CXO DX October 2020

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» EDITORIAL

THE BRIGHTER SIDE OF THINGS This year continues to be a test of resilience for mankind as a whole. The pandemic continues to create havoc, but we are possibly not far from taming it.

For individuals and Businesses, the year has thrown up unprecedented challenges. Life as we knew it was dramatically changed and we have had to compromise with a ‘new normal’, reconciling with social distancing and realities like remote work, new shift rotations for office workers, more webinars and e-meetings etc. We are still coming to terms with it but if it weren’t for Technology, it would have been impossible to stay connected while the lockdowns were in place. While most offices have resumed work with 30% attendance to allow for social distancing norms and possible shift rotations over the past couple of months or more, caution is still the watchword.

Although verticals like hospitality and travel took a huge hit for obvious reasons as people were travelling less and less, this has been a time to reimagine Business models and create as many digital channels for the Businesses to reach out to customers. This year indeed is heralding the acceleration of the omni-channel era.

E-commerce has seen a significant spurt in the region especially and this has meant that Businesses in the retail segment were rushing to ramp up their infrastructure. Edutech has blossomed and as education transitioned to holding online classes almost seamlessly, there were technology teams working behind the scenes enabling all of that. Add to it that there were tools from technology companies like Microsoft or Zoom for instance that were mature to enable those live one to many video conferencing sessions. It has been a coming together of many aspects that has enabled our resilience in the midst of the pandemic.

Companies in the cloud Business have seen significant traction as cloud is seen as the gateway to true digital transformation. Around the cloud services ecosystem, the technology industry is yet again flourishing whether they are focusing on security, storage, networking etc. That is in sum a mix of some of the brighter side of things for the year.

R. Narayan

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Pooja Panjwani Assistant Project Manager

Co-Founder & MD

saumadeep@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 OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» CONTENTS

22 » MANAGING CONTAINERS WITH KUBERNETES Kubernetes and its variants from leading vendors have taken the lead in helping manage containers in multi cloud environments

INTERVIEW

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26 » SECURITY IN THE REMOTE WORK ERA

14 » A QUANTUM JUMP IN PATIENT CARE

Tarek Kuzbari, regional director - Middle East & Turkey, Cybereason discusses the company’s focus in the region in a chat with CXODX

Finesse helps Zulekha Hospital to enhance patient care with Automation Anywhere’s RPA solutions

28 » THE PRIMACY OF ITSM

COVER STORY

NEWS INSIGHT

12 » DELL TECHNOLOGIES UNVEILS INNOVATIONS FOR MANAGING VMWARE ENVIRONMENTS

Rajesh Ganesan, Vice President, ManageEngine discusses the importance of ITSM in the era of remote working

Tighter integration of solutions will help customers and partners

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

Sakkeer Hussain-Director, Sales & Marketing, D- Link MEA discusses some of the key solutions of focus for enterprise and SME

INSIGHT

32 » UNLOCKING THE BENEFITS OF THE INDUSTRIAL INTERNET OF THINGS

REGULARS

18 » A TEST OF RESILIENCE

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30 » TOWARDS STRONGER CONNECTIVITY

34 » THE FAST AND THE CURIOUS

FEATURE The pandemic lockdowns called upon IT teams to rise to the occasion and enable remote working

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06 » NEWS 36 » TECHSHOW

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38 » TRENDS & STATS

» NEWS

HPE STRENGTHENS PARTNERSHIP WITH SAP FOR THE CLOUD SERVICES BUSINESS With HPE GreenLake, SAP will be enabled to offer the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with a consistent, automated cloud experience and their flexible subscription-based as-a-service model.

“Customers are increasingly turning to HPE GreenLake to enable them to benefit from the agility and flexibility of the cloud while also offering the security, data sovereignty, compliance, visibility, and cost controls of an on-premises deployment,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services, at HPE. “We have a tremendous opportunity to build on the extensive proven partnership that HPE and SAP have built over decades, with the combination of our rapidly-growing cloud services business with HPE GreenLake and our leadership in powering SAP workloads.”

Keith White

Senior Vice President & GM, HPE GreenLake Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced plans to partner with SAP for the cloud services business in the UAE and globe. The partnership delivers the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with HPE GreenLake, as a fully managed service at the edge, in the customer’s data center or colocation facility of their choice. The customers in the UAE and globe will be able to keep their SAP software landscape and data on-premises while gaining the benefits of a subscription-based, agile, elastic, and consistent cloud experience from SAP with HPE GreenLake. With HPE GreenLake, SAP will be enabled to offer the customer edition of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud

Peter Pluim, EVP, Global Head of Enterprise Cloud Services, at SAP said, “The new deployment model SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, customer edition is a direct response to customers who want the flexibility and service level of a managed private cloud, but need to keep their systems in their own data centers, such as public sector and regulated industry customers. We are planning to make that possible with cloud services from HPE GreenLake and whiteglove operations and application management services from SAP, which will help unlock value and create new experiences for our joint customers.”

AL-FUTTAIM GROUP TAPS INTO MICROSOFT CLOUD AI Factory that will serve all Al-Futtaim business units. Various business challenges will be tackled around product recommendation, forecasting demand, pricing and many others. Al-Futtaim will migrate its data centre to the intelligent cloud by modernizing its core business applications and SAP environment to the cloud.

Cloud-native services and microservices will also enable an omni-channel experience for end customers, bridging the gap between physical and digital experiences.

Three-year partnership will leverage the intelligent cloud to integrate infrastructure, apps, and data, while continuing to support AI, DevOps for deployment speed, agility and scalability Al-Futtaim Group has adopted the Microsoft intelligent Cloud to accelerate its digital transformation journey and reimagine its business model.

“Our goal is to unlock hyper-personalised experiences for our customers,” said Gurmeet Singh, Al- Futtaim Group Chief Digital Officer. “This requires us to invest in advanced technologies and infuse digital innovations into our customer-first philosophy, enabling us to make a direct impact across all of our business entities. Microsoft is an ideal partner on this journey, to help realise our vision to create powerful and enriching experiences for our customers.”

Al-Futtaim will leverage its multiple touch

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Sayed Hashish

General Manager, Microsoft UAE points with its customers, building a Customer Data Platform, that will deepen its knowledge of their preferences to deliver personalized messages, experiences and recommendations, driving greater loyalty to Al-Futtaim brand. This will be powered by the use of advanced analytics for a variety of case scenarios, as part of an

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

Sayed Hashish, GM Microsoft UAE said, “Knowing your customers, empowering employees, delivering on an intelligent retail operation and reinventing business models sit at the heart of digitally enabled business transformation for the group.

Al-Futtaim’s journey to the secure, intelligent and trusted Microsoft Cloud is a leap forward in its ambitions to reinvent customer experiences, and we look forward to providing the best tools and technologies for the company to achieve their goals”.

» NEWS

NUTANIX LAUNCHES KUBERNETES PLATFORM-AS-ASERVICE FOR THE MULTICLOUD ERA

Karbon Platform Services provides Managed Offering to accelerate container-based Application Delivery and Operations on any cloud Enterprises, with their sights set on realizing the benefits of digital initiatives, often struggle to unleash the full potential of their software developers and the agile DevOps processes by which they need to operate. Kubernetes, along with its ecosystem of cloud native technologies, continues to rapidly evolve, making it increasingly difficult to implement without extensive technical resources. Furthermore, organizations need to be able to leverage both on-premises and public cloud-based Kubernetes deployments without compromising their ability to manage data, applications, and IT resources simply and effectively.

Rajiv Mirani CTO, Nutanix

Nutanix announced Karbon Platform Services, a Kubernetes-based multicloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with automated system-managed security, to accelerate the development and deployment of microservices-based apps across any cloud. This offering provides software developers with a turnkey managed services experience, on-premises, in the public cloud, and at the edge, to build and run cloud native applications while enabling them to decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure. It also provides IT operations teams with a simplified and consistent application lifecycle management and security framework. This announcement marks a significant milestone for Nutanix as it looks to expand offerings aimed at accelerating enterprises’ cloud native journeys.

“IT resources are the engines that power digital enterprises.

But as a company scales, adopts hybrid cloud, and manages an increasing number of applications, supporting engineering needs can be challenging for IT,” said Rajiv Mirani, CTO at Nutanix. “With Karbon Platform Services, we aim to simplify application development and orchestration while streamlining the relationship between IT and development teams to support our customers’ DevOps strategies.”

This new cloud native PaaS will help software engineers to streamline application development and orchestration without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. Karbon Platform Services builds on the core Kubernetes lifecycle management capabilities initially introduced with Karbon as an integrated component of the Nutanix HCI software. This new offering brings automated, system-managed security and multi-tenancy to run a wide range of microservices- based applications across multiple cloud infrastructures.

MORO HUB ANNOUNCES COLLABORATION WITH SMART DUBAI The collaboration will help empower Government entities with seamless network access Moro Hub, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DEWA has joined forces with Smart Dubai for the provision of a high-end node at Moro Hub to accelerate the digital transformation initiatives of Dubai Government entities and avail latest digital services.

Dubai Government Information Network (GIN), is the internetworking infrastructure, providing the information backbone between Dubai Government entities and

the Internet. GIN serves as the cornerstone of the electronic infrastructure connecting government systems that effectively transfers information and handles transactions.

The network comprises of secure and highly robust mesh infrastructure connecting all government offices by using state-of-the-art multi-service networking technology. In line with the digital adoption in Dubai and the implementation of the Dubai Paperless Strategy, the collaboration agreement was signed digitally

by both parties through the secured UAE pass that embodies the digital transformation evolution in Dubai and UAE. Eng. Marwan Bin Haider, Vice Chairman of Moro Hub, commented: “Our collaboration with Smart Dubai brings value-added offerings to government entities. To this effect, Smart Dubai has hosted a highend node in Moro Hub Data Centre to cater to the GIN connectivity requirements of the government entities.

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» NEWS

FORCEPOINT INTRODUCES DYNAMIC USER PROTECTION The EMEA-wide survey also found that the lack of contract process automation is resulting in wasted resources Forcepoint has announced the introduction of Dynamic User Protection that redefines modern user activity monitoring (UAM) and insider threat protection with the industry’s first cloud-native solution to deliver out-of-the-box functionality with no policy configuration. Through this capability, security teams are now empowered with real-time visibility into true risk behaviors of compromised and malicious users within hybrid cloud environments.

All security begins with visibility and the massive shift to remote work created blind spots into user activities with critical data and intellectual property in unmanaged home environments. It is a competitive imperative today that businesses gain needed visibility to mitigate a data breach in real-time. With Dynamic User Protection, user activity monitoring not only becomes easy-to-deploy it also brings mainstream enterprise access to continuous risk assessment across security control points.

“In this next phase of cybersecurity,

Officer at Forcepoint. “Dynamic UserProtection is the heart of our new converged cloud security platform with integration into Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention available today with future integration planned across the entirety of the Forcepoint portfolio, including our recently announced Cloud Security Gateway SASE solution which will be delivered in first-quarter 2021.”

Nico Popp

Chief Product Officer, Forcepoint managing risk across the cloud, network and endpoint will drive everything. With Dynamic User Protection, Forcepoint is changing the rules of the cybersecurity game by delivering global enterprises the ability to automatically enforce security policy across all control points tailored to a specific end-user based on the risk they represent,” said Nico Popp, Chief Product

Dynamic User Protection utilizes Indicators of Behavior (IoB) as the real-time analytics engine to determine the overall risk of an entity. These IoBs deliver security teams context around behaviors and by combining multiple behaviors determines true risk scores that assess overall risk of an entity as good and/or bad.

Delivered in an easy-to-consume SaaS model, Dynamic User Protection is fast and easy to deploy with a small 30MB footprint on the endpoint that installs in under 30 seconds with no reboot required.

