CXO DX September 2022

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OPTIMIZING THE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY

Organizations as they get deeper into digital transformation initiatives, will seek to leverage tools like low-code no-code (LC/NC) that enables automated code generation through visual building blocks like drag-and-drop and pull-down menu interfaces to cre ate new applications. This makes it easier to deploy new applications and automate pro cesses that are critical help to meet customer expectations for a seamless user experience. In short, it helps makes the transformation cost effective and faster. According to Gartner these LC/NC tools are expected to account for over 70% of new apps by the year 2025, which is a 45% increase compared to 2020, when less than 25% of apps were built on LC/NC platforms.

On the other hand, while there has been buzz around blockchain technologies for long, it may take few years more to mature as far as larger scale enterprise adoption goes. How ever, solutions are available for use case scenarios around smart contracts, streamlining supply chain processes such as transparent and accurate end-to-end tracking or to ad dress consumer demand for product authenticity etc, for ensuring data integrity between partners and more. Blockchain applications can help in securing identity credentials in critical sectors including healthcare and education, to create digital assets of organiza tions etc. For enterprises, exploring how they can use these technologies in relevant use case scenarios can unravel better efficiencies, boost their profile as well as gain a definite competitive advantage.

Cybersecurity will always be key priority at all phases of this journey. Organizations need to ensure that they are utilising services of a Security Operations Centre that in cludes proactive threat hunting and neutralization. Automation of security will allow quicker responses to security events. And while organizations go full steam ahead in their adoption of multi cloud infrastructure, a vital cog in their infrastructure would be the need to have full real time observability of their applications to resolve issues in quick time and meet Business objectives better.

R. Narayan

Editor in Chief, CXO DX

COVER STORY

14 » REINFORCING THE COMPETITIVE EDGE

Organizations will continue to seek transformation through further IT investments that keep them competitive in a growing digital economy.

NEWS INSIGHT

12 » DUBAI CUSTOMS DEPLOYS DELL TECHNOLOGIES DATA PROTECTION SOLUTIONS

CASE STUDY

18 » ON CLOUD NINE

Manish Bindra, Group CIO at Galadari Brothers Group discusses the success of “Cloud 9”.

INTERVIEW

17 » INSTILLING A TRAINING FOCUS

Ned Baltagi, MD, MEA at SANS Institute discusses the challeng es when it comes to reskilling employees.

22 » ALIGNING WITH MARKET TRENDS

Renjan George, MD at DVCOM dis cusses trends in market as well as their expansion plans.

COLUMN

24 » THE NEXT WAVE OF RANSOMWARE

Edwin Weijdema, Global Technol ogist, Veeam Software discusses the threat of triple extortion from ranwomware attacks

26 » WAKING UP TO THE DAWN OF HYBRID MULTI-CLOUD

Rob Tribe, VP, System Engineering EMEA at Nutanix elaborates why hybrid multicloud has become a kind of de facto industry standard

28 » HOW CIOS CAN KEEP STALLED DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROJECTS MOVING FORWARD

30 » TIPS TO CHOOSE YOUR SURVEILLENCE PROVIDER

Rudie Opperman, Regional Man ager, MEA at Axis Communications discusses 4 factors to consider before choosing a surveillence system provider

32 » CYBERSECURITY MYTHS THAT ARE HARMING YOUR BUSINESS

Dan Woods, Global Head of In telligence at F5 discusses seven myths that are distracting cyber security strategies

34 » THE METAVERSE REALITY CHECK

Ram Narayanan, Country Manager at Check Point Software Tech nologies, says the biggest hurdle to the Metaverse being a secure environment is in its foundations

REGULARS

20 » EMPOWERING THE AGENTS OF TRANSFORMATION

Technology leaders steering trans formation initiatives need to have complete observability of their IT stack in the cloud in real time

CIOs must realize that successful digital transformation requires non-technical skills as well, explains Ranjith Kaippada, MD at Cloud Box Technologies Machine Learning

06 » NEWS 36 » TECHSHOW

» TRENDS & STATS

ACTIVE ADVERSARIES INCREASINGLY EXPLOITING STOLEN SESSION COOKIES

With Stolen Session Cookies, Attackers can Impersonate Legitimate Users and Move Freely Around the Network

Sean Gallagher Principal Threat Researcher, Sophos

Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, today announced in the So phos X-Ops report, “Cookie stealing: the new perimeter bypass,” that active adver saries are increasingly exploiting stolen

session cookies to bypass Multi-Factor Au thentication (MFA) and gain access to cor porate resources. In some cases, the cookie theft itself is a highly targeted attack, with adversaries scraping cookie data from com promised systems within a network and using legitimate executables to disguise the malicious activity. Once the attackers obtain access to corporate web-based and cloud resources using the cookies, they can use them for further exploitation such as business email compromise, social en gineering to gain additional system access, and even modification of data or source code repositories.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen attackers increasingly turn to cookie theft to work around the growing adoption of MFA. At tackers are turning to new and improved versions of information stealing malware like Raccoon Stealer to simplify the pro cess of obtaining authentication cookies,

also known as access tokens,” said Sean Gallagher, principal threat researcher, So phos. “If attackers have session cookies, they can move freely around a network, impersonating legitimate users.”

Session, or authentication, cookies are a particular type of cookie stored by a web browser when a user logs into web resourc es. If attackers obtain them, then they can conduct a “pass-the-cookie" attack whereby they inject the access token into a new web session, tricking the browser into believing it is the authenticated user and nullifying the need for authentication. Since a token is also created and stored on a web browser when using MFA, this same attack can be used to bypass this additional layer of au thentication. Compounding the issue is that many legitimate web-based applications have long-lasting cookies that rarely or nev er expire; other cookies only expire if the user specifically logs out of the service.

