CXO DX January 2022

January 2022

ENABLING NEXT GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE With an extensive range of solutions including its APEX Cloud Services, Dell Technologies is focusing on helping organizations accelerate business transformation objectives

Walid Yehia

General Manager – UAE, Dell Technologies

» EDITORIAL

OPERATIONALIZING A REMOTE FIRST VISION To be sure, the pandemic was among our worst fears come true and we were not as prepared for such a widescale breakout that drove all countries into various periods of lockdown in the initial months. And for sure, many Businesses could have fallen apart if not for the stellar role communication and collaboration technologies played in keeping them connected with their suppliers, partners, and customers.

Looking beyond the pandemic, which may perhaps become endemic as some health experts suggest, the hybrid model will continue as a work mode of convenience with increased automation supported by technologies such as AI, ML and IoT. You can expect more improved solutions from leading vendors for sure, across collaboration suites to better connectivity, from cybersecurity to back-up and data management in the cloud, all of them pivoting around the focus of enabling, enhancing and securing a hybrid work experience. Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), a form of VDI hosted in the cloud and managed by a third-party provider, could emerge as a preferred way of enabling a secured mode of working for the remote workforce and in an increasingly remote first world.

Gartner identifies hyperautomation, distributed enterprise, cloud native platforms and composable applications among some of the key trends for the year. These could be early days for those trends but like we have seem with many of the technologies which have been buzzwords in the past, we are now being able to operationalize them in wider contexts. Use case scenarios for many of these technologies have widened and all of these possibilities have opened up because of the scalability and flexibility that cloud adoption gives and especially more since the advent of the multi cloud as a viable option. A multi cloud infrastructure via a combination of private, public, and hybrid cloud services will enable greater efficiencies and economies of scale and alongside edge computing, yet another key trend, will redefine the road ahead.

R. 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 2022 / CXO DX

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» CONTENTS INDUSTRY OUTLOOK January 2022

24 » THE PIVOTS OF TRANSFORMATION A continued pursuit of digital enablement will look to ramp up secured hybrid working environments ENABLING NEXT GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE With an extensive range of solutions including its APEX Cloud Services, Dell Technologies is focusing on helping organizations accelerate business transformation objectives

CIO OUTLOOK

Walid Yehia

General Manager – UAE, Dell Technologies

16 COVER FEATURE

16 » ENABLING NEXT GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE With an extensive range of solutions including its APEX Cloud Services, Dell Technologies is focusing on helping organizations accelerate business transformation objectives.

NEWS INSIGHTS

11 » ACRONIS REVEALS CYBERSECURITY TRENDS AND THREATS

20 » A DEFINING PHASE With Technologies continuing to play a key role in helping Businesses navigate the disruptions caused by the pandemic, the role of the CIO will continue to be critical in ensuring that organizations are keeping pace with the right transformation initiatives

INTERVIEW

13 » ENABLING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 14 » MAKING COLLABORATION WORK

28 23 » AMBITIOUS TARGETS FOR TRANSFORMATION COLUMN

28 » BUILDING AN INVISIBLE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE 30 » EFFECTIVE CYBERSECURITY AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 32 » THE STATE OF THE SOC 34 » DATACENTERS AND THE SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE REGULARS

12 » EMPLOYEE SURVEILLANCE MEASURES COULD THREATEN TRUST AND INCREASE STAFF TURNOVER 4

CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

06 » NEWS

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36 » TECHSHOW 38 » TRENDS & STATS

» NEWS

NOZOMI PROVIDE STC AND NOZOMI NETWORKS PARTNER TO DELIVER OT & IT SECURITY SOLUTIONS IN KSA Nozomi Networks provides asset discovery, network visualization, vulnerability assessment, risk monitoring and threat detection in a single solution Nozomi Networks Inc. a leader in OT and IoT security, t, and stc, the largest digital enabler in MEA, have partnered to address the growing demand for security services and solutions designed to holistically address IoT and OT cybersecurity requirements for customers in industrial automation, manufacturing, healthcare, public safety systems, smart cities, utilities and building management systems (BMS) industries across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. stc Group will offer Nozomi Networks’ advanced solutions for OT/IoT cyber resiliency and real-time network monitoring and visibility.

“Cybersecurity is one of stc’s main focuses. This partnership supports stc’s continued pursuit of delivering data and AI-driven, purpose-built IoT and OT solutions for clients across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, said Saud AlSheraihi VP of Products and Solutions in stc.

Nozomi Networks solutions are available through stc for clients who need deep insight into their industrial networks. With Nozomi Networks, they gain asset discovery, network visualization, vulnerability assessment, risk monitoring and threat detection in a single solution. The technology accelerates security and simplifies IT/OT convergence by delivering actionable intelligence to

the business and operational decision makers.

Recognized as the market leader in OT and IoT security, Nozomi Networks is valued for superior operational visibility, advanced OT and IoT threat detection and strength across deployments.

Nozomi Networks solutions support more than 57 million devices in thousands of installations across energy, manufacturing, mining, transportation, utilities, building automation, smart cities and critical infrastructure.

VEEAM APPOINTS ANAND ESWARAN AS CEO The new CEO will focus on market expansion and growth and a member of the company’s Board of Directors. William H. Largent (Bill Largent) will step down as CEO to focus on his role as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Veeam crossed $1 billion in ARR this year and has over 400,000 customers.

Anand Eswaran CEO, Veeam

Veeam Software, the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection, has appointed Anand Eswaran as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

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Eswaran joins Veeam from a successful tenure at RingCentral where he was President and COO, overseeing exponential growth and customer expansion.

In the company’s most recent financial results under Eswaran’s leadership, it reported ARR of $1.6 billion, a 39% increase year-over-year.

Bill Largent has been a key pillar of the company over the past 15 years.

Under Largent’s leadership, Veeam has enjoyed a record year of profitable growth in 2021, and was recognized as a Leader for the fifth time by Gartner in its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise

CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

Backup and Recovery Solutions.

“Bill Largent, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Veeam said, “I am excited to welcome Anand as Veeam’s new CEO. Anand brings extensive experience in developing new business models, executing on market expansion and driving growth with an inclusive purpose-led and people-first culture.

Anand Eswaran, CEO at Veeam said, “Data is exploding and has become one of the most important assets for all organizations. As such, data management, security and protection are pivotal to the way organizations operate today, and failure to have a robust strategy can be catastrophic. Veeam has a unique opportunity to break away as we sit in the middle of the data ecosystem, with the most robust ransomware protection and ability to protect data wherever it may reside.”

» NEWS

DNS EVOLUTION CRITICAL TO THE ADOPTION OF 5G, FINDS INFOBLOX RESEARCH CSPs consider DNS to be critical to the adoption of network technologies like 5G , cloud-based managed security services and MEC Infoblox announced new research that identifies the challenges Communication Service Providers (CSPs) face in transitioning to distributed cloud models, as well as use cases for Multi-access edge computing (MEC), 5G New Radio (NR), and 5G Next Generation Core (NGC) networks. The report, titled “DNS and the Edge: The Evolution will be distributed” was conducted by Heavy Reading and surveyed CSPs around the world.

“Distributed cloud models such as 5G and multi-access edge computing networks have the potential to drastically change the CSP industry, delivering high-bandwidth, low latency services to network customers” said Dilip Pillaipakam, Vice President and GM of Service Provider Business at Infoblox.

“Yet to fully take advantage of the benefits of these new technologies, DNS will have to evolve to address the challenges that come from delivering these high-value services at the network edge.”

DNS is a critical element to these new network architectures and technologies, enabling devices to access the network securely and reliably. And as 5G NR, NGC, and MEC technologies enable faster, more distributed networks with significantly more connected devices, DNS will need to be increasingly automated and operate at greater scale and with greater flexibility.

The survey found that few CSPs believe that their DNS is currently capable of supporting MEC or 5G NGC. To meet this need, networks will need to leverage the benefits of distributed DNS technology that can enable network managers to meet users where they are—at the network edge Other key findings of the survey include: • CSPs consider DNS to be critical to the adoption of next-generation network technologies like 5G (71%), cloud-based managed security services (66%) and MEC (63%)

Dilip Pillaipakam

Vice President and GM of Service Provider Business at Infoblox • More than one third of CSPs surveyed plan to implement MEC (36%), 5G (35%), and NGC (35%) in the next 12-18 months.

• Despite this, the lack of a mature vendor solution ranks as the largest obstacle these providers face in MEC (36%), 5G NR (46%) and 5G NGC (39%) deployments.

KISSFLOW RELEASES NEW WORKFLOW PLATFORM FOR MANAGING AD-HOC AND UNSTRUCTURED WORKFLOWS FOR HYBRID TEAMS Advanced case management capabilities will empower business users to become ‘citizen developers’ Kissflow, a leading SaaS software company, has rolled out a more powerful & comprehensive version of its flagship product, Kissflow Workflow. The new enhancements will allow business users to automate and track both structured processes as well as unstructured dynamic cases using a single no-code platform.

“There is a clear appetite for automation in the region as organisations with more automation have reported to see more value, higher customer satisfaction and enhanced productivity. At the same time, the higher-than-average adoption rate places pressure on all Middle East organisations to match pace. Without the right tools, they risk countless hours lost on tackling complexity with little to no positive outcome. A simple, unified platform that empowers business users to automate processes is therefore the

In today’s dynamic work environment, business users are constantly swamped with adhoc and unpredictable processes & tasks, and the number of these processes continues to grow with remote and hybrid work. While the majority of these workflows can be automated, a large number of business users, functional managers, and team leads remain heavily reliant on spreadsheets, as modern alternatives don't offer the flexibility for them to design their own workflows or are too complex to deploy.

Dinesh Varadharajan

VP of Product Management, Kissflow. need of the hour,” said Dinesh Varadharajan, VP of Product Management at Kissflow.

Kissflow provides over 140+ readymade templates for business users to set up and launch anything from simple approval requests to complex processes. These drag and drop templates are built for use by HR, sales, IT, finance, procurement, customer support and other functions. The platform also comes with contextual collaboration built into it.

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» NEWS

IIOT PROVIDER ROMBIT JOINS HANDS WITH SOFTWARE AG The cooperation extends and expands Software AG’s expertise in providing real solutions, improving quality of services and enhancing security in the industrial and allied sectors Rombit, a leading IIoT provider of smart devices for safety and efficiency joins Software AG’s partner ecosystem in the region to boost transformation led by IoT and Analytics for operational excellence.

The partnership was recently signed by Rami Kichli, VP, Gulf and Levant, Software AG, and Jan Vercammen, Chairman, Rombit Middle East. The cooperation entails enterprise technology from Software AG and plug-and-play devices from Rombit that together enhance worker safety compliance, equipment performance levels and operational efficiencies at the least.

The collaboration offers Software AG’s integrated IoT solution with Cumulocity for enterprise architecture needs. It aims to support enterprises to maximize IIoT across transportation, manufacturing, warehousing and any sectors that require

human+machinery interaction. Moreover, the joint solutions will aid enterprises to accelerate innovation, achieve accurate results through real time information on tracking of assets and grow business sustainably via IoT deployments.

Rami Kichli, VP, Gulf and Levant, Software AG added: “All our partnerships and collaborations at Software AG are strategic in nature and with each partnership, we aim to expand reach for our technologies and solutions to a larger base of the ecosystem we operate in. As a solution, Cumulocity is becoming extremely popular among IoT developers as a platform for creating and scaling new applications that automatically accommodate capabilities. With Rombit, we are embarking on a complementing journey – our technologies and their devices. The power of data

Rami Kichli

VP, Gulf and Levant, Software AG and analysis will enhance digital experiences and human life working together will revamp processes and system frameworks of these for enterprise efficiencies.”

AVEVA LAUNCHES NEW VISION AI ASSISTANT The image classification-based analytics tool dynamically transforms existing image feeds into actionable industrial insights System Platform and Operations Management Interface and AVEVA Insight, enables customers to use video and images from existing general-purpose cameras and convert them into user-friendly information and timely alerts.