MIMECAST ANNOUNCES INTEGRATION WITH THETA LAKE

Integrating archive data into a unified environment can help bring significant benefits Mimecast Limited, a leading email security and cyber resilience company, has announced the availability of Mimecast Cloud Archive for Theta Lake. The robust integration is designed to streamline risk analysis and governance efforts in the current remote working era to enable capture, retention, eDiscovery, and automated risk detection across relevant productivity applications. Key productivity applications include e-mail, audio, video, and chat data from Webex Teams, Webex Meetings, Zoom (Meetings, Phone, Chat), Microsoft Teams (Chat, Calls, and Meetings), RingCentral Office, Slack, LogMeIn, BlueJeans, and more. Integrating archive data into a unified environment can help bring significant benefits including speed of search, risk reduction, cost minimization and user-friendly compliance.

Effective risk and information governance have always been a business-critical issue, and the introduction

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vant data becomes difficult to identify and collect.

Garth Landers

Director of Product Marketing, Mimecast

of new productivity and communication applications to support remote working efforts has only increased the need. Organizations must adapt to intelligently capture, manage and retain rich, high- volume data. When data is stored in multiple silos and disparate cloud environments, governance rele-

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

“Although the way we conduct business has dramatically changed in recent months, governance requirements remain and are increasing with new privacy regulations and litigation on the rise. All organizations must adapt to intelligently capture, manage and retain their communication data,” said Garth Landers, director of product marketing at Mimecast. “Mimecast Cloud Archive for Theta Lake is designed to streamline information governance in the remote working era, allowing key stakeholders to quickly analyze data, manage risk and monitor productivity applications.”

Theta Lake provides a fully-featured, supervised-focused media player, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted review workspace, timestamp of risk detections and a search across any content – spoken, shown or shared.

» NEWS

SKILLS AS MUCH IMPORTANT AS TECHNOLOGY TO MAXIMIZE VALUE FROM AI Global research released by Microsoft reveals that companies see the biggest business benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) when they combine deployment of AI with skilling initiatives that focus on both tech and soft skills. Surveying more than 600 employees and leaders within larger enterprises across the UAE, the research focuses on skills needed to thrive as AI becomes increasingly adopted by UAE businesses, giving enterprises insights into where to best place their investment.

Among the UAE companies that are the most mature in terms of AI adoption, the majority of their senior leaders (93%) say they are actively building the skills of their workers or have plans to do so. Further, almost two-thirds (78%) of employees at these businesses say they have already benefitted from reskilling programs.

The research shows that companies prioritizing AI are focused on ensuring it’s complementing the talents of their people.

These businesses are cultivating employee skills across every category – ranging from advanced data analysis and critical thinking to communications and creativity.

AI is supporting the creation of company cultures more focused on innovation and learning In the UAE, almost all workers (97%) are

keen to take part in AI reskilling initiatives. The majority (77%) of those working within an organization using more AI say their organization is actively preparing them for a digital future that will be increasingly powered by AI. To address the skills gap in today’s workforce, Microsoft has set up a virtual training ecosystem designed to benefit employees.

MINDWARE SIGNS AGREEMENT TO DRIVE ACER’S ME MARKET SHARE IN THE COMMERCIAL SECTOR The distribution agreement cover Acer’s commercial and education portfolio with a large focus on the Travelmate Series Mindware, a regional leader in Value Added Distribution, has signed a commercial distribution agreement across the Middle East with Acer. This will include the vendor’s commercial and education portfolio including Windows based laptops, Chromebook devices, accessories, projectors, Enduro and ConceptD devices.

The main focus will be on the Travelmate Series, specifically designed both for the corporate world and the public sector.

Nicholas Argyrides, General Manager – Gulf at Mindware stated, “The work from home and e-learning trends have fuelled demand for laptops and smart devices. For remote workers to maintain high productivity levels, devices need to have good processing power, portability, and durability combined with business features and advanced connectivity op-

tions. On the education front, teaching staff and students need to have access to modern, purpose-built devices and apps that support the new blended learning model.”

Acer Middle East has achieved great success in the education market with a 92% market share in Chrome OS devices for Q1’ 2020 in UAE, as per latest statistics from research and consulting firm Futuresource Consulting.

Nicholas Argyrides GM, Gulf, Mindware

Acer Middle East and Mindware will work closely together in conducting events and webinars so as to interact and engage with resellers. Acer Middle East will be offering the channel the opportunity of joining its Synergy program, which provides business rewards for supporting the Acer line-up.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» NEWS

REDINGTON VALUE SIGNS DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT WITH FIREEYE

Redington will work with FireEye in key markets of MEA towards enabling its partners to use the new security practices Redington Value has signed an agreement with FireEye to distribute its cybersecurity offerings in West & North Africa, the UAE and Oman. This agreement will see both organisations engaging with local channel partners to provide end customers with comprehensive security solutions that offer protection against the latest cyber threats facing the region.

FireEye delivers a complete suite of detection, protection, and response capabilities with solutions spanning: Network Security, Endpoint Security, Email Security, and Cloud Security, all tightly integrated with their Helix security operations platform. FireEye also offers Mandiant Security Validation which gives security practitioners the evidence to manage and report on their organization’s systemic cybersecurity risks.

“The modern dependency on data has created a degree of vulnerability, which if not addressed can cause serious harm to organisations and their customers. We have chosen to work with FireEye because I believe their solutions are world-class and they support our aim to deliver high quality protection to our customers who are facing cyber attacks targeting their critical data and assets,” said Sayantan Dev, President at Redington Value.

“This distribution agreement with Redington Value allows us to serve an increasing number of customers throughout the region, this includes locations where we would like to significantly expand our footprint,” said Hussam Sidani, Regional Director of Gulf, Levant and Africa at FireEye. “We’re pleased to be working

PROVEN CONSULT AND VSIGHT SIGN PARTNERSHIP Proven Consult to deliver consulting services for VSight’s offerings to Middle East customers across verticals such as manufacturing, oil & gas, telecom, energy, utilities, automotive and machinery Proven Consult, a UAE-based digital consulting services and solutions provider, has announced a strategic partnership with VSight, a pioneer in augmented reality (AR) remote support solutions. As per the terms of the agreement, Proven Consult will be VSight’s exclusive partner in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain.

VSight specializes in AR to eliminate physical boundaries and enhance productivity in remote environments. As an artificial intelligence solutions provider, Proven Consult will deliver consulting services for VSight’s offerings to customers across verticals such as manufacturing, oil & gas, telecom, energy, utialities, automotive and machinery. Proven’s experienced technical team across the GCC will assist customers to address their remote work challenges through VSight’s AR driven solutions.

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Anas A. Abdul-Haiy

Director and Deputy CEO, Proven Consult.

A recent report by research firm IDC earlier this year said that enterprises are moving to augmented and virtual reality majorly driven by leading use cases with US$ 31.2 Billion spend by 2023.

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

Sayantan Dev

President, Redington Value

with a distributor like Redington Value which has a proven track record of delivering high quality technology to its partners. Together, we will strive to defend organisations facing the complex Middle Eastern and African threat landscape.”

“Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are transforming the traditional business landscape to offer boundless collaboration opportunities and enhance workforce productivity to a whole new level. Our latest partnership with AR technology specialist VSight will further enable us to strengthen our comprehensive portfolio and offer ground-breaking solutions and consulting services to our valued regional customers.

We are thrilled to expand our offerings with VSight and look forward to solving customers’ challenges and building regional AR expertise with innovative use cases,”said Anas A. Abdul-Haiy, Director and Deputy CEO, Proven Consult.

As a leading provider of AR remote support and remote assistance software platform, VSight enables customer organizations to easily share knowledge to perform operations such as maintenance, repair, inspection, training remotely. Developed for enterprises, VSight Remote integrated with smart glasses provides a hands-free approach for field workers to perform their tasks effortlessly and offers a huge potential for efficiency gains.

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» NEWS INSIGHT

DELL TECHNOLOGIES UNVEILS INNOVATIONS FOR MANAGING VMWARE ENVIRONMENTS Tighter integration of solutions will help customers and partners Dell Technologies has announced several infrastructure portfolio innovations for VMware environments, designed to help customers better protect, manage and support traditional and modern applications across edge locations, core data centers and hybrid clouds.

“Customers looking to accelerate their digital transformation need trusted, proven solutions that can help them navigate today’s multi-cloud landscape while managing their IT and business needs,” said Jeff Boudreau, president and general manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies. “Dell Technologies and VMware are raising the bar with tightly integrated solutions, designed to help customers and partners better manage and protect traditional and modern applications. These latest advancements across our infrastructure portfolio are a testament to our joint commitment to innovation.”

As VMware delivers its latest releases for vSphere, vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation to support Tanzu, Dell Technologies is extending support of these technologies across the Dell infrastructure portfolio, with tightly integrated solutions.Dell EMC VxRail, the only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware, is the first system to be integrated with VMware vSphere with Tanzu, allowing customers to adopt Kubernetes quickly and easily with automated deployment and provisioning.

Dell Technologies storage innovations are designed to help customers easily manage and access traditional and modern applications in VMware environments: • Dell EMC PowerMax simplifies VMware Management – Dell EMC PowerMax replication is now integrated with VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) and VMware Site Recovery Manager, simplifying VMware management by reducing time needed for provisioning, replication and service level policies.

• Dell EMC ObjectScale brings Object Access to VMware Cloud Foundation – ObjectScale will allow developers to provision S3-compatible, cloud-scale storage for modern stateful applications on demand.

Dell Technologies adds advanced management and backup capabilities to PowerProtect Data Manager in VMware environments with the introduction of new data protection updates: • PowerProtect Data Manager support for Tanzu – To help support and protect a customer’s critical modern applications, Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager now supports the VMware Tanzu portfolio, including Tanzu Kubernetes clusters, Kubernetes clusters in vSphere, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI) on-premises and in public clouds.

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CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

Jeff Boudreau President and General Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies

• VMware Storage Policy-Based Management and VMware Cloud Foundation Protection – New PowerProtect Data Manager integrations make it the only solution to provide native vCenter Storage Policy-based Management integration for VM protection. This allows VI admins to save time by using well-known workflows from within their vSphere environment to assign data protection policies.

• Enhanced Protection of Mission-Critical VMs – Dell Technologies is previewing a new feature in PowerProtect Data Manager that will eliminate the need to pause a VM during backup. With new snapshot and data movement technologies, teams can back up mission-critical VMs without business disruption.

Dell Technologies and VMware are making it easier for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to quickly build and scale hosted cloud environments through tighter integration between VMware Cloud Director and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP). Dell Technologies is also joining VMware in supporting Project Monterey, an applications-driven response to the unprecedented change in how applications are being built and deployed.

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» COVER FEATURE

Finesse is deploying Automation Anywhere’s RPA solutions at Zulekha Hospital to automate the process of insurance eligibility checks of patients. The deployment is expected to have a significant impact in terms of enhancing operational efficiencies of the hospital.

– By R. Narayan

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F

inesse, a leading digital transformation solutions provider in the region is deploying an automated process for elevating the insurance eligibility administrative process experience at Zulekha Hospitals, one of the well-known healthcare facilities in the UAE. The solution is being deployed using Automation Anywhere, a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

The deployment of RPA solutions will help the hospital to automate the many manual and repetitive tasks that slow down the entire administrative process of insurance eligibility, by quickly extracting insightful information and delivering error free results. In fact, it is expected that as much as 30% of insurance processes or more will be automated in the near future and is a key aspect to be addressed as part of digital transformation efforts at healthcare facilities. The current investment in RPA

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

are in line with the Zulekha group’s strong intent to continue playing a pivotal role in delivering quality healthcare in the UAE. “With the aim of providing quality healthcare services to patients, Zulekha Hospital has implemented various technologies and is continuously seeking newer ways to enhance patient experience. In order to boost our capabilities, we are seeking a significant enhancement in our processes with RPA technologies. The insurance automation will add a new dimension to how we achieve greater efficiencies, ensuring our patients are well taken care of and our employees are focusing on qualitative tasks instead of repetitive ones,” said Taher Shams, Managing Director at Zulekha Healthcare Group.

