CXO DX June 2021 by LeapMediaSolutions

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» EDITORIAL

COMMITMENT AND CONFIDENCE While the pandemic has been a dampener to the speed at what the economies had been moving (perhaps an understatement), yet it has also been a catalyst to swifter digital transformation across organizations. During the challenging phase of lockdowns and thereafter, Technology vendors did manage to make big strides as they rolled out solutions that have helped their customers adopt to the multi cloud era and in turn enhance their range of services. On the investment front, there have been many significant investments from the Tech vendors but I will just cite a few to highlight the point that the region is on the move and Technology is playing its part in that gathering momentum. One of the recent announcements has been of an AWS region being opened by early 2022 in UAE, a significant one that will help drive cloud adoption rates further across market segments. The AWS Region in the UAE will consist of three Availability Zones, each of which has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. Zoho, a vendor that has made significant inroads in this region recently announced its plans to adopt a hub-and-spoke office model in the region, with Dubai acting as the hub for offices in the GCC countries. The vendor is expected to expand its team of customer facing executives with local hires as well as have local language support in its products. ServiceNow, a leading digital workflow company is setting up a new office in Dubai Internet City (DIC), Dubai. In addition to employee workspaces and private meeting and executive rooms, the design will feature two phone booths, a cafeteria and a bespoke mother’s room for expectant or expecting women. And finally, Ingram Micro, one of the leading VADS globally and in the region opened new warehouse facilities in Dubai. The new warehouse’s advanced facilities include a 7,500+ sq. m. plot and 4,850+ sq. m. carpet area, 11 meters height storage with over 7,500+ Pallet location. The expansion reflects Ingram’s confidence and commitment to the region. The details above in the separate developments outline that serious Technology Businesses are investing and committing to longer terms growth in the region. That underlines why the outlook for the region continues to be upbeat.

R. Narayan

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Pooja Panjwani Assistant Project Manager

Co-Founder & MD

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SAUMYADEEP HALDER

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Co-Founder & Editor in Chief

MALLIKA REGO Co-Founder & Director Client Solutions

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RAMAN NARAYAN

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Editor in Chief, CXO DX

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

» CONTENTS INTERVIEW

18 » MANUFACTURING IN THE DIGITAL ERA

Khalid Rashid Moh'd Jalal, Senior group ICT Manager, GARMCO, elaborates on Digital transformation trends in the manufacturing industry.

28 » OT LEADERS CONTINUE TO FACE SECURITY CHALLENGES Rick Peters, Operational Technology Global Enablement Director at Fortinet shares his thoughts on how security readiness continues to challenge OT leaders

INSIGHT

14 COVER FEATURE

14 » NEW APPROACHES TO CYBERSECURITY With more surface area that is vulnerable to cyber-attacks across diverse environments, leading vendors adopt new approaches to delivering solutions that enable resilience

NEWS INSIGHT

12 » AWS TO OPEN DATA CENTERS IN UAE 13 » THREATS UNDETECTED FOR MORE THAN 250 HOURS IN TARGET NETWORKS

30 » INTEGRATING WFH 23 » HOW HAS HOSPITALITY INTO THE HYBRID WORKADAPTED TO COVID-19? PLACE Ali Askar - Senior Business Development Manager looks at how hospitality is adapting to the new normal

24 » KEY PIVOTS OF TRANSFORMATION Angelique Montalto, SAP Concur Regional Director discusses key Tech moments that helped ME Businesses face COVID-19

26 » TOP 10 SECURITY MISPERCEPTIONS PPeter Mackenzie, Manager of Sophos’ Rapid Response team discusses most commonly held security misperceptions

FEATURE

20 » A UNIFIED APPROACH FOR DATA INTENSIVE APPLICATIONS Joerg Jung, EVP EMEA at Infor, and Amel Gardner, VP and GM, MEA discuss Infor’s focus on the region and the cloud

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Guido Kragten, Category Lead for Cloud Platforms at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard company discusses how to look at integrating the longer-term Home Office into your Hybrid Workplace

32 » FROM ON-CAMPUS TO ON-DEMAND Amr Alashaal, Regional Vice President - Middle East at A10 Networks writes about secure networking for the new higher education

34 » RETURNING TO THE WORKPLACE Sanjit Bardhan, Vice President Head of Emerging Markets, Physical Access Control Solutions writes how Access Control plays a vital role in a safe and secure return to work strategy

REGULARS

06 » NEWS 36 » TECHSHOW 38 » TRENDS & STATS

» NEWS

ZOHO LAUNCHES QNTRL TO ADDRESS MID-MARKET WORKFLOW ORCHESTRATION MARKET New Corporate Division enables Business Managers to maximize visibility and control and reduce manual work through automation modern, complex workflows that require tight alignment between multiple stakeholders.

Rodrigo Vaca

Qntrl's Chief Marketing Orchestrator Zoho Corporation, the parent company of leading technology brands such as ManageEngine, WebNMS, and Zoho. com announced the launch of a new business division, Qntrl (pronounced "control"). As a separate brand, Qntrl delivers workflow solutions aimed at solving the widening gap in process management for

With Qntrl, department and process managers—also called orchestrators—gain more visibility, control, and automation over their workflows, making it easier for them to collaborate across stakeholders and departments. Qntrl empowers orchestrators with tighter alignment for non-linear modern workflows, so tandem efforts can be managed with seamless clarity. "Managers need increased visibility into their department's operations to ensure things are running the way they designed them to. Qntrl allows Orchestrators to customize workflows at scale in a more intuitive way, without sacrificing the ability to manage complex scenarios,"

said Rodrigo Vaca, Qntrl's Chief Marketing Orchestrator. "Qntrl was built to make this process simpler and smoother, addressing the specific challenges and needs of both business and IT, and helping to achieve their objectives with confidence and certainty. Orchestrators are empowered for lock-step collaboration among stakeholders, minimizing the typical frustrations and redundancies of process management so that teams can focus on delivering high-quality work." As a business division of Zoho Corporation, Qntrl is able to integrate with products from sister divisions such as Zoho. com and ManageEngine. Qntrl is launching as a separate division focused exclusively on delivering a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use workflow orchestration software that also integrates with technology from other vendors.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES UNLOCKS VALUE OF DATA AT THE EDGE The Streaming Data Platform brings real-time analytics to the edge of the network Dell Technologies is unveiling solutions and partnerships designed to extract more value from data at the edge. The new offerings are part of the company’s edge strategy to deliver fully integrated technologies that allow workloads to run and be managed across multiple clouds and applications. “Data is the currency of the digital world, and it’s time for customers to take it to the bank,” said Jeff Boudreau, president and general manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. “The edge is quickly rivalling data centers and public clouds as the location where organizations are gaining valuable insights. By putting compute, storage, and analytics where data is created, we can deliver those data insights in real time and create new opportunities for businesses.” New solutions and partnerships include: • Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform: An upgraded Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform (SDP) offers powerful, real-time analytics at the edge. With a smaller footprint, SDP is ideal for capturing, storing and analyzing streaming data in real-time at the edge. An amusement park customer is using SDP to send alerts to staff when a ride needs maintenance. The park can quickly evaluate and fix the attraction instead of waiting until it requires costly repairs.

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Jeff Boudreau

President and General Manager, Dell Technologies

• Dell Technologies manufacturing edge solutions: The Dell Technologies Manufacturing Edge Reference Architecture with PTC helps manufacturing companies derive insights from workstations, computers, mobile devices and other endpoints within the manufacturing environment. With access to edge data in one place, companies can increase production line reliability, reduce operational costs and make more informed real-time decisions..

» NEWS

COVID-19 SHUTDOWNS HAVE CHALLENGED THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY’S CORE INFRASTRUCTURE Cloud-based threats cost Financial Services Companies an estimated $4.2 million Infoblox, a leader in Secure Cloud-Managed Network Services, unveiled a new research into how the COVID-19 shutdowns challenged the financial services industry’s core infrastructure. Based on more than 800 responses from IT professionals working in the financial services industry in North America, Latin America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region, the survey highlights: Data breaches are an increasingly significant cost burden for the industry: Worldwide, financial firms that experienced a data breach reported estimated average losses of roughly $4.2 million per attack, with U.S. organizations hit hardest at $4.7 million in estimated losses. Network outages also result in costly burdens: Institutions lose an estimated

$3.2 million on average with Asia-Pacific followed by European institutions carrying the heaviest losses at $4.3 million and $3.1 million respectively. The industry remains a popular target for cloud-based attacks: Over half of all organizations (54%) surveyed suffered a data breach in the last 12 months with 49% were plagued by a cloud malware attack as well. Cloud and network-based attacks will continue to be a major threat vector: More than 50% of respondents expect to face a combination of IoT attacks, cloud vulnerabilities including misconfigurations, and data manipulation attempts over the next 12 months. Threat resolution teams are embracing network visibility for security hygiene:

Globally, network monitoring (76%), threat intelligence (64%), and threat hunting (57%) are considered the most effective mitigation tactics against these threats. “This report shows us that cloud compromise has become the biggest cybersecurity issue for financial institutions and the investments they are making to protect themselves,” said Anthony James, VP of Product Marketing at Infoblox. “Notably, respondents are starting to use DNS to catch network threats before they move upstream. This is reflected in the customer uplift we’re seeing for our BloxOne Threat Defense platform, which uses DNS to extend security to cloudfirst infrastructure and accelerates threat resolution by orchestrating detection and remediation tools from the existing security stack.”

SERVICENOW OPENS NEW MEA OFFICE IN DUBAI The digital workflow company sees a significant demand for its enterprise workflow solutions in the region surpassed US$4.5 billion in total revenues and it is now establishing strong momentum for 2021 with US$1,293 million in subscription revenues for Q1, a 30% year-on-year growth. Mark Ackerman, Area Vice President for the Middle East and Africa (MEA) at ServiceNow, sees 2021 as a pivotal time for the region. The wave of digital transformation spurred by the coronavirus pandemic has led to a trend among regional enterprises of reducing complexity, increasing agility, cutting costs, and delivering stronger governance and compliance. Regional organizations are switching to platform architectures to achieve these goals.

ServiceNow, a leading digital workflow company that makes work, work better for people, today announced the opening of a new office in Dubai Internet City (DIC), Dubai. The company’s expansion is fueled by its industry strength as the platform company of choice for digital businesses. Its flagship modern enterprise workflow solution is designed to unlock optimal productivity and deliver exceptional employee and customer experiences. In 2020, ServiceNow reinforced its global credentials as a market leader, significantly beating expectations. Last year, the company

According to the December 2020 IDC META CIO DX Survey, 57% of CIOs considered workflow management applications a priority for the future of work, and 45% prioritized the enhancement of customer journeys. “Today, time to value is measured in days rather than months. This acceleration has become a critical defining element of commercial success. The Now Platform is the Platform of Platforms, built for the modern digital enterprise. It excels at digitizing work that flows throughout a company, across multiple functions, in a unified experience,” said Ackerman.

JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» NEWS

AMIRI HOSPITAL IN KUWAIT BOOSTS NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE WITH ARUBA The hospital now delivers all services –including registration, appointment setting, and prescription management – through the Digital Gateway “Derwaza” mobility, and other digital healthcare services, facilitated 60% reduction in hospital footfall while serving same patient volumes and increased appointment efficiency by 120%.

