions to market through a keen eye for the future of digitization and human support.

At Vectra, Taj will build on the company’s presence in Southern Europe, Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, and continued commitment to serving the need for resilient threat detection and response technologies within the regions. He will be responsible for driving growth through transformative and adaptable go-tomarket and sales strategies.

Delinea, announced new executive team leadership appointments, in addition to promotions in the customer success, professional services, and support organizations. Seasoned industry leaders Stan Black and Bob Janssen join Delinea as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Vice President, Global Head of Innovation, respectively.

Black joins Delinea from Lattice Security, where he was CISO and provided executive security consulting and advisory services for private equity, commercial, and research firms. He previously was Chief Security Officer and Chief Information Officer at Citrix for six years, leading global operational security and risk management. Black has held several C-level security and technology positions over the past 15 years including Nuance Communications, EMC, RSA, Forcepoint,

and more.

Ali Kaddoura, Feras Bilto join ServiceNow as Country Manager UAE, Saudi Arabia

Taj El-khayat moves from Citrix, joins Vectra AI as Managing Director, Growth Markets

Stan Black moves from Lattice Security and joins Delinea as CISO

(Left to right) Mandy Dhaliwal, Chief Marketing Officer; and Shyam Desirazu, Head of Engineering at Nutanix.

(Left to right) Ali Kaddoura, Country Manager, UAE; and Feras Bilto, Country Manager, Saudi Arabia, both from ServiceNow.

Cybereason, announced that it has hired Hussam Sidani as Regional Vice President for the Middle East and Turkey region. Sidani will oversee the company’s operations in the region and be responsible for accelerating Cybereason’s customer and partner base in MEA, giving Defenders the ability to stop sophisticated cyberattacks. Sidani will hire the top sales and engineering talent in the region to best support the business.

Sidani joins Cybereason with more than 20 years of security experience, having most recently led Gulf, Levant, & Africa sales for FireEye. He previously spent 10 years leading the Gulf region for Symantec where he grew revenues by expanding channel partnerships and strategic selling initiatives.

Delinea, announced new executive team leadership appointments, in addition to promotions in the customer success, professional services, and support organizations. Seasoned industry leaders Stan Black and Bob Janssen join Delinea as Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President, Global Head of Innovation, respectively.

Janssen most recently was Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Ivanti, where he provided leadership on technology breakthroughs, performed technology research, and drove technology innovation. He joined Ivanti after the acquisition of RES Software, which he co-founded and was CTO and SVP of Innovation for over 16 years. Janssen notably created the flagship platform RES ONE, consisting of Workspace Manager, Automation Manager, and Identity Director.

The world’s leading analytics platform, Tableau, a Salesforce company, appointed former Senior Director at Microsoft, Rita Tenan, as Area Vice President, Public Sector, Tableau EMEA. In this role, Rita will be responsible for leading the regional Public Sector team at Tableau, driving forward this priority area and equipping civic organisations with tools to better utilise and understand their data. Rita brings with her more than 10 years of experience at Microsoft, as an expert in driving growth initiatives and managing sustainable business development.

Dataiku, announced appointment of tech veteran Adam Towns as Chief Financial Officer. Towns, who previously took Mimecast through its successful IPO and oversaw a 15-fold increase in revenue, joins a rapidly scaling company with 60% year-over-year ARR growth, surpassing $150M in ARR.

Before joining Dataiku, Towns served as the CFO of Sisense, where he led the company’s global finance and business operations team. Before that, he was Senior VP of Strategic Finance and FP&A at Mimecast, managing the company through a successful IPO in 2015 and scaling the company globally from 100 employees and $30M in revenue to nearly 2,000 employees and over $500M in revenue.

Hervé

Rita graduated from Ecole de Commerce with multiple degrees in International Business Management before beginning her career at business intelligence firm Fisher International with responsibility for mainframe and security solutions throughout EMEA. She then worked for software company Dynasoft, managing sales for Europe Central and South.

Freshworks , a software company empowering the people who power business, announced the launch of an enhanced partner program and appointment of Hervé Danzelaud as vice president of Global Channel and Alliances to lead the growth of the company’s partner ecosystem. Danzelaud previously served as the head of Channels and Alliances for North America.

Today, the Freshworks partner program includes 500+ resellers in 50+ countries, 20+ systems integrators, 350+ ISVs and 1,100+ technology applications in the Freshworks Marketplace. The enhanced Freshworks partner program builds on its industry-leading enablement, marketing and lead generation benefits making it easier than ever to partner with Freshworks while adding value to joint customers.

Rita Tenan moves from Microsoft to join Tableau EMEA as Area Vice President, Public Sector

Hussam Sidani moves from FireEye to Cybereason as Regional Vice President, Middle East Turkey

Bob Janssen moves from Ivanti, joins Delinea as Vice President, Global Head of Innovation

Adam Towns who led Mimecast through its 2015 IPO, joins Dataiku as CFO

Danzelaud elevated to Freshworks’ Vice President, Global Channel and Alliances

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