Jim Chappell

Global Head of AI and Advanced Analytics, AVEVA AVEVA, a global leader in industrial software, launched Vision AI Assistant 2021 – an image classification-based analytics tool. The artificial intelligence (AI) solution, which can be integrated into AVEVA

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Designed for low latency industrial environments, Vision AI Assistant leverages deep learning to train and deploy 24x7 artificial intelligence models to enhance situational awareness to help operators focus on the task at hand without continuously monitoring live camera feeds.

Vision AI Assistant enables organizations to improve operations, quality, and maintenance capabilities across industrial enterprises by using cameras to determine visual anomalies, assess quality, and vigorously monitor production, optimizing efficiencies and improving sustainability in the process

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Jim Chappell, Global Head of AI and Advanced Analytics at AVEVA said: “This breakthrough technology represents a game changer that transforms factory operations through the power of AI. The Vision AI Assistant enables enhanced process optimization, thereby reducing time, wastage, and costs. Cameras can also be used in areas that are not suitable for humans for security or safety concerns, freeing up workers to focus on high-value tasks instead of continuously monitoring live camera feeds.”

Vision AI Assistant is offered as an exclusive extension for AVEVA System Platform purchases through the AVEVA Flex subscription initiative. The flexible payment and usage program spans any mix of cloud, hybrid, and on-premises solutions across AVEVA's portfolio – enabling simple license purchasing, usage and management.

» NEWS

SAP QUALITY AWARDS FOR CUSTOMER SUCCESS 2020 ANNOUNCED UAE’s Crescent Petroleum, RAK Ceramics, Western International LLC, Asmak Holding Company and RAK Electronic Government Authority named as leading MENA Digital Innovators Recognizing leadership in innovation and the top digital transformation initiatives, SAP has announced the winners of its SAP Quality Awards for Customer Success 2020. Winning organizations and their channel partners were across three categories: Business Transformation, Fast Delivery, and SAP S/4HANA Move.

The awards ceremony was held at the SAP House at Expo 2020 Dubai.

“Congratulations to the SAP MENA Quality Awards winners, especially Asmak, Crescent Petroleum, RAK Ceramics, RAK HR Department, and Western International for delivering digital transformation and innovation over the past year,” said Bamberger.

Digital Business Services, Asmak Holding Company Limited (IHC Food Holding) in the UAE with Seidor MENA, and the RAK Electronic Government Authority (Human Resources Department of Ras Al Khaimah) in the UAE with PwC.

In the Business Transformation – Middle East South category, winners included Crescent Petroleum in the UAE with SAP

In the Fast Delivery category, winners included the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Finance (National Center for Government Resource Systems) with Albilad Arabia

Pvt Company Ltd, Umm Al Houl Power in Qatar with Kaar Technologies, and K-Electric Limited in Pakistan with Tallymarks Consulting.

In SAP S/4HANA Move, winners included RAK Ceramics in the UAE with eBorn Consulting, Western International LLC in the UAE with DXC Technology Middle East, and PharmaOverseas in Egypt with their own partner AST.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES AND AWS COLLABORATE TO PROTECT CUSTOMER DATA FROM RANSOMWARE ATTACKS New offering Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS provides a fast, easy-to-deploy public cloud vault to help secure, isolate and recover data from a ransomware attack Dell Technologies and Amazon Web Services, are bringing Dell’s cyber recovery vault to the AWS Marketplace with the launch of Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS. Through the AWS Marketplace, customers can easily purchase and deploy an air-gapped cyber vault from Dell, to help securely protect and isolate data away from a ransomware attack.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS provides multiple layers of protection with a modern approach that allows AWS customers to resume normal business operations quickly and confidently after a cyberattack. The solution moves a customer’s critical data away from the attack surface, physically and logically isolating it with a secure, automated operational air gap. Unlike standard backup

“Data is a strategic asset, and protecting it against ransomware and other cyberattacks is critical for organizations to make informed decisions about their business and thrive in today’s digital economy,” said David Noy, vice president of data protection product management, Dell Technologies. “By teaming with AWS, we are offering customers a cyber recovery solution that isolates business-critical data away from an attack with an airgapped cyber vault, helping organizations reduce risk and protect data with confidence after a successful cyberattack.”

David Noy

VP, data protection product management, Dell Technologies solutions, this air gap locks down management interfaces, requiring separate security credentials and multi-factor authentication for access.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS helps customers address the increasing risk of ransomware and other cyberattacks.

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» NEWS

SONICWALL UNIFIES CLOUD, VIRTUAL & HARDWARE PORTFOLIO Introduces three new high-performance firewall models — NSa 5700, NSsp 10700 and NSsp 11700 SonicWall announced the latest additions of its Generation 7 cybersecurity evolution, the largest in the company’s 30-year history. Driven by this innovation, SonicWall unified cloud, virtual and hardware offerings across a single and fully integrated cloud-powered platform.

SonicWall’s achievement is marked by the introduction of three new high-performance firewall models — NSa 5700, NSsp 10700 and NSsp 11700 — designed to protect the largest and most complex enterprises, government agencies and MSSPs from advanced cyberattacks, including ransomware and never-before-seen malware, without sacrificing network performance.

“More than two years ago, SonicWall set out to evolve its cybersecurity portfolio to meet the diverse needs of our customers

commitment, we’re proud to announce the completion of a unified foundation that helps protect our customers with more simplicity, flexibility and cost-effectiveness than ever before. As always, our mission remains protecting our loyal users, organizations and data, no matter the environment. This is the next phase of many in exceeding those objectives.”

Bill Conner

President and CEO, SonicWall

and partners across a variety of complex on-premises, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “As a sign of that

The company’s collection of 17 virtual and physical firewall offerings on the Generation 7 platform ensure that organizations of any size — in any industry — are all able to implement SonicWall’s Boundless Cybersecurity model.vSonicWall’s entire line of TZ, NSa, NSsp and NSv (virtual) firewalls can be quickly managed by the cloud-native Network Security Manager (NSM), which gives distributed enterprises a single, easy-to-use cloud interface for streamlined management, analytics and reporting.

CYBERKNIGHT SIGNS PARTNERSHIP WITH BLUECAT BlueCat’s DDI platform helps secure DNS, DHCP, IP Address Management As enterprises lean further into their hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, challenges associated with DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (DDI) create complexities in the form of IP utilization issues, downtime, compliance infractions, and data loss. As pressure mounts on enterprises to modernize their digital foundations, IT teams report spending 30% of their time fulfilling DNS-related tickets, and only 26% on strategic initiatives.

For more than 20 years, BlueCat has been transforming the biggest, most complex business networks around with the world with secure, fast, and flexible Adaptive DNS. BlueCat’s DDI platform centralizes the three critical services to create a multiplier effect on an IT teams’ ability to help their organization increase the resilience of critical infrastructure, leverage DNS data to reduce risk, embrace hybrid cloud, and drive rapid change through automation. Adaptive DNS is dynamic, open,

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secure, scalable, and automated, helping businesses thrive in hybrid and multicloud complexity.

“According to Enterprise Management Associates, only 25% of enterprises consider their toolset for managing the networking challenges associated with cloud adoption to be very good. Also, higher costs, and technical support issues from other DDI vendors in the market are driving customers to look at alternatives such as BlueCat, that bring more robust DDI technology at a significantly lower price tag. As a BlueCat distributor, we aim to help regional organizations achieve more reliable, scalable and secure DDI to accelerate their digital transformation,” commented Vivek Gupta, Co-Founder & COO at CyberKnight.

“Partnering with CyberKnight helps us to accelerate our growth in the region and allows more enterprise and government

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Vivek Gupta

Co-Founder & COO at CyberKnight customers in the Middle East to unlock the power of their critical infrastructure services. In fact, we have already seen strong collaboration with CyberKnight by closing multimillion-dollar projects with some of the largest customers in the region in a short period of time,” said Steffen Marckardt, Vice President, EMEA Channel & Alliances at BlueCat.

» NEWS INSIGHT

ACRONIS REVEALS CYBERSECURITY TRENDS AND THREATS Cybercriminals are using MSPs’ own internal tools against them; ransomware damage to exceed $20 billion by end of the year — as per the Acronis Cyberthreats Report 2022 Acronis released its Cyberthreats Report 2022, an in-depth review of cybersecurity trends and threats worldwide at the Acronis #CyberFit Summit Dubai — the third stop in the Acronis World Tour. The annual report warns that managed service providers (MSPs) are particularly at risk — having more of their own management tools, such as PSA or RMM, used against them by cybercriminals, and thus are becoming increasingly vulnerable to supply chain attacks. “ Supply-chain attacks on MSPs are particularly devastating since attackers gain access to both their business and clients — as seen in the SolarWinds breach last year and the Kaseya VSA attack earlier in 2021, one successful attack means crippling hundreds or thousands of SMBs. The report also shows that during the second half of 2021, only 20% of companies reported not having been attacked, as opposed to 32% last year.

“The cybercrime industry is a well-oiled machine, using cloud and machine intelligence to scale and automate their operations. While the threat landscape continues to grow, we see that the main attack vectors stay the same — and they still work,” says Candid Wuest, Acronis VP of Cyber Protection Research. “While the attack surface is growing and 2022 will surely bring us surprises, cyber protection automation remains the only path to greater security, reduced risks, lower costs, and improved efficiency.”

Key trends and predictions

Beyond the growing efficiency of cybercriminals and the impact on MSPs and small businesses, the Acronis Cyberthreats Report 2022 shows: ● Phishing remains the main attack vector. 94% of malware gets delivered by email — using social engineering techniques to trick users into opening malicious attachments or links, phishing has been topping the charts even before the pandemic. It still continues to grow rapid-

ly: just this year, Acronis reported blocking 23% more phishing emails and 40% more malware emails in Q3, as compared with Q2 of the same year. ● Phishing actors develop new tricks, move to messengers. Now targeting OAuth and multifactor authentication tools (MFA), these new tricks allow criminals to take over accounts. To bypass common anti-phishing tools, they will use text messages, Slack, Teams chats and other tools for attacks such as business email compromise (BEC). One recent example of such an attack was the infamous hijacking of the FBI’s own email service, which was compromised and started sending spam emails in November 2021. ● Ransomware is still the #1 threat — to big companies and SMBs alike. High-value targets include the public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, and other critical organizations. But despite some recent arrests, ransomware continues to be one of the most profitable cyber attacks these days. Acronis predicts ransomware damages will exceed $20 billion before the end of 2021. ● Cryptocurrency among the attackers’ favourite playing cards. Info stealers and malware that swaps digital wallet address-

es are the reality today. We can expect more such attacks waged directly against smart contracts in 2022 — attacking the programs at the heart of cryptocurrencies.

Attacks against Web 3.0 apps will also occur more frequently, and new and increasingly sophisticated attacks, such as flash loan attacks, will allow attackers to drain millions of dollars from cryptocurrency pools.

Overall, in terms of cybersecurity, this year was the worst on record; not just for many organizations, but for many countries as well, including the UAE. And despite their best effort, as Acronis’ own recent survey shows, 25% of people in UAE still do not use any cyber protection tools.

The normalized malware detection in the research suggests that the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region rank fairly high on the list, with the UAE at 38%; South Africa at 36%; and Saudi Arabia at 29%.

Similar statistics were seen for blocked ransomware attacks: the UAE ranked 33rd globally, responsible for 0.3% of all global detections — a 63% increase from Oct 2021. While ransomware attacks are clearly on the rise in MEA, the high malware detection rates could mean that countries are paying more attention to cyber protection by upgrading their detection capabilities.

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» NEWS INSIGHT

Amin Hanafieh

Country Director, UAE, VMware

EMPLOYEE SURVEILLANCE MEASURES COULD INCREASE STAFF TURNOVER

90 percent of companies surveyed in the UAE have either already implemented or are planning to implement employee surveillance measures

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Mware shared results of a global study that revealed the rise in employee performance and trust established in new hybrid working models could be under threat from an increase in the implementation of remote monitoring measures.

