CXO DX December 2020

» EDITORIAL

LEADING THE WAY The 40th edition of GITEX happening in a few days as I write this, from Dec 6th to 10th, will go down as one of the most significant editions if one were to look back a few years from now, for the simple reason that it demonstrates resilience. In the face of the pandemic, worldwide most events have been held as virtual editions. Holding GITEX as a physical event therefore marks a milestone,because of the fact that although physical events including ‘Seamless Middle East’ have been held recently, GITEX has always been in a different league in terms of its much grander scale.

At this year’s edition, while some of the regular international delegates who attend GITEX every year could be missing from the event because of travel challenges and perhaps because of the continuing specter of caution, yet the Expo should see a sufficient footfall of attendees. In addition to product displays, there would be many virtual presentations as well from several global Technology and industry experts at the various exhibitor booths. There would be a showcasing of some of the further advances in digital transformation technologies. GISEC, which is being held alongside will put the spotlight on several new cybersecurity technologies.

Undoubtedly, Technology has been key to keeping the world in progress and connected, during the pandemic, much more than prior to it. The role of technology as an enabler of Businesses and of the connectivity that we now take for granted, has been further underlined by the year’s happenings. As a matter of introspection, if the pandemic had unraveled even a few years ago, the world wouldn’t have coped as well as it has perhaps done now because those technologies essential to collaboration and communication which are mature now, were not available then. It has been rapid progress on the technology front in the past few years and will be even more so in the future ahead.

R. Narayan

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Pooja Panjwani Assistant Project Manager

Co-Founder & MD

saumyadeep@leapmediallc.com Mob: +971-54-4458401 Sunil Kumar Designer

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narayan@leapmediallc.com Mob: +971-55-7802403

SAUMYADEEP HALDER

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Co-Founder & Editor in Chief

MALLIKA REGO Co-Founder & Director Client Solutions

mallika@leapmediallc.com Mob: +971-50-2489676

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RAMAN NARAYAN

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Editor in Chief, CXO DX

Nihal Shetty Webmaster

REGISTERED OFFICE: Office 10, Sharjah Media City | www.cxodx.com DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» CONTENTS INTERVIEW

INSIGHT

12 » SECURITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE Giuseppe Brizio, CISO EMEA, Qualys discusses some key solutions and trends in security

26 » DRIVING INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION

16 COVER STORY

16 » SETTING FORMIDABLE BENCHMARKS

Finesse continue to be a trailblazer in digital transformation services and is steadily growing its reach globally

NEWS INSIGHT

11 » CARDING AND DATA LEAKAGE ON THE RISE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, SAYS HELP AG’S REPORT

Dr Tariq Aslam, Head of MEA, AVEVA shares details of their solutions

30 » ADDRESSING THE MARKET DEMAND Renjan George, MD DVCOM TECHNOLOGY LLC discusses how they are addressing market demand

CIO OUTLOOK

24 » A YEAR OF ACCELERATED TRANSFORMATION Shino Thomas, SVP, Transformation Group, NBO shares his perspectives on digital transformation

Help AG's security analysts observed a nearly 50% increase in hacktivism risk alerts

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

34 » MODERNISING NETWORKS TO CATER FOR THE CHANGING APP LANDSCAPE Ahmed El Saadi, Regional Sales Director at VMware discusses the changes in networking as deperimeterization becomes a reality

36 » THE FUTURE OF CONNECTIVITY Sakkeer Hussain, Director, Sales and Marketing, D-Link Middle East and Africa, explores the future of connectivity and highlights the potential of mesh networks.

38 » MONITORING CLOUD NATIVE APPLICATIONS

REGULARS

20 » THE SHIFTING SANDS OF TECHNOLOGY

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Patrick Smith, CTO EMEA, Pure Storage discusses why it’s time UAE organizations shift from a cloud-first strategy to a cloudbest one

Effective cloud-native strategies must include application-performance monitoring says David Noël, regional VP at AppDynamics

GITEX SPOTLIGHT

GITEX 2020 possibly gives an exclusive opportunity to gauge the changes that the industry is going through

32 » THE CASE FOR A ‘CLOUD BEST’ STRATEGY

06 » NEWS 40 » TECHSHOW

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42 » TRENDS & STATS

Built for Device-Dense Areas 4x More Capacity Better Battery Life 25% Increase in Speed Perfect Partner for IoT

» NEWS

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION SOFTWARE HELPS ETISALAT MOVE TOWARDS AUTONOMOUS NETWORK The deployment further reduce the time Etisalat takes to introduce new services by 70 to 90 percent DWDM Transport network orchestration in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region with software from Blue Planet, a division of Ciena , forging a path to create one of the world’s most adaptive and self-optimising networks. Blue Planet’s intelligent automation software supports in accelerating Etisalat’s digital transformation journey in line with UAE’s vision to create a more competitive digital economy.

Haitham Abdulrazzak

Chief Technology Officer, Etisalat Etisalat, one of the leading telecommunications operators in emerging markets recognized by Ookla Speedtest as the world’s fastest mobile network in 2020, has deployed the first end-to-end multi-vendor

Haitham Abdulrazzak, Chief Technology Officer, Etisalat, , said: “Etisalat as a global leader in many technologies and innovations continuously aims to enhance its leadership, position, network efficiency and provide superior customer experience, and a “zero-touch network target” is a tool to achieve this. Transport network is in the heart of all autonomous networks, and the deployment of Blue Planet solution is a major step in our strategy to create more

agile on demand adaptive networks.”

The Blue Planet software has been designed to support Etisalat’s specific intelligent automation requirements and has been implemented in close collaboration with Etisalat.

By reducing manual operations and automating order-to-service processes, Blue Planet supports Etisalat to further reduce the time it takes to introduce new services by 70 to 90 percent. This efficiency is achieved via the Blue Planet Multi Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO) at the Transport DWDM Network level, which is integrated with Etisalat’s existing OSS inventory and automation systems to execute closed loop automation. Blue Planet also provides automated fiber diversity by integrating with a GIS system, while orchestrating service provisioning across the multi-vendor and multi-domain WDM network.

CLOUD SERVICES CONSUMPTION WILL CONTINUE TO GROW, SAYS NUTANIX CLOUD USAGE REPORT 70% of cloud spend comes from IaaS consisting of Compute, Network & Storage

ogy in turbulent times. Whilst for financial services, spend hit a low in the early part of 2020 but quickly bounced back with growth as high as 34% for the month of April.

Nutanix has announced findings of a new report analysing how cloud usage trends have changed throughout 2019 and 2020.

2020 has been an extraordinary year, re-defining ‘normal life’ and following significant growth in cloud consumption across many vertical sectors in 2019, the report highlights a shift in consumption across some industries this year due to COVID-19. However, whilst for some industries growth has retracted, a push toward digital and working from home has resulted in sectors including tech, media and telecoms seeing an increase in cloud consumption, with consistent QoQ growth through the first half of 2020.

Regarding cloud consumption by services, Compute continues to represent the largest service spend across all segments. 70% of cloud spend comes from IaaS consisting of Compute, Network & Storage. Another observation from the report showed that Enterprise customers are spending the most on analytics and emerging services, with the majority of that spend in Azure.

Looking at trends across vertical sectors, whilst COVID-19 led to an increase in the adoption of cloud services amongst the tech, media and telecoms industries, manufactur-

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Aaron White

Regional Director, ME, Nutanix ing and retail saw a drop of over 40% for cloud usage in the first quarter of 2020. However, these sectors did experience growth on cloud spending at a searing pace in 2019, with a 363% increase in the third quarter of 2019. In the health sector, the report shows that cloud consumption has been volatile, highlighting the elasticity of cloud technol-

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

“In times of crisis, the value in adopting cloud technologies is evident,” stated Aaron White, Regional Director, Middle East at Nutanix.

“As this report shows, whilst the ever-changing landscape of 2020 was always likely to cause uncertainty in cloud spending, it is very encouraging to see growth and stability across a number of sectors and we expect this resilience to continue.”

» NEWS

QUALYS ADDS CONTAINER SECURITY SUPPORT FOR GOOGLE CLOUD ARTIFACT REGISTRY Built on the Qualys Cloud Platform, Qualys Container Security discovers, tracks and secures containers from build to runtime Qualys, a leading provider of disruptive cloud-based IT, security and compliance solutions, announced it has worked with Google Cloud to provide out-of-the-box support for Google Cloud Artifact Registry for its Container Security solution.

The new integration allows security and DevOps teams to set up automated security scans of container artifacts in Artifact Registry, now generally available.

Qualys Container Security scanning will assess all images for software inventory, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and provide a unified view across multiple Google Cloud regions. Customers can then leverage the Qualys security posture API of these container images for automation of security workflows like container deployments in Google Cloud Build or integrating with DevOps ticketing systems.

“Google Cloud’s Artifact Registry pro-

vides a convenient fully-managed service that allows customers to have a central repository for all their software artifacts,” said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of Qualys. “Now, with our new integration, customers can quickly adopt this artifact management offering from Google Cloud in their DevOps pipeline with seamless container security built-in from Qualys.”

Built on the Qualys Cloud Platform, Qualys Container Security discovers, tracks and secures containers from build to runtime. Container Security continuously flags and responds to security and compliance issues in containers across your hybrid IT environment. The addition of runtime protection extends these capabilities, delivering full, granular visibility into running containers and the ability to enforce policies that govern containers’ behavior. As a result, you can immediate-

Philippe Courtot

chairman and CEO, Qualys

ly detect and act upon containers drifting from their parent images and potentially creating a security risk due to vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.

MINDWARE AWARDED ‘EMEA REGIONAL DISTRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR’ BY DELL TECHNOLOGIES fiscal year by putting in place the appropriate strategy aligning with the vendor’s FY21 channel priorities.”

The distributor has grown Dell Technologies’ channel business in the region by 20% this fiscal year

“We are indeed proud to have won this award which is a tribute to our strategic relationship with Dell Technologies and to our deep commitment towards this partnership. We intend to build on the success that we have had with growing our regional business hubs through focus, closer collaboration and further co-investments.”

Mindware, a leading Value Added Distributor has been awarded by Dell Technologies as the ‘EMEA Regional Distributor of the Year’ for the fiscal year 2020.

Mindware is one of only ten winners among Dell Technologies’ authorised partner-base of over 2,000 ‘Metal Channel Partners’ in EMEA The annual awards program recognizes partners for their extraordinary performance, support and ongoing commitment to Dell Technologies.

Philippe Jarre, CEO of Mindware Group, stated, “Dell Technologies is one of the most strategic vendors in our portfolio for over 20 years. Over time, we have worked zealously to build up the highest levels of technical proficiency around Dell Tech-

Philippe Jarre

CEO, Mindware Group nologies’ solutions. We have also formed a sustainable channel ecosystem that is well-equipped to position and implement such solutions in a manner that creates exceptional customer value and contributes to their digital transformation initiatives.

Mindware has grown Dell Technologies’ channel business in the region by 20% this

“The achievements can be largely attributed to our in-country presence across the region that supports our expanding channel base, a dedicated Dell Technologies Business Unit that works in close partnership with the vendor, and a Solutions Team which includes a pool of exceptional technical experts capable of addressing technology concerns, simplifying technology and effectively deploying it in complex IT infrastructures, cyber-security and Cloud environments.”

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» NEWS/GITEX

TREND MICRO FOCUSES ON “THE ART OF CYBERSECURITY” The security vendor’s showcase will include solutions for securing cloud, endpoints and more Supporting Middle East organizations in their secure digital transformation, Trend Micro will exhibit at GITEX under the theme of “The Art of Cybersecurity.” The theme combines Trend Micro’s proven foresight, its XGen security strategy of cross-generational threat defense solutions, and passionate people to make cybersecurity a work of art.

“The GCC’s high rates of cyber-attacks across email, URL, and malware show that cybercriminals are ramping up their exploits of the weak points in organizations’ endpoints, network, and cloud — especially with COVID-19-related threats,” said Dr. Moataz Bin Ali, Vice President, Middle East & North Africa, Trend Micro.

At GITEX, Trend Micro will showcase cybersecurity solutions across cloud (Cloud One Hybrid Cloud Security), user protection for endpoints (Apex One), email and web, detection and response (XDR), Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial Control security (TXOne Networks), and network protection from

how Middle East organizations can reinvent their cybersecurity posture and processes” Encouragingly, since the lockdown, more than four-fifths (82%) of the UAE’s remote workers say they are more conscious of their organization’s cybersecurity policies, according to Trend Micro’s recent study “Head in the Clouds.”

