BRILLIANT OPTICS. AMAZING DESIGN.
THE FUTURE IS IN SIGHT: Increase in video meetings in 20201
400%
11%
Information workers who rarely or never use video in meetings3
Growth of UC meetings with video from 2019 to 20202
274%
71%
Information workers who use video at least once a day3
ADVANTAGES OF RALLY BAR Superior Audio and Video: A video bar engineered for midsize rooms, featuring a motorized PTZ lens, adaptive beamforming mics, support for two
Flexible Deployment Options: Run meetings in appliance mode without a computer for Microsoft Teams, Zoom, GoTo, Pexip, or RingCentral. Or, connect to a computer or laptop and use with any software. Simple Setup and Cable Management: Place on a table or credenza, or add a wall or TV mount for a sleek space-saving set up. Integrated cable management keeps connections tight. Easy to monitor, manage, and support: Stay informed and ahead with metrics like people count. Medium room solution with Logitech Tap for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
MAKE EVERYONE LOOK AMAZING.
» EDITORIAL
THE PLOT THICKENS The impact of Technology is now so pervasive in Businesses that they cannot afford false steps and need to make the right Technology investments at the right pace or risk being left behind. A myriad of technologies including AI and automation are now applicable across increasing number of Business contexts. Vendors who are constantly pushing the boundaries of these technologies are bringing in new possibilities that Businesses can take advantages of. In many ways, Technology has driven progress at a rapidly accelerating pace across all verticals. The cover story in this issue examines this deep intertwining of business processes and technologies. For tech leaders such as CIOs, the onus is to have a good awareness of what technologies suit their organization’s business needs and try and address those pain points proactively, and the challenge is to take the stakeholders in the top management into confidence. While there are several organizations that have been quite the pioneers in terms of technology deployments, there are other who are still laggards and are yet to start earnestly on the digital transformation journey. For the laggards, the further they delay, the worse it could become as they may find it challenging to be connected even with their own supply chain ecosystem or with their core customers on a real time basis. There is a need for all organizations to modernise whatever legacy IT they may be using and get on to adopting the cloud to the greatest extent possible in their businesses because that is what will offer them the scalability to grow their business faster. They need to take a leaf out of the pioneers in their industries and see what technologies they adopting to transform their businesses. The willingness to adopt technologies could go a long way in even discovering new Business extensions or avenues as well that further expand their future prospects.
R. Narayan
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Arya Devi Associate Editor
editor@leapmediallc.com
Co-Founder & MD
saumyadeep@leapmediallc.com Mob: +971-54-4458401 Sunil Kumar Designer
PUBLISHED BY - Leap Media Solutions LLC
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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 JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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» CONTENTS
23 » REDEFINING TRUST Rejeesh Kumar, Director Technology and Services at Mindfire Technolgies explains Zero Trust
24 » ADDRESSING CONNECTIVITY NEEDS OF A HYBRID WORKFORCE Sakkeer Hussain, Director, Sales and Marketing, D-Link Middle East discusses details
14 COVER FEATURE
14 » THE ONGOING TRANSFORMATION With new use cases coming up and the maturing of more new technologies, IT will intertwine further with Businesses in days ahead
26 » CONSOLIDATION TRANSFORMATION Abdulrahman Khaiwi, Head of IT Department, Emirates National Schools, talks to CXO DX on the change in IT landscape in the education industry.
COLUMN
28 » THE CHALLENGE OF BUILDING ZERO TRUST IN 12 » COMPANIES RESOLVED AN OT-IOT ENVIRONMENT While multiple vendors have EMPLOYEE IT ISSUES 23% multiple approaches towards FASTER IN 2021 approaching Zero Trust in an IT NEWS INSIGHT
INTERVIEW
18 » AN EXPANSIVE AI VISION Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of Research at ManageEngine discusses the vendor's AI vision
22 » RELENTLESS ON THE GROWTH CURVE
Ali Shabdar, Regional Director for MEA, Zoho Corp discusses the growth trends
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CXO DX / JUNE 2022
34
CIO OUTLOOK
environment, many rules change in an OT-IoT environment, says Khalid Aljamed, Regional Director, ME Nozomi Networks.
30 » REVEALED: FIVE STEPS FOR REDUCING YOUR COMPANY’S CLOUD ATTACK SURFACE Today’s network perimeters are growing at a rapid rate and require multi-layered, strategic protection, writes Rahil Ghaffar, Director, Sales for Middle East & Africa at Virsec
34 » THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND KUBERNETES BETTER Claude Schuck, Regional Director, Middle East at Veeam Software about the next phase of Kubernetes Education
36 » DATA’S ROARING TWENTIES NEED FAST FILE AND OBJECT STORAGE Fred Lherault, field CTO, EMEA, Pure Storage writes that object storage is becoming increasingly important and well-established.
38 » OPEN, NATIVE XDR - AN END TO COMPLEXITY AND BEGINNING OF CONTROL Vibin Shaju, GM - UAE, Trellix discusses how flexibility and centrality of an open, native XDR allows teams to network the elements of their security ecosystem together.
REGULARS
06 » NEWS 36 » TECHSHOW 38 » TRENDS & STATS
» NEWS
NETAPP TEAMS WITH NVIDIA TO ACCELERATE HPC AND AI Expanded AI portfolio now includes NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, NetApp ONTAP AI Integrated Solution, and NVIDIA DGX Foundry Instant AI Infrastructure age combined with the BeeGFS parallel file system is now certified for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. The new certification simplifies artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to enable faster implementation of these use cases.
Senior Manager, PreSales and Solutions Engineering – ME Region at NetApp
Since 2018, NetApp and NVIDIA have served hundreds of customers with a range of solutions, from building AI Centers of Excellence to solving massive-scale AI training challenges. The qualification of NetApp EF600 and BeeGFS file system for DGX SuperPOD is the latest addition to a complete set of AI solutions that have been developed by the companies.
NetApp, a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, announced that NetApp EF600 all-flash NVMe stor-
“The NetApp and NVIDIA alliance has delivered industry-leading innovation for years, and this new qualification for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD builds on that
Walid Issa
momentum,” said Walid Issa, Senior Manager, PreSales and Solutions Engineering - Middle East Region at NetApp. “As performance and data demands are exploding, NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, coupled with ONTAP AI platform and DGX Foundry AI service, ensures our customers get the best-in-class model training infrastructure, with the full support of AI industry leaders.” NetApp’s portfolio of NVIDIA-accelerated solutions includes ONTAP AI to eliminate guesswork for faster adoption by using a field-proven reference architecture as well as a preconfigured, integrated solution that is easy to procure and deploy in a turnkey manner. Also included is NVIDIA DGX Foundry, which features NVIDIA Base Command software and NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription.
PURE STORAGE EXPANDS PORTWORX PORTFOLIO Portworx portfolio advancements provide more data services than ever before while giving DevOps teams greater control over their workstreams Pure Storage has announced updates to its Portworx portfolio which include general availability of Portworx Data Services, a Kubernetes Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) Platform and the next generation of the Portworx Enterprise, a complete multi-cloud ready Kubernetes data management platform for running mission-critical applications in production. The vendor also announced the general availability of Portworx Backup-as-a-Service, which supports backup and restore of any Kubernetes services including Amazon EKS, Red Hat OpenShift, Google Kubernetes Engine, VMware Tanzu, and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service “Our focus is to unify and simplify the world of platform and DevOps teams, who are tackling some of the biggest challenges when bringing Kubernetes applications in production to enterprise scale. We are providing our customers with a com-
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CXO DX / JUNE 2022
prehensive Kubernetes suite of solutions that help them accelerate data services, run Kubernetes apps in production, and protect apps and data anywhere with a few clicks,” said Murli Thirumale, VP and General Manager, Cloud Native Business Unit, Pure Storage.
Murli Thirumale VP and General Manager, Cloud Native Business Unit, Pure Storage
Portworx Data Services is a Kubernetes Database-as-a-Service platform which organizations can leverage to expedite deployment, Day 2 operations, and protection - for any data service - with a single click, without any lock-in or the need to hire specialists. Portworx Data Services can be purchased through a pay-as-you-go model, or through pre-purchased hours. The next generation of Portworx Enterprise unlocks new use cases that will help customers to bring varied workloads in Kubernetes production environments, boost developer agility, maximize application performance, and reduce failover time to seconds.
» NEWS
DELL TECHNOLOGIES EXPANDS MULTI-CLOUD EXPERIENCES Dell strengthens its APEX portfolio with managed services for cyber recovery and extends multi-cloud cyber recovery capabilities in public clouds Dell Technologies is delivering new cloud experiences, an expanded ecosystem, and offerings to help customers manage and protect applications across data centers and multi-cloud environments. These new offerings are designed to help organizations easily store, protect and control their data and applications across an increasing number of platforms and locations. “Our customers want help reducing complexity and are seeking solutions that use a common approach to managing data wherever it lives – from public clouds, to the data center, to the edge," said Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer, Dell Technologies. “We are building a portfolio of software and services that simplifies on-premises and multi-cloud environments and offers.” As cyber protection continues to become a greater priority, Dell is providing new options for managed cyber recovery offerings and public cloud cyber recovery solutions for multi-cloud environments. Dell is bolstering its APEX portfolio with the introduction of Dell APEX Cyber Recovery Services. The first in a series of new APEX full stack solutions that deliver a cloud experience, APEX Cyber Recovery Services simplifies recovery from cyberattacks. Dell is delivering an as-a-Service experience with
Chuck Whitten
Co-Chief Operating Officer, Dell Technologies standardized configurations, simplified Dell-assisted recovery options and expertise from nearly 2,000 isolated vault solutions deployed globally. Dell is extending the reach of its multi-cloud ecosystem and speeding access to its data protection offerings for public clouds with the release of Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Microsoft Azure.
