EC MEA January 2020

NUTANIX - ACHIEVING INVISIBLE TOGETHER /28

PA G E S 5 2 VOLUME O7 | ISSUE 06 JANUARY 2020 WWW.EC-MEA.COM

TECHNOLOGY OUTLOOK FOR 2020: WHAT LIES AHEAD

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Twelve technology executives give their predictions of how technologies will morph and change from 2019 into 2020, influencing the rest of the IT industry.. .../32

TECHNOLOGY IS AN ENABLER, BUT PEOPLE MAKE THE DIFFERENCE..... /38

Global Community for Technology leaders

EDITORIAL

$5.2 trillion in 2020

ANUSHREE DIXIT EDITOR A N U S H R E E @ G E C M E D I A G R O U P. C O M

It is 2020. It is a new beginning. It is time for the industry to take bigger and bolder steps.

While there are a number of advantages that lie at the organization’s disposal, it is very important to rethink safety, sustainability, resilience and trust before availing the advantages.

The global information technology industry is on pace to reach $5.2 trillion in 2020, according to the research consultancy IDC. According to Deloitte, Cloud computing and artificial intelligence will once again dominate the technology headlines, but 2020 could be a breakout year for edge computing. Like every year, industry veterans are putting forth a number of predictions and setting the outlook for the year of transformation – 2020.

In this issue of Enterprise Channels MEA, we dive into some of these aspects in detail. We have tried to put together the views of industry leaders and compiled their thoughts about how the IT industry will mold itself to the changing needs. Some of the opinions support the fact that the market in 2019 showed an increased appetite for the flexibility to build applications that combine the best native cloud services and open source technologies. Cloud is becoming the new normal model of deployment, with 85% of businesses self-identifying as being predominantly hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud today. While few agree that Companies that deploy chatbots to relieve people from these repetitive tasks will realise significant productivity gains, others are of the opinion that Blockchain will be used wherever immutable and event-driven trust needs to be established or where there is a need to share specific data in a secure, democratised way.

Read more about this and much more in the New Year edition of this issue.

Also, do not miss to read our exclusive insights into The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 and learn how GEC Media Group successfully created a benchmark on creating a global community of digital champions.

Much in store for this year! Happy reading, happy new year! ë

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JANUARY 2020 | VOLUME 07 | ISSUE 06

CONTENTS 22

26. WCS GRAND FINALE

GUEST ARTICLE

HOW WILL SMART BUILDINGS HELP SOLVE THE CHALLENGES OF TODAY AND TOMORROW? ARAFAT YOUSEF, MANAGING DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA, NEXANS CABLING SOLUTIONS

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INTERVIEW

TECHNOLOGY IS AN ENABLER, BUT PEOPLE MAKE THE DIFFERENCE.....

HELD UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF THE GLOBAL CIO FORUM, THE WORLD CIO 200 SUMMIT 2019 SHOWCASED HOW TECHNOLOGY,

ENABLING THE MODERN DATA EXPERIENCE SAMER SEMAAN, CHANNEL AND ALLIANCE MANAGER – MIDDLE EAST | PURE STORAGE

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INTERVIEW

ACHIEVING INVISIBLE TOGETHER MIKE O’HARA, TERRITORY ACCOUNT MANAGER, NUTANIX

04 06 EDITORIAL

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CHANNEL STREET

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TECHNOLOGY OUTLOOK FOR 2020: WHAT LIES AHEAD

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INTERVIEW THE POWER OF VOICE

INNOVATIONS

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CHANNEL

STREET The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 Connects Global Communities on a Singular Platform The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 edition, held on December 9-10 2019 at The DoubleTree by Hilton Resort and Spa recognized the champions of UAE in four key categories; Next-Gen, Leader, Master and Legend.

Setting a global benchmark in 2018, The CIO 200 has been testified as one of the most objective-oriented events in terms of having all the right elements on the platform for spearheading the digital transformation champions. This year, the Summit toured 15 countries, covering 3 continents and gathering

over 3000+ C-level executives in the entire journey. The event was meticulously designed for; Meeting with other technology leaders with a willingness to learn and share challenges in our environments today; Sharing and learning from other countries and industries to understand leadership differences; Being with some top thought leaders across the world, learning and challenging one another.

The official ribbon cutting and inauguration of the event was done by senior government leaders from the GCC including— Dr. Esam

AlFalasi, Director of IT, Ministry of Economy; Mr. Mohammed Mahnashi, ICT Advisor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, KSA; Dr. Ali Jassim Al Aradi, Director of IT, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bahrain; Eng Suleiman Al Kharashi, Deputy Minister of Finance, KSA; Dr. Thalaya AlFozan, Director IT, Ministry of Finance, Kuwait. Over the two days, the delegates inter acted and networked with one another on various platforms like The morning yoga, breakfast meet, after party club nights, themed sessions and much more.

EMIRATES NBD BOOSTS AED 1 BILLION DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITH NEW MILESTONE IN CORE BANKING SYSTEM UPGRADE Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the region, has completed the third phase of its international core banking system upgrade, as it forges ahead with its ongoing digital transformation efforts to boost innovation and efficiency across its domestic and international operations.

Leveraging advanced Finacle technology, the third phase of the project sees the rollout of the new core banking system for Emirates NBD Saudi Arabia, following prior launches in

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Singapore and the UK in November 2018 and July 2019, respectively. By end-2020, all Emirates NBD entities and markets will be consolidated onto one single, updated core banking platform, enabling the bank to offer new financial services more rapidly across all markets while reducing global IT costs.

The global initiative is the bank’s biggest in its ongoing AED 1 billion digital transformation that will enter its fourth and final year in 2020. It

has already delivered many large-scale enterprise system improvements. This includes completing one of the world’s largest Calypso upgrades to enhance treasury services, strengthening the bank’s global payments capabilities with a new payments hub, and introducing smartTrade for trade finance customers, while simultaneously building world-class, in-house cloud, agile, enterprise data, security and API-based architecture capabilities.

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Aruba to Simplify Branch Deployments with Amazon Web Services Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), announced the integration of the Aruba SD-WAN solution with the new AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager from Amazon Web Services (AWS), to greatly simplify the deployment and management of networks connecting remote branch locations to Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs). With this integration, customers deploying the Aruba SD-WAN solution alongside AWS will have the ability to monitor and manage connectivity between AWS resources and their on-premises locations using either Aruba Central or AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager in a simple and intuitive manner. Aruba Central completely

automates the process of setting up and managing these networks using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to interact with AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager. “We are pleased to be working with Aruba to integrate the Aruba SD-Branch solution with AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager as a simplified branch networking solution that delivers enterprise-grade performance at scale,” said David Brown, vice president of Amazon EC2 at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “This new capability helps to simplify and streamline network management for customers, so they can focus on driving their businesses forward.”

NEW MIMECAST RESEARCH FINDS DATA LOSS IS PRIMARY CONCERN FOR FINANCIAL INDUSTRY Financial services organizations like retail banks, investment firms and insurance companies have always operated under stringent regulations and controls. However, increasing regulatory frameworks and evolving security threats are making compliance an increasing priority within these organizations. Mimecast and IDG Research surveyed financial services professionals to understand their compliance efforts and what they consider critical priorities. Nearly all respondents (92%) reported that compliance management has become an increasingly high priority over the past two years. Organizations’ compliance strategies for supervision in the coming year are being shaped most heavily by new regulatory requirements (45%) and a growing number of cybersecurity threats (39%). When asked which compliance regulations will have the largest impact over the next 12 months, respondents noted those related to third-party collaboration, cloud storage and legislative orders such as Brexit, GDPR and MIFID II. Regardless of industry, data loss is an ongoing struggle most organizations face. For the financial organizations surveyed it’s the number one concern, largely due to the ever-evolving threat landscape. More than half (58%) cited data loss as their organization’s biggest concern regarding non-compliance, and 49% said their organization had been impacted by data loss in the past 2 years. Additionally, compliance management can be time consuming, in fact eighty-nine percent said the amount of time their compliance teams spend maintaining audit readiness has increased over the past two years. Organizations are looking to reduce the complexity of compliance supervision over the next year. Almost half of respondents cited they intend to improve integration and collaboration between internal teams, streamline processes so IT can focus on higher value activity, and improve their ability to document compliance supervision processes in the coming year.

CITRIX MAKES WORK PERSONAL WITH CITRIX WORKSPACE Technology has made our personal lives easier than ever. But it’s complicating things in the office.

On any given day, the average employee spends nearly 65 percent of their time on busy work and in meetings, 20 percent searching for information and just 15 percent doing what they want and are paid to do.

Why? Because technology that was supposed to streamline work has only made it more complex. Citrix Systems is out to change this. The company today announced general availability of new features within Citrix® Workspace including an intelligent feed and personalized workflows designed to simplify work by eliminating digital noise and automating meaningless tasks so that employees can focus on their core jobs and be their best.

“As consumers, we rely on things like Instagram and Uber to organize and manage our lives.

And with a single click, we can accomplish what we set out to do,” said Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer, Citrix. “Then we get to the office and these streamlined and personalized experiences are replaced with company-issued technology that is cumbersome to use, slows us down, continually interrupts us, and keeps us from doing meaningful work.”

CISCO UNVEILS PLAN FOR BUILDING INTERNET FOR THE NEXT DECADE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION Cisco introduced its latest innovation including Cisco Silicon OneTM, the industry’s only networking silicon architecture of its kind; released the new Cisco 8000 Series, the world’s most powerful carrier class routers built on the new silicon; and announced new purchasing options that enable customers to consume the

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company’s technology through disaggregated business models.

“Innovation requires focused investment, the right team and a culture that values imagination,” said Chuck Robbins, chairman and CEO of Cisco. “We are dedicated to transforming the industry to build a new internet for the 5G era.

Our latest solutions in silicon, optics and software represent the continued innovation we’re driving that helps our customers stay ahead of the curve and create new, ground-breaking experiences for their customers and end users for decades to come.””

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Acer enhances Chrome Enterprise portfolio for businesses

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BAHRAIN WINS DIGITAL STARTUP HUB OF THE YEAR AT ENTERPRISE AGILITY AWARDS

Six new Acer Chrome Enterprise devices have been specifically engineered to meet the needs of enterprises and will be available to customers in the region.

Thanks to Chrome OS’s quick boot-up, silent automatic updates, multi-layer security, and Artificial Intelligence enhancements, users are empowered to work faster and smarter.

Built for the cloud, these Chrome Enterprise devices combine the end user benefits of Chrome devices with the business capabilities of Chrome OS, helping IT departments power their cloud workforces to perform securely and effectively from anywhere. Chrome Enterprise provides cloud-

native security for all kinds of businesses.

Employees and enterprises using Chrome devices are protected in case hardware is lost or stolen IT can easily disable the device preventing potential bad actors from accessing corporate data. Devices can also be set as ephemeral, so that a user’s data is removed from the device at the end of their session. Chrome Enterprise provides IT with access to device policies and fleet control capabilities, all from the easy-to-use, cloud-based Google Admin console or third party UEM (Unified End Management) solution. Administrators have access to Chrome OS troubleshooting assistance. With 24/7 IT admin support, administrators can call Google if any issues come up, at no additional cost.

The Kingdom was awarded the honour for StartUp Bahrain – a community led initiative powered by the Bahrain Economic Development Board to boost the entrepreneurial ecosystem by bringing together startups, corporates, investors, incubators, educational institutions and the government. This award recognises Bahrain’s fast-growing, highly-connected and pro-business hub with technology at its heart - enabling startups to test, innovate and scale quickly.

LOGMEIN’S BOLD360 EXPANDS MESSAGING TO WHATSAPP, WECHAT, FACEBOOK MESSENGER, ANDSMS TEX Bold360’s latest release helps businesses transform contact centers by offering always-on, scalable, and best-in-class customer engagement on the most popular global messaging channels including WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, and SMS Text. The speed and ease-of-use with messaging apps lowers the barrier to engagement, making it easier for customers to reach out to customer support on their own schedule.

MOBILE SERVICE PROVIDERS PREPARING TO FORTIFY SECURITY IN ANTICIPATION OF 5G DEPLOYMENTS – According to a global survey fielded earlier this year by the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network, in partnership with A10 Networks, mobile service providers anticipate significant new revenue opportunities from the coming deployment of high-speed 5G networks and a host of new IoT-driven use cases, but they also believe much-improved security will be essential to realizing that potential. The study report, “Securing the Future of a Smart World” demonstrates that carriers are moving decisively toward 5G commercialization and that security is a top concern. n 67% - will deploy their first commercial 5G networks within 18 months and another 20 percent within two years n 94% - expect growth in network traffic, connected devices and mission-critical IoT use cases to significantly increase security and reliability concerns for 5G networks n 79% - say 5G is a consideration in current security investments

LTI WINS MULTIYEAR ENGAGEMENT WITH HOIST FINANCE AB Klaus-Anders Nysteen, CEO, Hoist Finance, said “ With a strong delivery record and focus on increased stability, security and automation, LTI is the perfect fit for us to enhance the user experience for both our customers and employees and to accelerate our digital developments. We are looking forward to continuing on our digital journey through our multiyear partnership with LTI.” SENTINELONE LAUNCHES SENTINELLABS RESEARCH UNIT Led by famed cybersecurity researcher Vitali Kremez, SentinelLabs is powering SentinelOne’s first threat intelligence offering, a managed threat monitoring and reporting service designed to equip SentinelOne customers in the Middle East and globally with analyst coverage of the latest cybersecurity tactics and techniques.