Dr. Moataz Bin Ali

Vice President, Middle East & North Africa, Trend Micro known, unknown, and undisclosed threats (Network Defense).

“As the region’s only in-person technology event in 2020, GITEX is a key event for Trend Micro to spread the importance of cybersecurity in the shift to digital transformation,” added Dr. Moataz Bin Ali. “We are returning to GITEX to show

However, many employees are still breaking the rules anyway due to limited understanding or resource constraints. During GITEX, Trend Micro will also educate organizations about the importance of not having a one-size-fits-all cybersecurity strategy, but rather tailoring their cybersecurity strategies to the most common employee attitudes and behaviors on risk awareness, risk management, and risk avoidance, and personal accountability.

During GITEX, Trend Micro aims to once again meet customers and channel partners, and to exchange best practices in cybersecurity.

EPSON TO SHOWCASE SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES AT GITEX Demos will highlight the benefits of Epson’s Heat-free business inkjet technology At GITEX Technology Week 2020, Epson will showcase its range of sustainable solutions for businesses and education - that also support the current need for social distancing.

This year’s demonstration areas, Sustainable Solutions for Business and Smart Solutions for Education, will give a flavour for how technology can deliver both efficiency and cost savings, as well as support the growing demand for sustainability.

“There is no doubt that the recent months have changed the way we live and work, especially with social distancing practices. We have seen a strong demand for our technology to help support new hybrid work and learning environments. The Middle East market is now looking for technology that helps remote workers and students stay connected,

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as well as being flexible, cost-effective and eco-friendly,” said Jason McMillan, sales director, Epson ME. As per Epson’s recent survey, 91% of Middle East employees expect a change in the use of shared devices, including printers, as they return to the office.

While it’s natural that people will be cautious about sharing products, simple software solutions such as Epson’s Print Admin mean that printers can be used without the need to touch buttons to retrieve prints.

In addition, 89% of those surveyed expect a higher use of green and sustainable technology, to improve the environmental and social impact of businesses post-COVID-19.

This year’s demonstration area will highlight the benefits of Epson’s Heat-

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

Jason McMillan

Sales Director, Epson ME free business inkjet technology which enables its printer range to reduce energy consumption by up 95% compared to laser printers – reducing both cost and CO2 emissions.

Epson will also showcase solutions to enable schools and universities to deliver the best possible education for in-person, remote and hybrid learning.

These include the Epson EB-1400 series, Epson’s visualisers, WorkForce Enterprise and WorkForce Pro RIPS business inkjet printers.

» NEWS/GITEX

HUAWEI FOCUSES ON CREATING NEW VALUE TOGETHER AT GITEX 2020 The showcase will include current and future-oriented applications that Huawei has developed During this year’s GITEX Technology Week 2020, Huawei is collaborating with partners from around the world to showcase how governments and organizations in the Middle East can create new value through synergy across five tech domains.

As this year’s 5G Innovation Partner, Huawei has strengthened its commitment to the region’s technology ecosystem by confirming its largest ever GITEX Technology Week presence at the 40th anniversary edition of the event.

Charles Yang, President of Huawei Middle East, notes: “This year’s GITEX Technology Week comes at a time when the true value of ICT has become increasingly clear. Keeping people, businesses, and communities connected even when physically apart is more essential than ever.

Through open collaboration, the ICT sector can accelerate the development of the digital economy, in turn contributing to

sustainable growth and supporting national transformation agendas in a post-pandemic world.”

GITEX visitors will not only see a demonstration of new technologies, but current and future-oriented applications that Huawei has developed with its global partners for customers in government, energy, transportation, finance, and more.

Huawei’s regional leadership team is also connecting with attendees through participation in many of the individual GITEX conference tracks.

In addition, Huawei will host a “Igniting Innovation Through Education” virtual summit dedicated to the unique requirements of today’s education sector, and what the ICT community can do to bolster digital learning, support new academic models, and promote ICT innovation in line with countries’ national development

VMRAY TO SHOWCASE AT GITEX

President of Huawei Middle East

visions.Huawei will also host its sixth 5G Ecosystem Conference bringing together vertical industries, 5G ecosystem partners, and 5G operators. GITEX visitors and virtual guests will also be able to attend the Huawei Middle East Data Center Network Online Summit 2020. email threats and phishing attacks to a new level.”

The focus will be on three products that addresses specific Incident Response and SOC requirements

The company will present its complete portfolio consisting of three products that addresses specific Incident Response and SOC requirements:

VMRay, a provider of automated malware analysis and detection solutions, is participating at GITEX Technology Week 2020.

VMRay Analyzer enables IR teams to quickly analyze and protect against the full spectrum of threats, including advanced malware and phishing attacks.

This year at GITEX Technology Week, VMRay will be showcasing the industry’s most comprehensive and accurate technology for automated analysis and detection of advanced threats.

“We’ll demonstrate how our technologies differ from other solutions. We strengthen our customers’ capacity to detect unknown malware and provide their Incident Response and SOC teams with the tools to handle the growing volume and diversity of threats with far greater speed and precision,” explained Ilijana Vavan, Chief Sales Officer at VMRay. “At GITEX, we’ll present for the first time our Email Threat Defender technology with its unique capability of detonating and

Charles Yang

VMRay Detector is the key to scaling automated detection across the organization and the nexus for integrating the VMRay Platform with other security systems.

VMRay Email Threat Defender complements anti-Spam and anti-Phishing solutions and detects email threats that other defences miss.

Ilijana Vavan

Chief Sales Officer, VMRay

analyzing suspect URLs at time-of-delivery rather than time-of-click. This powerful solution lifts protection from

This year the theme for VMRay at GITEX Technology Week is ‘Certainty Through Clarity’. VMRay will be at Hall No. 2, Stand No. H2-01.20.

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» NEWS/GITEX

VEEAM TO HIGHLIGHT BEST PRACTICES TO PROTECT, MANAGE AND UNLEASH DATA The showcase will include Veeam’s entire suite of software solutions with a focus on the Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform

Claude Schuck

Regional Manager, Veeam Software, ME

At this year’s GITEX, Veeam has announced its participation that is centered around the theme ‘Protect, Manage and Unleash Data’, referring to Cloud, Cyber Security and Modern Data Protection as the three pillars that form the foundation driving Digital Transformation (DX) and

enabling organizations to unleash the power of their data to deliver a rich customer experience. The company will have both a physical and an online booth on the new GITEX.Virtual.Platform. As part of the GITEX Conference Program, Claude Schuck, Regional Manager for Veeam Software Middle East, will be participating as a speaker in the ´Smart Cities & 5G´ panel discussion on ´Boosting Efficiency in Business and Industry with 5G’.

“I am very excited to take part in GITEX, and looking back, I can attribute much of our success to the relationships we have initiated and fostered at the event and I expect this year to be no different. After months full of virtual meetings and interactions, my team and I are eager to personally meet with our partners, customers and prospects again while respecting safe

STARLINK TO HIGHLIGHT ‘CONNECT STRATEGY’ AT GITEX The distributor is celebrating 10th year of GITEX participation At this year's GITEX, StarLink's showcase at its stand in Hall 2 will include solutions that are going to be essential for enterprises as they adapt to the new-normal. These would include solutions from Palo Alto Networks, Citrix, BeyondTrust, SailPoint, Nutanix, Infoblox, FireEye, Riverbed, Imperva, Forescout, Cloudera, Cofense, ThreatQ, Pulse Secure, FireMon, Getvisibility, LinkShadow, SecureLink and Tripwire.

StarLink and their participating vendor teams will be engaging and networking, both virtually and face-to-face, with channel partners and end-customers to share business and technical insights on their solutions offering and industry best practices.

“This year has been exceptional – full of learnings and new experiences. With a ‘new norm’ being introduced, innovative

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Nidal Othman

Co-Founder & Managing Director, StarLink

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

meeting protocols and social distancing guidelines. I look forward to meaningful and memorable interactions that will strengthen our local presence and open up the pipeline of new business for 2021,” said Claude Schuck.

Key solutions presented include: • Veeam Availability Suite v10, which offers modern NAS support, Multi-VM Instant Recovery and heightened ransomware protection.

• Veeam Backup & Replication, a single solution for simple, reliable and flexible protection of ALL enterprise cloud, virtual and physical workloads.

• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 • Veeam Cloud Connect that enables service provider to offer cloud backup or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to their customers.

ways of doing things has become inevitable. This has unlocked huge potential in the areas of digitization, cloud, AI and applications and we are excited about the opportunities presented by these changes. In line with our theme and strategy for FY’21 “StarLink Connect”, we have invested in giving vendors, partners and end-users more ways to connect with experts from around the globe virtually, and face-to-face at our stand this GITEX. Every GITEX, StarLink raises the bar and this year will be no different”, commented Nidal Othman, co-founder & managing director, StarLink.

Mahmoud Nimer, co-founder and general manager, StarLink said, “We are very privileged to be in a country where the Government demonstrates visionary leadership. StarLink is committed to supporting such great vision as we work together with our different stakeholders to accelerate the growth of the economy.

We are indeed proud to be part of ‘the only global tech show live, – in-person’ and look forward to welcoming our channel partners, end-customers and vendors at GITEX.”

» NEWS INSIGHT

CARDING AND DATA LEAKAGE ON THE RISE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, SAYS HELP AG’S REPORT Help AG's security analysts observed a nearly 50% increase in hacktivism risk alerts As virtual footprints of organizations have continued to expand multi-fold during the coronavirus pandemic, instances of carding, data exposure, and hacktivism have escalated to become the highest rated digital risk categories in 2020, impacting almost all major industry verticals in the Middle East region, the first ever Digital Risk Protection report by Help AG, the cyber security arm of Etisalat Digital, has revealed.

CARDING

Help AG's security analysts saw a 500% jump in risk alerts for carding from January to June 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. Carding refers to the trafficking of credit cards, bank accounts, and other personal information online.

The massive five-time increase in carding alerts was observed through scans of public sources including information sharing platforms and deep web sources with data compiled by botnets and underground markets. Findings comprised all possible details including recovery date, BIN code, card number, card expiry, source, card brand, card type, issuing bank, and country of the issuer. The top impacted sectors include aviation, logistics, and retail.

DATA LEAK OR DATA EXPOSURE

During the initial months of COVID-19, Help AG's security analysts witnessed a staggering 3X (183%) jump in threat alerts related to data exposure. Data leakage refers to the intentional (malicious intent) or unintentional (human error) exposure of confidential documents, corporate emails, and documents with sensitive metadata on official channels of an organization and the dark web for subsequent unauthorized use and exploitation for malicious purposes. The alarming increase was identified as a result of continuous monitoring of documents and file repositories on information sharing platforms, official portals of organizations, and the dark web through Help

AG's Digital Risk Protection service. The top impacted sectors include healthcare, government, aviation, logistics, retail, and energy and utilities.

HACKTIVISM

Help AG's security analysts observed a nearly 50% increase in hacktivism risk alerts following analysis of monitored hacker groups' advertisements on social networks (hacktivist profiles and groups), media (local, sectorial, and syndicalist), petition and signature platforms, information sharing platforms and manifestos (pastes). Hacktivism is an open challenge among cybercriminals to take down a normal business by causing disruption. The top impacted sectors include healthcare, government, aviation, logistics, retail, and energy and utilities.

For organizations, the biggest impacts of these major digital risks range from service disruptions to exposure of private information intended for confidential use for future business goals, loss of reputation and trust established with customers and partners, inability to ensure compliance against regulatory requirements, and ultimately a dent in the success of digital transformation initiatives. It is important to note that the risks affect a wide audience of stakeholders from board and executive management levels to legal, marketing, risk, compliance, governance, and operations.

To help address these challenges, Help AG’s Digital Risk Protection service, under its Managed Security Services, safeguards organizations' brands from misuse whilst protecting social media and digital channels from business risks and security threats. The service offers a comprehensive solution against external cyber threats, covering the entire life cycle from early detection to final resolution. In order to further protect customers, Help AG has also activated a "Special COVID Moni-

Stephan Berner Chief Executive Officer, Help AG

toring Plan" that includes a combination of special keywords with the aim to detect any mentions of its customers as well as detecting changes in the tendencies of posts on social media.

“The impact of the pandemic is very clear as we compare risk alerts with the corresponding number of alerts in 2019 in our first ever Digital Risk Protection report,” Stephan Berner, Chief Executive Officer at Help AG, said.

“These high rated threats are an unfortunate reality of the COVID-19 era, hence knowing and guarding against your enemy is now more important than ever before.

