Unlocking Seamless Connectivity by GEC Media Group

PA G E S 5 2 VOLUME 11 | ISSUE 02 SEPTEMBER 2023 WWW.EC-MEA .COM

UNLOCKING SEAMLESS CONNECTIVITY ARUBA INSTANT ON REDEFINES NETWORKING FOR SMBs IN THE MIDDLE EAST In an era where seamless connectivity is the backbone of success, small-medium businesses (SMBs) are fervently embracing the digital landscape.

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Tech Extravaganza Awaits: GITEX 2023 & The World CIO 200 Summit Welcome to the September issue of Enterprise Channels MEA!

s we strive for excellence, it’s evident that technology has already reached unprecedented heights, surpassing our wildest imaginations from just a few years ago. In the September cover story of Enterprise Channel Magazine, technology titan HPE Aruba has made a significant contribution by shedding light on “Instant On,” an innovative network portfolio meticulously crafted to cater to the unique needs of SMBs in the region. In this context, it’s evident that Aruba is committed to meeting the ever-expanding networking requirements of SMBs in the Middle East and Africa. With a comprehensive range of wired switches and wireless Wi-Fi 6 access points, they are addressing the surge in internet traffic, the proliferation of end devices, the prevalence of video streaming, and the evolving preferences of users. Their technology serves as a robust foundation, facilitating the rapid growth of smart IoT devices in the region. So, the coming months are going to be full of excitement and thrill with GITEX and The World CIO 200 around the corner. The Grand Finale of the World CIO 200 Summit is also around the corner after the successful World CIO 200 roadshow in 50 countries. With a packed agenda of insightful panel discussions, hands-on workshops, and networking sessions the IT leaders and CIOs will gather to gain valuable insights at Baku, Azerbaijan from 17th to 19th September for a global tech extravaganza. We’re bringing together tech luminaries and CIOs from 50 countries to explore the future of technology leadership. While we continue to stay connected with our readers through technology, it would be remiss not to mention the upcoming technology extravaganza, GITEX 2023, scheduled for October 16th. This premier technology trade show will showcase the latest products and partnerships, setting the stage for innovation. On the sidelines of GITEX 2023, we will host the prestigious GEC Awards 2023, where we will honor outstanding vendors, resellers, and distinguished personalities. Stay tuned for exciting announcements and initiatives at GITEX. We encourage you to read, support, and foster technological advancements. “And miles to go before I sleep.” This age-old saying underscores the enduring journey and ongoing tasks that life presents.” Happy reading!

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September 2023

volume 11

issue 02

contents 32-34

COVER STORY

UNLOCKING

SEAMLESS CONNECTIVITY ARUBA INSTANT ON REDEFINES NETWORKING FOR SMBs IN THE MIDDLE EAST

07-08

VIEWPOINT

18-19

The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 Pakistan edition

EVENTS

28-30

REAL LIFE 35-38

INNOVATION

10-11

The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 UK, Italy & Turkey Edition

12-13

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The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 Belgium & Spain edition

14-15

The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 Switzerland, Germany & Netherland edition

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The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 India edition

20-21

The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 USA edition

23-27

CHANNEL

40-43

PRODUCT 44-49

GUEST COLUMN 50

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENTS

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VIEWPOINT

Building data structures in cloud Vendors have invested in developing skillsets so that partners can guide customers in making the right architectural and technical decisions to eliminate departmental siloes.

Vlad Postelnicu, Director Alliances and Strategic Partnerships, Middle East and Turkey, Software AG

egacy applications are a big burden on the IT framework of any organisation with its huge operational costs. Most organisations currently will have a legacy system of some kind. Software AG anticipates that it will take around 15-20years for legacy systems to wean out completely. Therefore, proactively, as a company, before diving into a project with any organisation, vendors aim to streamline operations and technical capabilities to meet evolved business requirements through a phased migration of legacy system to the cloud. This is facilitated by a partner ecosystem through different approaches based on customer’s preferences as below. Typically an existing application is picked up and deployed as-is to infrastructure-as-aservice, or IaaS in the cloud. There are multiple advantages with this approach – with massive time advantages to move to the cloud and the software will no longer run on a computer in a datacentre that would otherwise need to operate, maintain, backup and upgrade. This as-is, on-premises architecture, however, is not flexible under load nor will it have a built-in high availability. The second path is where a customer chooses to adopt the capabilities provided by a softwareas-a-service, or SaaS application. Good examples of this are Salesforce, ServiceNow or Marketo. With a move of a particular business

function to a SaaS application, one can switch off or decommission an old application on-premises. The advantages here are that the applications are cloud native, with clear pricing and no operational efforts by the customer. The third path is where a customer chooses to build brand new cloud-native applications using all the powerful capabilities provided by a platform-as-a-service, PaaS such as the AWS stack or Azure stack. This may allow to wind down obsolete on-premises applications. A key advantage of this approach is the faster time to market, which makes it very suitable for systems of innovation. Also, by building applications from scratch, customers can leverage the best the cloud providers offer, example databases as a service and easy access to huge storages that can be used as data lakes for analytics.

Siloed enterprises Siloes are a heavy burden on enterprise systems. Vendors understand how enterprises work across the globe and removing departmental silos is presently their main motto to help customers. Vendors have invested in their partner ecosystem in recent years

Software AG anticipates that it will take around 15-20years for legacy systems to wean out completely

in developing skillsets towards executional excellence not only in using a suite of solutions, but also in architectural and consultant point of view so that partners can guide customers in making right architectural and technical decisions to eliminate departmental siloes. Therefore, vendors are equipped not only as a technology implementor but also as a consultant through their partner ecosystem throughout the customer journey. With a quick view at any organisation, the primary area is to understand business requirements to streamline operations and technical capabilities required for such capabilities. The partner ecosystem supports vendor customers to understand their business processes, identify dependencies, find bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement while it also provides insights into a company’s operational stage. These insights enable entities to optimise and stimulate systems and processes coordinated with business strategy and objectives. This means a deep analysis and an understanding of the technology landscape is imperative to execute this transformation. This involves channel partners to be working closely with CIM, CIOs, enterprise architects, head of transformation, within the organisation to assess the current state of systems and capabilities, the business and market needs, maximise investments already made for effective new technology decision-making to facilitate and drive successful transformation. Post the analysis, optimising those processes and defining how future operations will develop are determined, reaching a joint vendor-partner partnership with customers enabling them to own skills and themes where they are able to execute a transformation independently, post the implementation and project completion

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VIEWPOINT

Emerging dual roles of CIOs As macroeconomic concerns rise, CIOs must play both offense and defence, mitigating spiralling costs and enabling the business.

Jason Conyard, Chief Information Officer, VMware

n today’s uncertain economic environment, business leaders are looking to CIOs more than ever before, to accelerate key priorities while hitting aggressive financial targets. This often means charging ahead with digital initiatives that set us up for future success, while simultaneously lowering costs and optimising for efficiency. If it sounds like these priorities are often in conflict, you are not wrong. Over the past few years, multi-cloud has emerged as one of the most effective ways for organisations around the globe to sharpen their competitive edge. Recent research commissioned by VMware found that nearly all, 95% organisations believe multi-cloud architectures are critical for business success. However, several years into the multi-cloud journey, organisations are starting to see the financial and operational costs of moving fast across multiple clouds. According to the same study, 76% of multi-cloud organisations reported a need to improve control over their cloud expenses. It is not enough to just enable the business; it is incumbent on the CIO to also mitigate spiralling costs. Simply said, as macroeconomic concerns rise, CIOs must play both offense and defence. Here are three ways we can be playing both sides of the field.

MEA

Cloud mobility

Cloud spending

The value of a multi-cloud strategy is in the flexibility and freedom to access your data from anywhere and at any time. The primary risk in realising this potential is in commercial and technical lock-in. If your cloud provider changes their pricing model, are you commercially locked in, or can you seamlessly migrate workloads and applications? If the next global news headline has you concerned about data privacy and security, does your team have the skills to adopt a new cloud architecture? By designing and refactoring with mobility in mind, you can easily move applications between clouds without requiring significant changes to the underlying architecture, thus reducing the risk of being contingent on a particular provider. Maintaining mobility also offers benefits such as empowering developers to choose the right cloud for the right app, leveraging bestin-class AI and ML capabilities for cross-cloud analysis and mitigation, and enabling anywhere work for employees all over the world while complying with data sovereignty regulations.

Rising cloud costs can be the Achilles heel of app innovation. While developers drive demand for multi-cloud technology, CIOs are often left to clean up the financial aftermath of successful application launches. Providing visibility to your application and service owners is the first step to reigning in spend and protecting against ballooning costs. Think about an apartment complex that includes the cost of utilities as part of the monthly rate. How closely would you monitor your electricity or water usage if you never receive a bill? With visibility comes accountability and while previously applications owners could only optimise for security, scale, and availability, today, they can now also optimise for cost.

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Multi-cloud has emerged as one of the most effective ways for organisations around the globe to sharpen their competitive edge.

Simplify the landscape In response to the profound pace of change in the industry, we are seeing businesses being quick to add powerful technology and services to their portfolios, but much slower to fully cut the legacy systems these new tools were meant to replace. This creates a cumbersome technology web that can frustrate your business and slow down innovation. When companies take the opportunity to reduce the number of legacy applications and systems, they can not only save money and increase productivity, but reduce their attack surface and risk profile. Agility is key here. To be agile and give developers the environment they need, we must simplify the landscape.

Empower the team Leaders need to leverage their employees’ skills and empower them to help their business grow, while enabling customers to prosper. To foster this growth mindset, it requires up- and cross-skilling employees to be successful on both offense and defence: innovating fast, while controlling costs and complexity

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EVENTS

The World CIO 200 Summit 2023

UK, Italy & Turkey Edition The World CIO 200 Summit UK, Italy & Turkey Edition, held on 24th August brought together some of the brightest minds in the technology and leadership sectors for insightful discussions, networking, and knowledge sharing. The event was a resounding success, fostering collaboration and innovation in the field of information technology. The event followed the theme of ‘Rise of the power’. The World CIO 200 2023 roadshow is designed to help IT leaders develop and enhance the qualities of leadership, power, vision and focus. Distinguished industry experts and thought leaders shared their insights and visions for the future of technology and digital transformation. Attendees and keynote speakers were welcomed by Anushree Dixit, Global Head of Strategic Alliances, GEC Media Group. She shared the aim of The World CIO 200 Summit which identifies the technological advancement and thought leadership, recognizes like-minded technology heads and their groundbreaking innovations in the IT landscape. Renowned thought leaders and industry experts delivered

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inspiring keynote addresses on emerging technology trends, digital transformation, and leadership in the digital age. The event was kicked off by Andrew Raynes, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, CIO with his opening keynote. Sriram Ganesan, Associate Director EMEA, Kissflow shared his vision on the topic ‘ERP Orchestration With The Power Of Low-Code & No-Code’. Enrico Maria Cestari, Jointly il Welfare Condiviso srl, Chief Technology Officer also spoke at the event. Venkatesh Mahadevan, Founding Member, CAAS, addressed the delegates at UK, Italy & Turkey edition of the World CIO 200 Summit 2023 and spoke about the amazing journey and vision of CAAS, since its launch in Bangkok in 2022. Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Chief Research Officer, Research-as-a-Service, CAAS spoke about the Research-as-a-service arm of CaaS and how it is all set to disrupt the research and market study landscape. The summit concluded with an awards ceremony honoring exceptional CIOs and IT leaders for their contributions to the industry