With the launch of the new threat intelligence platform, SentinelOne provides clients with 24/7 secure and stable access to platform data along with daily updates, detailed threat intelligence reports, infection metrics, and further requests for information and briefings.

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Saudi Telecom Company selects IFS to improve customer experience IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announces that Saudi Telecom Company (STC), a world class digital leader providing innovative services and platforms to our customers and enabling the digital transformation of the MENA region, has selected IFS Service Management™ to increase process efficiency, improve margins, and facilitate improved customer satisfaction.

To bolster its leading market position and ready the company for future business driven by an increasing need for digitalization, STC launched a comprehensive evaluation process, selecting a service platform to replace legacy business systems while improving operational efficiency.

From a short list that included solutions from some of the largest vendors in the world, STC chose IFS for its powerful scalability, intuitive user experience and robust functionality.

Stephen Keys, IFS Regional President, APJ ME&A, added, “We are honored to be working with STC, a prestigious and most valuable brand in the region. We look forward to a long and successful partnership together, creating value for STC and its customers.”

UL URGES COMPANIES TO TAKE DRASTIC ACTION AGAINST CYBERTHREATS BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE UL, an independent safety science company, has urged companies in the Middle East to take drastic action against cybersecurity before it is too late.

As technology continues to evolve by the day, cybersecurity has become an increasingly significant issue for businesses around the globe. Hacking and data breaches have resulted in financial and reputational damages affecting organisations of all sizes.

With millions of people using different forms of technology every day, IoT devices connected to high-speed internet 5G networks are proving to be prime targets for hackers and criminals.

Industry bodies all over the world are continually updating and introducing new regulations and certification standards driving towards creating a structured ecosystem, which is safer.

KASPERSKY SAYS 2019 WAS THE YEAR OF RANSOMWARE ATTACKS ON MUNICIPALITIES 2019 has been the “year of ransomware attacks on municipalities” according to Kaspersky security experts. This comes after the company’s researchers observed that at least 174 municipal institutions, with more than 3,000 subset organisations, have been targeted by ransomware. This represents a 60% increase at least, from the figure in 2018. While threat actors’ demands would sometimes reach up to

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$5,000,000, actual costs and damages sustained during attacks are estimated to be larger. These are among the main findings of Kaspersky’s Security Bulletin: Story of the Year 2019.

Ransomware is a notorious headache for the corporate sector, affecting businesses around the world for a number of years.

As if that wasn’t enough, 2019 has seen the rapid development of an earlier trend, where

malware distributors have targeted municipal organisations. Researchers note that while these targets might be less capable of paying a large ransom, they are more likely to agree to cybercriminals’ demands. Blocking any municipal services directly affects the welfare of citizens and results, not only in financial losses but other socially significant and sensitive consequences.

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DESC Announced Security Standard for Electronic Biomedical Devices Across Dubai Dubai Electronic Security Center (DESC) in association with Dubai Health Authority (DHA) announced the launch of Security Standard for Electronic Biomedical Devices (EBMD) across the emirate. This move, affecting healthcare facilities and medical device manufacturers and suppliers operating within Dubai, is geared at limiting breaches within the healthcare sector and protecting sensitive patient information.

Adherence to this standard will ensure a minimal risk framework, as well as fortify the sector’s digital infrastructure against the recent rise in cyber-attacks on healthcare institutions around the world. The launch was inaugurated during a press conference and was attended

by Mr. Amer Sharaf, Director of Compliance, Support and Alliances at Dubai Electronic Security Center; Dr Bushra Al Blooshi, Director of Research and Innovation at Dubai Electronic

Security Center; Dr Amani Al Jasmi, Director of IT at DHA and Eng. Nasser Al-Bloushi, Chief Information Security Officer from Dubai Health Authority. “DESC is proud to continue its cooperative efforts with DHA in its ongoing success of digitization initiatives in the healthcare sector to constantly develop and further enhance policies and standards to safeguard sensitive patient information and all electronic biomedical devices being used in Dubai,” said H.E. Yousuf Al Shaibani, Director General at Dubai Electronic Security Center As per the new guidelines, EBMD offered within Dubai will now be categorised into four major classes based on the nature of the device. Devices falling under Class I and Class II will have to meet general security standards, while specialised devices falling under Class III will have to meet specific standards based on risk assessment.

WEB CLIPS TENABLE RESEARCH FINDS NEW VULNERABILITIES IN POPULAR BLINK SMART SECURITY CAMERAS The research team has discovered seven severe vulnerabilities in Amazon-owned Blink XT2 security camera systems. If exploited, the vulnerabilities could give attackers full control of an affected device, allowing them to remotely view camera footage, listen to audio output and hijack the device for use in a botnet to perform, for example, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, steal data or send spam. The flaws in Blink XT2 allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information about the owner’s account, enabling them to view stored photographs and videos, add or remove devices from the account or block camera communications entirely.

BEYONDTRUST EXPANDS PAM OFFERING FOR DEVOPS ENVIRONMENTS BeyondTrust has announced the release of DevOps Secrets Safe to help organizations store, access and audit secrets and privileged credentials used by applications, tools and other nonhuman identities. This expansion in BeyondTrust’s product portfolio addresses a significant challenge for enterprises and mid-market companies— safeguarding the “unmanageable number” of credentials and secrets used in DevOps workflows workflows, according to Dan DeRosa, senior vice president of product management at BeyondTrust.

MOVEMENTS Thomas Rollin is the new Director Global Accounts EMEA at Nutanix

YAHSAT APPOINTS KHALED AL QUBAISI AS NEW CHAIRMAN

Emitac Enterprise Solutions appoints Antoine Abi Abad as the New General Manager

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NUMBER GAME

VEEAM INTRODUCES ENHANCED ACCREDITED SERVICES PARTNER PROGRAM Veeam announced the launch of its enhanced

usd5.2tn Artificial Intelligence is the Key to the Sustainable Economy, Boosting Global GDP

by USD 5.2 Trillion acc to A New Report for the World Future Energy Summit

Veeam Accredited Services Partner (VASP) program to strengthen its partners’ capabilities to sell, deploy and support Veeam solutions, and ensure customer satisfaction. This transition seamlessly aligns with Veeam’s go-to-market model and enables Veeam’s partners to provide a direct service delivery model to Veeam customers.

EMERSON RELEASES NEW MAGNETIC SLURRY SENSOR Emerson’s Rosemount™ MS Slurry Sensor with the Rosemount 8782 Slurry Transmitter is a slurry magnetic flow meter specifically designed for high noise and slurry applications for use in the oil and gas, mining, and pulp and paper industries. Featuring robust coils and advanced signal processing, a responsive yet stable flow signal is possible even in high noise applications.

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Trend Micro Predicts Escalating Cloud and Supply Chain Risk

Trend Micro announced its 2020 predictions report, which states that organizations will face a growing risk from their cloud and the supply chain. The growing popularity of cloud and DevOps environments drive business agility while exposing organizations, from enterprises to manufacturers, to third-party risk.

“As we enter a new decade, organizations of all industries and sizes will increasingly rely on third party software, open-source, and modern working practices to drive the digital innovation and growth they crave,” said Dr. Moataz Bin Ali, Vice President, Trend Micro, Middle East and

North Africa. “Our threat experts predict that this fast growth and change will bring new risks of supply chain attacks. From the cloud layer all the way down to the home network, IT security leaders will need to reassess their cyber risk and protection strategy in 2020.”

Attackers will increasingly go after corporate data stored in the cloud via code injection attacks such as deserialization bugs, cross-site scripting and SQL injection. They will either target cloud providers directly or compromise third-party libraries to do this

‘BUILDING A 5G WORLD’: EITC HOSTS 2ND ANNUAL GLOBAL CERTIFICATION FORUM 5G MENA WORKSHOP In cooperation with the Global Certification Forum (GCF), Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC) has hosted the second annual GCF 5G MENA workshop under the theme: ‘Building a 5G world’.

Held at the Sheraton Hotel, Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, the exclusive one-day forum was officially opened by Jasim AlAwadi, Senior Vice President Service Operations, EITC, and explored how regulators, network operators, manufacturers, and industries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are using and developing 5G in innovative ways.

The event was attended by operators, vendors, companies from the testing industry, the Standardization bodies at GCF GSMA, and regulators from the region to discuss and understand how 5G can enable new business opportunities beyond traditional services.

Participants also engaged in discourse surrounding the importance of standards and interoperability towards supporting 5G developments.

MCAFEE INTRODUCES CASB-INTEGRATED CLOUD SECURITY PLATFORM FOR CONTAINER-BASED APPLICATIONS McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, has announced McAfee MVISION Cloud for Containers, thereby becoming the first unified cloud security platform to integrate container security with its Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) security solution. Leveraging NanoSec’s zero trust application visibility and control capabilities for

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container-based deployments in cloud environments, the solution provides customers with the ability to speed up application delivery while enhancing the governance, compliance and security of their container workloads.

Container security has long been treated as separate from other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) security solutions, requiring

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evaluation, investment and management of multiple, niche products thus increasing total cost of ownership and complexity and reducing security. McAfee MVISION Cloud for Containers integrates Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Vulnerability Scanning for container workloads into the existing McAfee MVISION Cloud platform to give customers a

unified cloud security solution where consistent security policies can be implemented across all forms of cloud IaaS workloads.

McAfee MVISION Cloud integrates with DevOps tools, helps users “shift-left” to pre-emptively improve compliance and secure container workloads by running security audits in the DevOps pipeline and providing security incident data directly back to the development teams.

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ManageEngine Delivers Industry’s First On-Premises Solution to Offer Endpoint MFA for all Major OSs ManageEngine announced that ADSelfService Plus, its integrated Active Directory (AD) self-service password management and single sign-on solution, now offers Endpoint Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) for Linux logins. The new feature supplements Windows and macOS MFA support, making ADSelfService Plus the industry’s first onpremises solution to provide endpoint MFA for

all three major operating systems so that IT admins can improve user account security and keep sophisticated cyberthreats at bay.

According to the State of Linux report, 90 percent of the public cloud runs on Linux. With stolen credentials ranking among the top data breach vectors, it's high time that every organization works on

its strategy in securing access to endpoints running on Linux. After all, one set of credentials is all a hacker needs to get into an organization's network and cause havoc. When MFA is implemented organization-wide, the traditional username and password login is supplemented by an additional security measure.

SOPHOS PUBLISHES INVESTIGATIVE REPORT ON SNATCH RANSOMWARE Sophos (LSE: SOPH), a global leader in nextgeneration cybersecurity, published an investigative report, Snatch Ransomware Reboots PCs into Safe Mode to Bypass Protection, by SophosLabs and Sophos Managed Threat Response. The report details the changing attack methods of Snatch ransomware, first seen in December 2018, including rebooting PCs into Safe Mode mid-attack in an attempt to bypass behavioral protections that detect ransomware activity.

Sophos believes this is a new attack technique adopted by cybercriminals for defense evasion.

Continuing a trend noted in SophosLabs’ 2020 Threat Report , the Snatch cybercriminals are now also exfiltrating data before the ransomware attack begins. This behavior has been used by other ransomware groups, including Bitpaymer.

Sophos expects this sequence of exfiltrating data before ransomware encryption to continue.

Businesses needing to comply with GDPR, the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act and other regulatory laws may need to notify data protection regulators if they are victims of Snatch.

Snatch is an example of an automated, active

attack, also outlined in SophosLabs’ 2020 Threat Report .

Once attackers gain access by abusing remote access services, they use hand-to-keyboard hacking to move laterally and do damage. As explained in the Snatch report, attackers are gaining entry through insecure IT remote access services, such as (but not limited to) Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

The report shows examples of Snatch attackers recruiting potential collaborators who are skilled in compromising remote access services in dark web forums.

Honeywell brings together key decision-makers to advance the future of smart buildings and cities During a recent event held at Honeywell’s high-tech office complex in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, industry leaders convened to discuss the transformative impact of digital transformation, how it is shaping the future of the region’s smart buildings and cities, and the importance of implementing robust cybersecurity strategies

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to protect operational technologies across industries.

The Honeywell Abu Dhabi Technology Day 2019 was attended by smart building and city decision-makers from the UAE’s public and private sectors.

The discussion focused on how smart building technology solutions can support the UAE

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government’s objectives, such as UAE Vision 2021 and Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030, and how business leaders can adopt and incorporate these technologies more actively.

Earlier this year, Honeywell research highlighted that more than 70% of medium-to-large organizations in the buildings and

cities sector in the UAE and Saudi Arabia expect to increase spending on digitalization and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) technologies in the next five years.

The research also revealed a growing appetite for investments in cybersecurity solutions in the next five years in both the UAE (75%) and Saudi Arabia (68%).

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Proofpoint Named a Leader in 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving Proofpoint has been positioned

by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving* for the eighth consecutive year. The report provides a detailed overview of the enterprise information archiving market and evaluates vendors based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.“Organizations are struggling to maintain compli-

ance as they migrate to the cloud, regulations evolve, data grows, and new content types emerge—and it’s hitting their bottom line. In 2018, $1.46B in SEC fines were levied and between 2016 and 2018, $295M FINRA fines were enforced,” said Darren Lee, executive vice president and general manager of Compliance and Digital Risk for Proofpoint. “Compliance and legal teams need the tools that can

meet today’s demands for security, retention, supervision, and retrieval.

