CXO DX January 2021

» EDITORIAL

LESSONS WE HAVE LEARNT 2020 will go down as a year mankind would like to forget but we must keep the lessons we learnt from the year that was replete with challenges thrown at us. 2021 is likely to be a year of slow and steady recovery for all major economies, but with some likely to show a remarkable rebound.

What we learnt from 2020 is that while as a species, we are brilliant in terms of our achievements and vision, we are also fragile and vulnerable to health outbreaks, such as newer variants of Covid-19 or any others that could flare up. With early warning systems and better coordination, it could be possible to limit any such pandemic in future, closer to their places of origin and eradicate. That’s possible only with use of Technologies such as AI and with a greater sense of responsibility from the local administration.

A lot has been said about remote working that it is likely to stay on as a long-term trend adopted by companies for some of their workforce profiles, that can deliver their jobs sitting out of remote locations, whether it be their homes or anywhere else on the move.

While mobile or remote based workforce isn’t a new idea, 2020 has been a watershed year in making it a mainstream option. There is simply no going back on this.

While physical offices will continue to stay on, companies could save a lot on the total real estate with a percentage of employees working remotely on a daily basis, either on shift rotations, as an option or as a rule. Offices may have a lot more investments going into enabling virtual meeting and collaboration infrastructure to facilitate virtual interactions with employees, colleagues, customers or stakeholders.

On the Technology front, people are going to be more and more receptive to adoption of new technologies and there will be more traction on the digital transactions and ecommerce front. The cloud, nurtured by all major technology leaders through their new product releases, is well on course to be the leading delivery model for all IT and as the only gateway to digital transformation.

R. Narayan

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Pooja Panjwani Assistant Project Manager

Co-Founder & MD

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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

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REGISTERED OFFICE: Office 10, Sharjah Media City | www.cxodx.com JANUARY 2021 / CXO DX

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» CONTENTS

18 » ENABLING THE SUSTAINABILITY VISION Jason McMillan, sales director, Epson Middle East discusses the focus on sustainable printing

24 » THE SHIFTING SANDS OF CYBERSECURITY

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Nader Baghdadi, General Manager, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Secureworks discusses from his perspective some of the key trends shaping the cybersecurity landscape

COVER FEATURE

14 » TOWARDS DIGITAL ACCELERATION

Globally and regionally, more companies will continue to adopt more digital transformation strategies this year towards meeting their Business goals

NEWS INSIGHT

11 » NYU ABU DHABI TRANSFORMS TRAVEL AND EXPENSE CAPABILITIES WITH SAP CONCUR

INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

Partha Narasimhan, CTO of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company takes stock of the changes from enabling hybrid workforces

30 » EVOLUTION AND OPTIMISM Tom Kellermann, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, VMware Carbon Black discusses six trends shaping the cybersecurity outlook for 2021

20 » GUARDED OPTIMISM The industry expects a much better year as economies make steady recoveries and companies aim for digital acceleration

INSIGHT

26 » ENABLING IDEAL USER EXPERIENCE Ty Amell, CTO, AppDynamics writes about the Observability, User Experience and the Evolving Role of Technologists

12 » MANAGING DATA IN THE CLOUD Matt Watts, Chief Technology Evangelist at NetApp discusses trends in storage and data management and NetApp’s key role in enabling data management across multi-cloud environments

CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

32 » HELPING CISOS PREPARE FOR THE 2021 THREAT LANDSCAPE

Alain Penel, Regional VP - Middle East, Fortinet opines that CISOs need to solidify their plans for effective incident response and business continuity

35 » RPA - OVERCOMING KEY IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES Francea Lobo- Digital Business Analyst at Finesse shares some key considerations to successfully deploying RPA

INTERVIEW

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28 » THE FOUR 2021 NETWORKING TRENDS EVERY CIO NEEDS TO KNOW

REGULARS

06 » NEWS 36 » TECHSHOW

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38 » TRENDS & STATS

» NEWS

RIVERBED EXPERIENCES NEARLY 100% GROWTH FOR CLIENT ACCELERATOR

Expands Product Capabilities as Organizations Shift Toward Remote Working and Work from Anywhere Models ployees as increasingly more employees Work From Anywhere.

Dante Malagrino

Chief Development Officer, Riverbed Riverbed announced expanded product capabilities and strong market momentum of Client Accelerator, with nearly 100% sequential growth, as IT organizations look to accelerate business-critical applications and performance of remote em-

Delivered in a software form factor, Client Accelerator extends best-in-class optimization and acceleration technology all the way down to the end user – laptops or desktops – eliminating performance problems caused by network congestion, latency, and increasingly unpredictable last-mile networks, providing accelerated access to on-prem, IaaS, or SaaS-based applications, even in less than ideal user conditions and regardless of location.

Client Accelerator reduces network data congestion by up to 99% and offers up to 10x faster and reliable performance for business-critical SaaS apps, on-prem applications and IaaS cloud workloads.

As a result, the user experience of business-critical applications significantly improves along with employee productivity.

Client Accelerator feature enhancements

include added support for scaling up to 200k clients per customer instance, new reporting APIs and enhanced integration with Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, which eliminates network inhibitors that impact the user experience of key SaaS apps such as Office 365 and Microsoft Teams Live Events and Stream Video, Salesforce, Box, ServiceNow and more. In addition, both SaaS Accelerator and Client Accelerator will be available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace during November 2020.

“In the continued Work From Anywhere reality, Client Accelerator offers a path to fast, consistent and available enterprise applications wherever employees do their work. We’ve experienced significant market momentum and customer demand for Client Accelerator, as IT and business leaders are looking to deliver strong user productivity and performance regardless of where an employee resides,” said Dante Malagrino, Chief Development Officer at Riverbed.

SALESFORCE HYPERFORCE ANNOUNCED the elasticity of public cloud, customers can more easily access compute capacity as required to be more flexible and efficient. Hyperforce allows resources to be deployed in the public cloud quickly and easily — reducing implementation time from months to just weeks or even days.

Hyperforce to be available from major public clouds Salesforce has announced Salesforce Hyperforce, a reimagination of the company’s platform architecture built to securely and reliably deliver the Salesforce Customer 360, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries and more, on major public clouds.

Hyperforce is a complete re-architecture of Salesforce designed to deliver an even more powerful and scalable platform to support the growth and success of Salesforce’s global customer base. Hyperforce will empower Salesforce customers to securely deploy Salesforce apps and services from anywhere, while using the scale and agility of the public cloud.

“Every company right now is facing an imperative — to go digital, fast,” said Bret Taylor, President and COO, Salesforce.

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Bret Taylor

President & COO, Salesforce “Salesforce Hyperforce is a quantum leap forward in how Salesforce can accelerate our global customers’ digital transformations and empower them to grow, fast and at scale, on our trusted platform.”

Hyperforce delivers: • Performance at B2B and B2C scale. With

CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

• Built-in Trust. Hyperforce’s security architecture limits users to appropriate levels of access to customer data, protecting sensitive information from human error or misconfiguration. Encryption, at rest and in transit, comes standard, ensuring the privacy and the security of data.

• Local Data Storage. Through Hyperforce, customers around the world can choose to store data in a particular location to support compliance with regulations specific to their company, industry and region.

• Backwards Compatibility. Every Salesforce app, customization and integration, regardless of Cloud, will run on Hyperforce.

» NEWS

SOPHOS ANNOUNCES 4 NEW OPEN AI DEVELOPMENTS SophosAI advances the practices and Language to transform Cybersecurity Industry Sophos has announced four new open Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments to help broaden and sharpen the industry’s defenses against cyberattacks, including datasets, tools and methodologies designed to advance industry collaboration and cumulative innovation. This move accelerates a key Sophos objective to open its data science breakthroughs and make the use of AI in cybersecurity more transparent.

“With SophosAI’s new initiative to open its research, we can help influence how AI is positioned and discussed in cybersecurity moving forward. Today’s cacophony of opaque or guarded claims about the capabilities or efficacy of AI in solutions makes it difficult to impossible for buyers to understand or validate these claims.

This leads to buyer skepticism, creating headwinds to future progress at the very moment we’re starting to see great breakthroughs,” said Joe Levy, chief technology officer, Sophos.

Sophos is providing datasets, tools and methodologies in four important areas:

SOREL-20M Dataset for Accelerating Malware Detection Research

SOREL-20M, a joint project between SophosAI and ReversingLabs, is a production-scale dataset containing metadata, labels and features for 20 million Windows Portable Executable files (PE).

AI-powered Impersonation Protection Method SophosAI’s Impersonation Protection is designed to protect against email spearphishing attacks, where influential people are impersonated to trick recipients into taking some harmful action for the benefit of the attacker.

Digital Epidemiology to Determine Undetected Malware

SophosAI has also built a set of epidemiology-inspired statistical models for estimat-

Joe Levy

Chief Technology Officer, Sophos. ing the prevalence of malware infections in total, which enables Sophos to estimate – and in turn enabling a better chance to find – the needles in a PE file haystack

YaraML Automatic Signature Generation Tools

SophosAI has developed a new method for automatic signature generation, called YaraML, that’s significantly different from previous options by taking an AI based approach to the problem.

MOHAMED YOUSUF NAGHI & BROTHERS GROUP IMPLEMENT HYBRID-CLOUD STRATEGY WITH COMMVAULT The deployments save time and costs for the diversified group Commvault has brought significant operational benefits to Mohamed Yousuf Naghi & Brothers Group through implementing a hybrid-cloud strategy. The Saudi Arabian Services Group has saved time and cost through working with Commvault and transforming its virtualization and disaster recovery processes.

Mohamed Yousuf Naghi & Brothers Group operates diversified businesses in Saudi Arabia across four verticals: fast moving consumer goods, luxury automotive, public and private transportation, and logistics. The data needs of each sector vary widely, and for many years the different divisions used different solutions – such as Symantec and Veritas NetBackup – to back up data to disks and tapes. But this process was slow and could not adequately replicate data from various cloud platforms, including Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. As part of an effort to digitally transform its business, the IT team selected Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery as the main orchestration for integration with the different cloud providers, VMs replication from on-premises to the cloud or cloud to cloud, and providing warm disaster recovery copies in the disaster recovery site.

Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery was selected as the main orchestration for integration with the different cloud providers

Wael Mustafa

Area Vice President MESAT

Wael Mustafa, Area Vice President, Middle East, South Africa and Turkey (MESAT) at Commvault added: “We are proud of the work that we have done with the leading Saudi Arabian Services Group, especially during the challenging months we have all faced recently. By consolidating all the backups with Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery, Mohamed Yousuf Naghi & Brothers Group can now finish RMAN backup in just three to four hours and restore them in the cloud..”

JANUARY 2021 / CXO DX

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» NEWS

QUALYS UNVEILS ITS UAE CLOUD The Qualys UAE Cloud will offer all the company’s key solutions Qualys, a pioneer and leading provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, launched the Qualys UAE Cloud, a platform that will allow public and private enterprises across the Middle East to innovate as Qualys brings them enhanced security and visibility across their hybrid IT environment.

The move comes as regional cloud migration reaches fever pitch. Across the GCC, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as an accelerant to digital transformation, with IDC projecting that the Gulf’s public cloud market alone will more than double over the next four years, from US$956 million in 2020 to US$2.35 billion in 2024. IDC also predicted that hybrid clouds — known for their complexity and compliance issues — will grow in popularity.

when planning their migration journeys.

The Qualys UAE Cloud platform will eliminate these barriers and will act as the company’s main hub for the Middle East.

But many organizations in heavily regulated industries such as banking, oil and gas, and government have had to consider issues such as privacy and data residency

“The UAE has been a clear leader in cloud-first technology strategy, as it has moved forward boldly with its ambition to become a regional data hub,” said Hadi

Hadi Jaafarawi

Managing Director, ME, Qualys

Jaafarawi, Managing Director Middle East at Qualys. “The Qualys UAE Cloud will help further this goal. It is a clear signal of our resolute commitment to the country and the wider region and comes at a pivotal moment — amid an economic crisis — when organizations need to innovate with greater ease.”

The Qualys UAE Cloud will offer all the company’s key solutions including VMDR; Multi-Vector EDR; Global IT Asset Inventory; Configuration Management; Certificate Inventory; Threat Protection; Continuous Monitoring; Patch Management; Container Security; Web Application Scanning; and Web Application Firewalls.

The Qualys Cloud Platform, already trusted by businesses across the country and the region, will now support several local compliance requirements, such as the Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Centre’s (ADSIC) Information Security Policy and the UAE Information Assurance Regulation. It will also allow Qualys’ partners, such as managed service providers (MSPs), the opportunity to offer cloud services to sectors that are highly regulated.