MICROSOFT AZURE AVAILABILITY ZONES TO BE DELIVERED VIA ITS UAE DATA CENTRES

Cloud-native business continuity and disaster recovery suite makes regional debut

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Avail ability Zones, to be delivered via its UAE data centres in Dubai. The investment, which is aimed at enhancing the competitive ness of UAE businesses through the vital provision of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to the UAE government, its business community, and its population.

“With the advent of the always-on economy, uptime and contin uous access to critical data, applications and workloads have be come front-of-mind concerns for the region’s technology stake holders,” said Naim Yazbeck, General Manager, Microsoft UAE. “As businesses move forward amid increased industry upheavals and competition from market disrupters, competitiveness hinges on the ability to remain operational even as external issues desta bilise markets and supply chains. Backups alone will not deliver such capabilities. Rapid recovery requires strategy-focused infra structure and solutions to work effectively. That is what Azure Availability Zones delivers.”

Azure Availability Zones is a critical building block of a compre hensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. It is

designed to guarantee resilience and availability of business-crit ical applications and data in times of crisis, through advanced ar chitecture and built-in, end-to-end security. The launch of Azure Availability Zones also signifies the readiness of Microsoft’s UAE cloud locations to form the backbone of organisations’ fu tureproofing programmes, undertaken in the wake of the COVID pandemic crisis. Azure Availability Zones will build on the capa bilities and benefits offered through Microsoft’s enterprise-grade data centres in Dubai, which began operations in June 2019.

CROWDSTRIKE INTRODUCES AI-POWERED INDICATORS OF ATTACK

Trained on the world's richest threat intelligence, new detection and response capabilities proactively protect organizations against emerging adversary techniques

CrowdStrike, a leader in cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data, introduced the indus try’s first AI-powered Indicators of Attack (IoAs), new innovations for fileless attack prevention at scale and enhanced visibili ty for stealthy cloud intrusions. Delivered on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform and powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, these new detection and response capabilities stop emerging attack tech niques and enable organizations to op timize the threat detection and response lifecycle with speed, scale and accuracy.

More than a decade ago, CrowdStrike in vented IoAs, which brought a fundamen tally new approach to stopping breaches based on real adversary behavior, irrespec tive of the malware or exploit used in an attack. CrowdStrike has also pushed the

boundaries of applying AI in cybersecuri ty to identify and stop the most advanced, emerging attacks. Now, CrowdStrike is le veraging powerful AI techniques to create new IoAs at machine speed and scale.

“CrowdStrike leads the way in stopping the most sophisticated attacks with our in dustry-leading Indicators of Attack capa bility, which revolutionized how security teams prevent threats based on adversary behavior, not easily changed indicators,” said Amol Kulkarni, chief product and en gineering officer at CrowdStrike. “Now, we are changing the game again with the addition of AI-powered Indicators of At tack, which enable organizations to har ness the power of the CrowdStrike Securi ty Cloud to examine adversary behavior at machine speed and scale to stop breaches in the most effective way possible.”

KISSFLOW UNVEILS UNIFIED WORK PLATFORM

The platform bridges the gap between business users and IT to simplify work management and effectively mobilise the region’s community of ‘citizen developers

As it looks to cement its position as a pi oneer in the $50 billion low-code market, Kissflow has unveiled its vision for seam less work management across all facets of the modern enterprise. The company has consolidated market-leading solu tions across its portfolio – including its low-code, no-code, process automation, collaboration, and analytics offerings – to deliver a unified low-code/no-code work platform that enables enterprises to fasttrack digital transformation.

Outlining how the current, fragmented ap proach to work software hinders the success of digital initiatives, Suresh Sambandam, CEO, Kissflow said, “The multitude of si loed work management tools has created a complex, disjointed digital ecosystem. A holistic digital transformation is impossible without an inclusive approach where busi ness experts and IT teams can co-create.”

Suresh Sambandam CEO, Kissflow

“With our new unified platform, we’re enabling Middle East enterprises to move away from this disconnected, tactical ap proach to productivity, and instead em brace a radically simple and effective IT paradigm that delivers an inclusive and

unified experience to all enterprise users,” Sambandam added.

Kissflow’s new work platform consoli dates capabilities for app development, process management, task management, case management, data management, integrations, analytics, and collabora tion. It makes these easily consumable to end-users, teams, team managers, process experts, citizen developers and IT de velopers through the intuitive low-code, no-code model. This aligns with the com pany’s mission of democratising app de velopment in the region.

While Kissflow has designed its unified work platform to be industry-agnostic, in the Middle East, the company will focus on driv ing the uptake in the banking and finance, re tail, oil and gas, logistics and supply chain, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors.

Amol Kulkarni Chief Product and Engineering Officer, CrowdStrike

BEYONDTRUST UNVEILS NEW SECURITY PLATFORM

The new platform delivers breakthrough native integration across BeyondTrust applications with central visibility and control across an organization’s entire digital environment

BeyondTrust, the leader in intelligent identity and access security, today an nounced the BeyondTrust Platform, fea turing a modern architecture that delivers unprecedented visibility of identities and access across an organization’s entire digital estate, from on-premises to cloud, hybrid and operational technology en vironments. The BeyondTrust Platform delivers the most powerful intelligent identity and access security through an el egant, unified platform and interface that removes friction and drives unparalleled insights for organizations of all sizes.

Today, organizations are being asked to do more with less, while facing an expanding threat landscape. They know they cannot solve emerging security problems with a disjointed patchwork of solutions or a poorly integrated ecosystem.

“Our customers have told us they want a single platform that removes complexity

and the risk created by fragmented in frastructure,” said Raj Cherukuri, Chief Product Officer at BeyondTrust. “They need solutions that accelerate time to val ue with easy deployments and deliver a robust set of common capabilities to re duce security risk, while accelerating their digital transformation initiatives.”

The BeyondTrust Platform leverages a single interface to discover, manage, and protect identities, control access, as well as proactively detect anomalous activity.