The study, “The Virtual Floorplan: New Rules for a New Era of Work,” conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of VMware, found that 90 percent of companies surveyed in the UAE have either already implemented or are planning to implement employee surveillance measures to monitor employee productivity since the shift to hybrid working. Among these organizations, the measures being taken include the monitoring of emails 56 percent, web browsing and collaboration tools 44 percent, as well as video surveillance 36 percent, attention tracking via webcams 34 percent and keylogger software 28 percent. However, 46 percent of UAE companies that have already implemented device monitoring, and 64 percent of companies who are currently in the process of doing so, are in fact seeing “drastically increased” or “increased” employee turnover.

The research findings suggest there is a delicate balance to be struck as businesses look for new ways to assess employee performance beyond presentism. From the employee perspective, 80% of UAE employees agree that moving to a distributed working environment has meant that their performance – and not traditional metrics such as time spent in the office – is being valued more by their employers. And, 85 percent of employees agree that remote work technologies have enabled them to work more efficiently than before. A further 85 percent of organizations have had to develop new ways to measure employee productivity. Among these organizations, the new approach to monitoring productivity has been achieved through the use of performance-focused solutions including regular catch-ups with managers to discuss workloads

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(54 percent) assessing output and agreed deliverables (54 percent), and using new project management software (56 percent).

Malou Toft

VP EMEA, Milestone Systems However, now that direct reports are not necessarily sitting a few cubicles away, employers are evolving new ways to monitor and quantify employee productivity. While 83 percent employees recognise their organisation has had to develop new ways to monitor productivity as part of the move to hybrid working, transparency remains critical.

Amin Hanafieh, country director, UAE, VMware, said: “The results of the survey show the importance for company leaders to take a step back when deciding how to assess employee productivity.

While technology was key to enabling the distributed workforce, traditional techniques such as regular catch ups, setting expectations, agreeing KPIs, and keeping open lines of communication can be used effectively to monitor and measure productivity.

The focus should be on providing the employees with the tools they need to perform their roles, while agreeing expectations on performance, with the employee’s full buy in.”

“Globally we are seeing organisations shift permanently to hybrid work models that don’t require knowledge workers to be office-based all the time. With this shift, employers should proceed with caution when replacing presentism with monitoring tools.

Monitoring and performance are two very different things,” says Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “Digital workspace tools enable people to work from anywhere and our research shows employees are feeling more valued and trusted. A lack of transparency and measurement by ‘stealth and numbers’, can quickly erode employee faith and lead to talent heading for the door, in a highly competitive and challenging skills market.”

» INTERVIEW

ENABLING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION In addition to quickly developing e-commerce across industries and regions, Majid Al Futtaim is known to promote a wide variety of digital efforts to fuel growth. Tabish Asifi, Group IT Governance Lead Majid Al Futtaim elaborates to CXO DX on their digital journey.

How has the IT landscape changed in the last 2 years?

We have predominantly moved to a cloud infra base in the last couple of years. The option of Low code and no code platform has got its due attention now. A lot of focus at present is on enhancing the integration layer with API orchestration technology platforms in the mix. Digital Innovation has finally got its own excusive budget and ownership.

What is the next phase of digital transformation requirement? How far have you reached in the initial digital transformation journey?

I would say we have more or less crossed the exploratory phase of the digital transformation journey and have entered the enablement phase. Smart RPA / Intelligent Automation , at present is one of the focus areas for us , acting as our digital accelerator. We are also exploring the ideas of consolidating and homogenizing larger enterprise platforms like ERP / CRM / SCM into a more effective and efficient platform.

With massive digital transformation occurring across the region, what were the major challenges faced by you?

Structural and budget constraints were the common theme of challenges faced. We literally had to reorganize many of our IT operations under a shared service model to ensure we would act out on our digital ambitions. We also developed dedicated CoE in areas of RPA and a Digital Labs for CX enhancements to many of our customer facing business applications.

What is your cloud strategy? Do you have hybrid cloud strategy in place? Are you looking at multi-cloud adoption for leveraging the best of cloud?

Yes we do have a multi cloud strategy but over the last two years there has been a general effort in the consolidation and standardization of the cloud layer. Our move has been more towards the AWS, while we do have a fair share of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Infra elements.

What is your IT agenda for this year?

The focus is on stabilizing the IT service layer to a managed service approach, and on the other hand enable innovation CoE through the right supporting structure and resources. We are also focusing on enhancing DevSecOps capabilities within and

Tabish Asifi

Group IT Governance Lead Majid Al Futtaim

"The focus is on stabilizing the IT service layer to a managed service approach, and on the other hand enable innovation CoE through the right supporting structure and resources." in some areas transitioning to a more product center organization model rather than a project centric model. We also have a task ahead to optimize the mix of offshore and onshore resources which comes as a given, post a transition to a shared service model with a significant offshore resource mix.

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» INTERVIEW

MAKING COLLABO Pramod Sharda, CEO, IceWarp India and Middle East, spoke to CXO DX about the company’s solutions and focus in the region Pramod Sharda

CEO, IceWarp India and Middle East

Tell us about your global operations?

Globally we have been present for more than 22 years. Though we are headquartered out of Prague and our co-founders live out there, we operate out of 50 odd countries and have direct presence in some of them. IceWarp also has more than 100 million users globally. With multiple awards, we have been recognized as the only alternative to M365 in global workspace.

IceWarp’s 1st data center hub opened in Bahrain a couple of years ago. Since then, we have been present in the region. We have ensured our participation at GITEX in the past few years as well and look forward to making our presence stronger in the region.

You mentioned Icewarp as a strong alternative to Microsoft 365. Please elaborate.

We have evolved over time with the evolution of communication. The whole industry evolved from messaging to communication. From emails, we shifted to collaboration. Collaboration is more about the availability of people, resources

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etc. Collaboration came with audio, video meetings and a common place where documents can be shared along with comments. Instead of a loop of emails or attachments, this model gives a better clarity to work.

The era also shifted to collaborative authoring, where a colleague can view the document real-time. This breaks a barrier of geographical distance. Though this facility was available pre-pandemic, there needed to be a slight adaptation of the human mindset to accept and enforce it.

IceWarp is the best in collaboration services. IceWarp is also the only alternative in the market as an alternative for G-suite, Gmail or Google Workspace as well as Microsoft Exchange and Office 365. Also, having our own cloud technology helps us offer a complete offering to the market.

How many data centers do you have globally? Are you available on hyperscalers?

We are not on hyperscalers as the SLA that we give now cannot be given with this.

When a market/region shows growth potential, we go in with our own cloud data

CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

centers. We do have data centers in countries like USA, Turkey India, Brazil etc.

The first one in Middle East was set up in Bahrain. Step by step we will be growing in other GCC countries as well, possibly starting with UAE. IceWarp wishes to offer customers local data centers as a preference or let them choose any region of their choice.

Do you have equivalent of Microsoft One drive or Google Drive?

Yes, we have. Customers can easily choose their preferred plans with larger storage on IceWarp Drive. Our IceWarp Teams is a plan with video conferencing along with collaboration on a single platform. We even have the option to augment the drive across team members. This is a unique feature offered with which storage can be shared and made best use of.

IceWarp Docs is an equivalent option for Microsoft Office, which is available on the web browser and is downloadable. The documents are also saved onto the drive by default. Though replacing MS Office is possibly impossible, yet IceWarp is the best alternative for people who is not in need of all the Office applications.

» INTERVIEW

ORATION WORK

Which sectors are of major focus for IceWarp? Is there a focus on education?

Since the pandemic broke out, IceWarp’s existing customers could jump start and use the collaboration features. We also shared video tutorials with customers to make the journey easier. But the pandemic gave us the chance to inform customers about a feature which they already own: Collaboration. Pre and post pandemic, cost was one of the major issues. IceWarp has customers across verticals as we are not specific to any domain. This is a widely used and the use cases are in every vertical.

What are the least used features across your platform?

Today, no feature is left out by users. Even a small feature like Smart Attach, which was not used much previously is highly used now. With this feature, attachments above a certain size will automatically be saved into a drive which will be replaced by a link in the email. Though it looks like any regular feature, it saved storage space during the pandemic when there was a huge number of email exchanges.

Has the pandemic been an accelerator for your business?

It has been. Not just for us but also for all IT companies worldwide. We understand the customers have been forced to adapt to new technologies but, we are adding value to customers at a good price point. A good user experience is ensured by not compromising on features and ability to enable all workforce.

What your expectation from the market in the near future?

At this year’s GITEX, we saw a trend among visitors to understand the product better. This pandemic made many unheard brands to come up and make their mark.

It provided them with chance to showcase the strengths. The customer readiness to adopt Technologies in the Middle East along with the market gives us confidence to invest in resources, manpower, infrastructure, marketing etc. We also expect customers to give opportunity to do a POC so they can see the actual use of IceWarp.

IceWarp is globally a partner driven company. They are the pillars of our growth.

This region is no different. Our partners are our key to success. IceWarp is here to

enable and support partners. In 2022, we wish to have credible partners who believe in us.

Any customization of solutions you have looked at?

On IceWarp’s website is a section on API which showcases some of the interesting case studies. For example, a pharmacy company, wanted a solution which could help make the exit process of employees more seamless as well as for new recruits.

Our partner came with this client to automate the process through IceWarp. This ensures that the exit formalities are taking place when an employee is serving the notice period and at the same take care of all formalities when a new employee joins.

IceWarp along with the partner helped the customer meet their needs with a seamless solution.

We are also in discussion today with few other ISVs. CRM vendors are looking at mailing and collaboration solution as an add on feature. Communication is intrinsic to CRM. We are looking augmenting the offering of ISVs to their customers and partner base also.

JANUARY 2022 / CXO DX

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» COVER FEATURE

T

he pandemic took us by surprise, but thankfully smart digital technologies kept us connected and the Businesses afloat. Technologies have been the lifeline for our societies and now with so much learning behind us, from collectively managing a period of crisis and the transition to remote working, getting the workforce to adopt the hybrid mode successfully, there is the possibility to renew ambitious growth.

In particular, the UAE and wider Middle East region, sits on the cusp of a major shift underpinned by ambitious growth roadmaps, new technologies and a drive to develop knowledge-economies through digital transformation. From supporting eGovernment strategies, to assisting telehealth infrastructure and investing in the digital transformation of education, governments’ across the region are embracing the importance of universal access and the role of technology as an enabler of a more equal society. According to Gartner, IT spend in MENA is forecast to total $1.7 billion in 2022, an increase of 2.6 per cent from 2021.

Walid Yehia

General Manager – UAE at Dell Technologies

ENABLING NEXT GENERATION INFRASTRUCTURE With an extensive range of solutions including its APEX Cloud Services, Dell Technologies is focusing on helping organizations accelerate business transformation objectives

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CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

Walid Yehia, General Manager – UAE at Dell Technologies says, “With 89% of businesses recognizing the need for more agile and scalable IT infrastructure going forward, recovery efforts can play a vital role in laying the foundations required for further and improved societal and sectoral evolution. For example, practical innovations that kept businesses afloat over the best part of almost two years, ranged from the embracing of virtual desktops and video conferencing, to more advanced data processing within our hospitals and banks. Meanwhile, investments into cloud-based technologies, as well as AI and machine learning, are allowing entire industries to communicate with citizens, customers, and service-users in a faster, more personable fashion, whilst also automating various back-end processes that previously may have been both a financial and time drain.

In this transition from designs of recovery, to an ambitious, tech-driven reality, Technology powerhouses like Dell Technologies have a crucial role to play. As a premier provider of end-to-end tech-

» COVER FEATURE

nologies including cloud services, the company sees facilitating accelerated digitalization for business as mission critical. From creating remote workforces with its leading line up of laptops and monitors to virtualized infrastructure – to protecting critical data and applications, Dell Technologies offers best-of-breed products that can cater to all need of the customer. Dell’s line-up of ‘Power’ branded product lines extends across its storage, servers, data protection and networking portfolio. The vendor has also expanded its as-a-service capabilities, offering flexible payment options so that organizations have greater access to technology across Dell Technologies’ infrastructure stack including compute, storage, networking, virtualization, and data protection.