TENABLE RECOGNIZED AS VENDOR OF THE YEAR BY INGRAM MICRO Strategic channel partnerships like those with Ingram Micro remain a top priority for the cybersecurity vendor Tenable the Cyber Exposure company, has been recognized as Vendor of the Year in the Networking & Security Divisional Award from Ingram Micro Inc., the world's largest wholesale technology distributor. The annual awards recognize dozens of technology providers for their outstanding engagement and work ethic, and unwavering commitment to grow more profitably together.

“Our successful working relationship with Ingram Micro is very important to delivering on our Cyber Exposure vision — helping joint customers around the world see everything, predict what matters and act to reduce risk,” said Mark Thurmond, chief operating officer, Tenable. “We’re honored to have been chosen as Vendor of the Year and we look forward to our continued strategic alliance with Ingram Micro.”

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CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

Tenable’s investment in and commitment to the channel community is fundamental to its global go-to-market strategy. The Tenable Assure Partner Program pairs the company’s industry-leading risk-based vulnerability management solutions with world-class distributors, resellers and managed security service providers (MSSPs) to help joint customers secure their highly dynamic IT and OT environments. As Tenable extends its position as a category-leading cybersecurity company, strategic channel partnerships like those with Ingram Micro will remain a top priority.

Ingram Micro evaluated vendors across more than two dozen high-profile technology categories including cloud, business and consumer technology, advanced solutions and global markets. The winning partners were chosen

Mark Thurmond

Chief Operating Officer, Tenable based on a variety of criteria and key performance indicators, including collaboration, marketing and sales.

Eric Kohl, vice president, U.S. Advanced Solutions, Ingram Micro. said, “Tenable has consistently leveraged the power of Ingram Micro’s Security Business Unit to become today’s fastest-growing, channel-friendly, Cyber Exposure vendor. We are thrilled to serve as Tenable’s go-to-market partner and celebrate their success as an Ingram Micro Vendor of the Year.”

» NEWS

MINDWARE PARTNERS WITH VADE SECURE TO OFFER PREDICTIVE EMAIL SECURITY The solution will be hosted on Mindware Cloud Marketplace Mindware, a leading Value Added Distributor (VAD), signed a partnership agreement with Vade Secure, a global leader in predictive email defense. As per the agreement, Vade Secure for Microsoft 365 will be made available to Mindware’s managed service provider (MSP) partners across select countries in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) market. The solution will be hosted on Mindware Cloud Marketplace.

Vade Secure for Microsoft 365 is an award-winning email security solution that provides comprehensive, automated protection before, during, and after attacks. The solution uses artificial intelligence, including machine-learning mechanisms patented in the USA, to detect unknown, highly targeted threats, such as phishing, spear phishing, malware, and ransomware.

Philippe Jarre, CEO of Mindware said, “With over 258 million corporate users, the highly popular Microsoft 365 platform has become the most popular target for hackers. Vade Secure is a best-of-breed AIbased email security solution for Microsoft 365. Our partnership with the security vendor will benefit all our partners that are looking to increase their business around Microsoft 365 and protect their customers from targeted and unknown attacks that pass through standard protect ions.”

Vade Secure integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 environments via a simple API call and can be deployed in minutes, without changing the client’s MX record. The solution is well suited to small-to-medium-sized business (SMBs) as it is very simple to deploy and manage.

The solution that can be deployed in 3 clicks allows MSPs to deliver additional value with a complementary cloud

Philippe Jarre CEO, Mindware

security solution designed to augment Microsoft 365 protection. They also benefit from a more than 95% client retention rate that leads to long-term growth and stability.

USER EDUCATION, CLOUD SECURITY AND XDR, CRITICAL FOR THE UAE’S CYBERSECURITY IN 2021 Cybercriminals in 2021 will particularly look to home networks as a critical launch pad to compromising corporate IT and IoT networks

cro’s Midyear Security Report. Ransomware attacks in the UAE were 4.27% of the world’s ransomware attacks.

Trend Micro predicts that the UAE’s home networks, remote working software, and cloud systems will be at the center of a new wave of cyberattacks in 2021.

The report warns that end users who regularly access sensitive data will be at greatest risk. Attacks will likely exploit known vulnerabilities in online collaboration and productivity software soon after they are disclosed, rather than zero-days.

Trend Micro’s predictions report, Turning the Tide, forecasts that cybercriminals in 2021 will particularly look to home networks as a critical launch pad to compromising corporate IT and IoT networks.

“As the UAE begins to enter a post-pandemic world, the trend for remote and hybrid working is likely going to continue for many organizations,” said Majd Sinan, Country Manager – UAE, Trend Micro. “In 2021, we predict that cyber criminals will launch more aggressive attacks to target corporate data and networks in the UAE.” Showing the breadth of cyberattacks, during the first half of 2020, the UAE ex-

Majd Sinan

Country Manager – UAE, Trend Micro.

perienced a combined 13,100,616 email, URL, and malware cyber-threats detected

by Trend Micro, according to Trend Mi-

Access-as-a-service business models of cybercrime will grow, targeting the home networks of high-value employees, corporate IT and IoT networks. IT security teams will need to overhaul work from home policies and protections to tackle the complexity of hybrid environments — where work and personal data comingle in a single machine. Zero-trust approaches will increasingly be favored to empower and secure distributed workforces.

JANUARY 2021 / CXO DX

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» NEWS

F5 APPOINTS ALJAMMAZ TECHNOLOGIES AS VALUE-ADDED DISTRIBUTOR IN SAUDI ARABIA With the addition of NGINX and Shape Security, F5 now has the most comprehensive set of application services in the industry in class portfolio of products.

“Joining forces with F5 will bring huge benefits to Saudi Arabian organizations, opening up significant new routes to market and innovation,” said Asim Saud AlJammaz, CEO at AlJammaz.

“We look forward to delivering secure and extraordinary digital experiences by simplifying traditional application delivery, enabling modern app delivery at scale, securing every application wherever deployed, and using data to unlock the value of insights and automation.”

AlJammaz Technologies announced that it will operate as F5’s new Value-Added distributor in Saudi Arabia.

AlJammaz Technologies is now part of F5’s Unity+ Partner Program, which has been specifically designed to address the evolution of the market, F5, and partner business models. The program offers a clear path to success for serving customers with F5’s best

With over two decades’ experience, AlJammaz Technologies is one of the leading Value-Added Distributors in the region. It has a 1500-strong active channel partner network and can provide goto-market coverage for 85% of the Middle East.

“AlJammaz joins us as a Value-Added distributor at an important time for F5 in Saudi Arabia. COVID-19 has significantly accelerated digital transformation imperatives and we’re seeing soaring multi-cloud adoption across the region,” said Mamduh Allam, Senior Regional Director for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bahrain, F5.

PURE STORAGE ANNOUNCES PURE AS-ASERVICE IN AWS MARKETPLACE AWS customers can now deploy Pure as-a-Service capacity in locations that service cloud, on-premises and edge workloads As part of its focus on simplifying hybrid architecture mobility, Pure Storage, a leader in in delivering storage as-a-service in a hybrid world announced two new offerings to make it easier than ever for enterprises to consume and deploy storage – the availability of Pure as-a-Service in AWS Marketplace and a new Cloud Block Store Efficiency Guarantee program backed by Pure’s promise to reduce cloud storage consumption with no feature trade-offs.

Pure Storage works with AWS to drive applications that run across AWS Regions and AWS Outposts and leverage the agility and innovation of private, edge, SaaS, and clouds simultaneously. These announcements are the latest innovations that reinforce how Pure and AWS work together to serve customers’ modern data needs.

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Pure as-a-Service helps enterprises get the value of cloud economics, operational excellence and an outstanding customer experience in a “pay as you go” flexible model. With availability in AWS Marketplace, AWS customers can now deploy Pure asa-Service capacity in locations that service

CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

cloud, on-premises and edge workloads.

“Customers are looking for flexibility and choice as they procure, store, and manage their data across the enterprise as part of a comprehensive digitization initiative,” said Garth Fort, Director of Product Management, AWS Marketplace, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are delighted to welcome Pure Storage to offer our shared customers enhanced flexibility, mobility, and consistency between on-premises and edge applications to AWS storage.”

“Working with Pure Storage and AWS is an essential part of our business, and today’s announcements are a strong demonstration of their value together,” said Lance Broderick, Director of Technology Finance and Enterprise Architect, NuSkin. “We can see the power of Pure as-a-Service on the AWS marketplace for our on-prem and edge workloads.”

Pure Storage also announced the Cloud Efficiency Guarantee program that allows customers to take advantage of Cloud Block Store in a risk-free manner with guaranteed cloud operational cost savings.

» NEWS INSIGHT

NYU ABU DHABI TRANSFORMS TRAVEL AND EXPENSE CAPABILITIES WITH SAP CONCUR DEPLOYMENT

T

he events of 2020 have heightened the need for organisations to efficiently track and control travel and expense costs while ensuring they meet their duty of care obligations toward traveling employees.

At one university in Abu Dhabi, a timely implementation of SAP Concur’s platform ensured it was ready when the challenging events of 2020 unfolded.

NYU Abu Dhabi, which welcomed its inaugural class 10 years ago, was established in partnership with NYU and the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and founded upon a shared understanding of the essential roles and challenges of higher education in the 21st century. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly-selective liberal arts, engineering and science curriculum with a world center for advanced research and scholarship enabling its students to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on humanity’s shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi’s high-achieving students come from 115 nations and speak over 115 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university.

Nafeh Masood, Senior Director for Financial Operations at NYU Abu Dhabi, says the university initially deployed SAP Concur in 2014 to improve cost control. “We wanted to ensure we received the best and most cost-efficient deals from our travel partners, and to find areas where we could achieve further efficiencies.

Our journey with SAP Concur has also provided us with greater transparency into our compliance and internal audit regulation.

We now have a full view of our travel across our organisation.”

Prior to implementing SAP Concur, the NYU Abu Dhabi used a paper form that was circulated for signatures for proper delegation of authority. “We wanted to automate many of these processes to reduce the administrative burden on our back-office operations,” says Nafeh Masood. “One of the most important outcomes was the ability to get accurate reports on-the-fly, so we don’t have to chase our travel suppliers to know the status of our travel and expense costs. We also integrated our duty of care programme from a third-party provider with Concur, enabling us to always know where our traveling staff and students are.”

Change management plays a vital role in any implementation of new technology. According to a global study by KPMG, less than half of organisations undergoing business transformations expected to realise sustainable value from those investments.

Nafeh Masood believes the keys to a successful implementation are to get consensus across the organisation, enable collaboration

Nafeh Masood Senior Director, Financial Operations, NYU Abu Dhabi

between different stakeholders, and to ensure effective change management. “We had to ensure from the start that we truly understood the needs and challenges of our students, faculty, and administrative staff. This required us to listen to the voice of our stakeholders and take their feedback on board. Once we started the implementation, we rolled out a full change management process with training videos, documents and other helpful resources.”

The approach has been a success. “We could see benefits right away,” says Nafeh Masood. “Our administrative burden was reduced, and we could process receipts quicker and more efficiently. Our travel management partners could also get our travel and expense data in a systemic format that improved our efficiencies.”

Emma Shakespeare, MENA South Director at SAP Concur, believes Masood and his team have made great strides toward future-proofing the NYU Abu Dhabi’s travel and expense capabilities. “Any organisation that relies on manual processes, have vague travel and expense policies, or lack tools to ensure business travellers are safe will find their efforts at post-2020 recovery hampered. By putting SAP Concur at the core of its travel and expense capabilities, the university has achieved great immediate business outcomes while also ensuring it is ready and able to adapt to future challenges.”

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» INTERVIEW

MANAGING DATA IN THE CLOUD Matt Watts, Chief Technology Evangelist at NetApp discusses trends in storage and data management and NetApp’s key role in enabling data management across multi-cloud environments Discuss NetApp’s strategy towards adoption of cloud in solutions offered?

This has been a journey that we have undertaken since Oct 2014- so it has been a long one. Initially it was about taking our storage operating system and making it available across all the hyperscale providers. We are now in just over 300 regions. In the storage part of our Business, we are very well established with the major hyperscale providers. We have been bringing in new capabilities to that as well. To achieve that, we have been doing acquisitions. For instance, we bought Cognigo, a developer of data security and GDPR compliance software that gives us compliance capabilities.