ZOHO ANNOUNCES NEW UNIFIED MARKETING PLATFORM The new platform boasts advanced features including a centralized workplace, known as “Brand Studio” fective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren’t bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers.”
Zoho Corp announced Zoho Marketing Plus, a new unified software that combines a powerful mix of marketing capabilities to provide stakeholders across the entire marketing organization with a single, shared view of critical information for improved collaboration and results. The new software packs an innovative mix of marketing tools that helps marketing professionals better understand customers, make more informed decisions, and ultimately drive better results, growth, and revenue. “Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI,” said Hyther Nizam, President, Middle East and Africa at Zoho.
Hyther Nizam
Hyther Nizam, President, MEA, Zoho
“The complexity of data and personalization at-scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver ef-
The new platform boasts advanced features including a centralized workplace, known as “Brand Studio”, AI-powered data analysis, integration with third-party solutions, a unified digital brand asset creation and repository, improved collaboration across campaigns as well as an accurate and real-time measurement for improved business intelligence and customer impact. JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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» NEWS
NEW AXIS EXPERIENCE CENTER IN DUBAI SHOWCASES LATEST INNOVATIONS Visitors will get an opportunity to learn about the various Axis products and services related to video, audio, physical access control, and data and analytics Axis Communications announced the opening of an Axis Experience Center (AEC) in Dubai. As the first experience center in the Middle East & Africa (MEA) region, the center has been designed to offer visitors an intimate look at the wide range of network and security solutions offered by the world’s leading surveillance services provider. They will also get a unique opportunity to visualize the application of these solutions in use cases ranging from smart city traffic monitoring and vehicle access control to body-worn and deployable surveillance solutions. With Axis Experience Centers across the world in cities such as New York, London, Hong Kong, and Munich, expanding to MEA is the next step in reaching more people in this critical area and offering them the space to truly become familiar with Axis.
“Bringing the Axis experience to Dubai is a testament to the region’s reputation as a hub for raw innovation and ideas. An Axis Experience Center gives us the space and opportunity to engage with clients and partners, and work together to design and develop the solutions that we will use to realise the smart, sustainable cities and systems of the future,” Ettiene van der Watt, Regional Director – Middle East & Africa at Axis Communications explained. Stepping inside, visitors are taken on an immersive journey, where they will get an opportunity to learn about the various Axis products and services related to video, audio, physical access control, and data and analytics. To help visitors understand the power of the company's offerings, in addition to being displayed as
Ettiene van der Watt Regional Director – MEA Axis Communications
standalone products, Axis's solutions have been integrated with broader ecosystems in a wide range of use cases.
CLOUDFLARE ANNOUNCES MIDDLE EAST REGIONAL OFFICE IN DUBAI The company continues to expand its presence in the Middle East and in Turkey Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced that Dubai, UAE, will be the home of its first office in the Middle East, to further support its growing EMEA operations. Dubai represents a growing Cloudflare team presence in the Middle East and Turkey, following the company’s EMEA headquarters in London, and offices in Munich, Paris, and Lisbon. Cloudflare’s Dubai-based team will help the company grow brand awareness, acquire and support customers, and recruit new talent
Bashar Bashaireh
MD, Middle East & Turkey Cloudflare
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CXO DX / JUNE 2022
Cloudflare’s first managing director of Middle East and Turkey, Bashar Bashaireh, will oversee and lead the company’s business and overall team in the region. “With digital transformation and increased cloud adoption, organizations are in need for a fast, secure and reliable Internet, more than ever, to optimally serve
and secure their customers, partners, and employees, and Cloudflare is leading this transition.” said Bashar Bashaireh “I have been impressed by what Cloudflare has built and I’m thrilled to help to promote such an innovative technology in the region to help to build a better Internet, and to support the development of the regional digital economies.” Cloudflare started to invest in the region by expanding its network into the Middle East and Turkey in 2015. Now with data centers spanning more than 270 cities in over 100 countries worldwide, the company continues to grow its presence to be even closer to Internet-connected users everywhere. In the MET region Cloudflare has 27 data centers located in Bahrain, Iraq, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates.
» NEWS
MINDWARE AND R&M SIGN DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT R&M is known for its agility in customizing solutions in response to various customer needs to various customer needs, in contrast to just selling off-the-shelf products. It’s globally distributed network of production plants and competence centres provides consistent and stable customer support.
Mindware, announced that it has been appointed as a Value-Added Distributor (VAD) by Reichle & De-Massari (R&M) for the Gulf and Levant regions. Mindware will promote and distribute the vendor’s innovative cabling systems for high-end data and communication networks. R&M is a top tier solution provider in the structured cabling industry and a smart innovator in data centre, LAN and telecom verticals. The company’s large portfolio of state-of-the-art solutions is based on well-established Swiss quality standards. R&M is renowned for its agility in customizing solutions in response
Commenting on the partnership, Mr. Nicholas Argyrides, General Manager – Gulf at Mindware said, “R&M is a leading global cabling and connectivity solution provider and the company’s diversified and high-quality solutions perfectly complement Mindware’s portfolio. We are confident that Mindware’s wide market coverage through our reseller network, well-established supply chain system, and long-standing experience in distribution strategies are key to supporting the growth strategy of R&M in the region.” R&M will support Mindware in providing turnkey technology solutions to the market, especially in the data centre segment. The vendor’s renowned, state-of-the art offerings will be now made available across the region via Mindware’s seven warehousing hubs. The distributor and their reselling partners will have access to an extensive database of knowledge, including the ability to enrol in the R&M Academy, providing a variety of courses covering various technology topics in different verticals. The vendor will also provide international and local support of senior technical consultants and technical engineers.
ESET MIDDLE EAST SIGNS UP GRAPHEAST TO DISTRIBUTE ITS SOLUTIONS ESET PROTECT platform has undergone a host of changes to assist IT admins in managing the security risks in their environment ESET Middle East, has signed a new partnership with Grapheast, a leading regional distributor of specialized solutions to promote, market and distribute entire suite of ESET business cybersecurity products and solutions including its cloud security, network security, endpoint security, mobile security and security management through its strong network of channel partners spread across the region. The ESET PROTECT platform has undergone a host of changes to assist IT admins in managing the security risks in their environments, and popular Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution ESET Inspect is available from the cloud and has been rebranded as "ESET Inspect Cloud". In addition, several of ESET’s endpoint solutions for Windows, macOS, and An-
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CXO DX / JUNE 2022
droid have also undergone a significant evolution. ESET has always taken a science-based, security-first approach, with early adoption of machine learning and cloud computing power to develop its global threat intelligence systems. The company has continuously been named a top player and a leader in the industry for its business solutions. Demes Strouthos, General Manager, ESET Middle East says, “Grapheast are one of the most reputed value added distributors for over 25 years now in the region with best of the breed technologies in their portfolio. We are confident that with their decades of experience in channel management, technical expertise and
Demes Strouthos
General Manager, ESET ME extensive channel network and strong customer base will enable ESET to further strengthen its market penetration in the fast growing Middle Eastern cybersecurity market.”
Highest and Furthest Again Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Primary Storage Find out more
Purestorage.com
» NEWS INSIGHTS
COMPANIES RESOLVED EMPLOYEE IT ISSUES 23% FASTER IN 2021, SAYS FRESHWORKS’ REPORT The annual IT Service Management Benchmark Report from Freshworks reveals how automation, virtual agents, and chatbots helped companies delight employees in the remote and hybrid work era help them do more, faster. Importantly, these technologies are also engaging employees at work, which is critical to help companies retain talent and grow.” The report analysed anonymous, aggregated data from 86 countries, more than 4,200 organizations, and over 62 million unique employee support tickets. New tech features including AI-powered responses played a significant role in speeding up resolutions as bots deflected nearly 60% of tickets. Companies with automations achieved resolution times 22% faster than those who did not, and companies offering a catalogue of IT services through their ITSM software reduced resolution times 17% compared to those who did not. Companies are taking notice and rapidly adopting more advanced technologies. Nearly 25% of integrations included bots and workflow applications — a 40% increase compared to 2020.