Dr. Raed Syed Hashem

Head of Disaster Management Team Amiri Hospital, one of Kuwait’s most established medical facilities, has leveraged new network architecture from Aruba, a HPE company, to pioneer new innovations and standards in digital health, telemedicine and in-patient care. The implementation has resulted in 99.9% network availability, enabled introduction of remote healthcare, staff

The IT Infrastructure supports the Health Informatics Platform, employing best of breed solutions and integrating with existing systems, delivered through the Kuwait based systems integrator – Ms Virtus Informatics Company WLL. “To enhance our operations, we were seeking a HIMSS EMRAM Level 5 certification and aimed to establish ourselves as a Smart Hospital that offers digital services and advanced technologies for patient care. We recognized that a secure, reliable, and high-performance network infrastructure would be essential to achieving this ambition,” said Dr Ali Al

Alanda, Director of the Hospital. The hospital now delivers all services –including registration, appointment setting, and prescription management – through the Digital Gateway “Derwaza”. “We have set up the Gateway for the convenience of our patients with seamless and secure access, and high-performance for a remarkable user experience,” he said. “We have implemented over 50 portable devices, that give our medical practitioners instant secure access to patient records, wherever and whenever they need it,” said Dr Raed Syed Hashem, Head of Disaster Management Team. “This not only empowers our staff to perform their duties more effectively, but it also serves as a highly visual example to patients, of Amiri Hospital’s commitment to pioneering the latest digital technologies.”

VEEAMON 2021 OFFERS A PREVIEW OF VEEAM’S ROADMAP FOR THE YEAR The event showcased innovations around upcoming updates to its single platform to protect and manage all workloads Veeam Software showcased a glimpse into its roadmap through 2021 and how the company will continue provide its customers with the most advanced data protection across all environments - cloud, virtual, SaaS, Kubernetes and physical. At VeeamON 2021, Veeam provided a select preview of the future, showcasing innovations around upcoming updates to its single platform to protect and manage ALL workloads. Due in the second half of 2021, Veeam demonstrated key innovations of cloud-native solutions for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft Office 365 and the first integration of Kasten K10 for Kubernetes into Veeam Platform. “Over the past 18 months, Veeam enjoyed its most prolific product launch period, bringing to market more than 20 new offerings such as Veeam V10 and V11, Veeam Backup for Google Cloud, updates for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, AWS & Microsoft Office 365 and many, many more,” said Danny Allan, CTO & SVP, Product Strategy at Veeam. “We are continually innovating and know customers are looking to protect their data across multicloud environments; with Veeam’s single platform we are helping our customers ensure that every piece of data, every workload is safe, secure and easily recoverable no matter where they reside.” Veeam’s single platform for protecting and managing resources

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

in multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, delivers cloud mobility to backup, recover and migrate workloads across any environment, ensuring up to 50X lower costs when natively protecting cloud workloads. Veeam now provides cloud-native support for the three leading hyperscale public clouds – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – under a single platform across hybrid-/multi-cloud environments. Veeam also unveiled support for archive object storage for all three leading hyperscale public cloud providers and expanded support for cloud-native backup and recovery.

» NEWS

TOSHIBA GULF LEADS STORAGE MARKET IN SAUDI ARABIA, UAE AND SOUTH AFRICA Work-from-home and remote learning models has fueled demand for data storage Toshiba Gulf FZE has seen a significant surge in its market share in key geographies of UAE, Saudi Arabia and South Africa over the past year. Having concluded its FY 2020 on high growth, the storage leader has also garnered a greater market share for its Surveillance HDD portfolio and has built on the positive reception of its recently launched cutting-edge products. Santosh Varghese, Vice President – MEA, Toshiba Gulf FZE, commented, “At Toshiba Gulf, our focused priority continues to be to empower customers navigate the increasingly digital landscape with world-class storage solutions. We have positively grown our market share over the past 12 months, and we attribute this success to unsurpassed quality and expansive product range, relentless dedication of our valued employees and chan-

nel partners, and innovative go-to-market strategies.” The storage pioneer has invested substantially in strengthening its channel ecosystem. It has provided in-depth training workshops, resources and tools to manage challenging market dynamics and operate effectively in the new normal along with highly incentivized programs. Toshiba Gulf has seized a significant 45% market share in Saudi Arabia and a notable 30% in UAE and South Africa, cementing its leadership position in the storage sector across these territories. The ongoing pandemic has accelerated the immediate need for organizations to digitalize their operations, which in turn has snowballed demands for data storage. The pandemic has compelled organizations and educational institutions to adopt

Santosh Varghese

Vice President–MEA, Toshiba Gulf FZE work-from-home and remote learning models, leading to a further explosion of data generation, and fueling the demand for personal storage. Identifying the opportunities, Toshiba has doubled down on its HDD portfolio, with its Surveillance HDD line-up clocking a notable 17% climb in 2020 from 0.7% in 2018 in the Middle East and Africa region.

PURE STORAGE UNVEILS ENHANCEMENTS TO PURE1 DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

AI-engine Meta delivers predictive service management that proactively identifies issues and prescribes resolutions said Prakash Darji, VP and GM, Digital Experience, Pure Storage.

Pure Storage has announced the new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. These enhancements give customers additional control by delivering new automated monitoring and AI-driven recommendation capabilities with self-service management and digital procurement. The Pure1 Digital Experience is redefining the rest of the IT ownership experience, enabling IT teams to anticipate needs, acquire resources on their terms (and on their time frames) while eliminating risks to the business — around purchasing, data protection, and customer satisfaction. “Pure has always innovated for a better customer experience — an experience that is simple and streamlined with unparalleled support. By giving our customers more control over their environments and active recommendations for solving problems be-

Pure1’s AI-engine Meta delivers predictive service management that proactively identifies issues and prescribes resolutions

Prakash Darji

VP and GM, Digital Experience, Pure Storage. fore they happen, we’re delivering on our Digital Experience vision and transforming the IT management experience yet again,”

Key updates include: • Intelligent monitoring and management of all data service platforms, whether on-premises FlashArray or FlashBlade, cloud-native on Portworx, or through Pure Cloud Block Store for AWS and Microsoft Azure. • Predictive fault analysis and resolution using analytics gathered from across Pure’s ecosystem to quickly pinpoint potential challenges. • Assessments for ransomware protection, with proactive recommendations for solutions like SafeMode snapshots. • Real time troubleshooting using new search capability across storage and VMs. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» NEWS

INGRAM MICRO LAUNCHES ADVANCED WAREHOUSE FACILITIES IN JAFZA World, UAE Region & Jafza, Dr. Ali Baghdadi, SVP & Chief Executive of Ingram Micro – META, and Lalit Sharma, Ingram Micro Head of Operations in META.

Dr. Ali Baghdadi

SVP & Chief Executive, Ingram Micro–META

Ingram Micro opened its new warehouse facilities in Dubai during an official inauguration ceremony, attended by senior executives from DP World, UAE Region and Jebel Ali Free Zone (Jafza), including Abdulla Bin Damithan, CEO & Managing Director, DP

Abdulla Bin Damithan, CEO & Managing Director, DP World, UAE Region & Jafza said: “As a global trade enabler, we at DP World, UAE Region firmly believe in contributing to the success of our partners through our multimodal hub that includes Jafza, our flagship free zone. We are certain that the technologically-advanced warehousing facilities by Ingram Micro will elevate the offerings in Jafza, adding to the success of both entities, in the UAE and the ME.” Dr. Ali Baghdadi, SVP & Chief Executive of Ingram Micro – META, stated, “We are delighted to be present in Jafza, which is a globally recognised free zone. It has provided us with the ability to serve many countries in the Middle East and Africa and supported us with their services and technologies

during a challenging year of the pandemic.” The new warehouse facilities include a 7,500+ sq. m. plot and 4,850+ sq. m. carpet area, 11 meters height storage with over 7,500+ Pallet location. The warehouse is served by the Narrow Aisle Articulated (VNA) machines that can operate less than 2 meters of aisle width and go up to 11 meters. Site equipped with Dock Levelers for efficient loading/offloading newly installed Dock Shelters. The warehouse features state-of-the-art CCTV cameras and radars from Axis Communications, intrusion, access control systems, temperature monitoring cameras linked with access control, ANPR cameras for advanced parking solution, designed by Ingram Micro Physical Security Team. The facilities also include some of the most advanced security solutions in the region. The entire solution was designed and installed in line with SIRA guidelines and connected with Dubai Police via Video Guard service.

ARADA PARTNERS WITH MICROSOFT TO ACCELERATE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY The new Busines Unit will forge partnerships with niche vendors specialized in data science, AI, and data monetization Microsoft announced that Arada, the United Arab Emirates’ fastest growing property developer, will leverage the Microsoft Cloud to accelerate its digital transformation and enhance experiences for its customers and business managers. “Arada is a builder of communities,” said Shrikant Kabboor, CTO, Arada. “To develop market-leading experiences that enrich and inspire our residents, we focus on leveraging the power of technology to create a strong sense of a sustainable community. Design is, of course, important; amenities are important; price points are important. But technology can take us in exciting new directions. With Microsoft’s support, we expect to reap rich dividends from becoming a digitally enabled enterprise. Now that we are in a position to leverage best-in-class business-productivity and cloud-computing solutions, we can enhance the experience of

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Shrikant Kabboor CTO, Arada

our business managers and customers alike, allowing everyone to engage digitally and more efficiently.”

At the heart of Arada’s digital transformation will be the trusted, versatile, MS Dynamics 365 platform, which the property developer will use as the enterprise resource planning backbone to digitize the business processes covering finance, procurement, human resources, projects, commerce/retail and home services across business units. Arada has also adopted Microsoft Office Suite as its unified communication platform promoting digital collaboration amongst employees and business partners. The company is championing a Cloud First strategy by using the Microsoft Azure hosting platform for data storage and management to enable the leveraging of the Azure Warehouse, machine learning (ML) and AI capabilities, empowering Arada’s business with real-time data analytics and business insights.

» NEWS

SITECORE LOOKS TO TAP MEA’S GROWING CLOUD APPLICATIONS MARKET

Mohammed Alkhotani appointed as Area Vice President of Middle East and Africa Sitecore, a global leader in digital experience management software, today announced it is supporting the Middle East and Africa’s cloud applications market by appointing Mohammed Alkhotani as Area Vice President of Middle East and Africa. Across the Middle East and Africa, organizations are rapidly adopting cloud-based applications to drive new levels of citizen and customer experiences. As a result, the Middle East and Africa’s cloud applications market is set to reach USD 4.5 billion by 2024, more than doubling from USD 2 billion in 2019, according to a recent report by Markets and Markets. Alkhotani will be responsible for the company’s in-region presence and growth strategy, including sales and marketing operations. “The Middle East and Africa’s doubling cloud applications market underlines the importance of marketing technology and content personalization as the heart of digital transformation,” said Mohammed Alkhotani, Area Vice President of Middle East and Africa, Sitecore. “At Sitecore, I’m eager to emphasize how marketing technology can enable new levels of customer experiences and e-commerce, especially in the government and public sector, banking and finance, telecommunications, energy, and tourism and hospitality sectors.” In his role, Alkhotani will bolster the rollout of Sitecore’s $1.2 billion global investment plan. He will also support the integration of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation across websites, apps, and social media. Alkhotani brings more than 14 years of business and executive management experience. Prior to Sitecore, Alkhotani was with the enterprise application software company SAP as Managing Director of Saudi Arabia, and SAP Ariba Senior Director for the Middle East and Africa, along with ICT in Australia, and Cisco Systems in The Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.