So we can now scan files and databases with Technology that allows AI-powered personally identifiable information (PII) recognition, privacy management, and policy enforcement for monitoring and remediating GDPR violations in structured, unstructured, and cloud data, and produce reports against that, to meet requirements of companies that are looking for that kind of compliance.

The latest acquisition of SPOT, a leader in compute management and cost optimization on the public clouds is to strengthen capabilities around insights and optimization. Those storage and data management tools are growing fast

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and they are excellent. We began with developing cloud insights. With companies looking to use more than one cloud, they need a single window through which they can see what they are consuming across different clouds, from an infrastructure perspective, which is a significant option. Spot, which is about Application Driven Infrastructure for continuous optimization will help customers save up to 90 percent of their compute and storage cloud expenses, which typically make up 70 percent of total cloud spending, and will help accelerate public cloud adoption. The potential for cost savings is huge and that gives us a good advantage with companies that may have never worked with us before or with companies that are just cloud native.

We introduced Spot Technology into our engineering function, which is predominantly dealing with all our development work in the cloud. When we introduce Spot into our Engineering teams, we reduced our cloud computing bills by over 75%. So we think, there is a significant opportunity for us to add value to customers who are looking to ramp up their cloud computing usage by helping them optimize it.

With several recent acquisitions, has the integration been a challenge?

One of the things we have seen with our

CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

cloud Business is that we can move there at very rapid pace. Connecting technologies in the clod is something we are doing at a good pace. We are typically seeing new releases of our Cloud based products almost on a weekly basis. With SPOT, the first part of the integration was done sometime ago. We have a cloud Manager portal, actually a software as a service portal, that allows us to bring a lot of our capabilities together and SPOT analytics has already been embedded into that platform. Anyone using cloud manager right now will see the new option ‘Compute’ at the top and that option will give them analytics of their cloud Compute-based environments using SPOT. So within days of the acquisition, the integration was already unfolding.

What changes does you see in the Cloud adoption scenario?

What we have seen is a change in the attitude change towards the cloud. In the earlier days, they went with the mandate ‘Cloud First’ but the strategy for the cloud wasn’t spelt out. IT teams in general seemed to be pushing whatever workloads were easier to move to the cloud. There wasn’t much thought into the value they will get from the move to cloud. What we saw then happening is that a lot of these workloads that were moved to the cloud, but the costs went up and then many of the workloads came off the cloud to as before. But now, the deep shift we have seen in the past 12-18 months is that people are now looking at ‘Cloud First’ as a question, not as a mandate. We are seeing this maturity in thinking across the regions. They are now asking the right questions which is if they should or could move to the cloud and for what benefits before taking the decision.

They also understand that moving to the cloud is more about being able to do new things rather than just reducing costs.

Âť INTERVIEW From a data perspective, what are the challenges in moving to the cloud and how does NetApp help customers in that aspect?

With our data fabric strategy, our focus has been about getting the right data to the right people at the right speed and that includes across different clouds. We are beginning to see is the need for companies looking to move more of their mission critical workloads to the cloud. There is a desire to have enterprise grade data services underpinning that move. NetApp with its pedigree of providing that technology on premises, and now providing the same across different cloud providers, gives people the confidence that their data on the cloud is stored, managed, protected by a company that has been doing this for the past 28 years. A key factor is that we can make the data available across all the regions. As a case in point, there was a significant outage with one of the hyperscaler regions recently and in such an instance, e our Technology would have been handy for a customer who had their data stored in that region, because that would have been replicated in another region as well. So along with this capability we bring, we offer confidence and address availability.

Although your focus is data management, do you also work with data security vendors to achieve a synergy on the cloud?

We work with companies like Equinix and Telcos because to have a secure data fabric, you need a secure data network to begin with. We also provide security and have added a lot of security capabilities.

For Amazon, Microsoft and Google, we offer encryption for the data within the datacentre, encryption for data in transit to the cloud provider and also encryption for data at rest with the cloud service provider. We are constantly enhancing that.

Are containers a key focus of data management?

It has been a huge focus over the past few years. We have an open sourced storage orchestrator technology called Trident for Kubernetes environments. it is very easy to connect to connect to our

Matt Watts Chief Technology Evangelist, NetApp

storage and the data protections we have within our environment using Trident as the Orchestrator for that capability. By using Trident with your NetApp storage, you can natively support many popular application container platforms and orchestrators, such as Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, Docker Enterprise Edition, Rancher etc.

vironment and that is going to be a huge focus for us.

We have a project called Astra- a fully managed application-aware data management service that manages, protects, and moves Kubernetes data-rich containerized workloads in both public clouds and on-premises. It will be able to understand what Kubernetes environment people are using, to be able to map systems storage to them, to be able to snapshot them and replicate that data somewhere else and bring it back online using whatever Kubernetes tool is there at the destination. So it’s kind of a multi cloud multi Kubernetes management framework.

We are seeing Object platforms as a growth area for us. NetAPP StorageGRID provides greater data management intelligence on a simplified platform for your object data.

What are some the top trends you see in storage management and specifically from NetApp’s focus?

We are keen in unlocking the best of the cloud, by bringing more rich data services into the public cloud providers en-

We will be helping Businesses build data pipelines addressing requirements such as how do you bring data from the edge to the core, edge to the cloud or edge to different clouds so that we can tap into different frameworks.

We will continue to employ more of software defined strategies as the core approach in our strategies. We will also give people the choice to run it wherever they want.

Another focus area would be on the edgehow do we take some of the lighter weight data management tools and move them to the edge.

Also, we are seeing companies going from containers for stateless workloads to stateful workloads. Managing persistent workloads into containers is also going to be a large focus for us.

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» COVER FEATURE

Towards Digital Acceleration

Globally and regionally, more companies will continue to adopt more digital transformation strategies this year towards meeting their Business goals — By: R. Narayan

T

echnology has been quite an integral part of the world’s attempt to stay connected and make progress through 2020, despite the covid-19 challenges. Digital transformation initiatives in the past few years have been taking-off but every company has been following their individual journeys. The early adopters of relevant digitalization initiatives have been certainly well placed to handle the challenges of remote working and emphasizes the necessity to continue relevant new technology investments and upgrades. The scalability that digital acceleration offers to companies in terms of reaching out to new customer segments and in terms of broadening their delivery channels of services are certainly advantages that Businesses will seek to leverage more and more.

Khaldun Al Khaldi, Banking Technology Enthusiast and Transformational Leader at Noor bank says, “We are witnessing a drastic shift in the role of Technology from enabler to driver role by empowering business with digital transformation capabilities and services. This should influence businesses to change their mind-

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» COVER FEATURE sets and maintain strong partnership and collaboration driven relationship with Technology. With the necessity to consider digital as an integral part of any new business’s plans or growth, it is not anymore to be just left to one’s choice to have technology budgets fully integrated and justified by business. In addition, Technology’s KPIs, processes and performance evaluation should be one of the main drivers for business’s performance measurement along with other drivers such as revenue growth.”

For those organizations that have been putting technology upgrades on the backburner in view of budgeting constraints, covid-19 has been a wake-up call to prioritize Technology investments. And with more consumers and users preferring to go digital in their transactions or interactions, there is a need to ramp up on the digital front.

Tabish Asifi, Group IT Governance Lead at Majid Al Futtaim Holding says, “The perception of technology not just as an enabler but also in many scenarios as a savior has been reinforced during the pandemic. The digital channels to reach our customers and provision our services to them during the pandemic restrictions proved to be a lifeline for many business streams. Besides technology providing a reliable and solid platform for employees to collaborate and interact with each other really helped to ensure the "show went on" without much of a disruption. “ In the past year or so, the growing realization has been to digitize as many processes and automate, placing the IT leaders of organizations in a pivotal role of decision making.

Khaldun Al Khaldi

Banking Technology Enthusiast and Transformational Leader

Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Group Head - Information Technology at Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group says, “Technology was always considered as an enabler well before Covid but with Covid-19 it now got pushed into the forefront of all organizations thereby even in a better position to drive the digital transformation. As IT professionals, business continuity and disaster recovery is in our DNA, but Covid-19 has enabled and forced organizations to start experimenting how to be more flexible and resilient. Organizations that were behind in automating workloads or reluctant about embracing cloud, has all reached the stage where these became the mandate for existence. Businesses who were never bothered about technology initiatives has all started talking about digitization, transformation and overall how to go more digital in the new era. This is certainly a great advantage for people in IT function to take the digital transformation to the next level.”

continue in 2021 as steady progress isn’t enough anymore, hence, CIO focus will remain on digital acceleration. We’re still living in a world of uncertainty and any organization’s success in 2021 will be mainly impacted by how technology will help with resetting, restarting, and responding to society and the enterprise.

Nowadays, technologies are being stressed to their limits, and traditional computing is limiting business growth. While organizations are trying to cut costs as a reaction to the tough economic conditions, they need to strategically invest in new trends to keep up with the business growth requirements and customer’s’ needs including “New Normal “post the pandemic.”

In 2021, there will be acceleration around key technology investments as Businesses and organizations understand for sure that IT has a decision role to play as an enabler of smart Business or smart processes, across verticals from healthcare to Banking to retail, education etc. With virtually no sector left untouched by IT in terms of processes, the onus is on organizations to fully embrace digital technologies that can enable better reach out and enhances services in the front end as well as make for a very robust backend from the operational point of view. 2021 in all likelihood would be a year of greater digital acceleration, with AI, RPA etc being among important focus areas.

Tabish says, “For us the focus on improving operational efficiency with reduced cost while increasing costumer experience, happens to be the main agenda for IT, as challenging as it may seem.

This translates into enhancing a few essential Technology capabilities like RPA, Group wide CRM, APi orchestration platform and a low code development platform as priority investments for the coming year.”

Khaldun says, “CIOs have witnessed a great shift of focus from long term digital transformation plans to digital business acceleration as a logical response to COVID-19 pandemic. This will

Among the major considerations for going digital is cost of operations and enhanced operational efficiency. The objectives behind Technology investments would be around achieving those key goals.

More workloads are now on the cloud with organizations preferring a hybrid cloud strategy and this trend continues to gain traction.

Jayakumar adds, “Big Data, Cloud and Automation will be the three key pillars for this year and beyond for organizations to JANUARY 2021 / CXO DX

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» COVER FEATURE can plan the same without thinking too much about the regulatory or compliance issues.”

Tabish agrees as well that the arrival of the local datacenters of public cloud service providers is a definite game changer.

Tabish Asifi

Group IT Governance Lead, Majid Al Futtaim Holding rebuild and drive transformation. Organizations will continue to invest in moving workloads towards cloud and to be precise a hybrid model considering the scale and size of organization.

Automation will further gain momentum in organizations as cost reduction being one another major challenge for organizations with improved efficiency while they try to stay agile and nimble.

Cyber Security will cut across all different facets of technology to ensure the business continuity.”

In critical sectors, there will be progress around moving some of the critical workloads to the cloud, meeting required compliance measures.

Khaldun adds, “There are good amount of cloud migration pitfalls enterprises are currently facing including the fail to meet business cases along with cost and objectives. In addition to the lack of planning, re-platforming and compliance. Despite the above obstacles and more, migrating some of critical workloads using Hybrid Cloud will be “to go” option for most of enterprises. It will also enable them to achieve risk and regulatory compliance, security & governance, operational flexibility and retain data privacy and visibility. Other critical workloads such as core financial applications require more modernization and cloud native architectural changes for cloud adoption readiness.”

The arrival of local data centers of major public cloud providers has given more confidence to organizations looking at cloud adoption, even in verticals that do face stricter compliance regulations like Banking for instance.

Jayakumar concurs and elaborates, “That is absolutely possible.

As mentioned, organizations are now re-thinking about how to avoid a similar situation in the future thereby ensuring that people can work from any part of the world and to have this achieved, Cloud is one of the biggest enablers. With more providers coming into the region and opening up data centers, this even adds up the percentage of workloads that will get migrated as organizations

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He says, “Yes this definitely is a big win for many businesses in UAE. There was always a concern from the compliance side that certain types of data should not cross the geographical boundaries because of regulatory restrictions. This many a times led to unnecessary resistance and reservations in taking full advantage of the cloud platforms. With the advent of local data centres by the likes of Microsoft and others was a big relief for the technology leaders here, who could now think more freely in terms of leveraging these platforms to their full advantage.