RPA based automation is indeed being seen as crucial for enhancing process efficiencies in vital sectors like healthcare, allow-

» COVER FEATURE

Taher Shams Managing Director, Zulekha Healthcare Group

ing the staff to focus on non-repetitive and higher value-adding tasks. The deployment at Zulekha Hospital is expected to likewise unleash a higher a level of productivity optimization. The solution is being deployed at all hospitals of the Zulekha group and will be integrated with their current administrative systems.

“RPA has evolved from being a simple mimicking by robots of repetitive human activities to a highly seamless collaboration of human and digital functions. RPA is being deployed at Zulekha Hospitals over the next 45 to 60 days and should be operational by early December this year. The deployment is expected to deliver a qualitative shift in the administrative process for eligibility, reducing the waiting time at the counters, especially for hospitals like Zulekha that cater to a large number of patients every day,” said Samer Dlikan, Chief Technology Officer at Finesse.

The deployment is the latest initiative for Zulekha, which has kept pace in terms of leveraging modern technologies for being in the forefront of healthcare facilities.

“Zulekha Healthcare Group has always been at the forefront when it comes to providing advanced medical care for the residents of UAE and medical tourists to the country. Over the past few years, we have invested in several advanced facilities and continuously upgraded our technology environment. As part of our continued pursuit to ensure leading edge experiences for our patients, we have chosen Finesse to deploy a leading automation platform from Automation Anywhere, for our insurance administrative process. We are certain this initiative will go a long way in simplifying the process and will enhance patient experience by reducing their waiting time,” said Aliasgar Bohari, Director IT at Zulekha Healthcare Group.

The solution will first check with the various departments on the treatment sought by the patient and with access to the required details, will run through insurance eligibility of the patient for specific treatments across multiple insurance portals. The eligibility checks across portals are run until it gets the confirmation on patient’s eligibility of insurance for the specific treatment.

“Currently, insurance validation is done manually by multiple staff at the reception, which is time consuming and require patients to wait at counter till their insurance eligibility check is complete. Since this process is time consuming and increases patient waiting time, it may lead to patient frustration The automation of this repetitive process will ensure that the insurance eligibility is checked and validated even before the patient comes to the counter, which will drive greater efficiencies for the hospital in providing a seamless and enhanced experience for

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» COVER FEATURE its patients, ” said Bobby Thomas, Delivery Head, Emerging Technologies (RPA, Blockchain), of Finesse.

The automated process will be based on Intelligent Automation solution from Automation Anywhere, that has been named a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation. Automation Anywhere provides an Intelligent automation platform that is cloud-native and web-based.

“Our Bots automate several time-consuming, manual intensive, and error-prone processes increasing the overall efficiency of the business. Bots build structure to the vast volume of information lying in the system and makes it accessible for applications to fetch data, thus streamlining business outcome. We are delighted to work with Zulekha Hospitals, a leading name in the healthcare industry within the region and we will be seeking to deliver a solution that will substantially enhance the services offered by the hospital,” said Milan Sheth, EVP-IMEA, Automation Anywhere.

For Finesse, this is yet another milestone in its journey so far as a leading provider of digital transformation solutions for organizations in the region.

“Finesse began its journey a decade ago – firmly guided by its vision to positively impact the lives of people around us. Today we are delighted to announce that Team Finesse would be offering our expertise to Zulekha

Milan Sheth

EVP-IMEA, Automation Anywhere

Hospitals as one of the leading RPA implementors in the region. Our experts will be deploying the best in class RPA platform from Automation Anywhere, which will take away all hassles of manually running eligibility checks for insurance coverage across multiple portals. This will substantially elevate the patient experience at the hospitals.

We are grateful to Zulekha Hospital for choosing Finesse & Automation Anywhere to be their strategic partner in their digital transformation journey,” said Eljo, Director & Chief Business Officer, Finesse.

Bobby Thomas

Delivery Head, Emerging Techologies, Finesse

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CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

Eljo JP

Director & Chief Business Officer, Finesse

The current scenario in the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic has revealed the true worth and the need for digital transformation, such as enabling employees to work remotely in a secure manner and ensuring Business continuity. Healthcare is no exception and in fact the sector stands to gain more from embracing digital transformation in its processes and significantly boost its patient care processes. For Zulekha Hospital, the latest initiative reveals its intent to pursue excellence in its domain with such transformative deployments.

Samer Dlikan

Chief Technology Officer, Finesse

» COVER FEATURE

LEVERAGING RPA FOR BETTER SERVICES Aliasgar Bohari, Director – IT at Zulekha Healthcare Group discusses how the deployment of RPA will make a significant impact in optimizing its administrative operations driven organization and we have already automated many of our processes, be it the robotic pharmacy, revenue cycle management and many more, and we are continuously seeking more ways to improve and automate our tasks with the help of technology and innovations. Moving forward we are planning to automate and re-engineer our business processes with the help of RPA.

Aliasgar Bohari - Director – IT, Zulekha Healthcare Group Tell us about how you are transforming and enhancing the process for doing the insurance eligibility checks in Zulekha hospital?

Patient satisfaction is always our priority and we are continuously working on implementing various technologies to reduce patient waiting time and to provide seamless experiences to our patrons.

Checking patient eligibility over insurance platforms is a time-consuming process and is being done presently manually by the front office staff. This increases patient waiting time at counter and creates longer patient queues. This is a repetitive task and ideal for automation. Once this process is automated, it will make sure that all the necessary insurance checks are done in advance before the patient reaches the counter, so that the turnaround time with each patient transaction is drastically reduced. This will mean the hospital can be more efficient and our staff can be more focused on delivering better patient

care than doing repetitive work.

Is deployment to be across the group?

Yes, we will implement across the group. That wills integrate with our overall operations and help realize better operational benefits.

Will this mean consolidation of manpower at your reception counters?

Rather than consolidating job roles or reducing manpower, our sole purpose for implementation this technology is to reduce patient waiting time and enhancing patient care. RPA will definitely help us in achieving that and our reception staff will be able to spend more time servicing patients rather than wasting their time over unproductive work.

Do you intend to look at more such automation of processes going ahead?

Zulekha Hospital is an innovation

How do you see digital transformation initiatives as key differentiates especially during the current Covid period? How has technology been key to delivering better services in terms of patient care?

Technology plays a vital role in transformation of healthcare business. From handwritten prescription and manual diagnosis, today we have moved to AI based tools helping doctors not only in diagnosis but also in predicting patient’s medical condition based on the historical data.

Covid -19 has made a huge financial impact on healthcare business. Due to the lockdown and movement restrictions, there were a decrease in the number patients as they couldn’t come although they needed to, perhaps deferring their visits. By implementation of various technological innovations such as Telemedicine we were able to help the business navigate and maintain continuity of business. Starting from patient registration to checking patient medical records, laboratory, radiology investigation, insurance approval and patient billing, everything is driven by technology. Today, it is almost impossible to think of providing quality care to patients without use of technology.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» CIO OUTLOOK

A TEST OF RESILIENCE In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns, IT teams and CIOs were called upon to rise to the occasion, enable remote working and manage those operations. The most difficult passage of time has also perhaps been their finest hour, in demonstrating their value to their organizations.

— By R. Narayan

I

t has been one of the toughest years for mankind in recent decades, courtesy the ongoing pandemic. The challenge continues as mankind awaits an effective vaccine to put the threat behind. Needless to add then that in the early months of the lockdown, Businesses were impacted severely. However, even as they couldn’t get people down to their workplaces, Technology provided the solution to connect and transact Business. The collaboration software tools for work from anywhere as well as other remote tools for network configuration to monitoring ensured that people in roles that used computers at work could carry on despite the unprecedented disruption. However, for those who had to be physically available at workplaces or on duty such as field staff, they did have a disruption in their work schedules, until there was partial relaxation and a return to work was possible with all social distancing norms followed. The world continues to cope with the pandemic, with social distancing being followed.

For Technology CIOs, it has been a year to step up and they have done so admirably. Their role has never been more pronounced as has been this year. The companies who had implemented digital transformation even partially, were better placed than those who lagged behind in digital ways.

The CIO had to be up to the challenge during the early days of the lockdown, in terms of overseeing the remote work arrangements.

For the Lulu Group, the IT team has to meet the steep demand of supporting the Lulu Group’s vast scale of operations.

Piyush Kumar Chowhan, Group CIO LuLu Group International says “COVID is a unique disruption which I believe no one was prepared in early part of 2020. It was a shock which has provided great learning for all enterprises in the area of strategy and working culture. The CIO’s office had to step up and play a very dif-

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CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

ferent role to support the busines teams. IT teams had to respond quickly to enable remote working and ensure business continuity.

Since we had already started our cloud journey and invested in remote working technologies, which helped us respond better.

The only challenge was the speed of implementation which tested the agile ways of working of IT teams. It was evident that as the situation evolved with multiple lockdowns, there would be a need to accelerate the pace of change for application features and enabling the underlying infrastructure.”

For the Gulftainer Company, a privately owned, independent port management and 3PL logistics company, Remote working and work from home were not new as the Gulftainer IT team has been providing support to their port operations 24/7 spread across various geographies. However, this was a situation on a larger unprecedented scale.

Vinay Sharma, Group IT head, Gulftainer Company says, “Managing with 100% of our office based staff working remotely meant that we did face a few challenges; mainly team timings; isolating in the home environment where there may be internet issues; having to conduct all meetings which used to be daily face to face meetings or discussions across different time zones.”

He adds, “However, the team was able to quickly adapt to the new work norms, many of us created an office room/space to ensure that we were able to focus on work during business hours and not get distracted by family and children. Another challenge was to ensure everyone maintained a proper work/life balance. In the Mohammed beginning of the lockdown weShabeer found that our teams were spendVP, Heading long hours working without the routine Tecchnology of coming and going GEMS Education to the office. With the help ofServices, regular one to ones with staff, team meetings, HR broadcasts and online collaboration tools, we are now very well adjusted to this new normal.”

» CIO OUTLOOK For the diversified Bin Dasmal Group, the situation prompted a rethink at the strategic and operational levels.

Umesh Moolchandani, Group IT Head, Bin Dasmal Group said, “The unprecedented situation, forced the organization to rethink the business strategy and the operating environment. The top leadership and managers of the group engaged with employees and IT team to respond to the situation considering the government’s guidelines, health and security of the employees and reducing the impact on the business. The IT teams was relied upon to create work-from-home setups for entire group companies.”

The role of IT teams in business continuity had never been seen as more important than during this tough passage of time. For IT teams, this was the moment of reckoning and they had to deliver.

Umesh adds, “The IT department in consultation with business and as per the organization policies implemented the right infrastructure e.g. VPN, communication and collaboration tools, data backup tools based on the remote environment of each employee.

Employees working with unstructured data were encouraged not to store their files on their own laptops, but rather to store work files on a company-managed file server that had immutable snapshots capability. Having taken these steps, IT department ensured that mission-critical data and applications were fully backed up.”

There were beneficial outcomes as well during this period. For instance, with people hardly stepping out in the months of March to May, e-Commerce got a massive boost in the region. Online retail began to flourish and possibly this is sustainable growth.