We believe our positioning as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the eighth consecutive year underscores our dedication to innovation and unmatched ability to provide organizations with the visibility and control over the compliance risks that matter most.”

Proofpoint Enterprise Archive is a complete, end-to-end solution that

helps organizations manage information risk without needing to manage archiving in-house.

Organizations can simplify compliance and reduce the risk and cost of e-discovery through automated, policy-based retention, compliantcapture, storage and access, streamlined workflow, intelligent supervision, and uncompromised security.

UAE BECOMES DIGITAL HUB FOR INNOVATION WITH GLOBAL LEADERSHIP IN FIBER OPTIC NETWORK UAE today leads globally as the country with the highest Fiber to the Home (FTTH) penetration for a third year in a row making it a digital hub for innovation with an advanced network that has helped transform and bring innovative future technologies to all its subscribers. FTTH has reached 95.7 percent of homes across the UAE, maintaining the country’s position as a global leader in FTTH, accord-

ing to the latest international report from the FTTH council.

The council publishes its annual report that showcases the countries with the highest fiber optic network penetration globally. The report highlighted UAE as the number one country globally with its fiber network coverage surpassing Singapore, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.

Juan Colina, President, FTTH

Council MENA, said: “Fiber connectivity is integral as it becomes a platform for the future of the network especially today with the launch of 5G making it easier to bring futuristic technologies to all subscribers. Etisalat has played a critical role in positioning UAE on this global scale by driving infrastructure investments in building one of the most advanced networks in the region and maintaining

consistent leadership for the third year in a row.”

With Etisalat’s strategy focused on ‘Driving the Digital Future to Empower Societies’ the network forms a significant component of this digital transformation journey.

Etisalat has continuously focused on investing in innovation and on next generation technologies and services to expand and enhance the network

Traka Continues to Modernise Atlantis, The Palm’s Access Control Systems Traka, the leading worldwide specialist in intelligent asset management solutions, has announced the successful integration of its advanced key and asset management software at Atlantis, The Palm, allowing the iconic Dubai hotel to offer its guests the highest level of hospitality and security.

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An intuitive, browser-based asset control software, Traka WebTM and Traka TouchTM technology provides all the tools necessary to centrally manage all Traka key cabinets and lockers.

With the ability to regionalize administrative control, different areas of an organization can

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customize its security needs to make keys and assets more efficient and effective for the business.

Additionally, it is designed for easy and simple integration into existing third-party systems, for a seamless deployment process while greatly reducing administration overhead.

Traka, a subsidiary of access con-

trol systems giant ASSA ABLOY, has been the key management solution of choice for Atlantis, The Palm since 2009. The company manages nearly 600 keys throughout the luxury resort, including systems at Housekeeping, Fish Loading Bay, the Water Park and other key areas in the site.

INTERVIEW

HOW WILL SMART BUILDINGS HELP SOLVE THE CHALLENGES OF TODAY AND TOMORROW?

FTTO is especially suitable for Intelligent Building environments as they feature a high number of ports in large buildings or across multiple buildings. The solution not only supports standard point-to-point topologies, but also cascading of systems. Design can be flexibly based on project requirements.

ARAFAT YOUSEF,

MANAGING DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA, NEXANS CABLING SOLUTIONS

What is Building Intelligence?

An Intelligent Building relies on technology to create an environment that is safer, more productive and easier to manage in an efficient and cost-effective way. According to the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) “Intelligent Buildings help building owners, property managers and occupants realise their goals in the areas of costs, lifetime energy management, well-being, convenience, safety, long term flexibility and marketability to achieve buildings which have high social, environmental and economic values.”

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Which benefits can Intelligent Buildings bring?

Fast and reliable internet connections and optimised controlling heating, ventilation, aircon and lighting make an important contribution to employee wellbeing and happiness. Smart buildings help ensure occupants’ safety with connected alarm systems and IP cameras. Furthermore, Power over Ethernet allows the introduction of smart LED lighting powered over the network connection. Current LED systems can save up to 80% energy compared to legacy lighting systems.

Introducing sensors makes lighting and space usage even more efficient. Smart lighting with built-in occupancy and ambient light sensors that can change the light over the course of the day also help increase employee productivity.

Intelligent Buildings can also reduce energy and water consumption.

The convergence of networks that comes with creating intelligent building networks means IT and facilities management teams need to work together in entirely new ways. Rethinking basic infrastructure is essential. What’s more, historically, field bus components and IT have always been regarded as two completely separate things. However, when making a building ‘smart’, it is vital that all platforms and components can communicate in a unified manner and act as an integrated whole. That requires a common language and an integrated approach to structured cabling and devices. By introducing a cross-platform, fully integrated ‘central nervous system’ in a building, or even between buildings, investment and operational costs can be reduced and implementation and maintenance can be simplified.

Why choose FTTO? This solution combines the benefits of both copper and fibre to provide a future-proof solution with high bandwidth and minimum energy use. FTTO is especially suitable for Intelligent Building environments as they feature

a high number of ports in large buildings or across multiple buildings. The solution not only supports standard point-to-point topologies, but also cascading of systems. Design can be flexibly based on project requirements. Redundancy can be designed-in at the access level in a cost-effective way by linking each network path. In a traditional LAN design, this would be extremely costly, but FTTO can provide significant cost benefits in situations where large areas need to be covered, or building usage requirements impose specific restrictions. With no energy-hungry floor distributors and technical service rooms and support for energy-saving features, FTTO could be considered the most sustainable solution in terms of CO2 footprint, waste, and energy consumption.

Supporting growing demand for Intelligent Buildings FTTO combines passive fibre cabling and active switches to provide Gigabit Ethernet services from a central core switch to an FTTO switch and from there to the end user devices.

The excellent performance and simplicity of the concept brings savings by reducing complexity, and enabling faster and easier rollout, maintenance and expansion. The scalability of the system allows you to expand as you grow, ensuring expenditure is always perfectly in line with current requirements. FTTO eliminates the need for floor distributors, separate fibre backbone, active equipment, patch panels and racks, as well as large volumes of horizontal copper cabling. A significant advantage in an environment where every square meter counts. Increasing demand from the market for more sustainable and low-carbon buildings will only serve to sustain the demand for Intelligent Buildings in the years to come and FTTO can play a key role in meeting that demand, and facilitating the energy saving, efficiency-enhancing innovations of today and tomorrow. ë

INTERVIEW

ENABLING THE MODERN DATA EXPERIENCE

DURING THE WORLD CIO 200 SUMMIT 2019 UAE EDITION, SAMER SEMAAN, CHANNEL AND ALLIANCE MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST AT PURE STORAGE MADE A VERY IMPACTFUL PRESENTATION. THE CRUX OF IT WAS THAT— IT’S A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF DATA…AND PURE STORAGE IS COMMITTING TO DELIVER ORGANIZATIONS’ AN ENTERPRISE-CLASS ALL FLASH STORAGE THAT IS SIMPLE, EFFICIENT & EVERGREEN

Each and every one of us today has at least one phone, one tablet, one laptop, desktop or smart device that is generating data every second. The result data is growing exponentially. Just think about some of these statistics: l 500 Million Tweets are sent l 294 billion emails are sent l 4 TB of data are created from each connected car l 65 Billion messages are sent on WhatsApp l 5 Billion Searches are made In fact, according to statistics from IDC, the total amount of data generated across the globe will reach 175 zetttabytes by 2025. More importantly 30% of it will be generated in real-time and nearly half of the data will be stored in the public cloud.

Compounding this data explosion is the fact we now live in the IOE (Internet of Everything) world everything is connected today from device to cloud and from IT to OT. Not surprisingly, businesses are realizing the need to leverage all this data, turning this data into insight to gain a competitive advantage. In fact: l 47% of enterprise’s revenue is now being driven through digital l 67% of the CIOs in the world believe that data should be added in the balance sheet

And 83 % of executives agree that AI is a game changer in the data world The big question then is where and how will organizations store all this data. That is where Pure Storage comes in with our simple, efficient and evergreen technology, we are delivering a modern data experience. In less than 10 years, we have disrupted the storage industry by creating solutions that are intelligent, automated, and modern. Unlike legacy infrastructure vendors, Pure enables customers to utilize more of their data, while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. We provide a modern data experience that creates a common operating environment across multiple data centers and clouds, easing operations via APIs and intelligent AI-driven automation. We also now offer our customers integrated hybrid cloud and on-prem solutions, consumable as a flexible subscription.

Pure’s portfolio of technology solutions are focused on meeting the priorities that are important to CIOs and strategic decision makers today building a hybrid cloud, transitioning to fast, consolidated data architectures, and deriving business value from AI and analytics. l Hybrid Cloud: Pure is delivering the market’s strongest solution to unify hybrid clouds. l

AI/Analytics: Through advanced engineering integration with established partners, Pure helps customers unify and manage multiple AI projects across any stage. l Fast, Consolidated Architectures: Pure enables faster access to data wherever customers need it by delivering flash at disk prices. As a result customers can derive more intelligence from their data to make the best business decisions. l As-a-Service: Pure is the only storage vendor today that has made all of its core products available as-a-service under one full, integrated portfolio. This represents the simplest on-ramp to the cloud for customers.

These innovations are a large reason why we have been placed as a leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage, have ensured a 61 % TCO saving for our customers and achieved an NPS score that puts us in the top 1% of B2B companies.

The bottom line is that we are obsessed about our customers. By offering unified, automated and multi-cloud solutions that focus on data utility, we are enabling companies to modernize their existing applications and simultaneously accelerate their adoption of hybrid cloud, containers, DevOps, AI, and real-time analytics at scale. ë l

PURE STORAGE FLASHARRAY//C Pure Storage FlashArray//C provides a 100% NVMe all-flash foundation for tier 2 production applications, test and development workloads, multi-site disaster recovery, and data protection at hybrid storage economics.

Like all products in the FlashArray family line, FlashArray//C provides a no-compromise enterprise experience built for >99.9999 percent availability, Pure1® cloud data management, API automation, AI-driven predictive support, and is built from the ground up to be Evergreen™ with non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades and no data migrations.

THE TOP FOUR USE CASES FOR PURE FLASHARRAY//C ARE: n Policy based VM-tiering n Disaster recovery for tier 2 apps n Multi-cloud test/dev n Snapshot consolidation

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INTERVIEW

SAMER SEMAAN, CHANNEL AND ALLIANCE MANAGER – MIDDLE EAST | PURE STORAGE

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INTERVIEW

RESKILLING THE DIGITAL WORKFORCE “I WAS SPEAKING RECENTLY AT THE WORLD CIO 200 SUMMIT AND REQUESTED THE AUDIENCE

(WHICH CONSISTED OF CIOS OF PRESTIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS AND BUSINESS) A SHOW OF HANDS TO THE QUESTION ‘HOW MANY OF YOU FEEL IT IS TOUGH TO GET THE RIGHT SKILL IN YOUR TEAM?’.

AS YOU WOULD HAVE GUESSED, THEY RESPONDED WITH A RESOUNDING ‘YES’.”

I

ndustry 4.0 and what is more commonly known as digital disruption or digital transformation is taking our world by storm with new technologies in the Cloud, AI and ML invading our space. It is in this very context that I wish to draw your attention to the need for reskilling our workforce. CIOs and heads of IT teams understand that getting the right skills even for the present jobs in our teams is quite a challenge; let alone preparing for skilling our organizations for the future jobs. When we ask any IT manager, ‘what is the main hurdle to migrate to cloud?’ the number one reason beside the IT Governance is the shortage of the right skills either within their organization or even in the marketplace.

THE ‘WHY’ OF RESKILLING: Let’s probe the question ‘Why reskill?’ a bit further. Firstly, the way compute, networking and storage is handled has changed drastically owing to digital disruption. New concepts such as DevOps, PaaS and the like have changed our approach on these and we need to rapidly reskill to keep in step. Secondly, IT is mainstream today and is not a back office thing anymore. As IT takes center stage we cannot compromise on the skills required to run our IT operations. Thirdly, its data, data and more data, which is good when we have the right tools that can help us make good business sense out of it. The wealth of information that can be mined from the data available to us today is phenomenal. For example, it can tell us which countries a traveler had travelled to and help us pitch the right travel package. Fourthly, technologies for compute, networking and storage has a new mandate and a new focus, which is to enhance our business more tangible and measurable forms. We see this happening in BSFI, Airlines, Oil and Gas, Telecom industries. Even in the field of Agriculture (where

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previously IT was a foreign word) we see how they benefit a lot from the recent progress in information technology. IOT and Machine learning can now help farmers with predictive analysis for better crop yield. Not only in agriculture but also in the field of healthcare where it helps in early detection of malignant diseases. Information technology is contributing to new capabilities in the domain of Technology for Accessibility. People with disabilities can use technology to overcome their physical limitations. IT is also helping us address issues concerning our globe and nature, which cannot be handled otherwise. For instance IT enables us to track our wildlife and provide us with data that can help us with timely response for preserving them from calamities and threats.