At Help AG, the leading cyber security provider in the region, we are fully geared to manage digital risks for our customers and ensure a secure but sustainable digital presence in the cyber world. Our report details the various risks organizations must be aware of as well as all aspects of digital risk protection covering proactive identification, validation, response, and remediation. The risk management cycle is never ending but remains critical for business continuity.”

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» INTERVIEW

SECURITY

IN THE DIGITAL AGE Qualys is a leading provider of disruptive cloud-based IT, security and compliance solutions and is a key exhibitor at this year’s GISEC being held alongside GITEX. Giuseppe Brizio, CISO EMEA, Qualys discusses the solutions they would be showcasing and also details some of the key trends in security

Please elaborate on the focus for Qualys at GISEC in terms of the showcase and new products announcements?

We have released a couple of game-changing innovations over the last few months and will use GISEC 2020 as a platform to showcase these to our Middle East customers and partners.

Showcased at our stand will be Qualys VMDR® — Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response. VMDR provides an allin-one, cloud-based app that automates the entire vulnerability management cycle, significantly accelerating the ability for companies to respond to threats, and prevent breaches while drastically reducing licensing and operating cost. We will also show Qualys Multi-Vector EDR — taking a new multi-vector approach to Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Qualys now brings the unifying power of its highly scalable cloud platform to EDR. As part of our participation at the event, we will also have two speaking sessions. The first will be on December 06 between 11:00am and 11:20am and focus on how enterprises get breached.

The second, on December 08 between 1:40pm and 2:00pm will discuss the MITRE ATT&CK framework for threat hunting.

Finally, we will be making a key announcement during the event. This will be particularly significant for businesses and government entities in the UAE, so we encourage visitors to stop by our stand to find out more.B20.

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CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

How do you think the concept of security is getting redefined more in the cloud era? With SASE gaining ground, discuss how this approach is addressed as part of your offerings?

In the Digital and Cloud Era, Enterprise IT environments are made of several different components such as multi-cloud, on prem, endpoints, containers and more. The Enterprise IT environments keep constantly evolving and expanding at unprecedented pace, becoming increasingly hybrid and more and more difficult to secure in a hyper connected world. The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation initiatives, by pushing the migration to the cloud even further, in order to support the shift to remote and mobile working. The drastic changes brought by the cloud, have had an impact on how organizations provide seamless security across the hybrid IT environments.

To serve the purpose of constantly reducing the time to remediate, the next generation security architecture needs to provide Visibility, Prevention, Detection and Response capabilities, all built-in and natively integrated in a cloud-based platform. What is required in today’s increasingly cloud-based world, is a security Open Cloud Platform able to (a) consolidate point solutions (b) collect all the telemetry in one place to better analyze and correlate — in real time — massive amounts of data (c) build effective intelligence, eliminating false positives/negatives and enabling automation and (d) communicate with other platforms.

» INTERVIEW

Giuseppe Brizio CISO EMEA, Qualys

Qualys developed a complete platform where metadata is continuously collected by specialized sensors across the entirety of the digital landscape — traditional datacenters, web apps, CI/ CD pipelines, mobile workforce, application containers, and multi-cloud environments. This data is centrally indexed, enriched, and processed into actionable information that is consumed through an integrated set of applications, accessible from anywhere with standard secure communication protocols and a browser. This approach provides the flexibility and agility needed by security practitioners to operate at the speed of business, to achieve operational effectiveness and a continuously validated security posture; harmonizing the needs of IT, Security, and Compliance.

Discuss the transforming threat landscape in terms of threat vectors with distributed edge networks becoming more prevalent?

With the continuous evolution and expansion of IT hybrid environments, and consequently more distributed edge networks, the threat landscape is transforming with some threat vectors developing quicker than others. For instance, as part of the industry 4.0 robotics and automation process, operational technology (OT) is increasingly being deployed on shopfloors and industrial controlled system environments, becoming a very concerning threat vector especially for the manufacturing industry. In addition, connected objects as part of the internet of

things (IoT) — potentially affecting any company — are climbing the list of threat vector rankings, considering their projected expansion from 30 billion connected devices in 2020 to over 60 billion by the end of 2025. Remote access. which has dramatically increased due to the pandemic, is a significant threat vector particularly when corporate devices use unsecured wireless hotspots and get compromised thereby impacting the corporate network. With the 5G era coming soon, the mobile threat vector will become even more relevant with a much broader attack surface, as the industry will diversify and enlarge its services offering. The 5G will also add further complexity to the network, increasing the workload on security operations teams and potentially allowing attackers remaining unnoticed for significant longer periods of time, unless emerging artificial intelligent technologies will be used to increase the efficiency of security operations centres.

Can you please elaborate on the impact that the new hybrid workforce arrnagements is having on expanding the attack surface The organizations shift to new hybrid workforce models requires the implementation of new strategies for securing remote employees and protecting their digital assets from cyberthreats and cyberattacks. The pandemic has accelerated the migration to the cloud, and companies have started to adopt cloud services faster than they had originally planned, increasing consequently DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» INTERVIEW the attack surface and exposing security gaps to hackers. Since the beginning of the pandemic the cybersecurity complaints have dramatically increased — up to 3000+ a day, 400% increase, according to FBI reports — where phishing remains the most prevalent threat facing employees working remotely.

Many companies have reacted quickly to connect their remote workforce with secured equipment but some others had to rely on employee owned devices with lower security levels. It's important for companies to consider a long-term plan on how to provide security to employees and protect their digital assets at a time when cybercriminals have a bigger attack surface to target. The time has come for a more strategic approach to security as companies get used to new hybrid workforces that support remote work. Interesting to highlight that a study also revealed that 43% of security incidents that occurred between March and July 2020 were caused by malicious insiders compared to the five months before the pandemic. The same study also indicated 25% increase in the number of employees attempting to extract data to unauthorized email accounts between March to July 2020, compared to the previous five months.

What are the solutions you offer for container security including your strategic partnerships with cloud providers?

Driven by digital transformation and remote work, enterprises today face a proliferation of cloud infrastructure and containerized workloads. Securing this infrastructure requires a holistic approach that runs across workloads and the cloud posture. The Qualys platform approach focuses on visibility, prevention, detection, and response as key capabilities to effectively address security challenges. Qualys CloudView and Container Security provide visibility into your cloud footprint, continuously assess its security posture and helps to proactively manage the associated attack surface with automated detection and response capabilities across cloud and container resources. Qualys has partnerships with major cloud providers such as MS Azure, Google Cloud platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing native integration of its cloud agent and sensors with above mentioned CSPs. This means that when a new instance is created, you can apply a Qualys agent or sensor gaining the ability to scan all containers images in order to identify vulnerabilities, and ensure near real-time, up-to-date visibility of your security posture on CSP Security Centers. This allows customers to quickly detect risks in their CSPs environments and take rapid and automated remedial actions.

Is the Qualys Cloud meant for monitoring and managing all assets in various Cloud? What powers the Qualys cloud?

Yes, the Qualys Cloud is meant to monitor and manage all the IT assets across the entire IT hybrid environment which is made of Multi-Cloud but also of On-premise, Containers, SaaS, Mobility, OT (Operational Technology) etc.

The power of the Qualys Cloud Platform is in its ability to provide Visibility, Prevention, Detection and Response capabilities in one natively cloud-based and integrated security and compliance solution. So, it starts with a large set of sen-

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CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

sors (e.g. cloud agent, cloud connectors, scanners etc.) able to provide visibility on IT assets throughout the IT hybrid environment and that’s not just from time to time, it’s all the time and in real time.

The Prevention capability allows organizations to identify vulnerabilities, mis-configurations etc. which could be exploited and evaluate the threats via risk-based approach in order to prioritize and apply remediation through patching or going a step further to DevOps (i.e. shifting left) for ensuring security by design.

The Detection and Response capabilities are paramount in order to swiftly detect a breach, understanding the context in which it took place and then enable rapid and effective response by quarantining and sanitizing the concerned IT assets.

What powers the Qualys open, highly scalable and extensible architecture, is made of four core layers: • The suite of more than 20 natively integrated security and compliance applications • Shared services for tasks like authentication, authorization, subscriptions, indexing, data sync and tagging • Messaging, data and analytics engines, including Kafka, JanusGraph, Ceph, Elastic, Cassandra, Redis, Flink • An infrastructure and DevOps toolchain that includes logging, monitoring, configuration management, service registry, CI/CD and Docker and Kubernetes The Qualys Cloud Platform has indexed 8 trillion data points, moves 15 billion Kafka messages per day, processes 3 trillion security events per year, and conducts 6 billion IP scans annually, all with 99.9996% Six Sigma accuracy for the benefit of our 15,700+ customers in 130 countries Please discuss the multi-vector EDR solution and its key benefits for Businesses?

Qualys multi vector EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) has the ability to detect malware live, based on the expansion of the Qualys agent, leveraging the same one single agent, which collects large amounts of telemetry (e.g. process, network, files, registry etc. all kind of parameters changing on the IT assets) and pushes it to the platform. From there, it gets enriched with other telemetry of data already collected, providing capabilities to perform highly scalable threat hunting, identifies what malware is in there and then has the ability to take comprehensive response actions.

The key differentiator here is the ability to bring in other vectors such as traffic analysis, mis-configurations, vulnerabilities, etc for a broader analysis and response, versus traditional EDR point solutions which focus only on endpoint activity to detect attacks, lacking the full context for analyzing attacks accurately. Qualys fills the gaps by bringing a new multi-vector approach and the unifying power of its highly scalable Cloud Platform to EDR, providing vital context and comprehensive visibility to the entire attack chain, from prevention to detection to response.

» COVER FEATURE

SETTING FORMIDABLE BENCHMARKS

FINESSE CONTINUES TO BE A TRAILBLAZER IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SERVICES AND IS STEADILY GROWING ITS REACH GLOBALLY

I

n the past several years, perhaps only a handful of companies in the region have consistently created a trailblazing trajectory of growth and innovation in the systems integration and consulting business like Finesse. Inside the last decade, Finesse has set a scorching pace of growth and has grown from a niche focused software SI to a company that is today established as a premier enabler of digital transformation for enterprises across sectors.

The company has expanded its domains of focus, added an extensive number of domain experts, and has been quite focused in tapping into all those new promising growth areas. Along the way, it has broadened its market coverage with operations globally across the MENA, APAC and Americas, in over 10 global locations. Steadily, the company has built strong customer credentials whether in the BFSI sector or healthcare or any other sectors. It has allied with several pioneering technology vendors that has helped it broaden its portfolio and keeps itself attuned to the newer demand trends. Finesse today has partnerships with leading global technology vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Automation Anywhere, Salesforce, Qlik, Kyriba, Ui Path, Kofax, Equifax, Capillary among others.

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CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

— By: R. Narayan

ENABLING AND SECURING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

The company is focused on helping enterprise customers steer their digital transformation journeys, offering their expertise across technologies including AI Chatbots, BI & Analytics, Blockchain, CRM / CEM, Cloud, Corporate Treasury Management, E-Commerce Enablement, Mobility, RPA, Infra & Applications Managed Services and much more. Trusted by over 300 enterprise clients across BFSI, Education, Energy, Healthcare, Public Sector, Telecom, Travel & Logistics and more, Finesse is helping them transform into more agile and resilient organizations, by helping them leverage the best tools and practices of digital transformation relevant to their Business models.

“At Finesse, we do not only see ourselves as enabling technology transformation for our clients but rather also help them culturally adapt to the new digital processes, as required on case to case basis.

We understand that digital transformation has to be an all-inclusive journey and people working in the organizations play a crucial

» COVER FEATURE role to make the transformation truly successful,” says Sunil Paul, Co-Founder and MD of Finesse.

To ensure that digital transformation initiatives of the clients are heading towards the right direction, Finesse helps with training users onsite at the client location on the new tools and also helping drive awareness as required. These proactive measures are quite critical in ensuring that that digital transformation initiatives are accepted well, and the outcomes are quite satisfying.

Finesse ensures that while clients are engaging with them for Managed services, they take away their worries around the functioning of their IT Business processes and services.

Sunil adds, “We help our clients to focus on their core business by providing end to end managed services for their technology environment & non-core business processes. Finesse proposition goes far beyond the transaction benefits of resource outsourcing and focus on delivering business efficiency & results by bringing to bear our deep technology and domain expertise to all our engagements.

This model helps our clients to optimally manage costs & risks and at the same time improve efficiency with their core business.”

In addition to extensive digital transformation solutions & services that Finesse offers today, the onsite, offshore and hybrid managed support services from Finesse covers proactive monitoring, preventive maintenance, SLA monitoring, asset / resource management and vendor management.