Prasad Ramakrishnan CIO, Freshworks
Freshworks announced the findings from its second annual Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report which measured key performance indicators (KPIs) for the IT industry across 62 million tickets in 2021. The report revealed that global IT teams adapted to remote work in 2021, resolving employee tickets 23% faster than the year before as overall resolution time for IT tickets went down by seven hours. In a world where employees increasingly rely on technology to get their work done at home, in the office, and everywhere in between, the Freshworks report confirmed that new technologies that enable chatbots and virtual agents are making a substantial impact helping employees and companies become more productive — and even delighting them along the way. “Making sure IT works flawlessly is essential for modern businesses to succeed,” said Prasad Ramakrishnan, CIO of Freshworks. “Analysing data from around the world, we found that IT teams mastered the challenges of remote work last year in large part by employing powerful yet easy-to-use technologies that
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While less than one percent of IT interactions were via chat, this channel provided significant benefits: employees who chatted with virtual agents saw customer satisfaction scores hit 100% in some cases, while delivering 48% faster responses (5.21 hours) and 62% faster resolution times (8.74 hours) compared to those who don’t use virtual agents. Freshworks analysed KPIs across 14 industries to understand how industries compare to each other: • Happy hoteliers: Companies in hotels, tourism, and leisure achieved the highest employee satisfaction rating (98.01%). • Real estate resolutions: Property development and building infrastructure companies have the lowest average resolution time at 18.49 hours, while leisure and hospitality has the highest (27.32). • Consumer products and services finish first in first response: Their average first response arrived in 8.23 hours, nearly 50% faster than the industry with the slowest first response time (healthcare). • Retail and e-commerce IT departments fix it fast: They achieved the highest first contact resolution rate at 73%. The report also analysed regional differences. Notably, the report found that North American IT departments achieved the highest customer satisfaction rating at 97.92%. However, it takes multiple interactions to resolve employee queries, leading to the longest average resolution time in the world at 24.27 hours. Conversely, companies in Latin America are the quickest to assign tickets and respond to customer issues within 8.24 hours and 7.60 hours, respectively.
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vee.am/DPR22
» COVER STORY
THE ONGOING TRANSFORMATION With new use cases coming up and the maturing of more new technologies, IT will intertwine further with Businesses in days ahead
had been steadily entrenching itself as a Business enabler right at the forefront over the past decade or so but in the past two years of disruption, we have seen an escalation of the role IT plays in Businesses. Today, Businesses are accelerating their investments in multiple solutions that are now critical to them having an edge in their respective domains. The transformative impact of the emerging technologies can be seen across different verticals.
IT
implementations needs to be aligned towards business goals and managed by outcomes. There needs to be a far better alignment of Technology and business team to achieve this goal of digital transformation.”
Piyush Chowhan, Group Chief Information Officer at Lulu says, “IT or Technology enabled business will play a pivotal role in this digital age. Enterprises need to digitalize their business models to provide a much superior offer to the customers. There are technology advancements happening at a rapid pace which enterprises need to implement using agile models. Technology
Damir Jaksic, CIO at KEO International Consultants says, “While the construction industry has been very slow to embrace digital change, digitalization is just about to transform construction as radically as the first spreadsheets transformed finance. KEO International Consultants is an enterprise for creative design, engineering, and project management in the built environ-
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Even industries that have been traditionally slower to adopt Technologies have been increasing their speed of adoption because of the scale at which the right IT tools can enable Business processes.
» COVER STORY ment, and we are over 2000 staff strong, operating from 8 offices and many project sites across the Middle East and Europe. IT has been the differentiator for our organizations, for several reasons, with the most pertinent being the enablement of collaboration, or to be more specific – hyper-collaboration. Since KEO is a creative organization, collaboration for us means bringing people together, since, in many cases, it becomes easier to brainstorm creative ideas and, equally importantly, solve an existing problem when we are working together. KEO IT has rolled out a number of collaboration platforms, and since we are a multi-disciplinary organization, we mobilize a variety of knowledge and skills, and we combine them together – to create a talent pool that is vast and far more competent, able, and experienced to service the needs of our clients and communities.” He adds that digital technologies and its adoption are rapidly changing the way we imagine, design, and deliver communities we live and operate within. “We are approaching the golden age of construction and build environment and I believe we are just at the beginning, as our industry is experimenting with advanced construction technologies from the modular to prefabrication to 3D printing entire structures. We're using augmented reality wearables and drones and we are utilizing our data to make quicker and better-informed decisions, which is transforming how work is being delivered.” In Manufacturing, the fourth digital revolution in manufacturing is enhancing automation, precision, and the efficient, digitized manufacturing of goods and services with cutting-edge technologies ranging from the internet of things to cloud computing, smart data exchange, robotics, and much more. Umesh Moolchandani, Chief Information Officer, Bin Dasmal Group says, “Industry 4.0 is not something that happens to manufacturers. This new era is the transformation of a digitized world within which manufacturers should actively work to learn, adapt and evolve. It is the cumulative effect of technological advancements, adaptations, and optimizations that have come together to shape the manufacturing landscape. Now is the time for manufacturers to embrace the fourth digital revolution for better, smarter, faster manufacturing.” He adds that digital enablers are technological tools that have the capacity to drive the digital transformation of industry by bringing these technologies closer to the reality of companies and making it possible to implement them on a day-to-day basis. “They include sensors and embedded systems, advanced robotics, cybersecurity, connectivity and mobility, cloud computing, business solutions like ERP and CRM software, intelligence and control solutions etc. The list is not exhaustive and there are many emerging technologies which are contributing the accelerated digital transformation in the manufacturing industry and various other industries as a matter of fact.” In the healthcare sector, where a customer’s health is at stake, services need to be very efficient and of the highest quality. IT is therefore seen as the lifeblood and backbone of healthcare
Piyush Chowhan
Group Chief Information Officer, Lulu
and plays a core role in healthcare value chain, ensuring reduction of service costs and provision of quality healthcare at affordable prices. Aliasgar Bohari, Senior Director - IT at Zulekha Hospital says, “IT encompasses all aspects of healthcare, from patient care to clinical research and everything in between. It makes up the foundation for a successful healthcare organization, but it's also what keeps it running smoothly. The more efficient your IT infrastructure is, the more time you can spend on providing better care and improving efficiency. Information technology is becoming increasingly critical in the healthcare sector. In particular, the use of information technology in health care delivery has a number of benefits, such as improved data capturing, faster and better decision-making, and better coordination and communication between different healthcare institutions. Aliasgar adds, “Having access to patient health record and data is vital for the doctors and allied healthcare workers specially in case of emergency. Information technology has become one of the most important tools that hospitals use to improve patient outcomes and make better management decisions. It allows hospitals to centralize information so that it can be accessed by all members of staff quickly and easily.”
Automation rising
Automation is one of the key aspects of digital transformation JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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» COVER STORY
Umesh Moolchandani Chief Information Officer, Bin Dasmal Group
and it has an important role to play in different use case scenarios varying by industries. Intelligent process automation can help simplify and fasten daily operations, reduce spending and make precise forecasts. Damir says, “This is an area where we have invested very early, partially due to my obsession with the business process automation and for a far more important past - fantastic returns on investment. We have instituted a range of improvements in our EPR system, but we have also accelerated the process of digitization by instituting a major process automation platform to handle many processes that would have taken a significant investment of time and money if there were to be done within the ERP portfolio. And it is not the case of competing between the two or more systems, decisions are made based on data itself, its value, and its importance to the organization. Implementation of automation has reinforced accountability, but the greatest gain was in improved accessibility and drastically improved turn-around for every single approval process in the organization. We have also witnessed improvements in end-user satisfaction due to our focus on simplifying employees’ working lives and driving innovative behaviours.” Bin Dasmal Group used workflow automation to make the flow of tasks, documents and information across work-related activities perform independently in accordance with defined business rules. When implemented, this type of automation should be a straightforward process that is executed on a regular basis to improve everyday productivity.
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CXO DX / JUNE 2022
Damir Jaksic
CIO, KEO International Consultants
Umesh adds, “At Bin Dasmal Group, we have deployed Joget Low-code / No-code application development platform to accelerate the digital transformation and map the processes which were being done manually, taking time and were consuming more resources. The platform has provided various benefits to the organization. We are building a world where any business idea can be automated in minutes.” Combining AI, RPA and business process management (BPM) helps streamline internal business processes and follow a data-driven approach that helps in swift decision making and execution. This holds true across all industries based on the deployment context. In healthcare, there are RPA deployments happening that are simplifying the repetitive and cumbersome process of insurance validation. Alisagar says, “Recently we have implemented Automated comprehensive and integrated RCM solution using RPA. Under this project we have deployed and integrate multiple solutions to streamline RCM processes from checking Insurance verification to claims tracking. The implemented solution is the integration of various different software application for enhancing patient experience, streamline business process, increase accuracy, facilitate timely claim submission, increase claim visibility and tracking, reduce denial and increase hospital revenue by overcoming and addressing challenges faced by RCM.” The challenge of checking patient insurance eligibility is overcome by integrating disparate systems using RPA to automatically acquire and integrate data from HMIS applications and
» COVER STORY third-party insurance portals freeing employees from manual and repetitive tasks.
Focus on cybersecurity
With the hybrid and remote force models coming into vogue, the onus has been on organizations to offer secure access to employees working out of anywhere. SO cybersecurity investments are seeing a significant traction. Umesh says, “Information Security or in particular “Cybersecurity” has always been a core component at Bin Dasmal Group whenever there is a consideration of any deployment of new technology product or service whether it’s related to infrastructure, networking or business applications. Hybrid work comes with plenty of benefits for all types of employees, of course. But even so, it also comes with a fair share of risks as well, such as increased cybersecurity issues. one of our main objectives is to identify as many as possible of the known security risks as early as possible. In fact, this should be done as soon as the remote team becomes active. This way, we can start addressing risks before they become a problem and prevent their potential consequences from developing into a full-blown attack.” In the healthcare sector, cybersecurity is quite a critical aspect with the paramount need to secure patient data. Aliasgar says,“It is legal as well as moral responsibility for the healthcare provider to keep the confidentiality of patient data. Thus healthcare organizations need to be able to manage and secure their data, develop a reliable network, and ensure availability of patient records. This means they must have an effective IT security strategy in place. Cybersecurity has become an important issue in the healthcare industry as healthcare organizations are increasingly being targeted by criminals who seek to exploit vulnerabilities in systems to gain access to patient data or inflict other types of attacks.”