Piyush adds, “Internet commerce got a big boost hence it was necessary to scale the e-com business to deliver to the customer expectations. The technology team had to gear up to immediately to offer multiple modes of delivery for our customers like Click and Collect, Express Delivery etc. Use of modern devops tools did help the team develop functionality at a pace not seen before” Remote working necessitated adoption of new technologies in addition to whatever was already in place. Companies made investments in various tools including collaboration suites and security.

Piyush says, “As response to COVID it was necessary that we provide seamless working condition for all our staff remotely. This required new VDI installations for about 30% of the staff to enable work from home. These were provisioned in cloud very quickly and the transition was near seamless. While a lot of staff were not using lot of collaboration tools, immediate training was provided to them to quickly upskill for better collaboration tools like online calls, virtual chats, common file sharing platforms etc.”

Companies, large and small, had to orient a majority of their staff, to the new way of remote working, familiarizing them with various collaboration tools. This has been a baptism by fire of sorts for a large number of people to digital working but that’s been a positive outcome.

Vinay says, “From Gulftainer’s perspective many of these online tools and collaboration platforms were already in place and in use, throughout our global offices, prior to the pandemic. These were largely being utilized by managers and senior management, how-

Piyush Kumar Chowhan Group CIO, LuLu Group International ever, with the new working practices we’ve had to adopt, we were able to transition all staff on to these platforms to enable them to more easily work from home. In my view this was a bigger task for us rather than bringing in new tools. We had to conduct training to all people below management level on the use of these tools like MS teams, VPNs, and SharePoint to ensure that all business teams remained productive and able to deliver their KPIs.” The Bin Dasmal Group too ramped up on their IT infrastructure side.

Umesh says, “To cope with the challenges of remote working, the IT team in Bin Dasmal Group had to bring in various new technologies to support the business. The IT department managed digital devices entrusted to employees using key enabling technologies. Bin Dasmal Group had been already using Email Services, ERP and CRM Application deployed on cloud-based infrastructure to access remotely. Microsoft Teams was primarily used for communication and collaboration between employees, management and other outside parties. Finally, Firewall based VPN provided a secure communication channel through public Internet connections.”

Making the best of the digital initiatives

The organizations which had rolled out digital transformation initiatives prior to the outbreak were better placed as they just had to make an incremental adjustment in terms of scaling up their remote work support.

Gulftainer’s Vinay says, “While we had all the tools and required OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» CIO OUTLOOK stead and kept it resilient.

Umesh says, “Bin Dasmal Group has been one of the early adopters of the cloud-based technologies. The organization had taken up digital transformation initiatives and deployed IT services like emails, business critical applications like ERP and CRM in the cloud environment. Even while deploying these services in the cloud, the IT department had taken good care of security in designing and setting up the network environment, protocols, policies and procedures. Any new initiative, whether it’s technology refresh, business application upgrade or any new technology deployment, the IT department follows the security by design and makes sure that it’s taken up with utmost priority in Bin Dasmal Group.”

Ramping cloud strategies

On the infrastructure front, companies that adopted cloud strategies have been able to manage the niggles of operations in these tough times better with the ability to scale up.

Vinay Sharma Group IT head, Gulftainer Company

Piyush says, “We always believed in hybrid cloud strategy which helps manage out workloads better. We have out large core enterprise applications hosted in our data center and customer facing applications hosted on cloud. This strategy has provided us flexibility and security to manage them very differently. The enterprise workloads are more predictable hence the on-premise solutions are better managed in-house.”

Large companies have relied on a hybrid strategy because that continues to serve them well in terms of scale of operations and also ensuring data integrity.

collaboration platforms in place due to our global business units, expanding that facility to many more departments and people was the task in hand. As part of our digital transformation initiatives we had already adopted MS team, cloud hosting and e-meeting tools, which were already in use by management and our executive teams, have now been rolled out across all employees at all sites. “

Vinay says, “We have embarked on our cloud journey few year back , many of our applications and DR sites are on cloud. However, we still have a considerable load hosted on local Data centre. With the recent availability of cloud-based options in the UAE, more applications that are mission critical and response driven can now be moved onto the cloud.”

However, he adds that Gulftainer’s other digital transformation initiatives have been impacted because of directing time, manpower and resources towards expanding these collaboration tools and platforms in the organization. “The transformation process has slowed, down if not paused in some areas, due not only our own internal challenges, but also to challenges being faced by our various suppliers, vendors and partners having to cope with similar changes in their own organizations,” he says.

Bin Dasmal group has also been an adopter of cloud services and the group has deployed a hybrid cloud strategy like several of its peers in the market.

For Lulu, this seems to have created an opportunity to accelerate omnichannel retail.

Piyush says, “We were already on the digital transformation path and we believe that this pace will be accelerated and some of our plans of creating omni-channel retail for our customers. While COVID has brought in new customer behavior, we are working to understand the trends and build out customer proposition accordingly. We will keep on investing more on customer facing technologies to understand them better and serve them better.”

The Bin Dasmal Group was also quite ahead in terms of adopting transformation technologies. This has stood the company in good

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CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

Umesh says, “Bin Dasmal Group, being an early adopter of cloud computing, has embraced the cloud to be the digital enterprise.

However, this has been a process driven with caution and based on merits. The organization has adopted the Hybrid cloud environment which includes a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud.”

Addressing security concerns

Enabling remote work meant serious concerns of vulnerabilities being exposed to cyberattacks. Security indeed continues to be a serious subject of focus for all companies that have enabled remote work.

Piyush says, “Security is an important topic and in this digital era requires special attention. Its seen, with more transactions moving contactless and digital the chances of fraud are increasing which is an area of focus for us. Remote working provided us

» CIO OUTLOOK to revisit the entire network infrastructure and identify potential areas of vulnerability for possible threats. We also did multiple rounds of VAPT to ensure that we are create secure connections as most of our data was being accessed remotely. We are gearing us to protect not only enterprise IT transactions but also ensure that customer interactions happen in a totally secure way.”

For a maritime company like Gulftainer, security has always been a paramount focus and this has been accentuated during the current phase.

Vinay says, “Yes, like any other organization, due to having to work from home, most of our devices are connecting from private networks to our core applications and network components, which in itself is vulnerable and prone to attacks. Recent increased attacks on maritime companies is making the situation even tougher and mandates strict security restrictions Gulftainer has a very strong security framework and policies in place, we are ISO 27001 certified and constantly keep updating our defenses to ensure that our systems and business is protected. We have two independent teams that run the NOC and SOC to monitor all event proactively and ensuring that our platforms remain safe.”

Coping with the cultural change

One of the challenges was to see how employees made the adjustments to a near overnight change from working in offices to working out of their homes. And certainly, not all job roles could be done remotely but companies went all out to enable as much remote working possible as they could.

Piyush says, “The biggest change which we see of COVID is in the culture and ways of working. Initially with all the teams working remotely it took time to adapt to this new reality but slowly it became clear that this is the new norm. It surely has made a few employees not so comfortable but most of them were able to adopt this new way of working. The use of remote calls, meeting and collaboration was put to test and helped in having the toolset used by all the employees who were not using them precovid. During the months of April to June the entire workforce was working remotely and then slowly they were brought back into office in phased manner. The other aspect of culture has been agile ways of working which is more prevalent than pre-covid.

The adoption of devops for technology and prototyping is going to adopted at a much faster pace across the organizations.”

The organizations guided their employees through the awkward phase when they were required to move to new tools at work swiftly, which was key to making the transition successful.

“It took a few days for employees to brace and handle the change towards remote working. The IT team evaluated the remote working environment of each employee on case-to-case basis and making it secure enough to access the enterprise IT services.

Based on the approval provided by the business, the setup for remote working was enabled for the employee. Apart from enabling various IT services for the employees to work remotely, there was a requirement to provide proper awareness and training to the employees. Each and every employee was given the training regarding accessing the IT services securely and contacting the IT team immediately in case of encountering an unforeseen incident.”

Umesh Moolchandani Group IT Head, Bin Dasmal Group

Some sectors were exempted from the lockdown rules, Maritime being one of them.

Vinay says, “Initially we transitioned 100% of our white collar/ office based staff to work remotely. However, our core terminal operations staff had to continue working from our port sites, as our business is classed as an essential part of supply chain industry. Our business was always exempt from lock down to ensure we were able to get vital supplies to medical facilities, first responders and into stores.”

As restrictions have eased in the various countries in which it operates, Gulftainer has been able to transition more people back to the office. Currently in the UAE, it is working on a 30% occupancy basis, in line with UAE government regulations and is being seen most companies.

Vinay adds that critical services staff and support staff working are working on a rotation basis to ensure that there is an IT team available for any support needed either by office or home-based staff.

While people have made adjustments, the heart of the matter is that the world is well served by technology in these trying times. When the Pandemic becomes a thing of the past, hopefully sooner than later, the world would have already embraced newer digital technologies, helping to redefine a ‘new normal’.

Companies of the region in general are also keeping pace with digital transformation initiatives that seems quite a necessity now to stay resilient.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» KUBERNETES

MANAGING CONTAINERS WITH KUBERNETES Kubernetes and its variants from leading vendors have taken the lead in helping manage containers in multi cloud environments

– By R. Narayan

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CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

» KUBERNETES In the past few years, Container technology has become quite integral to how workloads are managed on cloud and across. As the multi-cloud era goes mainstream and with the need for flexibility of moving applications across clouds or between cloud and on-premise, Containers help achieve that portability challenge as they essentially decouple applications from the OS and rest of infrastructure underneath. This makes it easier to deploy the containers across other clouds or OS. Containers by definition cannot be changed as they have an immutable code that maybe running and with a ready to run software package stored as an image. To make changes, a containerized image needs to be recreated with the change included. The software to execute a container is called container runtime and there are several container runtimes including Docker, containerd, CRI-O etc.

While containers help run the workloads, they still need to be managed as there could be issues such as a container that isn’t running and needs to be replaced by another, which is where there is the need for a container management system. Kubernetes has emerged in recent years as the popular orchestration system for managing containers while Docker itself remains the popular container technology. Kubernets is perhaps being seen as one of the fastest-growing infrastructure platforms.

Kubernetes had been set up by Google as an open source project back in 2014. It is used to automate application deployment, scaling, and operations of containers. It helps execute provisioning and scheduling containers/clusters to ensuring container availability, managing and monitoring containers etc.

According to Paulo Pereira, Director, Systems Engineering – Emerging Markets and Eastern Europe at Nutanix, “Docker is a container technology, like many others in the market while Kubernetes is an orchestration tool for containers, be that docker or something else.”

Michael Cade, Senior Technologist Product Strategy at Veeam Software gives a more descriptive analogy to illustrate the difference between a container such as Docker and Kubernetes. He says, "Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine while Docker is a container runtime. Think of a hotel with all it's rooms for sale or rent to the public. As the hotel owner, you can choose to manage the room booking and sales process yourself or you can let a well-known travel site sell your rooms for a small fee or overhead. The rooms can be considered as containers and can absolutely be run alone with no container orchestration (this would be the commercial travel site) but and this depends on the value, it can be managed by a travel site, the travel site will look after the vacant rooms and potentially discount rooms to be sold cheaper to fill them or the other way in terms of increasing prices. Think of this as the way of orchestrating workloads up and down dynamically making sure the service is not only available, but it can deal with demand.”

Michael Cade Senior Technologist, Product Strategy, Veeam Software

While Kubernetes is open source, there are variant distributions of the open source platform from different vendors under different names, such as OpenShift for instance from Red Hat, SUSE CaaS Platform, Nutanix Karbon, VMWare Tanzu etc.