Among some of new technology trends expected to be part of CIO agenda in 2021 supporting digital business acceleration journey according to some research studies, will be to enable ‘Anywhere services and Operations’ Khaldun adds “This will entail a flexible operating model with digital capabilities to enable employees to work from anywhere and anytime securely with 100 % productivity. In addition, you could also deploy digital business services to customers based on AI technology and using distributed could technology.”

Citing research studies, he says that there could be a lot of remodeling and modernization of core technologies which includes but is not limited to digital workplace technologies to support work from home, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), robotic process automation (RPA), hybrid cloud and multi-experience platforms. These emerging technologies will help to automate processes and decisions, enabling a faster pace and scalable digital. Further, there will also be trends around adapting and enabling new ecosystems in cooperation with Fintech such as AISP (Account Information Service providers) & PISP (Payment Initiation Service Providers).

There has always been so much emphasis on cybersecurity but more so during the past year when more people were working remotely.

Cybersecurity is being constantly redefined to make it pervasive as the traditional borders of the networks have vanished with people accessing corporate networks remotely from wherever they work.

Tabish says, “The necessity of Cybersecurity has been well understood for quite sometimes by the Technology leaders of the region. The pandemic hasn’t really brought anything new to the execution except the needed for scaling things up, since it has increased the perimeter of concern because of increased workforce operating from outside of office premises.”

Jayakumar opines that perhaps cybersecurity is now too big a responsibility to be handled by a small in-house team and is best handled by specialized Managed service providers.

He elaborates, “Covid-19 was a big realization time for many organizations and IT teams to revisit the Cyber security strategy.

We have seen a huge spike in the cyber-attacks all across and especially within this region the issue was even worse. It’s high time where organizations have to adopt a managed security ser-

» COVER FEATURE vices as the in-house IT teams will always have limitations in handling the issues as the cyber-attacks are so dynamic in nature and it requires a fully dedicated and committed team to act upon it. This also talks about the investments within this space as there are certain rudimentary controls which all organizations would require to enable the remote working, file access etc. but this won’t be enough to protect the larger eco-system and thus arises the need for Managed Services which help us to stay afloat with the frequent changes that happens in this space.”

According to Gartner, cybersecurity mesh which is defined as a distributed architectural approach to scalable, flexible and reliable cybersecurity control that allows for the security perimeter to be defined around the identity of a person or thing is now a more effective way of defining and delivering security as traditional perimeters no holder hold true.

Khaldun says, “Cybersecurity mesh is expected to emerge as the preferred delivery model for security services. This cloud-based and highly modular architecture makes it much more practical to control the uncontrollable. Cybersecurity mesh is expected to offer the most efficient and effective way to extend security policy to digital assets and data that is outside of the traditional enterprise.”

He adds further, “Cybersecurity will remain one of the main pillars in any enterprise digital strategy and priority despite the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. Enterprises acted quickly to reorient security to cover remote workers and business continuity during the COVID-19 crisis must now prepare for the future. Such preparation includes determining how to allocate limited cybersecurity budgets to support additional modifications. There is a fundamental need for Cybersecurity to remain ahead of growing and emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, 5G, and the cloud.”

Staying protected from cybersecurity attacks in 2021 is not going to be an easy game; threats are evolving, new threats are constantly appearing.

“However, you can safeguard your organization’s business and stay protected by understanding the evolved digital risks, your own organization’s risk profile, and then mitigating threats with the right strategy, systems and technologies. Approaches such as Breach Assessment or Attack Simulations are generally a great place to start when it comes to assessing your own areas of vulnerability, including testing your current security solutions. In addition, controls and security capabilities provided by models such SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) support the dynamic, secure access needs of digital enterprises and rapidly react to business changes,” says Khaldun.

Among other trends, edge computing will continue to be a trend that will continue to gain ground, in the short and longer term.

Jayakumar says, “With 5G getting enabled, edge computing is more becoming a reality for enterprises, especially the manufacturing companies will have a lot of benefit out of this. 5G and edge computing are opening a world of revenue opportunities and helps enterprise level businesses to maximize operational efficiency, improve performance and safety, automate all core business processes, and ensure “always on” availability.”

Jayakumar Mohanachandran

Group Head - Information Technology, Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group

In the next couple of years and more, edge computing will continue to get more pervasive to deliver applications to wherever the employee is based out of and to deliver consumer services also more seamlessly with higher efficiencies at the edge.

Khaldun says, “Based on latest study’s results, edge computing will become one of the top priorities in the coming years. This will be mainly driven by the reaction to changed workforce and new business models. The need to deliver infrastructure, application and data resources to edge locations will spur adoption of new, cloud-centric edge and network solutions that enable faster responses to current business needs while serving as a foundation for boosting long-term digital resilience, enabling business scaling, and ensuring greater business operational flexibility.”

With its advantages including lowering of latency and reduced transmission costs for data being at the edge, edge computing is a trend that is likely to be a priority for Businesses going ahead over the next few years.

Tabish says, “I believe the adoption and priority of edge computing is going to be correlated with the penetration of Technology enablers like IoT, IoE devices in the business domain and also by the need for performance decided by the volume of data being handled by these businesses. Given the associated technology stack and endpoint related infrastructure investment I believe it is more likely going to fall on the long-term strategic roadmap of IT rather than on its shortterm priority list.

Achieving a balance between immediate requirements and longer- term goals of Technology investments would be the key priority of IT decision makers but for certain, there would be hardly an organization that doesn’t work on its digital acceleration plans this year.

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» INTERVIEW

ENABLING THE SUSTAINABILITY VISION Jason McMillan, sales director, Epson Middle East discusses the focus on sustainable printing

consumable parts mean less user intervention and fewer used consumables to store and dispose of.

The suite of services we wrap around our printers in terms of contactless printing solutions, ability to monitor the printing from remote locations as well as allow IT administrator to control how you print are among other value add features we offer.

And with PaperLab, our inhouse recycling machines, we complete the circle, taking used paper and recycling it into new paper in your own corporate environment.

How are you supporting the hybrid work environment that has shaped up in view of the pandemic?

Jason McMillan

Sales Director, Epson Middle East

Discuss the focus on sustainability at Epson in the solutions you bring to market?

Sustainability starts from our highly designed products. Epson being a company steeped in product innovation, we look at it not only from the manufacturing point of view but also from point of view of how to get rid of them at the end of their lifecycle. Sustainability is at the core of our vision 2050 and one of the key efforts we have undertaken in this part of the world is to move completely away from laser to ink based technologies. Our Micro Piezo heat free Business inkjet Technology enables us to achieve lower cost per page, lower cost of ownership, the latter due to the fact that we not only save because of the ink used but also because of the lower power and less intervention printing due to less moving parts. With lesser moving parts, ink-based printers offer less intervention printing, thereby reducing the need for visits by a service engineer. Epson’s Heat-free business inkjet technology also helps to reduce energy consumption by up 95% compared to laser printers – reducing both cost and CO2 emissions. The lack of heat also means there is no warmup time needed, ensuring fast first page-out speeds and improving productivity. And fewer

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There are two aspects to this. This includes how we address partners and customers on one front and how we address the supply chain challenges on the other hand to meet the market demand without disruption. We own manufacturing facilities across the world and own the supply chain, so we were able to make the adjustments moving capacity of production from facilities in countries more affected by Covd-19 to those less impacted, thereby keeping the supply chain intact. In terms of the workforce, we made our office staff start working out from remote or their home locations during the pandemic. We enabled ourselves to interact with customers through a virtual environment, running customer events, trainings and so on, ensuring we keep our customer aware of what we were doing and also addressing the needs of partners as to what they from us during this time.

What would be some of the major expectations from Epson in the new year?

Innovation is at the core of what we offer. We will bring a lot of new products in the year, across consumer print, Business print, projection, wearable and Robotics etc. There is a significant shift towards contractual printing. We are developing new capabilities and services around Managed print services. That will also enable us to emphasize our message about sustainability, of taking the cost away from printing and allowing Businesses to focus on their core Business.

How do you see Epson vis-a-vis enabling digital transformation and in the context of paperless offices?

Even as we have been talking of paperless offices, there is still going to be a requirement for printed paper. The challenge would be to manage the print workflow and through the solutions we offer, we can better manage them for our customers, show them how to do it in a cost effective as well as sustainable manner.

» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

Guarded Optimism The industry expects that a much better year is in store as economies make steady recoveries from the pandemic and companies look to leverage new technology investments aimed at digital acceleration At the beginning of last year, not many people had an inkling of the horror show that the pandemic would unravel right through the whole year, although the initial infections of Covid-19 had already begun to show up by December 2019. Now in the new year, while we are still negotiating our way through some rough waters, life as we have known it has changed dramatically.

It could have been undoubtedly tougher if not for some great technologies that helped us cope with the challenges, allowing us to collaborate and work remotely. Collectively, we are now much better prepared for the new normal and at the same instance also looking forward to leveraging technologies better. Technology companies played their part and continue to help Businesses out with smarter solutions.

Mohammed AbuKhater, Vice President Sales, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, F5 says, “While 2020 was a challenging year around the world, companies like F5 were able to play a key role in helping organizations maintain business continuity and keep their apps available and secure amid challenges such as the sudden need for remote working and a surge in cybercrime exploiting changing working practices. As the new year unfolds, we’re very much maintaining our focus on helping customers to reach new levels of success with the broadest set of application services for enterprise-grade apps, whether on-premises or across multi-cloud environments” On a note of guarded optimism, it would be fair to believe that this year should be a lot better via-a-vis 2020 and there should be steady recoveries all around. Demand for solutions such as 5G will continue to be a strong driving factor fueling growth in related categories.

Sakkeer Hussain-Director, Sales & Marketing, D- Link MEA says, “The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional market outlook looks positive and stable as the first month of the year rolls out. We are expecting most countries to record improving growth during this year as economies gradually recover from the pandemic. The increased uptake of cloud and digital solutions will continue to be a priority for enterprises across the region. Organizations will double down on their business continuity plans and ensure they are prepared for the next crisis. This means we will see more investments in advanced networking solutions, IoT devices and solutions, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 technologies as well as solutions that enable remote working. Digitalization will be the single most important focus for all companies, big or small, across verticals in 2021.”

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Businesses that were more digitally advanced were better placed to enable remote working for employees soon. Some verticals saw a massive decline because of travel restrictions and some were stretched to their full capacities such as healthcare. In terms of IT, Cloud adoption became quite a critical driver of enabling the transformation required for the IT infrastructure to cope with the challenges.

Ahmed Auda, Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, VMware says, “The big lesson from 2020 was to always expect the unexpected and be prepared for every eventuality. Of course, some verticals have been hit much harder than others by COVID-19, with sectors such as leisure and tourism seeing demand drop significantly, while others, such as healthcare, have been placed under unprecedented pressure. What’s common across almost all sectors is that by embracing cloud and cloud-ready solutions, organizations gain a huge amount of flexibility and efficiency: Organizations that adopt a digital foundation with consistent infrastructure and operations across all types of cloud, whether public, private or hybrid, will be able to accelerate their pace of innovation by developing new modern apps and modernizing existing apps and infrastructure to launch new services and serve customers better.”

2020 brought a major change with more people forced to working remotely as lockdowns ensued but by and large the adoption to a new way of working happened successfully. While in the beginning it might have seemed that this is a shorter-term trend, later the relatively significant success with remote working meant many companies exploring to shift some jobs on a longer term basis to remote working.

Ahmed says, “Another major lesson in 2020 relates to the workforce. One of the biggest impacts of the pandemic was to push millions of people to work from home. It was a steep learning curve for many organizations and individuals, with concerns around security, access to systems and data, management oversight, and productivity. The future workforce is an area of expertise for VMware and we commissioned research on the subject to gain insights into the impact of this dramatic move towards distributed workforces globally, and the findings were fascinating.”

In the UAE the research revealed a 48% increase in the proportion of employees who see remote working as a prerequisite rather than a perk. Furthermore, 62% of UAE respondents recognize that their organization is realizing the benefits of remote work and can’t go

» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK back to the way they used to be. Despite this, there is a concern that company leadership and management are not putting in the work to adapt in offering their employees greater choice and flexibility.

For example, 43% of decision makers in UAE worry their team won’t stay on task when working remotely, and almost a quarter (24%) feel their boardroom culture discourages remote working.

Meanwhile, 65% feel more pressure to be online outside of normal working hours.

“All this tells us that company directors and management teams need to look carefully at their remote and flexible working policies to ensure their distributed workforce is happy, content and productive, and that the policies put in place work in everyone’s favor,” adds Ahmed.

Growth in a challenging year

For the Technology industry, 2020 did bring growth in some segments as companies were compelled to look at key investments to enable remote working infrastructure for their distributed workforce working out of their homes.