The change is rapid
Finally, Businesses and institutions need to ensure they are quite connected to their core customer segment and are receiving real time feedback, to ensure they are always meeting expectations. This is where the new AI enabled CX technologies play a critical role across in enabling an omnichannel experience for customers. Piyush says, “We believe that great customer experience will play a very important role in the digital era. Hence we are investing in building an Omni-channel CX to engage with the customers. This would involve creating customer data platforms and enhancing customer targeting. This will help in understanding customer behaviour to provide a better offer to them.” To ensure that they were getting their customer focus right, Bin Dasmal Group implemented CRM and integrated it with the ERP application in a cost efficient and secure manner.
Aliasgar Bohari
Senior Director - IT, Zulekha Hospital
Umesh says, “The main objective of CRM implementation project is Sales optimization, retaining established customers and Improving customer satisfaction. This integrated view of customer data in a web enabled architecture would improve information sharing, collaboration across functional and corporate boundaries and improve decision making for the management.” In healthcare, the focus on best-in-class services is quite pivotal and it is all about enabling the greatest convenience in services. Zulekha Hospital is working on “Patient Portal” project, which will not only significantly improve patient engagement but will also involve them in taking informed decision about their health. “Once they login to portal, it will allow them to check their health record including all their Laboratory and Radiology reports, allow them to book their appointment, ask questions, give feedback, request information and provide advice on how we can improve the quality of their care. It will also allow them to have video consultation with the doctor. By implementing patient portal, we aim to provide better visibility to patient about their health, engaging them in the decision-making process and treat them in most effective way possible.” In myriad ways, IT is entrenching itself as a Business enabler across industries. With new use cases coming up and the maturing of more new technologies, IT will intertwine further with Businesses in days ahead.
JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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» INTERVIEW
AN EXPANSIVE AI VISION Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of Research at ManageEngine discusses how the vendor has expanded and grown its AI vision
Elaborate on the evolving focus on AI, within ManageEngine? Our first efforts started off in 2011. It was a toy project where we trying to do sentiment analysis on our service delivery tickets. And interestingly, back then, that was the time when the whole idea of MapReduce was taking on, you know, distributed computing, Big Data and all that, where the notion was, instead of buying one big monolithic server, you got hundreds of commodity servers and distributed your workloads among them. As a part of it, we had sentiment analysis coming in. And we did a lot of experiments. But back then data was a challenge. We didn't have streamlined data annotation, data processing techniques, like we have today. We started off into those in 2011 and slowly expanded; our efforts got more serious in 2015 and we started adding more people.
consumer software also started seeing AI come in, especially, companies with a data driven business model where it was like, you don't pay for your social network or you don't pay for your search engine, but instead they make a successful business model out of your data.
In 2015, we started taking our efforts more seriously; we started with some statistical machine learning techniques, but this was not effective in capturing trend, and seasonal and random patterns in the data. We started investing more. We started evangelizing AI as something that could change the game. A lot of
When was you first launch? And how was the feedback? We had a lot of internal experiments going on but our first customer facing launch was in 2018. We had learnings from the rollout. When we launched it in 2018, we were consistently refreshing our mailboxes for feedback. But we couldn't really
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CXO DX / JUNE 2022
We started working on AI, but the challenge was we had very limited data. Back then we didn't have terabytes of data or gigabytes of data, we had just few 100 rows of data. And then we had to make our predictions. It had to be effective and at the same tim and it had to work with limited amount of data. So that was the challenge. From we started to where we are today, we have implemented AI across the stack from our service delivery, to monitoring to security to endpoint security, and all of it, so we have come a long way.
» INTERVIEW
“We believe in long term research; all our stack is built ground up from our data centers to the operating system that runs in our data centers. We believe in playing the long-term game, all of it has been built in house very organically. And we are a very privacy first company as well." Ramprakash Ramamoorthy
Director of Research at ManageEngine
get any feedback from our users. Basically, what we did was we, we replaced our existing statistical anomaly technique with a machine learning based anomaly detection technique. The question was did users notice the difference and when did they notice the difference?
had chatbots. Today, where we have added statistical machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing, we have also tried to add explanations wherever possible. Moving forward, the trend I see is we are trying to make sure our data or model learns from the limited amount of data that is available.
We give a lot of anomaly alerts and recommendations. But previously, it was just on the dashboard, you would have to click on an anomaly. That's what you will see anomaly. But here now we tied it up with alerts and all that. Some 15 to 20 days later, there was a customer’s feedback that came in asking how do I turn this off? And we were all disappointed. Because, so many years of effort, and the first thing that comes in is how do we turn this off?
Our goal is not to be an ivory tower research team, we don't go by the number of papers we published in the last quarter or so, our goal is to make sure our research works today. That has been the motto. We have a platform, but we are we are exposing a few aspects of the platform via our low code, no code tools in Zoho platform. From a management perspective, it's all behind the scenes. AI has to be an integral part for the low code, no code platform to be successful.
However, we saw that our AI feature usage went up by around 80%, when we started adding explanations, because in enterprise AI, a lot of these decisions are acted upon by a team or teams of people. Unlike consumer AI, where, let's say there is a book recommendation for me. One wrong recommendation doesn't matter. And I'm not answerable to anybody for, you know, clicking that buy that book. But you have, that's not the case, I need to explain to my boss. Adding the Explainable AI was a very big step. And that is when we saw usage going up. How did you expand further? In subsequent months, we launched, statistical machine learning where we do anomaly forecasting from a series of data points. Then we rolled out our computer vision. Then we also added our natural language processing engine wherein we
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How do you benchmark against competition? We are more focused on our customers than our competitors. But given the progress we have, obviously customers will look for the best technology. So, you have to you have to have your benchmarks. We believe in long term research; all our stack is built ground up from our data centers to the operating system that runs in our data centers. We believe in playing the long-term game, all of it has been built in house very organically. And we are a very privacy first company as well. In the last 20 years, we have never had a single ad-based revenue model in our products, and we will never have it any time in the future also. And of course, we have not taken any venture funding. So there's no pressure to deliver, things isnt realistically possible.
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» INTERVIEW
RELENTLESS ON THE GROWTH CURVE Zoho continues to see phenomenal growth in the region. The vendor has also increased its regional workforce to try and meet the growing demand. Ali Shabdar, Regional Director for MEA, Zoho Corp discusses the growth trends
You have increased your installed customer base, over the past one year, also driven by this pandemic related acceleration. Now, how challenging is it to match those growth numbers in a more normal year? There is always a spike upwards or downwards. The year-onyear growth was very impressive. So we can aim to keep that up. But I must highlight the fact that we are not too bogged down by numbers. We don't play the numbers game. Growth comes as a byproduct of what we love to do. We never really looked at KPIs from that perspective. Now if this year also we see growth of 58% like last year, that will be amazing. But if not, it just means we're just normalizing back into a steady normal growth rate. Is this growth rate driven more by the UAE than by the neighboring countries of the region? Not really. There is a very good contribution from all countries. UAE is the biggest market, but Saudi Arabia is catching up so fast. South Africa and Israel are showing growth as are Nigeria and Kenya. We have plans to open new office in Nigeria and Kenya. Have you increased number of partners? We added to the number of partners we have for the region by about 55%. We definitely rely on them and we encourage more service providers consultancy firms, IT companies to come in and see what we have and how we can partner.
Ali Shabdar
Regional Director - MEA, Zoho Corp
How has the growth been for this region? Growth has been phenomenal in the region as we had 58% growth in the past year in the UAE and 52% across MEA. We're improving our software, making it more available to different customers, through strategic initiatives, better support, special pandemic related packages and initiatives. During the pandemic and its Mario Foster multiple waves, we have seen a surge in demand for customer Group CIO, Al Naboodah experience platform, low-code platform and business intelligence Group Enterprises offerings, as they became instrumental for any business to stay operational and react to the quickly changing market demands
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Zoho perhaps challenged the legacy players when it came in but with so many years behind you, you might be on the way to become a legacy player? How do you avoid the pitfalls that perhaps confronts an entrenched leader? We might be a 25-year-old company, but our software is as fresh as it gets. We keep enhancing the features and innovating. There are times where we need to decide on our product direction very quickly. One of the things helps us do that is that this is not a public company. Leadership has been very clear about direction. And I respec the fact that this company would remain private and there has been no conversation of IPO whatsoever. The choice has been to add value. The priority is not about creating monetary value for shareholders; rather they are about R&D, bringing more quality, making available more services for customers and a better life for employees. We are likely to constantly reinvent ourselves to add value.