Finesse complements its wide portfolio with a dedicated Cyber security practice, that overs Infrastructure & Cloud Security, Application security assurance, Security intelligence & analytics, Digital Identity, Data protection & Privacy. As organizations embrace cloud services from multiple providers, they cannot afford a compromise in their security options and must choose the best.

Sunil says, “Native security tools offered by cloud providers, while advantageous, are not sufficient to work across clouds. An ideal approach is deploying security tools such as a unified platform; security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technology to gain a centralized view and control of the threats and vulnerabilities across a multi-cloud environment. This will provide security teams with the capability to analyze threat data better and prioritize alerts."

He adds, “The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call for most organizations in terms of evaluating where they are in digital journeys and how prepared they are to tackle cyber threats. Cybersecurity strategies also need to be ever-evolving to stay in tune with ongoing market developments.”

BUILDING EXPERTISE TO MEET EXPECTATIONS

Finesse has actively recruited some of the brightest talents across domains and built itself an extensive team of experts that are responsible for planning out and executing the digital transformation destinies of its clients.

The journey has not been without challenges. The constant churn in the Technology landscape demands solutions providers to keep their competencies updated in all relevant emerging areas as well.

Sunil Paul

Co-Founder & Managing Director, Finesse

Sunil says, “The biggest challenge that we are facing in the SI space is the rapid changing of technologies and toolsets. It takes considerable amount of time to build up the skills sets in certain technology / tool sets and by then it’s up for a revival. This constant change in the technology landscape put pressure on SIs like us who will need to constantly upgrading our skillsets.”

Finesse has been more than equal to the challenge however and has built a large team of over experts. These technical experts and consultants approach the task of undertaking execution of digital transformation for a client with a holistic outlook, looking into and deciding on those business processes which need to be reengineered, prior to initiating digital transformation. Finesse follows a comprehensive approach to make sure that customers have measurable outcomes from digital transformation and ensuring that they are deploying trending products and solutions used by world leaders in their respective domains.

“Finesse believes in helping clients orchestrate unique and strategic approach to enhance their business value. Improved operational efficiencies, cost optimization and realizing business goals that sustain the business in a transforming landscape are some of the key goals of what we seek out for our clients while they embark on a digital transformation journey,” says Eljo JP, Chief Business Officer, Finesse.

In the BFSI sector, Finesse has unquestionable credentials where a huge list of customers of over 120 Banks and Financial institutions DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» COVER FEATURE

These include healthcare where it has been involved in deploying RPA solutions for instance that help achieve those organizations in a very critical sector achieve extensive enhancements in their Business processes. Finesse recently deployed Automation Anywhere’s Intelligent Automation platform for Fujifilm. Effective Solution design was key to this successful RPA implementation. Finesse designs and develops highly efficient digital workers, or bots, that deliver the expected output accurately, consistently, on-time and on-demand saving a lot of man hours.

Even in a sector like Aviation for instance, Finesse has proven its credentials by helping an airliner achieve greater operational efficiencies through the deployment of a Business intelligence solution. Finesse continues to demonstrate an extensive width in terms of competencies across verticals and technology domains.

With cloud services achieving mainstream acceptance across verticals, Finesse has also focused on ensuring its clients are leveraging the best of cloud-based solutions in their respective domains.

While offering end to integration and support of cloud-based services, Finesse offers value to its clients through cloud- ready solutions, mobile devices and social media platforms.

Eljo JP

Chief Business Officer, Finesse

include more than 80 such entities operating in the UAE. Finesse has for long been strongest in the BFSI segment, where not surprisingly it also has a vast array of offerings that include solutions & services for Core Banking, API / Digital / New Generation Banking, Trade Finance, Treasury, Payments, Governance, Risk, Compliance, Regulatory Reporting, Basel III, IFRS- 9, Credit Control; Management, Fraud Management, Multilevel Authentication, Secured App Protection, PIM / PAM, Banking Process Outsourcing & IT Managed Services, and more.

“We have been working with banks & financial institutions to help enhance their efficiencies and optimize costs in their operational business functions by introducing automation and managed services. We are today positioned as a preferred and trusted provider of high performance, reliable, and sustainable digitized business solutions,” adds Eljo.

Success has come in plenty from other sectors as well. Finesse has been able to replicate its strengths built around its focus and early success within the BFSI sector in the others as well with a clear vision.

Sunil says, “Fundamentally we have a double-sided approach to this. First, we keep hiring domain experts and also engage with senior industry stalwarts to help us as we craft vertical specific solutions. Second, we keep creating frameworks, from which part of the technology components and operational business knowledge can be reused as we build foundation layer for other verticals. This approach has indeed helped us to adapt to newer verticals such as Education, Energy, Healthcare, Retail, Public Sector etc.”

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CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

In the current year, driven by the pandemic, companies have been compelled to accelerate their digital transformation. From cloud services to edge networking, all have witnessed a massive growth to enable remote working.

“Remote working models, digital technologies and virtual meetings and interactions have been the way of life this year, prompting the demand to fast embrace digital transformation technologies.

The setting up of local data centers by cloud majors has resulted in fast rolling out products and services which will create better customer experience and take the banking comfort to a different dimension,” says Sunil.

As Finesse looks to thrive on demand for more cloud delivered digital solutions, from RPA to chatbots, the SI is also looking to help their clients deliver hyper personalized services to customers by deploying digital transformation technologies. In this direction, Finesse has joined hands with Capillary Technologies, a cloudbased Loyalty platform that leverages AI and Machine Learning to automatically create high-conversion campaign for clients.

Finesse is not resting on the multiple laurels that have come its way over the recent years. The company intends to make a mark as a global vendor over next few years.

Sunil adds, “We see ourselves growing into global Tier-2 digital SI in in the next 3-5 years. We already have projects from US, Europe and the Fareast and have been supporting clients such as Boeing, Sunlife Insurance, Marriott, Genpact, Amway etc. We will be focusing further on our global expansion in the coming years.”

Even as Finesse builds and enhances solutions and services it offers, holding on to a robust customer focused vision is possibly what will help drive the company’s growth to help it achieve a more formidable stature in the years ahead.

» GITEX SPOTLIGHT

THE SHIFTING SANDS OF TECHNOLOGY While change has been constant in Technology, this year saw a radical disruption, accelerated by the pandemic. Consequently, several trends gained faster traction from remote work enabling technologies to cloud services and cloud security. GITEX 2020 possibly gives an exclusive opportunity to gauge the changes that the industry is going through

T

his year’s GITEX Technology week, the 40th edition of the iconic Technology expo, is an exhibition of mankind’s resilience in the face of immense challenges. The pandemic had brought the entire world to its knees in the earlier part of the year, but the world has fought back with remarkable fortitude.

While the pandemic threat lingers, people have got back to their lives and work, albeit following safety guidelines. Remote working gained ground as a defining trend that is likely to stay on into the future. Technologies have supported remote working and several digital forms of transacting business and finance.

The year has accelerated consumption of cloud services as most applications are now being delivered as a cloud service. While there are many advantages when it comes to the cloud, there are also security con-

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cerns that have come to the fore, especially with more people working out of anywhere and accessing corporate networks. Concerns around data management are also very significant in the multi cloud era. At GITEX, there would be solutions showcased that address several of these concerns while also empowering remote working in a more secure manner. It is indeed the era of distributed edge networks and empowering and securing them would be a key focus of solutions at the showcase. The event and the conversations around it enable us a view of the shifts in the industry in terms of what technologies are gaining ground and what are the concerns in the foreground.

On remote working as a defining trend of the year, Rajesh Ganesan, Vice President, ManageEngine says, “Remote working is not entirely new and has been prevalent at least over the last decade. It allowed people the ability to get their normal work done regardless of their location, but for mission critical jobs, they were still required at the office premises. However, with the pandemic forcing everyone out of the office premises for extended periods, businesses have to deploy technologies even to allow sensitive and mission critical jobs remotely. The normal work involved communication, collaboration, access to one's own corporate assets and less critical business applications. Whereas, for mission critical jobs, employees need privileged access to the network, systems, applications and data to be able to perform administrative and sensitive tasks. This need is not just for people in technology, but for everyone across all the business functions.”

He adds, “Adding to the challenge of this necessity is the reality that employees will work from random locations, with different devices, connecting from networks with no guarantee of security levels. Businesses do have the option of continuing to use legacy technologies like the VPN,

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

but it neither scales effectively nor allows other forms of remote access to be managed together. This has given rise to a new breed of technology solution that enables unified and secure remote access for every employee in the organization.”

ManageEngine is exhibiting at GITEX 2020 to showcase its unified endpoint management tool, Desktop Central; new-gen SIEM solution, Log360, which has UEBA capabilities for proactive threat analytics using AI and ML; and PAM360, which enables enterprises to establish strict privileged access governance and monitor privileged operations. The company will also highlight Device Control Plus and Application Control Plus, which enforce the principle of least privileges for employees using various devices and applications.

As a key trend, accelerated adoption of cloud services has played a key role in the near overnight transitions to remote working when lockdowns were announced across the world.

Fadi Kanafani, Managing Director – Middle East, NetApp says, “Undeniably, cloud has played a crucial role in helping businesses with enabling a large remote workforce and maintain business continuity.

Data at the edge took on a heightened relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses were forced to rapidly transition to remote work and shift large amounts of transferable data to the cloud. Many companies increased or changed their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) footprint to meet the demands of their remote users, and end-user computing (EUC) solutions were created to meet these demands across many workloads, on premises, in the cloud, or remote. From collaboration tools, to overall workloads, the cloud has been an indispensable asset for business.

It’s helped business support remote-access workers, help ensure the availability of data

» GITEX SPOTLIGHT and applications, and helped prepare for— and avoid—the next wave of potential disruptions.”

With business continuity being a key, NetApp helped customers implement Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), cloud and hybrid cloud models as they deployed a remote working strategy.

“We also gave customers access to our consumption model to gain a cost advantage and to lessen the complexities associated with IT infrastructure and lifecycle management. NetApp is enabling business with end-user computing (EUC), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and cloud solutions make it easy for IT to enable this kind of adaptability. We’ve also deployed the NetApp ONTAP AI platform in healthcare institutions as researchers worked aggressively on genomics, analytics, ” he adds.

NetApp through its virtual presence at GITEX this year will focus on the theme ‘Unlock the Best of Cloud’ and will be focusing on the new capabilities of its portfolio, showcasing its solutions in Cloud, Business Continuity, Data Services, Hybrid Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Security.

“We will also emphasize our data fabric vision as businesses rapidly adopt cloud.

With AI and cloud & edge computing undeniably being the technologies that are revolutionizing how businesses store, access, analyze and use their data to gain competitive advantage, NetApp is strategically placed to help businesses address the challenges that they have been facing over the past few months – businesses continuity being at the center, “ adds Fadi.

IMPACT OF DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS ON SECURITY

A significant shift today is that the technology infrastructure of modern organizations are typically and perhaps completely distributed, across private and public clouds, spanning multiple countries. The optimal upkeep of the infrastructure demands that administrators be given privileged access to every component, for both maintenance and troubleshooting.

“As administrators start to work from remote, using their own devices over insecure networks, the situation calls for a remote access solution that inherently packs layers

of security to account for every weak link introduced by extended remote work. Access to systems in public and private cloud, VMs in IaaS platforms, admin consoles of SaaS applications, databases and network devices spread across the infrastructure should all be seamless and unified for the administrators. From within one console, they should be able to launch a secure remote session to any of those components, with the whole session monitored and recorded for both security and compliance reasons,” says Rajesh.

ManageEngine exclusively launched a couple of products in the first quarter of 2020, to enable secure remote access for all employees. Remote Access Plus brought the ability for employees to initiate remote connections to Windows, Linux or Mac computers regardless of the user's or device's location.

It also allowed technicians the ability to remote access into users' computers at home for troubleshooting assistance. Whereas, Access Manager Plus, allowed administrators to launch RDP, VNC and SSH connections to critical infrastructure components without the need for VPN or any special software in employee devices.

While remote working brings on several security challenges including secure access to devices, the challenges around identity management can be considerable as well when cloud is the predominant form of IT. Morey Haber, CTO & CISO, BeyondTrust explains, “The single biggest threat to identity management in the era of the cloud is based on the loss of security controls that traditionally were available with on premise technology. For example, identity management in a traditional office environment delegated entitlements and security controls based on network zoning and segmentation to help define how and where an identity can have access from, and to. The identity itself could not have accounts authenticated or be authorized for tasks outside of a defined perimeter. In the era of the cloud, these security controls are no longer available to identity management.”