Sakkeer Hussain-Director, Sales & Marketing, D- Link MEA says, “Over the last year we have seen remote working models being implemented almost overnight to adjust to the mandatory social distancing requirements. This has greatly accelerated the demand for networking range of products. To sustain and succeed with remote business models, organizations require robust networking solutions and other technologies that support the performance of networks.

Organizations have to ensure all the devices connected to its networks function seamlessly, maintain network traffic and make sure networks support sufficient bandwidth to allow for optimal performances. This means they need to look at speed and efficiencies.”

He says that D-Link Middle East and Africa experienced a significant growth in 2020 allowing the company to close the year on high double-digit growth rate. The growth was largely driven by some of the new products introduced during the pandemic lockdown.

These new innovations ranged from D-Link Thermal Solution Fever Screening Kit and D-Link Temperature Measurement Face Recognition Terminal suite of products to remote work management solutions such as the Nuclias Managed Wireless Networking Solution portfolio. D-Link also announced Wi-Fi 6 routers, including two of its flagship products - DIR-X6060 EXO AX AX5450 and DIR-X1860 EXO AX AX1800 and the DWR-925W 4G LTE M2M Router. There was also an increased demand for its secure wireless router portfolio, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G solutions over the course of last year and the Nuclias Managed Wireless Networking Solution portfolio.

For Qualys, the traction in adoption of cloud services is a significantly favorable trend and they had announced the Qualys UAE Cloud at GISEC 2020.

Hadi Jaafarawi, Managing Director – Middle East, Qualys says, “I think the accelerated adoption of cloud is going to be a big driver of growth for us. Last year, YouGov revealed that 88% of IT stakeholders in the UAE were planning budget increases for cloud

Mohammed AbuKhater

Vice President Sales, META, F5

computing. Across the GCC, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as an accelerant to digital transformation, with the International Data Corporation (IDC) projecting that the Gulf’s public cloud market alone will more than double over the next four years, from US$956 million in 2020 to US$2.35 billion in 2024.

IDC also predicted that hybrid clouds — known for their complexity and compliance issues — will grow in popularity.”

He adds, “But many organizations in heavily regulated industries such as banking, oil and gas, and government have had to consider issues such as privacy and data residency when planning their migration journeys. The Qualys UAE Cloud platform, which was announced in December 2020, will eliminate these barriers and will act as the company’s main hub for the Middle East.”

The Qualys Cloud Platform that offers all key solutions from Qualys will now support several local compliance requirements, such as the Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Centre’s (ADSIC) Information Security Policy and the UAE Information Assurance Regulation. It will also allow Qualys’ partners, such as managed service providers (MSPs), the opportunity to offer cloud services to sectors that are highly regulated.

Pure Storage saw growth in its subscription services, being preferred by customers for the flexibility and choice these services provide. Its unified subscription, Pure-as-a-Service, which includes Cloud Block Store, enables customers to subscribe to storage in their data center and the cloud, paying for only what they consume, making migration to the public cloud possible at any time without worrying about stranded assets.

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» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

Sakkeer Hussain

Director, Sales & Marketing, D- Link MEA Assaad El Saadi, regional director – Middle East, Pure Storage says, “There has been a tremendous demand for our subscription services — including Evergreen and unified Pure as-a-Service offering. As per our third quarter fiscal 2021 (Aug-Oct 2020) results, globally, our subscription services revenue grew 29% YOY. We also saw strong growth in the enterprise segment, particularly for our FlashBlade and FlashArray//C product lines, both offerings achieving record sales during Q3.”

He adds, “In terms of growth, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi continued to be key markets for Pure in the region and we built a strong portfolio of customers particularly in the BFSI, government and managed service provider (MSP) sectors. Interestingly, in addition to adding several new logos over the past 12-18 months, we successfully expanded our footprint within existing accounts.“

The transformation route

The region has taken to digital transformation quite keenly over the past few years. The trend has been driven by a growing awareness of the advantages that the new technologies promise and also the by the fact that the governments of the region, especially in the UAE, have been quite determined to embrace the technology transformation.

Ahmed says, “Digital transformation is high on the agenda for organizations in the Middle East, and this is in large part driven by the commitment of governments in the GCC to introduce smart government and smart city initiatives. Private enterprises also recognize the need to transform and they understand that modern applications are the fuel for digital transformation. As such, they need to be built, run, managed, secured and connected in the right way, allowing them to add immense value to all industries and verticals, from retail, to energy, healthcare and education. Digital transformation is being powered by the growth and development of technologies including cloud, 5G, AI and data analytics, which will each experience rapid growth in 2021. In combination, these technologies provide phenomenal potential for organizations across all

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Ahmed Auda

Managing Director, ME, Turkey & North Africa, VMware sectors to transform and have a positive impact on society: from the automation of transport, to advances in healthcare and medicine, and improvements in agriculture. New ways of analyzing and using data, combined with seamless communication will transform all aspects of society and we will see continued moves in this direction in 2021.”

He goes on to adds, “In the current scenario digital transformation is also playing a critical role for driving business resilience and growth. COVID-19 and its response has taught us that software-minded leaders are future leaders. This has been a challenging yet rewarding time for CXOs who are making bold decisions amid the current tough scenario.”

On the other hand, as a result of the ongoing pandemic, businesses are forced to rethink their working models and remote working is now increasingly becoming more common and looks certain to be a long term trend. In this case, companies will see related opportunities arising from requirements to enable remote working and secure them as well.

Sakkeer says, “We have to keep in mind that remote working is not a new concept. Much before the pandemic, many companies had already embarked on the path to such models. However, they lacked proper strategies for protocols and frameworks in place.

D-Link, through its innovations, has long supported customers driving this goal. We aim to continue supporting organizations to enable remote working and adhere to safe working requirements by rolling out newer products around cloud, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 routers, wireless solutions and so on during this year. We are happy that our extensive portfolio of networking, cloud-enabled products and solutions can greatly help SMEs and enterprises to operate successfully without any hassles during these challenging times.”

Many vendors saw an increased demand for their technologies as – By R. Narayan companies sought to deploy technologies or boost their infrastructure. However, there was also volatility in demand as some of the

» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

Hadi Jaafarawi

Managing Director, Middle East, Qualys Businesses struggled to keep their Business afloat. The deployment of cloud gained significant traction as it was the gateway to digitalization.

F5’s Mohammed adds, “We experienced strong demand for solutions associated with remote working, particularly as they relate to the cloud and security. The pandemic also made it difficult for companies to make accurate demand forecasts and led to unexpected spikes in demand for firms in certain sectors, and sudden declines in demand for others. This reinforced the benefits of embracing an agile, cloud-based approach to IT, enabling companies to respond to situations quickly and develop and deploy seamless, secure applications at a rapid pace. Not surprisingly, organizations of all types can see the benefits of moving their systems to the cloud.”

The outlook for the current year is a mix of caution and moderate expectations.

Sakkeer says, “Technologies such as IoT, cloud, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will play a critical role in driving the growth of networking.

D-Link has seen this trend head on and has developed innovations that will enable customers to leverage these technologies to bolster their networking strategies. “ Pure Storage that delivers storage as-a-service in an increasingly multi-cloud world expects growth from some of it key product categories as it enables cloud based storage infrastructure.

Assaad says, “Going into 2021, we will focus on driving adoption of FlashArray//C — one of the fastest-growing products in Pure’s portfolio and the first and only enterprise-grade all-QLC flash array. In parallel, we will focus on FlashBlade, a Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO) storage platform, that is helping customers meet today’s challenges including: desire for real-time insight; need to consolidate and re-use data for analytics/AI and increased ransomware attacks.”

Assaad El Saadi

Regional Director – ME, Pure Storage F5’s Mohammed says, they expect to see continued demand from customers requiring application services that enable them to focus on their core business, boost speed to market, improve operations, and build trust with their own customers. Zooming in a little more, some specific trends to look out for include how growing numbers of organizations are starting to migrate from monolithic to microservices based apps.

Quoting NGINX’s annual customer survey, he adds that the proportion of businesses building apps with microservices jumped from 40% to 60% this year.

“More than half of respondents are also using microservices in some or all of their apps. As a result, we anticipate more investment in commercial and open-source container orchestrators, as well as API management. At the same time, public cloud usage will continue to increase, along with the ongoing migration to software load balancers. Use of related technologies like WAF and Service Discovery are also on the rise.”

Among other trends, Mohammed forecasts that combating fraud will also be a top priority in 2021.

“This will create demand for solutions like Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE), which is a SaaS solution that eliminates fraudulent online transactions that get past existing fraud tools. Leveraging Shape’s industry leading expertise, SAFE utilizes a battle-tested AI engine to evaluate each online transaction across a variety of telemetry, environmental, and behavioral signals to accurately understand user intent and block human fraudsters—before the fraud occurs,” he adds.

In summary, 2021 should give some relief to all and there should be substantial momentum around key tech trends as the expert insights suggest. That should go a long way in doing a fair repair of the damage that 2020 did as well as take the world ahead into a better future.

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» INTERVIEW

THE SHIFTING SANDS OF CYBERSECURITY Nader Baghdadi, General Manager, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Secureworks discusses from his perspective some of the key trends shaping the cybersecurity landscape renders it vulnerable to attackers.

Does ransomware continue to be a major threat? How is it impacting trends in cybersecurity priorities and investments?

Nader Baghdadi

General Manager, META Secureworks

What are the solutions likely to see continued demand? Will remote working enforced in many instances enforced by the pandemic continue to pose security challenges?

We expect to see continued demand for security solutions in 2021, especially Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Managed Detection and Response (MDR), which are better equipped to tackle the kind of threats we see in the region as compared with older SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions, which are no longer sufficiently nuanced for modern threats.

COVID-19 will continue to be a cyber security challenge in 2021. MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) has already been implemented and as 2021 progresses it’s time for security teams to ensure it is properly configured. MFA is only as strong as you make it. When implemented poorly or when access isn’t regularly reviewed and re-validated it

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Ransomware continues to be a scourge on organizations. In 2018, 1 in 10 Secureworks’ incident response engagements were ransomware related. In 2020, that proportion has increased to around 1 in 4. The first notable change was toward the end of 2019, when criminals realized they could gain additional leverage by stealing data before encrypting it and then threatening the victim with public disclosure.

Alongside ransomware, threat actors exploited uncertainty and the desire for information by masquerading as trusted entities to gain initial access to their targets, commonly using email and SMS. Secureworks’ incident responders helped several organizations respond to incidents of unauthorized credentials-based access.

Social engineering attacks had a greater chance of success with remote workers, who could be tricked into releasing their credentials over the phone, by text, or in chat applications. Threat actors were also able to purchase data packages from underground forums, giving them access to stolen personally identifiable information which simplified the tax identity theft process.

For some time now, the industry, both

CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

insurer and insured has kicked the tyres on cyber security insurance in attempts to understand exactly what it is and what the level of risks/costs are, in order to write sound policies.

This year, due to ransomware, we are already seeing shifts in the projection of premiums in 2021 with expected increases in policies and increases in premiums. At the same time, the concerns around the sheer volume of ransomware has raised cyber insurance to the top of executives’ priorities and is now seen as a serious element to a strong threat mitigation program.

What do you suggest organizations and CISO must look to do to address these threats?

Organizations must look to expand their investment in penetration testing services to get visibility into how they’d stand up to a motivated attacker. Don’t forget to look well beyond compliance check boxes because that will only get you limited results. Look for ways to move up the stack in terms of maturity from a vulnerability assessment, to penetration tests and web application/API/ Mobile tests to a stealthy Nation State style Red Team engagement.

Finally, mass distribution via phishing and compromised websites has been replaced by a far more aggressive and damaging approach, where criminals gain access and then use a hands-on-

» INTERVIEW keyboard process in the back end to set up deployments to cause maximum damage across a network.

While CISOs understand this in theory, they continue to struggle with obtaining the proper funding for the right tools and services. That means it’s crucial that security practitioners take on educating the entire C-suite on the critical investment in right tools and services to stay ahead of the threat via ransomware preparedness assessments. Pen testing to evaluate ransomware preparedness increased in 2020 and will likely continue to rise next year.

How did the company perform over last year in the region in the face of the pandemic challenges?

Secureworks experienced growth in the Middle East region in 2020. The pandemic increased demand for security solutions, largely due to the need for organisations to facilitate remote working for employees.