» INTERVIEW
REDEFINING TRUST Rejeesh Kumar
Director Technology and Services, Mindfire Technolgies
Zero Trust is gaining momentum in security discussions. Please elaborate what Zero Trust is all about? The traditional perimeter-based security approach is no longer enough to protect in the modern enterprise computing landscape, with workloads moving to cloud and also due to the remote and mobile work force. As the name implies, the basic precinct of zero trust is to deny all access to resources from both inside and the network until verified explicitly. With zero trust architecture, we are rescoping the trust boundary to include identity, device, and the application, instead of a network perimeter. To answer the question directly, as to why it is gaining momentum in security discussions is because of the fact that this approach help addresses the challenges associated with a shifting security perimeter in a cloud-centric and mobile workforce era. How can organizations benefit from adopting zero trust? Ideally zero trust should be a guiding approach to an organization’s future security investments; it is no longer optional but a necessity. By moving to zero trust an organization can reduce business risk and lower operational costs. Business risk is reduced by eliminating implicit trust to users, applications and devices. The Zero Trust approach increases the visibility of how data is being accessed by users, workloads and devices and can reduce the attack surface of system breaches by continuously monitoring and
Rejeesh Kumar, Director Technology and Services at Mindfire Technolgies explains why Zero Trust is gaining ground in terms of adoption and how it works Jesper Andersen
assessing all access requests to protectedCEO information and assets. of Infoblox How can enterprises adopt zero trust? Will it require major changes in the existing architecture? To answer second part of the question first, there is a notion that implementing a zero-trust architecture require a complete overhaul of an organization network, this is not correct. There will certainly be heavy lifting required but successful implementation is about having the right framework and applying it to the context under design coupled with the right tools. As an adoption methodology the organizations can focus on zero trust for users, zero trust for application and zero trust for infrastructure. Zero trust from users starts with securing identity and reinforcing with strong authentication. Device user integrity need to be locked down and least privileged access method should be adopted for data and applications. How is Mindfire helping its customers in adopting this? At Mindfire we encourage our customers to follow the ZTA architecture in the cybersecurity initiatives, irrespective of the size of the engagement and component under consideration. We have been investing in developing industry specific, localised, methodologies and use cases around the framework which adds tremendous value to the cybersecurity engagements we participate. JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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» INTERVIEW
ADDRESSING CONNECTIVITY NEEDS OF A HYBRID WORKFORCE D-Link continues to deliver solutions that offer seamless and secure wireless connectivity for today’s hubrid workforces. Sakkeer Hussain, Director, Sales and Marketing, D-Link Middle East discusses some details
Discuss how demand for networking solutions has been in the current year from the Business segment with more people returning to office? The future of work has been transformed by COVID-19 and its aftermath. With all businesses operating at full capacity today, we have continued to see great receptiveness for networking solutions. Hybrid working models continue to be in practice and organizations are embracing collaborative solutions as they enhance productivity. The pandemic is definitely becoming a problem of the past, and the positive consequences it left in its wake continue to be widespread. Companies understand the importance of robust networking solutions and are looking to invest more in 5G, Wi-Fi 6 and network automation. Which product lines from D-Link have been showing greater demand in the current year? We have seen increased uptake for our Wi-Fi 6 solutions and routers integrated with AI technology. D-Link’s latest solutions support the post-covid lifestyle by providing the intelligent, powerful network communications for bandwidth-heavy applications in device-dense homes and offices. We have seen an increased demand for D-Link’s EAGLE PRO AI Series, which features a comprehensive range of routers to fulfill everyone’s needs for home Wi-Fi. Also, our other products like Nuclias Cloud Solutions, Cloud Cameras, Exo Series Wi-Fi 6 Routers and smart switches have seen a high growth over the course of this year.
Sakkeer Hussain
Director, Sales and Marketing, D-Link ME
oneering enterprise-focused solutions such as our suite of cloud and networking solutions. One of the key reasons for our market leadership is because we can customize as per each customer’s requirement and help them achieve their business outcomes seamlessly and securely. While we cater to all the key segments in the region, we are especially strong in retail, education, healthcare and hospitality.
Additionally, the benefits of moving to the cloud is now well-recognized across the market. D-Link’s Nuclias solution is cloudbased and continues to see immense success in the market. We also have mydlink cloud services, where customers can view, access, and monitor all their cloud cameras from anywhere. Our cloud-based routers and access points are also doing well.
How are your solutions supporting the hybrid work model? The elements for a successful hybrid work model revolves around seamlessness, reliability, and continuous wireless connectivity. A robust wireless connection is essential for deploying any technology today. Now employees expect to stay connected, access emails, files, and shared drives, etc. from any location without any latency. D-Link understands the importance of strong wireless networks being the pillars of hybrid work models. Our wide portfolio of solutions offers everything today’s hybrid work models demand – cloud-based, wireless, AI-enabled and secure solutions for the modern enterprise.
Elaborate on how you are making in-roads across midmarket and enterprise verticals- which segments are strongest for you? D-Link is and has been a market leader in the mid-market space, as we have specific solutions and different consumption models designed for this target audience. At the same time, we have pi-
Discuss any recent or upcoming new technology/ product announcements? Our business objective at D-Link is straightforward – innovate to be several steps ahead of the market. With this as our guiding principle, we are working on exciting new launches around 5G, IoT, AI, smart home tech, Wi-Fi 6, cybersecurity and networking.
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CXO DX / JUNE 2022
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» CIO OUTLOOK
CONSOLIDATION TRANSFORMATION Abdulrahman Khaiwi, Head of IT Department, Emirates National Schools, talks to CXO DX on the change in IT landscape in the education industry. How has the IT landscape changed in the last 2 years, especially in the education sector? The landscape of IT delivery and services has changed almost 360 degree in recent times. The planned three years or five years goals were reprioritized to become current requirements rather than goals. Health matters and people safety being a top priority has ruled the overall delivery model, where remote work has become the new norm. Education sector is not exceptional to this new norm but the difference is that with k-12 schools we are dealing with kids rather than mature individuals and therefore comes with added responsibility. Being ready with the necessary technology platform is one challenge while handling the daily operations is another. The support calls brought in a new dimension to the table for IT administrators, support, software developers and security engineers. How far have you reached in the initial digital transformation journey and what is your agenda for this year? The leadership team at our schools had the vision of distance learning and the IT team has implemented a solution to support this concept since 2019. We have prepared specific classrooms with the audio/video equipment and software solution to support distance learning, support audience in another classroom or in a different school campus or even from outside the school premises. Furthermore, as a strategy, we have adopted Microsoft Office 365 solutions for all school requirements of emails, cloud storage, collaboration, video conferencing etc. This strategic move has in fact helped our schools to be ready and conquer the requirements of the new norm and be ready
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ing. However, the level of adoption was very minimal especially in the region. Secure platforms were available and mature enough to meet the business requirements. While some institutes were not ready with the required infrastructure, others were completely ready and hence for the latter, the transformation phase was smoother.
Abdulrahman Khaiwi
Head of IT Department, Emirates National Schools
with the platform, including the backend infrastructure of connectivity, network bandwidth and security measures. Due to that fact, we were among the fortunate schools who were able to sustain their classes without any interruptions, supporting the teachers, students, parents, and the management leadership. The agenda, however, for this year includes major improvements to the internal IT services for staff, teachers, and management. We are also targeting automation of processes towards a paperless office. We have many projects on our budget for the academic year of 22/23. With massive digital transformation occurring across the region, what were the major challenges faced by you? The nature of challenges that the schools face is quite like those faced by any business which maybe summarized with one sentence “Human resistance for change”. The technology was ready for quite some time, supporting remote work or distance learn-
The human mind’s willingness to embrace the new norm of working from home was the challenge in some scenarios while in others, it reflected higher outputs and greater results. What is your cloud strategy? Cloud has become the default option for the majority, as the security dilemma and location of data is already addressed. Cloud has proven to be secure enough with multiple levels of offerings and a complete spectrum of secure solutions around the cloud architecture. The availability of Datacenters in the region by the major cloud providers has also supported the plan to the decision makers to move to the cloud. We have consolidated our datacenters and made sure we have the necessary redundancy and availability of services offered on-premise. We have been on the cloud for more than five years now, we are using cloud-based solutions as SaaS model. We have adopted “Cloud First” as a strategy and hence, we are on hybrid mode. Many institutes are more cautious and have only migrated the dev ops to the cloud, but I could see that it is a matter of time before all workloads will be migrated to multi c louds and the focus will be on managing the cloud resources and services while offloading the management of the underlying infrastructure to the cloud providers.
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» COLUMN
The challenge of building Zero Trust in an OT-IoT environment
While multiple vendors have multiple approaches and multiple policies towards approaching Zero Trust in an IT environment, many of the rules change in an OT-IoT environment, explains Khalid Aljamed, Regional Director for Middle East and Africa from Nozomi Networks. Zero Trust is not a clearly defined standard. Each vendor seems to take liberties to match their focus. This makes it a very fluid conversation. What should it do? What problems should it solve? Zero Trust somehow switches the mentality of the network from allowing access by default, to blocking access by default unless required. A lofty goal, but what does it imply? Context is very important for Zero Trust policies. A Zero Trust architecture, prior to allowing a machine or user to connect to the network, should verify whether that connection can be made safely. The connection should be established to be the minimum number of resources that it needs. These checks should be done on a per-session basis instead of once-off at the start. Incorporating context into Zero Trust policy decisions stands in stark contrast to the usual allow-list approach of Zero Trust implementations. Obviously, identity is important to verify but it still does not really help assess whether the connection can be made safely and should be allowed, especially if the device has been compromised. Zero Trust is a framework that disallows connectivity by assuming there is risk unless proven otherwise. Rather than simply defining a minimalist access policy, security posture and context can play a role in improving Zero Trust security. This helps significantly reduce risk by making more informed decisions about connectivity. How do you do this in an OT-IoT infrastructure? Zero Trust for OT-IoT Here is a basic check list: • Does micro-segmentation make sense for OT? • What about user agents?