Along with the platform, BeyondTrust also announced its new Endpoint Secu rity App, a modern privilege manage ment solution that enables better policy management, access control, aggregated application monitoring, and threat detec tion; these integrated capabilities prevent attackers from elevating privileges, mit igating cyberattacks. The company also unveiled an initial release of its new Cloud

WSO2 ADOPTS MICROSOFT’S TRUSTED CLOUD FOR OPEN-SOURCE INNOVATION

Under the partnership, cloud-native solutions will be rolled out to regions around the world via Microsoft Azure

tities. The partnership will also see the integration vendor adopt Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform.

The partnership will accelerate the delivery of the Choreo digital platform as a service (digital PaaS) and Asgardeo identity as a service (iDaaS) to help enterprise customers across multiple markets and industries speed up their cloud adoption and digital transfor mation initiatives.

Asgardeo simplifies customer identity and access management for any developer to integrate into their applications. It com bines traditional employee Identity Ac cess Management (IAM) principles with consumer credential security to create a secure personalized digital experience.

WSO2, a leading open-source integration vendor and Microsoft have announced a strategic partnership to roll out cloud-na tive solutions to regions around the world via Microsoft Azure—for securely deliv ering APIs, applications, and digital iden

Choreo empowers organizations to rapidly deliver new digital experiences by creating and deploying services, integrations, and APIs. The all-inclusive platform takes away the complexity of cloud native infrastruc ture so that development teams can quickly create, compose, collaborate on, reuse, and deliver API-driven business logic.

“WSO2 is pleased to enter into this stra tegic partnership with Microsoft,” said Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder and CEO, WSO2. “With Microsoft’s trusted cloud and services, the experience that WSO2 has cultivated in its own systems will en able development teams to build digital services that are safer and more secure than ever before. This partnership will allow them to increase their speed of in novation and accelerate our growth and customer adoption.”

Privilege Manager App, which provides visibility and management of entitlements across multicloud environments from a single pane of glass.

Raj Cherukuri Chief Product Officer, BeyondTrust

Sanjiva Weerawarana

Founder and CEO, WSO2

MANAGEENGINE RELEASES SAAS VERSION OF ANALYTICS PLUS

Integrates with over 40 Business Apps and 30 IT Apps

ManageEngine, the enterprise IT man agement division of Zoho Corporation, announced that its IT analytics product, Analytics Plus, is now available as a SaaS offering, enabling users set up a fully functional, integrated analytics platform in under 60 seconds. This launch com pletes the company's vision to deploy an alytics anywhere, that is, to make it easy for the organization to deploy analytics on private or public clouds such as AWS and Azure.

IT operations nowadays are structured in a way that warrants the use of sever al monitoring tools and technologies to ensure the business remains operational and accessible to its customers around the clock. These disjointed IT tools, while im peccable in providing visibility into their area of operations, fall short in providing complete visibility into IT as a whole, costing IT leaders time and effort in gath

ering insights.

Analytics Plus' new cloud offering com pletes the IT application stack by creating a foundation for integrations, allowing organizations to connect to a multitude of data sources and attain faster time to mar ket, increase productivity, curb expendi ture and garner more revenue.

"At ManageEngine, we've witnessed sev eral digital transformation trends over the last two decades across all industry ver ticals: rapid cloud adoption, a need for setting up a data-centric culture, and the need for advanced AI to sift through data lakes and establish correlations, triage events, and eliminate the need for human intervention in data analysis," said Rakesh Jayaprakash, product manager at Mana geEngine. "That's why we've launched the cloud version of Analytics Plus—a mar riage of our 20+ years of domain expertise

Rakesh Jayaprakash Product Manager, ManageEngine

with cloud benefits like flexibility, agility and scalability to help augment strategic decision-making with insights that are fast, reliable and contextual."

BEDU ALIGNS ITS EXPANSION PLANS WITH THE DUBAI METAVERSE STRATEGY

Digital pioneer to create new jobs adding consultancy and advisory services for Web3 and Metaverse projects

the Metaverse. Our UAENFT Keypass, a unique membership scheme for the non-fungible token community, was launched by our UAENFT division earlier this year, and we have conducted a series of well-received curated art drops. As we expand our ser vices, it is now our intention to enable a free economy within our Metaverse and create several job opportunities that will contrib ute to national growth.”

BEDU, the Dubai-based leader of Metaverse and Web3 technolo gies in the Middle East, announced an ambitious expansion of its services and team, as it aligns itself closely with Dubai’s recently announced emirate-wide strategy for the Metaverse.

“Dubai’s bold vision for the next iteration of the Internet is one we wholeheartedly share,” said Amin Al Zarouni, Chief Exec utive Officer of BEDU. “Today, BEDU looks to that future, as our strategy already aligns with that of the government. We have made waves already with our work in NFTs, blockchain and

The Dubai Metaverse Strategy, announced recently, is designed to support the generation of some 40,000 virtual jobs by 2030 while adding US$4 billion to Dubai’s GDP over the next five years. The programme is also aimed at consolidating the emir ate’s reputation as a Web3 leader and Metaverse hub, being home to more than 1,000 metaverse and blockchain companies already operating here.

Founded in 2021, BEDU has rapidly risen to become the leading Web3 company in the UAE. Following the Dubai government’s announcement of its Metaverse strategy, the company has made plans to expand its services to support public and private sector entities in their Web3 transformation journeys.

REDINGTON FOSTERS COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN AZURE-NATIVE ISVS AND CHANNEL

Opportunities on offer for channel partners to leverage unique solutions from key Azure-native ISVs

Redington Value, a leading value-add ed distributor (VAD) in the Middle East and Africa, has launched a new initiative ‘The Pitch Room’ by Redington, powered by Microsoft, to help channel partners capitalize on state-of-the-art and unique solutions from Azure-native Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).