Walid elaborates, “At Dell Technologies, our primary focus is to help organizations accelerate national and business transformation initiatives with speed and purpose, as we work together to power the innovation agendas of the region. Our aim is to democratize technology so giving our customers and partners the freedom and flexibility to continue their investment in IT infrastructure and to evolve their digital transformation journey is vital. Over the last 24 months, customers looked to Dell Technologies for our end-to-end product lines that are helping businesses transform their IT strategies and infrastructure. Dell Technologies is committed to making transformation real for organizations, and we look forward to not only strengthening our position as trusted advisors to our customers and partners, but to also help businesses chart a successful digital roadmap for the future.”

Accelerating transformation

Dell Technologies has been working with its customers, enabling them migrate from legacy infrastructure and embrace the cloud.

The challenges have been several including the need for upskilling the workforce.

“At the start of the pandemic many organizations had to undergo legacy IT migrations and quickly transform to enable their staff to work from home so that business could continue. We are currently working with several organizations in the region to move them from their legacy infrastructure to a digital infrastructure that employs and supports emerging technologies. Some of the common challenges that organizations encounter are having the right roadmap in replicating the office environment (through tools like virtual conferencing, virtual desktop infrastructure or cloudbased desktop-as-a-service) and enough network bandwidth to support access to office networks,” says Walid.

He further elaborates, “Upskilling the IT teams to meet the fastpaced digital transformation demands is another area where companies require additional support. Our solutions ensure organizations remain up-to-date and are able to capitalize on the growth wave with best-in-class infrastructure offerings comprising multicloud, digital workplace, data, security and finance solutions. We see everything-as-a-service (XaaS) becoming a strategic and operational blueprint across organizations, as it strives to meet the changing hybrid work needs and lay the groundwork for a successful digital future.”

JANUARY 2022 / CXO DX

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» COVER FEATURE Today, having the right infrastructure to support and empower remote workers has proven to be business critical and optimizing this infrastructure with reliable and secure access to applications and data – whether running on-premises, in the cloud or both – is necessary to support users who are working and learning remotely. As the region works towards realizing the vision of smart, innovation-backed economies, Dell Technologies is focusing on supporting organizations create a sustainable hybrid work strategy that upholds resiliency, efficiency and collaboration.

The cloud proposition

Today, regional businesses have transformed the way they consume and deploy software infrastructure and applications. This includes a growing demand for cloud technologies, with a focus on hybrid models which enables businesses to adapt and grow in today’s data-driven, location-independent era. This shift was noted in the Dell Technologies’ Digital Transformation Index study, where 80 percent of global businesses accelerated their digital transformation plans, with 79 percent reinventing their business model due to disruption caused by the pandemic.

Dell Technologies APEX, a portfolio of as-a-Service offerings from Dell Technologies help simplify digital transformation by increasing IT agility and control. It is a transformational technology experience, which will deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service wherever it is needed. Organizations can focus less on managing infrastructure and more on running their business, accelerate innovation by adapting to evolving requirements, and run IT operations more effectively on their terms while minimizing risk and maximizing resources.

Walid says, “In this critical time of change, Dell Technologies’ Cloud is a suite of cloud solutions that utilizes the expertise of Dell Technologies to provide a consistent operating model for easier management of public, private and edge cloud resources.

Rather than acquiring, installing, and maintaining computing technology on-premises, with the Dell Technologies Cloud services, organizations can quickly add capacity without incurring capital expense while significantly increasing agility and scalability. It allows organizations to simplify operations, improve cloud economics, eliminate operational silos and manage a hybrid cloud infrastructure with ease.”

Focus on the edge

Edge computing is not new. Businesses across diverse industries have been collecting data and deploying IT outside of traditional data centers for many years. Industry analysts predict that more than 50% of new IT infrastructure will be deployed at the edge by 2023. And the number of new operational processes deployed on edge infrastructure will grow from less than 20% today to over 90% by 2024.

Most agree that edge computing needs to be an essential element of the data-driven enterprise. And for many organizations, the potential of data at the edge remains yet untapped, invisible and unused. Add the complexity that can arise from deploying, managing and supporting the proliferation of infrastructure, and you

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can see why organizations need to take a new approach to edge computing. This shift results from the immense explosion of data generated by machines and people, wherever they are, and the demand for immediate access and insights into this data. Further, edge computing hand in hand with the 5G rollout is expected to be game changer in the data driven future. With 5G offering almost 10 times the speed of 4G, and its bandwidth able to support billions of connected devices, new applications for sensors and connected devices will emerge. This will raise the demand for edge devices that can process, analyze and transmit data in real-time, unlocking numerous potentials in various industries.

Processing data closer to the source reduces the physical distance it must travel, therefore reducing the latency and the implicated cost. Secondly, processing at the edge allows for near-real-time insight. This allows organizations to be more agile. Third, Edge computing allows heavier workloads to be processed at speed (due to lower latency). Addressing these needs, Dell Technologies offers a value proposition of operationalizing edge computing with effective data processing with its offering of validated, end-to-end hardware and software edge solutions.

“At Dell Technologies, we believe that ‘The edge exists wherever the digital and physical world intersect, and data is securely collected, generated and processed.’ This means bringing software, compute hardware, storage and networking closer to data improving the customer experience by enabling faster insights from more data on their device of choice. We are committed to developing and offering validated, end-to-end hardware and software edge solutions that provide the speed, scalability, and resiliency for smart business outcomes. This includes developing simple solutions and the Dell EMC VxRail appliances portfolio is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution that is jointly engineered with VMWare. This single-node deployment can automate day-to-day operations, health monitoring and lifecycle management from a centralized location without the need for local technical and specialized resources,” says Walid.

He adds further, “Without the edge, intelligent innovation and differentiation from competitors are nearly impossible, allowing adaption, innovation and ultimately Return on Investment and growth. It’s an interesting time to see how these conditions are challenging CIOs to rethink the role of the data center and ultimately find solutions that will allow their organizations to succeed in the digital era.”

Securing from core to edge

As new technologies create opportunities to innovate, we’re seeing more large-scale data loss and the rise of ransomware attacks – so business resiliency planning is key to survival. In fact, according to a recent study by Gartner, Ransomware is cited as one of the most dangerous threats to organizations and that by 2025, at least 75% of IT organizations will face one or more attacks.

The Dell Technologies 2021 Global Data Protection Index found that IT decision makers in the UAE see the potential value that data holds, but despite this risk, organizations have limited confi-

dence in their data protection solutions, with 76% citing that their current data protection solution will not enable them to meet future business challenges. These concerns are well-founded, with more than 35% reporting data loss and unplanned systems downtime in the UAE last year. In addition, 72% of respondents agreed that they have increased exposure to data loss from cyber threats with the growth of employees working from home.

With a mix of public, private edge cloud resources, a hybrid cloud environment poses visibility and control challenges for IT teams as they seek to secure data. As enterprises look to reap the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure, data security must be a critical priority. Traditional security controls are no longer useful when data resides across multiple public and private clouds.

“We develop a comprehensive set of next-generation data protection appliances and software defined solutions that protect an organizations’ data across edge, core and cloud. From protecting critical data right from the identification phase to performing data recovery and building cyber resilience – we are helping our customers meet specific challenges of a constantly evolving IT landscape,” says Walid.

Outlook ahead

to turning ocean-bound plastics into recyclable packaging, Dell Technologies is a world leader in using resources in a way that protects the planet. Our circular design approach includes recycling and repurposing scrap materials, creating innovative uses for what was once discarded as waste.”

In summary, Dell Technologies is helping customers navigate and accelerate their digital transformation journey, ensuring they stay competitive in their respective segments.

“As we being to turn the corner into a post-pandemic world, we are fully aligned to the outlook for the market in terms of the critical role that technology will play in driving socio-economic growth. I’m very optimistic about the opportunity that the digital sector in the UAE and wider region presents, with the push for digital transformation coming from governments and businesses.

Our primary focus in the coming months is to enable digital transformation to help organizations accelerate their IT transformation initiatives with speed and purpose. Enterprises should disrupt themselves before technology disrupts their business. Given the pace of change today and the constant risk of falling behind, we at Dell Technologies are enabling our customers to be more competitive, optimize costs and drive innovation”.

Technologies such as cloud, AI/ML, Edge and IoT, storage, data analytics, security and workforce transformation continue to be at the forefront of IT investments, and businesses need to focus their priorities in those areas to remain competitive. These technologies are rapidly changing how organizations must operate to be able to succeed in the hybrid and digital era. More specifically, Edge, Data Management and Security will have a great influence on how industries operate. The better a business knows its data; the more powerful insights can be gleaned from it and ultimately the bolder and more confident the innovation. Data management provides a vital key to unlocking opportunities, evolving to meet new and urgent customer demands while leading the way in the zettabyte era.

With its new Infrastructure-as-a-Service under the APEX Cloud Services portfolio, Dell is offering organizations the ability and flexibility to quickly deploy application ready infrastructure, move workloads across multiple cloud environments and scale resources quickly with predictable pricing and transparent costs.

Given the extensive range of solutions and services it offers with multiple options and the wide customer base in the region and elsewhere, Dell Technologies will continue to be at the forefront of choices for customers looking to enable next generation infrastructure.

Walid says, “It’s also why as-a-service technology solutions are innovation gold. As-a-service offerings promise the ultimate simplification and agility that will set businesses up to master the oncoming data deluge. It provides the flexibility to choose technology services that work best for them and only pay for what they need when they need it as it reduces the time and complexity of acquiring, maintaining and servicing physical IT infrastructure.

Customers can scale IT as needed to launch new applications, kickstart new projects, and address the changing needs of their organisations – all managed by their technology provider. “

"At Dell Technologies, we believe that ‘The edge exists wherever the digital and physical world intersect, and data is securely collected, generated and processed.’

This means bringing software, compute hardware, storage and networking closer to data improving the customer experience by enabling faster insights from more data on their device of choice."

He adds that the region will also play a significant role in the global fight against climate change with many governments and companies heavily investing in green alternatives.

“Dell Technologies has set an ambitious goal to source 100% of our packaging materials and more than 50% of our product materials from recycled-content or renewable materials by 2030.

From recycling the plastic in old electronics for new computers,

JANUARY 2022 / CXO DX

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» CIO OUTLOOK 2022

A DEFINING PHASE With Technologies continuing to play a key role in helping Businesses navigate the disruptions caused by the pandemic, the role of the CIO will continue to be critical in ensuring that organizations are keeping pace with the right transformation initiatives A few years ago, there was a growing trend of CIOs adding new responsibilities to their job profiles. In the near future, many CIOs will be involved, if not already, in monitoring the transition to hybrid work and thus they will need to give more attention to facilities, people, and operations. The scope of their accountability has therefore increased.

Nithin Thomas

Head of Information Technology, Amity University Dubai

T

he ongoing pandemic has been a key driver of Technology acceleration and has led the way in removing reservations of those who were cautious or just lagging behind in embracing digital transformation. The technology industry is quite different to what it was even as few as two years ago before the pandemic and one can only expect the pace of change to quicken further.

The contemporary CIO has had to keep pace with an accelerated expansion in the scope of responsibilities as traditional IT infrastructure gave way to cloud and digital transformation became a priority pursuit for organizations. The need to balance management of day-to-day IT operations while also pursuing strategic goals, with transformational change has been at the top of the priority list.

After successfully navigating two years of transition and change, CIOs have been entrusted with implementing digital initiatives that will define the next decade of work. The year 2022 will likely be a watershed, with important developments determining the course of the next several years.

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CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

CIOs and IT leaders are expected to keep pace with the changing technology trends, understand them in order to assess how their businesses' implementation and technology adoptions should change over the year. Organizations that embrace and plan for these developments will develop long-term strategies for dependable and sustainable corporate success. Some of these advances reflect the fundamental technological capabilities necessary to compete in a digital environment, whilst others give business-oriented capabilities to stay ahead of the competition. IT leaders play a pivotal role and are best positioned to assess whether new technology trends and disruptions pose a threat or an opportunity for their organization and identify what their response needs to be. They may affect corporate transformation by utilizing their business and technology skills to identify the impact of trends on their enterprises.