When the COVID-19 crisis struck, organizations had to quickly shift to remote work—without the time to analyze, design, and implement necessary security controls. To address the need quickly, cloud transition projects were accelerated, and many security teams did not have time to properly assess the new services or deploy controls such as multi-factor authentication. Throughout the pandemic, threat actors shifted tactics to take advantage of heightened concern and interest in COVID-19.

While initial media reports suggested a sharp increase in the number of threats, Secureworks’ researchers observed no significant change in overall threat volume. Adversaries simply pivoted their tactics to launch COVID-19-themed campaigns, e targeting healthcare, pharmaceutical, and government organizations. Nation-state actors were particularly interested in information related to vaccine development and pandemic response strategies. And cybercriminals of all kinds recognized the large sums of money funding pandemic-related work and targeted the data for financial gain.

Secureworks to deliver new threat detection and response security analytics features Secureworks to deliver new threat detection and response security analytics features

Secureworks, a leader in software-driven security solutions, is delivering on its commitment to protect customers with flexible log collection and retention; a new search query language and flexible reporting; and custom use case support and alert customization capabilities on its cloud-native security analytics application, Threat Detection and Response (TDR).

The announced improvements to Secureworks’ TDR directly address customers’ needs for a compelling SIEM alternative. Now, security operations teams can detect, investigate and respond to security incidents with greater detection visibility. They can also proactively hunt for, and gain actionable insights on, both known and unknown threats.

Secureworks’ TDR takes a holistic approach to security with superior detection and remediation capabilities informed and enriched by threat intelligence, machine learning, and integrations with a variety of 3rd-party point products.

New Log Collection, Health and Retention

Security operations teams require data collection and retention flexibility to make informed decisions and power better business outcomes. In response to this need, Secureworks’ TDR supports the ingest and normalization of a growing list of supported data sources, including Endpoint, Network, Cloud and Business Systems, and is expanding capabilities to support additional data sources when investigating incidents. TDR will now support the collection and storage of raw data from any syslog-based log source in investigations, reporting and enrichment activities. This support, coupled with expanded retention options, allows TDR buyers the data retention flexibility they need to power business outcomes in addition to TDR’s existing security investigation capabilities. These latest improvements also help practitioners and IT professionals understand the health of their data sources in TDR, which further establishes TDR as a trusted analytics solution.

New Search and Reporting

Secureworks is enhancing TDR’s flexible search and reporting capabilities to help security operations leaders and administrators quickly find the data they need, and more easily share insights across the organization to improve communication and decision making in an increasingly complex threat environment.

Building on application capabilities, such as storage of normalized data which have been embedded in the application since its launch in 2019, these latest enhancements deliver an improved intuitive data query experience, allowing users to search across all raw data up to three years, including custom log sources, and use search results for on demand, export or scheduled reports.

New Custom Use Case Support and Alert Customization

Secureworks’ TDR will have new and improved alert customization and suppression capabilities, with custom detection rules for Secureworks supported data sources. This extension enables security operations teams to customize the software application to better fit their varying security use cases.

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Âť INSIGHT

ENABLING IDEAL USER EXPERIENCE Ty Amell, CTO, AppDynamics writes about the Observability, User Experience and the Evolving Role of Technologists

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020 was a year that will go down in history as one of the most challenging, tragic and complex years of our lives. And yet, amid all of the loss and hardship of this year, it has also shown how resilient and strong human beings can be when we work together toward a common goal.

In the technology industry, we watched IT leaders become the overnight superheroes of their organizations. They enabled entire workforces to shift to working remotely, supporting the IT needs and their entire businesses to be set up and supported while working from home. They accelerated digital transformation projects, delivering in weeks what would normally have taken months, empowering their organizations to deliver flawless customer experiences as businesses shifted to a digital-first approach. From supporting hospital management to COVID-19 contact tracing applications and contactless grocery orders — IT teams played an essential role in all aspects of our lives throughout the course of this unprecedented year.

Technologists have never been more crit-

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ical to the success of the businesses they support, and I see 2021 as being the year they have the biggest opportunity to elevate their careers and truly change the perception of the IT industry and its impact on meaningful business outcomes.

It will be paramount that IT teams are granted the tools, technologies and support needed to deliver on this opportunity.

Research we conducted in May found that 97 percent of UAE technologists believe that having visibility and insight into the performance of the technology stack and its impact on customers and the business is the most important factor right now.

It’s that opportunity for technologists that has me excited about 2021 and all of the meaningful change these teams can bring to every industry around the world. As we look to the new year, here are the top IT trends I predict will be most critical to the technologists looking to grab hold of this opportunity:

Observability Will Take Center Stage

As more organizations have shifted to ac-

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commodate our new digital lives, observability connected to business outcomes is now a necessity.

The past year has been incredibly transformational for teams across industries.

2021 will be the year of observability as companies continue to develop more complex IT systems and expand their technology infrastructures. Using observability solutions will enable developers to cut through the noise and focus on the performance issues that have the biggest impact on the business.

User Experience Will Determine Business Decisions

Part of the reason it is important to keep technology solutions operating at their highest level is to maintain a consistent digital user experience. In 2021, user experience will matter more than ever before as workers and consumers become more accustomed to digital solutions across their day-to-day lives and their expectations for flawless engagement increase significantly.

To successfully navigate this need for a

Âť INSIGHT

seamless digital user experience, organizations will need to view maintaining their applications and technology stack as not just one-off projects, but as business-critical solutions that serve as the backbone to providing the ideal experience for end users.

Another element of this renewed emphasis on user experience in 2021 will include an elevated focus on observability not just at the application level, but beyond. For businesses that want to thrive in 2021, incorporating network visibility into existing monitoring efforts can ensure that nothing impedes the user experience, whether it’s an anomaly in an application or an issue that stems from the Internet.

This enables end-users to have the best possible experience as IT teams are able to spot and address issues efficiently.

Technology Will Bring Even Bigger Impact to Business Outcomes This year has put a spotlight on IT teams and demonstrated just how important technologists are to the success of any organization. In particular, the Agents of Transformation, those elite technologists

driving successful digital transformation within a company.

The AppDynamics Agents of Transformation Report 2020: COVID-19 Special Edition showed 85 percent of UAE technologists said the rapid response of their IT team to the pandemic positively changed the perception of IT within their organization and 86 percent said digital transformation projects that would have taken years for sign off were now being approved in a matter of weeks.

2021 will be the year that positive perception will kick into overdrive and technologists will have the opportunity to impact business critical outcomes more than ever before. The emphasis that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the need for flawless digital experiences will have lasting impacts in 2021. Organizations are already seeing the benefits of enabling their IT teams to take calculated risks and drive a faster, more innovative approach and will continue to invest in those teams and solutions in the new year.

Ty Amell

CTO, AppDynamics

Wishing everyone a healthy and peaceful 2021.

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» INSIGHT

The Four 2021

Networking Trends Every CIO Needs to Know Partha Narasimhan, CTO of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company takes stock of the changes from enabling hybrid workforces to ensuring user satisfaction, connected security to automation and more.

We enter 2021 in a very different place from where we were at the start of 2020. The role of networking and more broadly, the IT function, has more often become the hero – and sometimes the scorn – of business continuity and resilience in the face of the pandemic. As CIOs soak up the praise or take their lumps, they must now look to the horizon and define their approach and strategy in a post-pandemic world.

Aruba has identified four major trends that CIOs now face that can make or break an organization’s IT program: •

•

•

•

The rise of the hybrid workforce and how that will evolve during and after the pandemic The changing role of network security integrated across the fabric of the network Graduating from uptime networking metrics to user satisfac tion metrics, examining networking holistically as part of the broader IT technology stack Staying the course in implementing automation in network ing operations, despite challenges posed by the LAN, WAN and Cloud

The Hybrid Workforce is Here to Stay

Despite recent advances in vaccines for COVID-19, many roles may still not fully return to the office until late 2021, and in many cases, not at all. After speaking with CIOs from across the country, what is clear is that some amount of remote working will remain after the pandemic exits. That admission portends profound changes for physical office spaces, corporate culture, connectivity, and networking.

What many organizations thought would be temporary remote

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CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

setups to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic infection rate, have evolved to form the hybrid workforce of the future, where employees will work from home, the office, or anywhere else – wherever they have a secure and reliable connection.

For IT, this crisis has presented enormous challenges, but there is a silver lining. CEOs and their boards of directors have come to recognize the impact that IT can have on the business, including how fast change can be implemented, even under such stressful circumstances.

Now, CEOs and their boards are thinking about lessons learned from the pandemic to make networking, security, and the overall IT programs they oversee more flexible and dynamic. As a result, IT has a seat at the table in pushing forward ambitious forms of digital transformation, even accelerating existing planned transitions, emboldened with how the workforce has adapted to what has become known as the “new normal.”

Security Must Be Viewed Dynamically – from Endpoints, to the Edge, to the Cloud

With the maturation of the cloud and the growth of edge networking with its myriad endpoints – all accelerated by the explosion of IoT – how security is defined and implemented is now becoming part of the network architecture, and not some bolted-on component of the enterprise IT environment.

With the rise of remote working and the hybrid work environment, CSOs and CIOs are clamoring for a connected security approach. When looking at network design principles of the past, security experts essentially started with a policy and then designed a network topology that in turn satisfied policy, which meant that topology and policy were tightly coupled. That dynamic is drastically changing. Networking solutions have evolved to offer significant degrees of separation, where policy gets programmed when and where it is needed, and only when and where it is needed.

Zero Trust network architecture solutions will remain a core piece of effective security with traditional IT workloads moving out of the Edge into either the cloud or SaaS environment. The vacuum left behind is eventually going to be replaced by OT/IoT specific workloads at the Edge. Furthermore, with the implementation of 5G, the networking architecture must contend with multi-access

» INSIGHT edge compute (MEC) workloads – both private and public - all the more requiring dynamic approaches to security policy that must evolve beyond the user-centric workflows that Zero Trust is primarily optimized for today.

End-User Satisfaction is King

Key IT metrics are also evolving. It’s no longer sufficient to just keep the network infrastructure up and running. The metric du jour is user satisfaction which, from the CIO standpoint, is tied to employee productivity that can ultimately impact business profitability.

Networking and security teams are now focused on dynamic experiences that end-users want and expect with the services and applications they choose to use for improved productivity. Instead of asking just what kind of devices are connecting to the network, they are also required to focus on maintaining flexibility and agility while minimizing risk. The goal of network control goes hand-in-hand with business agility. By applying the appropriate security measures, CIOs can better facilitate this increasingly dynamic IT environment.

Ultimately, CIOs want insights beyond the network itself and into availability and performance applications that the users and business leaders care about. They are not as interested in how esoteric aspects of the network are performing, but rather, they’re more concerned about whether a specific user had a poor Zoom experience.

Staying the Course on Automation in Network Operations

Tied to understanding the needs and experience of end users is the maturation of network automation. But automation progress is not equal across the entire networking paradigm.

In the data center, which is a more controlled environment when compared to the WAN or LAN, adoption is farther along. Changes in a data center are driven mostly in a naturally hierarchical structure and is thus easier to understand and manage through automation scripts.

The Edge (both LAN and WAN), on the other hand, is a more chaotic environment because changes are triggered by factors that are not totally within IT’s control – namely human and device behavior patterns that are constantly changing. There is a big need for leveraging AI and machine learning models to sense changes as soon as they occur and respond to the ones that seem persistent, even if for a short period of time. The maturity of deployed solutions that provide this learning component of automation at the Edge will improve significantly in 2021. There will also be significant progress in combining these with APIs and other automation tools that will deliver on the promised efficiencies and insights that IT leaders crave.

The pandemic has also heightened the interest in networking automation at the Edge among CIOs and IT leaders. According to a recent survey of 2,400 IT decision makers across the globe, 35% plan to increase their investment in in AI-based networking, as they seek more agile, automated infrastructures for hybrid work environments.

Partha Narasimhan CTO, Aruba

"Ultimately, CIOs want insights beyond the network itself and into availability and performance applications that the users and business leaders care about."

Making 2021 a Success

In 2020, businesses and the economy were rescued by a raft of communication technologies developed over the past 40 years, ranging from security, cloud connectivity, to managed and supported applications over the network. Now in 2021, the four trends outlined here can provide CIOs and IT leaders with the tools to be better equipped for navigating the unpredictability of today and beyond. They empower IT leaders from the top down to strategically position IT as the crucial function businesses need to successfully maneuver whatever the future holds, from pandemics to accelerating shifts in work culture trends and environments.