ISVs are the tech-based IP owners that disrupt the way customers function or process information. ‘The Pitch Room’ by Redington offers a one-of-a-kind plat form for regional value-added resellers to strengthen skillsets and knowledge on de signing comprehensive and innovative in dustry-specific solutions from Azure-na tive ISVs.

At the recently concluded event, chan nel partners had a one-off opportunity to listen to pitches from five different Azure-native ISVs – Human Logic Soft

ware, VDD, ZIWO, AHOY, Verofax – to then assess how they can add value to end customers and boost their portfolios with these solutions.

The initiative also serves as an ideal stage for Redington’s ISV ecosystem to have meaningful discussions and network

ing opportunities with relevant channel partners. By creating this close-knit eco system for collaborations, Redington is playing a vital role in enhancing customer experiences and simplifying their digital transformation journeys.

ACRONIS’ MID-YEAR REPORT FINDS RANSOMWARE IS THE NUMBER-ONE THREAT

Ransomware Projects Damages to exceed $30 Billion by 2023

tion vectors. Nearly one percent of all emails contain malicious links or files, and more than one-quarter (26.5%) of all emails were delivered to the user’s inbox (not blocked by Microsoft365) and then were removed by Acronis email security.

Acronis unveiled its mid-year cyberthreats report that details how ransomware continues to be the number one threat to large and medium-sized businesses, including government organizations, and underlines how over-complexity in IT and infrastructure leads to increased attacks. Nearly half of all reported breaches during the first half of 2022 involved stolen credentials, which en able phishing and ransomware campaigns. Findings underscore the need for more holistic approaches to cybersecurity.

To extract credentials and other sensitive information, cybercrim inals use phishing and malicious emails as their preferred infec

Moreover, the research reveals how cybercriminals also use mal ware and target unpatched software vulnerabilities to extract data and hold organizations hostage. Further complicating the cyber security threat landscape is the proliferation of attacks on non-tra ditional entry avenues. Attackers have made cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance systems a priority of late. Successful breaches using these various routes have resulted in the loss of billions of dollars and terabytes of exposed data.

These attacks are able to be launched due to overcomplexity in IT, a common problem throughout businesses as many tech lead ers assume more vendors and programs lead to improved secu rity when the inverse is actually true. The current cybersecurity threat landscape requires a multi-layered solution that combines anti-malware, EDR, DLP, email security, vulnerability assess ment, patch management, RMM, and backup capabilities all in one place.

DUBAI CUSTOMS DEPLOYS DELL TECHNOLOGIES DATA PROTECTION SOLUTIONS

The integrated data protection solutions to simplify the work of Dubai Customs and its employees, streamline customer services and drive operational efficiencies

Dubai Customs has implemented Dell Technologies suite of data protection solu tions to accelerate its digital transforma tion agenda.

Dubai Customs chose a combination of Dell’s next-generation data protection and backup solutions to meet the organi zation’s constantly evolving data protec tion needs. The new solutions will enable Dubai Customs to save time and resources and allow staff to manage and use data insights to facilitate trade movement in Dubai while providing customer services.

The technologies in use include the Dell PowerProtect DP4400 which is an inte grated appliance that offers backup, rep lication, recovery, and cloud readiness. It also offers comprehensive data protection with broad application ecosystem support and seamless integration and automation across the entire protection stack. This makes it easy and cost-effective to scale up to protect more physical and virtual machines with high efficiency. The solu tion is also helping Dubai Customs to pre vent end-user data loss, reduce operation al overheads and allow more than 2,500 users in 17 Customs centers in Dubai, to operate in a secure, hybrid environment.

As the region’s leading Customs admin istration and Dubai’s first government de partment, Dubai Customs has been among the first entities to embrace digitization

to promote ease of doing business. The Covid-19 pandemic propelled new ways of working that required rapid responses and transformation to deal with the situ ation. Dubai Customs was able to adapt quickly due to its technology adoption, in cluding a virtual computing environment, data protection solutions, and backup solutions from Dell, which were used to transfer users’ data from computers locat ed in the offices to their remote devices, through desktop virtualization, without any need for physical employee presence.

Facilitating global trade requires a robust digital infrastructure supported by a thor ough understanding of the value of data. Its collection, storage and analysis will prove crucial in ensuring business growth and longevity.

“Dubai Customs’ keenness to develop its capabilities and provide the best services by using the latest advanced IT applica tions enabled the department to respond quickly to the challenges imposed by the pandemic and leverage integrated data protection,” said Younis Othman, Director of Information Technology Department at Dubai Customs.

“Dell Technologies data protection solu tions and virtual desktop infrastructure technologies strengthen our capabilities in taking our valued services to ultimate levels of protection. This reinforces our

Younis Othman Director of Information Technology Department, Dubai Customs

role in serving Dubai and the wider na tional economy by providing services that enable users to improve their businesses in Dubai.”

“By advancing the automation process, simplifying our daily operations through smart infrastructure, and keeping pace with the latest technologies while ensuring the highest safety standards, we strength en our role in keeping pace with Dubai’s continuous progress and smart city am bitions. With cost savings amounting to 1.816 million dirhams from 2019 until the first half of 2022, we’ve consolidated our high rank in customs administrations around the world,” added Othman.

Walid Yehia, Sr. Director and General Manager – UAE, at Dell Technologies said: “Dubai Customs’ digital trans formation strategy is underpinned by a strong technology foundation that will help foster global trade and drive a new era of global connectivity. As part of our collaboration, we have developed an agile, software defined data protection platform that provides flexible data man agement and compliance across applica tions, while safeguarding critical data. As Dubai Customs drives its digitisation agenda forward, we are committed to pro viding cutting edge technologies that will help Dubai Customs achieve their goal of transforming Dubai into a global trading hub of the future.”