“The organizations will tend to follow the lessons learned from the last two years in 2022. More and more companies will focus on work from anywhere technologies, rather than confining to stable work environments. Many companies will put their priorities on cloud-based infrastructure and Services.

AI and ML will be used extensively going forward,” said Nithin Thomas, Head of Information Technology, Amity University Dubai.

For CIOs and IT leaders, the top strategic technology trends will advance digital capabilities and drive success by addressing common business concerns. They provide a road map for distinguishing your firm from competitors, achieving business objectives, and placing CIOs and IT executives as strategic partners in the enterprise.

All the CIOs interviewed for this feature agrees that there is an emphasis on cloud deployment. Many companies consider cloud services to be nothing more than "computing," "storage," and "networking." Customers are increasingly cloudfirst, not thinking about the underlying infrastructure, service levels, or debating the advantages of on-premises vs cloud.

» CIO OUTLOOK 2022

Lijeesh Rajan

Director of Centralized IT Services, Rotana Hotel Management Corporation

While many startups have no reservations about basing their IT strategy on the cloud and SaaS products, the larger enterprises have been traditionally cautious in their cloud journey and have had reservation in the past on aspects of security but that may have changed to a large extent over the recent past. They focus and righty so on ensuring security, compliance, SLAs on their journey to the cloud.

The industry is still dominated by the "big three" hyperscalers, who get the majority of customer and partner attention. However, interest in the alternative cloud sector is growing. Outside of the global providers, there are regional providers in the alternative market. Cloud deployments will benefit from the finest aspects of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, thanks to the present market's abundance of cloud providers. Furthermore, the businesses will place a greater emphasis on application mobility, security, cloudbased automation, and cost-effectiveness.

“Cloud adoption or deployment is a big differentiator for the agile workforce and business. Whether private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide simple and scalable access to computing resources and IT services,” said Lijeesh Rajan, Director of Centralized IT Services, Rotana Hotel Management Corporation.

He further added, “Having global market leaders like Microsoft, Google, Aws and Oracle in cloud computing put a lot more focus and business resources in the MENA region is a big positive.

Such regional investments will do away with the Data security and border control concerns. And there are local players as well meeting that need for scalability and security. These are excit-

Girish J Bhatia

Head of Practice - Digital Okta, Yas Holding

ing times for customers to throttle their digital transformation journeys.”

Digital transformation initiatives and followed by remote workforce deployments have been the major reasons for an initial increase in cloud deployment in 2020 and 2021. If 2021 is any indicator, cloud computing demand will continue to rise in 2022.

The pandemic for sure has played the role of an accelerator for cloud deployments.

As mentioned earlier, many CIOs are or will be involved deeply in remote work monitoring. This new remote workforce presents a unique set of problems for the IT team. The CIO is expected to be an active participant in leading and driving change, defining and setting up competitive advantage for their organization in terms of technologies used, and proving the correlation between the technology agenda and the employee value proposition. With the right technologies in place, employee productivity can only improve and vice-versa.

Creating a work culture conducive to the development of remote work infrastructure is difficult, but the pandemic has functioned as a spur to shift everyone into this culture. This opportunity was immediately seized by a majority of the organizations across the world with the Middle East very much in the forefront.

“Our organization is people centric organization and we are keen to provide safe work environment to our employees hence remote work is of utmost importance. The Technologies we have deployed are Microsoft Teams and Microsoft WVD Solution to publish remote apps safely through the internet without VPN,” JANUARY 2022 / CXO DX

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» CIO OUTLOOK 2022

Gigi Mathew Thomas

Group Head – IT & Digital Transformation, Ittihad International Investment

said Girish J Bhatia, Head of Practice - Digital Okta, Yas Holding.

Ensuring secure remote working environments is a key priority for organizations on the road ahead.. Cybersecurity policies and procedures will continue to be critical for organizations of all sizes in every vertical industry. While the cybersecurity skills gap will continue to be an issue for the industry, zero-trust will play an increasingly greater role as ransomware and third-party threats grow, and companies will need to be proactive in order to maintain highly secure convergence with IT and operational technologies (OT).

Traditional cybersecurity techniques focus on security mechanisms to keep adversaries out. These methods implies that any user who has the necessary credentials to enter a network has done so lawfully, and that the firm can trust them to navigate the system freely. However, as more enterprises migrate their data and operations to the cloud, the idea of a secure perimeter as we know it is becoming outdated. As a result, companies will continue to prioritize the implementation of a zero-trust security paradigm that restricts network access to just those personnel who require it. This approach believes that danger can originate from anyplace and restricts the potential of illegal network mobility.

A dynamic company environment will benefit from a zero-trust, pragmatic approach to cybersecurity.

“We will continue to see cybersecurity investments increase, not just for security solutions and platforms, also for periodic audits,

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"We will continue to see cybersecurity investments increase, not just for security solutions and platforms, also for periodic audits, testing, SIEM and threat intelligence. The need of the hour is to focus on security and scalability aspects of cloud deployments. These, in particular, need attention by the IT streams to ensure their organizations are well protected from new forms of threats they may not have encountered before."

testing, SIEM and threat intelligence,” said Gigi Mathew Thomas, Group Head – IT & Digital Transformation, Ittihad International Investment. “The need of the hour is to focus on security and scalability aspects of cloud deployments. These, in particular, need attention by the IT streams to ensure their organizations are well protected from new forms of threats they may not have encountered before,” he pointed out.

Companies will need to examine their vendor relationships as well as the access and monitoring mechanisms they use for internal resources. The digital supply chain will become more important, making it a more attractive target for attackers. Furthermore, social engineering will continue to be the dominant form of attack until firms can develop a real cybersecurity culture, properly train personnel, and enhance individual cyber-behavior and hygiene.

The past couple of years have been testing times for most Businesses and people in charge of running them. For CIOs, it's been a year of putting their IT infrastructure to the test and assessing the effectiveness of the company's digital transformation initiatives to date. The most difficult challenge for CIOs in 2022 will be to alter corporate processes to meet requirements from post-pandemic disruptions, and the most difficult task for CIOs will be to create the digital infrastructure to support them. CIOs will continue to play a lead role in the foreseeable future or organizations navigate the disruptions we face today at work because of the pandemic and embrace a new era of work.

» INTERVIEW

AMBITIOUS TARGETS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION By aiding in providing strategic assessments, training and education to all Abu Dhabi government sector employees, Jacob Kaleekal Mathew, IT Consultant, Government of Abu Dhabi talks to CXO DX on the evolution of IT landscape in the education sector.

How has the IT landscape changed in the last 2 years, especially in the education sector?

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation by a number of years across all sectors and education was no exception.

Since the UAE has excellent public infrastructure and 5G coverage across the entire country, it helped set up remote education with ease. The access to video conference technology platforms like Teams, Zoom etc. played a major role as well.

In the education sector, the need to have online registration, training and assessment has been challenging, however the industry was quick to adapt, and we were able to continue to offer our services with no disruption although we were working remotely from home.

Needless to say, the cloud has become very critical – it has moved from a nice to have to a core component for most companies in the educational sector.

How far have you reached in the initial digital transformation journey and what is your agenda for this year?

We had made very ambitious target for last year and I am very happy that we were able to accomplish all of this including the public cloud adoption, implementation of network operations center (NOC), security operations center (SOC) while lowering costs. However, this is a long journey, and we will need to progress every year with more ambitious targets.

This year we have plans to utilize more data and analytics tools mostly run from cloud to provide better value and more custom service offerings based on the in-

terest and needs of the industry. We will also use our systems to leverage more real time data especially with the classes moving back to physical learning.

What have been the major challenges faced during recent past?

The uncertainty caused by the pandemic is a major challenge. At any time, we may be in close contact with someone who has covid or worse we might get infected, and this causes disruption in our planned activities or those of our suppliers and partners.

Another challenge was with respect to hiring and retaining skilled staff in key areas such as Cybersecurity, AI, data analytics etc.

What do you think a cloud strategy should focus on?

The first and most important step is to establish a Cloud center of excellence in your company that involves key business stakeholders, and this group can define a cloud migration roadmap and lead on the below activities: 1. Access current IT landscape and determine what services needs to be migrated to the cloud based on the assessment, legal and business requirements.

2. Adapt a cloud first principle – where all new technology is hosted on the cloud and not built on premises 3. Migrate existing workloads from on premises to cloud 4. Adapt a multi-cloud principle – to reduce risks of a single source 5. Exit strategy – on how to move out from one or all suppliers based on changing requirements or government / industry regulations. To include areas like data portability,

Jacob Kaleekal Mathew IT Consultant, Government of Abu Dhabi

backup, secure destruction etc.

How do you ensure adequate Cyber security for your staffs and students?

We have a number of initiatives and controls in place to ensure adequate security for our staff and also learners using our resources to improve their skills. Some of these include isolated staff and learner networks with zero trust technologies, 24x7 SOC and NOC, multi factor authentication etc.

According to you, what does the future of education sector look like?

I think the remote learning used widely during the pandemic will be here to stay with several courses being available both onsite and remotely. I think this be especially useful for remote students whether from villages or other countries.

This anytime, anywhere learning adoption can be specially useful for third world countries and those who want to do further studies after their day jobs. Teachers will become more like facilitators of learning and students having more control of their learning journey.

JANUARY 2022 / CXO DX

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» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

THE PIVOTS OF TRANSFORM A continued pursuit of digital enablement will see organizations looking to ramp up secured hybrid working environments

T

echnology’s impact on the various aspects of our personal and work lives continues to rise with the ongoing advances and investments into Technology, and the pandemic playing a key hand in helping accelerate this digital embrace by mankind.

With the need to invest more into enabling and enhancing Remote work infrastructure, organizations will look to increase their cloud investments, across most applications and services with customer engagement, AI, cybersecurity among key areas of focus.

According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending will exceed $4 trillion in 2022.

This is an increase of 5.5% from 2021.

Digital transformation goals continue to be a key focus for companies as they look to build robust infrastructure for their increasingly hybrid workforce. The past year has also seen a sharp rise in device shipments, driven by need of remote workers as well a massive need for

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students attending online classes to be digitally enabled. Enterprise software has also seen a sharp spike and is predicted to expand at the fastest rate in 2022, reaching 11.5 percent, as infrastructure software investment continues to outperform application software spending.

As enterprises throughout the world continue to realize the benefits of implementing remote work arrangements, there is an urgent demand for advanced remote work infrastructure to enable distant workers to accomplish their duties quickly and safely Claude Schuck, Regional Director, Middle East at Veeam Software says, “I think we can all agree remote working is here to stay. A hybrid approach to satisfying both, employee and customers’ needs and wants will be further ratified this year. Most organizations had to ‘scramble’ at the beginning of the pandemic to accommodate this new way of transacting and doing business. Going forward, companies will be tasked with making those changes more

CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

‘permanent’ and more secure.”

Concurring with that view, Amanulla Khan, Managing Director of Linksys Middle East, Turkey & Africa, says “We’re already seeing remote infrastructure driving trends and it will continue to grow as flexible working becomes more common across the globe. People like to have the option to work securely from home and will need reliable connections for this.”

While we were talking about a new normal last year, that now is more entrenched with another year of some level of uncertainty because of the variants. Being physically at workplaces can have its own benefits such as forging a better sense of loyalty and bonding among the employees, and for some roles, remote work scenarios don’t apply at all. At the same time, while looking to meet the convenience of employees in many roles by enabling their remote working, organizations also have perhaps seen enhanced productivity from them as they spend lesser time commuting to workplaces.

» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

MATION The hybrid model therefore seems to be a wiser approach going ahead and the onus is on Technologies to deliver the goods.