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The World CIO 200 Summit 2023

Belgium & Spain edition The World CIO 200 Summit Belgium and Spain edition happened on 25th August attracted top CIOs and IT leaders, and industry experts from across Europe and around the globe. This year’s summit explored cutting-edge technologies, best practices, and strategies to address the ever-evolving challenges faced by IT executives in a rapidly changing digital landscape. Attendees and keynote speakers were welcomed by Anushree Dixit, Global Head of Strategic Alliances, GEC Media Group. The event followed the theme of ‘Rise of the power’. The World CIO 200 2023 roadshow is designed to help IT leaders develop and enhance the qualities of leadership, power, vision and focus. The event was kicked off by Andrew De Prest, Exthand, CCO. Sriram Ganesan, Associate Director EMEA, Kissflow shared his vision on the topic ‘ERP Orchestration with The Power of Low-Code & No-Code’. Badr Boussabat, International Speaker & Advisory Board Member, International Group of Artificial Intelligence also

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spoke at the event. Flavio Carvalho, Group Crédit Agricole, CISO shared his vision on the growing importance of technology and companies that showcases their latest innovations and cutting-edge technologies. Venkatesh Mahadevan, Founding Member, CAAS, addressed the delegates at Belgium and Spain edition of the World CIO 200 Summit 2023 and spoke about the amazing journey and vision of CAAS, since its launch in Bangkok in 2022. Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Chief Research Officer, Research-as-a-Service, CAAS spoke about the Research-as-a-service arm of CaaS and how it is all set to disrupt the research and market study landscape. The IT leaders were honored with World CIO 200 Awards that recognizes and honor outstanding CIOs and IT leaders who have made remarkable contributions to their industry. The exchange of ideas, the connections made, and the knowledge shared have undoubtedly contributed to the growth and innovation within the IT industry

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The World CIO 200 Summit 2023

Switzerland, Germany & Netherland edition The World CIO 200 Summit recently concluded its highly anticipated Switzerland, Germany and Netherlands edition, held on 28th August. This landmark event brought together preeminent technology executives and thought leaders from across the globe for a captivating series of discussions and knowledge exchange. Esteemed thought leaders delivered captivating keynote presentations, offering deep insights into emerging technology trends, the intricacies of digital transformation, and the evolving dynamics of leadership in the digital era. The event was kicked off by Dr. Milan Kumar, ZF Commercial Vehicles, Chief Information Officer. Sriram Ganesan, Associate Director EMEA, Kissflow shared his vision on the topic ‘ERP Orchestration with The Power of Low-Code & No-Code’. Awais Bin Imran, Unzer GmbH,

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CIO/Compliance and Information Security Officer also spoke at the event. Venkatesh Mahadevan, Founding Member, CAAS, addressed the delegates at Switzerland, Germany and Netherland edition of the World CIO 200 Summit 2023 and spoke about the amazing journey and vision of CAAS, since its launch in Bangkok in 2022. Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Chief Research Officer, Research-as-a-Service, CAAS spoke about the Research-as-a-service arm of CaaS and how it is all set to disrupt the research and market study landscape. The summits culminated in an illustrious awards ceremony, where exceptional CIOs and IT leaders were celebrated for their outstanding contributions to the industry. These individuals embody the spirit of innovation and leadership that define our field

EVENTS

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The World CIO 200 Summit 2023

India edition The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 India Edition, held at ITC MarathaMumbai, on 1st September 2023 concluded with resounding success and widespread acclaim. The event brought together some of the most influential and forward-thinking IT leaders from across India and around the world, fostering insightful discussions, networking opportunities, and knowledge sharing. This prestigious gathering of CIOs and technology leaders aimed to explore the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities in the everevolving world of information technology. The event followed the theme of ‘Rise of the power’. The World CIO 200 2023 roadshow is designed to help IT leaders develop and enhance the qualities of leadership, power, vision and focus. Renowned industry experts and thought leaders delivered captivating keynote presentations, sharing their visions and insights on the future of technology and digital transformation. The summit was welcomed by Sundip Sibal, Executive Director, GEC Media Group & Co-Founder, Business Transformation – Asia. Dr Akhil Shahani, Managing Director, The Shahani Group kicked off the event with his Country Inaugural Keynote. Gaurav Singh, Founder, Futuristic Wealth Creation Network spoke about ‘OM JANAH: A Xanadu of Augmented Evolution and Prosperity in a Post-COVID AI-Enabled Automated New World Order of INDIA LED – HYPER TECH ECONOMY’. NC Venkatachari -Director – Strategic Alliances – QUANTUM shared his vision on the topic ‘Elevating Business Agility: Empowering Innovation through Quantum’s

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Comprehensive Unstructured Data Management Solution’. Venkatesh Mahadevan, Founding Member, CAAS, addressed the delegates at the India edition of the World CIO 200 Summit 2023 and spoke about the amazing journey and vision of CAAS, since its launch in Bangkok in 2022. Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Chief Research Officer, Research-as-a-Service, CAAS spoke about the Research-as-a-service arm of CaaS and how it is all set to disrupt the research and market study landscape.

EVENTS

Engaging panel discussions covered a wide array of topics:

CIO Leadership Panel – The Rise of Power l

l l

Moderated By: Pratap Pat Joshi-EVP IT & Chief Evangelist-Yotta Infrastructure Solutions Binita Prasad-Head IT & Digital, Saint Gobain Grindwell Norton Rahul Mergu, Vice President IT MarketsandMarkets Research Pvt Ltd Vikas Gupta-Chief Technology Officer-Hiranandani Energy Ravindra Kumar Srivastava, State IT Head Maharashtra and GoaReliance Jio Infocomm Ltd

CIO Leadership Panel – Eliminating Data Debt and Replacing Legacies l l l

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Moderated By: Ganesh Joshi-CIO-Nilons Enterprises Pvt.Ltd. Prince Joseph-Group Chief Information Officer-Nest Group Lakshmana Vadaga-Head of IT-Imagicaaworld Entertainment Limited Shabbir Badra, Head of IT, Apraava Energy Siddharth Saxena, Senior Vice President-Information Technology Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd

CIO Leadership Panel – Rapid Fire session on Leadership DO’S and DONT’S Moderated By: Vivek Zakarde-Senior Vice President IT-IndusInd Bank Ltd l Allauddin Mohamad, Global Head – Information Technology l Ajay Awale-Head of IT-Aquapharm Chemicals l Rajesh Kulkarni-DGM-IT-Piaggio Vehicles Private Limited l Satyanarayana, Kasturi-Vice President Group IT-Ashok Piramal Group The summit recognized the outstanding contributions of CIOs and IT leaders with the prestigious World CIO 200 Awards, celebrating excellence in leadership, innovation, and digital transformation. The success of The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 India Edition was made possible by the generous support of sponsors, including, Probuddy (Supporting Partner), Positive Technologies and Quantum India (Gold Partners). The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 India edition proved to be a pivotal event for CIOs and IT leaders, providing a platform for them to stay at the forefront of technological advancements and strategic thinking in a rapidly changing world l

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The World CIO 200 Summit 2023

Pakistan edition

The World CIO 200 Summit 2023 Pakistan Edition, held at Karachi Expo Center, Pakistan on 2nd September 2023 marked the culmination of an exceptional event that brought together top Chief Information Officers and technology leaders from Pakistan and around the world. This summit provided a platform for collaborative discussions, networking, and knowledge sharing that will undoubtedly shape the future of information technology. Attendees and keynote speakers were welcomed by Sijda Khan, Project Manager, GEC Media Group. She shared the vision of The World CIO 200 Summit, the event that showcases the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities in the dynamic field of information technology. The event followed the theme of ‘Rise of the power’. The World CIO 200 2023 roadshow is designed to help IT leaders develop and enhance the qualities of leadership, power, vision and focus. Distinguished industry experts and thought leaders delivered thought-provoking keynote addresses, sharing their insights and visions for the future of technology and digital transformation. Syed Abdul Qadir PMP, CISA, ISO LA, Executive

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Director – IT and Cybersecurity Risk Assurance, PwC Pakistan kicked off the event with his country inaugural keynote. Muhammad Azfar Ahsan, Former Minister for State Investment & CEO, Nutshell spoke at the event. Muhammad Umair Nizam, Project Director, ITCN Asia delivered his Event Partner Speech. Zohaib Khan, Chairman, Pakistan Software House Association and Shahzad Shahid, Group CEO, TPS Worldwide also spoke at the event.

Venkatesh Mahadevan, Founding Member, CAAS, addressed the delegates at Pakistan edition of the World CIO 200 Summit 2023 and spoke about the amazing journey and vision of CAAS, since its launch in Bangkok in 2022. Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Chief Research Officer, Research-asa-Service, CAAS spoke about the Research-as-a-service arm of CaaS and how it is all set to disrupt the research and market study landscape.

CXO Leadership Panel – Rise of the Power l

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Ali Imran Khan, Meezan Bank Ltd., Deputy Chief Information Officer Shaukat Ali Khan, Aga Khan University & Hospitals, Global Chief Information Officer Khurram Gul Agha, HBL Microfinance Bank, CIO & Head of Operations Mohsin Ali, Inbox Business Technologies, CEO Hussein Hassanali, Habib Bank Limited, Head of IT & Digital Audit Moderator: Shah Abdullah Raza, National Foods Ltd., Director Technology & Digital Transformation

Rapid Fire with CIOs – Leadership Dos & Don’ts Faisal Anwar, MCB Bank Ltd., Group Head Chief Information Officer l Mehzad Sahar, Engro Corp., Group Head InfoSec l Bilal Javeri, Lucky Motor Corporation, Chief Information Officer l Khurram Rahat, Unifonic, Senior Country Director l Moderator: Dr. Sahibzada Ali Mahmud, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Technology Board, Managing Director The summit celebrated outstanding contributions by CIOs and IT leaders through the prestigious CIO 200 Awards, recognizing excellence in leadership, innovation, and digital transformation. ITCN Asia (Strategic partner) made the event an unforgettable one with their complete support. The World CIO 200 Summit Pakistan edition 2023 stands as a testament to the importance of collaboration and innovation in driving Pakistan’s IT sector forward l

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The World CIO 200 Summit 2023

USA edition Esteemed technology leaders, and visionaries from across the globe gathered for the highly anticipated World CIO 200 Summit USA edition at Molos Restaurant 1 Pershing Road Weehawken, New Jersey on 5th September. The IT leaders embarked on a journey filled with profound insights, thought-provoking discussions, and transformative ideas. The event followed the theme of ‘Rise of the power’. The World CIO 200 2023 roadshow is designed to help IT leaders develop and enhance the qualities of leadership, power, vision and focus. Distinguished

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industry experts and thought leaders shared their insights and visions for the future of technology and digital transformation. Dr. Erdal Ozkaya-Chief Cybersecurity Strategist | CISO-Xcitium kicked off the event with his country inaugural keynote. The event brought together some of the most influential minds in the industry for a transformative and knowledge-rich experience. CIOs, tech experts, and thought leaders from various sectors convened to exchange ideas, share best practices, and form invaluable professional connections

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ROAD TO THE WORLD CIO 200 SUMMIT Countries

Date

Morocoo United Arab Emirates Bahrain Malaysia Philippines Kuwait Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Singapore Indonesia Qatar Switzerland & Germany Oman Egypt India Bangladesh Srilanka Pakistan United States of America