THE ‘WHAT’ OF RESKILLING When new job roles are getting activated in our workplace what do we do with our existing workforce?’ Of course, the answer is to reskill our existing workforce. As CIOs and learning development managers it is important to have a fair idea of which job roles require reskilling. Industry statistics shows us that the new technologies being adopted like Machine Learning, AI, Data Science, Cyber Security, 3D Printing, Blockchain creates new job roles where reskilling is much required. Think about it. How else can corporates adopt these new technologies? Our workforce provides the hands and legs for these new technologies and they need to be trained and equipped if we need to see actual return on investment on these technologies.

Gartner’s Top 10 predictions for 2020 indicates wide adoption of AI and ML design, blockchain and mobile technologies for banking, augmented reality. An 11% jump in new roles is predicted in the upcoming years and a substantial reduction of redundant job roles is expected as well.

INTERVIEW

SANJEEV SINGH, MD, SPECTRUM NETWORKS

In today’s world eight out of ten middle-skill jobs require digital skills. The range of skills required is also becoming quite wide and requires specialization - for example Data scientist, DevOps/AIOps, Cloud, Cyber Security.

THE ‘HOW’ OF RESKILLING Here comes the most important ‘HOW’ of reskilling. Organizations need to look at reskilling their workforce from a strategic point of view. Look at it as how critical it is for the success of their busi-

ness - or conversely how a lack of reskilling may contribute to the inefficiency of their organization or business. What if we were able to measure the success or failure of your business with respect to relevance and quality of the skills posed by their workforce? This calls for some thinking at the senior management level. There are four aspects to consider when we are considering a ground-up approach to skilling of our organizations and businesses. First is to have a strategy that links your business objectives to the skills required to deliver the service to your customers on par or

even better than your competitors. Second is to foster a culture of innovation and adapting to change. Third is a sense of responsibility to ensure any technology investment made by our organization actually translates to value creation for the organization. Fourth is to encourage a culture of constant learning. Because organizations that don’t learn don’t adapt and those that don’t adapt are left behind. I wish to quote Alvin Toffler here “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” ë

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INTERVIEW

ACHIEVING INVISIBLE TOGETHER WOULD IT SHOCK YOU TO KNOW THAT SINCE 2000, 52% OF FORTUNE 500 HAVE BEEN ACQUIRED OR GONE BANKRUPT AND ONLY 12% OF THOSE THAT EXISTED IN 1955 EXIST TODAY? THE MARKETPLACE IS COMPETITIVE AND UNFORGIVING. EVEN INNOVATIVE STARTUPS ARE NOT SPARED. WITHIN THE FIRST YEAR, 50% OF US BASED VENTURES FAIL. COMPANIES THAT DON’T CONSTANTLY REDEFINE THEMSELVES BASED ON CUSTOMER NEEDS AND MARKET DYNAMICS SIMPLY CANNOT SURVIVE.

T

oday, IT leaders struggle to manage the unrelenting complexity across their IT environments. This includes not only core datacenter infrastructure, but remote and branch offices, disaster recovery sites and more. This complexity makes it difficult for the business to pursue new markets, develop advanced products & services, and tackle strategic initiatives, such as digital transformation projects.

Much of the challenge stems from legacy infrastructure, constructed with discrete resource silos, such as storage, server, virtualization, networking and security. This fragmented design makes it difficult and time consuming to provision new IT environments to run critical business applications. Additionally, these architectures have multiple points of failure, creating a fragile IT system that is susceptible to unplanned downtime.

This keeps us spending a disproportionate amount of our time on tending to infrastructure. Although the infrastructure is the underlying foundation, our business partners care only about the applications and services that run upon them and because the infrastructure is complex and keep us focused on the speeds and feeds, it is no wonder that according to a Nutanix survey, we found that 57% of developers circumvent instead of collaborate with IT. The adoption of public cloud services has reset expectations of what enterprise IT must deliver. Internal IT consumers need infrastructure provisioned in minutes, not weeks or months. Otherwise, the business will circumvent IT teams in favor of public cloud services, creating shadow IT challenges.

Public cloud has changed how organizations pay for and consume IT services. Expensive, overprovisioned infrastructure is no longer tenable. The business expects pay-asyou-Grow economics, where IT services are provided only when needed, and paid for only when used.

Solutions that are simple to deploy, manage and scale – with one-click operations for common workflows.

Continuous innovation with new features and capabilities incorporated into production environments continuously, non disruptively and with no maintenance windows Failure to adapt to elevated expectations poses risks to the business, and makes IT teams less relevant.

To meet a diverse and expanding set of IT requirements, organizations are leveraging multiple cloud environments

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to power their workloads and manage valuable customer and business data. These multi-cloud designs may include: l Public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) l Private clouds environments running in corporate datacenters or co-location facilities l Distributed and edge deployments, including remote/ branch offices and field-based IT sites While individual cloud environments may deliver particular capabilities and have unique set of operational requirements, managing a multi-cloud IT architecture brings a clear set of imperatives: l Lower the long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT services l Accelerate overall IT agility to keep pace with the business l Bring real-time visibility of cloud costs – public and private – enabling informed decisions for application placement and data storage l Simplify IT and cloud operations, leaving more time for IT teams to add business value l Meet stringent requirements imposed by the business, while maintaining necessary security and IT controls Datacenter architectures are in need of modernization.

A rethinking of datacenter design must incorporate two fundamental tenets: 100% software-defined architectures provide significantly more flexibility and agility than those based on specialized hardware devices, which quickly become obsolete and depreciate in value A well-designed softwaredriven datacenter must deliver: l A full stack solution delivering a complete infrastructure stack with all IT resources to run any application, including compute, storage, virtualization, networking and security l The freedom to deploy software on a broad range of hardware platforms, preventing lock-in and enabling long-term flexibility to re-deploy software on different platforms in order to meet changing use case and business requirements l A datacenter environment that can be ready in just minutes - ready to provision applications immediately l A full ecosystem of technology solutions that augment and extend datacenter capabilities – via API integration and

INTERVIEW

MIKE O’HARA,

TERRITORY ACCOUNT MANAGER, NUTANIX

proven interoperability Application-centric datacenters provide IT infrastructure services that adapt and respond to the needs of the application. The datacenter serves the application, not vice versa. This requires: l The ability to run any application (virtualized, container-based, bare metal) at any scale l Full application orchestration and lifecycle management l Platform services to support application development, testing and production (e.g., one-click database provisioning and efficient copy data management) l The ability to abstract (or decouple) applications from the underlying infrastructure

– making workloads mobile across different IT environments Modern IT environments extend beyond the core datacenter, and include the complete end-to-end IT fabric. An enterprise-wide strategy demands: l Common IT building blocks that allow for standardization of operations across all environments, including datacenter, remote and branch offices and distributed edge locations. This allows a single team to manage IT operations at all sites, with common technology stacks, management constructs and IT workflows. l with the right configuration, for each location and use case

l Ability to scale infrastructure without limit to handle business growth – planned and unplanned l Manage IT operations centrally with full visibility and control l The flexibility to leverage the same infrastructure for emerging Internet of Things (IoT) use cases With built-in ML and automation, presented via a single web user interface, customers can reduce complex and repetitive tasks across the IT lifecycle to just a few clicks.

They can deploy resources non-disruptively and scale their cloud during business hours. No longer to they have to work through weekends.

They can manage and monitor servers, storage and VMs from one place as opposed to multiple specialized tools.

The system can detect and automatically resolve anomalies in real-time. No more needless firefighting.

They can perform upgrades from hardware to hypervisor with one-click. This frees up weeks of careful planning and running of upgrades during off-hours.

Finally, customers get the data and insights they need to plan for growth and for new projects – no longer do they have to rely on Excel spreadsheets.

All of this frees up maintenance time, ensures 24/7 performance and enables your customers to get ahead of the needs of the business.

This transition empowers your customers to take a more service oriented approach to IT. To effectively do so, they need to focus on reducing time taken to resolve requests while raising quality, and this can only be done using automation.

With fully-integrated self-service capabilities delivered by Calm, your customers can truly deliver ITaaS. They need to simply gather an inventory of the most commonly requested resources or applications, blueprint them and publish them onto an internal marketplace.

Their stakeholders can visit this app store, and get what they need instantly thus freeing up from manually closing IT tickets, while still retaining control of the application instances that were deployed. ë

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GUEST ARTICLE

WHY A SMART HOSPITAL NEEDS TO LOOK AFTER ITS NETWORK THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT) HAS THE POTENTIAL TO TRANSFORM ALL AREAS OF THE ECONOMY. BUT FEW INDUSTRIES STAND TO BENEFIT MORE IN A CONNECTED WORLD THAN HEALTHCARE.

n G A M A L E M A R A , C O U N T R Y M A N A G E R - U A E AT A R U B A , A H E W L E T T PA C K A R D E N T E R P R I S E C O M PA N Y

Consider how a hospital currently operates – running on a network of machines that are constantly monitoring, measuring and analysing, dealing with hundreds of people walking in and out of its doors on a daily basis, and on high alert around the clock. This is the ideal environment for smart, connected devices with greater autonomous, predictive and analytical capability. Turning a siloed device-driven environment into a connected one has the potential to enhance existing operations considerably: improving speed, efficiency and reliability, and ultimately enabling better patient care and experiences. It is little wonder then that US hospitals are already estimated to have as many as 10 to 15 IoT devices per bed, according to research by Zingbox.

Unfortunately, the security considerations of all this connectivity are significant, with implications for both patient data and care. Reports have shown that up to 89% of healthcare organisations that have adopted an IoT strategy have experienced an IoT-related data breach, while patient records are some of the most sought-after by hackers (fetching up to $250 on the black market according to Trustwave).

So what more can hospitals do to anticipate the risks of future connectivity? And how can they set up their networks to fight back?

ANTICIPATING AND OVERCOMING IOT RISKS For any network manager responding to these questions, the starting point is recognising the vulnerabilities that are inherent in large networks

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of connected devices. With every component offering a potential point of failure or entry to a would-be attacker, the more devices a hospital brings in, the greater the risk of a significant data breach.

But it is not just patient data that could be at risk in a worst-case scenario – far more worrying are the implications for patient care. A device that has autonomy to measure and deliver drug doses, for example, could suffer from a software glitch, or be taken over by a malicious attacker.

Meanwhile during an episode of unexpected downtime, a device that isn’t critical to life – such as an MRI scanner – could gain preferential access to one that is, like a heart monitor.

These may be extreme scenarios, but they are something for which every hospital and healthcare provider must prepare. And guarding against them means addressing a key source of IoT vulnerability: network visibility.

SECURE, VISIBLE, AND UNDER CONTROL As the volume and sophistication of IoT devices in hospitals increases, this is only becoming more of a mammoth task for network managers. Traditional approaches for profiling aren’t suitable for many IoT devices, rendering them indistinguishable and generic. And yet the ability to discriminate between devices is absolutely vital.

Consider how you would react to an issue with an automated insulin delivery system versus one with the smart sensors in the hospital carpark.

Critical-care devices that need to run continu-

ously can’t be treated the same way as those which can be disconnected if needed.

Luckily, there is a solve for this lack of visibility – and that comes in the form of an increasing array of AI and machine learning solutions, like Aruba’s ClearPass Device, that are being created to ensure every device connected to the network can be monitored with the appropriate depth. Running on a purpose-built cloud platform, ClearPass deploys a range of machine learning models to differentiate between devices with similar IT attributes, and build highly detailed, behavioural-based profiles for any that are connected to the network.

PUTTING THE SPOTLIGHT ON NETWORK SECURITY When the future of healthcare is discussed, the spotlight is understandably focussed on clinicians, patients and devices. But as smart hospitals become a reality, attention will increasingly shift to the less visible role of the network security manager.

This brings with it great responsibility, but also the opportunity to play a vital role in the ongoing revolution of today’s healthcare system. In the age of IoT continued progress will rely as much on effective security as it does on hardware innovations and digitally enabled caregiving. Doctors will only be able to look after the patients if network managers use the right tools to care for the hospital. So, isn’t it about time you run a proper diagnosis of your network security? ë

G

INTERVIEW

ARCHITECTS OF CONTINUITY

As 5G is widely expected to raise overall energy costs, it’s clear that mitigation strategies will be critical to maintain 5G business case viability. Energy-saving tactics will be varied and address every layer, from intelligent networking equipment that enters sleep mode during idle time to use of artificial intelligence (AI) and new coding techniques.

your IT systems. As Architects of Continuity, Vertiv ensures your digital infrastructure runs continuously and evolves as your business changes. needs. Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extends from the cloud to the edge of the network.

PIERRE HAVENGA,

MANAGING DIRECTOR MEA AT VERTIV.

In a recent report, 451 Research welcomed Vertis’s transformation, saying the company has “remade itself for a data centre market that demands a lean cost structure and rewards speed,” adding that Vertiv is now “gearing up to take advantage of its broad portfolio and global footprint to take more share in a challenging but expanding data centre market.”

After the corporate re-structuring, briefly describe Vertiv po rtfolio now and the various offerings that enterprises can have from you?

We are very fortunate in terms of where we have positioned ourselves as a company. Power requirement is a basic necessity, be it any household, small and medium enterprise or any large-scale enterprise. Digital transformation is creating extraordinary growth for your business, but it also places extraordinary pressure on

How do you see the future with Smart Cities? What role would Vertiv play in realizing the vision of a smart city to go low on carbon footprint and more on renewable energy?