He adds, “Threat actors understand this principle and can leverage identity management in the cloud, unless other additional mitigating controls have been implemented. The most common ones include software defined perimeters, zero trust

Rajesh Ganesan

Vice President, ManageEngine

architectures, just in time access, and endpoint based least privilege security models.

These concepts add security controls that improve the confidence.”

The impact of edge security and distributed networks on privileged identity management has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. And since this model will continue to grow even after a vaccine is available and the pandemic has subsided, the threat vectors would be substantial.

“Organizations have seen a rapid increase in edge security models based on employees working from home and an intrinsic need to manage and validate identities outside of the traditional corporate perimeter. There is a fundamental truth in the expression “the perimeter is dead” since employees, access, resources, and applications need to be available from almost everywhere and nearly at any time due to the current health crisis, “Morey adds.

He believes that with the remote working trend likely to continue, privileged identity management takes center stage to provide confidence that the user is who they

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» GITEX SPOTLIGHT “While phishing remains the number one vehicle for conducting attacks, once successful, threat actors leverage the users’ compromised account, with associated privileges, to move laterally throughout the environment based on any entitlements assigned, or can that be stolen, associated with the identity. If identities are not managed, users can have a myriad of accounts associated with them that have administrative or root entitlements ripe for pilfering.”

With PIM, you can identify, manage, and remove all associated excessive rights to ensure phishing attacks and their associated threat actors cannot easily install malware or leverage an identity as a part of their attack.

Fadi Kanafani

Managing Director – ME, NetApp

say they are and that they should be permitted to complete sanctioned tasks.

“The best place to host this privileged identity management is in the cloud since it can be accessed virtually anywhere there is internet access and provide confidence and context for an identity even before any corporate resources have been accessed," he adds.

TOWARDS MORE CONTROL

Companies in the region are accelerating their transformations towards deploying tools that can help them be in better control as they move towards consuming more cloud services from multiple providers.

Rajesh says, “Indeed they are and this is a trend that has been happening for a while and the pandemic has only accelerated it.

As is always the case, technology alone cannot solve the problem holistically and this is where technology leaders have to play a crucial role of bridging together the business objectives, the organization culture, employee training and the right tools.

Moreover, this should be done in a way where each aspect complements each other.

For example, the tools should be intelligent enough to handle any employee lapses due to lack of training or inadvertent errors.”

On the PIM front, Morey adds that Businesses should make PIM a priority since it is truly the easiest attack vector for threat actors to compromise an environment.

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“Therefore, starting with PIM, hosted in the cloud to manage end users anywhere, is a recommended first step in mitigating modern attack vectors, “ adds Morey.

According to Fadi, AI is one of the biggest opportunities for businesses today and it will play a key role in enabling employees to work better in a new working environment. AI is already changing the way data is being processed and analyzed especially in the healthcare sector to help institutions with research and development of treatments. Applications of AI will be accelerated in everyday scenarios such as financial services fraud detection, retail purchase predictions, and online customer support interaction for example.

“The process of operationalizing artificial intelligence (AI) requires massive amounts of data to flow unhindered through a fivestage pipeline, from ingest through archive.

As enterprises of all types embrace AI technologies, they face data challenges, aka bottlenecks from edge to core to cloud.”

It has been a year of severe challenges but it can only get better from hereon. While vaccines are almost here, newer technologies are enabling greater possibilities for learning, working and collaborating on multiple fronts.

Rajesh says, “It has been a tough year for everyone around the world but the good news is we are already springing back to life and looking forward for the situation to get a lot better. Especially the technology industry which is going to lead major transformations in terms of organizations

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

Morey Haber

CTO & CISO, BeyondTrust

reinventing and executing new business models and the arrival of completely new players with fresh ideas. General availability of 5G networks, explosion of IoT and smart devices will disrupt every industry in how they operate. Technology will be a key underpinning for businesses regardless of their size and location.”

According to him, the teams responsible for running the technology infrastructure will literally progress to the front line, leading their business to achieve higher objectives.

“The objectives would be of delivering on user experience and business outcomes as opposed to just maintaining the systems.

And they will need all the ammunition to stay on top of their game and as their supplier, we are equally stoked at ManageEngine in building the tools they need. We are investing heavily in bringing AI and ML capabilities to our tools along with envisioning a fully integrated suite that will help our customers manage the users, end points and the infrastructure components holistically, from both operations and security perspective. “ Technologies have constantly evolved and every year we get to see some newer trends each year. The disruptions of the current year have redefined the landscape consid– Byand R. some Narayan erably of the changes are likely to be lasting.

Âť CIO OUTLOOK

A YEAR OF ACCELERATED

TRANSFORMATION Shino Thomas, Senior Vice President, Transformation Group, NBO (National Bank of Oman) shares his perspectives on how digital transformation has seen an acceleration driven by remote working compulsions Please elaborate how the need for Remote working has impacted the need for accelerated digital transformation in key sectors? From the IT team perspective, did it mean several new investments as well?

The need for remote working has certainly accelerated digital transformation in key sectors be it customer facing or internal to the organization. It has also really accelerated internal organization readiness to operate from different locations and as result many organizations have discovered themselves a new operating model, which otherwise they would have not dared to implement. The amazing fact is that most of the CIOs and enterprises have taken on the challenge head on and are ready to fulfill immediate and growing needs caused by the pandemic and gained in market value.

Although a few of the large organizations in terms of the Technology maturity were capable of managing the immediate requirement of enabling a large workforce from home, majority of enterprises IT team have been to devise a quick strategy to equip themselves to extend the work from home and support customers remotely to enable business continuity. Obviously this warrants for investment depending on the size of the organization right from the end user PC/laptops to security appliances, related configurations, infrastructure changes, VPN, moving internal applications to cloud, opening up internal network etc.

But the good thing is that these investments made are futuristic and many organizations as I mentioned earlier are thinking of changing their operating model to take leverage of the investment made and drive cost optimization.

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CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

What do you think the challenges were as organizations transitioned to newer ways of working?

There are challenges in various aspects of the enterprise during the transition, be it in terms of people, technology or fulfilling the customer expectations of how they expect to be served. Obviously the staff are affected by normal ways of working in relation to customers, agile methodologies and scrum techniques are challenged because of remote working, leaving employees with a loss of normal social contact with colleagues. As studies suggest, the psychological strain of isolation is bad for both mental and physical health and can have profound long-term consequences for individuals. This impacts productivity and, in turn, affects business performance. In terms of technology, obviously there is a greater risk in terms of security when you have a large surface of attack due to remote workplaces be it in terms of data leakage, security vulnerabilities. However, I’m sure over time organizations will mitigate these threats to a manageable level.

Another challenge organizations faced is to ensure customer service levels are maintained and the demand to up your digital offerings & services to cater to the need of hour, while on other side they are busy setting up internally for enabling remote working.

How has remote working impacted efficiencies of the workforce?

Initially, I believe organizations would have faced challenges in terms of efficiency because they need to exert too much effort to use technology, learning curve to adapt to new style of working, organizing themselves for work from home etc. But eventually, I think the situation has turned out to be good and new way working has been created where efficiency is not impacted. For example, some of the employees found it to be convenient to work from home and avoid the commuting time and also enjoy the flexibility to complete work at their own convenience.

So enterprises are looking to take advantage of this and may consider to have staff in some of the roles to continue to work permanently from remote locations, greater access to skillset across globe etc.

» CIO OUTLOOK How are these disruptions challenging the CIO in his role as a key decision maker for IT investments?

More than challenge, I feel CIOs see this as an opportunity to step in as a key business executive orchestrating digital acceleration. CIOs can use this as an opportunity to have key initiatives in terms of • Developing a clear digital goal • Build High digital dexterity • Elevate Enterprise Digital Competency & drive efficiency • Establish a new enterprise I&T model to implement cross cutting technology, integration platforms provided by IT organizations, to support the digitized enterprise.

Are critical sectors like Banks now more comfortable with cloud services from multiple cloud services providers in terms of security? Are those concerns addressed well by service providers?

Technology is moving towards cloud enabled infrastructure whether it is for efficiency, agility, scale or optimization.

Banks are increasing their cloud investments with the overwhelming majority focusing on private cloud deployments while public cloud is on the rise. Eventually cloud will become a norm for banking application as well and already Banks are embracing cloud for infrastructure , or non-core application and where ever regulatory permits even in core Banking.

Many of the new digital banks and fintech is already running fully on the cloud. It is vital for Banks to embrace cloud to harness the power of AI and Machine learning, Risk Management and payment processing, which will be key enabler for the digital transformation roadmap.

Definitely there will be concerns in terms of security, data privacy and regulatory aspect with respect to cloud movement and service providers are more aware of this and providing better solutions to address these concerns.

How is digital Banking taking off in the region as you see it - has the pandemic been a key driver?

I think almost all Banks would have witnessed an increased penetration and adoption in their digital channels during

Shino Thomas

Senior Vice President, Transformation Group , NBO

"EVENTUALLY CLOUD WILL BECOME A NORM FOR BANKING APPLICATION AS WELL AND ALREADY BANKS ARE EMBRACING CLOUD FOR INFRASTRUCTURE , OR NON-CORE APPLICATION AND WHERE EVER REGULATORY PERMITS EVEN IN CORE BANKING."

pandemic from a range of minimum 20 to 60% or even more. The fact is even after lock down is over, the customer digital behavior is still sustaining and not finding any deep dip in the adoption. Hence, I feel this is pivotal point for Banks to accelerate in offering their product and services digitally for enhanced revenue and optimization of the cost. Technology investment for the Banks in region would increase for digital innovation seeing IT as strategic investment. Banks would further collaborate with fintech in the region to create superior customer experience and differentiating value proposition for the customer. In general financial services as an industry will harness the power of digital create products, services, platform/ ecosystem ,partnership models which will derive value to customers.

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» INTERVIEW

DRIVING INDUSTRIAL

TRANSFORMATION

A

VEVA, a global leader in engineering and industrial software, focuses on solutions that help drive digital transformation in various industrial sectors. Dr Tariq Aslam, Head of MEA, AVEVA shares more details of their solutions

Elaborate on AVEVA's solutions that help drive digital transformation?

AVEVA provides innovative industrial software to transform complex industries such as Oil & Gas, Construction, Engineering, Marine, and Utilities to name some. Our software solutions and platform enable the design and management of complex industrial assets like power plants, chemical plants, water treatment facilities and food and beverage manufacturers – deploying IIoT, Cloud, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digitally transform industries.

When it comes to advancing industries in changing times, performance insights that are faster, deeper and more accurate are key to building a sustainable future.

By leveraging the most precise, opti-

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mized performance insights – organizations can reduce maintenance costs, improve on productivity, efficiency, safety, and sustainability.

We are the first company in the engineering and industrial software market to comprehensively address the end-toend digital transformation imperatives with an integrated portfolio of solutions that deliver efficiency, unlock value and empower people across the lifecycle of capital assets and operational value chains. AVEVA enables companies to realize capital project efficiency, edge to enterprise visualization, optimized value chains, safe and reliable operations, and a workforce enabled and empowered with rich information and decision support.

» INTERVIEW Cloud is critical right now and we are working across our customers to expedite their use of the technology. New technologies like AI enable four key areas to mitigate business and operational risk, improve workforce safety and efficiency, and forge a more reliable and secure enterprise - the four Ps: Predictive, Performance, Prescriptive and Prognostic.

What makes AVEVA unique is our full portfolio of products cover not only Operations of an asset and system but also the CAPEX side, or Engineering – in which we are currently developing new AI/ML modules to help our customers make better design decisions. To further this point, we believe most all of our products will be “AI-Infused” at some point in the near future as we are seeing high customer value in applying this technology across our portfolio.

How critical is the use of digital twins in managing digital transformation journeys in the industrial sector? Discuss from AVEVA's offerings point of view Digital twin technology is increasingly being deployed by organizations as part of their digital transformation journey.

It presents an opportunity to find new ways of working and rethink how people collaborate and engage with these information models to create value for the business – and not view digital twins as simply as automating the current way of doing business.

Digital twins provide the ability to create a virtual replica of potential and actual physical assets, processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes. Organizations use the technology for many reasons including testing new assets or procedures before launching them in the real world, where it becomes more expensive and complicated to fix any issues, the improvement of ongoing operations or training employees.

In practical terms, this type of technology can help improve the safety on an oil rig, improve the efficiency of a production plant, or ensuring buildings meet sustainability, efficiency or regulatory requirements.