1st June

Baku, Azerbaijan

18th July 20th July 24th July 26th July 1st Aug 2nd Aug 7th Aug 8th Aug 14th Aug 16th Aug 17th Aug 22nd Aug 1st Sept 1st Sept 2nd Sept 2nd Sept 5th Sept 17th-19th Sept

VIRTUAL COUNTRIES

PHYSICAL COUNTRIES

Countries

Tunisia Algeria Libya Ghana Ivory Coast Uganda Zimbawe Tanzania Rwanda Mauritius Ethiopia South Africa Kenya Botswana Brazil Hong Kong Vietnam United Kingdom Taiwan Thailand Belgium Spain Italy France Canada Netherlands Turkey

Date

1st June 6th July 14th July

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Trigger Software partners with Sigma Software Group to focus on opportunities in digital banking Dubai’s Trigger Software agreed to work together with Sigma Software Group on projects in the digital banking space. The strategic partnership between the two aims to fast-track projects in the digital banking sphere, empowering financial institutions to serve their clients more efficiently. With Trigger’s cuttingedge solutions already aiding over 10 million clients worldwide and Sigma’s deep fintech expertise, this partnership signifies a new era in digital banking. Trigger Software develops its own proprietary technologies: Trigger Neobank Engine (TNBE) and Trigger API Gateway (TAG). TNBE includes 300+ pixel-perfect visual layouts and 150+ ready-made business processes, such as KYC, payments, loans, and more. Trigger offers the Trigger Interface Constructor (TIC) for easy iOS and Android app interface configuration without updating

the app on App Store or Google Play. TAG allows quick production-ready API deployment with authorization, supporting various databases and AI integration for natural language API requests. Sigma Software is recognized as one of the Top 100 leading IT service providers globally by IAOP and is a trusted partner for numerous companies in the Middle East. With a strong expertise in various industries, Sigma Software has further enriched its capabilities in fintech and blockchain through a merger with Ideasoft in 2021. As a result of this partnership, Global Ledger, a startup offering an effective solution to combat money laundering and cybercrime while enabling banks to seamlessly engage with cryptocurrencies, was successfully facilitated. Another noteworthy success story is Datrics.ai, providing intelligent AI-powered

Max Bondar, CEO & Founder of Trigger Software growth solutions to accelerate financial services. Recently, they announced a strategic partnership with the NEAR Foundation.

F5 hosted in marketplace of Google Cloud Doha region in Qatar with access to 45 solutions F5 has reinforced its relationship with Google Cloud in Qatar, enabling organisations across the region to access 45 key solutions via Google Cloud Marketplace. Businesses in Qatar, and the surrounding region, can now access a wide-ranging suite of services to secure, optimise and deliver apps and APIs, irrespective of deployment environment. Notable solutions include F5 Distributed Cloud Services (F5 XC), which are SaaSbased security, networking, and application management services that enable customers to deploy, secure, and operate their applications in a cloud-native environment wherever needed: the data center, multi-cloud, or the network or enterprise edge. “With the launch of Google Cloud’s new data center in Doha, more organisations than ever before can deliver extraordinary digital experiences for their customers. Today, you don’t have to choose between legacy and

Mohammed Abukhater, RVP for Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa Sales at F5

modern apps. Or between on-premises data centers and cloud or edge locations. There’s also no need to compromise on either app performance or security. Thanks to F5 and our partner network, organisations across the region will gain new levels of freedom and security to scale and innovate. In Qatar itself, this will help to fuel the ongoing success of Qatar National Vision 2030.” “We’re thrilled that F5 has provisioned their enterprise solutions to the Google Cloud region in Qatar,” said Dai Vu, Managing Director, Cloud Marketplace & ISV GTM Initiatives. “We are pleased to provide F5’s global network of leading customers with convenient and secure solutions through Google Cloud Marketplace.” Google Cloud’s new Doha region is now part of a global network of 37 regions and 112 zones that reach 200 countries and territories worldwide.

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Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development partners with e& enterprise to boost Industry 4.0 The Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development ADDED and e& enterprise announced their joint cooperation to enhance and exchange experiences in the areas of Industry 4.0 and sustainable manufacturing, as part of efforts to achieve the Abu Dhabi Industrial Strategy’s (ADIS) objectives. ADDED and e& enterprise signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) during the 1st Smart Manufacturing Incentives Programme’s Awareness and Business Matching workshop” hosted by the Industrial Development Bureau (IDB), ADDED’s arm to develop the industrial sector. The event gathered over 100 industrial stakeholders, with more than 50 per cent coming from manufacturing SMEs and the rest from advisory and technology firms. The primary goal of the signed MoU is to promote digital transformation in Abu Dhabi’s manufacturing sector, aiming to facilitate a seamless transition to Industry 4.0 technologies while encouraging sustainable practices and leveraging e& enterprise’s expertise in cutting-

edge technologies like cloud computing, cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to empower manufacturing enterprises in Abu Dhabi. To act on the agreement, ADDED and e& enterprise will establish a joint working group comprising representatives from both sides to ensure effective communication and cooperation. ADDED and e& enterprise will collaborate to develop joint white papers and workshops to bolster research and knowledge exchange and

raise awareness of sustainable manufacturing. The two parties will also explore opportunities to provide digital solutions for manufacturing operations to enhance sustainability and improve operational efficiency. The partnership aims to increase awareness within the manufacturing community about the benefits of Industry 4.0 and related technologies by showcasing innovative digital approaches and providing skill set development programmes.

Confluent cloud-native data-streaming platform hosted on Microsoft cloud region in Qatar Confluent announced that Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure is now available to customers in Qatar through Microsoft Cloud region in country. Microsoft Cloud regions offers Confluent the availability, high performance, low latency, and security it needs to meet customer standards of flexibility, reliability, and disaster recovery. Additionally, because data is stored in-country, Confluent can cater to highly regulated verticals such as government and financial services. Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloudnative service for connecting and processing data, everywhere it is needed. Its elastic scalability and virtually infinite storage simplify real-time data movement across public and private clouds. And it offers managed

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connectors to the most popular data sources in the Kafka ecosystem, as well as SQL-based stream processing and a governance suite for streaming data, all from the same access pane. The service is backed by 99.95% uptimes that are guaranteed by SLAs. Additionally, Confluent has worked to ensure some of the industry’s most robust enterprisegrade security and compliance measures are in place. For example, the company recently announced Stream Governance Advanced, which includes the Schema Registry for Stream Quality. By more than doubling the global availability of Schema Registry to 28 regions, Confluent has provided customers with more flexibility to manage schemas directly alongside their Kafka clusters in order to maintain strict compliance requirements and data sovereignty.

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Fred Crehan, Area Vice President, Emerging Markets at Confluent Confluent sees the availability of its data streaming platform on Microsoft Azure in Qatar as a clear signal of its ongoing commitment to the nation’s government, businesses, and people.

CHANNEL

Jumbo Serve adds Toshiba, Datalogic, HMD Global to serviced brands, opens Oman centre

Jumbo Serve, one of the UAE’s leading after-sales service providers for consumer electronics, durables, home appliances and IT products, is strengthening its operations in the GCC region with three new service agreements and the opening of a new centre in Oman. A division of Jumbo Electronics, Jumbo Serve recently signed deals with global brands including Toshiba, Datalogic and HMD Global, the home of Nokia phones, adding to its portfolio of over 40 brand partners.

The agreement with HMD Global strengthens Jumbo Serve’s already comprehensive list of mobile phone brands, which includes Samsung, Oppo, Lava, and Tecno. As part of this, Jumbo Serve will provide repair and warranty service for Nokia phones. The agreement with Toshiba TV UAE is for TVs and will maximise Jumbo Serve’s AV and TV service expertise. Underpinned by an impressive onsite team and widespread network, Jumbo Serve will manage delivery

and installation services over and above warranty and contract service for Toshiba TV. Meanwhile Datalogic, a global technology leader in the automatic data capture and factory automation, has appointed Jumbo Serve as its authorised service provider for managing the warranty and contract service of its full suite of products sold in the UAE. Jumbo Serve is also expanding its footprint across the GCC region with its latest developments in Oman and Bahrain. It recently opened a new service centre at Nizwa, Oman, for facilitating AV-TV and appliance services, and it has started servicing top brands such as Samsung and Dyson in both countries. Jumbo Serve currently provides services to over 40 global brands across the region, including Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, Lenovo, Huawei, Acer, HP, MSI, OPPO, Lava and Tecno. Offering after-market services for 15 categories including consumer electronics, professional products, durables, home appliances, mobility and IT products, it meets the needs of more than tens of thousands of customers every month.

dnata Travel Management partners with SAP Concur Solutions enhancing corporate travel sector SAP Concur Solutions, for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management, announced its partnership with dnata Travel Management, a world-renowned leader in the travel industry, part of the Emirates Group, now a certified reseller of its full range of travel solutions. Savio Vaz, Vice President of Government and Corporate Travel at the dnata Travel Group, said, “This collaboration will enable dnata to empower its valued customers through streamlined and automated travel processes, leveraging SAP Concur’s innovative technology and state-of-the-art products. These solutions automate spend management, allowing us to provide customers with enhanced value, convenience, and flexibility.” The partnership between dnata Travel

Management and SAP Concur Solutions marks a significant advancement in the corporate travel sector. By combining their unique strengths and resources, both entities are well positioned to respond to changing market demands, streamline travel processes,

and enhance customer experiences. Gabriele Indrieri, Vice President and Managing Director for EMEA South Region at SAP Concur, commented that the business travel market is returning to its former volumes, but requirements have now changed. “Cost control and compliance measures must be delivered while improving employee experiences – and this is where digital transformation can play a key role,” she said. “This partnership with dnata is a key element in delivering exceptional end-to-end services for our customers. By integrating their sector-leading travel services to support our customers’ digital transformation agendas, this collaboration enables us to deliver the best-inclass technologies,” Indrieri added.

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CHANNEL

Mindware partners with Schneider Electric to distribute Secure Power solutions Mindware, announced its partnership with Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation. Mindware will market and distribute the vendor’s Secure Power solutions via its expansive channel ecosystem of resellers and system integrators across the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. This strategic partnership aims to expand Schneider Electric’s portfolio and strengthen the company’s presence in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. Schneider Electric holds the top position in Transactional & Edge offerings, boasting a wide range of applications and an end-to-end portfolio. The company’s Secure Power division provides data centre physical infrastructure solutions for customers using data centres, server rooms, and edge computing solutions. Speaking about the partnership, Mr. Nicholas Argyrides, General Manager, Gulf at Mindware commented: “Schneider Electric’s comprehensive solutions in power effectively tackle the complexities surrounding data centre sustainability, efficiency, energy security, and resilience. This new partnership adds significant value to our offerings. Together with our channel partners, we are excited at

the prospect of bringing the vendor’s solutions to the market and are confident of driving aggressive growth, this year and beyond.” Commenting on the partnership, Manuel Rodrigues, Vice President for Secure Power in the Gulf region at Schneider Electric, said,

“We are excited to have onboarded Mindware as a leading value-added distributor and service provider in the region. Partnering with them allows us to expand our portfolio and solutions, enabling closer engagement with solution providers in the UAE and Gulf region.”