5G and smart cities go hand in hand, in my opinion. As 5G is widely expected to raise overall energy costs, it’s clear that mitigation strategies will be critical to maintain 5G business case viability. Energy-saving tactics will be varied and address every layer, from intelligent networking equipment that enters sleep mode during idle time to use of artificial intelligence (AI) and new coding techniques.

How does your go to market strategy look like form a channel

point of view and a customer point of view? What kind of market objective have you aligned for the year 2020 and what would be your top three priorities?

From a MEA point of view, our go to market is mainly indirect. Each of the geographies has its own set of opportunities and challenges from economic and political point of view, different growth phases, etc.

Our go to market is indirect but it does not mean that we completely drift away from our customers. We shall continue with this strategy and build our priorities on strong relationship with our partners and consultants. We shall also thrive on consultant and technology workshops that takes us closer to our target customers.

We will continue to invest in this region in key countries and add more people to the team, specifically driving key accounts to effectively manage our distribution models. We went through a partner transformation program few years ago. We have already seen the benefits of it and have had double the growth in certain areas.

We are fortunate to be in an environment where digitization is the driver of the world at the end of the day. We just need to make sure that we stay with that element. ë

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INTERVIEW

TECHNOLOGY OUTLOOK FOR 2020: WHAT LIES AHEAD TWELVE TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVES GIVE THEIR PREDICTIONS OF HOW TECHNOLOGIES WILL MORPH AND CHANGE FROM

2019 INTO 2020, INFLUENCING THE REST OF THE IT INDUSTRY.

AMER OWAIDA,

ASSAAD EL SAADI,

SECURITY WRITER, ESET.

REGIONAL DIRECTOR MIDDLE EAST, PURE STORAGE.

Fake news is closely tied to the issue of election tampering and it is worth taking a step back to consider how fake news impacts daily lives.

Fuelling the growth for modern analytics is more affordable infrastructure options, consumption-based infrastructure, and lower priced flash memory.

With machine learning machine gaining traction, a lot of the tasks have been simplified. From sifting through heaps of data to dealing with repetitive chores, the learning mechanism allows systems to improve the way they tackle problems. In 2019 machine learning gained notoriety because of a more concerning issue – the rise of the deepfake. This technology renders the popular saying seeing is believing quite useless.

The court of public opinion will matter next year, particularly during the US presidential election. Even more so when fake news, Collins’s 2017 word of the year, will be making a regular appearance. Fake news is closely tied to the issue of election tampering and foreign interference and it is worth taking a step back to consider how disinformation and fake news impact not just politics but our daily lives.

Privacy was another issue that arose indirectly from the 2016 elections.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal had much of the world reevaluating how we approach our privacy. In the US this has translated into an environment of suspicion when it comes to big tech companies and how they protect the data of their users. Legislation is being introduced to tackle the issue of privacy and how companies handle users’ data. But the consensus is that the issues are not being tackled fast enough. Companies should treat privacy measures as cornerstones of their products and not just an afterthought. Which begs the question: What more can companies and governments do to secure data privacy?

In 2020, the demand for as-a-Service in storage will increase and organisations are speaking with their wallets with more investment in OPEX models, but successful models need to balance both the operations and purchasing aspects. From an operations perspective, key attributes include standardisation vs snowflakes, on-demand access, API-driven management, and limitless scale.

On the consumption side, key traits include a pay for what you use model, bursting capabilities flex up down as needed, and a non-disruptive evergreen experience, services can be grown evolved over time without disruption. And all this delivered as a 100% pay-per-month OPEX service.

Fuelling the growth for modern analytics is more affordable infrastructure options such as more powerful CPUs, consumption-based infrastructure, available both on-prem and in the public cloud, and lower priced flash memory. There is also a significant growth in stream analytics platforms, both open source Apache Flink, Apache Beam and Spark Streaming and commercial Splunk DSP replacing more and more batch-based processing platforms.

Modern analytics can now reach larger scale with cloud native analytics architectures comprised of stateless servers and container and high-performance S3 object stores. Additionally, the unbridled growth of data sources including smart devices smart home, wearables, connected cars, industrial internet, etc. will drive the adoption of modern analytics in order to drive more insights.

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INTERVIEW

CHRIS WOLF,

DAVE RUSSELL,

CTO GLOBAL FIELD AND INDUSTRY, VMWARE.

VICE PRESIDENT OF ENTERPRISE STRATEGY, VEEAM.

We are reaching a point where network and security policy, along with firewall rules, are simply attributes of an application.

The number of applications that businesses classify as mission-critical will rise during 2020, paving the way to a landscape in which every app is considered a high-priority.

A hybrid app is an application that is more or less an aggregate of various microservices. It is a way to build best-of-breed applications and differentiated services that can help organisations stand out from competitors.

Imagine the ability to leverage data services from one cloud provider and machine learning or analytics from another. Or perhaps you have a business partner who has built services that want to run adjacent to your data.

For organisations, innovation is no longer limited by what can be offered from a single cloud provider. A platform can bring all these heterogeneous services together and run these in ways you just cannot do anywhere else. Meetings with IT leaders throughout 2019 showed there is an appetite for the flexibility to build applications that combine the best native cloud services and open source technologies.

Security should be intrinsic to IT infrastructure. The challenge is security systems and processes are far too critical to disrupt all at once across an organisation, and networking and security professionals are riskaverse by nature, as they should be. Instead, enterprises will slowly evolve toward intrinsic security models, starting with a single application or new project. We are reaching a point where network and security policy, along with firewall rules, are simply attributes of an application.

This means that rules and policy are dynamically created at the time an application is initialised and can be destroyed when the application is retired. The ways in which we protect applications and data are evolving, and it is hard to find IT professionals with these skillsets.

The best approach is to start small. Pick a new Kubernetes project, for example, and go greenfield with modern, software-defined network and security solutions. Your team can build knowledge organically and scale these new methodologies across your enterprise over time. We are reaching a point where network and security policy, along with firewall rules, are simply attributes of an application.

Throughout 2019, technology has continued to have a transformative impact on businesses and communities. From the first deployments of 5G to businesses getting to grips with how they use artificial intelligence, it is been another year of rapid progress. From an IT perspective, we have seen two major trends that will continue in 2020. The first is that on-premises and public cloud will increasingly become equal citizens.

Cloud is becoming the new normal model of deployment, with 85% of businesses self-identifying as being predominantly hybrid-cloud or multicloud today. Related to this are the issues of cybersecurity and data privacy, which remain the top cloud concerns of IT decision makers. In 2020, cyber threats will increase rather than diminish, so businesses must ensure that 100% of their business-critical data can be recovered.

Businesses will continue to pick and choose the storage technologies and hardware that work best for their organisation, but data centre management will become even more about software. Manual provisioning of IT infrastructure is fast-becoming a thing of the past. Automating replication procedures and leveraging the public cloud offers precision, agility and scalability — enabling organisations to deploy applications with speed and ease.

With over three-quarters 77% of organisations using software-as-a-service SaaS, a software-defined approach to data management is now relevant to the vast majority of businesses.

The number of applications that businesses classify as mission-critical will rise during 2020 — paving the way to a landscape in which every app is considered a high-priority. Previously, organisations have been prepared to distinguish between mission-critical apps and non-mission-critical apps.

As businesses become completely reliant on their digital infrastructure, the ability to make this distinction becomes very difficult. On average, the 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management report revealed that IT decision makers say their business can tolerate a maximum of two hours’ downtime of missioncritical apps. But what apps can any enterprise realistically afford to have unavailable for this amount of time?

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INTERVIEW

DAVE WRIGHT,

DR MOATAZ BIN ALI,

CHIEF INNOVATION OFFICER, SERVICENOW.

VICE PRESIDENT, TREND MICRO, MIDDLE EAST, NORTH AFRICA.

Over the next three to five years, enhancing the employee experience will become a major priority for enterprises seeking to recruit and retain top talent.

For companies focused on the tough challenges of engaging and retaining your top talent, these are some trends worth watching—and perhaps investing in—for the future. Over the next year, advances in natural language understanding will help companies to minimise, if not entirely eliminate, human involvement in a wide range of business processes.

Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots will make it possible to give executives a virtual personal assistant, automating time-consuming chores such as booking business travel, scheduling meetings, and managing to-do lists. Companies that deploy chatbots to relieve people from these repetitive tasks will realise significant productivity gains.

The concept of Agile HR will shift from an experimental practice to broad adoption in 2020, driven by tech companies applying agile methodology throughout their organisations. it is a major undertaking to transform a traditional HR model to an agile one, but significant payoffs hang in the balance: HR teams play a much more active role in designing and digitising employee workflows, and in much tighter collaboration with workers themselves.

Over the next three to five years, enhancing the employee experience will become a major priority for enterprises seeking to recruit and retain top talent. But you cannot craft a seamless employee experience when personnel policies, technology, and work spaces are controlled by separate entities.

That is why traditional silo-based HR, IT, and facilities departments will merge into what will become known as the Employee Experience Office.

Artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on work. As artificial intelligence applications and tools take on more rote tasks, organisations will need to invest in retooling processes, re-skilling employees and rethinking job descriptions.

Companies will debate how automated employee services should be as they manage the new generational divide—between employees who expect the human touch and employees who consider themselves digital natives.

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Attackers will increasingly go after corporate data stored in the cloud via code injection attacks such as deserialisation bugs, cross-site scripting and SQL injection.

Organisations will face a growing risk from their cloud and the supply chain. The growing popularity of cloud and DevOps environments drive business agility while exposing organisations, from enterprises to manufacturers, to third-party risk. As we enter a new decade, organisations of all industries and sizes will increasingly rely on third party software, open-source, and modern working practices to drive the digital innovation and growth they crave.

Threat experts predict that this fast growth and change will bring new risks of supply chain attacks. From the cloud layer all the way down to the home network, IT security leaders will need to reassess their cyber risk and protection strategy in 2020.

Attackers will increasingly go after corporate data stored in the cloud via code injection attacks such as deserialisation bugs, cross-site scripting and SQL injection. They will either target cloud providers directly or compromise third-party libraries to do this.

In fact, the increasing use of third-party code by organisations employing a DevOps culture will increase business risk in 2020 and beyond. Compromised container components and libraries used in serverless and microservices architectures will further broaden the enterprise attack surface, as traditional security practices struggle to keep up.

Managed service providers MSPs will be targeted in 2020 as an avenue for compromising multiple organisations via a single target. They will not only be looking to steal valuable corporate and customer data, but also install malware to sabotage smart factories and extort money via ransomware.

The new year will also see a relatively new kind of supply chain risk, as remote workers introduce threats to the corporate network via weak Wi-Fi security. Additionally, vulnerabilities in connected home devices can serve as a point of entry into the corporate network.

INTERVIEW

GREG DAY,

HOZEFA SAYLAWALA,

VICE PRESIDENT AND CSO EMEA, PALO ALTO NETWORKS.

MIDDLE EAST DIRECTOR, ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES.

The idea of a trusted digital contact or source is hitting an all-time low as faking continues to grow.

The year 2020 has often been singled out by futurists and technologists as the year when sci-fi will become reality.

There has been much talk of how artificial intelligence offers new methods of threat detection and how the adversary is looking to subvert artificial intelligence capabilities. While all the excitement no doubt continues, artificial intelligence will make a real impact in 2020 in a different way: streamlining cybersecurity processes.

Security orchestration, automation, and response is just one example – using artificial intelligence to gather the human knowledge held by cybersecurity staff through NLP and allowing it to be reusable across the rest of the team.

This approach provides the building blocks for automating what are typically high-volume, simple, repetitive tasks that no security expert likes doing. It will also help ensure the right people with the right knowledge are engaged on any given project, to best navigate cybersecurity’s latest complex challenges.

The idea of a trusted digital contact or source is hitting an all-time low as faking continues to grow. For the last few years, we have seen an increase in business email compromise, using stolen trusted credentials to gain access to systems.

As the concept of faking continues to broaden into video, audio, and other digital formats, we are seeing faking move from simple spoofing into a complex web of lies that spans multiple platforms. We can only expect to see more complex, deeper fakes being created to trick and dupe users into doing things the adversary wants.

Historically, most businesses want to understand the cyber risk and what impact that would have on them. Typically, the CSO wants the platinum solution as they want to reduce as much risk as possible; yet often business leaders may settle for less, where they see the likelihood of business impact being low and a bronze or silver solution being good enough at a much lower cost.

None of this is going away, although savvy business leaders are increasingly asking the what if question. If things do happen, what is the response strategy, how long will it take to get the business back to normal, what is the backup strategy, and are processes in place to keep the business moving?

The year 2020 has often been singled out by futurists and technologists as the year when sci-fi will become reality – tarmac roads were to be replaced by pneumatic tubes that connect places, humans were to walk on Mars or that everyone was to own a flying vehicle of some sort. Well, the vision for 2020 was not quite 2020 vision. Despite being at a nascent stage in the enterprise space, we will no doubt see the growth of blockchain use across various industries for enhanced traceability in areas such as anti-counterfeiting, supply chain operations, and patient data. It has become mission-critical for organisations to master their data ownership pertaining to usage rights, data privacy and security as best-in-class customer experience becomes increasingly data-driven.

Supply chain players that can realise immediate benefits from blockchain include pharmaceutical, food and goods manufacturers, transportation and logistics providers, healthcare institutions, and even retailers of high-end goods. Blockchain will be used wherever immutable and event-driven trust needs to be established or where there is a need to share specific data in a secure, democratised way.