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» INSIGHT

EVOLUTION AND OPTIMISM:

SIX TRENDS SHAPING THE CYBERSECURITY OUTLOOK FOR 2021 Tom Kellermann, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, VMware Carbon Black outlines six trends shaping the cybersecurity outlook for 2021

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verything is different, and yet the same. As we look ahead to the cybersecurity landscape in the next 12 months, it is from a position no one predicted this time last year. Business operations have changed beyond recognition with most employees working from home in a transition that happened almost overnight. Stretched security teams have been challenged to rapidly deploy robust remote working facilities to maintain productivity. Most were writing the ‘pandemic playbook’ as they went along.

Ironically, one of the few certainties of the situation was that cybercriminals would take advantage of disruption to escalate campaigns. In that sense nothing changed, except that the opportunity was suddenly much greater. As a result, nine in ten security professionals surveyed by our Threat Analysis Unit

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As business becomes more mobile than ever and remote working persists, mobile devices and operating systems will be increasingly targeted. As employees use personal devices to review and share sensitive corporate information, these become an excellent point of ingress for attackers. If hackers can get into your Android or iPhone, they will then be able to island hop into the corporate networks you access, whether by deactivating VPNs or breaking down firewalls.

We will also see hackers using malware such as Shlayer to access iOS, ultimately turning Siri into their personal listening device to eavesdrop on sensitive business communications.

Combating these risks requires a combination of new mobile device policies and infrastructure designed to facilitate continued remote working, as well as raising employee awareness of the persistent risks and the importance of digital distancing.

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Remote-working focuses attacker attention on mobile compromise

said they were facing increased attack volumes, which they attributed to the newly distributed working environment.

The effects of COVID-19 will continue to impact the cybersecurity sector for some time, but they are not the only considerations. This year we’ve seen cybercrime and cybercriminal groups continue along a path of technical and industry innovation that will see new strategies and tactics gain traction in 2021. We have also seen cyber defences tested like never before and, for the most part, they have held firm; there is reason for cybersecurity professionals to be optimistic.

With this in mind, the following are six trends we expect to see, and key areas cybersecurity professionals should keep their eyes on in 2021.

Continuing direct impacts on healthcare

In terms of direct impact of COVID-19 the healthcare sector, at the heart of crisis response, will see the adaptations it made to try and maintain patient services become a vulnerability. With growing reliance on telemedicine for routine medical appointments lucrative personally identifiable information (PII) is being accessed from remote locations and as a result is more easily intercepted by hackers. At the same time, vaccine-related data pertaining to trials and formulae is some of the most sought-after intellectual property right now and the drive to get hold of it for financial or political gain is putting healthcare and biotech organisations under intense pressure from external threats and insider risk.

That said, the strain on healthcare cybersecurity is not going unheeded; we will see increased IT and security budgets in the sector to combat the growth in external threats.

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Emerging tactical trends: cloud-jacking and destructive ICS attacks

As the new year dawns, we will see tried and tested tactics evolving to become more sophisticated and take advantage of changes in network architecture.

Cloud-jacking through public clouds will become the island-hopping strategy of choice for cybercriminals as opportunity proliferates due to the overreliance on public clouds by the newly distributed workforce.

It won’t be only the virtual environment under threat. Increasing cyber-physical integration will tempt nation state-sponsored groups into bolder, more destructive attacks against industrial control system (ICS) environments. Critical National Infrastructure, energy and manufacturing companies will be in the crosshairs as OT threats ramp up. Our analysts are seeing new ICS-specific malware changing hands on the dark web and we are likely to see it in action in the coming year.

» INSIGHT

Tom Kellermann

Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, VMware Carbon Black

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The ransomware economy pivots to extortion and collaboration

Another familiar tactic taking on a new twist is ransomware. Ransomware groups have evolved their approach to neutralise the defensive effect of backups and disaster recovery by making sure they’ve exfiltrated all the data they need before the victim knows they’re under attack. Once the systems are locked attackers use the data in their possession to extort victims to pay to prevent the breach becoming public. And if that fails, they can sell the data anyway, meaning the victim is doubly damaged.

Ransomware is such big business that the leading groups are collaborating, sharing resources and infrastructure to develop more sophisticated and lucrative campaigns. Not all collaborations will be successful, however, and we’ll see groups disagreeing on the ethics of targeting vulnerable sectors such as healthcare.

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AI utilised for defensive and offensive purposes

Technology innovation is as relevant to attackers as it is to defenders and, while artificial intelligence and machine learning have significant benefits in cybersecurity, we can expect to see adversaries continue to advance in the way AI/ML principles are used for post-exploitation activities. They’ll leverage collected information to pivot to other systems, move laterally and spread efficiently – all through automation.

The silver lining is that in 2021 defenders will begin to see significant AI/ML advancements and integrations into the security stack. Security automation will be simplified and integrated into the arsenal of more organisations – not just those with mature SOCs. As awareness of how attackers are using automation increases, we can expect defenders to fix the issue, maximising automation to spot malicious activity faster than ever before.

Defender confidence is justifiably on the rise

To finish on a resoundingly positive note, this year we saw cyber defences placed under inconceivable strain and they flexed in response. Yes, there were vulnerabilities due to the rapidity of the switch to fully remote working, but on the whole security tools and processes are working. Defender technology is doing the job is it designed to do and that is no small feat.

The mission-critical nature of cybersecurity has never been more apparent than in 2020 as teams have risen to the challenge of uniquely difficult circumstances. In recognition of this we will see board-level support and a much healthier relationship between IT and security teams as they collaborate to simultaneously empower and safeguard users. 2020 has been the catalyst for change for which we were more than ready.

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» INSIGHT

HELPING CISOS PREPARE FOR THE 2021 THREAT LANDSCAPE

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Alain Penel, Regional Vice President - Middle East, Fortinet opines that in addition to establishing a proactive and forward-looking defense strategy, CISOs also need to solidify their plans for effective incident response and business continuity

n an era of constant innovation, it is important to be constantly aware of the impact that new technology has on the threat landscape. While IoT devices and multi-cloud environments have proven beneficial, especially in times of increased remote work, CISOs must also understand the risks that such solutions pose to their employees and to their organization.

Over the past 20 years, Fortinet’s team of security researchers has found that while certain aspects of cyberattacks continue to evolve, such as new malware or targeting new elements of the network, the under-

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lying attack patterns, criminal behaviors, and end goals have typically remained the same. In recent years, the team’s predictions have addressed issues such as the evolution of ransomware, attacks targeting converged technologies, and the weaponization of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). However, while some of these threats have already come and gone, others are only just starting to make an impact.

Cybercriminals Will Continue to Target Edge Environments

As digital innovation, the expansion of

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the network, evolving corporate strategies, and the growing reliance on business applications continue to accelerate, the traditional network perimeter has been replaced by multiple edge environments— each with their own unique set of risks.

Cybercriminals are fully aware of these vulnerabilities, as well as the fact that for far too many organizations, a full security strategy often lags behind network expansion. They also know that organizations often sacrifice security to maximize agility and enhance performance between these interconnected edges. This lack of adequate security measures has led threat

» INSIGHT actors to allocate significant resources towards targeting and exploiting new edge environments, especially the home office branch and remote workers. Through the weaponization of 5G and edge computing—and the subsequent deployment of swarm-based attacks—cybercriminals are able to easily target victims while fending off most of the lackluster solutions attempting to fight their attacks.

Combining AI and Playbooks to Anticipate Threats

As cyberattacks grow more advanced, CISOs should understand the role AI can play in helping their organizations stay a step ahead of their cyber adversaries. In addition to enabling an automated system that can detect threats and attacks before they occur, AI can also be used to document the behaviors of cyber-criminal activity in detail, resulting playbooks that can help identify an attack, anticipate an attacker’s next moves, and circumvent their threat before they can complete their mission or achieve their objectives. As AI and ML systems gain a greater foothold in networks, their ability to build out such playbooks is not far from reality. In fact, basic playbooks using schemes like the MITRE ATT&CK framework to standardize behaviors and methodologies are already being used by various threat research organizations, including FortiGuard Labs.

The Increasing Sophistication of Ransomware

One of the most likely outcomes of this will be the continued evolution of ransomware, making it one of the most dangerous and damaging threats facing organizations today. In addition to encrypting data and systems, cybercriminals are now posting data on public servers and threatening to expose organizational leaders unless a ransom is paid, moving extortion and defacement to the digital realm. And while there are now organizations appearing on the darknet with a business model of negotiating ransoms to save victims money, the benefits of this are short-term. And at the end of the day, the bad guy will almost always get a payday, which will only reinforce their criminal behavior.

The Continued Development of Swarm Intelligence

Inspired by the collective behavior of biological systems such as ants, bees,

Alain Penel

Regional Vice President, ME Fortinet

or flocks of birds, swarm intelligence is being developed by industry to tackle such tasks as efficiently exploring a new environment by collecting, aggregating, and correlating data in real time, rapidly assembling complex devices, optimizing complex problems such as vehicle routing, or tightly coordinating flight maneuvers of a squadron of military jets. As this technology matures, the opportunities for malicious use are endless. The cyber wars of the future will occur in milliseconds, meaning the primary role of humans will be to ensure that their security systems have been fed enough intelligence to not only counter attacks in real-time but also anticipate such attacks so that they do not happen in the first place. To defend their networks against these increasingly sophisticated, and eventually, AI-enabled attacks, security teams must look to adopt AI-enhanced technologies of their own designed to see, anticipate, and counter such threats.

Satellite-Based Systems Present New Opportunities for Threat Actors

Security implemented after the fact is

never as effective as if it were to be interwoven in the fabric of a new network or solution right from the start. This is especially important to remember as our reliance on data and internet links enabled through advanced satellite-based systems continues to grow. And while satellite security concerns have traditionally been nominal because they are extremely remote, this may no longer be enough as satellite-based networks proliferate. By compromising satellite base stations and spreading malware through these networks, attackers potentially gain the ability to potentially target millions of users. Such attacks will likely start with such tactics distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but as communication through satellite systems becomes more common, CISOs should expect more advanced attacks to follow.

Looking Ahead to the Role of Quantum Computing

The 2020 FortiGuard Labs Threat Predictions report highlights several important concerns, but perhaps the most forward-looking involves quantum computing. While access to quantum

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» INSIGHT

computers is beyond the scope of traditional cyber criminals, one of the biggest concerns is the use of such systems by nation-states to break cryptographic keys and algorithms. Experts now expect quantum computers to break elliptical curve cryptography by 2027, and governments everywhere are developing cyber strategies to address such a threat. With this in mind, organizations, like their government counterparts, will need to adopt quantum-resistant computing algorithms wherever cryptography is used to “sign” and protect the integrity of information as soon as they become available.

What’s Next for CISOs?

The threat landscape will only grow more advanced as time goes by, meaning that it is no longer a matter of if an organization will be a target of a cyberattack, but instead a matter of when. Which is why, in addition to establishing a proactive and forward-looking defense strategy, CISOs also need to solidify their plans for effective incident response and business continuity. The use of an integrated AI system will enable a security team to defend their networks and respond to attacks before they can leave a mark.

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But even with the right technology in place, organizations cannot be expected to fend off the full range of modern attacks on their own. To effectively protect their networks, they will also need to: • Subscribe to threat intelligence feeds • Join relevant consortiums • Proactively share data and strategies with others in their region or industry In addition, organizations must also work with vendors who have established partnerships with public sector institutions, including education and law enforcement. Such public-private sector alliances help raise the bar for the detection, response, and prosecution of criminal behavior. And organizations must also play an active role in educating their employees and others to not only engage in safe cyber behaviors, but possibly even consider a career in cybersecurity, helping to close the skills gap while protecting others along the way.

Because cybercriminals do not respect political borders, law enforcement organizations have built global command centers closely tied to the public sector,

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helping them see and respond to cybercrime in real-time. By weaving similar threat intelligence into their security resources and enabling team members to stay abreast of the latest updates, CISOs can build and deploy more effective playbooks that will not only help their own organizations, but by being a good neighbor, also help protect others that could be affected by certain threats.

Final Thoughts on Cyberthreat Predictions for 2021

What this latest round of predictions highlights is the fact that cybercriminals will only grow more advanced in their attack methods. During such a time of rapid evolution, it is up to CISOs to stay up to date on the latest threat intelligence as well as understand how the new technologies and network operations their organizations adopt to improve efficiency could have a lasting impact on cybersecurity. By monitoring the threat landscape, partnering with the right vendors, and establishing valuable alliances, these security leaders can better protect their employees while also helping the industry as a whole stay ahead of modern threats.