According to Sakkeer Hussain, Director- Sales and Marketing, D-Link MEA, “Remote and hybrid work models are definitely here to stay. Amid the pandemic, organizations have seen its benefits, and many have announced plans to continue using this model even after the pandemic is long gone. As we enter the third year of the pandemic, with increasing number of COVID-19 variants, organizations across the globe continue to see the benefits of enforcing these remote work models. This results in an imminent need to provide advance remote work infrastructure to enable remote workers to do their jobs efficiently and securely. So yes, this will result in embracing new technologies and trends to support employee productivity in a remote work environment, which amounts to business growth. Seamless Wi-Fi connections, cybersecurity solutions, data backup solutions, increased use of collaborative tools and apps as well as cloud computing solutions are some of the key requirements for successful remote work.”

Cloud has been the gateway to digital trans-

Claude Schuck

Regional Director, Middle East at Veeam Software

formation and itis predicted that cloud revenue will overtake non-cloud revenue in important business IT industries during the next few years. Countries in the region are embracing cloud with as much enthusiasm as in some of the leading global markets.

CIOs across the MENA region are turning to the cloud to ensure the shortest time to value for their IT expenditures made over the previous two years. Cloud application services (SaaS), which include business intelligence apps, content services, customer experience and relationship management, and supply chain, will be a major focus of investments for MENA CIOs in 2022. This will amount to $2.3 billion, a 16% increase from 2021, and will account for 40% of overall expenditure in public cloud services.

The onus is on companies to deliver apps and updates without disrupting seamless user experience. creating apps directly in the cloud using micro service architectures enable organizations to achieve unparalleled business agility and quick innovation.

Gartner predicts that more than 85% of organizations will adopt a cloud-first strategy by 2025. Organizations will be unable to properly execute on their digital objectives without the utilization of cloud-native architectures and technologies.

“Cloud native solutions are developed specifically to be used in the cloud environment and will therefore be more agile, scalable and can feature multi-tenant instances.

Implementing cloud native apps will be faster and more efficient than cloud-enabled ones as there are no servers or hardware to configure. Also, with cloud-native apps, changes can be done easily and in real-time to specific micro services without disruptions to the app, whereas migrated apps to the cloud will need to be shut down for any updates. Cloud-native apps and architecture offer more benefits compared to their cloud-enabled counterparts, and helps organizations to utilize the complete benefits of cloud computing,” says Sakkeer Hussain, Director- Sales and Marketing, D-Link MEA. 5G connectivity and reimagined networks Majority of enterprises in the Middle East want to invest in 5G-enabled network systems as they aim to digitally modernize their operations as per a survey.

“5G technology brings greater speeds to move more data and allows for more responsive services. The technology will fast-track compute and processing power at the network edge – this will enable better

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» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK business, facilitating critical operations, giving situational awareness, and offering strategic insights. The expansion of remote access, the proliferation of IoT data, and the installation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications are putting additional strains on the network edge.

John Morrison , Extreme Networks’ SVP for EMEA, believes 2022 is a year of the network.

Amanulla Khan Director, Linksys META

connected experiences. Organizations are focusing on delivering seamless, fast and connected experiences, both for customers and employees. 5G will play a critical role here. It is even more significant in today’s remote work and work-from-home environments.,” says Sakkeer.

The convergence of 5G and technologies such as the cloud, edge computing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things is seen as key to achieving key objectives of digital transformation. 5G technology enables for faster data transmission and more responsive services. It can accelerate computation and processing capacity at the network edge, allowing for more connected experiences. 5G also enables tech like IoT, including connected buildings, cars and health technologies, to perform seamlessly and efficiently. It will also pave the path for the success of smart cities..

Amanullah says, “We expect 5G will drive connections as it becomes more accessible to the mass market through ISP infrastructures being setup across the region. With every new generation, innovation is able to move forward. A good example of this is our new 5G mobile hotspot solution will enhance connected experiences because it enables people to be more efficient as flexible working becomes more common.”

With evolution of technology and digital transformation, networks must also evolve. Networks are critical to digital

26

“In 2022, organisations will begin to discover the value of viewing their networks holistically and will come to appreciate how their networks are in fact multi-layered. “Going forward, networks will only continue to become more intricate and complex, with many more parts now comprising the whole. Thus, companies must reflect on their infrastructure in the same way - as a whole. They can do this by finding ways to combine the power of cloud management with next-generation switches and access points, utilising the likes of AI and ML and deciding whether public cloud, private cloud, and/or on-premises solutions best cater to them. This approach allows them to achieve both diverse business connectivity and their commercial needs,” said Morrison.

The primacy of data

Though various technologies will drive the businesses in most of the verticals, Data will play a pivotal role. Organizations must make the most of their huge data repositories in order to provide tailored and relevant services and solutions to their consumers while also improving business efficiencies. This entails leveraging analytics and applying the insights gained to take prompt action to improve various elements of their business.

Claude Schuck, Regional Director, Middle East at Veeam Software, says that a good data strategy has always been essential, and a Modern Data Protection plan is even more critical now, for every organization, regardless of size or structure. Companies that have adapted or survived must continue to evaluate their data strategy, since things change rapidly and businesses must stay adaptable to these changes.

“Today’s modern enterprise faces the dual challenges of not only managing and mining the data they produce and use, but also of ensuring that the digital experience is

CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

Harish Chib

vice president, Middle East & Africa, Sophos always-on for both internal and external customers. To solve these challenges, business leaders need a deep understanding of how enterprise data is changing and how new technologies and approaches can unleash its full value. At every step of the way data security, availability and recoverability is key. However, in today’s new reality, where enterprise data is scattered across many different clouds and systems, it’s not enough for data to be backed up, secure, and available. Data must also move to a new state of intelligence, automatically able to anticipate need and meet demand, securely, across multi-cloud infrastructures to meet the expectations of the mobile, always-on world,” he added.

Sakkeer corroborates the view that Data will be vital asset for organizations “Data-driven businesses will continue to thrive. Having the right data strategies will be the criteria for success in the digital era. Organizations need to maximize the large repositories of data they have at hand to offer customized and relevant services and solutions to their customers as well as to enhance business efficiencies.

This means employing analytics and using those insights derived to take immediate action for improving different aspects of their operations. Companies will need to invest in tools and personnel to successfully get the most from their data strategies,” he adds.

Among further defining trends, contain-

» INDUSTRY OUTLOOK

John Morrison

Senior Vice President, Extreme Networks EMEA erization is a definitive one. As Claude adds, the next wave of change regarding how business applications get used and consumed from various datacentres will certainly include containerization, such as Kubernetes.

“Business is quickly moving to adapt to the new way of presenting applications to their workforce and customers. Containers bring so many advantages in terms of introducing agility to the business like true ‘’pay per use’, enabling services to ‘scale’ when needed. They also bring with it a new complexity as it is mostly new technologies which businesses are adapting to. The way companies need to protect and recover from these workloads is also going to drive the adoption and move towards this ‘new’ more efficient consumption of ‘data services’’.

Cybersecurity concerns

In the middle of increasing digital transformation, which has reconfigured government and corporate operations with remote work and more over the last two years, cybersecurity worries are once again leading the list of CIO concerns for 2022. There has never been a more critical set of cyber insights to study in order to enable IT professionals to combat the cyber conflicts that lie ahead in the new year.

Gartner's most recent prediction for information security and risk management spending goes into further depth about

Steve Cottrell

Sakkeer Hussain

EMEA CTO, Vectra AI

Director- Sales and Marketing, D-Link MEA

where the money is going: Security services will get almost $77 billion in 2022, making it by far the largest spending category; infrastructure protection will receive $30 billion, network security equipment will receive $19 billion, and identity and access management will receive $17 billion.

Steve Cottrell, EMEA CTO, Vectra AI, says, “Ransomware for many organizations will be the most feared threat, and with the emergence of ‘Ransomware-as-a-Service’ (RaaS) operators, the bar to entry in this market has never been lower. It is going to be increasingly important for organizations to have an in depth security architecture, covering network and endpoints, that can work at speed to detect and thwart these attacks.

Prevention, rather than a time-consuming recovery operations from backup, or worse, having to pay the ransom, has to be the focus. Business continuity plans must be updated to properly consider the increased risk presented by ransomware to the respective organizations, and investments made as appropriate to prevent and minimize downtime in the case of an attack.”

Hybrid and remote work environments have created new possibilities for cyber attackers while also highlighting security flaws in enterprises.

Harish Chib, vice president, Middle East & Africa, Sophos believes digital trans-

formation has brought increased speed and agility to business, but in this process, security often remains on the backburner.

When organizations are moving their infrastructure, applications, data and users into the cloud/digital environment, security also needs to go along with the new technology landscape.

“Organizations thus need to evaluate the current state of security critically in their respective organizations, and work to immediately resolve the largest problems, and then incrementally improve in all areas of concern. They need to set up a cybersecurity posture including solutions, services, processes, and people aligned to their area of business and the way they interact internally and with the external world. Collectively all departments should work to improve their digital immune system by raising the bar for cybercriminals,” he said.

The past two years have compelled radical shifts in the way we work. Those organizations which have invested and are upgrading towards enabling a secure data driven organization as a workplace, providing a seamless hybrid working experience will be frontrunners in their respective domains.

The onus is on Technology leaders at organizations and the Management stakeholders to adopt a digitally progressive agenda to take their Businesses forward.

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BUILDING AN INVISIBLE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE

The future of databases is maximally available invisible infrastructure writes Paulo Pereira, Senior Director, Systems Engineering – METI at Nutanix

A

data-driven culture is needed if a business wants to lead through digital innovation. But traditional data management infrastructures are rigid and unable to combine diverse data types. Then there is the challenge of storing, managing and securing growing volumes of data and extracting insights out of it. Throw in cloud data and the fact that data is moving closer to the application and the user, and it becomes a hotbed of poorly managed databases sullying the role of analytics.

Those organisations that are unable to access accurate, timely, relevant, and reliable information from their data run a legacy datacentre infrastructure based on proprietary SAN arrays and storage fabric networks. These "hardware-defined" datacentres are, in essence, the first problem. What is needed is a data services platform that supports open architecture and is maximally available, assuring business of continuous access and insights from the data, where the infrastructure itself is effectively invisible to users.

Open Architecture

To turn data into a competitive advantage, one needs to under-

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stand that data comes from different business areas and needs to be organised in three primary ways, namely relational databases, unstructured data, and high-velocity data. Because data is diverse, its collection often results in the formation of silos or individual repositories and as there is no cohesion between these sources because storage formats and data types differ.

Once data is organised, silos can be eliminated by adhering to open standards, adopting open paradigms, offering choice, and avoiding lock-in to users, customers, and operators alike. This helps the business firstly bring in all data types and secondly consume the data – or in this case, use the data to glean insights for improved business decision-making. This model also supports the API-centric IT economy as it ensures that data can be collected, no matter the source, because there is software interoperability via generic endpoints.

Maximally Available Infrastructure

Making infrastructure maximally calls for systems that can self-heal, dynamically adjust the write path to suit the workload,

» COLUMN and dynamically apply data transforms based on heuristics. When designing these environments, discipline is required because application placement and layout are important and need to factor in data sovereignty, workload affinity, workload availability, and workload redundancy upfront.

Maximally available data is simple to manage through a central management plane that offers end-to-end capabilities around alerting, events, and monitoring. It brings data closer to analytics – which is where it should be.

But what do we mean? Let's look at a traditional database environment where an application or database update may lead to issues across systems. Here DBAs take a snapshot before each update if they need to roll back to an ideal state. With a maximally available data architecture, this can be avoided entirely, and any upgrades to underlying infrastructure supporting your data are continuous without interruption to services. Now, adding capacity for storage or performance, or performing a software update, is seamless and non-disruptive to your data services.

Making Data Infrastructure Invisible

A competitive data infrastructure is effectively invisible, trusted, and autonomous. It is trusted because it already takes into consideration data and application security, data protection, and data governance and compliance. It is autonomous because it brings together cloud-like simplicity and ease of use to database provisioning, management, and patching.