Dahua Technology signs national distributor contract for Saudi Arabia with Mindware Dahua Technology KSA and Mindware KSA announced the signing of a new official national distributor contract for Dahua Technology New Business Products. This strategic partnership represents a significant milestone in the growth and expansion efforts of both companies. The agreement was signed by Gary Li, General Manager of Dahua Technology KSA, and Mr. Fadi Matta, General Manager of Mindware KSA. Speaking about the partnership, Gary Li stated, “We are delighted to sign this contract with Mindware as they are a reputable company with extensive experience in marketing, selling, and activating major brands in the IT products

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(L) Mr. Gary Li, General Manager of Dahua Technology KSA and (R) Mr. Fadi Matta, General Manager of Mindware KSA

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field. This partnership will enable Dahua Technology to expand its reach and strengthen its distribution network throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Fadi Matta, General Manager of Mindware Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, commented, “We are extremely pleased to sign this agreement and be appointed as the new official national distributor for Dahua Technology New Business Products. This partnership is a significant step forward for our company, enabling us to offer more advanced and reliable products to a wider audience and continue to meet the evolving needs of our customers.”

CHANNEL

Paratus Cyber Security signs new reseller partnership agreement with KnowBe4 Paratus Cybersecurity, a leading provider of comprehensive cybersecurity solutions, announced a new reseller partnership agreement with KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform. “Today marks an exciting milestone for Paratus as we forge a powerful partnership with KnowBe4, the leading provider of security awareness training and phishing simulations. Together, we will empower organisation in UAE and across the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region to build a robust defense against cyber threats and enhance their security posture. This collaboration underscores our commitment to delivering top-notch cybersecurity offerings to our valued clients in the MENA region.” Aleksandr Bychkov, CEO of Paratus

Cybersecurity. “We look forward to working with Paratus Cyber Security to deliver KnowBe4’s security awareness training and simulated phishing platform to even more organisation across the MENA,” said Tony Jennings, EVP of international and global channel sales, KnowBe4. “This new partnership will introduce more occasions to help organisation better manage the ongoing problem of social engineering. This is an exceptional opportunity to help drive real behavior change to ultimately enhance security culture.” KnowBe4 helps to make employees more aware of and teaches them how to respond to cybersecurity threats such as phishing and social engineering that frequently affect organisation. Social engineering and phishing are responsible for 70-90% of all

(L) Aleksandr Bychkov, CEO Paratus Cybersecurity (R) Tony Jennings, EVP at Knowbe4 malicious data breaches. KnowBe4 impacts organisation’ human firewall with awareness training that includes baseline testing, user training, and automated simulated phishing attacks for businesses of all sizes to build a more resilient and secure organisation.

OPSWAT partners with Starlink to provide cybersecurity solutions for OT-heavy organisations OPSWAT announced a partnership with valueadded distributor Starlink, an Infinigate Group company and a regional leader in the delivery of market-leading cyber and cloud solutions. Covering the Middle East and Africa region, Starlink will offer customers a well-rounded approach to cybersecurity. This joint value proposition for customers comes at a time when many countries across the region are keeping up with digitalization, thus expanding their industrial sectors and modernizing their critical infrastructures. The IoT-fueled convergence between digital IT and the industrial operational technology (OT) has led to a burgeoning attack surface and a multiplication of challenges for OT-heavy organisation — skill shortages, inability to securely transfer files and devices into, across, and out of secure environments, and more. OPSWAT has an answer to these challenges — an end-to-end cybersecurity platform purposely built to protect both enterprise IT and industrial OT environments.

(L) Sertan Selcuk, OPSWAT’s VP of Sales for the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan, and (R) Ahmed Diab, COO of Starlink, at the signing ceremony at the Starlink Office in Dubai, UAE OPSWAT’s partnership with Starlink presents an opportunity for the company to expand its product portfolio in the region and reach a broader customer base. It will leverage Starlink’s extensive network and market reach to further expand its growth. The company has the opportunity to tap into Starlink’s resources,

expertise, and customer relationships, ultimately strengthening its regionwide cybersecurity position through an enhanced market presence and greater flexibility to address organisation’ needs. Meanwhile, OPSWAT’s portfolio will complement that of Starlink, which already bridges multiple domains, from infrastructure security and data protection to OT security and compliance management. The collaboration will enrich the VAD’s ability to serve the security needs of a broader customer base that includes both IT and OT, which gives Starlink a significant differentiator in the regional cybersecurity solutions market. Starlink will focus on developing business opportunities for OPSWAT’s comprehensive solutions and zero-trust technologies in all major verticals, leveraging the VAD’s triedand-tested approach of offering solutions to business challenges rather than selling products or technologies in isolation.

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REAL LIFE

70% AI professionals see positive ROI from data science, analytics, AI finds Dataiku Dataiku, the platform for Everyday AI, together with Databricks, the data and AI company, has revealed survey findings that shed light on AI’s transformative impact on businesses globally. Over 70% of senior AI professionals see a positive return on investment for money spent on data science, analytics, and AI initiatives, with over half (54%) seeing at least a 2x return and five percent seeing a return greater than 10x. The findings confirm that AI, including Generative AI, is now experiencing an impactful level of business results, matching its rapid rate of adoption. The survey found that businesses are investing heavily in AI resources, with nearly half (47%) reporting AI tools budgets over $5 million for the next year and nearly one in five (17%) reporting budgets over $20M. In addition, nearly two in three (64%) plan to use Generative AI or Large Language Models

(LLMs) over the next year—and 45% are already experimenting with it. Facing high expectations and unprecedented market attention, AI and data science is delivering. AI Pioneers are seeing clear bottomline results from AI that would impress any CFO. The survey reveals that where they need the most help is the right AI tools and platforms to convert their mountains of data into marketmoving results faster than ever while protecting against potential risk. These findings demonstrate the significant interest in generative AI but also the accompanying challenges, from data access and privacy to regulation. Navigate these challenges, shared mission with Dataiku stands firm: to democratize data and AI, enabling every organisation to build their generative AI solutions securely and cost-effectively.

Jepson Taylor, Chief AI Strategist at Dataiku

Positive Technologies lists top ten Middle East cyberattacks in last 18 months In this day and age, the Middle East has witnessed a significant surge in cyberattacks, especially ones that pose a serious threat to organisation in the region. The threat to the Middle East is very much real. Rapid advancement in technology and the growing independence on the internet means that attackers have novel and innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities. Positive Technologies has identified the ten worst cyberattacks that happened in the Middle East in the last 18 months – Adalat Ali: In early 2022, an Iranian group hacktivist that go by the name “Adalat Ali” successfully managed to interfere with Telewebion, a streaming service from the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRIB). Bezeq and Cellcom DDoS attack: According to Israeli defence sources, this attack was the largest cyberattack ever launched against Israel. Public address systems in Palestine: In June of 2022, the public address systems in

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Jerusalem and Eilat were compromised by unnamed attackers that Sunday. Iranian Steel Plants Attack: In June of 2022, there was a major attack on three Iranian steel plants by a hacktivist group that goes by the name Goneshke Darande, meaning “Predatory Sparrow”. GamkenBot Scalper BotsGamkenBot is an appointment scheduling bot developed by Israel to expedite the appointment scheduling with government agencies. Cellebrite Data Breach: An Israeli company that provides digital data collection, analysis and management services called Cellebrite was targeted by hackers. Iranian News Agency Attack: Iran’s staterun news agency, Fars News, was subject to a cyberattack in November of 2022 Vice Society attack on IKEA: Vice Society, a ransomware group, targeted IKEA in Morocco and Kuwait in November 2022. Pro-Palestine attacks on Israeli companies:

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Fedor Chunizhekov, Information Security Analyst Positive Technologies In January of 2023, a hacktivist group called Electronic Quds Force launched a massive campaign targeting Israeli chemical production companies. Irrigation System Disruption: Farm irrigation systems in the Jordan Valley, and wastewater treatment control systems that are operated by the Galil Sewage Corporation were targeted by hackers.

REAL LIFE

BT Network Cloud now using Juniper Networks’ cloudnative solutions and professional services Juniper Networks announced it is supporting BT Group’s ongoing transformation journey towards a highly scalable, automated and robust cloud core infrastructure for business and consumer customers. BT Network Cloud supports diverse network applications across broadband, fixed, mobile and other missioncritical services on a single platform, using Juniper Networks’ high-performance cloudnative solutions and professional services. With this strategic deployment, BT Network Cloud has now scaled to accommodate multiple key network-centric applications, such as mobile voice and data, broadband authentication and IP voice calls for tens of millions of customers without extra overhead costs. An innovative global technology footprint from Juniper, including infrastructure consolidation and virtualization, along with improved hardware density and power efficiency, reduces space and power requirements in support of a more sustainable

infrastructure. BT Network Cloud enables applications that underpin BT Group’s U.K. consumer and business network services. Juniper’s highperformance, high-availability fabric for BT Network Cloud provides extreme robustness and high performance for BT Group’s core applications across a widely-distributed user base deployed at multiple locations across the U.K. Moving from dedicated compute platforms for each application to a shared infrastructure conserves and optimizes resources leading to better resource utilization and significantly lower environmental impact The provider’s network cloud optimizes service quality and streamlines operational deployment and management of core applications, which enables innovation and agility in delivering new services to market such as enhanced 5G services. The introduction of 5G created a unique opportunity for BT Group to transform its

core network to ensure it was well-positioned to offer a dynamic range of new services to customers at unprecedented scale. BT Group chose to build a network cloud to provide a common shared platform for core applications, which operate its broadband, fixed and mobile services.

e& enterprise partners with Informatica to implement Intelligent Data Management Cloud e& enterprise announced formalisation of partnership with Informatica, a globally recognised leader in data management. Through this partnership, e& enterprise has proven its proficiency in implementing Informatica’s cutting-edge Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform and solutions, resulting in substantial advantages for businesses. The partnership aims to empower government entities and private corporations in the UAE by leveraging the power of data to enhance operational efficiency and drive digital transformation efforts. The recognition reflects e& enterprise’s commitment to providing exceptional services to its clients and demonstrates its ability to deliver innovative solutions using Informatica’s products and technologies. The collaboration combines Informatica’s exceptional cloud data management solutions

with e& enterprise’s extensive industry knowledge, specialised solutions, and expertise in systems integration and services, enabling organisations in the UAE to achieve datadriven digital transformation outcomes.

Data modernisation is rapidly becoming an essential driver for businesses across industries. It facilitates seamless access, processing, and analysis of vast amounts of data, enabling organisations to make data-driven decisions. Data modernisation boosts operational efficiency, enhances customer experiences, informs business strategy, and can potentially lead to revenue growth. The partnership brings together Informatica’s top-notch data management solutions, trusted by 85 per cent of Fortune 100 companies, with e& enterprise’s comprehensive industry knowledge, specialised solutions and strong skills. This partnership creates a powerful system integration and services environment, making it a strong choice for government bodies and private companies that want to use their data for the best digital transformation results.