» INSIGHT

RPA-Overcoming key implementation challenges Francea Lobo- Digital Business Analyst at Finesse shares some key considerations to successfully deploying RPA Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has not been here for very long. Back in May 2013, McKinsey predicted that robotic advances will transform life, business and the global economy. In a short time since then, RPA has made rapid strides across a range of sectors – so much so that RPA has reached a stage of maturity where it is now a must for companies determined to pursue a real competitive advantage vis-à-vis their competition.

Each company looking to implement RPA will have many questions they are looking for answers on, the main among them being the challenges faced when implementing RPA at organizations. This article shares what are the major challenges faced during RPA implementation, and how you as an organization can overcome these.

These are the top challenges an organization faces when implementing RPA –

1. Starting with expectations that may be unrealistic

Let’s face it. We all want to generate revenue for the company, and by automating most processes that can be automated, we can bring loads of benefit. While this is important, keeping realistic expectations is key. It is not possible to adapt all processes in your organization to RPA, at least not at first. It needs to be a step-by-step process.

Proper understanding of the organization hierarchy and existing processes is key to identifying how RPA should be implemented. Based on this study, RPA implementation will need to be planned in a phased manner, starting with a single process to be automated, which brings us to the next challenge.

2. Picking the most appropriate process to automate first

Not all processes are suitable to be auto-

mated. It is necessary to identify processes with clear instructions, based on standardized or predictive rules.

A good idea would be to pick a business process that is more stable – in that it is less error prone and has less manual intervention. An added bonus would be if the process has measurable savings that can be evaluated. Once the challenges that come with this process implementation is overcome, it is easy to plan on next process automations.

3. Managing employee resistance

A very known RPA challenge, and it pertains to all companies due to a simple fact – humans fear change by nature. Any change that accompanies implementation of a new technology is stressful as they experience shifts in their responsibilities.

Frequent communication by business leaders will help employees know what is expected of them through the implementation process. This is key to essential adoption of RPA by the organization.

4. Ownership and Change Management

The question on who owns RPA within the organization, during and after implementation. Would it be the business teams or the IT team?

It is imperative that both business and the IT teams are on this together. The business teams need to set goals for themselves to enhance the business processes progressively through RPA, by providing requirements that foster growth. The IT teams should work with the business teams to ensure use-cases are properly implemented and the infrastructure is stable for use of RPA across the organization.

Francea Lobo

Digital Business Analyst Finesse

5. Industry-specific use cases

Your concern can be – will it take long to implement RPA at my organization, given the processes at my organization/sector are unique.

The RPA has reached a mature stage within many sectors like Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Energy, Telecommunications, Government/Public sector among many others. RPAs have in-built templates that are easily adaptable for use by your organization. If processes at your organization are different from those the templates, RPA tools can be adapted easily to your organization process needs - with hundreds of drag and options available.

At the outset, implementing RPA might seem daunting. Yet, careful planning helps side-step these concerns and fully leverage what RPA has to offer. The competitive advantage RPA offers far outweigh the pain-points, if properly planned and implemented, and can give your organization the boost it requires to pursue its competitive advantage.

Finesse provides smart RPA solutions to organizations across the GCC. Finesse has been certified as a Centre of Excellence for implementation of Automation Anywhere – a state-of-the-art RPA tool that has users across BPO, Financial Services, Government / Public Sector, Healthcare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, and Telecommunications.

JANUARY 2021 / CXO DX

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» TECHSHOW

DELL LATITUDE 7520 Dell has launched a series of new laptops in its Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex series. These laptops run on the latest 11th-generation Intel Core processors. The new Latitude 7520 Business Laptop is a small and premium 15.6" business laptop with the built-in AI of Dell Optimizer with new ExpressConnect for more productivity than ever before. It features the brightest screens with 4K ComfortView Plus, enhanced speakers and Intelligent Audio.

The exclusive Dell Optimizer software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically fine-tune application performance, battery life, audio quality and connectivity.

The Latitude 7520 has a 15.6-inch display with optimal touch support. The display comes in two variants of full-HD with a screen resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels and Ultra HD, with a screen resolution of3,740x2,160 pixels. The Latitude 7520 runs on an 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, along with 32GB of SDRAM. The storage specs of the Latitude 7520 are 1TB SSD M.2 2230 PCIe Gen 3 NVMe storage. The laptop comes with a 63Wh battery and 90W charging through the Type-C port.

Dell Latitude 7520 weighs 1.62 kilograms.

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You can get to work fast with our PC proximity sensor enabled by Intel Context Sensing Technology that detects your presence to instantly wake and log you in via the IR camera and Windows Hello, all without lifting a finger. It locks when you walk away, so your work stays safer.

Highlights: •

New ExpressConnect automatically joins the strongest access point in the office and directs bandwidth to critical applications, wherever you work.

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Dell Optimizer extends runtime and improves battery performance by adapting to your patterns. ExpressCharge Boost delivers up to 35% charge in about 20 minutes, or up to 80% charge in an hour with ExpressCharge.

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With Intel Adaptix Technology, you can prioritize your most important apps, so they open faster and perform better.

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Intelligent Audio enhances your audio quality and reduces background noises, so you can hear and be heard, creating a better conference experience for all.

ARUBA CX 8360 SWITCH SERIES The CX 8360 expands on the Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) vision by continuing to deliver innovative solutions that help organizations extend a unified, cloud-managed infrastructure and operating model across campuses, branches, traditional, and emerging centers of data. Built on Aruba’s powerful cloud-native AOS-CX network operating system, Aruba CX switches include advanced data center features, along with an embedded Network Analytics Engine (NAE), at no additional licensing cost.

Key Features •

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The new Aruba CX 8360 Series family consists of five, 1U fixed-port switches that deliver high throughput and ease-of-operations for edge environments (retailers and other remote locations) connecting via Aruba Central

CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

» TECHSHOW

FORTIGATE RUGGED 60F Fortinet, announced the FortiGate Rugged 60F and FortiGate Rugged 60F with built-in LTE next-generation firewalls, the industry’s first secure SD-WAN appliances certified to perform in operational technology (OT) environments. Built for non-environmentally controlled sites, these new ruggedized versions of the FortiGate platform enable the easy deployment of Fortinet’s industry leading Secure SD-WAN solution in locations never before possible for OT organizations in industries such as utilities and energy, manufacturing, and transportation.

IPsec VPN scale on top of integrated SD-WAN capabilities that are all managed by Fortinet’s intuitive SD-WAN orchestrator.

Highlights:

To address the unique concerns of OT organizations, Fortinet is releasing the FortiGate Rugged 60F and FortiGate Rugged 60F with built-in LTE, ruggedized versions of the FortiGate 60 series – the fastest, most powerful desktop Secure SD-WAN appliance and best-selling next-generation firewall with over 1.65 million units sold worldwide. The FortiGate Rugged 60F platform is a first-of-its-kind appliance that delivers the following features to support OT environments in safely and securely deploying SD-WAN. In addition to being the only Secure SD-WAN appliance certified for operational technology environments, the FortiGate Rugged 60F platform delivers the industry’s highest security and networking performance. Powered by Fortinet’s patented SOC4 SD-WAN ASIC, the FortiGate Rugged 60F platform delivers low-latency protection, including SSL decryption, and higher

and other cloud providers to regional and corporate data centers. Each is designed to support the most rigorous bandwidth-intensive enterprise applications and cloud network connectivity requirements.

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The Aruba AOS-CX operating system and integrated management tools (Aruba NetEdit and Aruba Network Analytics) create powerful, but easy-to-use procedures for performing day-to-day management tasks that deliver incredible time savings, as well as for reducing the times for deployment and scale-out projects from days to minutes.

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With as few as 12 ports on some models, enterprises can deploy CX 8360 switches at edge locations at a reduced overall cost compared to competitors who only offer switches at a 48-port low-end, which are overkill

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Small Footprint: The FortiGate Rugged 60F combines industry-leading SD-WAN, advanced routing and next-generation firewall security in a single, compact form factor, enabling it to be deployed in space-sensitive environments.

This has the additional benefit of reducing costs and simplifying operations for network analysts.

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Flexible Mounting and Power: The FortiGate Rugged 60F is designed specifically for deployment in smaller OT sites that require different mounting and power options than found in traditional IT wiring closets.

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Built Tough: The FortiGate Rugged 60F is specifically designed to function in harsh environmental conditions, such as extreme temperatures, electromagnetic interference, high moisture, and extreme or constant vibration.

and a waste of money from a cost-per-port perspective.

Competitors have no current offerings that match Aruba’s performance, simplicity, and cost advantage. The CX 8360 family spans from 12 to 48 ports, as line-rate speeds from 1 to 100 GbE. •

In addition to being ideal for enterprise edge locations and campus cores, Aruba CX 8360 switches are well-suited for inside regional and headquarters-based data centers that require top-of-rack server connectivity in traditional spine and leaf architectures.

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Currently unique among competitive offerings, Aruba CX switches have no additional software licensing costs for management tools that provide advanced Layer 2/Layer3 functionality and features that create modern cloud-native, end-to-end infrastructures.

JANUARY 2021 / CXO DX

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» TRENDS & STATS

TOP TRENDS IMPACTING INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS FOR 2021 Gartner has highlighted the six trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for in the next 12-18 months. Gartner analysts presented the findings during the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, which took place virtually in the Americas and EMEA. During his presentaion at the conference, Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner identified the top emerging trends that are impacting I&O and provided recommendations.

Trend No. 1: Anywhere Operations

Gartner expects that 48% of employees will work from home, even after the pandemic, compared with 30% pre-pandemic. This shift will force IT executives to develop flexible and resilient organizations that enable staff to work from anywhere, allow customers everywhere to access services, and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures.

“The traditional, structured processes within I&O made organizations fragile when it comes to the flexibility of location,” said Hewitt. “Anywhere operations enable organizations to decentralize staff and activate operations where it makes business sense.

It even makes way for broader talent choices as organizations do not need to necessarily recruit staff in a specific geography.”

Trend No. 2: Optimal Infrastructure

“The key for anywhere operations is developing programmable infrastructure that enables the right work in the right place at the right time – this is the crux of optimal infrastructure,” said Hewitt. “As infrastructure and operations evolves into integration and operations, various solutions such as hyperconverged infrastructure or computational storage must be matched with the optimal use case.”

Hewitt recommended organizations take a business viewpoint and look at both optimizing costs and tools to build their case for a given infrastructure deployment.

Trend No. 3: Operational Continuity

Increasingly, workloads will need to support geographically dispersed customers and employees. As a result, IT services must be continuous, regardless of external factors, providing automated deployments and minimal-touch maintenance. By 2025, 60% of organizations will use automation tools to deploy new compute resources, reduce deployment time and deliver greater agility.

“When done correctly, this trend increases efficiencies and allows for faster workload deployment. The main downside is the learning curve that comes with using new and sometimes complex tools or processes that support continuity,” said Mr. Hewitt.

Trend No. 4: Core Modernization

In order to ensure enterprise infrastructure evolves in lockstep,

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CXO DX / JANUARY 2021

maintaining core operations should be viewed as an ongoing process, not a one-time project. Enterprises will need to coordinate infrastructures on- and off-premises that minimize legacy drag.

“The upside of modernizing infrastructure is that it lowers technical debt and paves the way for agile infrastructure to respond to the growing list of digital business requirements,” said Hewitt.

“Enterprises must implement a modernization plan with a realistic timeline, one which accounts for shifting skill requirements.”

Trend No. 5: Distributed Cloud

Another major trend is distributing cloud resources so that the cloud becomes decentralized and the burden of support shifts to cloud service providers. This approach will enable flexible location and result in latency reduction.

“Since the distributed cloud market is currently immature, costs can be high and deployment models complex. Organizations should still have it on their horizon as a part of the future of cloud computing, since most cloud service platforms will provide at least some distributed cloud services that execute at the point of need over the next four years,” said. Hewitt.

Trend No. 6: Critical Skills Versus Critical Roles

“I&O skills requirements will continue to evolve as organizations adapt to new business environments,” said Mr. Hewitt. “Specifically, there is a shift in focus from infrastructure roles toward collective, critical skills. This challenges the traditional ‘territorial’ thinking of belonging to a specific infrastructure team and instead encourages collaboration.”

By 2022, I&O leaders can expect to plan for at least 12 high-priority skills in their organizations. While hiring for these skills now while the IT talent market remains a buyer’s market is recommended, Gartner said I&O leaders should consider the fundamental culture changes this trend will bring and to plan accordingly.

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