In the case of food manufacturing, there will be an increase of legislation around food and drug safety compliance globally in order to secure supply chains and increase transparency and safety for the endconsumer. Blockchain will be a key pillar of the ecosystem that will help companies achieve these objectives, and they will require trackand-trace technologies like temperature sensitive labels, barcodes, and radio-frequency identification RFID. Enterprises today need greater visibility in terms of their inventory levels, work-in-progress status, and their staff ’s location to gain a competitive edge. They are expecting more from data capture especially by using 2D barcodes, computer vision, and RFID. The 2D barcode is now ubiquitous on shipping labels, in grocery stores, patient wristbands, and mobile payments, and the adoption of this square barcode will undoubtedly continue to grow.

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INTERVIEW

JACOB CHACKO,

JONATHAN WOOD,

REGIONAL BUSINESS HEAD, MIDDLE EAST, SAUDI

GENERAL MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA,

ARABIA, SOUTH AFRICA, HPE ARUBA.

INFOR.

The introduction of Wi-Fi 6 this year was met with cautious optimism, with skeptics citing that increased bandwidth enabled by Wi-Fi 6, will not necessarily be put to use very soon.

In 2020, location services will continue to advance and serve up more meaningful, personalised experiences to users, inviting them to engage with their environment like never before. No longer just about wayfinding, location services will enable a new host of services based on proximity and preferences, delivering value to both the provider and the user in the form of customised offers for the user and consumer insights for the provider.

Despite the fanfare, the introduction of Wi-Fi 6 this year was met with cautious optimism, with skeptics citing that the increased bandwidth enabled by Wi-Fi 6, though impressive, will not necessarily be put to use very soon. As a result of continued Wi-Fi 6 innovation, Aruba predicts that 2020 will usher in a new swath of Wi-Fi 6-enabed services that will deliver the performance, availability and Quality of Service that is promised by technologies such as 5G. Wi Fi 6 will be the preferred on ramp to 5G for the majority of enterprise edge applications.

In 2020, organisations will increasingly leverage cloud-based services from branch offices to support mission-critical applications while reducing exposure to malicious users and other sources of cyberattacks. Virtual gateways will better integrate with network services provided in public clouds to greatly simplify and accelerate this trend. New SD-WAN features will enable IT to better monitor and manage applications from public cloud infrastructures.

In 2020, organisations will increasingly utilise public internet services, which is more widely available and costs up to 100x less than legacy MPLS, for SD-WAN remote office connectivity. This trend is being driven by next-gen SD-WAN solutions which use machine learning-based analytical tools to improve performance and utilisation. Additionally, these solutions automatically reroute traffic to minimise network disruptions which further increases confidence in public internet services as a primary transport vehicle.

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Attackers will increasingly go after corporate data stored in the cloud via code injection attacks such as deserialisation bugs, cross-site scripting and SQL injection.

With a growing focus on sustainability and efficiency, empty containers will be an increasingly hot button across the shipping industry. In freight, waste means that more fuel is consumed, more carbon is emitted, and drivers spend more hours sitting idle. Empty miles, non-revenue miles or deadhead miles are a drag on the industry and economy, as businesses pay more to move goods.

Carriers account for their own expectations for empty miles when deciding how much they charge for any particular load, so everyone from shippers down to end consumers – and, of course, the environment – ultimately pay the cost of empty miles.

As supply chains progress towards autonomous processes, machine learning and artificial intelligence platforms will continue to learn by observing humans and data signals that span across parties, regions and supply chains, to understand the complexities and nuances of global trade.

Some workflows will move to lights-out status, while many other complex scenarios involving multi-party collaboration and networkwide orchestration will require greater learning from their human counter-parts.

In 2019, we saw supply chains shift out of regions such as China due to tariffs and trade conflict. In 2020 an emphasis will shift towards selfsustaining economies with supply chains relying on domestic resources and trading partners where possible. This will occur primarily in the US, China and other developed economies. Production will increasingly lean towards produce locally, deliver locally. On the consumer side, there’s a growing trend towards domestic brands.

In China, consumers are increasingly turning to Chinese brands for clothing, high-tech gadgets and phones, and cars, and increasingly shunning Western names. In the US, companies are preparing for long term tensions with China by diversifying their supply networks beyond China and building up new networks elsewhere, in many cases closer to home.

INTERVIEW

JUSTIN DUSTZADEH,

KEN MOIR,

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, EQUINIX.

VICE PRESIDENT MARKETING, NICELABEL.

According to IDC, by 2023, more than 50% of new enterprise infrastructure deployments will be at the edge rather than corporate data centers.

Driven by the latest evolution of the Internet of Things IoT, printers themselves will increasingly become connected.

There is a seismic shift underway across many industries as businesses are embracing edge computing and hybrid multicloud architectures. Increasingly, businesses are moving computing from centralised data centers to a distributed infrastructure and toward the edge, where data exchange and interconnection between businesses and cloud services are growing at an exponential rate.

The advent of edge computing has also become a foundational enabler for other emerging technologies such as 5G mobile communications, which will allow internet of things IoT and other edge devices to take advantage of faster connectivity to data and compute resources with single-digit-millisecond network latency.

According to analyst firm IDC, by 2023, more than 50% of new enterprise infrastructure deployments will be at the edge rather than corporate data centers, up from less than 10% today. And by 2024, the number of apps at the edge will increase 800%.

The IDC report says to prepare, businesses must modernise IT to become virtualised, containerised and software-defined to support the edge. And they should also consider new data center partners that can bolster edge build-out and prioritise infrastructure optimisation and application communication costs.

With the increase in cybersecurity attacks and data privacy and protection regulations, most companies are now moving toward accessing cloud services over private networks and storing their encryption keys in a cloud-based Hardware Security Module at a location that is separate from where their data resides.

This HSM-as-a-Service model allows them to increase the level of control over their data, to strengthen resiliency of operations, and to support of a hybrid technology architecture.

42% of IT decision-makers agree that the greenness of a company’s suppliers has a direct impact on their buying decisions. Equinix anticipates that with increasing pressures on the world’s resources and the increasing desire by many companies to cut emissions, digital transformation could begin to set the world’s economy on a progressively sustainable footing.

As we look ahead to 2020 and beyond, it is clear that the labeling market is being driven by the broader IT trends of digitisation and modernisation. These trends are fueling the development of the market and will accelerate over time. In enterprise resource planning ERP, for example, this combination of digitisation and modernisation is transforming systems, with SAP software solutions in use today rapidly migrating from SAP ECC into the new business suite of SAP S 4HANA. That is just one example but it is important because it is part of a wider IT modernisation trend that ultimately impacts on labeling.

When large enterprises update ERP, one of the natural consequences is that they will subsequently modernise their labeling systems and often migrate to, or implement a new standardised global labeling solution.

In other words, the impact on labeling is part of a wider chain of events driving IT modernisation. And that chain is accelerating as new technology comes on stream. That is why we are seeing a pipeline of new opportunities for global labeling solutions or label management systems today across the industry that is larger than we have witnessed for many years. And we expect to see these trends speed up not just during 2020 but increasingly throughout the decade.

In fact, driven by the latest evolution of the Internet of Things, the printers themselves will increasingly become connected. The technological capability has been in place before but the rest of the market has not been advanced enough to take advantage. Over the next decade, the advent of driverless printers in the cloud will be a key benefit for businesses as the migration to the cloud gathers pace.

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WCS GRAND FINALE

TECHNOLOGY IS AN ENABLER, BUT PEOPLE MAKE THE DIFFERENCE.....

HELD UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF THE GLOBAL CIO FORUM, THE WORLD CIO 200 SUMMIT 2019 SHOWCASED HOW TECHNOLOGY, BUSINESS AND HUMAN CONVERGE TO CREATE OPPORTUNITIES LIKE NEVER BEFORE AND HOW CO-EXISTING IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD TO SUSTAIN AND PROGRESS.

Technology helps, but people make the difference. Many organizations struggle with the ‘people’s dilemma’. What competences are needed to coop with change? How do you manage this talent and who takes the lead? From the CIO we need both leadership and ownership.

Presented by Global CIO Forum and held on December 9-10th at The DoubleTree by Hilton Resort and Spa at Ras Al Khaimah, UAE, The World CIO 200 Summit witnessed the amalgamation of global and senior IT decision makers from 15 countries. Testified as one of the most objective-oriented events in terms of gathering the most relevant business and technology decision makers in a never-seen-before platform, the World CIO 200 Summit was attended by over 300 CIOs and CXOs from 15 countries.

The official ribbon cutting and inauguration of the event was done by senior government leaders from the GCC including— Dr. Esam AlFalasi, Director of IT, Ministry of Economy; Mr. Mohammed Mahnashi, ICT Advisor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, KSA; Dr. Ali Jassim Al Aradi, Director of IT, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bahrain; Eng Suleiman Al Kharashi, Deputy Minister of Finance, KSA; Dr. Thalaya AlFozan, Director IT, Ministry of Finance, Kuwait.

Technology is now a factor in more strategic decision making than ever before. From big data and business analytics, to break out departments using cloud technology to operate more like start-ups, technology is increasingly the medium in which business takes place. So how can a savvy solution provider take advantage of this shift, and how can a switched-on CIO make themselves indispensable to the business?

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THE EVENT CREATED A NICHE IN FACTORS MORE THAN ONE;

Connecting what is required, connecting what is right

Bringing global communities on a singular platform

Sharing local benchmarks with global counterparts

Highlightig how Business, Technology and Human work hand in hand through #HX,BX,TX sessions

Exploring the CIO/ CXO pain point from a global standard

Imbibing the seed of leadership in today’s CIOs with hard-hitting presentations

Building a community of like-minded people who were united by profession but divided by geographies

Creating global leadership models through the GCF advisory board

Laying out the 2025 vision for benchmarking this community on the global landscape And much more…….

Through this event, Global CIO Forum build roadmaps for strategic decision making and identified yardsticks that are the key drivers of growth in the digital world. While CIOs picked on sessions to help them fast-track their growth, the solution providers took to the stage to present their brand, present their solutions and network with 300+ relevant C-level IT decision makers flown in from 15 countries.

HUMAN LEADERSHIP TRANSFORMATION - #HX

ARUNACHALAM MURUGANANTHAM INVENTOR AND FOUNDER- CEO AT JAYASHREE INDUSTRIES

VENKATESH MAHADEVAN CIO, DUBAI INVESTMENTS

JOHN MATTONE WORLD’S TOP EXECUTIVE COACH. ORLANDO, USA

DR.ERDAL OZKAYA HEAD OF INFORMATION SECURITY, STANDARD CHARTERED BANK

DAVE CRANE GLOBAL MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER

Leadership across every aspect of business and IT is crucial in the shift to Generation NeXT. In response to these demands, technology and information leadership is undergoing a revolution. The beliefs and models of how we work are being shattered and re-shaped. It begins with mindsets accepting and embracing perpetual change. This track challenges your thinking about leadership, skills and the organization required to successfully navigate uncertainty and create a culture for success.

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WCS GRAND FINALE

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION - #BX

DR. HARI PRASAD PRESIDENT, APOLLO GROUP

SHAWN STEWART DIRECTOR OF AGILE DELIVERY, COX AUTOMOTIVE

UDAY AWASTHI SR.DIRECTOR, GE POWER

ADITYA TANGRI CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF KALEBR AMERICAS AND FOUNDER OF STEAMATHALON

KASHIF RANA CHIEF SYSTEMS OFFICER, PAKISTAN INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES ETIHAD AIRWAYS

Business Strategy Digital transformation has impacted all enterprises, and the winners will be those that can constantly adapt to change. CxOs are investing to exploit opportunities in digital business. CIOs must ditch the traditional IT project focused mind-set in favor of an IT product-focused approach. This track was for CIOs and IT leaders planning the role of information and technology in enterprise digital strategy

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION - #TX

DR. ESAM AL FALASI DIRECTOR IT, MINISTRY OF ECONOMY

MOHAMMED AL TAMIMI REGIONAL DIRECTOR FOR ME - RUBRIK

ABDULAZIZ ORAIJ FOSS DIRECTOR, MCIT

JOHN ZERIHOUN CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, YAMBA LUXEMBOURG

FADI AMOUDI CEO AND FOUNDER, IQ ROBOTICS

SANJEEV SINGH MD – SPECTRUM NETWORKS DMCC

MIKE O’HARA REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, NUTANIX

ASHITH P CIO OF AL MASAH CAPITAL

PAUL JOHNS EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF SAI GLOBAL

MOHAMMED MAHNASHI

SHOBHA SINGH BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR- ORACLE

ICT ADVISOR AND CDO, MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

SAMER SEMAAN CHANNEL MANAGER MIDDLE EAST AT PURE STORAGE

MOHAMMED AL TAMIMI REGIONAL DIRECTOR ME, RUBRIK

DERRICK LOUIS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS AT RACETRAC PETROLEUM

DR. JASSIM HAJI CHAIRMAN, AI SOCIETY BAHRAIN

EKTAA SIBAL

INTERNATIONAL MEDITATION EXPERT GIFTED ENERGY HEALER INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER INNER-SELF TRANSFORMATION SPECIALIST

YAHYA AL MAWALI IT CONSULTANT, RAWNAQ IT CONSULTING

An understanding of how technology and information is constantly evolving is a critical step in creating an effective transition to ContinuousNext. This track examined how new practices can be amplified by technology, leading to new capabilities that provide new business opportunities and increase value delivery.