REINFORCING THE COMPETITIVE EDGE

Organizations will continue to seek transformation through further IT investments that keep them competitive in a growing digital economy

An accelerated transformation led by technologies such as the cloud services is something that has been set in mo tion over past couple of years following the pandemic. Moving ahead, the Metaverse is emerging as a parallel digital world, and although it is still early days, it is likely to have a pivotal role in the digital economy.

Rapid digitalization across sectors, unfolding since the pandemic, looks unstoppable as companies explore and adopt all feasible digital commercial models to reach out and serve their customers. Against this backdrop, investments in IT will continue to see a surge.

Jayakumar Mohanachandaran, Group CIO, Easa Salah Al Gurg Group of companies says, “In the current scenario, everyone un

derstands the need of technology and related investments without going through an ROI battle. Nevertheless, there is a focus shift towards customer centric projects that will help the organizations to stay upbeat with the market conditions.”

IT has taken a giant leap to occupy centre stage as a strategic enabler the competitive advantage that Businesses seek in their growth plans.

Jacob Mathews, Head of IT at a government entity says, “The pandemic has moved IT from back office and cost centre roles to being seen as tools for strategic advantage over competitors. IT are no longer enablers for business but drivers for compet itive growth. The CEOs now ask IT leaders to advise on tech nology roadmaps aligned with business strategy and this is what drives IT requirements and investments. One of the key focus is to give excellent customer experiences through digital transfor mation that in turn drive revenue and growth. Business leaders understand routine expenses like replacement of old hardware are necessary but look to IT leaders to drive strategic growth. All IT leaders need to be focused on this area and to always look at continuous improvement in services - we must not rest in our prior achievements. As HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum said, whoever does not move forward is in retreat and whoever relies on past achievements loses his future.”

While it is safe to say that the darkest phase of the pandemic is truly behind us, the potency of digital transformation has been visible to all Businesses. It is safe to presume that there would

hardly any leading businesses in any sector that have not yet undertaken a transformation project. And those who have, will continue to pursue the next phase of adoptions because that’s the need of the hour, to try and stay a little ahead in the market. So investments in digital transformation will keep pace into the fore seeable period ahead.

Padam Sundar Kafle, Head IT and Automation, Aster Hospitals UAE says, “The Pandemic has shown the true picture for every industry as to the true impact and power of technology. Compa nies which survived and thrived did so largely the basis of digita lization and those who could not are probably because of a mis calculation of the need for digitalization transformation. I believe, companies are on priority basis deciding on the investments for the IT infrastructure and software in the post pandemic phase.” Investments related to any transformation will keep its pace irre spective of digital as pandemic has shown us the importance of being resilient to any situation. Technology transformation will continue to attract larger investments as the board understands these are must to have and not myths anymore.

Jacob adds, “I believe that digital transformation is not a one off but continuous process - companies and for the matter most of us will need to continuously keep improving and hence due to this the investments in digital transformation would continue across the board. The pace of the investments would differ based on the industry - some industries more impacted than the others.”

The focus of further transformation investments could be on the technologies that enhance the customer facing services.

Jayakumar says, “Customer Centric projects like CRM, Automa tion projects that helps organizations to increase the efficiency and reduce the people dependency, Analytics projects that gives clarity and up-to-date information for better decision making will top the list in my opinion.”

According to Jacob, “Key areas of investment would be digital transformation using artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, cloud computing, blockchain, web3 etc. These investments when done correctly can be used to gain strategic advantage based on the industry and geographies the company or government agen cies operate in. Another key focus will be on Cybersecurity as this has become a board level topic with the need to ensure that there are adequate information security controls in place.”

There is an opportunity for organizations to continue the good work and digitalize further to extend the gains they have made in terms of expanded markets and customer base.

Padam adds, “The investment trends have been showing an up ward curve in the past two years and there is every reason to be lieve that in the next few years, the trend will be likewise. In my opinion by 2025 , major IT investments from the companies would be for further digital transformation and the virtualization of the services to reach out to global markets more effectively.” He adds that in near future, around 60% of the investments by

businesses would be further fortifying their cybersecurity and the balance would be towards digitalization.

One would think that with the multi cloud a reality, managing such a diverse IT environment can get challenging for the IT teams. However, Jayakumar disagrees and views the multi-cloud as a blessing of multiple options vis-à-vis a vendor lock in seen traditionally especially in the pre-cloud era.

“I don’t think so. Honestly, the multi cloud is blessing for all the technology leaders. Earlier we had the situation of getting locked into a particular vendor but now we have plenty of options based on our business and technical requirements and this will help us to be more agile when it comes to serving business requirements. There is still some more clarity required in terms of getting in and out of vendor commitments, but in the current competitive mar ket conditions, I hope this should get addressed in near future.”

Concurrent with that view, Padam elaborates, “It would be easier for IT professionals in a multi cloud scenario with multiple choic es of vendors for the services they provider vis a vis the scenario where we are forced to have a single cloud provider and therefore need to accept what they provide. It will be beneficial in terms of both the financial aspects and security for the organizations who are opting for a multi-cloud environment.”

Jacob elaborates that running different workloads on a couple or more cloud platforms reduced the risk and further with cloud da

Jayakumar Mohanachandaran Group CIO, Easa Salah Al Gurg Group of companies

tacenters of the global providers available locally, this is surely an advantage to consider. Also, the teams need to upskill to be familiar with the different platforms.

“I think the IT leader needs to ensure that technology platform is not deployed on one cloud platform but on multiple - in UAE we have Azure and AWS available locally. By running on both cloud platforms our risks can be reduced and it will also help us to en sure that we get good competitive pricing from cloud providers.

To manage the multi-cloud environment, we need to ensure that our internal teams have skills in either one of these platforms and the team with AWS skills training Azure team and vice versa to save costs. However, the multi cloud is not any more challenging than other technology platforms if we have adequate planning up front and review this regularly for improvement.”