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is exchanged? At what frequency? If you understand this in real-time, you are well on your way towards an optimal Zero Trust for OT-IoT environments.
Decision making for OT-IoT
Khalid Aljamed
Regional Director, MEA, Nozomi Networks
• • •
Where do you start? What if traffic is blocked? What impact will that have on the process?
It is totally normal in IT to block traffic, but in OT-IoT, this is risky. Simply blocking it might just impact production more than allowing traffic. Many OT-IoT devices such as controllers, sensors, robots, and so forth are headless. Very often, security was not a consideration when these products were developed. To make better-quality decisions about connectivity, you need better information. Understanding what you are trying to protect is where it all starts. It is identical to IT, but the methods of getting there differs. It is about knowing the type of devices, what hardware and software is used and what the expected behaviour of those devices is. It is also about knowing how the entire OT-IoT environment behaves, which machine speaks to another machine? With what protocol? What payload
Gathering information must lead somewhere – it should be converted into actionable intelligence and, ultimately, actions. Knowing hardware and software versions will lead to knowing what vulnerabilities apply to those monitored devices, whether those devices are still supported by their vendors, and how they should act on the network. Knowing the behaviour of entire OT-IoT networks also implies the ability to detect and alert upon anomalies. If, suddenly, devices that never communicated with one another start doing so or if there were communications before, but it is now displaying entirely different behaviour, it justifies investigation into the legitimacy of it. It is very possible that this is the start of a breach. Data gathered towards Zero Trust should not just be an observation or a statement on what the likely issue is. It should help determine what impact it has on the entire OT-IoT network. With regards to enforcement of a Zero Trust policy, even in OT-IoT, sometimes it is justified to automate interventions by blocking traffic. The suite of tools that form the cyber defence mechanism should play nice and exchange information to act as fast as possible, so that each function can be fulfilled effectively. Pair all of this with digital transformation in OT-IoT and we have the perfect storm on our hands, which a Zero-Trust approach can help to mitigate.
» COLUMN
REVEALED: FIVE STEPS FOR REDUCING YOUR COMPANY’S CLOUD ATTACK SURFACE Today’s network perimeters are growing at a rapid rate and require multi-layered, strategic protection, writes Rahil Ghaffar, Director, Sales for Middle East & Africa at Virsec
The unique challenges of the pandemic propelled many organizations towards digital transformation. In turn, the global business landscape has witnessed mainstream migration to the cloud. But as more organizations scale to meet the demands of a hybrid workforce model, more cloud services inherently increase the attack surface. A study by McAfee found almost 3.1 million external attacks on cloud user accounts throughout 2020. As attack opportunities proliferate, it’s vital that companies minimize external exposure to their cloud environments. Let’s take Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leader in cloud infrastructure services, as an example.
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» COLUMN When the public cloud emerged, it reimagined how businesses deployed infrastructure and forced companies to rethink security for this highly dynamic environment. Cloud native security solutions, such as security groups and network access control lists (NACLs), offer an immediate level of protection at no cost and with nothing to deploy. For example, organizations can use security groups to restrict traffic based on IP addresses. They can quickly and easily microsegment the environment and secure east-west traffic to restrict lateral movement once an adversary is inside. And these security solutions will scale to the size of any environment transparently.
A nuanced picture
But while these strategies may sound straightforward, the real picture is more complex. One reason AWS is so popular is because of the many different services offered for consumption – 285 in total. Some of those services create more attack surface. So, with the right credentials combined with loose security policies and a growing list of interconnected services, an attacker has many avenues to take advantage of. Put simply, the network perimeter from the pre-cloud era is now just one of many. As enterprises move to the cloud they must protect four additional perimeters, because one successful penetration on the right resource can lead to a major incident. 1. Data perimeters can allow unauthorized users to read, modify, delete, or download your private data directly from the internet. 2. Compute perimeters can allow external entities to run code in your environment, exploiting software vulnerabilities to compromise workloads. 3. Messaging perimeters can allow external entities to receive and send messages to private systems that can trigger code or transport malicious payloads to downstream applications. 4. Identity perimeters can allow external entities full control over your virtualized data center when privileged Identity Access Management (IAM) users, roles, and access keys are compromised.
5 ways to protect your attack surface
While cloud-native tools are imperative for network protection, it’s also vital to employ security best practices. Here are five steps to reduce your cloud attack surface. 1. Deploy sufficient network segmentation and security. Establish security zones in each of your environments and allow traffic through the firewall for only what is needed and scoped. At a minimum, have a separate virtual private cloud for each application and environment, but also consider assigning each application environment (development, staging, and production) its own cloud account. 2. Take advantage of the principle of least privilege. Assign access and resources with purpose. For instance, a developer just deploying code should not have administrative rights across the entire cloud account. Nor should a developer have continuous access to a production environment. Give them exactly what they need and nothing more. There are tools available to help scope accounts and users appropriately.
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Rahil Ghaffar
Director, Sales for Middle East & Africa, Virsec
3. Minimize the install base on computer resources. Install what you need, remove what you don’t. For example, with containers, only install the packages and libraries that your application needs to run. Anything superfluous an attacker can use against you. 4. Patch software to fix vulnerabilities. Patching is essential but it doesn’t address every vulnerability. It is dependent on the vulnerability having been seen in the wild; if you have a version of software that has a zero-day threat, it does nothing for you. And, once a patch is published, it’s a race against time to patch it before an attacker has an opportunity to find and exploit that vulnerability in a system. 5. Stop attacker-influenced code with runtime protection. True runtime protection acts as a safety net. It enforces what your application should be doing and stops what it shouldn’t be doing in real-time – before an attack happens. Adversaries are blocked before they can exploit a software vulnerability, known or unknown, or take advantage of misconfigurations, outdated security policies, improperly scoped access rights, and insufficient identity or credential management. Dwell time is non-existent, so threat actors never have a chance to install malware or exfiltrate data. And you gain air cover and time to make updates, while still being protected. While today’s attack surface is expanding at an unprecedented rate, taking the right precautionary steps will considerably mitigate risk and protect your business.
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» COLUMN
THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND KUBERNETES BETTER The next phase of Kubernetes Education will drive simplification of deployment writes Claude Schuck, Regional Director, Middle East at Veeam Software Kubernetes is still in its early educational phase as a technology. On Gartner’s Hype Cycle, container management currently sits on top of the peak of inflated expectations. If Kubernetes and other technologies within this category follow the expected trajectory, they will enter the Trough of Disillusionment in the next 12 months – before climbing the Slope of Enlightenment. This aligns fairly well with where Kubernetes currently is in terms of business deployment. In the Middle East, organizations are waking up to its potential and developing an understanding of where it can deliver real competitive advantage, in the light of the increasing rate of adoption of containers. According to Veeam’s Data Protection Report 2022 69% of organizations in the UAE and 76% of organizations in Saudi are already running containers in production, while 29% and 22% respectively plan to do so in the next 12 months. However, there is a lot of education to be done before IT teams have fully got to grips with how best to deploy Kubernetes. Over the next 12 months we will see two things happen that will shift perceptions around Kubernetes. The first is that those deploying the technology will start to understand it more, gain confidence in build-
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ing the business case, and start to demonstrate real ROI. The second is that cloud providers will find simpler ways to serve Kubernetes to organizations, reducing the need for deep technical understanding to deploy it effectively.
Education and enlightenment
Much of the appetite for learning about how to successfully deploy Kubernetes and the benefits of doing so comes from within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community. The technical barriers to entry are still relatively high, which is why one of the top challenges identified by organizations looking to deploy Kubernetes is that they lack the necessary in-house skills. It is often the case that relatively new technologies which experience unprecedented spurts of adoption outpace the market in terms of the skills and infrastructure required to support growth. However, when it comes to Kubernetes, we’re talking about one of the fastest-growing open source technologies of all time in terms of early adoption. It’s important, therefore, that this process of educating the technical community gathers pace. Over the next 12 months, we will see the
number of learning opportunities increase as the industry looks to address the emerging skills gap. An example of such an initiative is Learning.kasten.io, a Kubernetes learning platform from Kasten by Veeam. The programme aims to equip technical professionals looking to upskill and the next generation of tech talent with at least a basic understanding of Kubernetes. This will shorten the learning curve for both experienced and entry-level technologists – burnishing enterprises with a pool of talent that understands Kubernetes and how to get the best out of it.
Making Kubernetes easy
As well as building a solid pipeline of people who understand and can capably consult businesses on Kubernetes, cloud providers are working on ways to make it easier for IT teams to consume and deploy them without in-house technical proficiency. This will ultimately be one of the major driving forces that takes Kubernetes from being an emerging technology in its experimental stages to established enterprise technology. The success of Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) proves that organizations are demanding simpler ways to consume and deploy IT through the cloud. Kubernetes will be no exception to this rule.