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REAL LIFE

Ransomware attacks in municipality, healthcare, education double since 2022 finds Barracuda Barracuda Networks, published its fifth annual Threat Spotlight on ransomware. The new report looks at ransomware attack patterns that occurred between August 2022 and July 2023. Barracuda researchers analysed 175 publicly reported successful ransomware attacks across the world between August 2022 and July 2023, and in the primary categories Barracuda has been tracking — municipalities, healthcare and education — the number of reported attacks have all doubled since last year and more than quadrupled since 2021. While successful ransomware attacks targeting infrastructure-related industries are lower in volume compared to the top three sectors, these industries also experienced more than twice the number of attacks compared to last year. The analysis revealed similar patterns of escalation in other industries, particularly ransomware attacks on software businesses. In the past 12 months, Barracuda’s SOC-asa-service team observed the following types of incidents: business email compromise, ransomware, malware infection, insider threat, identity theft, and data leakage. Ransomware

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accounted for 27.3% of incidents, second only to BEC (36.4%). This year also, Barracuda researchers also took a closer look the impact of generative AI

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tactics on ransomware attacks, looking at ways cybercriminals can use these capabilities to strike faster and with better accuracy.

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COVER STORY

UNLOCKING SEAMLESS CONNECTIVITY

ARUBA INSTANT ON REDEFINES NETWORKING FOR SMBs IN THE MIDDLE EAST

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COVER STORY

In an era where seamless connectivity is the backbone of success, small-medium businesses (SMBs) are fervently embracing the digital landscape. HPE Aruba Networking is a name synonymous with cutting-edge networking solutions and has taken the lead in transforming the Wi-Fi experience for businesses across the Middle East. In this exclusive interview of Amol Mitra, VP and General Manager of Global SMB Business, along with Hemayun Bazaz, EMEA SMB Business Development Manager, we delve into the world of Aruba Instant On, an innovative network portfolio tailor-made to cater to the unique needs of SMBs.

Could you shed some light on the Instant On network portfolio and its tailored approach to meeting the needs of SMBs in the Middle East? Instant On simplifies Wi-Fi for SMB IT teams. SMBs are hyper-focused on productivity and customer efficiency in a digital-first world. Our comprehensive portfolio of wired switches and wireless Wi-Fi 6 access points is designed to cater to the expanding networking requirements of SMBs. Considering the rising internet traffic, increased end devices, video streaming, and evolving preferences in the Middle East and Africa, our technology serves as a backbone to support the proliferation of smart IoT devices.

H E M AY U N B A Z A Z HP E Ar uba Ne twor king

AMOL MITRA HP E Arub a Ne twor king

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COVER STORY

made for different vertical industries within the SMB customer segment.

What sets Aruba Instant On apart from other solutions available in the market? What unique features make Instant On an appealing offering?

How do Instant On access points and switches ensure steadfast Wi-Fi coverage across varied environments? Reliable Wi-Fi coverage is the lifeblood of modern businesses, spanning indoor and outdoor spaces. Instant On isn’t just a solution: it’s a commitment to ensuring steadfast connectivity. Indoors, outdoors, or even in the face of extreme weather conditions – Aruba Instant On access points boast unmatched connectivity. But it doesn’t stop there. With the growing specter of cybersecurity threats haunting emerging businesses, Instant On’s built-in security features become the guardian angels, ensuring smooth user segmentation, and fortifying wireless networks against unauthorized access. The beauty lies in its simplicity – no need to be an IT expert to manage it.

Can you elaborate on how Instant On has revolutionized Wi-Fi experiences for Middle Eastern businesses and effectively addressed their challenges? Certainly, we’ve been fortunate to be part of several success stories in the region. A recent example comes from the United Arab Emirates, where we transformed the Wi-Fi experience for the Beaconhouse School System. Our access points and switches resolved issues like dropped connections and slow Wi-Fi performance, which were impacting the learning environment. These students are future leaders, and we take pride in contributing to an infrastructure that fosters conducive learning spaces. Students and staff now enjoy high-speed, reliable Wi-Fi, resulting in enriched digital learning experiences. Instant On has facilitated seamless access to educational resources, elevating student engagement and overall learning outcomes.

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Given the focus of this magazine on channel partners, could you elaborate on the support you provide to partners in promoting and selling your SMB solutions? We recognize that the SMB sector has unique dynamics and requirements distinct from those of the enterprise space. Our goal is to empower our partners to drive sales for a technology that’s crucial for businesses of all sizes. The Aruba Instant On portfolio is solely sold and supported through our channel partners in the Middle East. Their success is our success. We have designed the ACTION Partner Club—an exclusive program to expedite sales of Aruba Instant On networking solutions in the SMB market. Membership in this club equips partners with vital tools to grow their businesses. They gain access to up-to-date product information, training resources, and comprehensive sales and marketing support. This helps partners effectively promote and sell Aruba Instant On solutions. Incentives, such as cash rebates, e-vouchers, or free products based on sales performance, offer further motivation.

Could you outline the ways in which Instant On has proved advantageous in industries? Instant On serves a variety of use cases. In the retail sector, it ensures seamless Point-ofSale operations and streamlined inventory control. It guarantees reliable connectivity for the hospitality industry guests and staff. In healthcare, it supports telehealth services and secures patient communications. In education, it offers swift and secure connections for students and teachers, both in the classroom and remotely. For gaming enthusiasts, Instant On elevates the online gaming experience with faster Wi-Fi speeds and reduced latency. The portfolio is tailor-

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Our early recognition of the need for SMBs to embrace the Cloud has been a distinctive factor. Instant On empowers SMBs small with remote network management, a gamechanging advantage for businesses with multiple single rooms or hotels spanning several floors. Our user-friendly mobile app and cloud-based web portal achieve simplicity of use. This means businesses can deploy, manage, and optimize their networks from any location, for any network device. Our level of remote accessibility enhances operational flexibility, allowing business owners and lean IT teams to make real-time adjustments, add new devices, and efficiently manage their networks while on the move. The ease of installation, setup, configuration, remote management via mobile app, enterprise-grade security features and intelligence at the edge is what sets this Instant On portfolio apart from the rest of the industry.

How does Aruba Instant On differentiate itself in terms of simplicity, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, particularly in a challenging economic environment? What truly sets our solution apart is the absence of recurring license or subscription fees, a considerable advantage for businesses with constrained or fluctuating budgets. Our plugand-play switches seamlessly integrate with Instant On access points straight out of the box, simplifying setup. The solution offers flexible management options, enabling businesses to choose between cloud-based management, local web GUI, or zero configuration for unmanaged models. Support for Class 4 and Class 6 PoE enhances the network’s device powering capabilities, while built-in security features ensure a secure networking experience. Scalability is seamlessly achieved through stacking and high-speed uplinks, enabling businesses to expand and adapt their networks easily. Discover the world of Aruba Instant On – where connectivity meets innovation, simplicity meets sophistication, and SMBs find their bridge to success. For deeper insights and firsthand experience, explore further here

INNOVATION

The irreplaceable role of servers and data centres in modern organisations In today’s fast-paced, digitally driven world, the role of servers and data centres in modern organisation is nothing short of indispensable. These silent technological workhorses form the very bedrock of an organisation’s IT infrastructure, facilitating a multitude of digital services, applications, and operations.

ervers and data centres play a crucial role in modern organisations by providing the technological infrastructure required for a whole host of digital services, applications, and operations. They form the backbone of an organisation’s IT ecosystem and enable a wide range of functions, from internal communication and data storage to customer-facing applications and services. While we’re seeing a huge shift in organisations moving their data and applications to the cloud, these businesses still rely on servers and data centres used by their cloud service providers. Servers and data centres are the lifeline that keeps our digitalised world going, supporting everything from data storage and application hosting to security and disaster recovery. Their roles are integral to enabling efficient operations, innovation, and digital transformation.

Ramzi Itani Regional Director Middle East at Veritas Technologies

Maintaining and managing the server and datacentre environments Maintaining and managing server and data centre environments, especially when spread across different locations, can be incredibly costly, complex, and challenging for organisations. It requires careful and efficient management of people, skills, and computing resources. In a region like the Middle East, which is prone to extreme temperatures, one major challenge is managing power and cooling to optimise performance while minimising energy consumption. From a security perspective, protecting data, safeguarding against cyber threats, and

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INNOVATION

2025, half of cloud data centres will deploy advanced robots with AI and ML capabilities, resulting in 30% higher operating efficiency. Driven by digital transformation, data has become an organisation’s most strategic asset and hybrid, multi-cloud the preferred operational model. The adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies will lead to the evolution of data centre technologies to accommodate the seamless integration, management, security, and optimisation of resources across diverse environments.

Implementing security measures in organisation

upholding regulatory compliance demands constant attention, while preparing for and responding to hardware failures, cyberattacks, or natural disasters requires robust backup and recovery strategies. Moving to the cloud can help mitigate some of these challenges by shifting the responsibility for infrastructure management to cloud providers. Meanwhile, abandoning point solutions and embracing autonomous data management platforms that can provide support across increasingly heterogeneous environments from a single pane of glass can help reduce administrative and management burdens.

Harnessing data centres for resilience Data centres can provide the infrastructure, redundancy, and protocols necessary for effective disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. They enable organisations to protect critical data and services, minimise downtime, and ensure that operations can resume swiftly following disruptions or disasters. With modern organisations now spreading data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, a holistic approach to security is imperative. With the right data management solutions, businesses can extend the same level of protection to data across their entire IT estate. Consistency in security practices, policies, and technology implementations is key to maintaining a unified and effective data protection strategy.

Modern datacentre design and operation

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Energy efficiency and sustainability are paramount in the design and operation of modern data centres due to rising energy costs, environmental concerns, and particularly with regards to the Middle East’s sustainability agenda. Data centre operations consume significant amounts of energy, and more attention needs to be given to the environmental impact of ‘dark’ data, which is defined as data that organisations don’t even know exists. Indeed, previous Veritas research discovered that 52% of all data stored by organisations in 2020 was considered ‘dark’, and storing it resulted in 6.4 million tonnes of CO2 unnecessarily pumped into the atmosphere. By reducing the amount of dark data businesses hold, as well as adopting stateof-the-art cooling technologies, leveraging renewable energy sources, and implementing energy-efficient hardware, organisations can not only minimise their carbon footprint but also reduce costs and enhance their reputation as environmentally conscious entities.

Shaping the future: emerging trends in data centre technology One of the biggest emerging trends is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimise data centre operations, ultimately facilitating better decision-making and automation. By placing data analytics at the heart of operations, AI and ML can deliver energy savings, increased robustness, and operational efficiency, providing the information operators need to transform their business. Leveraging AI in the data centre in a viable way is necessary for all data-driven businesses. In fact, according to Gartner, by

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Businesses must create a multi-layered defence strategy that can safeguard against increasingly frequent and sophisticated cyber threats and unauthorised access attempts. This begins with securing physical access with biometric controls and security cameras/alarms but also extends to implementing strong access controls with role-based permissions, multi-factor authentication, and least privilege principles to ensure only authorised employees can access sensitive systems and data. Regularly backing up critical data and systems and storing backups in secure off-site locations can ensure data recovery in case of a breach or disaster, while data encryption can ensure that even if data is compromised, it remains unreadable without the proper encryption keys.

Company’s path to future success The Veritas vision is built on a strategy for Autonomous Data Management (ADM), where the solutions use AI and machine learning to self-provision, self-optimise and self-heal. Equipping businesses to be agile and adaptive without putting pressure on human resources. This strategy is founded on Cloud Scale Technology, a containerised, cloud-optimised reimaging of the software underpinning our market-leading NetBackup solution. Veritas Alta, our secure, unified, and cloudnative data management platform, features data protection with unmatched ransomware resiliency, enabling customers to manage their entire data protection estate via a singlepane-of-glass console. It provides the highest levels of application resiliency, application portability across clouds and optimisation of storage consumption. Veritas Alta additionally allows enterprises to illuminate and remediate information risks with data compliance as-aservice

INNOVATION

Navigating the complex landscape of servers and data centres In the era of relentless data generation and consumption, the pivotal role played by servers and data centres in the modern business landscape cannot be overstated. The rapid digitization of industries and the surging demand for data-driven insights have driven organisation to rely heavily on these infrastructural foundations.