SAUDI ARABIA’S BASAMH TRANSFORMS DIGITALLY Implements the SAP S/HANA real-time business suite and SAP SuccessFactors human experience management suite Basamh Trading and Industries Group, one of Saudi Arabia’s most successful purpose-led fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) businesses in in the Middle East and Africa, announced its digital transformation is driving the GCC’s USD 253 billion retail market. Thanks to robust population growth, the rise in e-commerce, and multi-national brands entering the region, the GCC’s retail market has topped USD 253 billion, according to Alpen Capital. Basamh, with top brands Goody, Cofique, and Treva, and a distributor of a range of quality brands such as Perfetto, Betty Croker, Nature Valley, Bugles, Best Mix, Glade, Raid, Pledge and Windex, is supporting FMCG innovation with its 5-year digital transformation strategy LEAP, with global technology company SAP. Central to the strategy is the Leap to Digital (L2D) program that is enabling sustainable profitability. With a world-class enterprise resources planning system, Basamh has standardized, streamlined, and integrated business processes across finance, procurement, sales, and distribution. Basamh’s solutions cover nearly 1,200 employees in 12 branches in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. “In the highly-competitive fast moving consumer goods field, Basamh needed to improve our on-time delivery, increase our salesforce efficiency, and automate reporting and employee self-services to enhance business competitiveness,” said Khalid Temairik, Group CEO, Basamh Trading and Industries Group. In response, Basamh implemented the SAP S/HANA real-time business suite and SAP SuccessFactors human experience management suite with channel partner LABS. Basamh also implemented the SAP Extended Warehouse Management solution with channel partner Westernacher, and various enterprise solutions with the channel partner Vistex.

JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» NEWS INSIGHT

AWS TO OPEN DATA CENTERS IN UAE portunities in the UAE and beyond.”

Peter DeSantis

Senior Vice President, Global Infrastructure, AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has announced that it plans to open an infrastructure region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first half of 2022. The new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region will consist of three Availability Zones and become AWS’s second region in the Middle East with the existing AWS Region in Bahrain, giving customers more choice and flexibility to leverage advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud. Globally, AWS has 80 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. “We are excited to build on the great momentum of cloud adoption in the Middle East by providing more choice for customers in the UAE to run applications and store data locally,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure, AWS. “The new AWS Region supports the UAE’s focus on promoting technology innovation that has made it a thriving global hub for entrepreneurs, e-governments, and multi-national businesses. With the new region, organizations of all sizes will be able to innovate faster and serve end-users with even lower latency across the region.” His Excellency Mohammed Ali Al Shorafa, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development, said, “AWS’s expansion into the UAE is a testament to our rapidly growing innovation ecosystem that will benefit from access to the world’s leading cloud platform and its advanced technologies and solutions. Building on Abu Dhabi’s smart infrastructure and digital transformation, AWS’s investment will further enable innovators and companies with globally-relevant solutions to realize new op-

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that leverage multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones and across multiple regions to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The addition of the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in the UAE while also providing even lower latency across the country. Organizations using this region will also be able to access advanced technologies from the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services to drive innovation including compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services and more. Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world, including tens of thousands of customers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Enterprises choose AWS to become more agile and innovative, and include Al Tayer Group, Aramex, AXA Gulf, Axiom Telecom, Emirates NBD, Flydubai, Gulf News, MBC Group, OSN, Seera Group, Virgin Middle East, and many more. MENA public sector organizations are using AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and better serve the citizens of the region. They include the Communications and Information Technology Regulatory Authority of Kuwait (CITRA), Dubai Expo 2020, Egypt Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of Bahrain’s Ministries, Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University, University of Bahrain, and many more. MENA startups building their businesses on top of AWS to scale rapidly and expand around the world include Alef Education, Anghami, Careem, Dubizzle, EKar, Fetchr, Haraj, Health at Hand, Maestro Pizza, Mawdoo3.com, Property Finder, Sarwa, Souqalmal, StarzPlay, and Yallacompare. AWS customers welcomed the news of the AWS Region in UAE, including global customers who will be able to leverage the region to serve new audiences, such as Salesforce, the global customer relationship management (CRM) leader. “Salesforce is powering digital transformations for our global customer base that require the modern enterprise features of AWS,” said Srinivas Tallapragada, President and Chief Engineering Officer of Salesforce. “We’re excited to partner with Amazon and bring our trusted platform to new markets, empowering customers to succeed from anywhere by leveraging Hyperforce and all the advantages of public cloud computing.”

» NEWS INSIGHT

THREATS UNDETECTED FOR MORE THAN 250 HOURS IN TARGET NETWORKS ON AVERAGE of ransomware is often the point at which an attack becomes visible to an IT security team. It is, therefore, not surprising that the vast majoirty of the incidents Sophos responded to involved ransomware. Other attack types Sophos investigated included exfiltration only, cryptominers, banking trojans, wipers, droppers, pen test/attack tools, and more.

Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, has released the “Active Adversary Playbook 2021,” detailing attacker behaviors and the tools, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that Sophos’ frontline threat hunters and incident responders saw in the wild in 2020. The TTP detection data also covers early 2021. The findings show that the median attacker dwell time before detection was 11 days – or 264 hours – with the longest undetected intrusion lasting 15 months. Ransomware featured in 81% of incidents and 69% of attacks involved the use of the remote desktop protocol (RDP) for lateral movement inside the network. The playbook is based on Sophos telemetry as well as 81 incident investigations and insight from the Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR) team of threat hunters and analysts and the Sophos Rapid Response team of incident responders. The aim is to help security teams understand what adversaries do during attacks and how to spot and defend against malicious activity on their network.

Key findings in the playbook include:

The median attacker dwell time before detection was 11 days – To put this in context, 11 days potentially provide attackers with 264 hours for malicious activity, such as lateral movement, reconnaissance, credential dumping, data exfiltration, and more. Considering that some of these activities can take just minutes or a few hours to implement – often taking place at night or outside standard working hours – 11 days offers attackers plenty of time to cause damage in an organization’s network. It is also worth noting that ransomware attacks tend to have a shorter dwell time than “stealth” attacks, because they are all about destruction. 90% of attacks seen involved the use of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) – and in 69% of all cases, attackers used RDP for internal lateral movement – Se-

John Shier

Sr. Research Scientist, Sophos

curity measures for RDP, such a VPNs and multi-factor authentication tend to focus on protecting external access. However, these don’t work if the attacker is already inside the network. The use of RDP for internal lateral movement is increasingly common in active, hands-onkeyboard attacks such as those involving ransomware. Interesting correlations emerge among the top five tools found in victim networks. For instance, when PowerShell is used in an attack, Cobalt Strike is seen in 58% of cases, PsExec in 49%, Mimikatz in 33%, and GMER in 19%. Cobalt Strike and PsExec are used together in 27% of attacks, while Mimikatz and PsExec occur together in 31% of attacks. Lastly, the combination of Cobalt Strike, PowerShell and PsExec occurs in 12% of all attacks. Such correlations are important because their detection can serve as an early warning of an impending attack or confirm the presence of an active attack. Ransomware was involved in 81% of the attacks Sophos investigated. The release

“The threat landscape is becoming more crowded and complex, with attacks launched by adversaries with a wide range of skills and resources, from script kiddies to nation-state backed threat groups. This can make life challenging for defenders,” said John Shier, Sophos Sr Research Scientist. “Over the last year, our incident responders helped to neutralize attacks launched by more than 37 attack groups, using more than 400 different tools between them. Many of these tools are also used by IT administrators and security professionals for their everyday tasks and spotting the difference between benign and malicious activity isn’t always easy. “With adversaries spending a median of 11 days in the network, implementing their attack while blending in with routine IT activity, it is critical that defenders understand the warning signs to look out for and investigate. One of the biggest red flags, for instance, is when a legitimate tool or activity is detected in an unexpected place. Most of all, defenders should remember that technology can do a great deal but, in today’s threat landscape, may not be enough by itself. Human experience and the ability to respond are a vital part of any security solution.” Other topics covered in the playbook include the tactics and techniques most likely to signpost an active threat and warrant closer investigation, the earliest signs of attack, the most widely seen stagers, threat types and malicious artefacts, the most prevalent adversary groups seen, and more. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» COVER FEATURE

NEW APPROACHES TO CYBERSECURITY

With more surface area that is vulnerable to cyber-attacks and the need to secure across diverse environments, there have been new approaches for leading vendors to delivering solutions that enable resilience

he cyberattack surface area has been seeing a staggering explosion with a growing number of IP enabled devices from the OT and IoT landscape joining the ones from the traditional IT landscape. The role of cybersecurity has expanded to secure all different environments. The approach to effective cybersecurity has also been rapidly evolving with the traction in multi cloud deployments. Previous approaches aren’t enough and hence SASE, ZTNA as well EDR are helping redefine a holistic approach to ensuring cybersecurity that is resilient in a landscape of rapidly evolving threats. OT environments for instance are facing a growing threat scenario. A high number of unidentified assets, legacy systems, and unmanaged devices make them more vulnerable than traditional IT environments.