» COLUMN Currently, Kubernetes is acting as a management platform for containers and among the earliest adopters are established and regulated industries such as banking and financial services. Businesses from other industries are currently evaluating the pros and cons of Kubernetes, looking at whether they can incorporate it into their networks. To accelerate the growing interest of the broader market, major cloud service providers are beginning to offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) – making it possible to operate Kubernetes as a managed service. KaaS is commonly provided via the public cloud, but as its penetration grows organizations will be able to consume similar services through local managed service providers (MSPs) or deploy them on-premises. The move towards KaaS will significantly drive-up Kubernetes adoption, taking away some of the initial pain and investment required to deploy Kubernetes and enjoy the benefits of delivering applications faster, at a greater scale, and with greater accuracy. No matter how Kubernetes is consumed, organizations looking to take advantage of the opportunity it offers must be aware of the data protection requirements which accompany it. Kubernetes does not significantly change the threat landscape or bridge any cybersecurity gaps. It requires the same Modern Data Protection capabilities as any other type of data on any other type of platform. Fundamentally, the infrastructure is now closer to the applications with the help of containers, and data backup must be carried out differently to align with this. The number of workloads using stateful data in container environments is increasing alongside data services being deployed within the Kubernetes cluster. Other public cloud tools can be connected to applications running within Kubernetes, which changes the way data is protected. Simply put, backup works differently for Kubernetes than virtualized environments. This is where specialized data protection
Claude Schuck Regional Director, Middle East, Veeam Software
"The success of Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) proves that organizations are demanding simpler ways to consume and deploy IT through the cloud. Kubernetes will be no exception to this rule."
solutions for backup and recovery of Kubernetes environments such as Kasten by Veeam come into play. Over the next 12 months, more businesses will get to grips with the many benefits of deploying Kubernetes, while cloud providers find more consumable ways of serving up Kubernetes including KaaS. As well as investing in the skills required to maximize ROI, businesses must seek the advice of data protection experts when deploying Kubernetes to ensure that they are not becoming exposed to new risks. Organisations in the Middle East must be equipped with Modern Data Protection solutions to ensure their data is protected across physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS and Kubernetes environments at all times.
JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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DATA’S ROARING TWENTIES NEED FAST FILE AND OBJECT STORAGE Fred Lherault, field CTO, EMEA, Pure Storage writes that object storage is becoming increasingly important and well-established, driven by the web and the rise of the cloud This decade is shaping up to be the Roaring Twenties of unstructured data. According to Gartner, unstructured data growth rates have hit 30% per year, which means total unstructured data volumes will almost quadruple by 2027. Such data growth is a challenge in itself, but unstructured data also comes in a variety of sizes and can be stored as files or objects, with increasingly demanding storage performance needs. This has resulted in a new category of storage emerging to provide unified fast file and object storage. What’s driving the need for fast file and object storage? The general backdrop is the growth in unstructured data, which can comprise very large amounts of very small files or objects — often billions of them. Unstructured data can also come as a smaller number of much larger files or objects, such as video or high-definition images. It could also be a combination of the two. Modern analytics workflows, for example, may need to access a wide variety of data types of different sizes.
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Fast file and object: I/O performance and throughput
Another key driver of fast file and object storage is storage performance to access this unstructured data. We’ve seen an explosion in analytics and machine learning, driven by the need to distil value from enormous amounts of raw data. Meanwhile, digital imagery is a rapidly-growing use case, such as PACS (picture archiving and communication systems) in the healthcare industry. An example here is the pioneering use of machine learning for cancer diagnosis by US-based Paige, which needs petabyte-scale storage capacity with rapid access and high throughput to allow machine recognition across millions of images in patient tissue samples. This demands high performance access to file and object data. In addition, backup and data protection can produce large numbers of files and objects of various sizes. While backups may once have been consigned to the slowest storage, very fast restore
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speeds are now required to help recover data rapidly in the event of a ransomware attack. Fast file and object: Why the and? The addition of fast object storage is a key innovation. For decades file storage has been a mainstream option, with scale-out NAS solutions ramping up capacity and performance to support unstructured data, but object storage is becoming increasingly important and well-established, driven by the web and the rise of the cloud. Files and objects can hold the same types of contents. But, while file systems use a hierarchical directory-based system, object storage uses a ‘flat’ structure with objects assigned an individual identifier and metadata that can be used to contextualise these objects. Historically, object has been the least-performant storage type and has formed a quite separate product category. This view of object storage is changing, as customers increasingly need to interrogate large amounts of unstructured data that can be in object format as well as file. Additionally, as applications and use cases evolve from file to object access, organisations require a platform that can support both access methods and ensure investment protection during and after this transition. All these factors have led to the emergence of high-performance storage solutions that combine access to file and object.
Fred Lherault Field CTO, EMEA, Pure Storage
Fast file and object benefits
Unlike traditional structured data — such as a database supporting an ERP system — which tends to be fairly static, unstructured data can span many locations and access methods during its lifecycle. Today’s emerging fast file and object storage products support network file system (NFS) and server message block (SMB) file protocols, which are compatible with the way many existing enterprise applications are written. Additionally, fast file and object solutions can also handle unstructured data in object-access formats that are the result of their cloud origins, such as Amazon S3. Fast file and object storage is therefore also ideal for hybrid clouds, with unstructured data that can transition between on-site and cloud locations. What do customers need to look for in a fast file and object storage product? Firstly, capacity. The platform needs to scale to your needs, which for many enterprises could be petabytes. Since unstructured data can grow quickly, scaling the solution also needs to be easy and not involve complex network configuration or manual data rebalancing tasks. Secondly, it must have file and object storage access, offering the key protocols such as NFS and SMB for file and S3 for object access. Thirdly, it must be built for fast access and high throughput. Low latency — especially for read and metadata access operations — is required to unlock the potential of AI/ML as well as many modern analytics frameworks. All-flash storage offers this fast access thanks to its solid-state nature.
Speed is key
Whether it is to analyse very large datasets or to perform a massive restore operation after a ransomware attack, unstructured data can require very high access performance. Low latency needs to be coupled with high throughput. For data analytics, this means speeds measured in tens of gigabytes per second. When it comes to restoring systems following an outage or ransomware attack, enterprise customers should look for throughput numbers that get close to 300TB per hour, to limit downtime and the financial and reputational damage that comes with this. Additionally, high performance both from a latency and throughput point of view must be provided by the platform automatically and without tuning. The world of unstructured data and modern analytics is evolving so quickly that it is difficult to predict what tools, file format, dataset size or access methods will be required tomorrow. Any storage solution that requires manual configuration or tuning to deliver high performance for a given use case will stifle innovation and delay projects. The world of data storage is truly embarking on the Roaring Twenties. The explosive growth of modern analytics, machine learning, video and image intelligence as well as ransomware attacks will require storage solutions built for large volumes of unstructured data, with roaring performance levels and flexibility in terms of access methods. Fast file and object storage platforms are the answer to the data challenges of both today and tomorrow, and are designed to support enterprises as they look at unlocking the value of unstructured data. JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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OPEN, NATIVE XDR - AN END TO COMPLEXITY AND THE BEGINNING OF CONTROL
Vibin Shaju, General Manager - UAE, Trellix discusses how flexibility and centrality of an open, native XDR allows teams to network the elements of their security ecosystem together and reduce complexity
In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as in other nations, COVID lockdowns forced companies to react. And react they did, with an unprecedented migration to the cloud, to facilitate remote work. And every sign points to a future that will retain that model in some form. A Ciena survey from June 2020 shows that UAE knowledge workers expected the flexibility of remote work to continue after the COVID crisis had passed. Some 79% predicted they would work remotely more often. More recent studies show this figure to be as high as 86%. This hybrid-work future puts today’s CISO and their SecOps team in a bind. They have watched helplessly as necessary cloud
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» COLUMN migration forced them into complex forests of endpoints and unknowable domains. Employees invariably used personal devices to authenticate to corporate environments and third-party networks frequently handled company data, which may or may not have been sensitive. And now security teams must face up to the fact that there is no going back to safer, more manageable infrastructures. Hybrid work is here to stay.
Threats on the rise
Amid a growing field of compliance, which now includes the UAE’s own Personal Data Protection (PDP) law, security teams have had to shift their practices from EDR (endpoint detection and response) to XDR (extended detection and response). This pivot was not for nothing. The UAE and its neighbor, Saudi Arabia, faced an onslaught of cyber-incidents during the pandemic years. Threat actors took full advantage of the new working conditions and technology sprawl. They struck using more innovative methods and they struck more often. Now, a complex mix of technologies is required to support security operations, but this just adds to the complexity that caused the threat escalation in the first place. And to make matters worse, ever-present cybersecurity skills gaps continue to widen.
Dialing down the noise
Trellix’s conversations with clients reveal an alarming number of security tools in place. For larger organizations, the average is more than 70 different security tools in use on any given day. This leads to false positives, unflagged threats, and a range of other errors that represent a clear and present danger to the enterprise. Running between screens trying to collate information as an attack is underway results in a suboptimal response. Tool complexity without a unifying platform is the greatest enemy of any threat hunter. Complexity is managed best when open APIs allow security teams to access event data from external solutions and automatically correlate it with native sources. Even in the noisiest environments, specialist teams will be able to identify threats and respond quickly and effectively because they have a rich view of the environment. Open-architecture platforms have the added advantage of being inherently easy to integrate, which means they deliver quicker time to value. This is why open, native XDR is so important. The flexibility and centrality of such a system allows teams to network the elements of their security ecosystem together and reduce complexity. Integration with as many solutions, from as many vendors as possible, is desirable. The platform should be capable of bringing all these sources together in a central pane and combining their telemetries with top-grade threat intelligence on common vectors such as endpoint, email, network, and cloud. This open-architecture XDR does what XDR was meant to do — unite data from across the ecosystem and beyond to empower security analysts to become threat hunters. This greatly reduces the possibility of a false positive or of a missed threat. Alerts become
Vibin Shaju General Manager – UAE, Trellix
more actionable because they do not need to be expertly sifted from a sea of others.