Ihab Farhoud, Director, Solutions Engineering – METNA, VMware METNA says, “Kubernetes is the open source and reliable platform for managing/orchestrating cloud native/modern containerized Apps. Hence, it plays a pivotal role in private/public and multi-cloud environments as it enables applications portability and flexibility (across multiple clouds) and it increases developers and operations productivity, among other benefits, for the container ecosystem.”

VMware announced recently that it offers vSphere with Tanzu as a developer-ready infrastructure, arguably delivering the fastest way to get started with Kubernetes. It helps configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure leveraging the existing networking and storage in as little as an hour.

With different leading vendors now offering different Kubernetes variants to enable customers with application modernization and containerization, these different variants also come with better support than working with the open source product by itself as it could be complex and challenging to configure. Essentially, Kubernetes helps you manage operations of a production environment running containerized workloads.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» KUBERNETES

Nutanix provides Nutanix Karbon which is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes Certified distribution that simplifies the provisioning, operations and lifecycle management of Kubernetes with a native Kubernetes experience. Karbon makes it simple to deploy a highly available Kubernetes cluster and operate web-scale workloads.

Responding to how important Kubernetes is from the point of view of data management in the hybrid/ multi-cloud IT infrastructure/ environments, Michael Cade, Senior Technologist Product Strategy at Veeam Software explains that Businesses would be looking at it as a convenient way to move workloads and data freely between clouds as well as between cloud and on site.

Ihab Farhoud Director, Solutions Engineering – METNA, VMware METNA

INCREASINGLY WE SEE THAT “RELIABLE, SECURE AND FLEXIBLE APPLICATIONS ARE KEY TO SUCCESS IN JUST ABOUT EVERY VERTICAL, AND KUBERNETES IS A KEY PILLAR OF DEVELOPING, DELIVERING, SCALING AND MAINTAINING APPLICATIONS, IRRESPECTIVE OF WHICH VERTICAL AND GEOGRAPHY AN ORGANIZATION MIGHT BE OPERATING IN.

"

Paulo Pereira, Director, Systems Engineering – Emerging Markets and Eastern Europe at Nutanix says, “Kubernetes are absolutely critical to manage a large deployment of containers.

Containers are the ultimate answer to the issue of portability of applications between private clouds and public clouds. Much has been done with virtual machines but it’s the container technology that really makes this process easy.”

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CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

He elaborates, “I would answer this in a similar way as when virtualisation came along. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t integral for every business small and large to adopt virtualisation, some did, and some didn’t to begin with. But fast forward to 20 years with virtualisation. I would say a large percentage of businesses have a majority of their workloads now running some form of virtualisation. Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform is something that many net new businesses will start with today and more mature companies will be looking to invest time, effort and learning in this area to see if it can help adapt businesses be faster, efficient and more performant as well as giving the business an edge in their markets. I think you could also look at Cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service as another trend that we saw come up pretty fast and has been strongly and widely adopted. Being able to move workloads and data freely between platforms regardless of source is something all businesses should be considering.”

SECURITY CONCERNS

Cloud native Security is seen as a function of securing four layers, from the base to the topmost as Kebernotes.io points out. The four layers are code, containers, cluster and cloud and if a base layer is vulnerable, securing the upper layer alone wouldn’t make a difference.

Michael says, “Kubernetes doesn’t change or remove any of the security challenges or vulnerabilities with a platform, applications, workloads or data. Kubernetes.IO has some in depth documentation and they reference a number of times regarding “The 4C’s of cloud native security:” Code, Container, Cluster and Cloud / Corporate Data center. Each layer of the Cloud Native security model builds upon the next outermost layer. The Code layer benefits from strong base (Cloud, Cluster, Container) security layers. You cannot safeguard against poor security standards in the base layers by addressing security at the Code level.”

So the base layer, which is the cloud, needs to be quite secure and most trusted. But standards are still evolving although there are enough Best Practices available. When an open source Kubernetes is used, all the security controls need to be configured at your end. The various Kubernetes distributions from vendors would however come with pre-configured security controls.

» KUBERNETES

Ihab says, “Like any complex system, there are many security and vulnerabilities challenges. Many security problems in early versions of Kubernetes have been resolved in recent versions. But there are still risks that must be understood before trusting it with production data. Best practices in Kubernetes security are rapidly evolving.”

Veeam as a data management leader for cloud infrastructure added a new dimension to its offerings with its partnership announced earlier this year with Kasten’s whose K10 Data Management Platform is purpose-built for Kubernetes, providing enterprise operations teams an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for Kubernetes backup and application mobility with operational simplicity.

Michael says, “Simply put, the vision and strategy for Veeam Software is to supply our customers with the ability to protect their data in whatever form that it is presented in. The complexity that these early adopters are finding is the lack of data management and data integrity when it comes to protecting Kubernetes and container workloads. Kubernetes and containers are often compared to Virtual Machines but it is a very different approach.

It is very much focused on a different persona., The person that looks after the lifecycle of containers in a Kubernetes environment is not your traditional operations infrastructure admin. They are focused on the application and have more of a DevOps function, but also understand the platform where the application lives.

Bringing the infrastructure or platform closer to the application carries its own benefits anyway. But this same approach means that data integrity has to be looked at differently than how we approach virtual machine backup, which has been our focus for 14+ years. This is where Kasten completes that ability to protect these new cloud native workloads."

ADVANTAGE EARLY ADOPTERS

As the shift to the multi-cloud infrastructure gains further momentum, the popularity of containerized applications is also growing. And as Kubernetes is open source based, it offers the convenience to porting applications across the multiple environments without the fear of losing out on either availability or performance.

Ihab says, “Increasingly we see that reliable, secure and flexible applications are key to success in just about every vertical, and Kubernetes is a key pillar of developing, delivering, scaling and maintaining applications, irrespective of which vertical and geography an organization might be operating in."

For innovative organizations looking to develop and scale their own softwares as well, there is a good reason as to why they should be adopting container technology.

Paulo say, “Every organization who is developing their own software and is interested in designing applications, which can scale horizontally must have their sights on container technology. There isn’t any vertical who can benefit more

Paulo Pereira Director, Systems Engineering, Emerging Markets & Eastern Europe, Nutanix

than other. Whoever is ahead has a competitive advantage.

Speed is power and this technology offers a way to release and scale quickly.”

There is in fact an acceleration in terms of container adoption.

And it is a reasonable assumption that many among those deployments would be using Kubernetes to orchestrate their container system.

Michael adds, “ESG recently released an eBook of research that covers this exact question and some more trends seen in this space. [Data Protection for Containers] released in September 2020 outlines that amongst those surveyed, 67% currently use containers for production applications. This shows that we are in a full acceleration phase for container adoption.

This is only going to continue over the next 24 months. In terms of particular verticals or areas, I would say broadly that Enterprise and Start Ups are the most likely to have the ability to go all in on containers and Kubernetes.”

The global application container market is growing significantly, led by the increasing number of container orchestration services, container data management, container security services etc being available as well as deployed. It is a fair bet that the deployment of various flavors of Kubernetes from different vendors would contribute a big chunk to that expected growth as enterprises look to deploy more containerized workloads .

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» INTERVIEW

SECURITY IN THE REMOTE WORK ERA

C

ybereason, creators of the leading Cyber DefensePlatform launched operations in the Middle East earlier this year. Cybereason provides complete visibility and actionable threat detection so security analysts can stop attacks before material damage happens. Tarek Kuzbari, regional director - Middle East & Turkey, Cybereason discusses the company’s focus in the region in a chat with CXODX

Are organizations doing enough to secure themselves in the era of increased remote working? What steps should they be ideally taking?

Many companies didn't have the underlying hardware, software and support infrastructure in place to support vast amounts of people working remotely when the pandemic initially hit. And even fewer had established security guidelines in place for remote work – including employee use of personal devices for company business -- and remote access to company information systems. Over the past several months, improvements have been made and heading into 2021 the new norm will be an increase in the hiring of more full-time remote workers.

The job of security professionals is to have a plan in place to reduce risks.

There are aspects organizations should be considering as the following.

Remote Access: you might have some employees remote right now, but are all of them remote? Do you allow insider information, like source code or strategic project documents like M&A named projects, to be accessed remotely? Obviously, the VPN and your extranet strategy here matter and burst licensing might be required from suppliers, but consider, by department, what new data types are

26

being accessed and what this exposure might mean from a risk perspective.

Mobile: Mobile is still a vulnerable medium and needs better security measures generally. Now might not be the time to beef up mobile, but the day is coming, post-crisis, when that is likely to be the hottest risk area for many businesses.

Laptops and Desktops: In a very real way, every employee is working on data that is by definition outside the perimeter.

If you don’t already use tools like FullDisk Encryption, now is not the time to turn it on blindly but rather to take note of what data is most sensitive and to come up with a policy for data-at-rest outside the company.

Security Operations and IR: Security operations and incident response are often group activities with highly specialized collaboration and tool use. Can your employees exchange ideas, talk, meet ad hoc, exchange data, and so on, securely? You need to make sure that employees can continue to work remotely well into 2021 and security can't be an afterthought.

Awareness Training: It might be a good time to encourage a refresher in aware-

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

ness programs and training as people move home. It will give them something to do and make them actively conscious of security issues. I suspect that there will be a few new modules in most awareness curricula soon, around working remotely or at least an emphasis on these, but you can always encourage the creation of a new module around your company’s move.

Is MDR a managed service offering through your partners to customers?

Yes, Cybereason's MDR-in-a-Box (Managed Detection and Response) is offered through partners. The MDR-in-a-Box program is designed to help strategic partners increase market share through the delivery of new SaaS driven cybersecurity solutions. By leveraging the Cybereason Defense Platform and program approach, partners can fast track new, high-demand service offerings and provide their customers with a holistic managed solution that addresses their specific needs.

Do your threat hunting solutions use any deception technology?

The Cybereason Defense Platform includes anti-malware technology to detect and prevent it when it executes and exhibits ransomware indicators. In particular, Cybereason's anti-ransomware technology uses deception techniques to detect, prevent and recover from attempts to encrypt files, remove local data backups, or modify critical system areas such as the master boot record.

As a cloud based solution, is your EDR solution effective across all possible cloud and premise based infrastructure of an enterprise client?

Yes, Cybereason technology can support cloud, hybrid, on-premise as well as airgaped environment.

» INTERVIEW Can you please elaborate on your partner strategy Cybereason sells entirely through the channel, and our success in the region depends entirely upon our ability to forge a rich partner ecosystem. Just in the past year alone, we have struck agreements with some of the biggest technology and services providers in the world, including Westcon, WWT, Cerner and TrustWave.

To ensure that our partner program is tailored to the region, in early August, we announced the launch of a new partner program for the Middle East that will allow the region’s value-added resellers (VARs) and managed security-service providers (MSSPs) to enhance their customers’ defense postures against an ever-evolving threat landscape.

The announcement follows Cybereason’s recent signing of Westcon-Comstor ME, which recently became a partner in the marketing and distribution of Cybereason solutions across the Middle East.

Through the new regional partner program, VARs and MSSPs will get access to Cybereason’s Partner Nest, which delivers top-flight sales and technical enablement.

In addition, all partners are instantly eligible for the Cybereason Defenders League certification program that empowers partners with skills to deliver a demo and a POC, enabling them to become experts.

Furthermore, certified partners automatically join the Cybereason Defenders League, an exclusive community of experts with access to Cybereason’s founders, product team, and key roadmap updates.

VARs will collaborate with a market leader in endpoint protection on areas such as business planning, marketing, and deal-making, while gaining access to world-class sales and technical training. MSSPs will get access to discounted pricing models and can also opt to deploy Cybereason's MDR-in-a-box offering, a practice building, all-encompassing program that leverages a combination of flexible support services, methodology, and Cybereason intellectual property.

Elaborate on the strides the company has made in the region since you started operation earlier this year?