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

» COVER FEATURE Bachir Moussa, Regional Director MEAR, Nozomi Networks says, “Operational Networks are critical and have the capabilities to enhance our lives. For instance, in the Metro, the gate when you scan your ticket is an example of the OT network. We provide solutions to provide complete visibility and security for such critical networks such as in Transport, Oil & Gas, Utilities, Energy etc. Our objective is to enable organizations in these verticals to monitor, see anything that has happened or happening and detect any threats including zero day ones.” He adds, “IoT is a big enabler of devices but these devices aren’t built to be very secure which enables the vulnerability cracks. Further Working from home isn’t easy to control. Attackers are leveraging the vulnerabilities that the situation has made possible. Further there is more convergence between OT and IT. In the past it was difficult to remove the access of OT environments. But now it is possible and this has increased the surface area of attack. There are more opportunities for attackers.” Critical infrastructure, such as Energy sector or utilizes are now increasingly seeing interconnected devices coming online while previously they weren’t so interconnected and often operated in isolation. This has made it a very attractive proposition for cyber attackers. The failure of such critical infrastructure is now a big concern for cybersecurity solutions to address. Nozomi Networks showcased its expansive product portfolio including its cloud-based SaaS offering Vantage and edge offering Guardian as well as other subscription-based and vertical-specific solutions at GISEC this year. Its recent “OT/IoT Security Report” revealed that ransomware activities and supply chain threats and vulnerabilities will continue to dominate the threat landscape. Organizations therefore have to prioritize investments in advanced cybersecurity solutions to secure their increasingly converged environments. Tenable, the Cyber Exposure company, was also an exhibitor at GISEC this year. Tenable also looks at enabling cybersecurity solutions across diverse environments. Maher Jadallah, Regional Director - Middle East, Tenable says there is a need for a new approach to tackling the evolving challenges. He elaborates, “From IT to Cloud to IoT to OT, this complex computing landscape is the modern cyber attack surface. The tools and processes of yesterday — built and designed for the old era of IT when the cyber attack surface was a static laptop, desktop or on-premises server — are being used to solve today’s problems. The digital era requires a new approach to achieve broad visibility across the modern attack surface and provide deep insights to help security teams, executives and boards of directors prioritize and measure cyber risk. “ Cyber Exposure Management is an emerging discipline that helps organisations’ see, predict and act to address risk across the entire attack surface. Built on the foundations of risk-based

Bachir Moussa

Regional Director MEAR, Nozomi Networks

vulnerability management, Cyber Exposure Management best practices introduce a common risk-focused and metric-based language that everyone understands—from security and IT Ops to executive leadership and key stakeholders. He adds, “An organisation’s attack surface is a complex and interconnected network of IT, cloud, operational technologies (OT), web apps and container assets that constantly changes. Different asset types require different approaches to gain deep insight into security issues. Tenable Adaptive Assessment provides a wide variety of sensor technologies optimized for an organisation’s unique environment. Whether it’s active scanning of the IT network, active querying of OT assets or frictionless assessment using third-party telemetry data, security teams can deploy what they need in a single platform for unified visibility.” Following its acquisition of Alsid in April, Tenable added Tenable.ad to its suite of Cyber Exposure solutions. With Tenable.ad, organisations can see, predict, and act to address risk in Active Directory to disrupt attack paths before bad actors exploit them. “The acceleration of digital transformation and remote work models over the past year has resulted in a surge of cybercrime. Active Directory is a prominent and valuable target for threat actors who can use to gain access into a network and conduct further attacks,” adds Maher. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» COVER FEATURE

Kalle Bjorn

Sr. Director, Systems Engineering-ME, Fortinet

With the remote working trends likely to continue in the longer term, there is a need for organizations to reconcile that into their roadmap for cybersecurity investments. Maher elaborates, “ Given the expanded perimeter, organisations should look for solutions that afford complete and live visibility into the entirety of the attack surface — be they IT or OT, traditional on-prem or in the cloud — as the first step toward reducing overall cyber risk. If providing access to data, make sure you have a mechanism to control that access and secure data in transit. As the workforce may not be using company-owned devices, it’s worth investing in an assessment solution that can check the security posture of all devices, regardless of ownership, connecting to the corporate network. Identify any with exploited vulnerabilities and either patch or remediate the risk - this could mean stopping the device connecting until it's been updated.” With an expanded surface area to cover, there has to be a definitive shift in cybersecurity. SASE is about enabling a new converged approach that can handle the security requirements for workloads that are dispersed across diverse environments, from on premise to different clouds. Kalle Bjorn, Sr Director, Systems Engineering - Middle East, Fortinet says, “It’s all about the convergence of networking and security. If you think about what happened during COVID-19, and now post-pandemic, it’s about users working from anywhere and enabling anytime access from any device.

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Maher Jadallah

Regional Director-ME, Tenable

And in this case, SASE as a framework makes sense as we talk about cloud-delivered security. By deploying connectivity and security solutions in the cloud, SASE allows organizations to extend firewalls, secure gateways, and zero-trust access— essentially all cybersecurity fundamentals—to any employee seeking remote access to critical resources, regardless of their location or the device they are using. It has rightly been praised for its simplicity, scalability, and ubiquitous protection.” He adds that one of the core components of SASE, along with cloud-delivered security, is SD-WAN. “At the end of the day, SASE’s outcome for the large or mid-market enterprise is to provide consistent security and the best quality of experience. While cloud-delivered security provides that security to users working from anywhere, SD-WAN actually enables that quality of experience. SASE would be incomplete if it doesn’t have SD-WAN as part of the framework. “ It’s important to remember that when you look to implement a SASE framework, you should look for a solution that converges security and networking — not just stitching them together, but having a unified policy so it’s easier for them to transform. For organizations looking to enable themselves with future proof cybersecurity solutions, there is a need to look for security suites that come integrated with identity-aware Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) as well as Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) services.

» CIO OUTLOOK

MANUFACTURING IN THE DIGITAL ERA Khalid Rashid Moh'd Jalal, Senior group ICT Manager, GARMCO, Kingdom of Bahrain elaborates on trends in the manufacturing industry in terms of digital transformation acceleration In the Manufacturing Industry, what do you see now the next phase of digital transformation requirements? How far have they reached in terms of accomplishing the initial objectives? Industrial transformation had been slow in the past but in recent past Industrial transformation had experienced a rapid increase with the help of latest technological developments that helped in digital transformation. Most of the large scale manufacturing industries have invested in technologies and upgraded their manufacturing units including PLCs and SCADA Systems with integration capabilities. Artificial Intelligence is slowly penetrating in manufacturing industries as well but with its initial challenges and high cost of implementations. However, as AI is maturing and becoming relatively affordable, manufacturing industries are adopting it as well. The global pandemic had played positive and negative roles in the accomplishments of 4th IR but as the world goes towards more peaceful period, the manufacturing industry will surely focus on more digital transformation initiatives in faster pace to recover the losses. How do you see manufacturing benefitting from digital transformation (4th IR) across different processes; where do you see maximum benefits possible? Since 1784 when the Industry 1.0 was launched, it took almost 86 years to reach Industrial 2.0 and further 99 more years to launch Industrial 3.0. But due to the rapid developments and enhancements in technologies, it only took about 50 years to become ready for 4th IR era. Although it’s the era of 4th IR but still only a fraction of manufacturers have fully leveraging the latest technologies of IoT/IIoT, Cloud Computing,

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Big Data and AI & Robotics. However, a large part of the manufacturer are already in their journey of being compliant with 4th IR by introducing various technological advancements step by introducing various technological advancements step by step and process by process. In this current era, almost most of the manufacturing plants are already integrated with their surrounding and supporting systems due to their interfacing capabilities with third party systems, hence they see various benefits like: processes with free from human errors, speed to customer responses, better controls and governance, lowered downtimes and various cost saving initiatives. What is the strategy towards cloud? Do they have a hybrid cloud strategy in place? Are you looking at multi-cloud adoption for leveraging the best of the cloud? Cyber security and cost and speed of internet are two major concerns for manufacturing industries to resist fully moving to cloud. However, with the right configuration, security measures and better internet bandwidth, some industries have already moved some of their workloads to cloud and operating in Hybrid model. Some are still exploring options, and some may face challenges until they upgrade. Now a days some manufacturing solution providers are also coming up with SAAS model but the legacy remains a challenge still. On the cyber security front, have there been any challenges that have had to be addressed in the past year? is this an area to strengthen in the year ahead for instance with so many endpoints on the edge ( with remote working)? Cyber security has always been a concern,

Khalid Rashid Moh'd Jalal Senior Group ICT Manager, GARMCO

it is still a concern, and it will remain a concern in future as well. Manufacturing plants are very expensive and hence having a DR site for the same plant is usually not affordable. This is one of the major reasons, most of the manufacturing plants are still working with either NO or limited interfaces with other systems in the same organizations. Cyberattacks would bring the entire operations down and there were many cases of ransomware in recent past. Manufacturing business is a major contributor to a national economy and helps a lot in national employment, and any cyber risk is a serious concern and therefore, not only the individual organization, but governments are also taking needful measures to improve the cyber security at national levels. Although there are cybercrime insurance policies which can be explored by organizations, but there should be more focuses on educating employees, so they are also prepared to handle any such situation before it occurs. End Points security must go through a serious review and more and more audits and checks to be introduced specially now with remote working era.

» FEATURE

A Unified Approach for Data Intensive Applications

SingleStore is redefining the approach to database, by helping businesses operationalize all their data through one platform, allowing them to embrace as well as leverage diverse data and enhance real time decision making

ata collection, management and analytics today and more than ever before have a critical role in enabling businesses looking to wrest and sustain the competitive edge in their respective industries. It is true that effective data analytics can help organizations reimagine their businesses and pursue higher growth. However, if organizations haven’t invested in a data solution that has the capabilities to address different types of workloads and data, they are at a massive disadvantage. In the era of hybrid cloud and multi-clouds, this is a bottleneck that holds companies back from realizing their maximum potential. A recent survey from SingleStore for instance reveals a serious challenge that organizations typically face with databases.

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

In the survey, a vast majority (82%) of IT professionals admitted that they manage different versions of the same database, and nearly three-quarters (74.4%) said that they run into issues with their current data warehouses. While organizations frequently employ multiple databases because they require a range of functionality, many also manage different versions of the same database. Often, organizations invest in and operate separate operational databases and analytics databases. if organizations are still invested in databases that are not cloud friendly, they would be unable to take the advantages of digital acceleration where cloud adoption is key. For many organizations, the challenge is to leverage the highly distributed, fragmented data that lies around in different systems as a unified whole. Without a uni-

» FEATURE fied view, it is not possible to get the real time insights that hold the real value in decision making. The SQL-based database platform from SingleStore addresses this need for a unified view of data insights from organizations having workloads deployed across different environments from different cloud environments to on-premises, delivering real time reporting and insights, thereby helping them manage, analyze and leverage all the dispersed data. The SingleStore unified database enables fast analytics on any data, anywhere, to support organizations’ analytics and customer experiences. This distributed SQL database supports transactions and analytics; handles structured, unstructured and semi-structured data; and works in public clouds, on-premises environments and hybrid deployments. SingleStore unified database is provided as a service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Red Hat and through deployments with SingleStore Managed Service and SingleStore DB. Founded in 2013, SingleStore has seen a rapid traction in terms of market demand for its solution over the recent past and especially more so since the pandemic, driven by the accelerated digital transformation initiatives at various organizations globally. With a $80 million in a Series E round funding late last year and a rebranding of the company name from its previous name MemSQL, the company is poised to meet the growing demand for HTAP (Hybrid transaction/analytical processing) database solutions that integrates transaction processing and analytics for real time data insights, a crucial advantage in business decision making. Businesses today need a new generation of data analytics tools to ingest and extract critical business insights in real time as information keeps flying from the millions to hundreds of millions of sensors, mobile devices and applications. With its capabilities, SingleStore, the unified database

Raj Verma CEO, SingleStore

for fast analytics, is redefining the database industry by helping deliver real time analytics, operational AI and ML. A distributed, highly-scalable relational SQL database, it runs smoothly for both transactional and analytical data across hybrid, multi-cloud workloads. For organizations inundated with big data and the challenges of the pandemic, SingleStore delivers consistent low-latency query responses with the fast-changing data of transactional and analytical workloads. The solution helps companies accelerate and gain the benefits of digital transformation, primarily ensuring it can be effective in decision making during those crucial and transient business situations by accessing real time data insights from ‘in -flight’ transaction data. It is a game changing phenomenon,

delivering sophisticated real time analysis of large volumes of data that helps companies predict and control business outcomes better than ever before. SingleStore’s Unified Database solution resolves the challenge of being efficient for both transactional and analytical workloads without either interfering with each other. This ensures consistency in responses to queries in real time, essential for businesses to succeed in this era of increasing number of digital interactions and data explosion. According to SingleStore CEO Raj Verma, “Organisations don’t need to contend with cost and complexity, lack of cloud support, performance and scalability limJUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» FEATURE This marks a watershed moment for the database industry, which has historically architected databases for analytical or transactional workloads. SingleStore has seen impressive growth in the recent past and has also expanded its strategic partnerships with companies such as SAS, Infosys, HCL, TCS and Bahwan CyberTek. The company has strengthened its leadership team with Paul Forte coming on board as the Chief Revenue Officer, Oliver Schabenberger as Chief Innovation Officer, and Former Veeva Systems' CFO Tim Cabral as an addition to SingleStore’s board of directors. Very recently, SingleStore has also appointed Suresh Sathyamurthy as SVP of Growth and Marketing, bringing with him experience from senior roles at tech industry leaders Dell EMC, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.