T Avinash Gujje Practice Head – Infrastructure Cloud Box Technologies

he age of data is upon us. The need for data is at an all-time high right now. Either the Core or the Edge generate the data. The simple compute node (server), which is located at the edge and connected to a data centre in the core, is a well-known example of an edge computing system. Additional categories for data centres include public, private, colocation, managed, cloud, etc. Any modern company needs a data centre to run their operations. To make innovation possible, servers and data centres are also essential. Servers and data centres enable organisation to create new goods and services, enhance customer service, and gain a competitive advantage by offering a dependable and secure platform for storing, processing, and disseminating data.

Insights into the challenges With a vast range of hardware, software, and networking components, server and data centre environments are getting more and more complicated. Effective management and upkeep of these environments may become challenging as a result. Another significant obstacle is the expense of running data centres and servers. This covers the price of the necessary tools, software, people, and resources. Cyberattacks often target server and data centre settings. Strong security measures must be implemented by organisation to safeguard their data and applications. Organisation must abide by several laws protecting data security and privacy. This may make operating and maintaining servers and data centres more challenging. The management of datacentres continues to be the main concern for the entire company. Capacity planning, networking, and cabling, environmental concerns, physical

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INNOVATION

security, power management, and realtime reporting are the key components of management and maintenance. The operations of an organisation can be significantly impacted by any outage in a server or data centre environment. Companies must have a strategy in place to lessen the effects of downtime.

Contributing to an organisation’s disaster recovery and business continuity strategies Datacentres can offer a dependable and safe place to save backup copies of an organisation’s data. In the event of a disaster, this can help to ensure that data can be restored swiftly and simply. Disaster recovery sites can be in datacentres. In the event of a disaster at the primary site, the organisation’s vital systems and data can be replicated to the datacentre. This can make it more likely that the business can carry on even in the face of a severe catastrophe. The utilization of datacentres can help business continuity planning. By doing this, the effect of a disaster on the organisation’s activities can be lessened.

Energy efficiency and sustainability in modern datacentre Modern datacentre architecture and operation have an increasing emphasis on energy efficiency and sustainability. Datacentres are having to store exponentially more data than they can handle. As a result, there is a greater need for energy. Datacentre operations are becoming more expensive because of growing energy costs. A significant source of carbon emissions is datacentres. Organisation can

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lessen their influence on the environment by running more energy-efficient datacentres. One of the major energy consumers in datacentres is IT equipment. Organisation can consume less energy by utilizing IT equipment that is more energy efficient.

Emerging trends in datacentre technology Green data centres, artificial intelligence, development operations (Dev Ops) for management, automation, intelligent monitoring, hybrid clouds, server virtualization, and the market are a few important new developments in data entry technology that organisation should keep an eye on. A distributed computing concept called edge computing brings processing and data storage closer to the consumer. This can help to decrease the burden on central datacentres and improve latency. Technologies like orchestration and containerization can increase the scalability and efficiency of datacentres. These centres can now be handled as software thanks to a combination of technologies known as SDDCs. This can facilitate managerial simplification and increase agility. Large datacentres called hyperscale datacentres are built to manage enormous volumes of data.

Looking into the future The demand for centralized datacentres will decrease as more applications and services are migrated to the cloud. Instead, a more decentralized model will be used, with storage and servers placed closer to the consumer. A distributed computing concept called

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edge computing brings processing and data storage closer to the consumer. This can help to decrease the burden on central datacentres and improve latency. In datacentres, AI and ML are employed in several applications, including security, workload optimization, and predictive maintenance. As datacentres become more sophisticated and demanding, these technologies will become more and more crucial. Green datacentres are created to be sustainable and energy efficient. Green datacentres will be more crucial as energy prices keep on rising.

Taking the business forward Cloud Box Technologies continues to assist customers in improving their journey toward constructing more sustainable, effective data centres employing cutting-edge technology like AI and Automation embedded with bestin-class Cyber Security Protection. Because of the advancement in technology and the demand see from customers to deploy new technologies, the company anticipate that this will continue to expand. By providing a greater range of services and solutions, Cloud Box Technologies intends to increase the scope of its cloud computing services. The business will also put a lot of effort into expanding its knowledge of hybrid and multicloud settings. The managed services division of Cloud Box Technologies intends to expand by offering a greater selection of products and services. Additionally, the business will concentrate on increasing its competence in IT infrastructure management, security, and security

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Frost & Sullivan ranks SentinelOne as XDR Growth Leader ahead of Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Palo Alto Networks According to Frost & Sullivan, SentinelOne is a clear leader in delivering them. The leading analyst firm today released the Frost Radar: Extended Detection and Response (XDR), 2023, in which it identified SentinelOne as the XDR Growth Index Leader, ahead of Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Palo Alto Networks and all other vendors evaluated. More than 70 vendors with revenue greater than $1 million were evaluated for the measure. Frost & Sullivan independently plotted 17 leaders based on their solution’s capabilities for integration (particularly third-party, vendoragnostic integration), meaningful automation, and cross-layered threat detection and response, and placed SentinelOne above all others on the growth index. The company was also recognized for its strengths in the following areas: l Innovation: SentinelOne’s Security DataLake provides a unified data platform that solves some of the most common pain points when it comes to data ingestion and interoperability of security

tools. Customers can leverage one-click integrations through the Singularity Marketplace. Flexibility: SentinelOne provides maximum flexibility through its solutions and provides for a wide variety of use cases. Customers can choose to use SentinelOne as their endpoint, cloud, or identity security provider, or leverage the Singularity Platform powered by Security Data Lake as their primary security platform. SentinelOne also offers multiple product tiers, allowing customers to pick and choose what they need, including long-term data ingestion and retention options, as well as additional services, such as MDR and DFIR, for customers that require help. Integrations: Through the Singularity Marketplace, SentinelOne makes it easy for customers to quickly choose from a wide range of integrations that can extend its platform capabilities, providing access

Milad Aslaner, Head of Product Management - XDR, SentinelOne

to a rich library of integrations for threat enrichment, threat intelligence, and response purposes. Partnerships: SentinelOne delivers Singularity XDR through a global ecosystem of more than 6,000 partners that cast a wide net over the cybersecurity market.

Pure Storage integrates Pure Cloud Block Store with Azure VMware solution Pure Storage announced an expanded, multi-year strategic product and go-to-market partnership with Microsoft, that brings Pure Storage’s industry leading storage capabilities to native Microsoft Azure services by leveraging Azure’s new Premium SSD v2 and introducing them to Azure VMware Solution in Preview. Gartner forecasts that in 2023, worldwide public cloud spending will grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. As cloud adoption accelerates, enterprises aspire to migrate all or portions of their VMware environments — the majority of which consume block-based storage — to the cloud but are met by challenges of inconsistent storage layer management in comparison to their on-premises deployment, and an unmet need to scale compute and storage independently to match data growth. The expanded partnership between Pure

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Storage and Microsoft eliminates this barrier. Now in Preview in 16 Azure regions globally, Pure Cloud Block Store for Azure VMware Solution enables customers to: Optimize AVS Costs. With Pure Storage’s compression and deduplication technology, organisation can achieve a high data reduction ratio on VMware workloads in Azure. Combined with Pure Storage’s ability to decouple block storage costs from compute costs, customers can achieve sizable savings off their baselines for storage heavy workloads. Leverage Pure Storage Safemode Ransomware Data Protection: Pure Storage delivers an always-on, policy-driven snapshot creation and protection mechanism called Safemode which provides the ability to leverage Pure Storage snapshots to instantly restore protected data sets. Implement Flexible Disaster Recovery:

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Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer, Pure Storage Organisation can take advantage of data protection capabilities in Purity such as zeroRPO ActiveCluster, near-zero RPO ActiveDR, and Purity CloudSnap to ensure the right data is protected in the right way, to the right place, at the right time. Right-Sizing Disaster Recovery: Pure Storage’s high availability and cloud replication capabilities enable disaster recovery targets on AVS.

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VMware announced modern AI integrations into its Anywhere Workspace platform VMware announced modern AI integrations to the Anywhere Workspace platform, part of the VMware Cross-Cloud services portfolio, that automatically optimize employee experience, drive new vulnerability management use cases, and simplify application lifecycle management. VMware Anywhere Workspace is the only hybrid work platform that integrates digital employee experience (DEX), virtual desktop infrastructure and apps (VDI and DaaS), unified endpoint management (UEM) and security to enable a seamless and secure workspace on any device or location. VMware continues to leverage data, intelligence, and automation to improve the employee and IT experience by introducing new Insights and Playbooks based on greatly expanded data and machine learning algorithms that enhance DEX remediation capabilities. These updates broaden access to data, help strengthen VMware Insights, and

allow for remediation of more issues. VMware will now enable delivery of new app performance scores, in addition to existing mobile device, desktop, and virtual environment experience scores. If a SaaS app service goes down, IT is proactively alerted and employees are automatically notified. But simply providing IT with more data is not enough to empower them to work smarter. VMware’s AI-driven Insights feature now provides anomaly detection that informs IT of potential experience issues for frontline devices and VDI environments, in addition to mobile and desktop environments. VMware is committed to innovating together with our technology partners to provide customers with more secure and seamless hybrid experiences. VMware continues this mission by announcing an expanded partnership with Intel through a one-of-a- kind, cloud-native

Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager, End- User Computing, VMware integration of Workspace ONE with Intel vPro. This chip-to-cloud integration makes it easier to secure and remotely manage work devices entirely from the cloud, with no additional on-premises infrastructure and management software needed.

Tenable announced the launch of ExposureAI across the Tenable One platform Tenable announced the launch of ExposureAI, new generative AI capabilities and services across the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform. Tenable has also introduced Tenable Exposure Graph, a scalable data lake, Powered by Snowflake, that fuels the ExposureAI engine. This unified data platform – representing more than 1 trillion unique exposures, IT assets and security findings (vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and identities) across IT, public cloud and OT environments – is the largest repository of contextual exposure data in the world and feeds all of Tenable’s Exposure Management products. Prevention has long been a challenge for security teams. Conducting analysis, interpreting the findings and identifying what steps to take to remediate and reduce risk has traditionally been a time-consuming process that puts organisational security in reactive mode. Nearly six in 10 (58%) cybersecurity and IT pros say the security team is too busy fighting

critical incidents to take a preventive approach to reducing their organisation’s exposure. Furthermore, 73% of cybersecurity and IT pros believe their organisation would be more successful at defending against cyberattacks if they could devote more resources to preventive cybersecurity. Tenable ExposureAI provides three new categories of generative AI-based preventive security capabilities that are foundational to exposure management programs: l Search – enables security teams to ask questions using natural language search queries to analyze assets and exposures across their environments, understand relevant contextual information and prioritize remediation efforts l Explain – provides specific mitigation guidance that leverages Tenable’s unrivaled exposure data to provide security teams with clear visibility and succinct analysis

Glen Pendley, chief technology officer, Tenable

of complex attack paths, specific assets or security findings Action – delivers actionable insights and recommended actions based on the highest impact exposures, empowering security teams to proactively address risks and reduce their organisation’s overall exposure.