If you look at the region, the financial

Tarek Kuzbari

Regional Director–ME & Turkey, Cybereason

losses due to lack of cybersecurity investment is staggering – Ransomware alone is forecasted to generate over US$21Billion this year compared to US$5M a couple of years back. Based on research done for UAE and Saudi Arabia, the cost of a breach is US$6.52M compared to US$3.86M global average, and the time to identify and contain a breach is 369 days compared to 280 days global average. So there is clearly a demand for robust cybersecurity, and specifically endpoint security solutions in the market.

The Cybereason Defense Platform gives security analysts and operations teams the industry's deepest visualized cloud services and the ability to stop targeted attacks. In addition, Cybereason is disrupting the global endpoint-security market. The company’s approach

centers on automating many tasks that previously required manual labor. Its cloud-based EPP (endpoint protection) platform delivers an industry-leading ratio of one analyst to 150,000 endpoints, compared with the benchmark of one analyst to just 20,000 endpoints.

Given our unique value proposition, since we entered the Middle East market back in early 2020, we have been gaining a lot of traction, particularly with organizations in the insurance and government sectors. As I mentioned previously, since our go-to-market strategy is 100% channel oriented, in addition to building out our direct presence, we have also made significant investments in recruiting and enabling a select number of system integrators and distributors.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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Âť INTERVIEW

Rajesh Ganesan, Vice President, ManageEngine discusses the importance of ITSM in the era of remote working

Rajesh Ganesan Vice President, ManageEngine

THE PRIMACY OF ITSM Discuss the challenges organizations face in terms of network management due to more people working remotely?

There are various challenges that organizations are facing during this pandemic in terms of network management, as employees embrace remote working and as the internet traffic continues to rise.

Organizations need to monitor the essential network elements and critical IT applications that are necessary to sustain an uninterrupted business service delivery.

VPN: Since employees are now connected to the company's network through

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VPNs, monitoring these connections and their bandwidth is crucial. Firewall restrictions on the number of VPN connections and the peak hour utilization also need to be critically monitored.

Network security: Lack of a secure corporate network and BYOD adoption exposes employee devices to a lot of network security threats and malware. Firewall security log analysis and user activity monitoring can help identify such remote issues that can infiltrate the corporate network and attack other devices.

Network configuration changes: The se-

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

curity exposure of the corporate network could also increase without updated network compliance protocols. Since remote working already poses a security risk from an employee perspective, it would be prudent to enforce strict network compliance protocols and back up device configuration changes consistently.

Server resource utilization: Monitor memory, CPU and disk utilization parameters of physical and virtual servers to make sure critical services and applications have adequate resources to process and deliver incoming user requests. Automate troubleshooting tasks such as start/ stop/restart for individual instances.

Application response time: End user facing applications have to deliver a seamless user experience, even while processing

» INTERVIEW numerous simultaneous user requests. Delayed response in critical transactions could be the result of slow SQL statements.

End user experience: Synthetic transaction monitoring allows you to simulate end user journeys through your website; record and replay these transactions from anywhere around the globe. This means, any problems with website elements (html, css, images, scripts, etc.) including third party integrations can be contributing to slow performance.

Capacity planning and performance forecasting: Measure growth and utilization trends of business critical servers and applications. Historical trend analysis can help in understanding usage patterns and predict the rate of saturation of applications. Load distribution and capacity upgrade decisions become easier with granular performance reports.

In remote working era, please tell us some of your IT Management tools that help in terms of enabling monitoring, securing etc.

Remote working brings with it new data security risks, especially the risk of both unintentional and malicious data exfiltration. ManageEngine's Desktop Central and Password Manager Pro, help manage and secure endpoints and passwords, respectively. With the launch of sophisticated phishing attacks, organizations must keep a close watch over user accounts. For instance, it’s vital to monitor users who log on from multiple locations simultaneously or who access multiple resources in a short period of time. Therefore, our new-gen SIEM solutions like Log360, which includes user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) capabilities, and our privileged access management solution, PAM360 can be very useful for enterprises.

pandemic times. That is surprising but do you see more organizations realizing the importance and looking to invest in such solutions?

While collaboration tools and cloud investments would certainly see an uptick, IT service desk teams would also continue to invest in chat bots and virtual assistants to shift left regular tickets through self-healing and diagnosis of issues rather than flood the service desk teams with level 1 tickets.

One of the primary functions of enterprise IT has been collecting data and building workflows around it. There are numerous domains where the first step in implementing AI would be to collect data and that would involve costs to digitize and plumb data to a central repository. The data-driven business model is transitioning to the enterprise, where we have a wealth of data lying around after the digitization wave of the past decade. The next decade is going to be all about using this data to a competitive advantage via AI.

To provide remote employees the access they need to exclusive information within the corporate network, organizations have to ensure secure remote access. This can be done using our Remote Access Plus and Access Manager Plus solutions, which is available to organisations of every size.

How do you see the state of the Middle East market, from SME to large enterprises, as being invested in advanced ITSM tools?

From our experience over the last fifteen years, companies in the Middle East have always demonstrated the pursuit of process maturity and adopting standards.

The obvious next step is execution and IT teams have led the way in technology adoption and deploying tools to automate their IT and service management processes. In recent years, the governments in the region have shown a great intent to leverage technology as an enabler and differentiator, motivating businesses of all verticals and sizes. Simultaneously, technology consumption by individuals is also growing at an extremely fast rate in the Middle East, driving them to have the same level of user experience with the enterprise IT systems. Given all these factors, from ManageEngine's perspective, we do see companies being proactive and are willing to make the investment in taking their IT service delivery and IT service management programs to match the user expectations.

A recent survey from you indicated that a good number of organizations haven’t invested in self service desks and virtual agents that hamper them during the

Have cloud enabled versions been showing greater sales traction in the region now for ManageEngine?

There has always been a demand for

cloud and cloud-based applications in the Middle East and the pandemic has only accelerated its demand. In this current crisis, 'Cloud-enabled' businesses were able to quickly move to a workfrom-home (WFH) mode and maintain productivity. This year we have seen a 50 percent increase in sales traction for all of our cloud-based solutions in the UAE. Be it to prepare for the next crisis or to make WFH an ongoing practice, businesses are prioritising cloud initiatives. Our expectation is that the cloud adoption rate in the Middle East region will accelerate in 2021, and for the next several years.

What's the role for AI in ITSM and from ManageEngine’s point of view?

By nature AI and ITSM have similar objectives and hence ITSM offers a ripe set of opportunities to deploy AI. ITSM solutions are increasingly deploying AI techniques to offer value to end users by cutting down response times and increasing satisfaction.

ITSM differs from the rest of the IT management suite by the fact that it has more human generated data than machine generated data and hence the need for deploying powerful NLP techniques. Chatbots can help customers search through the existing knowledge base and can hand over control as and when necessary to human agents. Asset tracking can also become easier, with AI based techniques converting semi structured information like emails, chat conversations and more into auditable asset registries. AI in ITSM can also identify the context of a ticket as soon as it lands in the tool, understand its context and assign the ticket to the right agent available, thereby enabling faster resolution.

Powerful OCR techniques can also retrieve information from a variety of data sources like invoices, purchase orders and fetch relevant information for the agents. Various time series techniques can also give a good insight into the trends of tickets, closure rates, satisfaction rates and asset deployment strategies.

AI has so much to offer for ITSM and I'm sure AI is no longer a luxury, but a necessity in ITSM!

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» INTERVIEW

TOWARDS STRONGER CONNECTIVITY Sakkeer Hussain-Director, Sales & Marketing, D- Link MEA discusses some of the key solutions of focus for enterprise and SME as it helps build stronger and faster networks How do you think the SME or enterprise segment can leverage some for your technologies best for enabling remote work for their workforce?

Both SME and enterprise segments can take advantage of D-Link’s broad portfolio of networking and cloud solutions, which enable effortless remote work models.

We are a pioneer in cloud solutions and services in the region. We have an elaborate portfolio of indoor and outdoor mydlink cameras, Nuclias Managed Wireless Networking Solution portfolio, market-leading Wi-Fi 6 routers, including two of flagship products - DIR-X6060 EXO AX AX6000 and DIR-X5460 EXO AX AX5400.

Our recent launch Nuclias Managed Wireless Networking Solution portfolio has experienced a wide adoption in the regional market, especially as it was introduced during the peak of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Regional businesses, across SMEs and enterprises, are able to implement solutions from Nuclias Cloud portfolio effortlessly to connect to company networks as the installation process demands a minimal need for in-house IT skills. Customers can manage their networks from the cloud with this solution, which boasts benefits around control and convenience.

Discuss how D-Link is enhancing its Nuclias ecosystem and broadening market reach?

Nuclias Connect and Nuclias Cloud Remote Network Management Solutions are part of our transformative remote work solutions portfolio and are genuine market differentiators. The complete end-to-end innovative suite of solutions is crafted to assist and empower remote learning and

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working. It is unique because never before have IT administrators set up, automated, monitored and scaled wireless networks remotely so easily and seamlessly.

Nuclias Cloud portfolio allows SMBs and large enterprises across retail, education and hospitality, as well as MSPs, to deploy professional-grade networks from anywhere and anytime, eliminating physical space constraints. Convenience, cost-effectiveness and ease of use make the solutions ideal for onboarding, studying, troubleshooting as well as monitoring and reporting network activity quickly and easily.

At D-Link, we are ensuring our partners are trained well in these solutions so that they are equipped to help regional customers with their remote work requirements. We are also continuously adding more partners into this ecosystem and bringing new and improved features to the portfolio.

Do you see demand growth for wireless deployments in campuses and larger institutions across the region? Is that a strong focus for D-Link with its wide portfolio of APs? The demand for wireless deployments across all sectors has increased, especially as a result of the ongoing pandemic. This is also seen in the education sector, across campuses and larger institutions. With remote and distance learning models in place, it is key that educational institutes invest in the right technology that not only offer the advantages of fast wireless connectivity but also provides security – a crucial element now more than ever. At D-Link, the education segment is a key focus and we have several APs targeted

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

towards this sector.

Please elaborate on how wifi-6 will benefit Business segment customers? Are your new product launches enabled to support WiFi-6?

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

In order to truly capitalize on the advantages of Wi-Fi 6, it is necessary for users to invest in new hardware as Wi-Fi standards not only rely on software upgrades.

Unlike the existing 11ac wireless standard that operates only in the 5 GHz range, WiFi 6 fully utilizes both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. It also comes with 1024 QAM to boost throughput to devices by up to 25%, and 160 MHz contiguous channel width for even more bandwidth. Wi-Fi 6 routers from D-Link include two of its flagship products - DIR-X6060 EXO AX AX6000 and DIR-X5460 EXO AX AX5400. Besides these two, all our new products are enabled to support Wi-Fi 6.

What are your solutions to support wireless video surveillance, wireless video/data transmission etc? Is there a growing demand?

There is a significantly growing demand for wireless video surveillance solutions.

D-Link’s extensive portfolio includes intelligent cameras, such as its flagship product – mydlink DCS-8630LH Full HD

» INTERVIEW Outdoor Wi-Fi Spotlight Camera with Built-in Smart Home Hub. These cameras are equipped with edge-based person detection with AI technology, allowing for more intelligent and personal automation and surveillance for every smart home. The cameras are interoperable with other devices in the mydlink ecosystem, and also work with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, as well as conform to the ONVIF standard. mydlink Wire-Free Camera Kit DCS2802KT also supports wireless video surveillance. With a rechargeable battery life up to 11 months, the camera offers true wireless freedom to view, record and share anywhere, anytime. It is equipped with cloud or local video storage and has other features such as IP65 weatherproof, builtin 100 dB siren, Full HD 1080p resolution and PIR motion detection among others.