CIOs and IT Executives enjoyed sessions on how to apply selected trending technologies for this exact purpose. These technologies include AI, machine learning and advanced data analysis, Blockchain and increasingly more comprehensive digital business platforms.

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UAE

KENYA

KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA

EGYPT

KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN

INDIA

SULTANATE OF OMAN

SOUTH AFRICA

QATAR

PAKISTAN

KUWAIT

SINGAPORE

GHANA

USA

CANADA

INSPIRE AWARDS

Digital Transformation does not necessarily mean the technological transformation that an organization embarks upon, it takes a whole lot more. When an organization, all its departments together, walks towards a single goal by unifying all its people and processes, that is when it truly realizes the potential of a ‘Digital’ organizations.

The #DXInspire 2019 Awards recognized path- breaking organizations that have redefined Digital Transformation to its core.

UAE CHAMPIONS 2019

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INTERVIEW

THE POWER OF VOICE

SALESFORCE IS BRINGING THE POWER OF VOICE TO EVERY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE SPANNING THE SALESFORCE CUSTOMER 360 PLATFORM AND ENABLING MILLIONS OF CRM USERS TO TALK TO SALESFORCE. WITH EINSTEIN VOICE ASSISTANT GUIDING EVERY ACTION, INSIGHT AND PREDICTION, SALESFORCE USERS WILL BE MORE PRODUCTIVE—FROM ANYWHERE.

BRET TAYLOR,

PRESIDENT AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, SALESFORCE

New Einstein Voice Skills will enable developers and admins to build custom voice-powered apps for employees across every role and industry, in just a matter of clicks. In addition, new solutions for service and sales teams will apply natural language processing to voice conversations, and deliver insights that drive smarter, more personalized customer engagement.

VOICE ENTERS THE WORKPLACE Voice is rapidly emerging as the user interface for our lives. Nearly half of U.S. households are already using a voice-activated device for everyday activities like getting driving directions, dictating text messages, playing their favorite songs and even turning on home appliances – all without lifting a finger or tapping a keyboard.

And, just like every other computing revolution that came before it—cloud, social, mobile and AI—Salesforce is helping companies bring voice’s immense potential to CRM to transform the way we work.

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BUILD CUSTOM VOICE APPS FOR ANY BUSINESS PROCESS Using Einstein Voice Skills, companies will be able to create custom voice-powered apps to reimagine workflows and processes—replacing any manual data entry or manual Salesforce navigation that may impede productivity. From a simple set-up page, developers and admins will be able to build custom skills for any CRM action— such as updating a field, creating a task or reading out a prediction—and select the Salesforce fields or objects that inform each action.

VOICE INTELLIGENCE: SMARTER AND MORE PRODUCTIVE SERVICE AND SALES EXPERIENCES Powered by Einstein, new voice intelligence applies natural language processing to call transcriptions – providing sales and service teams with insights and trends that will drive smarter,

more personalized customer engagement: l New Service Cloud Voice: Service Cloud Voice integrates telephony inside Service Cloud, unifying phone, digital channels and CRM data in real-time in one centralized console. Service Cloud Voice can also integrate with transcription services that convert voice to text in real time, enabling Einstein to serve up relevant AIpowered recommended responses, knowledge articles and next best actions as service agents are on voice calls. l New Einstein Call Coaching: Now with Einstein Call Coaching, our newest Sales Cloud capability, managers are able to see insights and trends within conversational data. Natural language processing identifies keywords in sales call transcripts, alerting managers to trends like a spike in competitor mentions, or best practices on topics like objection handling or pricing discussions. Those insights can then be used to provide sales reps with personalized coaching on how to improve the customer buying experience.

VOICE INTEROPERABILITY: EINSTEIN VOICE FOR ANY DEVICE In September, Salesforce joined Amazon and leading technology companies to announce the Voice Interoperability Initiative, a new program to ensure voice-enabled products provide customers with choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice services. As part of this, Einstein Voice Assistant and Einstein Voice Skills will be compatible with a variety of devices, from smart speakers to smartphones–whether it’s the Einstein Smart Speaker that will be unveiled at Dreamforce 2019 (not for sale), the new Salesforce Mobile App, or customers’ preferred devices. ë

INTERVIEW

3 WAYS TO CREATE VALUE THROUGH A DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORK FOR THE LONGEST TIME, PROCUREMENT AND SUPPLY MANAGEMENT TEAMS HAVE FOCUSED ON COST-SAVINGS AND PROVIDING ACCURATE SUPPLY FOR THEIR BUSINESSES. MORE SPECIFICALLY, THEIR VALUE WAS PRIMARILY LIMITED TO EFFICIENCY (THE MINIMIZATION OF COST FOR PROCUREMENT SERVICES) AND EFFECTIVENESS (THE MAXIMIZATION OF BUSINESS VALUE). IN RECENT YEARS, THERE IS AN INCREASED FOCUS BEYOND PRICE REDUCTION, WITH CONCENTRATION TOWARDS CONTRIBUTION TO TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP (TCO), AND THE MANAGEMENT OF OVERALL VALUE AND DEMAND.

JONATHAN WOOD, GENERAL MANAGER, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA, INFOR

with advanced visualization and AI capabilities within the network. Traditional supply chains are not only seeking end-to-end visibility, but accurate, descriptive and predictive intelligence. Imagine a world where you can optimize your service levels, costs and inventory faster, pre-emptively, to gain better insight for minimizing operational risk.

Digital supply chain networks that leverage artificial intelligence can process massive and diverse data sets from across all functions to provide better visibility with a path to the autonomous supply chain.

DEFINE CUSTOMER METRICS THAT ARE MEASURABLE Today, it’s about the value experience: the optimization of procurement relationships, engagement and collaboration for employees, customers and suppliers. In doing so, start to consider ways procurement and supply management teams provide value to the rest of the organization, outside of cost cutting.

Here are three ways a digital supply chain network will add value to your organization:

GATHER BETTER MARKET INTELLIGENCE IN THE WORLD OF CONSTANT CHANGE Big data has never been more vital to a company’s success than it is today. We’ve officially entered the world where there is more than enough data. We need to better evaluate the data that we have, in a single place, across multiple enterprises to make decisions quickly and accurately.

A digital supply chain network digitalizes your end-to-end supply chain processes, gains

real-time visibility of all supply chain events, and takes advantage of data-driven insights across both internal systems and your network partners.

With data changing at a rate of 50x per second in a typical supply chain, your organization will be more productive and your supply chain more efficient by expanding your network to receive real-time updates.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF BETTER INSIGHT AND PREDICTIVE CAPABILITIES Flash forward: Your organization has made the decision to better align data across your entire network. All information is in a single place and perhaps you access it across multiple devices, even globally. This will make your organization much more productive and capable of making better decisions. However, does this make you capable of keeping up with the speed of business? Not necessarily.

In order to be faster, you need to be smarter,

The most effective way to show value in an organization is to provide measures that combine both strategy and process and in doing so, creates an accelerated speed to value and return on investment (ROI). With a digital supply chain network that creates visibility into inbound and outbound supply chain processes, you can start to not only report on but measure against value-add data, such as production cycle times, on-time delivery, and order processing accuracy. These types of metrics steer the conversation towards benefits, and away from cost savings.

While cost reduction and maximizing business value remains a critical aspect for an organization’s procurement and supply management team, strengthening supplier relationships with real-time visibility allows for a better customer experience across the entire supply chain. Putting the data on a single platform where all parties share the same crucial information needed to execute, enables everyone involved to experience the benefits orchestrated through data alignment and collaboration. ë

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GUEST ARTICLE

2020 APPLICATION TRENDS, OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES WITHOUT WHEELING OUT ALL THE USUAL CLICHÉS, 2019 HAS BEEN

ANOTHER WHIRLWIND OF DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION AND OPPORTUNITY – WITH PLENTY OF CHALLENGES TO TACKLE AND CIRCUMVENT ALONG THE WAY. THE THREAT LANDSCAPE MUTATED WITH PREDICTABLE UNPREDICTABILITY, MULTI-CLOUD APP DEPLOYMENTS ARE BECOMING MAINSTREAM FIXTURES, AND DEVOPS METHODOLOGIES STARTED EXERTING A NEWFOUND INFLUENCE ON BUSINESS PLANS.

n V I N C E N T L AV E R G N E , R V P O F S Y S T E M E N G I N E E R I N G AT F 5 N E T W O R K S

The big question is what happens next? What anticipated app-centric trends will change the game and tear up the rulebook (again)?

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TAKES SHAPE 2020 will see more organisations shift away from aspirational sloganeering to substantively embrace what can, and should be, a seismic step-change. Further down the line, digital transformation efforts will likely be AI-assisted, particularly as they leverage more advanced capabilities in application platforms, telemetry, data analytics, and ML/AI technologies. End-to-end instrumentation will enable application services to emit telemetry and act on insights produced through AI-driven analytics. We anticipate that these distributed application services will improve performance, security, operability, and adaptability without significant development effort.

THE RISE AND RISE OF APPLICATION CAPITAL Applications are now firmly established as the main conduit for companies to develop and deliver goods and services. They have become modern enterprises’ important assets.

Even so, most still only have an approximate sense of how many applications they have, where they’re running, or whether they’re under threat.

To manage Application Capital effectively, it is essential to establish a company-wide strategy that sets policy and ensures compliance. This includes addressing how applications are built,

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acquired, deployed, managed, secured, and retired. At a high level, there are six distinct and unavoidable steps that need to take place: build an inventory, assess the cyber risks, define application categories, identify the application services needed for specific activities, define deployment parameters, and clarify roles and responsibilities.

DEVOPS’ CULTURE CLUB DevOps has a ten-year head start on NetOps in navigating and overcoming obstacles around certain types of integration, tools, and skillsets.

Collaborative teams can explode the status quo by promoting standardisation on tools that span from delivery to deployment (like Jenkins and GitHub/GitLab).

APPLICATION PROTECTION CHALLENGES According to F5 Labs, the server-side language PHP – used for at least 80% of websites since 2013 –will continue to supply rich, soft targets for hackers. Situational awareness is critical to mitigate both vulnerabilities and threats.

Businesses are also realising that applications encompass more than just the code that they execute. Attention needs to be paid to everything that makes them tick, including architecture, configurations, other connectable assets, and users. The prevalence of access attacks such as phishing are an obvious case in point.

API AND YOU KNOW IT One of the biggest issues is overly broad permis-

sions, which means attacks through the API can give bad actors visibility into everything within the application infrastructure. API calls are also prone to the usual web request pitfalls such as injections, credential brute force, parameter tampering, and session snooping. Visibility is another major and pervasive problem.

Organisations of every stripe – including IT vendors – have a notoriously poor track record of maintaining situational API awareness. API security can be implemented directly in an application or, even better, in an API gateway.

An API gateway can further protect APIs with capabilities like rate limiting (to prevent denial of service attacks) and authorisation. Authorisation narrows access to APIs by allowing access to specific API calls to only specified clients, usually identified by tokens or API keys. An API gateway can also limit the HTTP methods used and log attempts to abuse other methods so you’re aware of attempted attacks.

APPY NEW YEAR! All this is of course the tip of an increasingly interconnected iceberg. Any New Year’s resolution worth its salt should include a commitment to comprehensively master the development, deployment, operation, and governance of application portfolio. The best way to do this, and to get visibility into the code-to-customer pathways for all applications, is to leverage a consistent set of multi-cloud application services. Here’s to a safe, innovative and transformational 2020! ë

INTERVIEW

2FA: DOUBLE DOWN ON YOUR SECURITY THE SECOND AUTHENTICATION FACTOR MIGHT BE A MINOR INCONVENIENCE, BUT IT PROVIDES A MAJOR SECURITY BOOST. WITH PAST YEARS RIDDLED WITH SECURITY BREACHES, IT IS HIGH TIME WE EVALUATED THE WAY WE SECURE OUR ONLINE PRESENCE.

AMER OWAIDA,

SECURITY WRITER AT ESET

The usual way to secure most of your digital accounts is by using a password, no question about it. The problem is you have tens – even hundreds – of accounts you need to secure.

How do you go about it? Do you have a unique password for every service you use?

Perhaps, a significant number of you will answer “no”, which would not come as much of a surprise.

Far too often people tend to keep their passwords simple, so they can be easily remembered.

Nothing can underline this more than the fact that “123456” was ranked as the most commonly used password of 2018. If we adhere to the established (although now recognized as seriously flawed) practice of creating strong passwords such as including uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters and so on, we still tend to recycle our passwords or use minor varia-

tions of them. That being said, passwords have their limitations. They are only a single barrier between your account and a hacker.

Two-factor authentication (2FA), also known as multifactor authentication (MFA), is a simple way to add an extra layer of security to your accounts. What do we mean by the two factors?

To understand that, you need to know the three classic authentication factors, often referred to as “something you know, something you have, and something you are”.

You have now probably guessed that a 2FA system requires you to pass authentication challenges that require responses from two different factors. That could be a PIN code (something you know) and a fingerprint scan (something you are), or a retina scan (something you are) followed by entering a code from a security token (something you have). As passwords have

traditionally been used for online services, they tend to be one of the factors still required in 2FA schemes for such services. Hence, a 2FA system combining a password and the possession of another factor makes it difficult for hackers to access your account since they will be missing one of the pieces of the puzzle.