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Nutanix offers Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box for customers wanting to kick off AI, ML journey Nutanix announced the Nutanix GPT-ina-Box solution for customers looking to jump-start their artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation, while maintaining control over their data. The new offering, is a full-stack software-defined AI-ready platform, along with services to help organisation size and configure hardware and software infrastructure suitable to deploy a curated set of large language models using the leading open source AI and MLOps frameworks on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. It allows customers to easily procure AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers, including LLMs at the edge or in their datacenter. This new solution includes: l The Industry-leading Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform, with the Nutanix Files Storage and Objects Storage solutions, the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and Kubernetes, along with NVIDIA GPU acceleration, which can be sized for

large to small scale. Nutanix services to help customers size their cluster and deploy an opinionated stack with the leading open source deep learning and MLOps frameworks, inference server, and a curated set of large language models such as Llama2, Falcon and MPT. l Ability for data scientists and ML administrators to immediately consume these models with their choice of applications, enhanced terminal UI, or standard CLI. l The platform can also be leveraged to run other GPT models, as well as fine tune these models leveraging internal data, hosted on included Nutanix Files or Objects Storage services. The Nutanix GPT-In-a-Box solution builds on the full stack scalability, performance, resilience and ease of use that the Nutanix Cloud Platform is known for. Nutanix’s expertise with scalable infrastructure across l

Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix public cloud, datacenter and edge use cases delivers the ideal environment to fine-tune and run AI applications while maintaining control over the data. In fact, in a recent survey, 78% of Nutanix customers indicated that they were likely to run their AI/ML workloads on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

Vectra AI announces Vectra AI Platform with patented Attack Signal Intelligence to deliver integrated signals Vectra AI, announced the Vectra AI Platform with patented Attack Signal Intelligence to deliver the integrated signal enterprises need to make extended detection and response a reality. With the Vectra AI Platform, enterprises can integrate Vectra AI’s public cloud, identity, SaaS, and network signal with existing endpoint detection and response (EDR) signal to arm SOC teams to keep pace with the ever-growing sophistication, speed, and scale of hybrid attacks. Harnessing the power of AI to analyze attacker behavior and automatically triage, correlate, and prioritize security incidents, the Vectra AI Platform provides the integrated signal powering XDR. Achieve Integrated Signal Across Hybrid Attack Surfaces The Vectra AI Platform integrates native and third-party attack signals across hybrid cloud domains including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft 365,

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Microsoft Azure AD, networks of all types, and endpoints leveraging the customer’s Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool of choice. Automate Hybrid Attack Detection with Real-Time Attack Signal Intelligence Vectra AI Attack Signal Intelligence harnesses patented AI to automate threat detection, triage, and prioritization across hybrid cloud domains. Accelerate Hybrid Attack Investigation with the Respond UX Analyst Experience With Vectra AI, security teams accelerate investigation and response workflows with integrated investigations sophisticated enough for experienced analysts, simple enough for junior analysts. Execute targeted response actions natively or through ecosystem integrations and APIs The Vectra AI Platform puts humans in

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Hitesh Sheth, CEO at Vectra control of response by offering flexible response actions both native and orchestrated leveraging over 40 ecosystem integrations to: l Manually or automatically lock down an account, or isolate an endpoint. l Trigger security orchestration and automation (SOAR) playbooks and workflows.

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Qualys opens its risk management platform to AppSec teams to bring their own open-source components Qualys, announced it is opening up its award winning risk management platform to AppSec teams to bring their own detections to assess, prioritize and remediate the risk associated with firstparty software and its embedded opensource components. Today, application and security operations teams rely on manual checks or siloed scripts to evaluate the security of first-party software, resulting in ad-hoc security assessment that impedes the ability to prioritize and remediate risk effectively. The new Qualys solution enables organisation to bring their own detection and remediation scripts created using popular languages like PowerShell and Python to Qualys Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response (VMDR) as Qualys ID (QIDs), which the Qualys Cloud Agent executes in a

secure and controlled manner. Qualys TruRisk then detects and prioritizes the findings in the same workflow and reporting as used for the third-party software findings. The new Qualys platform capabilities allow teams to: Easily Build Your Own Signatures – Create Qualys Detections (QIDs) and remediations

based on your own logic or scripts leveraging major scripting languages such as Python, PowerShell and others. These detections integrate directly into VMDR workflows and TruRisk scoring, helping SecOps teams unify and manage risk across first and thirdparty applications in their environment. Proactively Detect, Manage and Reduce Supply Chain Risks: Get continuous, real-time visibility into deeply embedded open-source software packages, such as Log4J, openSSL and commercial software components leveraging the Qualys Cloud Agent. Effectively Communicate Risk with Unified Reporting and Dashboarding: With native integration to VMDR workflows, effectively communicate the unified view of risk in first and third-party software to the right stakeholders via real-time dashboards and reports.

BeyondTrust announced availability of Identity Security Insights to manage human, non-human identities BeyondTrust announced the general availability of its groundbreaking Identity Security Insights solution. With the escalating complexity of cyber threats targeting identities and credentials, this innovative solution sets a new standard in securing both human and non-human identities and privileges, providing organisation with unparalleled visibility and advanced identityfirst threat detection capabilities. Identity Security Insights represents a transformative addition to the BeyondTrust platform, providing an advanced intelligence layer that empowers organisation to achieve new levels of identity and access security. The solution offers a unified view of identities, accounts, cloud entitlements, and privileged access across the entire identity estate, enabling organisation to seamlessly correlate data from both BeyondTrust’s products and third-party identity providers, such as Okta, Ping Identity, and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), and cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure.

Early adopters of the solution have quickly discovered and remediated security risks where unauthorized users could gain access to sensitive systems and data, including unmanaged admin and over-privileged accounts, potential on-premises to cloud privilege escalation paths, pivot points that attackers could use to go from personal email accounts to corporate admin accounts, opportunities for session hijacking, and many other previously undetectable security gaps that could be compromised by bad actors. Key Features of BeyondTrust’s Identity Security Insights Solution include: l Comprehensive Identity & Access Visibility: Gain a unified view of identities and access across your entire estate, including multi-cloud and on-premises environments, all from a single interface, providing a holistic understanding of identity-related risks. l Identity Threat Detection: Instantly

Marc Maiffret, Chief Technology Officer, BeyondTrust

identify identity-based anomalies, ranked by severity, empowering organisation to detect and proactively respond to potential threats. Reduced Identity Attack Surface: Pinpoint blind spots and mitigate risks by proactively identifying vulnerabilities and recommending ways to close gaps and strengthen your identity security posture.

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Protecting against ransomware Going forward security experts believe that ransomware will begin targeting IoT devices as entry points, and target third-party applications, supply chain software, remote monitoring, and management software.

oday, ransomware stands as a significant money-maker for nefarious individuals, and is no longer just an attack that seeks to encrypt important files. Instead, it has evolved to include data theft and post-exploitation, using data garnered from attacks and leaks. On top of that, the emergence of Ransomware as a service, RaaS has meant that a much wider group of minimally skilled attackers can now launch sophisticated attacks. RaaS providers have full-fledged strategies and business models and leverage formal operating methods to conduct attacks. They market themselves on the dark web and secure clients interested in single or multiple attacks, even going as far as to maintain retainer relationships with them. As part of their fees, RaaS providers can offer advice and roundthe-clock assistance, in addition to assisting in negotiations with a victim.

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Going forward security experts believe that ransomware will increasingly begin targeting IoT devices as entry points, and target thirdparty applications, supply chain software, remote monitoring, and management software. It is also believed that ransomware will focus on operational technology, OT that is frequently found in critical infrastructure systems, which means the potential for damage outside of the targeted organisation is high. Considering these evolving threats, organisations have been forced to mature and are gradually improving at defending against ransomware. The goal of many companies now is to reach a point where threat actors cannot successfully hold them to ransom by holding their data hostage. While this is a step in the right direction, the approach does not protect companies against data theft and post-exploitation. With data theft, attackers penetrate an

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organisation’s systems, steal important data, and encrypt it, hoping for payment. This is a challenging situation because while it is possible to pay ransomware actors to unlock files, with proof that unlocking will work before paying a dollar, when data is stolen threat actors merely promise to delete stolen files. Can they be trusted to do this once they have been paid? When suitable tactics or measures are discovered for the data theft challenge, security analysts should make the effort to propagate them to other markets at pace, not delay implementation. Cyber insurance, for example, a useful tool that helps firms stay afloat during a ransomware attack was initially launched in the US. However, it took several years before it appeared and matured in other markets such as Europe and the Middle East. Moreover, in current times, attackers often penetrate an organisation’s systems via its staff by phishing, tricking them, but very often

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RaaS providers have strategies and business models and leverage formal operating methods to conduct attacks.

Ned Baltagi, Managing Director, Middle East and Africa, at SANS Institute

also because of vulnerabilities that are not patched on the external edge. Unfortunately, the reality is that many organisations struggle with patch fatigue and are uncertain about what to patch, sometimes unable to identify important issues. One important tool in this respect is the emergence of the Offensive Security Operations Centre. This facility conducts penetration testing activities every day, across every asset, and asks an important question: does this missing patch, or newly found vulnerability, or emerging cyber threat intelligence, pose a direct and immediate threat to the organisation? In addition, organisations can rely on tried-and-tested measures to defend against ransomware, the majority of which do not require the commitment of significant human or financial resources. 18 sensible Critical Security Controls, CSCs to defend against ransomware attacks have been identified by The Centre for Internet Security. The CSCs also explain how firms can mitigate damage should it occur. As there is significant overlap for the 18 controls, they can be grouped under five approaches:

Electronic asset inventory It is critical to take stock of all devices, fixed and mobile that can connect to technology platforms physically or remotely. By doing this an organisation will be able to discover any unauthorised or unmonitored devices

and can secure or remove them as needed. On the software side, operating systems and applications must be secured with the latest security patches. It is then important to review employee credentials and permissions across local and remote devices, and grant or limit access to files, folders, applications, and external websites accordingly.

Vigilance of access points The digital points connecting a business to the outside world are most at risk of a breach. These should all be identified and secured, including web links and emails with defensive techniques and the deployment of enhanced malware detection. This should be followed by a meticulous company-wide permission regime, which will prevent employees from straying to websites that could lead to a breach.

Prepare for the worst Organisations should always prepare for the worst-case scenario to ensure that the ensuing damage will not be as severe. Several industry resources that highlight current threats are available and should be taken advantage of. A common vulnerability that has afflicted businesses across sectors is reused passwords. Due to this, many businesses – especially financial providers – now require multi-factor authentication, MFA to log in. Even simple MFA, such as sending codes to a registered mobile phone number, can counter the majority, as much as 99% of all phishing attacks.

Engage employees on security Threat actors will actively target an organisation’s employees as a means of gaining access to their systems. Companies should therefore work to understand their staff ’s understanding and reaction to ransomware and other threats. Appropriate measures should be rolled out via security awareness programs that aim to alter user behaviour if, for example, they are presented with a fake email or web page. The security awareness programs should also run simulations of threat scenarios to evaluate the company’s overall cybersecurity standing.