The IT teams have never been more challenged as in past two years as they were called upon to support remote work support on in a very short time to. In some cases, they were to set up a remote work enabling infrastructure right from scratch. The past two years have been a challenging learning curve for IT teams and their leaders which made them realize the importance of as pects like Disaster Recovery or cybersecurity for instance.

Jayakumar says that there are multiple things learnt with a few right at the top of the list. For instance, he says that but to take the top few, that any IT Team truly needs to deliver Agility to their or ganization in whichever business model they may be in, and they

must prioritise projects that enables businesses to be resilient as well as be capable to handle the real disaster recovery situations and thereby ensuring business continuity.

Padam says that there was learning and relearning during the pandemic with hundreds of issues raised wherein there was an extensive area to cover during the transition, ranging from trans formation scenarios to security aspects.

“For IT team members with domain knowledge limited, they face huge challenges to keep up with the requirements. That phase underlined the need for IT teams to upskill on a continuous basis on trending technologies so that they can live up to expectations in their job roles.”

Jacob says, it has been a rewarding phase in terms of the continu ous learning which is a fact that IT professionals need to live with.

“Learning curve has been steep but I enjoyed every moment of it. I think those who opt to work in IT must be ready to be prepared to continuously learn and improve right from their graduation till they retire and beyond. Not all learning is from books, we have seminars, podcasts, ebooks and so many other digital and traditional channels.”

In summary, while IT teams are upskilling in a continuous mode to be conversant with technologies that they need to deploy for their organization, many organizations are getting set for the next phase of transformation.

Jacob Mathews Head of IT at a government entity

Padam Sundar Kafle Head of IT at a government entity

INSTILLING A TRAINING FOCUS

How are enterprise organisations building the next genera tion of IT leaders in MEA?

We are seeing an increased interest and uptake in upskilling and retraining programs across the region. Organisations are invest ing in programs that help them find the talent that they need to build their IT teams. At the same time, there is a global trend occurring coming out of COVID, where organisations are hav ing to double down on building career development schemes for their employees. These schemes include the need to provide training and personal development opportunities for staff. As a result, cybersecurity training and certification is becoming in creasingly important for enterprise organisations in the MEA region.

The tech talent squeeze in the Middle East means CIOs must build deep leadership benches. How should training and skilling be handled in enterprise organisations?

Next to building the talent pool through external hiring, enter prise organisations can look to their existing staff and use assess ments and training to identify internal talent to help strengthen the bench of IT talent. SANS provides several solutions to help enterprise organisations recruit, retain and retrain both existing and new talent. We’ve seen many successful programs with ex isting customers where talents are successfully recruited and then prepared through hands-on, immersive training for a new role within their own organisation.

What are some of the challenges your organisation faces when it comes to reskilling and training IT talent?

Time is probably the biggest enemy for all organisations when it comes to reskilling and training IT talent. The current short age gap is so large that organisations are looking for talent that they can deploy a day later. But SANS has solutions that allow people to train when they have time (OnDemand) or allow them to learn in a gamified manner, so they immediately learn how to apply the skills they learn. Essentially this is also SANS’ prom ise: you can apply the skills you learn with SANS the minute you go back to your job.

How can enterprise IT work together with multinational vendors to develop a huge skills pool to bridge the IT skills gap in the Middle East?

SANS has previously run programs in regions where it is our mission and intent to build the skills and talent pool for that particular region. Enterprise organisations can partner up to gether to support such regional programs, or sponsor them and offer open days that allow talents to see what it would mean working for those enterprise organisations. Next to building a bigger talent pool, these sorts of programs also help enhance and strengthen the regional cybersecurity community.

Ned Baltagi, Managing Director, MEA at SANS Institute discusses the challenges enterprise organizations face when it comes to reskilling employees

Ned Baltagi MD, MEA, SANS Institute

ON CLOUD NINE

Manish Bindra, Group CIO at Galadari

Brothers Group discusses a significant milestone for the company when it went live with the cloud migration project “Cloud 9” a few weeks back

Please elaborate on the Cloud 9 project you completed? what were the objectives and when did it start and finish?

Our “Cloud 9” project involved migrating servers from 4 data centres to a multi-cloud environment. This included a combi nation of 14 legacy and modern enterprise applications. For us maintaining multiple datacentres across geographies was becom ing a big challenge considering the ever-growing pressure of re ducing the back-office costs. Also, with an enhanced emphasis on digital transformation, we wanted to reduce our focus on day to day infra issues and concentrate more on launching new business apps at greater speed. Furthermore, this also called for an agile infrastructure where we could have the potential to scale as busi ness expands with minimal business disruption. These were the key drivers for us that motivated us to initiate this project. This

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project had three major phases: selection of cloud platform, rear chitecting legacy applications for cloud migration and the actual migration to cloud. The entire project took a year, out of which 6 months were spent in platform selection and the rest executed in the other two phases.

Discuss some of the challenges faced?

Considering the size of the project, we did face many technical challenges; however, it was easy to overcome technical challeng es as we had learnings from experiences of other companies who had moved to cloud. The real challenge is the change manage ment within the organisation. There is always a hesitation in ac ceptance when you want to shift from something which is stable and has been working for years to something new. Though we had full support from our senior management as they were convinced on the benefits of the cloud, it was a challenge to convince the project team as they had worked on on-prim infrastructure for many years and were worried about job continuity. We conducted multiple sessions to address their concerns and ensured that they are well equipped to execute the project.

Discuss the solutions you have used in your cloud journey and consolidation to a multi cloud environment?

Based on our infrastructure needs and future requirements, we chose to go with a hybrid solution. We have deployed combina tion/amalgamation of IaaS and PaaS from OCI and Azure. OCI was the natural choice for us as most of our application landscape is from Oracle and our legacy applications are deployed on Ora cle databases. We built our data warehouse & data analytics layer on Azure as we had selected Power BI for business intelligence.

Did the pandemic play any role in persuading the decision to accelerate to the cloud?