Dr Tariq Aslam

Head of MEA, AVEVA

More importantly, a digital twin can help predict potential failures before they happen and suggest ways to prevent those failures. Knowing the current state of an asset, the digital model can use predictive learning technology to proactively identify potential asset failures before they occur and even suggest ways to prevent those failures. In other words, the digital twin can predict when its physical counterpart will break, well before that happens.

AVEVA offers the industries’ only comprehensive trusted digital twin, fully integrating the entire value chain from asset creation to operations delivered in real-time. By leveraging data that is created at every stage of the lifecycle, from design and build to operations and main-

tenance, organizations can gain a more innovative way of working.

Which are the industrial sectors of focus for AVEVA? AVEVA works with customers in the energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, power & utilities, chemicals, mining and marine industries to name some across the globe. Some of the biggest names in the Oil and Gas, food and beverages, water and mining industries in the Middle East and Africa are our clients. Smart Cities is also a huge focus for us in the region.

How do you see capital intensive industries benefiting from cloud-based transformation? In this context discuss your recent extended partnership with Microsoft around its Azure

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» INSIGHT cloud services True digital transformation platforms provide the ability to choose between deployment options including on premise, cloud or hybrid rollouts especially given the complexities of today’s challenging macro-economic environment. Agility in procurement options allows industrial organizations to obtain the required tools through several options, including perpetual licensing or subscription-based services solutions for implementing technology on an as needed, staged approach, which helps the organization reduce upfront costs and decrease time to value of new technology investments while accelerating a path toward increased profitability.

deployments in the industrial sectors of the region?

The IIoT, or Industrial Internet of Things, represents a new way to bring data from previously inaccessible data streams into a more complete view of a business. The Internet of Things generally refers to devices which were historically not connected to the internet, but now are – for example wearables, smart TVs, and security cameras. IIoT specifically refers to industrial devices that are now equipped with the capabilities to send data to HMI and SCADA systems or the cloud. These smart devices may include things like connected sensors, valves, switches, or field devices that connect to the network.

AVEVA recently introduced a ‘CloudFirst’ approach, which is a key component of our long-term software portfolio strategy to focus on providing core services in the cloud to ensure high uptime and availability, user management and the flexibility to try new solutions. We are also working with Microsoft to help customers explore new ways to leverage the value of cloud technologies as well as Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics.

Since IIoT offers organizations a powerful framework for operational continuity, we are seeing an increased uptake in the region. IIoT offers innovative ways to monitor and manage objects in the physical world, particularly as huge streams of data offer organizations better avenues for decision making, with benefits such as more uptime, more efficiency and a more engaged and empowered workforce. This possible due to the access they have to a unified stream of insightful intelligence, at a time when it’s never been more important to contextualize data and information that drive actionable insights.

We recently extended our long-standing strategic collaboration with Microsoft to help maximize the value that customers can derive from the integration of AVEVA’s portfolio with Microsoft cloud services and especially Microsoft Azure (infrastructure, data and AI services), helping them achieve implementations quicker, connect teams more readily and drive growth opportunities throughout their integrated portfolio. Our key focus areas revolve around cloud as well as transforming the workforce (connected worker), and building a common Asset Strategy (Asset Performance Management). Working with Microsoft, we will continue to focus on three key areas - platform integration, a multi-solution engagement approach, and a shared go-to-market strategy. The platform integration approach can help generate new ways to increase business value for customers.

Is there an acceleration around IIoT

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"IIOT OFFERS INNOVATIVE WAYS TO MONITOR AND MANAGE OBJECTS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, PARTICULARLY AS HUGE STREAMS OF DATA OFFER ORGANIZATIONS BETTER AVENUES FOR DECISION MAKING, WITH BENEFITS SUCH AS MORE UPTIME, MORE EFFICIENCY AND A MORE ENGAGED AND EMPOWERED WORKFORCE"

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

The barriers to adopting IIoT technology have fallen dramatically in the past decade.

Historical challenges to implementing IIoT solutions included expensive components to add network connectivity, difficulty aggregating data from disparate data streams, and lack of a centralized dashboard.

The use of IIoT through real-time online monitoring and analytics has had a profound impact by improving response times to potential issues and minimizing possible damage to the environment, which has ultimately resulted in the avoidance of costly unscheduled shutdowns, while improving profits. IIoT has made a vast difference to the efficiency of the industry and is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Discuss AVEVA's go to market strategies in brief. What kind of channel or partners do you work with?

AVEVA has a robust presence in the MEA region with a strong team of professionals including technical experts and a growing channel partner network of some of the reputed distributors, systems integrators, value-added resellers, and industry specialists. Through our technology, we are empowering industry to achieve more efficiency and drive towards higher productivity. Over time, we want our software to help our Middle East customers work towards a more sustainable future. This mindset is shared by our team, and it is why we are committed to supporting industrial transformation, enabling our customers to realize a better future and our planet to thrive.

With over 5,000 members globally, AVEVA’s Partner and Channel Network is one of the most active and supportive global networks in the industrial and manufacturing sector. In 2021, we will continue to strengthen our MEA channel network by appointing new partners, who are established in their respective domains. Through AVEVA Select, our new partner program, we plan to grow our partner network from strength to strength by offering real value and enabling our network members to work better together to help their customers create increased business value.

6-10 20 Dec 20

DUBAI WORL D TRADE CENTRE

INSPIRING THE NEXT DECADE OF BREAKTHROUGHS #GITEX2020

Be part of the year’s only global tech event, LIVE in Dubai

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Co-located with

Some of our 2020 Exhibitors

» INTERVIEW

ADDRESSING THE MARKET DEMAND DVCOM Technology, a specialist VAD in the region and has several new solutions to showcase at this year’s GITEX. Renjan George, Managing Director at DVCOM TECHNOLOGY LLC discusses how they are responding to the current needs of the market in terms of products and solutions they offer Elaborate on the partnerships you have signed recently with vendors in the current year?

DVCOM is known for its choice of world class vendors in the ICT space but essentially in the hardware solutions space. With the pandemic changing the way companies work our focus has been to get a pie of the digital share of spend which has grown fast. Keeping this in mind we were quick to partner with Zoom a video conference software company that everyone knows about.

Gartner has positioned Zoom in the Leaders Quadrant of both the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions and Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, Worldwide and we are excited with this partnership.

Another exciting partnership has been with Teridion, the company delivering the only global public cloud-based SD-WAN service. Teridion’s global SD-WAN service is fully integrated with all leading WAN, SD-WAN and security edge solutions from providers such as Cisco Meraki, Fortinet, Citrix, Palo Alto Networks and others, and also supports connectivity to legacy branch office routers and firewalls. Enterprises no longer need to deploy costly carrier circuits or MPLS networks to gain high performance.

With Teridion, customers can expect lightning-fast file transfers, pristine voice and video sessions, and overall performance comparable to MPLS. Another top security concern for organizations is phishing attacks. 91% of all cyber-attacks start with phishing and 86% of organisations report being a victim of phishing. Cyberfish, whom we have signed up with recently combines Computer Vision and AI to stop phishing emails and websites in real-time - before they have been reported or added to the blacklists. Because standard anti-phishing protection is not enough, Cyberfish “looks” at emails, landing pages and even attachments using Computer Vision and AI, analyzes their actual visual representation and stops impersonation attacks in real-time.

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CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

Growth of e-learning has been instrumental in driving the growth of the interactive flat panel market which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34% by 2023. We have partnered with OneScreen for this region to makes it as simple as possible for people to work together and have productive interactions – without technological barriers – from wherever they are. Just as smartphones were suddenly everywhere once a touchscreen made them easy to use, OneScreen brings the plug-and-play concept to collaboration tech. The enterprise and education markets are just now beginning to catch up to the beauty of OneScreen’s elegant approach.

OneScreen was the first and remains the only interactive smart board manufacturer that provides the Screen Skills Guru service - unlimited, free, live help and training on any of their solutions.

OneScreen Hubware 6 introduces an evolution in the sensitivity of touch, the speed of wireless streaming, and the range of apps that deploy in an instant. Functionalities like real-time polling, easy dial out,screen sharing, interoperability, and translation have never been easier.

Discuss the new range from Yealink you will be showcasing at GITEX ?

DVCOM is showcasing Yealink’s latest UC solutions for businesses that include all-new audio and video solutions for Microsoft Teams and Zoom Rooms which allow users to work seamlessly from anywhere. This includes the Meeting Bar A20, an advanced all-in-one video device that integrates everything for orchestrating seamless video collaboration in huddle rooms; the MVC400, a native and easy-to-use video conferencing solution and the ZVC800 Zoom Rooms Kit. Visitors can experience an intelligent USB-wired headset, the UH36, that ensures clarity and convenience in every conversation. DVCOM is also displaying Yealink’s latest all-in-one IP phone solutions including the new-gen T4U series with dual USB ports, Ultra HD sound quality, and faster response speed; the T3 series, an ideal entry-level

» INTERVIEW business IP phone for daily desktop voice communications; and the third generation video conferencing endpoint, the MeetingEye series. Another highlight in this age of remote working is the Yealink Meeting which is a distributed cloud-based service platform tailored for multi-way video conferencing collaboration.

Characterized with rich functions, it provides 1080P full encoding and decoding capability and multi-groups and large-capacity conferences, scheduled conference, meet-now conference, etc.

Yealink Meeting is based on highly secured Amazon Web Services (AWS), which have industry-leading security practices and compliance, to avoid external malicious attack.

Yeastar is presenting its state-of-the-art PBX lineup for SME businesses for the first time in the region. The latest Yeastar P-Series PBX System converges voice, mobility, presence, web application, collaboration, and more for SMEs to fill the UC gap and embrace versatile, boundless communications. It also comes with advanced call centre features for SMEs to maximize their agent efficiency and boost customer satisfaction. Linkus UC Clients enable P-Series PBX users to easily turn mobile phones and desktops into office extensions. It also comes with a Operator Panel which is a visualized console for receptionists to quickly manage incoming calls based on the real-time availability of employees.

Discuss solutions from your end to enable remote working in a secured manner for organizations?

As more employees work remotely, enterprises face increasing challenges connecting them effectively to the organization’s network. Working remotely increases employees’ exposure to the volatility of the public Internet. Teridion’s solution is like having MPLS wherever you are. It provides high performance connectivity without any additional hardware or software. The solution allows employees to work remotely, using any device and operating system. It optimizes the use of Teams, Zoom and other unified communications tools and delivers fast, reliable access to your workloads in the cloud and on site.

The patented algorithm connects remote employees to the optimal Point of Presence to ensure consistently good performance.

Performance SLAs at an MPLS-level are guaranteed. The solution is interoperable with any cloud-based security solutions and is managed via Teridion’s portal and APIs. Which have been the key solutions that have shown increased demand in the current year?

COVID-19 has also changed the way companies operate. Businesses have found themselves forced to focus on remote working. Organizations have realized that they can operate remotely often at the same or higher levels of productivity and cost efficiency and they expect their remote interactions to operate smoothly. This has rocketed the usage of digital tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom by around 700%. Being a Yealink dis-

Renjan George

Managing Director, DVcom Technology LLC

"WITH THE PANDEMIC CHANGING THE WAY COMPANIES WORK OUR FOCUS HAS BEEN TO GET A PIE OF THE DIGITAL SHARE OF SPEND WHICH HAS GROWN FAST. KEEPING THIS IN MIND WE WERE QUICK TO PARTNER WITH ZOOM A VIDEO CONFERENCE SOFTWARE COMPANY THAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT."

tributor we were rightly placed to take advantage of this boom by providing Microsoft and Zoom certified hardware to meet the increasing demand to interact, connect, and collaborate with internal and external users seamlessly and intelligently, covering every scenario from small to extra-large spaces.

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» INSIGHT

THE CASE FOR A ‘CLOUD BEST’ STRATEGY

Patrick Smith, CTO EMEA, Pure Storage discusses why it’s time UAE organizations shift from a cloud-first strategy to a cloud-best one A lot has already been written about how the COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked most UAE organizations’ digital transformation efforts. As a case in point, according to AppDynamics’ The Agents of Transformation Report, 86% of UAE technologists reported that digital transformation projects which would typically take more than a year to be approved, were signed off in a matter of weeks and 78% point to digital transformation projects that have been implemented within weeks rather than the months or years it would have taken before the pandemic.

One solution that has come into the spotlight like never before is the cloud. Before the pandemic struck, cloud adoption was growing in popularity with $222.8 billion in public cloud investment in 2019 according to Gartner. While IDC reported that public cloud represented more than 30 percent of the overall cloud IT infrastructure market this year and estimated growth of almost 40 percent by 2023. Therefore, even before the pandemic, it was clear how critical cloud was becoming in supporting application delivery and assisting developers with new projects.