Traditional database management is done through an error-prone siloed approach to provisioning or cloning, which is time-consuming and makes troubleshooting exceptionally difficult. With an invisible data infrastructure, you know that the environment is integrated with your automation tools and gives DBAs the ability to create a self-service catalogue and perform delegation that controls who gets access, what they get access to (provision, clone, patch etc.), how much (storage, RAM, vCPU), and for how long (spin-down of resources).

Companies do not have the time or the resources to perform these functions manually in this digitally connected world. There are too many moving parts (applications). Today's DBAs must be able to copy/paste a particular database instance and create clones from any point in time.

Building It

To build an invisible data infrastructure, your organisation must follow a software-defined approach to data services. By adding the tools needed to architect an invisible plane that can orchestrate the functions of your databases, your business can unify how data is stored and consumed with a data services platform that is open, operative, and opaque and is supported both on-premises or in the public cloud.

Using integrated database management software, you can automate and simplify management, enjoy one-click simplicity and invisible operations to database provisioning, lifecycle and copy data management. In essence, this platform paves the way to the advantages inherent in Databases as a Service (DBaaS).

Paulo Pereira

Senior Director, Systems Engineering – METI at Nutanix

"By adding the tools needed to architect an invisible plane that can orchestrate the functions of your databases, your business can unify how data is stored and consumed with a data services platform that is open, operative, and opaque and is supported both on-premises or in the public cloud."

The benefit to your business is an end-to-end environment for structured and unstructured data with raw storage in a cloud-like experience with full API-first automation and self-service. When in place, you can enjoy the agility to embrace DevOps while maintaining traditional enterprise apps and speed up provisioning new file servers, object repositories, and databases with simplified recovery, empowering end-users, including DBAs and reducing their dependence on infrastructure and ops teams.

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EFFECTIVE CYBERSECURITY AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Effective cyber defense is a mixture of the right people, processes, and technologies. When it comes to cybersecurity and particularly cyber defense, it is simply not enough for an organization to buy various technologies and install them on their systems, insists Abed Samhuri, Cyber Institute Lead at Axon Technologies.

It is a fact that organizations that have adopted digital transformation in advance were able to cope with the remote working challenges during the pandemic. And this indeed has pushed many organizations to start considering digital transformation seriously.

However, if done with no security in mind, digital transformation can widen the attack surface against the organization and can open the door to more security incidents.

One of the greatest challenges to securely implementing digital transformation is not having enough resources (budget and manpower). For this reason, our first recommendation is to outsource this aspect to a third-party cybersecurity firm. The following are three key tips to mitigate any security risks that arise from digital transformation: • Cloud Security: given that a lot of technologies for digital transformation are cloud-based, it is crucial that you pay attention to this point. Cloud security starts with choosing the right cloud service provider – one that already has a strong security policy.

• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): it is not enough that you have strong passwords on various online accounts. You need to enable/ enforce MFA to prevent account compromise, session hijacking, and other attacks.

• Enable Auditing and Logging: whenever you utilize a cloudbased service, ensure to enable logging of various actions (permissible or otherwise). In times of crisis, those logs are the first thing that will give you clues of what is happening, why it is happening, and how to fix it.

Towards zero trust security

Zero-Trust Security is a principle in security architecture where “trust” is eliminated between interacting entities – such as a person accessing a system, an application accessing a network share, etc. In this approach, enforcement of authentication and authorization always takes place between entities regardless of their network or location. No network is regarded as trusted where entities in it can interact with no authentication. Thus, it is about eliminating trust.

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» COLUMN The advantage of the zero-trust approach is self-evident. It reduces any chance of an attacker exploiting a trust relationship and gaining unauthorized access due to that trust. Attacks like spoofing, hijacking, privilege escalation, etc., get reduced tremendously in an infrastructure designed with zero-trust principle.

However, this does not come without a cost. Zero trust security requires more effort in designing a network infrastructure. In addition, there is management overhead; zero-trust security requires continuous monitoring and auditing of users and devices.

What effective cyber defense looks like

Effective cyber defense is invariably a mixture of the right people, processes, and technologies. When it comes to cybersecurity and particularly cyber defense, it is not enough for an organization to buy various technologies and install them on their systems. Experience has shown repeatedly that technology cannot meet the expectation unless operated by a team of skilled security specialists.

The human intelligence is an essential component of a successful cyber defense program. The team can be composed of security analysts, engineers, and incident responders. Technology can a good preventive measure; but whatever slips through the technology would need the human to analyze, examine, and hunt for otherwise hidden intrusions.

Finally, there needs to be a set of processes that govern how the team interacts with the technology so that detection and response are efficient. Processes outline procedures and step-by-step actions to be undertaken by the team. They help eliminate ad hoc reactions in times of crisis and provide visibility and efficiency to the overall cyber defense strategy.

Enhancing cybersecurity with gamification

Gamification adds emotional engagement to training by providing a competitive context and excitement. Game playing is regarded as a sophisticated way of training and educating security specialists. According to scientific studies, people learn best when they engage their emotions and practical experience in a competitive environment.

The following are two examples where we leverage gamification in cyber training: • Training interns: within our internship program, the intern is assigned an account on a gamified cyber security platform. The intern has to complete around 200 challenges, where each challenge has a certain score. As the intern completes one challenge after the other, their score increases, and they can view their ranking on a leaderboard. The challenges are categorized into different topics such as web application attacks, reverse engineering, security event analysis, malware analysis, cryptography, etc.

• Cyber War Game: it is an event that is set up to simulate and exercise cyber offense and defense techniques and tactics in a gamified and challenging way. Participants are grouped into 2 Team categories: Red-Team (Offence) and Blue-Team (Defense).

The Red-Team attempts to break into a predesigned virtual infrastructure while the Blue-Team will detect, track, and respond to the attacks.

Abed Samhuri

Cyber Institute Lead, Axon Technologies

To sum it up, gamification is an effective approach to sharpen the skills of the security teams, enhance the communication between the team members, and increase the organization’s resilience to cyber-attacks.

Empowering cybersecurity professionals

The industry needs cybersecurity institutes that offer high-quality intensive courses and workshops in all fields of cybersecurity. IT professionals need to become well-established security specialists in their organizations.

The courses and training programs should cover a wide range of cybersecurity development paths, such as Cyber Defense, Cyber Offense, Incident Response and Forensics, and Management. For each path, we need progressive courses from a beginner level to an expert level. Participants can build a training path of their choosing.

Ideally, the courses need to be hands-on, with comprehensive lab sessions and exercises. We should not only cover the essential theories and concepts, but also make sure that the participants can apply the skills practically in real-world scenarios. By enrolling in such training courses and workshops, cybersecurity professionals can boost their knowledge and skills, and thus, advance in their career paths.

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THE STATE OF THE

SOC

Skills shortages, automation and gaining context remain a challenge for SOCs write Firas Ghanem, Regional Director - Middle East & Pakistan at ThreatQuotient.

T

he security operations centre (SOC) has been on the front line facing the pandemic-induced escalation of cybersecurity threats in the past eighteen months. A 2020 study by Forrester found that the average security operations team receives more than 11,000 alerts per day and that figure is likely to have grown in the intervening period. While they were deeply engaged responding to the crisis, SOC teams were simultaneously facing the disruption common to all formerly office-based workers. They were switching to remote working and learning how to continue collaborating successfully with colleagues at a distance.

As SOCs take stock of the changes and challenges of the past year, it is an opportune moment to explore some of the factors that characterise the modern SOC and the common issues experienced in this crucial sector. The SANS 2021 Survey: Security Operations Center (SOC) does just that in its fifth annual survey. By collecting and analysing the views of security analysts and team managers across a broad spectrum of industry sectors, the study draws insight across a range of issues. It is a valuable benchmark for SOCs who wish to compare their approach and actions with others in the industry.

Several findings stood out for me as priorities as we aim to equip SOCs for the future.

The cybersecurity skills shortage continues to bite It’s not new, but it is a continuing issue: the number one barrier

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preventing full utilisation of a SOC’s capabilities is a lack of skilled staff. With a typical team numbering between two and ten full time equivalent employees, it seems that within this mix organisations would still like more human resources devoted to SOC activities, and also the acquisition of additional skills by existing staff.

Supporting in-house skills development should be a key priority for SOC leaders as it doesn’t just improve SOC performance, it also encourages staff to remain with the organisation for the long term. The most common tenure for a SOC analyst is between one and three years and the report found that training opportunities and career development are the key factors encouraging employees to remain with an organisation.

There are further benefits to growing your own expertise. The report found that the top “missing skill” in teams was threat hunting experience, something that can be costly to bring in from outside. It also noted that threat hunting and intelligence monitoring are the activities most commonly outsourced by the SOC. Yet these are two areas where intimate knowledge of internal systems and infrastructure considerably improves effectiveness. If analysts are given the opportunity to acquire these skills and supported with tools that lift the burden of intelligence assimilation, this will amount to a double benefit for the business: they retain key staff and build stronger internal capability in the areas that would most benefit.

» COLUMN Work from home becomes the norm Linked to the challenge of staff retention are changes to the work environment. Unsurprisingly, 87% of those surveyed said that working from home was permitted in their organisation. It may have raised some issues around how to collaborate effectively, but the general success of remote working has liberated SOC analysts. Where previously they may have looked for employment within an easy commute, now they can search further afield. This means organisations will have to work harder to attract and retain employees and gives analysts greater leverage over pay and working conditions.

This should lead to greater focus on analyst workload, which is long overdue. Currently, organisations lack an appropriate method of calculating analyst workload with the majority of survey respondents saying their SOC doesn’t calculate it, and the next most common answer being that they use a basic time-per-ticket method. With 83% of SOCs operating 24/7 and the majority of these delivering this capability through in-house resources, managing workload is important to maintain team wellbeing.

As the workforce embarks on the “great resignation”, all the above factors should sound warning bells alerting employers that they need to develop and protect their employees if they want to retain them.

Automation and data context drive efficiency and security improvements Another efficient way to mitigate the impact of escalating workloads on the SOC is through automation and orchestration, and here teams are also struggling. Automation and orchestration was only just behind skills shortages as the most significant challenge facing SOCs. When you are short of staff and skills it is critical that mundane, repetitive and low value tasks are automated as far as possible, freeing analysts to focus on higher value activities that reduce time to detection and response and are more individually fulfilling. It also supports teams to meet performance objectives and handle the escalating volume of alerts.

There are some quick wins that can be implemented here. The study cites one respondent that has successfully deployed a portal integrating dozens of data sources which enabled consolidation of information from across the business. This resulted in a reduction in Level 0 to Level 2 response times by 25%.

A number of respondents cited the lack of context related to the data they are seeing as a major barrier to operating an efficient SOC. The SOC of the future will be increasingly data-driven, ingesting information from multiple sources within and outside the enterprise, but data without context or relevance simply overwhelms analysts.

Firas Ghanem

Regional Director, ME & Pakistan, ThreatQuotient

This is a challenge ThreatQuotient has addressed in the latest iteration of our ThreatQ platform. It incorporates a DataLinq Engine for connecting disparate systems and sources to enable XDR, along with Smart Collections for driving automation, plus an enhanced ThreatQ Data Exchange for bi-directional sharing of data, context and threat intelligence. It allows teams to be more thorough in their investigations, collaboration, response and reporting – which is particularly critical in a remote working environment – and results in more efficient, effective operations.

The benefits are measurable in terms of time savings and FTEs gained, improved risk management and greater confidence when detecting and responding to an event.

Supporting the SOC of the future As SOCs look to the next phase, focusing on people, data and the technology that enables the two to work effectively together is key. By balancing automation to allow machine-based support where possible, together with the right tooling for human analysts, SOCs can drive improvements while also keeping analysts engaging and giving them more time to upskill into key areas such as threat hunting.