Fits like a glove
Open, native XDR makes even more sense to mid-size and smaller enterprises, which do not have the budget, time, or personnel to use many different security tools. They need to eliminate their complexity without a lengthy migration process. Open platforms grow with these companies, empowering them with composable security — a customized platform that becomes what they need. When facing technology complexity, enterprises need visibility into every corner of the infrastructure. Overworked, under-resourced security teams need a respite from alert fatigue and confused scrambles to chase down threats. Security solutions should fit organizations like gloves, bending to their unique requirements. Open XDR platforms connect all current SOC tools through an open and extensible API framework. There is no better visibility than this — an end-to-end native footprint spanning endpoint, cloud, network, and data. From this approach emerges a living security ecosystem of detection, mitigation, and response. Complexity has been neutralized by openness. This is the environment CISOs have been waiting for. This is an environment ready for the hybrid-work future. This is the future of cybersecurity. JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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» TECHSHOW
FANVIL X4U The Fanvil X4U is a 12-line mid-level IP Phone that provides two screens for added convenience when using DSS keys. The X4U has all the features a professional user needs such as great voice quality, support for EHS headsets, and the option to add a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi dongle. It also supports the Opus codec and has HD audio on both the handset and speakerphone so that you can be sure all of your calls will be crisp and clear. Fanvil X4U provides the direct access to instructions with two high-resolution 320×240 color displays, which is an ideal option for enterprises to improve flexibility and have greater productivity on daily work. Harman speaker and wideband codec of G.722 and Opus in this device delivers you an immersive HD audio experience in both high band and low band with the network. Adopting a more intuitive design with a 2.8-inch color LCD, a 2.4-inch color side LCD, and 3 line keys with LED light, Fanvil X4U allows more user-friendly feature customization. Delivering a superb sound quality (Harman Kardon Speaker), supporting Opus Codec, as well as a rich visual experience. With the second DSS color screen, the IP Phone supports up to 0 DSS keys which improve work efficiency. Using standard encryption protocols to perform highly secure remote provisioning and software upgrades. Fanvil X5U High-end IP Phonematch with accessories like EHS headset vie EHS cable WIFI via WIFI dongle and built-in Bluetooth Fanvil x5u is designed to encourage your flexibility on work
Highlights: • • • • • • •
12 SIP lines, 3-way conference, SIP hotspot 3 Line keys on the main display HD audio on speakerphone and handset 1×2.8” main color display, 1×2.4” side color displays for DSS keys Support Bluetooth headset via optional BT dongle BT20 (not included) Support Wi-Fi connectivity via optional Wi-Fi dongle (not included) Support EHS wireless headset
NEXANS BRIGHTBOX Nexans Telecom Systems, a supplier of end-to-end telecom and data network infrastructure solutions, announced the launch of BRIGHTBOX, a versatile and user-friendly splice and patching closure for aerial and underground FTTx applications. BRIGHTBOX is a closure range for splicing or patching optical cable and is designed for aerial and underground applications. It is designed to be highly versatile, includes smart technologies & additional security features, and is available in two sizes with capacity of 144 and 288 splices. Options for patching are also possible, and the innovative fibre management system allows flexibility for cabling. The watertight closure is made with high-strength material to reach an IK09 level and IP68 watertightness and dust protection.
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» TECHSHOW
D-LINK DSR SERIES VPN The D-Link DSR Series Unified Services Routers provide secure, high-performance networking solutions to address the growing needs of small and medium businesses. A fully featured virtual private network (VPN) provides your mobile workers and branch offices with a secure link to your network. With 3G mobile Internet connectivity support via an optional 3G USB dongle, the DSR Series offers the ability to stay connected when wired Internet is not available or as a backup if the wired Internet connection fails. This affordable, high-performance router also enables businesses to secure their network whether in the office, at home or out on the road. You and your colleagues can stay connected to the office anywhere, anytime. Complete VPN features, as well as IPSec Hub and Spoke technology, ensures secure communication between mobile employees and offices.
The DSR series web content filtering feature to help administrators monitor, manage and control employees’ Internet usage. Static web content filtering helps to remove malicious objects such as Java applets, ActiveX, and cookies, or to block URLs by keyword. Dynamic web content filtering, which requires a license subscription, allows administrators to filter content from a list of categories. Multiple global index servers, with millions of URLs and real-time website data, enhance performance and maximize service availability.
Highlights:
Highlights: •
A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN tunnel provides remote access to a central corporate network
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Site-to-site VPN tunnels use IP Security (IPSec) Protocol
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Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP)
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Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) to facilitate branch office connectivity through encrypted virtual links
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The main function of BRIGHTBOX is as a junction box for up to 288 fibres, or as a distribution box for up 32 drop cables, or a mix or drop & distribution cables.
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Using the combs located on each side, the loose tubes or microbundles can be routed directly in the organiser, but it is also possible to route each individual fibre to a splice cassette thanks to a dedicated path allowing single fibre management.
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BRIGHTBOX also includes the latest technologies in terms of smart components - like a NFC TAG in order to access product information via smartphone, and this will also enable many more planned features to be added in future.
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The clamping system is able to support up to 4 drop or distribution cables.
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Two versions are available depending on the type of cable, offering a direct strain relief of the reinforcement elements like aramid yarns or strength members of the
Network security is another big concern for operators, and as an option, the BRIGHTBOX can be equipped with a keyless locking system which can control access to the closure using a digital solution called Nexans INFRABIRD to avoid any uncontrolled or accidental opening.
cable, and the closure is designed to allow preparation outside the box in order to simplify the installation on site.
JUNE 2022 / CXO DX
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» TRENDS & STATS
THREE TECHNOLOGY TRENDS GAIN TRACTION IN BANKING AND INVESTMENT SERVICES Banks and Investment Firms Will Spend $623 Billion on Technology Products and Services in 2022
from their environments and dynamically modify their own algorithms in real-time to optimize their behavior in complex ecosystems. They create an agile set of technology capabilities that support new requirements and situations, optimize performance and defend against attacks without human intervention.
Banks will apply generative AI in growth areas such as fraud detection, trading prediction and risk factor modeling. Autonomic systems exist in a basic form as roboadvisors, but more advanced forms will emerge. 60% of large organizations will use one or more privacy-enhancing computation techniques by 2025. Generative artificial intelligence (AI), autonomic systems and privacy-enhancing computation are three technology trends gaining traction in banking and investment services in 2022, according to Gartner, Inc. These trends will continue to grow over the next two to three years, contributing to growth and transformation of financial services organizations. IT spending by banking and investment services firms is forecast to grow 6.1% in 2022 to $623 billion worldwide. The largest category of spending is IT services, which includes consulting and managed services and accounts for 42% of total IT spending in the sector at $264 billion. The fastest growing category is software, with
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spending forecast to increase by 11.5% to $149 billion. The three emerging technologies identified by Gartner collectively contribute to goals to run, grow and transform a business and have demonstrated use cases in the banking and investment industry.
Generative AI
Gartner predicts that 20% of all test data for consumer-facing use cases will be synthetically generated by 2025. Generative AI learns a digital representation of artifacts from data and generates innovative new creations that are similar to the original but does not repeat it. In banking and investment services, application of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and natural language generation (NLG) can be found in most scenarios for fraud detection, trading prediction, synthetic data generation and risk factor modeling. It has potential because of the ability to take personalization to new heights.
Autonomic Systems
Autonomic systems are self-managed physical or software systems that learn
Currently, autonomic systems are mostly software-based in the banking context. However, humanoid robots are emerging in smart branches that are examples of hardware-based autonomous systems that cater to clients and customers. They could be applied in autonomous debt management, personal finance assistants and automated lending. Roboadvisors are essentially low-level autonomic systems, although there are still trust concerns due to their high level of automation. Gartner predicts that by 2024, 20% of organizations that sell autonomic systems or devices will require customers to waive indemnity provisions related to their products’ learned behavior.
Privacy-Enhancing Computation
Privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) secures the processing of personal data in untrusted environments — which is increasingly critical due to evolving privacy and data protection laws, as well as growing consumer concerns. It uses a variety of privacy-protection techniques to allow value to be extracted from data while still meeting compliance requirements. Gartner predicts that 60% of large organizations will use one or more privacy-enhancing computation techniques in analytics, business intelligence or cloud computing by 2025. Within financial services, data has an inherent role in any analytics, computing and data monetization efforts. The adoption of PEC is on the rise in use cases like fraud analysis, intelligence operations, data sharing and anti-money-laundering
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A better WiFi has arrived. Linksys Atlas Pro 6 with Velop Intelligent Mesh is a dual‑band WiFi 6 system that simultaneously delivers next‑level streaming, gaming and uninterrupted video calls to more than 30 devices per node. Access to 160 MHz unleashes the true power of WiFi 6 technology—these are the least congested channels available on the 5GHz band and offer incredibly fast connectivity.
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