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So what is the reason for its popularity? CTOs and CIOs are looking for agile, simple and scalable solutions. These characteristics continue to make the cloud model even more attractive when businesses are tasked with delivering projects quickly and have to manoeuvre the challenge of legacy IT equipment, as is the case for many companies operating in the current environment.

That being said, it’s important that leaders should refrain from rushing to adopt a ‘cloud-first’ strategy, and instead opt for a ‘cloud-best’ approach. This means aligning cloud to your business strategy, not the other way around. In doing so, it prevents over-spending for underwhelming returns, and keeps IT closely aligned to business needs.

NO LONGER A QUESTION OF PUBLIC CLOUD OR PRIVATE CLOUD

Those who are approaching the cloud for the first time face the classic question around which type of service to choose, public

» INSIGHT or private. Both have different use-cases and can be critical for businesses in achieving their objectives. For instance, the public cloud is agile, scalable and simple to use, great for teams looking to get up and running quickly. However, the private cloud offers its own benefits, chiefly a greater degree of control over data and performance. As organisations hosting their data in a private cloud are in full control of that data, there’s typically a more consistent security posture and a greater degree of flexibility and control over how that data is used and managed. Moreover, the private cloud can typically deliver faster and higher through-put environments for those mission critical applications that cannot run in the public cloud without business impacting performance issues.

However, companies risk getting caught in the cloud divide, feeling as though public cloud is not appropriate for their enterprise applications, or that on-prem enterprise infrastructure isn’t as user-friendly, simple or scalable as the public cloud.

Ultimately organisations should be able to make infrastructure choices based on what’s best for their business, not constrained by what the technology can do or where it lives. That age-old dilemma of choosing between private or public cloud no longer needs to exist. An option to unite the best of both worlds, the hybrid cloud, has emerged. This has become a strategy that underpins this ‘cloud-best’ approach that companies are opting for.

It allows them to simultaneously leverage the private cloud with its enterprise grade capabilities, and the public cloud, with all the agility, ease of use and dynamism that it offers.

HYBRID CLOUD — BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

As part of this cloud-best approach, leaders need to understand that the technology is no longer part of an isolated delivery option, but should be folded into part of an all-encompassing strategy; including public and private cloud, on-premises enterprise systems, IoT edge, Software-as-a-Service and a variety of other solutions. They should also prioritize a robust data strategy, as the portability and mobility of data and applications is essential to efficient development. Most businesses that are more than 10 years old started with a traditional on-premise only portfolio, but now they are looking at adopting a hybrid environment where applications can migrate seamlessly between private and public clouds. To deliver on this they need a solution that unifies cloud and delivers a common set of data services across on-premises and cloud, enabling consistent storage capabilities, APIs, and resiliency so that applications can be built once and run anywhere. It’s therefore best that companies work closely with their IT vendors to remove the complexity of legacy IT infrastructure and facilitate a cloud-best approach.

Hybrid IT models are continuing to gain traction with over 75 percent of midsize and large organizations having adopted or planning to roll out a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy by 2021. It is no surprise that these models are being adopted at such rates as they offer companies the best of both cloud worlds, and provide businesses with much needed agility. This is why hybrid is quickly becoming a core principle of digital businesses.

THE RISE OF AS-A-SERVICE, FLEXIBLE CONSUMPTION MODELS

In addition to the growing popularity of hybrid IT models, a

Patrick Smith

CTO EMEA, Pure Storage

select group of modern IT vendors have taken a very different approach to infrastructure consumption. It is thought about, implemented and consumed very much as a service, with a recognition that IT teams have organized themselves around the experience of public cloud. In tandem, organisations have shifted away from admins to engineers, to build infrastructure designed as a strategic tool and innovation driver rather than to simply keep the lights on. Modern IT professionals are not hired to turn screws and manage IT, they’re hired to focus on business-critical innovations that help the organisation achieve its objectives.

It’s very different from the traditional IT skill set. Infrastructure delivered as a cloud-like experience for developers empowers them to be more productive.

Ultimately, some leaders might choose to adopt one type of cloud service or the other, but this typically lends itself to a cloud-first approach, as opposed to cloud-best. For those modern, far sighted CIOs and CTOs that need to innovate, hybrid cloud is no longer a question. Leaders need to ensure they are benefitting from the best of both worlds with hybrid IT. By combining the enterprise class capabilities of private cloud with the scalability and agility of the public cloud, businesses can continue to innovate and outperform competitors during these times of uncertainty.

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» INSIGHT

CATERING TO THE CHANGING APP LANDSCAPE

Ahmed El Saadi, Regional Sales Director / METNA & SSA, Virtual Cloud Network & Security at VMware discusses the changes in networking as deperimeterization becomes a reality

I

t can be hard to bring the topic of networking into conversations at board level. In many ways, networking is a victim of its own success - if networks are performing well, then they struggle to attract any attention – they just work transparently. Yet in the context of business-critical modern apps, networking is critical. These apps, and their supporting microservices, are becoming increasingly disparate and data hungry. And networks are becoming an integral part of them, acting as a mesh-like conduit tying everything together and delivering digital experiences to end users.

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As workforces become increasingly distributed, and our reliance on modern apps, clouds and new devices increases, organisations need to recognise the expanding role that a modern, transformed network plays in facilitating modern business IT and ensuring end user satisfaction.

NETWORKING IN THE CONTEXT OF BUSINESS-WINNING MODERN APPS AND DATA

Apps and their users are increasingly data hungry, and the nature of this data, and where it lives, has changed. Data is now

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

much more disparate, spread from data centre to edge to endpoints, and everywhere in between. It’s also growing, and fast. By 2024 more than three quarters of a billion applications will exist – a six-fold increase in just ten years.

The very nature of apps themselves is also changing rapidly. Traditional apps were monolithic slabs of code, usually existing on a single server. In this scenario, the network’s main role was one of point-topoint connectivity. Modern, cloud-native apps are very different, however. They are made up of a series of small individual

» INSIGHT modules – so called microservices – that can exist anywhere, and communicate with each other via the network to form the app. This makes the network in effect part of the modern app itself, marking an entirely new use case for networking.

End users’ desire for feature-rich apps is also driving these changes, forcing developers to develop them at an ever-increasing speed. This requires new, mesh-like networks that seamlessly and automatically scale to everywhere that data and apps exist. Most traditional network infrastructures aren’t fit for this purpose. Organisations need a modernized network that is self-driving, scalable and agile, and meets the needs of modern business.

NETWORKING IN THE CONTEXT OF DEPERIMETERIZATION

Security and networking have always gone together, but as threats have increased and the demands on networks have grown, we are seeing even faster convergence. As a result, deperimeterization – the blurring of an organisation’s network boundary with the outside world – is becoming the norm to accommodate modern cloud-native applications, SaaS, remote working and so on.

Deperimeterization brings huge challenges, however. The first is complexity.

With organisations implementing modern applications that often span on-premises, cloud and edge environments, it’s extremely challenging for IT to manage application and service portfolios with any level of consistency. The second is an expanded attack surface - the increase in network communication between and within distributed applications creates more potential opportunities for breaches.

Delivering improved security via the network, rather than by a plethora of discrete point solutions, facilitates a universal ‘zero-trust’ approach to security, and the added intelligence, automatability and agility it provides. This is a key attribute of a modern network.

KEY FACTORS OF A SUCCESSFUL MODERN NETWORK

Modern Networking is a software-defined, virtual evolution of the traditional physical network, which leverages whatever existing infrastructure is available.

Ahmed El Saadi

Regional Sales Director - METNA & SSA, Virtual Cloud Network & Security, VMware

It drives universal and consistent connectivity and delivering intrinsic security to modern and traditional applications that meet user demand, at speed, by automating network and security policies.

A modern network consists of: o Modern app connectivity services A Modern Network uses capabilities such as service mesh so applications can communicate internally and with one another, and security models such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to give networks the agility to adapt to changing business needs in real time. o Multi-cloud network virtualization A Modern Network needs to be self-driven and self-healing, using AI and ML to reconfigure networking and security policies regularly. This again is where SASE comes in, steering traffic on a packet-by-packet basis across multiple clouds and locations to achieve the highest quality of user experience.

o Independence to the physical network infrastructure Software-defined networking is what delivers agility, but the underlying physical network infrastructure still plays a core role. Acting as a generic all-purpose platform, it is controlled by the overlay virtual network and can be reconfigured and rerouted to meet business requirements as needed.

MASTERING A MODERN NETWORK TO DRIVE BUSINESS SUCCESS

Customer experience is directly linked to business success and is fed both by modern apps and the data that flows through them. Ultimately a modern network is designed to best serve the needs of the end user – be that the employee or customers.

It not only enables greater alignment with business outcomes, but also provides an indispensable, adaptable digital foundation to power the new, digital-first world.

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Âť INSIGHT

THE FUTURE OF

CONNECTIVITY Sakkeer Hussain, Director, Sales and Marketing, D-Link Middle East and Africa, explores the future of connectivity and highlights the potential of mesh networks.

T

echnology will continue to be even more deeply rooted in our lives than it already is – in the future everything will be about connectivity. Home automation will increasingly become the norm, with customer expectations nothing short of unprecedented technologies that are seamless and unified. The main technologies that will define the connected and smart home future include cloud, IoT, latest Wi-Fi versions and hardware, innovations within networks and so on. This year we have seen the accelerated adoption of digital transformation technologies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and as we enter into the newyear, this is expected to further increase.

The global smart home market is expected to reach a value of more than $53 billion by 2022. The backbone technologies fueling the growth of this segment include Internet of Things (IoT), enabled by fast and stable Wi-Fi connections. According to a report by research firm IDC, spending on IoT technologies in the Middle East and Africa is set to reach $17.63 billion by 2023, as governments and organizations prioritize and invest in digital transformation projects.

Technologies such as 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will also play a key role in customer adoption of smart homes. The rampant growth of

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5G networks will clear the path for even more intelligent means of home automation. 5G will enable seamless uninterrupted networks all around the house, satiating users’ need for speed and higher bandwidth. The latest generation of wireless technology offers better reliable coverage, lower cost-per-bit, enhanced network performance and unified integration of 4G systems and Wi-Fi. It will also allow for a much higher number of devices to be connected to the Internet.

Wi-Fi 6, also known as AX Wi-Fi or 802.11ax Wi-Fi, also offers users the opportunity to achieve speedier and even more efficient performance from routers and other devices. Wi-Fi 6, introduced in the market in 2019, greatly expands and enriches the current 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.

According to research firm IDC, Wi-Fi 6 will offer extensive benefits to a vast number of users and use cases. The most important advantages will be seen in areas with high densities of users or client devices connecting to and transferring data over wireless networks. The research firm states that businesses that face these challenges will be the first adopters of the technology while others will integrate it as part of regular cyclical refreshes of WLAN hardware upgrades.

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

With so many different devices and appliances being connected to the Internet, it is worth ensuring that the router is updated and can distribute connections to your devices effectively. Sometimes, owners only think of checking the reliability of the WiFi connection after they have moved into the house, only to then realize they might have to invest even more to have the connections up to standard.

The smart homes of the future should be built with connectivity as its foundation.

Robust, fast and reliable Wi-Fi connections are essential to the smooth operation of a smart home or building. There is nothing more frustrating for homeowners when they experience inadequate quality of connectivity or poor coverage of Wi-Fi, making their homes momentarily unintelligent. This is why Mesh Wi-Fi routers can be the answer to most Wi-Fi-related challenges.

Mesh Wi-Fi Routers Mesh routers are the cutting-edge technology upgrade for home Wi-Fi setups, that can be the answer to most Wi-Fi challenges. It has been in use for many years in big spaces where network security was vital such as military bases and other businesses. It is a proven and stable technology.

Today, the technology can be applied at residential spaces to enhance home Wi-Fi. Many channel partners and customers are still not clear about how mesh routers work and why it is the better option.

Partners find it challenging to convince

Âť INSIGHT customers to upgrade their old routers, let alone make the switch to mesh routers.

So, what are mesh networks and how do they work? Often one of the biggest problems for most users is having spaces in their homes where the Wi-Fi connection is not strong enough or suddenly drops. A mesh router system employs multiple WiFi routers, part of a single wireless network, to operate together to cover every part of your home with an uninterrupted and strong wireless data connection. Technologies are evolving at a dynamic pace.

It is important to stay up to date with the latest technology to get the best possible results. Mesh networks adapt more efficiently to the way customers use technology today.