Yes, the pandemic did reshape the business strategy; we are not only expanding in new businesses and geographies but also de ploying new sales channels in existing businesses where technol ogy is playing a crucial role. We have started many new proj ects which have to be finished in much lesser time that what we used to target before pandemic. This requires greater flexibility and scalability of infrastructure which cannot be achieved by on premise Infrastucture.

What are the benefits you see from this consolidation on the cloud?

The topmost benefits for us are cost savings. We will have direct savings of AED 700,000 per year and opportunity cost savings of AED 14 Mn. In addition to this we will have usual cloud benefits of getting latest infrastructure as well as data security, scalability, agility and reliability in addition to reduction in carbon footprint and freeing up costly real estate utilised by data centres.

Discuss how cybersecurity concerns have been addressed? In my opinion it’s a misconception that on premise data is more secure than cloud. In order to match the security standards of cloud providers one need to invest considerably in security in

frastructure and constantly invest to keep it up to date. Cloud vendors have advantage of economies of scale, which an internal IT function cannot achieve. We had multiple sessions with each cloud vendor on their security infra and in few cases we also vis ited their datacenters.

Does the migration include most critical workloads as well? Yes, we have migrated all critical workloads, but we have en sured that we have a robust backup strategy and disaster recovery through mirroring in different geographies.

Do you think with regional datacentres available from all leading public cloud providers now, some major concerns are taken care of?

Yes, all the leading players have datacentres in region with most of them setting up in UAE. This was one of the key reasons, we confidently took the step of going ahead with cloud.

Manish Bindra Group CIO, Galadari Brothers Group

EMPOWERING THE AGENTS OF TRANSFORMATION

Technology leaders steering transformation initiatives need to have complete observability of their IT stack in the cloud at hand in real time

Organizations

across verticals need to grab a compet itive edge and sustain it, which is the objective of the digital transformation projects they undertake. Against this backdrop of digital transformation ini tiatives and cloud migration projects that have been gathering momentum in recent years and especially accelerated during the pandemic, it has also become critical to manage a diverse mix of multi cloud infrastructure and applications to deliver targeted business outcomes.

The focus is also on the Technology leaders who are helming the transformation projects and the support that they get from their organizations to help deliver sustainable transformation.

A recent report from Cisco AppDynamics ‘Agents of Transfor mation 2022’ reveals the benefits for those organizations that are able to create an environment in which technologists can devel op their skills and accelerate their careers to become Agents of Transformation - elite technologists with the skills, vision and ambition to deliver sustainable transformation and leave a pos itive and lasting legacy.

According to the report, while these ‘Agents of Transformation’ help drive innovation and delivering flawless digital experiences for customers and employees, they also have an positive impact on elite technologists around them. They’re able to educate, motivate and inspire other technologists to raise their game and to perform at a higher level - indeed, 85% of technologists claim that they would like to work alongside more Agents of Transformation.

It becomes critical for IT and business leaders to ensure that these Tech leaders in their organization have the necessary tools to manage and optimize IT availability and performance so that they can deliver the seamless digital experiences that customers and employees now demand at all times.

93% of technologists say that being able to monitor and observe all technical areas across their IT stack and directly link technology performance to business outcomes is now important to become an Agent of Transformation. Further, as many as 65% of technologists admitting that they now feel overwhelmed by complexity and data. They’re on the back foot, without the insight they need to make informed decisions and prioritize their actions in the right places.

According to the research, at a broad level, there is a strong urge amongst technologists to move beyond the reactive fire fighting that has characterized most IT departments since the start of the pandemic, and to embrace a more proactive and strategic approach to innovation. However, a good number of organizations still seem to be caught in a reactive mode following the pandemic, although a significant number claim that they are now starting to make the shift towards a more strategic mode.

At a personal level, these technologists want to get beyond the firefighting operational mode and get into more strategic initiatives. But a good number of them are held back because of the limitations of their current IT infrastructure where they don’t have access to the full-stack observability. It is critical for technologists to cut through data noise and complexity and to focus their actions on the areas that will have the big gest impact on the business.

Across all sectors, technologists recognize that their orga nizations will need to re-imagine their applications over the

next 12 months to address the changing customer needs and also enable new models of hybrid work. This will mean accel erating the shift to cloud-native technologies, which provide IT teams with a platform to deliver innovation at new levels of speed and scale.

To deliver these consistent, reliable digital experiences that consumers and end users now demand, IT teams have the need to monitor and manage a dynamic set of application depen dencies across a mix of infrastructure, microservices, contain ers, and APIs using home-grown IT stacks, multiple clouds, SaaS services, and security solutions. Traditional monitoring approaches aren’t able to meet the scale of observability that this diverse and complex ecosystem demands.

Technologists will need to be able to observe cloud-native applications and infrastructure and to connect IT performance in cloud-native environments to real-time business metrics. Otherwise they will find themselves facing an even greater deluge of data than they’ve experienced over the last two years and, once again, stuck in firefighting mode.

AppDynamics Cloud

To address this need, AppDynamics Cloud, launched in June this year, enables observability of cloud native applications, to help resolve application performance issues and deliver seamless digital experiences by correlating telemetry data from across any cloud environment at massive scale. It leverages cloud-native observability to remediate application performance issues with business context and insights-driven actions.

According to Liz Centoni, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, GM of Applications, “AppDynamics Cloud delivers power and us ability in a single, intuitive interface. It puts the focus where it needs to be—on 360-degree visibility and insights, and the ability to take action that leads to extraordinary application experiences every time.”

AppDynamics Cloud maximizes business outcomes and cus tomer experiences by continuously optimizing cloud-native applications. It accelerates detection and resolution of perfor mance issues, before they impact the business or the brand, with intelligent operations.

AppDynamics Cloud ingests the all deluge of metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) that is generated from a very diverse environment that included network, databases, storage, con tainers, security, and cloud services, to make sense of the cur rent state of the entire IT stack all the way to the end user. Actions can then be taken to optimize costs, maximize trans action revenue, and secure user and organizational data.