Upgrade security teams Several reports online discuss a cybersecurity staffing shortfall; however, many security organisations have instead found that the skills gap is a bigger challenge. This is a straightforward fix, an organisation must simply invest into upskilling its security analysts, so they can better take on the threats of today and tomorrow. Cybersecurity analysts should be upskilled on issues such as cloud security, machine learning, purple teaming, and other relevant topics. The ongoing evolution of ransomware means that companies are more at risk than ever before. It is therefore vital that organisations remain vigilant and take steps to ensure that their systems and data will never be compromised and be a source of profit for bad actors

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Ransomware is indiscriminatory – prepare for everything to fail In an increasingly digital age, the menace of ransomware looms larger than ever. As the frequency of ransomware attacks continues to surge, they grow not only in number but also in their destructive potency.

ansomware attacks continue to grow in frequency. As well as being more common, ransomware is also getting more potent. As per Veeam’s 2023 Ransomware Trends Report, 21% of companies paid the ransom but could not recover their data. The threat landscape is as volatile as it has ever been. There are more

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attacks taking place. They are more diverse. And they can have grave consequences for the companies they affect. On the other hand, rather than tremble with fear at the awesome power of the cyberattacks waiting to be deployed against them, organisation must focus on what they can control – their defence. Protecting your business against cyber-attacks requires

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following some fundamental and consistent principles – no matter what is being thrown at you.

The ransomware wild west There is a lawless and brutal feeling about the current cyber landscape businesses operate in. It is difficult for governments to hold cybercriminals to account and businesses

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There is a lawless and brutal feeling about the current cyber landscape businesses operate in.

Rick Vanover Senior Director, Product Strategy Veeam

are often keen to minimise public attention towards an incident that has compromised them. This contributes to a situation where almost all the focus is on the victim (the business) rather than the criminal (the attacker). Furthermore, ransomware – and most contemporary cybercrime – is almost indiscriminatory in terms of those who suffer. The fact is that every business is a target. Yes, hacktivist organisations such as Anonymous use organised cyber-attacks as a means of exercising social justice and calling out businesses or governments they view as immoral, unlawful, or dangerous. But even the most philanthropic and virtuous companies can find themselves begging a cybercriminal gang to restore their data and systems while a hefty ransom is demanded of them to do so. You often see a comparison made between cyber-attacks and fishing. Hence the term ‘phishing’ refers to using an email or text being used as bait to trick a victim into ‘biting’ – in this case clicking on the link and unwittingly downloading malware onto their device. With ransomware especially we are now seeing industrial-scale attacks being carried out which are more analogous to trawler fishing. This isn’t one guy with a rod casting out to get a bite off one or two fish. It’s AI-infused algorithms programmed to target everyone and everything – playing a blind

numbers game to catch whatever it can. This indiscriminate nature is compounded by the fact cyber-attacks are generally difficult to contain. For example, cyber warfare between nation states is a threat to every organisation – not just those deemed to be in the firing line. We saw this with the NotPetya attack in 2017 – an attack on a specific utility company – which impacted multiple unrelated organisations through an entirely organic spread of the chaos. Attack types also continue to evolve. For example, the LokiLocker attack was one of the first reported strains of ransomware to include a disk wiper functionality. This means organisations are not only held to ransom by having services suspended and threats of data extortion. Now they are being threatened with losing vast swathes of data completely if they do not pay up.

Consistent principles of defence There is some good news for businesses. No matter how scalable, spreadable, or malicious an attack is, these various evolutions can be viewed as attackers simply using bigger guns and more of them. The fundamental principles of how you prepare your defences against even the most sophisticated and powerful ransomware stay relatively the same. First, practice impeccable digital hygiene. All employees must be trained to identify suspicious content and be warned of the

impact that malpractice using work devices can lead to. For all the might at the hands of cybercriminals, in many ways, their biggest weapons are unsuspecting employees who give them the keys to the back door of an enterprise network. Given the scatter gun approach now adopted by many cyberattacks, criminals are not necessarily targeting your organisation specifically. But if you prove to be an easy hit, you’ll become a victim. With that said, all businesses must prepare for their defences to fail – no matter how robust you might think they are. Concepts such as zero trust and deploying techniques such as two-factor authentication can be useful for restricting the access an attacker has to data by taking over one individual’s workstation. Ultimately, the best way to protect data is to ensure that it has been securely backed up and is fully recoverable before an incident takes place. While the headlines and constant discussion around cybersecurity and ransomware can be daunting, it’s important to remember that the fundamental actions required to protect data remain the same. Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery strategies ensure businesses can protect all data from cyber-attacks, server outages, accidental loss and deletion across physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS, and Kubernetes environments

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Achieving unprecedented productivity and innovation with ChatGPT and generative AI In a world driven by technology and innovation, the fusion of ChatGPT and generative AI is ushering in an era of unprecedented productivity. Generative AI and causal AI complement each other, enhancing the impact of GPT technology

hatGPT and generative AI are revolutionizing industries worldwide, with the potential to transform software development and delivery. Although still in its early stages, generative pretrained transformer (GPT) technology offers significant advantages when combined with causal AI. This pairing enhances the impact and safer use of ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies.

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ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, launched in November 2022, captivating boardrooms and households globally. GPT technology and large language models (LLMs) that power it, hold immense potential for tasks like enhancing customer service and increasing employee productivity. Zooming in on the UAE, Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority (RTA) has also announced that it will start using AI in 2031 in a bid to contribute towards the Emirate’s ambition

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to become the world’s smartest city. The new technology will be used for road maintenance, monitoring public transportation, managing traffic, and much more. Additionally, Dubai’s government has set forth laws and regulations for autonomous vehicles with the aim of deploying 4,000 autonomous vehicles by 2030. The city’s goals for smart mobility are anticipated to be advanced by the new law, which is also expected to draw investment and create a

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Combining causal AI with GPTs empowers teams to automate analytics, explore code impact, and retain full context.

Bernd Greifeneder SVP, Chief Technology Officer and Founder Dynatrace

regulatory environment that makes it easier to use artificial intelligence (AI) in the mobility transport industry. Software development and delivery stand as critical areas where GPT technology, such as ChatGPT, excels. It aids DevOps and platform engineering teams in writing code snippets by drawing on information from software libraries. Moreover, it expedites problem resolution in custom code by providing rootcause context to GPTs, enabling auto-generated remediation. These examples represent significant improvements over time-consuming manual processes, such as writing repetitive code or scouring countless Stack Overflow pages for answers. GPTs also facilitate the rapid onboarding of team members to new development platforms and toolsets by allowing them to ask questions and receive immediate solutions. While employing GPTs to accelerate software development, organisation must establish safeguards to protect intellectual property (IP) and data privacy. Site reliability engineers (SREs) and privacy teams should ensure that teams recognize and respect IP rights when sharing code with GPTs. It is equally crucial to prevent inadvertent sharing of IP or confidential data through technologies like ChatGPT, especially when utilizing

repositories like GitHub. To fully understand the risks associated with GPTs and generative AI, organisation must recognize that LLM-based generative AI is susceptible to error and manipulation. The accuracy and quality of publicly available information and input drawn by these systems can be untrustworthy or biased. Engineering teams must verify the code they receive from GPTs to mitigate risks to software reliability, performance, compliance, and security. Prompt engineering plays a vital role in harnessing the power of GPT tools. Developers provide code and comments as context, which DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams feed into generative AI systems. To achieve precise results, prompt engineering requires trustworthy and actionable input. Causal AI, another form of artificial intelligence, plays a crucial role in achieving this precision by drawing insights from technology ecosystems and software lifecycles. Combining causal AI with GPTs empowers teams to automate analytics, explore code impact, and retain full context. By integrating GPTs into the Dynatrace unified observability and security platform, organisation can enhance the impact and value of ChatGPT and related technologies. Natural language queries combined with causal AI-powered answers provide accurate context,

improving the precision and actionability of GPT’s proposals. This integration enables DevOps and platform teams to receive precise recommendations for solutions to optimize application response time and automate workflow scaling. To maximize the impact of generative AI, organisation should combine it with causal AI, ensuring they receive reliable and meaningful suggestions. This approach enables deterministic and repeatable automation through causal AI and provides rich context to unlock the full potential of GPTs in software delivery and productivity use cases. By addressing security and privacy concerns, organisation can leverage automated prompt engineering to feed GPTs with real-time data and causal AI-powered context. This allows GPTs to drive productivity with suitable and meaningful suggestions. Additionally, combining causal AI and generative AI enables DevOps and platform engineering teams to verify the output of generative AI, ensuring reliability and security in their code. Intelligent automation further facilitates the execution of reliable and secure code. This journey towards combined causal AI and generative AI empowers organisation to achieve significant productivity gains and accelerate the speed of software innovation, creating a lasting competitive advantage

S E PTE M B E R 2023

MEA

EXECUTIVE MOVEMENTS

WSO2 awards Prof Dr Frank Leymann highest technical rank of WSO2 Technology Fellow WSO2, announced that Prof Dr Frank Leymann has been named the first WSO2 Technology Fellow, the highest technical rank in the company. The title recognizes the global impact that Frank has made through his technical innovations and leadership in working with WSO2, software industry groups, governments, and universities, among others. Frank has been recognized for his technical contributions by leading technical, scientific, academic and government organisation: He is an elected member of the Academy of Europe, as well as a fellow at both the AsiaPacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) and Centre of Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST). He also earned appointments as a member of the Expert Council for Quantum Computing of the German Government and a Kurt Gödel visiting professor for Quantum Computing, TU Wien.

Prof Dr Frank Leymann, WSO2 Technology Fellow

Schneider Electric elevates Ahmed Fateen to Channel Commercial VP for UAE, Oman, Bahrain

Ahmed Fateen, Commercial VP, UAE, Oman and Bahrain Schneider Electric

MEA

Jim Forger, Bodo Wagener, Cindy Collins, to lead Kodak Alaris’ business solutions organisation

Schneider Electric has appointed Ahmed Fateen as the Channel Commercial Vice President serving the UAE, Oman and Bahrain markets. Fateen will be responsible for driving business growth across the three Gulf markets, overseeing Channel commercial strategy, business development, and stronger customer integration. Fateen was previously Vice President of Power Systems covering the Gulf region for Schneider Electric for three and a half years. He is also an expert on sustainable designs for utilities, where he served across different geographies such as Egypt, West Africa, East Africa and the Middle East. Fateen will play a crucial role in enabling Schneider Electric’s customers on their path towards a greener and more connected future, many of whom are seeking ways to optimize energy usage.

S E PTE M B E R 2023

Don Lofstrom, President & General Manager of the Alaris division of Kodak Alaris Kodak Alaris has announced the formation of a new dedicated Business Solutions organisation and a number of strategic new hires, focused on helping customers across all industries to realize greater business value at speed and scale. The new structure supports the company’s goal to accelerate growth within its adjacent intelligent document processing offerings, including its IDP software Kodak Info Input Solution, INfuse Smart Connected Scanning Solution from Kodak Alaris, and related professional services. The global Business Solutions organisation will be led by Jim Forger, who has been promoted to VP Business Solutions, reporting directly to Don Lofstrom, President, and General Manager at Kodak Alaris. Bodo Wagener has been appointed Global Solutions Sales Leader, with responsibility to drive the company’s solutions sales strategy and objectives. Automated capture and IDP industry veteran Brent Wesler have joined Kodak Alaris as a Global Pre-Sales Solutions Engineer. Cindy Collins has been appointed Global Delivery Manager within the newly created Business Solutions organisation.

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