There is a variety of 2FA systems for services to use. What most of them have in common is that a one-time code is generated on, or sent to, an authentication device so you can input it together with your password, thus providing you with access to your account. The most common 2FA method used by popular online services is a text message with an authentication code sent to your phone. It is not the best and most secure method, but it is still better than not having one at all.

Then there are authenticator apps that you can use that can be paired with your accounts.

These apps keep on generating authentication codes that are valid for only a limited period of time. For example, each code is valid for only one minute. Google, for instance, has been experimenting with a new form of 2FA that does away with the need to enter keys manually, transforming your phone into a security key itself.

Alternatively, some companies provide hardware solutions of their own that you can use for 2FA purposes. The choices are many; just choose the one that suits your needs the best.

If you’re wondering if 2FA is bulletproof, there have been rare occasions when it has been bypassed. But in most cases, it provides a great extra layer of security against various attacks that attempt to scam you into revealing your login credentials. ë

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INTERVIEW

PARTNER IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONE AT THE RECENTLY HELD, THE WORLD CIO 200 SUMMIT 2019, CLOUDHOST POSITIONED THEMSELVES AS THE PREFERRED ‘PARTNER IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION’. THE COMPANY SPECIALIZES IN PROVIDING SOLUTIONS AND VALUE-ADDED SERVICES TO DIGITALLY TRANSFORM COMPANIES AND PUBLIC ENTITIES. THEIR EXPERIENCE, TALENT AND SECTOR KNOWLEDGE IS FOCUSED ON DEVELOPING INTEGRATED ADDED-VALUE CLOUD SOLUTIONS USING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY.

C

loudHost Technology, part of the RVS Group of Companies, is a Private Cloud Service provider in the GCC region. “As pioneers of Managed Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure solutions, we have been recognized for their innovative solutions and awarded the title of Best Cloud Solutions Provider in the industry,” says Nikhil Katara, Co-Founder of CloudHost.

“We are helping SMB’s and Enterprise level businesses to embrace cloud technology; to modernize their business IT infrastructure, create in-built security and focus on how it might serve customers digitally in new ways. To get the most from the evolving technologies such as Big Data and AI, your company needs to turn first to the cloud. With a modern, open approach to technology, your company can start to think how it can use technology to improve its operations, processes and services,” says Nikhil.

The company also works with market leaders and with emerging companies, with specialists in each industry, combining their best capabilities with ours to achieve remarkable results for our partners and clients. “At The World CIO 200 Summit, we had the pleasure of showcasing our top solutions to the CIO’s; CloudScales – Virtual Datacenter and AppLite – A Cloud & Mobility Solution,” adds Nikhil.

which can help you break free from these limitations. Businesses like you are looking for digital transformation in the cloud. As a maturing organization it is important to look for options that are refined and able to handle advanced requirements of enterprise workloads. We believe your cloud solution and support should grow right along with your business. CloudHost team has worked on hundreds of deployments and prides itself on understanding how to maximize today’s performance while building the foundation for tomorrow’s possibilities – that’s what flexibility and scalability is all about. It’s IT infrastructure that’s flexible and simple with proven reliability.

Whether you are looking to move a few servers to the cloud or completely migrate an on-premise infrastructure our Private Virtual Data Center provides the commercial benefits of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – like scalability and lower costs – while maximizing privacy and security.

Just select the compute power, memory, network, and storage that fit your business needs and we’ll combine them into a pool of resources that provides you with a comprehensive suite of private cloud services. Our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions are built on the best platforms in the industry and are ideal for any type of workload – from small websites to large-scale enterprise applications.

BUILD YOUR VIRTUAL DATACENTER WITHIN MINUTES.

MODERNIZE YOUR BUSINESS WITH SEAMLESS APP AND ERP INTEGRATION ACROSS MULTIPLE DEVICES.

Setting up and managing a traditional datacenter can be a complicated and a costly affair for an SME. Information Technology (IT) is a critical part of your business and if it is not managed well it can affect your businesses agility and slow you down. Businesses face IT limitations despite investing in expensive resources and infrastructure.

We have designed CloudScales as an IAAS solution

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IT applications have evolved significantly over the period, and the average user expects the applications to work seamlessly across multiple platforms and devices. With people working 24/7 from multiple locations, IT is expected to ensure the availability of workplace servers and applications around the clock. Significant investments are made to ensure that employees always have access to applications

INTERVIEW

RAJESH SAJNANI

CEO AND NIKHIL KATARA, CO-FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR AT CLOUDHOST

Department without worrying about capacity or any infrastructure requirements.

You can upgrade your AppLite with Security Features by choosing AppLite Secure. It is integrated with features of Desktop and Server Security, Geo-restriction, Ransomware Protection, Two-Factor Authentication and much more.

CLOUDHOST’S ESSENTIAL SOLUTIONS FOR ALL BUSINESSES.

and information as and when needed. AppLite, which is our application delivery platform, delivers the same seamless experience by bringing applications to the user in this dynamic era of mobility and cloud.

AppLite enables SMB’s to avail the enterprise grade technology at a fraction of the cost.

AppLite’s uniqueness addresses the need of moving business applications away from the desktop-bound software (installed on local server, and accessed by users) to the modern cloud way, where applications work across all types of

networks, and locations beyond the confines of the physical workplace. AppLite has the capability to make any application including customised and legacy applications seamlessly available on any device, and that too on a user-based pricing model. The platform is completely flexible to any level of infrastructure customization as demanded by the Application or the infrastructure compliance requirements. AppLite is powered by AutoScale infrastructure supported by the CloudScales Platform. This brings complete peace of mind to the user as well the IT

CloudHost has invested heavily in developing solutions with user-first approach in mind. Some of our other solutions are: CloudApps - All essential requirements to launch your business online. Domain, Hosting, Email and Applications to build your website.

CloudAssure - Security features like web application protection and virtual private networks with SSL certificates.

CloudVault - Be in charge of your data backup with simple to use dashboard and incremental scheduled services.

DataLife – It’s not just backing up data for disaster recovery, but maintaining virtual machine profiles from an operational environment that can be deployed within minutes.

FusionCloud - An on-premise and off-premise hybrid IT infrastructure solution. This comanaged service aims to accelerate your IT agility and maximize IT skill sets.

CloudGrid - Build your software defined data center with CloudGrid network services. These services include software defined switches, routers, load balancers, CDN and WAN Acceleration Services.

In today’s digital economy, businesses depend on the effective use of technology not just to support ongoing business processes, but also to drive new sources of competitive differentiation.

If your organization is on its path towards digital transformation, explore and evaluate CloudHost’s solutions for real-time insights of your entire IT infrastructure on a single pane dashboard, scaling on the go, improving team collaborations, Data Security and Compliance. ë

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INTERVIEW

GCC CITIES CAN SIGNIFICANTLY GAIN FROM LEVERAGING LEADER: SMART MOBILITY OFFERINGS USING INNOVATIVE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND SOLUTIONS CAN CREATE AN OPEN AND CONNECTED TRANSPORTATION NETWORKS IN THE GCC THAT CAN MOVE PEOPLE AND FREIGHT MORE EFFICIENTLY AND SUSTAINABLY THAN IN THE PAST, ACCORDING TO A NEW STUDY ENTITLED SMART MOBILITY IN GCC CITIES: FAST TRACK TO THE FUTURE PUBLISHED BY STRATEGY& MIDDLE EAST, PART OF THE PWC NETWORK.

MARK HADDAD,

PRINCIPAL WITH STRATEGY& MIDDLE EAST

KEY TAKEAWAYS

“By making vehicles and transportation infrastructure technology-enabled and data-informed, smart mobility has the potential to transform society. Used correctly, it can reshape cities and transform society across the GCC”, says Mark Haddad, Principal with Strategy& Middle East.

SAUDI ARABIA AND UAE LEADING THE WAY IN INTRODUCING SMART MOBILITY In Saudi Arabia, the NEOM megacity project recently announced plans to develop the world’s most user-centric, environmentally friendly, and technologically advanced land mobility ecosystem. Riyadh has already invested in a multi-million dollar, artificial intelligence-based adaptive signaling project, which has had a significant impact on day-to-day traffic management. l Dubai’s strategy for smart vehicles aims to convert 25 percent of total journeys to various types of driverless options by 2030. l Abu Dhabi’s environmentally friendly Masdar City now has a self-driving shuttle service and partnerships with several e-scooter providers

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Other cities are taking steps and generating progress: Kuwait is applying an intelligent traffic control system for overcrowded intersections.

Muscat has implemented smart road technology to manage traffic, significantly reducing congestion at peak hours across the city.

According to the report, applying smart mobility on a wider scale across the GCC will lead to broader benefits in several areas: Safer roads: Vehicle automation (either full or partial) and better safety technology can reduce the number of traffic accidents, leading to fewer roadway fatalities and injuries.

Less traffic: Smart mobility can move vehicles and people more efficiently over existing roadway networks with less congestion. It can also provide people with alternative options such as shared rides, scooters, bicycles, or mass transit, leading to reduced travel times.

Cleaner environment: Smart mobility can lead to a reduction in negative environmental effects of the transportation sector by providing travelers and transportation system operators with more environmentally friendly options.

More effective workforce: Reinventing mobility

n Smart mobility sits at the heart of urban development and the need to shape the agenda of GCC cities is imminent n Applying smart mobility on a wider scale across the GCC will have significant benefits across the transportation value chain n Saudi Arabia and UAE leading the way in introducing smart mobility n Appropriate governance framework and regulations are required to effectively implement smart mobility solutions in the GCC

will have an important effect on the workforce.

Some households will be able to move closer to urban areas (and dispose of private vehicles), increasing their employment prospects and options. Others that choose to move farther away from urban centers can do so as travel times decrease and as autonomous vehicles and other transit options allow commuters to be productive while traveling.

In the future, city transportation will be a linked network of autonomous vehicles (some electric- powered), shared-mobility solutions, adaptive traffic signals that can sense current conditions and adjust to improve traffic flows, micromobility options, and even airborne taxis.

These will work together to create a faster, more sustainable, and more efficient system. Vehicles will communicate with each other and with infrastructure. People will have a much wider range of options for getting around. ë

INNOVATIONS

KEY CAPABILITIES n 100% Performance l 150 µs to 1ms latency l NVMe and NVMe-oF Direct Flash l Plug-in storage-class memory l Efficient and affordable l Industry-leading 5:1 data reduction, 10:1 total efficiency l 3.3PB effective in 6U l Includes all array software n Resilient and highly available l Proven 99.9999% availability l QoS: Always-on, IOPs and bandwidth limits l Built-in business continuity and disaster recovery n Ultimate simplicity l AI-driven management and predictive support l REST API for cloud orchestration

PURE STORAGE FlashArray//X Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first all-flash end-to-end NVMe and NVMe-oF array, intended for everything from departmental to large-scale enterprise shared-storage deployments, high performance, and mission-critical applications.

PLEASE SEND YOUR FEEDBACK AT INFO@ GECMEDIAGROUP.COM

BARCO WEPRESENT WIPG-1600W WiPG-1600W is a multi-user presentation solution from the wePresent product line offering cross-platform compatibility allowing Windows, macOS, Chromebook, Android and iOS devices to present and interact together. The solution also offers support for Apple AirPlay, allowing users to present using Apple’s native protocol. n Flexible networking via wired LAN, wireless LAN or both at once n USB connectivity n Full 1080p resolution and low latency video streaming n On-screen annotation for more interactive presentations n Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) for flexible and simple installations BRINGING PEOPLE AND IDEAS TOGETHER

The device’s on-screen annotation and virtual whiteboard features enable presenters to highlight key points and elaborate on ideas during their presentation. Using a USB mouse plugged into the unit, presenters can easily annotate on-screen and access conference control features for moderators without a touchscreen display.

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INNOVATIONS

Aruba CX 6300 Switch Series

Next-gen stackable switches for the cloud, mobile, and IoT future • A powerful distributed architecture supports scalable, nonblocking performance to • future-proof your network for tomorrow’s unpredictable demands • Has built-in, high-speed uplinks and include models with 24 SFP+ ports and full• density 60W PoE with multi-gigabit Ethernet for a highperformance network • A cloud-centric design with a fully programmable OS delivers automation and • simplicity, including easy-to-use configuration tools for error-free installs • Built-in monitoring and analytics across the network provide operators with • immediate troubleshooting and problem resolution insights.

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MIC IP 7100i camera

Bosch Building Technologies will showcase its latest security, safety and communications products at Intersec 2020 that is to be held from 19th to 21th January 2020 in Dubai.

Bosch has developed its MIC IP family of extremely rugged moving cameras that are built to perform in practically any environment, including function at -40ºC to +65ºC. The housing of the new 7100i has been enhanced with a ruggedized, corrosion-resistant design that makes it perfectly suited for challenging applications where cameras are exposed to extreme conditions.

With Camera Trainer, a machine learning functionality, MIC IP cameras can recognize user-specific target objects, to alert operators of unusual activity. The 4K UHD versions also provide extreme high-resolution for mission critical applications such as city surveillance and congested highways.

www.fitsmea.com

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UNVEILING THE FUTURE AT #FITSMEA20

2020

#SMARTEverything Region’s Tech Future is here.

March 16, 2020

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OFFICIAL MEDIA PARTNERS