Among other products that support wireless video surveillance, D-Link also have 802.11a/n Outdoor Short-Distance Wireless Bridge DAP-F3704-I, various wireless AC outdoor bridges such as DAP-F3711-1, DAP-F3705-N, DAPF3712-N to name a few. These are powerful wireless broadband access and transmission products. They offer stable outdoor wireless signal coverage and longdistance wireless backhaul, and provide customers with stable, high quality, convenient broadband services.

How have your partners coped with the current period of pandemic led challenges? How did D-Link help to offset the impact to the greatest possible extent?

The new normal has redefined the usual way of doing business for everyone.

Boasting coveted customer relationships, partners have a unique opportunity to truly understand how their offerings can innovate and simplify customers’ operations and propel them digitally.

Our partners are increasingly looking at collaborations with their peers to jointly empower the customer. Partners are learning how to adapt to the evolving customer preferences that the new normal is now defining. This means thinking out of the box to fulfil a need, being agile and always available, offering flexible options and most of all understanding the customer’s changing business models.

Sakkeer Hussain Director, Sales & Marketing, D- Link MEA Our partners are looking at reskilling and bridging the skills gap within their firms as the new normal calls for all hands-on deck and simultaneously presents new opportunities for which they should be ready for. Partners are now also thinking of having their own business continuity plans mapped out and make the move to digital for their operations internally. Cash flow becomes another critical area which partners have to manage smartly.

At D-Link, we understand that each partner has been impacted differently by the crisis and hence have personalized approaches for each company. We are doubling down on our channel investments and prioritizing our channel partners even more. We are having dedicated meetings with our partners to understand their current challenges and finding ways to solve them together. We are adapting our approaches to channel sales, channel marketing and channel enablement to reflect the current market requirements and sentiments. We are also offering extended flexibility and support to our partner network. We are working with our partners closely to help navigate the current

market scenario and prep them to thrive in a digital future.

Discuss the tie-up with Ameyo?

D-Link has recently partnered with Ameyo, a leading provider of omnichannel customer engagement solutions.

Ameyo helps consumer-facing brands implement results-focussed engagement with customers across mediums like voice, email, chat, social media, and video for sales, onboarding, customer service, and collections use cases. Its product suite includes Omnichannel Contact Center Solutions and Helpdesk & Ticketing Software.

As Ameyo’s only cloud partner in the UAE and Oman, D-Link will bring to its partners the hardware reliability and software services under one umbrella with Ameyo’s product suite. The partnership with D-Link brings Ameyo’s cloud-based omnichannel contact center solutions to the UAE and Oman. Enterprises can replace their existing legacy contact center infrastructure as part of digital transformation and save huge costs with combined offerings from Ameyo and D-Link.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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Âť INSIGHT - IIOT

UNLOCKING THE BENEFITS OF THE INDUSTRIAL INTERNET OF THINGS Ravi Gopinath, Chief Cloud Officer and Chief Product Officer at AVEVA explores why connectivity in complex industries will continue to expand

T

he Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is here to stay. Many heavy industry companies in fields such as engineering, mining, oil & gas, and manufacturing are accelerating their adoption of digital transformation journeys due to recent global events.

The barriers to adopting IIoT technology has also fallen dramatically in the past decade. Historical challenges to implementing IIoT solutions included expensive components to add network connectivity, difficulty aggregating data from disparate data streams, and lack of a centralized database or dashboard. Now businesses can have the opportunity to adapt and maintain operational excellence in volatile times through digital transformation. The current global crisis is accelerating cloud and the use of data in increasingly sophisticated ways to provide visibility and certainty into operations.

Smarter data-driven decisions

Adoption of analytics is said to be one of the greatest drivers of digital transforma-

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tion, as businesses seek greater data-driven insights. Data acts as a source of truth that helps teams focus on the critical factors that determine business resilience.

There has also been a fundamental shift in mindset. Businesses are acutely aware that they must become more resilient by using technology.

Companies are using IIoT to their advantage to securely connect, and collect data from diverse remote assets, channeling information to advanced operational applications, and closing the loop by feeding key business applications. This helps to enable optimization, asset management, enhanced analytics, and modelling/simulation, thus providing and improving business efficiency.

This has been particularly true for the industrial sector, for instance, where IIoT has had a significant impact in five key areas including:

1.

Real-time operational information is used to understand what is happening in real-time and enables the condition management of asset and operations life-

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

cycles. For example, a dashboard displaying vibration frequency of a rotating asset such as a turbine during operation provides real-time understanding of the asset operational behavior and state.

2.

Historical operational information helps you to understand what has happened in the past to create intelligence around operational behavior of assets.

Through operational trends, display of KPIs and dashboards, you can create abstracted views of operational states. For example, a graph may be displayed on a dashboard showing the turbine’s past vibration frequency during operation. This can be compared to the real-time vibration frequency, creating intelligence on the asset’s long-term operational trends.

3.

Predictive analytics is used for whatif type modeling. Integrating up real-time and historical data enables your team to assess potential outcomes of operational states and behaviors, even accounting for tertiary variables. Deterministic or non-deterministic models can then be applied for open-loop simulation and predictive analytics. For example, you can

» INSIGHT - IIOT now estimate how long a piece of equipment can run before it requires inspection or is predicted to fail.

4.

Prescriptive analytics describes what’s needed to optimize asset and operations lifecycles. Scenario-based guidance is created and delivered through learning elements and closed-loop algorithms to enable your team to calibrate planning and scheduling across the entire enterprise value chain. For example, using a unified supply chain model, scenario-based calculations can be used to optimize maintenance schedules and performance, minimizing impact to your operations.

5.

Enhanced safety: A combination of connected IoT devices, augmented and virtual reality technology provide real time operating procedures and key messages to operations personnel, reducing human error for performing specific tasks.

Operators are also supplied with information about the location of existing hazards by superimposing them over the operator’s location.

Ravi Gopinath

Chief Cloud Officer and Chief Product Officer, AVEVA

IoT is evolving

Industrial organizations will continue to evolve how they handle and present data at the plant level, and those who make sensible choices to ensure flexibility and expansibility will unlock unlimited potential in existing and expanding data. If your organization does not have a strategy in place for Digital Transformation, the all-important first step is to execute a pilot project and key steps include: • Define an operational architecture (OA) - a key to success is think big and start small.

• Choose an initial underlying system to provide state-of-the-art user interface and data platform - What you choose today will undoubtedly evolve over time: in this case starting now and changing later is infinitely better than waiting for the next generation.

• Tackle small projects that prove the concept of key requirements — user interface, sharing plant and business data across the enterprise — real world use cases. Keep in mind that it’s still early in the fourth industrial revolution and things will change faster than we can cope with. Consumer electronics will continue to drive and accelerate the pace of change in human

machine interaction, and vendors will be making choices about which ones they’ll embrace or leave behind. Industrial organizations must work with their vendors to ensure they get technology to help them make the transitions needed as technology and the workforce continues to change.

Building resilience from within

Covid-19 has significantly curtailed global and local mobility, leaving the global economy to face the prospect of a sharp recession. This will put businesses under enormous strain in 2020. To help navigate the challenge, digital transformation can provide the data driven insights needed to adapt and overcome.

IIoT offers organizations a powerful framework for operational continuity. Enabling users of all levels and experience to access the critical information they need to do their jobs successfully. IIoT devices also empower workforces with the digital services they need, such as equipment uti-

lization, condition management and more.

IIoT offers innovative ways to monitor and manage objects in the physical world, particularly as huge streams of data offer companies’ better avenues for decision making. The results? More uptime, more efficiency and a more engaged and empowered workforce due to the access they have to a unified stream of insightful intelligence, at a time when it’s never been more important to contextualize data and information that drive actionable insights.

Digital transformation is enabling companies to enhance their capabilities, increase their reach and returns across their asset and operations value chains. The use of IIoT through real-time online monitoring and analytics has had a profound impact by improving response times to potential issues and minimizing possible damage to the environment, which has ultimately resulted in the avoidance of costly unscheduled shutdowns, while improving profits.

IIoT has made a vast difference to the efficiency of the industry and simply put, it is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» INSIGHT - USER EXPERIENCE

THE FAST AND THE CURIOUS Rasheed Al-Omari, Principal Business Solutions Strategist, SEMEA, VMware takes a look behind the scenes of the next generation user experience A patient receiving life-saving support in a speeding ambulance and a customer buying a dress may not appear to have much in common. Yet in both situations, you can be sure the organisation serving those individuals is focused on delivering an exceptional level of service.

For the ambulance staff, that’s about reducing the time to treat to increase the time to live – it’s that simple and critical.

For the retailer, the challenge is less dramatic but, within its world, no less significant. How do you sustain your business’s livelihood in an industry of zero second chances, one that’s historically hit first and hardest by the surrounding economy and where miscalculation and intense competition topple even the giants?

In our hyper-connected digital world, where 335 million applications run across billions of devices, the user experience has become everything. It is the single most important factor that’s defining and differentiating organisations.

That’s easy enough to say, but how does the magic happen? How are VR, AR, 5G, drones and robots transforming the experiences we have with the organisations in our lives? We’ll read about the imminent AI overhaul of healthcare and the new retail revolution, but less about the incredible complexity lying just beneath the surface of these amazing user experiences.

Organisations could be relying on a dozen different cloud environments, even more, to deliver the innovation they need. So, how are new technologies being brought together across private, public, hybrid, telco and edge clouds? How can organisations cope with all the data travelling between them, while ensuring our most sensitive information remains safe and secure throughout?

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Let’s look behind the scenes of the next generation user experience.

Reducing the time to treat to increase the time to live

Returning to the ambulance, by way of example, where the patient’s wellbeing depends on how quickly he or she can receive the right treatment. The challenge to this has always been locating the critical data, accessing and processing it safely to add context, and using this information to determine treatment.

Today, there’s an invisible journey of data making this happen. An emergency call is received, and its data logged by the local health authority within its own private cloud, who then schedules an ambulance based on the patient’s address and the nearest available vehicle. Information moves to a different organization, the ambulance group, for dispatch. This is all about speed – how quickly an ambulance reaches the patient. Once the patient is in the ambulance and travelling, data moves to a public cloud – the vehicle becomes a 4/5G connected hotspot, transmitting data via a telco network to the private cloud of the destination hospital. During transport, accuracy is utterly critical – get the right information, to inform the right treatment upon arrival.

In the near future, the secure and real-time journey of data across different cloud environments will push healthcare further to the edge, significantly reducing the time to treat to increase the time to live. Picture ambulance staff equipped with mobile devices continuously connected to A&E so, as data is inputted in the vehicle, the hospital immediately receives and processes this to locate the right available staff and monitor the patient’s wellbeing.

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

Real-time heart data could be displayed graphically on a hospital screen, so surgeons in the hospital can pre-diagnose and respond quicker when the patient arrives. Then picture a specialist surgeon in the hospital, with a virtual reality headset providing computer game like immersion into the ambulance itself, who can guide the triage doctor in the ambulance through time-critical surgery as the vehicle journeys through a city.

This is on the horizon. Antibacterial technology will sterilize the ambulance for surgery, but the real enabler is the movement of data. Essential compute power will reside in the ambulance itself, which becomes an edge device. Sensors on the patient and staff devices send data via an unbroken 5G connection, a telco cloud, to the private cloud of the hospital. The richness and ability to secure this connection across different clouds, enables augmented remote surgery and provides information. These are the most valuable things to give a waiting surgeon – time and accurate context – and could well make the difference between life and death.

Tomorrow’s consumer reality for retail It isn’t a matter of life and death in retail but delivering an equivalent level of exceptional service, faster than the competition, will be the difference between success and failure for companies in the sector. Consumers won’t care how it happens but they will care about the speed, reliability and quality of service they receive.