Suresh Sathyamurthy SVP, Growth and Marketing

itations and multiple database platforms. SingleStore eliminates these pain points and provides all needed capabilities in a single, simple and unified solution. It supports transactions and analytics; handles structured, unstructured and semi-structured data; and works in public clouds, on-premises environments and hybrid deployments. The SingleStore unified database empowers organizations to do fast analytics on any data, anywhere to deliver differentiated customer experiences and better business results. And we do this with a leave-and-leverage rather than a rip-and-replace approach.” SingleStore has also announced the availability of the only database in the industry that addresses both analytical and transactional workloads for the multi-cloud world. SingleStore users can scale their applications flexibly and cost effectively without compromising on performance.

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

“Organisations don’t need to contend with cost and complexity, lack of cloud support, performance and scalability limitations and multiple database platforms. SingleStore eliminates these pain points and provides all needed capabilities in a single, simple and unified solution.

The company has also launched its first innovation center in the US. The SingleStore Launch Pad exists to reduce the friction that organizations encounter in advancing their digital transformations and becoming more data-driven. This home of discovery and exploration will drive thought leadership about what is on the data and analytics horizon for SingleStore customers and enterprises everywhere. Work at SingleStore Launch Pad will include prototyping and identifying technological solutions for forward-looking product enhancements. It will also involve collaborating with customers and partners to integrate and enhance SingleStore technology As the pandemic accelerated the volume and velocity of data explosion, many companies continue to struggle with databases that cannot handle diverse workloads. With cloud migration gaining further speed, companies are looking at adopting new databases and it gives them the opportunity to look at a solution like SingleStore that offers a unified approach, leverage SQL, brings together real-time streaming data and analytics on multi-model data, and supports an agile, flexible cloud deployment mode.

» INSIGHT

HOW HAS HOSPITALITY ADAPTEDTO COVID-19? Ali Askar - Senior Business Development Manager in this article looks at how one of the most affected industries – hospitality is playing the long-game and adapting to the new normal with new initiatives (and not price-discounting). While this move is customer friendly, it is also smart and calculated. The last thing any brand wants is for its most loyal customers to reconsider their brand affiliation in a year of very little travel.

The outbreak of the Covid-19 has resulted in each one of us affected some way or the other. Entire industries have come to a standstill with the after-effects of the pandemic. All is not doom and gloom though. There is good news on the horizon!! With the roll-out of the vaccine across the globe, there is hope that most of these industries will recover. Some will rebound sooner, while others will take a while to return to pre-Covid levels. That said, the new normal will need companies adapting to the behaviors of its customers. This adaptation will be key to customers lining back to use their services. How did Hospitality react to the pandemic? With the onset of the pandemic, hospitality saw its worst downturn in more than two decades. At the start, everyone hoped the pandemic will subside within the first few months. Hotels started providing deep discounts to have customers coming back. Leisure travelers though, preferred to take extreme safety precautions putting off non-discretionary travel, putting these deep discounts to no use. Customers with loyalty points even chose to let them expire, than of taking that trip they had long been planning. Companies required their employees to cut on business-travel and take calls online, using their travel-budgets elsewhere. It did not help hospitality, when government further had restrictions in place for travel. With both leisure and business customers reducing travel, the hospitality industry as a whole suffered. This situation was no different across the globe, with many hotel-chains retrenching employees and others closing shop.

Turnaround from Hospitality

Amidst all this, few hotels/hotel chains are choosing not to panic, but to strategize on playing the long game. Choosing this option is never easy, especially when re-

3. Collaboration with other verticals to earn points.

Ali Askar

Senior Business Development Manager, Finesse

The hospitality industry has allowed its customers to earn and redeem loyalty points across other avenues – those which are being used through the pandemic. Collaborating with super-markets, credit-cards, luxury brands, car-rental, insurance companies has resulted in customers still being emotionally associated with these brands.

4. Keep customers engaged sults are not instantaneous, and often take months to materialize. These hotels/chain have hedged their recovery on keeping their customers happy, thus not losing them to other brands – hoping they return when travel returns. They have chosen to keep the customer in the center of their long-term strategies and effected these steps to keep them from losing their most-loyal customers.

1. Refundable cancellation

A big worry for customers at the start of the pandemic was around the hotel bookings they had made. Most hotels/chains responded by making the said bookings by either refunding the amounts or providing vouchers which customers can redeem later.

2. Loyalty points extension

Most of the hotels have adapted their Loyalty programs to match the customer need and have extended or paused loyalty points expiration. Few have also started giving 2-year extension for existing customers. Hilton's Mark Weinstein has reassured the 108 million Hilton Honors members that their status would be extended through Dec 31, 2021.

Keep customers engaged - be through social-media or through earning or redeeming of loyalty points through this lean period. Brands need to learn how to keep their loyal customers engaged, thus creating an emotional connect with them, at all times.

Endnote

It will take a couple more years to for hotels to reach pre-Covid occupancy levels. That gives enough time for hotels to put through their strategies to ensure customers return into their fold when the pandemic lifts. Use of a loyalty platform will help hotels manage all of the above and build custom-made brand experiences for its customers – experiences customers will love and get rewarded for their desired behavior. Finesse in collaboration with Capillary has been helping customers across the GCC implement cloud-based customer loyalty programs that helps hotels design and bring to life loyalty programs that are customer-centric, and helps you reward your loyalty customers in real-time. It also helps you track your loyalty program, and help you visualize how your loyalty program is working. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» INSIGHT

KEY PIVOTS OF TRANSFORMATION Angelique Montalto, SAP Concur Regional Director, Africa and Middle East discusses three defining Tech moments that have helped Middle East Businesses face COVID-19

he last twelve months have generated high levels of economic, political, and social uncertainty, and the same can be said for Middle East organisations, as the pandemic has completely altered the way we do business. It has brought forward new challenges and enabled new work conditions which we were never prepared for.

1. Cloud adoption and automation

And while COVID has delivered new challenges, it has also caused many companies to turn to new technology. If 2020 has taught businesses one thing, it’s that they can take decisive action when pushed to do so, especially when it comes to implementing new digital tech to help forward thinking organisations to thrive in unforeseen circumstances.

The cloud’s important role as a pillar of digital transformation hasn’t changed since before the pandemic — in fact, its uptake has quickened to manage the surge in data businesses need to process. New findings from Synergy Research Group have revealed that cloud spending is up and has not been hampered by the ongoing crisis. This trend is likely to persist, as the migration to virtual work underscores the urgency for scalable, secure, reliable, cost-effective, off-premises technology services. In fact, despite the inevitable economic downturn in the wake of the pandemic, cloud spending is estimated to rise 19% for the full year, even as IT spending as a whole is forecast to fall 8%, according to industry analyst Gartner.

Here are three technological advancements that have helped Middle East businesses during the pandemic. As many are now beginning to realise, these new tools have become critical to streamline processes, automate tasks, and remote work.

While the trend to move to cloud-based solutions has been increasing steadily over the past two to three years, it is now the on-demand utilisation of IT resources, including data storage, processing power, and applications on a pay-as-you-go basis via

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

» INSIGHT the internet. Effectively, the cloud now underpins all key digital strategies in the workplace. As businesses look at ways to increase productivity, reduce errors within their systems, and improve their employee experience, they are starting to use cloud-based automation tools and services. For instance, the cloud has been used to switch to a paperless and virtual expense management system, streamlining back-office finance processes and eliminating the need for staff to present expense claims in person. This has helped with automating and streamlining mundane, manual tasks for employees, and enabled finance teams to spend their time on tasks that are more strategic.

2. The Artificial Intelligence advantage

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way people work, how enterprises operate, and how entire industries transform. As businesses maintain hybrid remote-working models and forestall other potential disruptions in 2021 and beyond, the role of AI in the workplace will continue to grow. More businesses are leaning on AI algorithms to make quick decisions backed by real-time financial precision, to meet the business needs brought forward by the pandemic. This includes managing spend in near real-time to improve budget management and liquidity, increasing compliance and eliminating errors, to taking on mandatory tasks and maximising profitability. For the travel and expense (T&E) industries, AI has become particularly useful in analysing data. The new generation of AI-powered T&E tools allows businesses to analyse the travel experience and purchasing behaviours. Integration tools and various applications of AI can interpret traveller data to provide companies with meaningful information that can improve compliance, identify cost savings, and more. With AI, businesses can also automate an enormous quantity of data and reduce human errors. This then leads to predictive analytics, allowing companies to take proactive action in making business decisions. For example, the new SAP Concur survey, “The Hidden Potential of VAT Reclaim” has found that businesses are looking to ensure they have digital tools and solutions in place to take VAT reclaim processes online.

3. Pre-trip approval

More companies will implement pre-trip approvals for business travel in 2021, as part of a broader effort to keep employees safe and transform travel and expense policies. Typically, the pre-trip approval system enables employees to enter basic data, such as dates, times, trip destinations, reasons for the trip, and any requests for advances, in a travel request. All this information will help the corporate travel team and the employee’s line manager to assess whether a trip is essential and to keep tabs on employees for their duty of care requirements. Often, these pre-trip approvals have been mandated by cost-control concerns. But as countries around the world continue to reshape travel restrictions, advanced approvals can support traveller safety programmes.

Angelique Montalto

SAP Concur Regional Director, Africa and Middle East

The pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on many Middle East businesses. But the smart use of technology is one way to tackle current and future challenges. From supporting employees working from home, managing compliance and cashflow to duty of care obligations, there are many ways technology can support Middle East businesses and their staff - now and in the post-COVID world. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» INSIGHT

TOP 10 SECURITY MISPERCEPTIONS Peter Mackenzie, Manager of Sophos’ Rapid Response team discusses below a list of the most commonly held security misperceptions compiled by the Sophos Rapid Response team that it encountered in the last 12 months while neutralizing and investigating cyberattacks in a wide range of organizations. Misperception 1:

Sophos Counterpoint:

We are not a target; we are too small and/ or have no assets of value to an adversary

Some IT teams still believe that endpoint security software is enough to stop all threats and/or they don’t need security for their servers. Attackers take full advantage of such assumptions. Any mistakes in configuration, patching or protection make servers a primary target, not a secondary one as might have been the case in the past. The list of attack techniques that try to bypass or disable endpoint software and avoid detection by IT security teams grows longer by the day.