The advanced Mesh Wi-fi technology from global connectivity solutions provider D-Link boosts wireless network connectivity, effortlessly facilitating domotics or home automation across smart homes. A home automation system usually includes regulating lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances.

Sometimes it may also have to manage home security such as access control and alarm systems. D-Link’s mesh technology innovation Covr offers a seamless Wi-Fi solution that is ideal for modern smart homes. It envelops every inch of the home with high speed AC1200 Dual-Band WiFi, enabling users to experience stable, consistent and seamless Wi-Fi. D-Link had also introduced its all-new Exo Smart Mesh Wi-Fi Router series recently, adding to its portfolio of seamless connection solutions for the home, in the Middle East and Africa market. The next-generation routers offer high-performance Wi-Fi connectivity combined with McAfee protection, providing a faster and more secure home network.

ADVANTAGES OF MESH NETWORKING There are several advantages of using mesh networks in your home or small to medium office spaces.

Sakkeer Hussain

Director, Sales and Marketing, D-Link MEA

1. They are devised to offer easy network access from any point of your home or office.

lation of firmware updates. Some of the latest mesh routers are equipped with features to screen and block malicious sites.

2. No longer do you have to walk in and out of rooms searching for a spot that has the strongest Wi-Fi connection. Mesh networks offer uniform signal quality and strength, giving you an uninterrupted wireless experience.

The biggest benefit of mesh networks is that customers no longer have to worry about dead zones or connection gaps and can have a true seamless experience, whether they are streaming movies or video calling. The use cases and potential of mesh networks are far and wide. To sum up, the way we communicate, and speed of connectivity will transform greatly in the future. It is essential to stay tuned to the market developments to leverage the advantages a connected future can offer.

3. With IoT spending on the rise, one of the key issues that arises is security around connected devices and routers.

Mesh networks offer advanced security and enable automatic check and instal-

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» COLUMN

Effective cloud-native strategies must include application-performance monitoring writes David Noël, regional vice president, Southern Europe, Middle East & Africa at AppDynamics

2

020 has tested our resolve. As businesses found themselves with splintered workforces and stayat-home customers, they had to find ways to evolve their operations to fit a new reality. Customers and employees alike required a different IT architecture to be able to carry on as before. The acceleration of digital transformation may have been inevitable in hindsight, but it spun the head of many a regional CIO.

MONITORING CLOUD NATIVE APPLICATIONS 38

CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

Even before the current crisis, 88% of technology managers in the UAE intended to spend more on cloud computing, according to a YouGov survey, and analyst IDC predicts the Arab Gulf’s public cloud market to more than double in four years.

Furthermore, IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud Infrastructure Tracker found that COVID-19 was directly responsible for an acceleration of cloud infrastructure procurement in MENA this year.

But despite this collective enthusiasm, cloud isn’t an easy win or one-size-fitsall solution. It requires careful planning and it’s likely that your board will want to know their return on investment. Many businesses have rightly turned to cloud for answers, but they might be missing a trick.

In a fast-changing, rapidly evolving business landscape, real-time application performance monitoring (APM) is the most effective way of getting the most out of applications serving your customers and ultimately your business, especially those built natively in the cloud.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF VISIBILITY

If employees are cut off from the resources they need or if a customer is waiting endlessly for a webpage to load, the cloud is clearly not delivering on its best-of-all-worlds promise. Both these issues likely arose from poor underlying performance in the suite of applications that form the organisation’s digital backbone.

They can be alleviated, even eliminated, by real-time monitoring.

This is especially true of so-called cloud-native applications, which are containerised and subject to continual updates. In such development environments, the ability to respond quickly to operational bottlenecks — to identify the source, make amendments to code or configuration, and redeploy — is vital. Modern marketplaces tend to consist of an increasing number of digital transactions. If a customer encounters a point of failure, they will quickly pivot to a competitor and tell their friends about it. In the digital realm, bad reputations spread at an alarming rate. But according to research firm Gartner, not even 15% of enterprises have made moves to deploy monitoring solutions.

As cloud adoption continues to spread, the popularity of multicloud environments — which can involve several public-cloud providers and a range of virtualised and physical ecosystems — are rapidly dominating. Different providers may be custodians of different parts of the infrastructure, leading to complexity, but also undeniable cost savings.

THE DEMAND FOR APPS

So, in search of flexibility and innovation potential, a business may find itself trying to wrestle with a highly distributed application architecture. How can the developers of cloud-native systems manage their domains and deliver timely responses to performance issues?

Cloud-native development strategies are relevant because the demand for new digital capabilities is unrelenting. According to IDC, organisations have an average of 127 applications in operation with plans to grow this number by 40% in the next five years. Cloud-native is seen widely as the quick-win route, but since much of this development is occurring in complex environments, the case for effective monitoring and analysis is absolute.

Remember that the business case for cloud-native itself revolves around enhanced operational efficiency, improved customer experience, and accelerated innovation. Optimisation of the deployment environment is therefore crucial.

By investing in effective tools that visualise complex environments and present a simplified overview — and allow granular drill down and analysis in real time — enterprises can unlock the full potential of cloud-native application development. They can enjoy rapid time-to-market, optimal scalability, great flexibility, better customer experiences and reduced costs.

Organisations that fail to monitor cloud-native applications, particularly if they operate in a multi-cloud world, have seen a frustrating shortfall between expectations and the value delivered.

And poor ROI can lead to a lack of faith in the whole approach.

David Noël

Regional Vice President, Southern Europe, MEA, AppDynamics

UNITING IT AND BUSINESS GOALS

The right application performance monitoring tools must give users a broad and deep view of their cloud-native and traditional technologies and be able to tie application health to business outcomes in real time. The most advanced of these monitoring tools will leverage AI to predict performance issues before they translate into irate users.

One important element to the cloud-native strategy is the collaboration between those normally disparate areas of business and technology. IT teams should be included in business discussions.

After all, they are building the firm’s digital presence and hence its brand. Unified cloud monitoring must include humans teaming up on the things that matter most, so that innovation may be accelerated.

Cloud-native application development allows shrewd businesses to make a name for themselves quickly. To be shrewd means appreciating the importance of insights and intelligence that show how applications are affecting the business’ public image. Application-monitoring systems deliver these insights and lead to enhancements in brand loyalty, employee morale and profits.

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» TECHSHOW

YEALINK MEETINGBAR A20

A certified video collaboration bar for Microsoft Teams with Yealink MeetingBar A20. A20 incorporates a 20 MP camera with wide angle lens, 8 microphone array and 5W speaker.

The camera supports automatic speaker tracking and framing to provide an effortlessly natural conferencing experience.

The microphone features an improved algorithm for picking out individual voices. In addition, Yealink has developed face brightness enhancement technology so your faces won't be lost in shadows.

wireless connectivity — convenient. Although compact, it's powerful — including dual display support to show both people and content at the same time. And A20 maintains security with an automatic privacy shutter.

Yealink MeetingBar A20 uses an 8 MEMS microphone array and high-powered speaker to provide HD full-duplex conversations. Yealink Noise Proof technology greatly reduces background distractions. The automatic privacy shutter ensures security in the office.

• 20MP camera with wide-angle 133° lens

MeetingBar A20 supports Bluetooth and dual band Wi-Fi for

DBA-X1230P The DBA-X1230P is a 2x2 Access Point based on 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) technology which can reach outstanding throughput up to 1,800 Mbps (AX1200 + AX570) combined data rate.

The DBA-X1230P supports MU-MIMO which can take advantage of all streams to serve more wireless client to dramatically improve wireless experience. The user can managed AP control by D-Link Nuclias Cloud.

DBA-X1230P is an indoor concurrent dual band access point, it supports 2x2:2 spatial streams based on 11ax technology which can reach outstanding throughput at maximum AX1800 combined data rate.

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CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020

Highlights: • Certified for Microsoft Teams • All-in-one video collaboration bar: camera, microphone, speaker • Automatic framing, speaker tracking, and face brightness enhancement • 8 MEMS microphone array and 5W speaker for full-duplex audio

» TECHSHOW

LIGHTSCENE EV-100 A convergence of lighting and display technology, LightScene laser projectors captivate audiences by simultaneously illuminating and projecting on virtually any surface or material, unleashing dynamic, experiential content for digital art, commercial signage and décor applications. Designed to blend in discreetly to any setting — from retail, hospitality and event spaces to showrooms and museums — LightScene EV-100 offers a sleek, white spotlight design, with an array of configuration, mounting and programming options.

The LightScene EV-100 allows you to to create instantly appealing visuals with sharp WXGA resolution and 2,000-lumen brightness. Yet thanks to its low visual noise white casing, it can be used where a traditional projector would stand out, such as window displays and as part of exhibitions.

A light, flexible design means the EV-100 can be installed in a variety of ways, from a traditional ceiling mount to a freestanding floor mount, or attached to an existing lighting track like a spotlight¹. It can also be mounted at and project from any angle, including portrait. The projector can be used as a traditional spotlight for when simple lighting effects are needed.

UL MU-MIMO is one of new key features introduced on DBAX1230P. By leveraging UL MU-MIMO, sounding frames, data frames, etc can be grouped among multiple users to reduce overhead and increase uplink response time. This ultimately improves network throughput and efficiency.

Highlights • Discreet signage projector: Low visual noise white casing won't grab the spotlight •

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Sharp, vivid projection: 2,000-lumen brightness and detailed WXGA resolution Flexible installation: Can be ceiling-mounted, floor-standing or attached to a lighting track Easy playlist loading: Playlist can be loaded from an SD Card without the need for a computer Fit and forget reliability: Durable Epson technology supported by a five-year 20,000-hour warranty

 Up to 1800 Mbps with 2 x 2 MU-MIMO with two spatial streams  Supports MU-MIMO and load balancing  Simplified deployment, enabling installation into an existing network infrastructure  Integrates Gigabit PoE Ethernet LAN port

DL/UL MU-MIMO with four spatial streams can serve multiple capable wireless clients simultaneously and utilizes the spectrum more efficiently. Extensive range of management functions can be performed hassle-free from anywhere through the D-Link Nuclias cloud

Key Features:  IEEE 802.11ax Wireless Access Point

 Zero-touch provisioning, AP can be provisioned before deployment  Band Steering intelligently manages users, pushing them onto the higher radio frequency when possible  Stay secure with the latest WPA3 Personal & Enterprise wireless encryption  Support for Power of Ethernet 802.3at means less wires, for cleaner annd easier deployment

DECEMBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» TRENDS & STATS

WORLDWIDE PUBLIC CLOUD END-USER SPENDING TO GROW 18% IN 2021 Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. “The pandemic validated cloud’s value proposition,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “The ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing the impetus for organizations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans. The increased use of public cloud services has reinforced cloud adoption to be the ‘new normal,’ now more than ever.”

The proportion of IT spending that is shifting to cloud will accelerate in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, with cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020.

Although software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to grow to $117.7 billion in 2021, application infrastructure services (PaaS) is anticipated to grow by a higher margin at 26.6% (see Table). The increased consumption of PaaS is driven by the need for remote workers to have access to high performing, content-rich and scalable infrastructure to perform their duties, which largely comes in the form of modernized and cloud-native applications.

“The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to quickly focus on three priorities: preserve cash and optimize IT costs, support and secure a remote workforce, and ensure resiliency,” said Nag. “Investing in cloud became a convenient means to address all three of these needs.”

In fact, recent Gartner survey data indicates that almost 70% of organizations using cloud services today plan to increase

their cloud spending in the wake of the disruption caused by COVID-19.

As enterprises increase investments in mobility, collaboration, and other remote working technologies and infrastructure, Gartner expects growth in public cloud to be sustained through 2024.

The rising trend of cloud service providers partnering with telecommunications companies to extend their reach into the edge and support a hybrid workforce may also lead to further market growth.

“As CIOs think more strategically about how to lay the foundations to support a return to growth, it is clear that the move to digital and associated services will play a big role for organizations in the future,” said Nag. “Cloud adoption therefore becomes a significant means to stay ahead in a post-COVID-19 world focused on agility and digital touchpoints.”

WORLDWIDE PUBLIC CLOUD SERVICES END-USER SPENDING FORECAST (MILLIONS OF U.S. DOLLARS) Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS) Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS) Cloud Application Services (SaaS) Cloud Management and Security Services Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) Desktop as a Service (DaaS) Total Market

2019 45,212 37,512 102,064 12,836 44,457 616 242,696

2020 44,741 43,823 101,480 14,880 51,421 1,204 257,549

2021 47,521 55,486 117,773 17,001 65,264 1,945 304,990

2022 50,336 68,964 138,261 19,934 82,225 2,542 362,263

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service Source: Gartner (November 2020)

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