Again, this relies on the speed and security of the data’s journey behind the scenes.

Tomorrow’s retail store, for example, will autonomously know what’s in stock and reorder products based on context – ensuring enough BBQs for the first summer

» INSIGHT - USER EXPERIENCE heatwave, for example. How? Data will travel from IoT enabled shelves recording stock levels within a retail store’s private cloud and, combined with data journeying back and forth from a public cloud to access the likes of Google Weather, move to the private cloud of the main distribution warehouse – where the BBQs are – to ensure more are delivered to the specific store in time for the sun.

Elsewhere, a consumer will spot a dress online and use augmented reality to layer this onto an image of themselves, to see how the dress looks and feels, while AI in the website pinpoints the perfect size.

Data from the retailer’s private cloud travels over public cloud to the private laptop and wi-fi, before travelling to the private cloud of the delivery warehouse.

Here, a robot will be notified to collect the dress and transport it to a drone – an edge device equipped with sensors – which then communicates via a public cloud to a GPS system to navigate the skies and deliver the product, quite literally, to the consumer’s front door.

Autonomously optimising delivery routes in this way, based on live traffic data, ensures quicker packages and customer satisfaction, and efficiencies at scale by completing more deliveries per day.

This level of vision, innovation and capability is a priority for Ömer Lütfi Karagöz, Network, Communication and Security Group Manager at leading Turkish retailer Migros: “Our success is founded on delivering services in the right time and right place. Today, that’s instantaneous and intrinsically secure data movement – across any cloud required – covering 170,000 devices, 3,000 suppliers, 300 stores opened annually, and 45,000 employees. Tomorrow, it’s managing an infinite number of cloud environments to transform the industry as we know it – whether that’s measuring brain signals to record completely genuine customer reactions to products they are shown, or delivering AI-curated packages of fresh food, based on a customer’s personal diet ambitions. It could be an application that autonomously prioritises a customer’s shopping list, by triangulating their diary and known whereabouts, significant up-

Rasheed Al-Omari

Principal Business Solutions Strategist, SEMEA, VMware

coming financial outgoings and historic seasonal buying habits. The opportunity is total personalisation of the retail experience, without the consumer having to lift a finger.”

Faster, faster, safer

In the past, faster tended to be less secure – there was a balancing act between the speed at which data could be processed and the security of it. It was too complex to have it all. The above examples are only possible because that relationship has become harmonious and simplified: the rapidly moving ambulance cannot afford to be hacked, just as the consumer’s instantaneous financial transactions cannot be compromised.

What’s required is one software founda-

tion that can power the applications, services and experiences transforming the world, across any cloud, without complexity and risk. Cool new technologies themselves are not the point – bringing these together in the different environments that they need, with intrinsic security from the very outset, is what’s powerful. And it is the ability to manage all of this at speed, that’s transformative.

For those organisations that are curious and invest to get this right, the rewards are immense – more personalised services for consumers and better sales for retailers, a higher standard of care and faster recovery for patients. It is the future of customer experience and it can only be achieved by focusing on the magic behind the scenes.

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» TECHSHOW

CLOUDGENIX SD-WAN CloudGenix SD-WAN is the industry’s first next-generation SDWAN solution that is app-defined, autonomous and cloud-delivered. With powerful ML-based capabilities, it delivers dramatic reductions in “day two” operational costs. deliver a better user experience while being simpler to deploy and manage. Palo Alto Networks is announcing its new SD-WAN taking an entirely new approach, with a solution that has the following characteristics:  App Defined – Providing application layer visibility enabling network teams to create app-based policies and deliver SLAs for all apps, improving the end-user experience.

planning simpler by allowing operators to easily understand what WAN connections they are using, when they are using them, and what applications are driving that use.

 Autonomous – Automated operations and problem avoidance using machine learning and data science, eliminating up to 99% of WAN and application access trouble tickets.

ION 1000

 Cloud-delivered – Enabling all branch services to be delivered from the cloud, including networking and security, simplifying WAN management and enabling branches to be rolled out in minutes instead of months.

Palo Alto Networks has added machine learning (ML) and analytics features to CloudGenix SD- WAN to simplify network operations and improve capacity planning. For instance, the system automatically identifies common root cause events when there are multiple event alarms. This dramatically reduces the time to problem resolution and increases the availability of applications. Where possible, the system automates problem resolution as well, freeing up operators to focus on higher value activities. New analytics features make capacity

The CloudGenix ION 1000 is a powerful small form factor SDWAN appliance designed for retail and SOHO use cases. The ION 1000 is fanless, small and quiet enough to be placed in a work environment when no equipment room is available. As organizations re-architect their teleworking approaches to support remote workforces post-pandemic, the ION 1000 enables performance controls, availability and security for the home office that is consistent with enterprise policies.

ION 9000

The CloudGenix ION 9000 is the largest and most high-performance CloudGenix SD-WAN appliance to date, delivering twice the performance of the current flagship device. It is ideal for large branches and campus locations, supporting multi-gigabit throughput and a “fail to wire” high availability capability designed to mitigate the effects of physical WAN outages.

NUCLIAS CLOUD-MANAGED AX3600 ACCESS POINT Nuclias Cloud is D-Link’s complete, cloud-managed networking solution. It allows organizations with any level of IT resources the convenience of simple network deployment and configuration.

The DBA-X2830P Nuclias Cloud-Managed AX3600 Access Point is deployed as a premanaged, zero-configuration ac-

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CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

» TECHSHOW

HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series At HP Reinvent, HP Inc.’s annual global partner event, the company introduced the HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series, delivering an enterprise and managed-class experience in a small footprint for remote working and new office configurations.

Ready or not, businesses have made a swift transition to a much more distributed workforce – transforming a few offices into thousands of home offices. As a result, they need intuitive, nimble, and connected devices that can be managed remotely and securely, supporting how and where people need to work.

Security has also become a top concern for IT managers and home workers alike. According to HP’s new Workforce Evolution study, security software was ranked by office workers in the US and Europe as the highest priority for upgrading the home office, further underscoring the demand for secure work solutions. The HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series – available as a single function and MFP, mono and color and in versions adapted to Managed Print Services fleets – is expected to be available worldwide starting in December.

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HP Trusted Platform Module providing secure device identity with certificate private keys, strengthening protection of encrypted credentials and data.

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Security features goes beyond just the hardware, including the cartridge, for an end-to-end secure printing system that protects your network and information.

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Ability to easily manage devices and settings remotely with HP Web Jetadmin and HP JetAdvantage Security Manager.

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Easily deploy and integrate HP and third‑party solutions with the HP Open Extensibility Platform. Support card readers and allow users to use personalized settings to print from their own queue.

Highlights •

HP incorporates security into every step of the printer design, supply chain, and production process.

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HP Sure Start with automatic self-healing that protects, detects, and self-recovers from vulnerabilities and attacks.

Key Features: •

cess point (AP) controlled through the D-Link Nuclias Cloud.

It is the best-in-class indoor access point designed specifically for enterprise environments. Featuring 802.11ax WiFi 6 concurrent on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, the DBAX2830P Nuclias Cloud-Managed AX3600 Access Point offers high combined data rates to wireless clients. It provides lightning-fast access to bandwidth-intensive applications such as data, voice and video streaming, even in highly congested environments.

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802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 Next generation wireless standard with increased connection speeds Up to 3.6 Gbps combined throughput2 Better performance in highly congested areas Increased client device battery life Faster speeds on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands Powerful management, monitoring and troubleshooting functionality with Nuclias Cloud 4 x 4 MU-MIMO with 4 spatial streams Remote access via web browser Allows for a high number of concurrent users

OCTOBER 2020 / CXO DX

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» TRENDS & STATS

ENTERPRISE SECURITY CHALLENGES HEIGHTENED BY WORK-FROM-HOME SPIKE Sudden changes in priorities, poor network visibility and lack of time cited as key issues for security professionals struggling to cope with new norms

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raditional approaches to securing the network are amplifying challenges in the face of budget constraints and an increasingly remote workforce. This is among the findings of an international market research project from independent research agency Vanson Bourne. The study was conducted on behalf of Juniper Networks.

A clear and pertinent picture emerged from the data: network security is an ever-present and growing headache for IT teams, especially in the current climate of mass-scale remote working. The solution they overwhelmingly yearn for appears to lie in integrated visibility within the network for more accuracy providing data-driven context to faster security tools, automation and widespread policy enforcement to overcome these challenges.

Top highlights from the Vanson Bourne study are as follows: • Ninety-three percent (93%) of Middle East survey respondents (Ninety-seven percent 97% globally) admitted that they are specifically experiencing ongoing challenges when attempting to secure their organization’s network effectively. It bears repeating that the IT challenges present before the sudden increase in remote work have been amplified significantly against a burgeoning threat landscape, populated by prolific, highly motivated ‘bad actors’ who constantly innovate and take advantage of every opportunity to thrive and remain undetected. Meanwhile, IT and Security professionals are further

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challenged with the need to balance necessary business demands against security.

• Eighty percent (80%) of Middle East survey respondents (Eighty-six percent 86% globally) felt that they need to improve network reliability and performance compared to registered from Middle East. Especially in the current climate of enforced remote working for larger-than-usual employee numbers, the network is the ‘beating heart’ of any organization undergoing or sustaining digital transformation. To be fully effective, a security deployment must be fully integrated into the network it protects, rather than an uncoupled overlay.

Moreover, on average forty-five (45%) of IT employees in Middle East (forty-seven 47% globally) are absorbed by ‘keeping the lights on’ in the network instead of pursuing innovation.

• Eighty percent (80%) of Middle East survey respondents (Eighty-seven percent 87% globally) seek a security solution to give better visibility across existing apps, reducing false positives, and improving threat response times. The underlying subtext is that IT/Security teams lack time, which makes the pursuit of false positives frustrating and may lead to costly human error-driven mistakes. The net result is that timely mitigation of genuine threats could be hampered. As a result, team leaders crave real-time visibility into their organization’s data and network, adding context to better understand what is happening. They are also keen to balance the demands of delivering compliance with managing security risks effectively. How-

CXO DX / OCTOBER 2020

ever, the prospect of wholesale ‘rip-andreplace’ to introduce integrated security is not viable nor attractive.

• Forty-five (45%) of Middle East respondents stated that their organization positions IT security as a cost center rather than as a value-driving asset. In contrast ninety-nine percent (99%) stated that they had been obliged to spend money on breach mitigation in the last twelve months, with the average cost being more than US$221,123. This suggests that organizations do not fully realize how vulnerable their networks are to attack and that reluctance to invest in intelligent security is counter-productive. o Globally, Sixty-three percent (63%) of respondents stated that their organization positions IT security as a cost center rather than as a value-driving asset. In contrast ninety-seven percent (97%) stated that they had been obliged to spend money on breach mitigation in the last twelve months, with the average cost being more than US$276,000 • Ninety-six percent (96%) of Middle East survey global respondents (Ninety-five percent 95% globally) are working with multiple vendors in pursuit of their overall security deployment goals.

This suggests that IT and Security professionals are pragmatic in their attempts to navigate a successful course through all the conflicting challenges in their path, including compliance, costs, departmental preferences and demands.

SA PL E

M AD

CPR

COMPLIANT

Construction Products Regulation

EN 50575

Safety

is our

Top Priority

CAT6 24AWG U/UTP LSZH KEY FEATURES • Category 6 cable according to ISO 11801 2nd Edition • Category 6 cable according to ANSI/TIA-568-C.2 & EN50173-2 • EU Directive 2011/65/EU (RoHS-2) • LSZH Flame test meets CE (Class Eca)

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