Sophos Counterpoint: Many cyberattack victims assume they are too small, in a sector of no interest or lacking the kind of lucrative assets that would attract an adversary. The truth is, it doesn’t matter: if you have processing power and a digital presence, you are a target. Despite the media headlines, most attacks are not perpetrated by advanced nation-state attackers; they are launched by opportunists looking for easy prey and low hanging fruit, such as organizations with security gaps, errors or misconfigurations that cybercriminals can easily exploit. If you believe that your organization is not a target, you are probably not actively looking for suspicious activity on your network – such as the presence of Mimikatz (an open-source application that allows users to view and save authentication credentials) on your domain controller – and you could miss the early signs of an attack.

Misperception 2: We don’t need advanced security technologies installed everywhere

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Misperception 3: We have robust security policies in place

Sophos Counterpoint: Having security policies for applications and users is critical. However, they need to be checked and updated constantly as new features and functionality are added to devices connected to the network. Verify and test policies, using techniques such as penetration testing, tabletop exercises and trial runs of your disaster recovery plans.

Misperception 4: Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers can be protected from attackers by chang-

ing the ports they are on and introducing multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Sophos Counterpoint: The standard port used for RDP services is 3389, so most attackers will scan this port to find open remote access servers. However, the scanning will identify any open services, regardless of the port they are on, so changing ports offers little or no protection on its own. Further, while introducing multi-factor authentication is important, it won’t enhance security unless the policy is enforced for all employees and devices. RDP activity should take place within the protective boundary of a virtual private network (VPN), but even that cannot fully protect an organization if the attackers already have a foothold in a network. Ideally, unless its use is essential, IT security should limit or disable the use of RDP internally and externally.

Misperception 5: Blocking IP addresses from high-risk regions such as Russia, China and North Korea protects us against attacks from those geographies

Sophos Counterpoint: Blocking IPs from specific regions is unlikely to do any harm, but it could give a false sense of security if you rely only on this for protection. Adversaries host their malicious infrastructure in many countries, with hotspots including the US, the Netherlands and the rest of Europe.

Misperception 6: Our backups provide immunity from the impact of ransomware

» INSIGHT Sophos Counterpoint: Keeping up-to-date backups of documents is business critical. However, if your backups are connected to the network, then they are within reach of attackers and vulnerable to being encrypted, deleted or disabled in a ransomware attack. It is worth noting that limiting the number of people with access to your backups may not significantly enhance security as the attackers will have spent time in your network looking for these people and their access credentials.

Misperception 7: Our employees understand security

Sophos Counterpoint: According to the State of Ransomware 2021, 22% of organizations believe they’ll be hit by ransomware in the next 12 months because it’s hard to stop end users from compromising security. Social engineering tactics like phishing emails are becoming harder to spot. Messages are often hand-crafted, accurately written, persuasive and carefully targeted. Your employees need to know how to spot suspicious messages and what to do when they receive one. Who do they notify so that other employees can be put on alert? Misperception 8: Incident response teams can recover my data after a ransomware attack

Peter Mackenzie

Manager, Sophos’ Rapid Response team

Paying the ransom will get our data back after a ransomware attack

survey 2021, an organization that pays the ransom recovers on average around twothirds (65%) of its data. A mere 8% got back all of their data, and 29% recovered less than half. Paying the ransom – even when it seems the easier option and/or is covered by your cyber-insurance policy – is therefore not a straightforward solution to getting back on your feet. Further, restoring data is only part of the recovery process – in most cases the ransomware completely disables the computers, and the software and systems need to be rebuilt from the ground up before the data can be restored. The 2021 survey found that recovery costs are, on average, ten times the size of the ransom demand.

Sophos Counterpoint:

Misperception 10:

Sophos Counterpoint: This is very unlikely. Attackers today make far fewer mistakes, and the encryption process has improved, so relying on responders to find a loophole that can undo the damage is extremely rare. Automatic backups like Windows Volume Shadow Copies are also deleted by most modern ransomware as well as overwriting the original data stored on disk making recovery impossible other than paying the ransom.

Misperception 9:

According to the State of Ransomware

attack – if we survive that we’re OK

Sophos Counterpoint: Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. The ransomware is just the point at which the attackers want you to realize they are there and what they have done. The adversaries are likely to have been in your network for days if not weeks before releasing the ransomware, exploring, disabling or deleting backups, finding the machines with high value information or applications to target for encryption, removing information and installing additional payloads such as backdoors. Maintaining a presence in the victim’s networks allows attackers to launch a second attack if they want to.

The release of ransomware is the whole JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» INSIGHT

Rick Peters

Operational Technology Global Enablement Director, Fortinet

Rick Peters, Operational Technology Global Enablement Director at Fortinet shares his thoughts on how security readiness was taxed by the COVID-19 crisis and continues to challenge OT leaders

OT Leaders Cont to Face Security Challenges

perational technology (OT) is the cyber physical foundation that enables the world’s factories, energy production and transmission facilities, transportation networks, and utilities to function. To boost operational efficiency and profitability, many OT companies have been integrating OT infrastructure and thereby indirectly connecting supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems with IT networks to manage actionable data across a formerly air-gapped framework. However, the improved agility and efficiency derived from digitally connected OT-IT networks comes with increased cybersecurity risk. To understand the types of threats facing operational technology and how OT teams can mitigate these threats, Fortinet conducted a survey of organizations in critical industries with greater than 2,500 employees. We surveyed plant and manufacturing operations leaders in: 1. Manufacturing 2. Energy and utilities 3. Healthcare 4. Transportation The results are compiled in the Fortinet 2021 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report. The report illuminates where OT is most vulnerable, the types of cyberattacks organizations face, current security tactics, and the areas where cybersecurity protocols need improvement.

Security Struggles Continue within OT Organizations

This year's report indicates that OT leaders continue to be in-

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

» INSIGHT of ten organizations experienced at least one intrusion in the past year, which is almost identical to the results of the 2020 survey. Arguably, the pandemic presented some unforeseen challenges, however a 90% rate of intrusion represents a significant problem that should concern OT leaders.

Weren't Prepared for Pandemic-Re2.OTlatedLeaders Changes

tinue y volved in cybersecurity, but it remains a struggle. And over the past year, the pandemic only added to the security issues leaders had to face. The momentum for OT-IT network convergence was evident pre-pandemic, but the effects of pandemic-driven innovation accelerated digital transformation and increased extended connectivity. Facing the challenge of extending the plant environment to accommodate remote work, many organizations had to increase their technology budgets to support rapid solution deployment. Seeking to benefit where possible from the many changes brought about by the pandemic, many OT leaders are looking for new ways to streamline processes and reduce future costs. Although progress is being made, there is room for improvement. Most OT organizations are not leveraging orchestration and automation and their security readiness was further taxed by the COVID-19 crisis. OT-IT network convergence coupled with an ever-increasing advanced threat landscape and coping with pandemic-related issues made it even more difficult for OT leaders to stay ahead of disruptive cyber adversaries. The Fortinet study highlights four key insights about the current state of OT security across organizations.

OT Organizations Continue to Experience Intrusions

As a group, organizations represented by the OT leaders who participated in the survey faced challenges in preventing cyber criminals from accessing systems and disrupting business. Nine out

OT leaders had to quickly increase spending to manage the processes related to the digital connectivity of IT-OT network assets that are essential to supporting work from home. These two separate issues both affected technology budgets. SOCs and NOCs required more staff and equipment as the pandemic accelerated digital transformation and increased the need for connectivity for secure remote access. Employees working from home and OEMs and system integrators were hampered by their ability to travel. The pandemic accelerated the need for secure remote access as technical staff could not be on-site to perform work in-person.

Faced Malware and an Increased 3.Organizations Incidence of Insider Threats and Phishing

The survey showed significant growth in phishing attacks with 58% reporting this type of intrusion, up from 43% last year. The increase in phishing stems from attackers exploiting weaknesses related to the rapid changes to support remote work that emerged at the beginning of 2020. Along with balance of most global IT business, OT organizations were clearly affected. As employees continue to work remotely, it is clear that OT organizations need to extend zero trust to their endpoints to address the expanded attack surface.

Leaders Continue to Struggle with Security 4.OTMeasurements

OT leaders are tracking and reporting cybersecurity measurements consistently with "cost" falling lower on the priority list than "risk assessment" and "implications to the business." Vulnerabilities (70%), and intrusions (62%) remain the top cybersecurity measurements that are tracked and reported, but tangible risk management outcomes have become more prevalent this year (57%).

Overcoming the OT Challenges

Arguably, the demand for resiliency that is achieved from implementing cybersecurity best practices has gained amplified interest over the past 12 months. Despite that interest, the 2021 report indicates that OT leaders continue to struggle. Increased digital connectivity of OT and IT networks rolls on, yet in this year’s survey only 7% of OT leaders reported no intrusions. It's clear that many organizations face challenges when it comes to security practices and ultimately protecting their infrastructure from today's increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. With that said, top-tier OT organizations are realizing cybersecurity success and managing to weather the unusual situation brought on by the pandemic and the corresponding rapid innovation. Those top-tier organizations continue to make a commitment to promoting centralized visibility and taking a proactive approach to security to protect their critical systems. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» INSIGHT

INTEGRATING WFH INTO THE HYBRID WORKPLACE Guido Kragten, Category Lead for Cloud Platforms at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard company discusses how to look at integrating the longer-term Home Office into your Hybrid Workplace

inally, there is a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. As we get closer to the easing of lockdowns and social restrictions, many organizations are starting to look forward to welcoming employees and clients back to the office. But if you think that this is the end of working from home, think again. While working from home was initially a reactionary solution to COVID-19, now that it has demonstrated its value, it is here to stay. In fact, I believe we will see a re-

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newed focus on the home office as it becomes an integral part of organizations’ long-term hybrid workplace strategies, and not just a stopgap solution. This new approach will require a further change in mindset and network infrastructure. If organizations wish to enable their employees to successfully work from home in the long-term without impact or risk, their remote foundations need to be as strong as possible – before they even start thinking about the physical office. Here are three things they must consider.

Connectivity and access at the Edge is critical. With the home office set to become a permanent place of work, organizations can no longer afford to ignore the limitations of home network solutions and consumer-grade network equipment, which can cause user experience problems that pose a very real threat to workforce productivity and business continuity. Indeed, as expectation levels rise and patience levels fall in the wake of the pandemic, employees at home must be able to con-

» INSIGHT over which devices employees are using and the risks they are taking. This new explosion of unmanaged devices connecting regularly to the network at its Edge means that organizations are faced with a much larger attack surface, but lack a good view of it. They must find ways to increase visibility and control – without increasing workload. After all, securing and monitoring end users, devices and things, on a scale that a hybrid workplace model requires, takes time that IT teams do not have. Automation and Zero Trust Security models are the only way to effectively streamline security operations. With real-time monitoring, IT teams will be able to detect, prevent, isolate and stop network breaches, ideally before they happen. Solutions like automatic device categorization based on network fingerprint and dynamic segmentation will provide the reliable, effortless control needed.

nect and collaborate at the same level and access the same network functionality and applications as they do when in the office. To achieve this, organizations need to find ways to extend their infrastructure to the Edge of the network. This will include looking for remote access solutions that can provide home workers with fast, reliable enterprise-level network performance. These solutions must be able prioritize network tasks to eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks and have built-in policy enforcement to ensure that employees can connect securely to the network and key applications. Plug-and-play options should also be considered, as they make installation effortless for employees – and in turn, IT teams.