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DATACENTERS AND THE SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE

The increased reliance on data centres and by extension the telecoms infrastructure which connects us to them is here to stay writes Ashraf Yehia, Managing director, Eaton Middle East

No return to normal For data and the data centre industry, the pandemic disruption was also a major catalyst for accelerated digitalisation. Thankfully, most of the technology needed during the crisis was already in existence, supported by data centre and telecoms infrastructure.

way. But what is most significant is that this change is likely to be irreversible. When you remove a catalyst, the reactions it caused do not reverse themselves. The increased reliance on data centres (and by extension the telecoms infrastructure which connects us to them) is here to stay.

However, there are serious associated issues with this. A decades-long efficiency drive, which held data centres to steady demand levels while processing much more, has run out of headroom. Our economy and society have gone full throttle on data, exactly at the time when we need to put the brakes on energy consumption if we’re to combat climate change. There are no megabits without megawatts, and as we demand and produce more and more data, energy consumption levels will rise.

In addition to that, according to a PWC survey, 67% of Middle East consumers think they have become more digital in comparison to the global 51%, with the highest percentage being in Egypt at 72%. This can be related to the fact that governments are moving towards smart cities.

How, then, can the industry achieve seemingly contrasting objectives and ramp up while ramping down?

The before-mentioned crisis drove the rapid adoption of these technologies and sped developments which were already under-

Squaring this circle will be the dominant feature of the energy and data centre industry for the next five years. As if this conun-

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The data centre in a world of power transformation.

» COLUMN drum was not enough, now throw in the fact that electrification is sweeping other industrial sectors, transportation, and domestic and commercial heating/cooling. As the demand for electrical energy is set to soar, data centre operators will face tough challenges in accessing scarce, new energy production.

The solution is to ramp up renewable energy production, not only to meet new demand, but to also displace current fossil-based production. So, it is not just the data centre industry facing challenges. Energy network operators themselves will be stretched as they are asked to perform the magic trick of increasing supply while simultaneously decommissioning fossil fuel plants.

This may apply further pressure on commercial end-users. And governments setting the rules and direction for energy markets will be asked to make complex and highly consequential decisions about how energy is produced, managed and who is prioritised for power consumption. Data centres are crucial for ensuring data security. Moreover, emerging digital hubs including Bahrain and Dubai were awarded for data centre facilities.

Limited capacity means acute oversight Players in the data centre sector – from big tech to service providers and real estate owners – have grown used to getting power whenever they need it. But as the plates spin across many sources of demand, data’s role will be scrutinised in detail. The sector can make the case that its activities offset existing demand elsewhere but cannot excuse itself from the consequences of creating greater demand in the main.

As such the challenge for data centres will no longer be one of efficiency, but one of sustainability. New metrics, new approaches to data centre design and operations will fall under greater scrutiny, as will the energy consumed by the overall telecom infrastructure which has an energy requirement many times that of the data centre industry.

We rely on data, data relies on power, and a significant gap between our wants and needs will soon emerge. On one side this appears as a crisis. However, on the other side, this will be the kind of gap that will attract serious investment and innovation. For the grid, this gap will enable new and existing private ventures to build out the renewable power we desperately need.

The market opportunity for alignment of data and power A seller’s market for power supply opens the door to new approaches and new models. For data centres, it will solidify the economic case for a new relationship with power, not just as consumers but as sites which support the grid with energy services, storage and even power generation.

Data and power will realign and soon in some cases that alignment will become a physical proximity, too. With economics and policy beginning to align in this manner, there is a case for data

Ashraf Yehia

Managing director, Eaton, Middle East

"Our economy and society have gone full throttle on data, exactly at the time when we need to put the brakes on energy consumption if we’re to combat climate change." centres to offer not just frequency response, but also move into direct flexible supply to the grid. Sector coupling, then, could become one of 2022’s major headlines for the data centre sector.

Here in late 2021, we’re seeing the first glimmers of what this might look like; by the end of 2022 and beyond the dots between data and power will truly have been redrawn and hopefully look joined up, and we will continue to see the growth of ventures structured to make data centres part of the solution to the renewable transition.

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» TECHSHOW

PURE STORAGE FLASHARRAY//XL Pure Storage, the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, today announced FlashArray//XL, the newest member of the FlashArray family, designed for mission-critical, platinum tier enterprise applications — from massive databases to containerized and cloud-native apps. FlashArray//XL delivers unmatched performance and scale with a nearly 80% improvement in IOPS. With the pace of business only increasing, application demand can shoot up in an instant and the need for new apps to be deployed requires IT to work in hours, not months. Previously, the largest enterprises had to scale their top tier applications with legacy technology that required high management complexity, high power and energy costs, and disruptive forklift upgrades.

Now, with the new FlashArray//XL and Pure Fusion — Pure’s self-service, autonomous Storage-as-Code platform — Pure continues to add enterprise-grade scale to its promise of subscription storage that easily evolves to keep IT infrastructure agile and upto-date.

Key Features: •

•

Strength to run the most demanding business services: Accelerate enterprise workloads with maximum performance even as they scale to operate at increased loads, with 100% more host connectivity and two times more volume support on a single array.

Cloud-like model for deploying new apps quickly and easily:

Designed to work in concert, Pure Fusion and FlashArray//XL give enterprises Storage-as-Code access to cloud scale, enabling platinum-level storage tiers and data policies with robust tools to optimize storage pools and workload placement.

•

Efficiency and density to consolidate applications for maximum TCO and green data center standards: Enable workload consolidation on fewer arrays to simplify operations, reduce rack space requirements, and significantly reduce power consumption and cooling costs.

•

Always-on data protection that’s savvy to ransomware threats: Ensure that data stored on FlashArray// XL is secure, available, and easily recoverable after disruptions, including malicious attacks.

•

Future-proof with Evergreen subscription: Get immediate access to ever-improving capabilities with a right-size guarantee and non-disruptive upgrades and capacity expansions as storage needs evolve.

NETAPP AFF A900 AND ONTAP ENTERPRISE EDITION NetApp unveiled the latest evolution of its all-flash storage system array portfolio with the NetApp AFF A900, powered by NetApp ONTAP Enterprise Edition. The new AFF A900 offers organizations the highest data storage performance to accelerate their business-critical enterprise database and application needs, the security and reliability to keep customer data highly available and secure, and the simplicity and flexibility that agile organizations require.

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CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

NetApp AFF A900, the more performant next generation of the highly resilient AFF A700 system, is offered exclusively with NetApp ONTAP Enterprise Edition data management software. ONTAP Enterprise Edition leverages the world’s leading data management software and is delivered pre-packaged with all the components enterprises need, including unified support for SAN, NAS, NVMe-oF, and S3, built-in data protection with optional cutting-edge anti-ransomware capabilities, and the high performance and resiliency required to support the most critical business workloads.

» TECHSHOW

POLY EDGE B SERIES PHONES Key Features: •

Fast action at the touch of a button: Poly Edge B10 and B20 allow users to quickly cycle through and access available features like speed dials and extra lines with a fast access pagination key. The Poly Edge B30 has four hard-line keys providing access to sixteen additional key assignments in the same fashion.

•

Cut out the background noise: The background noise is eliminated with the Acoustic Fence technology that is built into every Poly Edge B Series phone. Pick up the handset or use your corded headset, and the background noise around you—background conversations, typing, dogs barking, leaf blowers blowing—disappears at the other end of your call.

Poly introduced the Poly Edge B Series IP Phones, the company’s newest IP desk phone family with a stylish design and the professional-grade audio customers have come to expect from Poly. The Edge B Series phones are available in 2- and 4-line key models supporting 8- and 16- line key assignments. The overall design and functionality of the Poly B Series IP Phones hit the entry-level sweet spot for small businesses, emerging markets, and even some enterprise use cases.

•

At-a-glance status with key illumination: Wth Poly Edge B Series phones, the mute key illuminates when selected.

There is never a question of whether your phone is muted or not. You can easily see it at-a-glance.

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Headsets to complement the workstyle: The Poly Edge B Series ensures connectivity to the headset of your choice.

No matter your work style, you are covered.

•

Easy to provision and install: Poly Device Management Service provides a central, secure portal to stage, deploy, and manage the Poly Edge phones from anywhere. Using our exclusive Poly Voice Software Lite (PVOS Lite) software, internet telephony service provides can deploy phones without any technicians touching the phones.

Poly cloud management software makes these phones the smart choice. You’ll easily monitor, manage and maintain devices securely from the cloud with PDMS-SP and Poly Lens software. You can install it on a desk or on a wall.

Key Features: •

The AFF A900 delivers an enhanced user experience for managing organizations’ most important enterprise databases like Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and virtualized applications.

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Enterprises connectivity networking prise-grade

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With the ONTAP Enterprise Edition and the new Anti-Ransomware Suite, organizations have built-in data protection and cutting-edge anti-ransomware solutions for both pre-emption and post-attack recovery.

can take advantage of modern network without new hardware investments in infrastructure with first-to-market enterNVMe/TCP in addition to NVMe/FC.

JANUARY 2022 / CXO DX

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» TRENDS & STATS

GARTNER SAYS 20% OF LARGE ENTERPRISES WILL USE DIGITAL CURRENCIES BY 2024 Twenty percent of large organizations will use digital currencies for payments, stored value or collateral by 2024, according to Gartner, Inc. The prediction has important implications for CFOs as they assess use cases and potential risks for digital currencies, which will be used more in business transactions and grow in overall economic significance in the years ahead.

“Increasing mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrencies on traditional payment platforms and the rise of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will push many large enterprises to incorporate digital currencies into their applications in the coming years,” said Avivah Litan, distinguished vice president analyst in the Gartner IT practice. “Digital currencies will be primarily used by these organizations for payment, a store of value and the ability to leverage high-yield investments available in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.”

Gartner experts recommend that organizations first clarify specific use cases for digital currencies before evaluating appropriate IT stacks to incorporate them within the enterprise. Each primary use case comes with a host of technological, regulatory, legal, and strategic considerations for both CFOs and applications leaders to assess, including selecting appropriate service providers and the ability to monitor and react to ongoing regulatory guidance.

“We have noticed an uptick in interest in digital currency and blockchain applications among CFOs since the start of the year,” said Alexander Bant, chief of research in the Gartner Finance practice.

“While volatility of cryptocurrencies remains a concern, anticipation of clearer regulatory guidance, and the advent of CBDCs, now offers CFOs more avenues to pressure-test use cases for digital currencies.”

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Multiple Factors Driving Adoption

Gartner’s prediction for wider adoption of digital currencies by 2024 is partly driven by the already healthy environment of service providers and off-the-shelf solutions available to large enterprises that have identified a specific use case for digital currencies.

“Among the primary use cases for digital currencies that we have identified, there will be no need for most organizations to develop a customized blockchain application stack,” said Litan. “Many large banks, payment platforms, institutional digital asset custodians and wallet providers have already done the heavy lifting in this area, which should provide large enterprises with a minimum of friction in deploying their own digital currency applications.”

Bant also pointed to additional factors that could make digital currency applications more palatable to CFOs in the next 1224 months, including hedging against the highest inflation in more than 39 years, increased regulatory clarity, improvements in energy usage, and adoption by employees, consumers and suppliers.

“There has always been theoretical appeal in the use of blockchain and digital currencies for CFOs as a means to low-

CXO DX / JANUARY 2022

er costs, increase transaction processing speed, reach new global customers, move toward continuous accounting and auditing, and create an error-free and fraudfree environment,” said Bant. “Now, with Congressional oversight starting to develop and the potential for more central banks to join China in launching a CBDC, we can see a path where the use of digital currencies will be potentially more predictable and stable in the future.”

Bant also noted that macroeconomic pressures related to ongoing high inflation, and its impact on fiat currencies, could push more CFOs to explore some digital currencies as a potential store of value for a portion of their reserves.

“2022 is the year that we expect CFOs to rapidly up their knowledge on digital assets, currencies, and other blockchain applications. When the CEO and Board start asking for the opinion of the CFO, they must have a point of view on the risks and points of differentiation for their organization,” he said. “We are starting to see some Fortune 500 companies map out scenarios for how they will respond if a country or supplier moved to doing business with only digital currency and what steps they would take as a result.”

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