Network security will be more complex than ever. The rapid transition to working from home throughout the pandemic brought with it significant complexities for network security – complexities that must now be addressed if employees are to be allowed to move freely between the office and home. IT teams no longer have complete control

Guido Kragten

Category Lead for Cloud Platforms, Aruba

But they should also be aware that any failures in connectivity and access will have implications for security and can compound threats. If employers fail to provide adequate remote working solutions, employees may search for digital workarounds, potentially downloading and installing tools and apps from questionable sources. Security must get back on the front foot.

considered the employer’s responsibility under a hybrid workplace model.

Organizations need to take full responsibility for the at-home employee experience. The only way a hybrid workplace model can truly succeed is if the work-fromhome experience is on par with the in-office experience.

These are all questions that organizations must ask if they want to successfully integrate the home office into their longterm strategy.

We have already spoken about the need to provide the same levels of connectivity and access. The quality of network experience directly impacts workforce productivity, collaboration and working relationships and as such, employee experience is a performance metric for IT. But network performance cannot be the only consideration, and satisfied employees require more than just digital capabilities. If the home office is to truly be a permanent extension of the workplace, employers must take a more holistic approach to equipping the employee experience. This means that factors such as physical workspaces, comfort and ergonomics, and additional equipment like headsets and monitors – which have largely been left to employees to date – may now also be

What other benefits are employees missing out on when they work from home? What tools and equipment do they not have access to? What aspects of the employee experience would discourage them from seeing the home office as a viable alternative – and can we address them?

What does the future hold? The truth is that no one knows. As we saw in 2020, circumstances can change at any moment and organizations must be ready to respond accordingly. What happens if your employees grow tired of working from home? If the trend for third-party collaboration spaces picks up where it left off pre-pandemic? With this in mind, flexible network technology such Remote Access Points offer a lowrisk solution to support home workers at the Edge as needed. They offer easy provisioning and can be easily turned off and mailed back – providing control and visibility while ensuring a consistent, safe experience. Longer-term, organizations will need to focus on building an agile network that can scale when and as required. This will be the most resourceful way of ensuring that you only pay for the connectivity you need at any given time. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» INSIGHT

FROM ON-CAMPUS TO ON-DEMAND

Amr Alashaal, Regional Vice President - Middle East at A10 Networks writes about secure networking for the new higher education

ven before the COVID-19 pandemic, connectivity played an important role in university life. In recent years, it has become a routine practice for students to attend lectures virtually. A wealth of online learning resources is available both within university networks and on the internet. Meanwhile, online retail, banking, health services, gaming, media, and more are mainstays of student life. Now a global pandemic has radically accelerated this trend. Universities everywhere have been forced to create and expand online remote access for their students, including many of which had not yet begun the evolution. More than just a convenience, connectivity has become a lifeline for students—and network admins to meet their needs. For university IT, this means making

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a fundamental shift from on-campus networking to supporting a distributed network across the globe.

Empowering the New University

The pandemic has been a wakeup call for university IT: Improvisation and patchwork of legacy infrastructure and security will no longer suffice. Institutions of higher education need a wellthought-out plan for moving to a more resilient, on-demand model. With current on campus traffic relatively light at many universities, the best time to upgrade is now.

Continued Needs of the On-campus Model

For their on-campus learning population, universities need to leverage their existing on-campus networks to support grow-

» INSIGHT ing devices and traffic. Even if the on-campus population is not growing, the number of devices and connections continues to rise. Rather than purchasing costly new IPv4 addresses on the market, a carrier-grade network (CGN) solution makes it possible to extend their current pool through carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), which uses address and port translation in large scale to extend the life of an IPv4 network infrastructure. Meanwhile, it’s important to have a plan in place for IPv6 migration. Specialized resources such as student ERP, registration, billing, online classes, and collaboration will be accessed on devices that will increasingly run IPv6, while network infrastructures may still be running IPv4 for the foreseeable future. Since IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, universities will have to accommodate the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks to ensure business continuity and prepare for future growth.

Ensuring High Availability

Higher education faces one of the most challenging environments in IT. From proliferating unmanaged devices, to spiky traffic patterns driven by class schedules, to highly latency-sensitive applications such as online classes, research, video, music, and gaming, university IT faces requirements more similar to a commercial service provider than an enterprise. In meeting these demands, IT must have a fully developed strategy to ensure high availability, disaster recovery, multi-cloud security, and load balancing.

Amr Alashaal Regional Vice President - Middle East, A10 Networks

Secure On-demand Education

As the university environment expands beyond campus, institutions need a security model based on the recognition that a threat can come from anywhere. The Zero Trust model responds to these challenges by adopting the approach of “trust nobody”—inside or outside the network. Cybersecurity strategies are redesigned accordingly along the following key principles: • • •

Create network micro-segments and micro-perimeters to restrict east-west traffic flow and limit excessive user privileges and access as much as possible. Strengthen incident detection and response using comprehensive analytics and automation. Provide comprehensive and centralized visibility into users, devices, data, the network, and workflows.

With learning platforms and resources accessible via the web, it’s essential to protect them against HTTP and web application-based security flaws. Web application firewall (WAF) systems use specific knowledge of HTTP and web-application vulnerabilities to filter or block these attacks without ever exposing the web servers or applications. This helps protect the environment against attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Automated DDoS protection is critical to protect against widespread and easily launched DDoS attacks. Universities should leverage DDoS threat intelligence, combined with real-time threat detection, to defend against DDoS attacks no matter where they originate. Methods such as automated signature extraction and blacklists of the IP addresses of DDoS botnets and available

vulnerable servers can help organizations proactively defend themselves even before the attacks starts.

Integrated Security Approach

Over the years, most organizations have collected a number of security point solutions, addressing specific threats and typically from many different vendors, added incrementally as new threats were identified or a new approach provided. These legacy systems increase the complexity of operations, add latency into applications and reduce security efficacy. An integrated approach that consolidates security functions as much as possible will allow these functions to work together seamlessly, enabling compliance and unified security. In conclusion, while the shift to remote and on-demand learning has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the transformation of higher education had already been well underway. Driven by trends in finances and enrollment, universities have needed to expand the opportunities and options available to students not only on campus, but around the world as well. The evolution in business models is now clear; what remains is to ensure that the university’s technology infrastructure can support the new direction. The network is front-and-center in this effort. By upgrading their capability to support growing numbers of connections and rising traffic, ensure cybersecurity and compliance, and maintain availability wherever and however students connect, universities can provide a solid foundation for success for their institutions and students alike. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» INSIGHT

RETURNING TO THE WORKPLACE Sanjit Bardhan, Vice President – Head of Emerging Markets, Physical Access Control Solutions writes how Access Control plays a vital role in a safe and secure return to work strategy Employers today face a new challenge: to provide a safe and clean work environment as employees bring with them a new social consciousness centered on public health awareness, social distancing and hygienic spaces. As employes consider a return to the physical workplace, they must adapt to new requirements, implement new procedures, and leverage technology to alleviate their employees’ concerns. Access control plays a critical role in creating a safe back-to-work strategy. Organizations can leverage contactless physical access technologies — including mobile credentials along with Bluetooth solutions — as well as implement location services and visitor management tools to provide employees with an experience that supports a healthy and safe work environment.

CHANGED EXPECTATIONS

As organizations move toward re-opening their offices, workers bring with them a new awareness of issues around human proximity, environmental and surface cleanliness, and the sharing of publicly accessed resources such as touch screens and keypads. Hygiene isn’t a new concern, but the level of awareness is new, as well as the need to give employees the confidence that their workplace is not only secure, but healthy and safe.

safety concerns at the forefront, security and facilities personnel have the opportunity to be the heroes of the day. At a time when employee safety is not just an ordinary need, but an extraordinary moral obligation, teams can rise to the fore with proactive solutions that meaningfully impact quality of life. Access control management can help route employees, in tandem with efforts to stagger work times. Physical access control systems (PACS) can also leverage location services to support contact tracing and reduce crowding, and these same systems can be used in support of thoughtful visitor management. While contactless credentials inherently support a touchless “badging in” experience, employers and building managers should implement these technologies as part of a holistic approach to building management. Clear policies, explicit signage, cleanliness protocols — all are part of this big picture. Those looking to support a safe return to the workplace can look to technology to help minimize the high-touch human interactions that have characterized PACS in the past. By upgrading from legacy systems to more modernized solutions, it is possible to significantly reduce human contact around access control in a way that directly addresses employee concerns.

TOUCHLESS ACCESS CONTROL

Physical access is a prime area of interest. Crowded entryways, elevators and shared working spaces are a threat to safe social distancing. Credentialing processes that come with high human-to-human contact are also a cause for concern.

Various forms of touchless access control can help to reduce viral spread at human-to-object touchpoints. By reducing contact between humans and the objects related to access control, security could help to minimize potential cross-contamination.

Those who manage physical access can play a key role in helping to meet these changed expectations. With health and

Automatic door operators, revolving doors, and sliding doors — all can help to reduce contact at high-volume entry

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

and exit points. These can be coupled with contactless credentials and readers to ensure security while minimizing surface contamination. Another strategy involves the use of longrange capable readers that leverage Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connections to deliver read performance at a distance. With a read range of up to several meters, BLE can further distance employees who might otherwise crowd up around readers and doors. Mobile access likewise reduces the need for employees to physically touch cards and communal readers. Organizations that rely on keypads or two-factor authentication may find mobile credentials and mobile capable readers to be a more hygienic alternative. The user is required to unlock their phone using a passcode, fingerprint or facial read in order for the phone to unlock, thus delivering two-factor security without the need to touch a shared keypad. In the same way, mobile also allows for a biometric layer to be added to the access experience. Businesses can configure the mobile credential to only work when the device is unlocked, thereby requiring the owner to authenticate using their enrolled biometric, whether fingerprint or facial recognition. That mitigates the risk of a lost, stolen, or shared mobile device from being used. And by leveraging the technology on the mobile device instead of at the door, users are only touching their own device, and not a touchpoint that is shared with every other occupant. Touchless credentials, including mobile-based, shouldn’t be limited to opening doors. Organizations also may find that these credentials support more hygienic protocols for logging in to networks, paying for vending, or activating printing.

» INSIGHT In order to reduce contact at shared surfaces, these technologies need to be implemented in tandem with clear policies and supporting signage.

OVER-THE-AIR CREDENTIALING

Most credentialing processes rely on a high degree of human-to-human interaction: someone in IT or the card office prepares the card, the card may then be passed to HR or the front desk for delivery to the user. And when a card is lost or stolen, the process repeats. Whether it is an employee or a visitor, the credentialing process is typically a high-touch operation. Over-the-air provisioning minimizes contact for those seeking credentials, and it can have a dramatic impact on the human-to-human contact for the administrator charged with assigning credentials. Fewer visits from those looking to obtain credentials significantly reduces the risk factor for those that normally see a range of personnel on a daily basis.

VISITOR MANAGEMENT

Visitors introduce a new variable to the equation. They must be credentialed upon entry, and their untracked movements can pose a health risk, or at least introduce a dangerous unknown should contact tracing become necessary. Solid policies and advanced technologies can ensure safe movement of visitors. Visitor management solutions can be used either standalone or in conjunction with an organization’s access control system. Visitors self-register in the lobby and hosts are notified when they arrive. Driver’s license scanners, barcode scanners, cameras, and printers all help support those front desk processes. While the primary use case is for visitors, these systems can also be used to issue employees temporary badges for single day use, or to issue replacement badges. Visitor management solutions are also ideal for a range of high-volume settings, including healthcare, schools, and logistics — all places where physical access control is critical and visitors are frequent. Even more, records from the visitor management system can be used for follow-up tracking of potential contacts in case an employee or visitor receives a positive virus test result.

Sanjit Bardhan

Head of Emerging Markets, Physical Access Control Solutions

LOCATION SERVICES

Key to keeping people physically distanced is knowing where they are at any given time. Much how GPS is used in outdoor settings, location services leverage BLE beacons to ping off gateways that in turn can identify the location of individuals in a physical space. An individual’s identity can be based on an ID card which broadcasts continually, creating a virtual map of location relative to the fixed gateways. Location services give management a means to be proactive rather than reactive in their efforts to promote physical distancing. The same system could make space utilization more efficient. Connected beacons could broadcast room occupancy, for example, letting people know which spaces are free and which are in use. In the same way, this connectivity could serve as an early-warning system. There’s also significant forensic value in this capability. Should an individual test positive for COVID, the arduous task of contact tracing — identifying people who have an infectious disease and those they’ve come in contact with — is automated. “Rather than relying on a person’s memory, you can trace a person — or anything tagged with a beacon – and build historical data on where that person had

been and who else had been there, with graphics and analysis,” said Blokker. In addition, location services support “mustering” — the ability to call together a select group of employees in an urgent circumstance.

BKrupa Srivatsan

Director of Product Marketing,

Location services can also support monInfoblox itoring usage of hand sanitizing stations. By embedding a BLE sensor in the soap or sanitizer dispenser, the user’s beacon authenticates and registers the event. With hand-hygiene being a key way to prevent the spread of infection, enforcing consistent usage is vital to a healthy workplace.

MAKING THE MOST OF PACS TECHNOLOGIES

For those charged with implementing and overseeing physical access control, these are extraordinarily challenging times. While technology can play a significant role in supporting social distancing and other pandemic- related needs, policies are at the core of any successful return-towork effort. It is critical, for example, to have solid audit systems in place. PACS systems generate logs, reports, and archives — invaluable information, if put to good use. Building managers can leverage this key data to see who was in the facility and when, in order to build a fuller picture of the operational risks. JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» TECHSHOW

DELL EMC VXRAIL

Dell Technologies announced Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) systems with enhanced performance based on recently launched Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

automated self-installation tools that give customers more deployment control.

The leader in HCI systems also delivers new software advancements and the introduction of dynamic nodes that evolve how customers use VxRail to more effectively use existing resources and support demanding workloads with Dell Technologies storage.

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New VxRail systems with the latest Dell EMC PowerEdge server technology, including 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, deliver 42% more cores for faster performance when compared to previous generations.

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Optional Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series increases bandwidth by 32% on average over the previous generation.

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Select VxRail systems are also being updated with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors, offering customers flexibility and scalability with up to 64 cores per processor with increased performance5 to support a wide range of workloads and use cases.

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Continued advancements to VxRail HCI System Software allow for a seamless experience when adopting next generation platforms with simplified VxRail deployment and management.

As the only HCI system jointly engineered with VMware, VxRail delivers unique automation and orchestration capabilities that allow its more than 12,000 customers to accelerate business outcomes across core data centers, cloud and edge locations. According to IDC research, VxRail customers experienced 452% five-year ROI, 70% more productive IT teams and 92% less unplanned downtime compared to previous IT environments. The new VxRail dynamic nodes support VMware HCI Mesh, allowing users to independently scale storage and compute for better resource management. VxRail dynamic nodes with VMware Cloud Foundation introduce connectivity with Dell EMC PowerStore, PowerMax and Unity XT to support additional data intensive workloads. VxRail HCI System Software introduces

Key Features:

NETSCALE 48 PATCH PANEL R&M, a globally leading developer and provider of cabling systems for high-quality network infrastructures, today launched the mixed-use Netscale 48 patch panel. With this new 48 port panel, both fiber optic and copper cabling can be accommodated within a single height unit, effectively saving up to half the rack space traditionally required for a combination of both media. This compact mixed-media solution helps free up valuable space for more cabling, switches, and servers, making it the ideal high-density patch panel for data centers and LAN environments.

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Copper cabling is still extensively used in the Middle East, especially in office environments. At the same time, fiber cabling is essential to meet ever growing bandwidth requirements. With space being a major constraint in such set ups, there is tremendous value that a mixedused panel can provide. Furthermore, this solution offers investment protection as it allows organizations to gradually shift from copper to fiber connectivity without having to replace existing data center infrastructure.

» TECHSHOW

LOGITECH SCRIBE Logitech is creating a more equitable meeting experience for remote participants with the launch of Logitech Scribe, an AI-powered whiteboard camera. Logitech Scribe, compatible with leading services like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, broadcasts whiteboard content into video meetings with incredible clarity, virtually transporting everyone into the same room. From meeting rooms to classrooms, Logitech Scribe comes at a crucial time when hybrid work and learning has become more pervasive. Logitech Scribe makes brainstorming, teaching, and team meetings equally accessible and productive for all participants through its simple-to-use design. Leveling the playing field for distributed teams, Scribe gives everyone — in-room or remote — a perfect view of the board. Enhanced integrations with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms make the experience effortless. In-room participants can begin sharing whiteboard content into video meetings by simply pressing the wireless button included with Scribe or tapping the meeting room touch controller, like Logitech Tap. The wireless button currently works with Zoom Rooms, and support for Teams Rooms will come later this year. Scribe also works as a USB content camera with virtually any video conferencing application, providing the flexibility to use Scribe in meeting rooms, classrooms, or even home offices.

Key Features: •

Capturing dry erase surfaces up to six by four feet, Logitech Scribe is a dedicated whiteboard camera that gives virtual meeting participants a clear, real-time view of the whiteboard.

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• • • •

Using built-in artificial intelligence, Scribe can render the presenter transparent, so remote users can see the whiteboard with nothing in the way, and automatically enhances the color of markers so the content is easier to read. Scribe even has the ability to detect other non-digital content like Post-its, a favorite tool for collaboration sessions. Whether viewing from a laptop at home or on the meeting room display, Scribe makes sure everyone has the best seat at the table. With a clean, wall-mounted design and thoughtful cable management, Scribe elegantly blends into any modern office or classroom. Plus, it comes with everything you need to quickly get it up and running. Together with the whiteboard content camera, Scribe includes a wireless share button, mounting components, power supply, and category cables for deployment at scale.

Key Features •

Netscale 48 can be equipped with all types of adapters available on the market today. These include the fiber optic connectors LC, SC, MPO, E-2000™ and even the latest types CS, SN, MDC of the Very Small Form Factor (VSFF) class. The R&M products Cat. 6A ISO, Cat 6A EL and Cat. 8 can be used for copper connectivity.

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The solution has been designed to accommodate changes without any network disruptions.

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An additional feature is the integrated patch cord manager which saves space-consuming additional height units with cable guides on the front.

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Netscale 48 supports Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) and is ‘hot-pluggable’ as sensor strips of the R&MinteliPhy AIM system can be plugged in or replaced during operation.

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The new 48 port variant is the latest addition to R&M’s Netscale range of solutions which offer the industry’s highest density of fiber optics ports for 19” cabinets.

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The family includes the larger Netscale 72 and Netscale 120 solutions, and is the first Ultra High Density platform with integrated functions for automated infrastructure management.

JUNE 2021 / CXO DX

» TRENDS & STATS

FINANCE TRANSFORMATION PLANS SHOULD ADDRESS FOUR KEY AREAS

Gartner has identified four transformation initiatives CFOs should implement or risk failing to meet their objectives. These plans will fail if CFOs do not fully account for the comparative advantages of their function.

guiding data owners’ governance of performance data, departing from a “single source of truth” to a “sufficient versions of truth” approach, optimized for decision-readiness, rather than reporting accuracy.

Finance transformation initiatives already have a historically poor track record, with just 39% of finance leaders agreeing that these projects have delivered on expected benefits to the function, and even fewer agreeing that the overall business has benefited. Now the stakes are higher, as digital is disrupting how businesses are run, and CFOs must reposition how they think about adding value to operations.

Portfolio-Level View of Decision Support – Finance has long sought to tailor its support to business unit-specific decisions. In an environment of increasing organizational complexity, this model suffers from a lack of scale, reduced decision support speed and the risk of duplication and “shadow finance” risks. Instead, Finance should focus on providing support at the portfolio level, with specialized decision experts focused on areas such as cost optimization, inventory and product improvements. Such an approach has provided a 2.5x improvement in the financial soundness of operational decisions.

The comparative advantages of the finance department, those services that finance can provide better than other functions, have shifted notably in recent years. Gartner has identified the four areas of comparative advantage where finance transformation initiatives should be focused: Maintain High-Quality Data – With the velocity, variety and volume of data growing exponentially and becoming increasingly accessible to decision makers throughout the organization, finance leaders should deemphasize their focus on driving corporate-approved performance data. Instead, finance should focus on

CXO DX / JUNE 2021

Balance Sheet Expertise – Business units are increasingly capable in conducting their own P&L analysis, yet 67% of decision makers agree or strongly agree that they would welcome more balance sheet-focused support from finance. Currently, 87% of support from finance is focused solely on P&L support. Finance departments should embed more balance sheet decision support experts from treasury and accounting into their go-forward support models, and resist defaulting to FP&A and embedded finance business partners for all business decision

support requests. End-to-End Process Design Expertise – While the business is less fully reliant on finance for both data synthesis and analytics support, there is scope for finance to provide further value through its unique expertise in end-to-end process design, which is becoming increasingly critical as more processes get disrupted through digital automation. This process expertise should also be leveraged within finance to accelerate the function’s digital ambition. For example, hyper-automation is going to become increasingly commonplace in finance organizations of the future, but most finance teams continue to focus their digital initiatives simply on reducing manual work. Gartner’s Future of Finance survey data, which interviewed 137 senior finance leaders in Q4 2020, revealed a common vision of the future of the finance department shared by 93% of respondents. It is a digital-first approach, able to provide data on demand, with a highly scaled finance structure and a broader diversity of skills among team members. However, CFOs report that finance departments are lagging against their ambitions: 15% were satisfied with progress on automation initiatives, 23% were satisfied on real-time commercial analytics and just 12% were satisfied with progress on driving digital technology adoption.