Complete observability of the entire IT stack empowers these Agents of Transformation to stay in control and optimize the performance of their entire IT stack in line with the business objectives of the organization. Without such solutions at hand, even the most ambitious transformation projects call stall with out meeting objectives they set out to achieve in the first place.

ALIGNING WITH MARKET TRENDS

Renjan George, Managing Director at DVCOM, a distributor of leading IP conferencing solutions discusses trends in market as well as their expansion plans

Discuss the focus on IP conferencing solutions at DV COM. How has the demand risen during the pandemic and has there been a correction once people went back to working from offices?

The video conferencing industry entered a phase of strong tran sition during the pandemic essentially driven by changes in the workplace strategy. Companies were compelled to opt for hy brid as well as flexible working models to ensure business con tinuity. This accelerated the usage of digital tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom by around 700%. As a Yealink distributor in GCC, we were rightly placed to take advantage of this boom by providing Microsoft and Zoom-certified hardware to meet the increasing demand to interact, connect, and collaborate with in ternal and external users seamlessly and intelligently, covering every scenario from small to extra-large spaces.

Now despite the pandemic being in the past, most businesses and people have adjusted to the new normal to an extent that day-today operations are unlikely to return to the way they were before the outbreak. Additionally, organizations have realized that they can operate remotely often at the same or higher levels of pro ductivity. For those companies where the workforce has largely returned to office, they have become used to these products & solutions to conduct discussions & run daily operations.

What have been typically the faster moving product lines over the year?

IP Telephony solutions have been our main focus since our in ception and consequently Yealink IP Phones and Yeastar UC solutions are the fastest moving product lines. Yealink tops the SIP phone market share with a range of endpoints designed to ensure that workers can enjoy the same workflow in any-sized room or workspace, or even on the go. The high-end business phones like T5 Business Phone Series come equipped with adjustable HD displays and support cordless DECT handsets

to enhance mobility and ensure a distraction-free voice with "Acoustic Shield" technology. Yeastar P-Series PBX System combines voice, video, applications, collaboration and more into one single and unified platform. With Yeastar P-Series, em ployees can stay connected anywhere anytime with their team mates and clients via one-stop access to any UC&C features at their preference.

Elaborate on some of the major initiatives taken by the com pany through the year to grow the business and how have been the outcomes?

As part of our initiative to embrace the Digital Future we have had a clear roadmap of using cloud solutions as an enabler of digital transformation and business innovation. As part of our cloud strategy, we have rolled out cloud-centric unified com munication and collaboration tools, cost-effective voice and video solutions, remote management tools, and various inno vative products that companies need to prepare for the future and transform themselves into intelligent enterprises. Offering an OPEX model to our partners on our cloud solutions has really helped in accelerating our recurring revenue stream.

We have also geographically grown our business this year with some joint ventures in the MENA region and we have had a significant growth in our business.

Which are the major verticals of focus for the company's partners in terms of solutions you offer?

With our portfolio of cutting-edge technologies, DVCOM part ners have access to solutions that cater to various verticals. For verticals ranging from healthcare and finance to government, evidently, our Fabulix Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions are ideal for combining computing, network, storage, and virtualization resources into a single, easy-to-use system. With Interactive Screens, our partners can cater to the Education

» INTERVIEW

vertical with a collaborative learning experience and also in the corporate sector to provide collaboration tools to help people work together. Our UC solution portfolio addresses the com munication digitalization efforts of all major verticals whether it be Financial, Health Care, Government, Manufacturing, or Enterprises.

Elaborate on your GITEX plans this year. As a distributor, our plan for Gitex is to ensure that our ven dors get the right visibility, and our partners get an opportunity to interact with the vendors. With new trends prompted by the pandemic, such as hybrid work, businesses are preparing for the next normal and there comes an increasing demand for digital workplace solutions. This year our vendors predominantly will be showcasing collaboration solutions and solutions that pro vide an effective hybrid work environment.

For the first time ever, US-based EdTech provider Onescreen will be attending the show with us. As the distributor for One screen in the MENA region visitors will be able to get a firsthand experience of the. OneScreen Hubware which introduces an evolution in the sensitivity of touch, the speed of wireless streaming, and the range of apps that deploy in an instant. Func tionalities like real-time polling, easy dial-out, screen sharing, interoperability, and translation have never been easier.

We will also be launching Fabulix which is the answer to au tonomous infrastructure. We are excited to have partnered with ISSQUARED which is one of the fastest growing cyber secu rity, cloud infrastructure companies to provide their hyper-con verged infrastructure platform in the GCC region.

Our vendor Yealink has been deeply partnering with Microsoft and bringing the most innovative technology to modern work places, making the collaboration more intelligent and conve nient. This time, Yealink brings MeetingBoard 65, its new col laboration display solutions, to Gitex 2022. Also you will be able to explore how the AI technology application in Yealink video products enables customers to have an effective meeting. We will have the MVC960 with its pro-grade video quality and smooth tracking experience and MeetingBar A30 with camera, microphone and speakers integrated into an all-in-one system. We will also demonstrate our full range of personal collabora tion devices including headsets, desk phones and DECT phones.

Wisitors will be able to take a closer look at the exciting lat est updates to Yeastar’s UC solutions which is now a com plete suite with audio, video, applications, and collaboration. Yeastar will also debut its Desk Booking and Visitor Manage ment System which orchestrates a truly all-in-one workplace management solution.

Akuvox, the global leading provider of smart AIoT products and solutions, together with its newly launched smart home brand akubela, is also exhibiting with us this year. Encompassing

Renjan George Managing Director DVCOM

artificial intelligence, SIP, Android, cloud, security, and other advanced technologies, Akuvox smart intercom leverages vast fields of technologies for smart building access.

Are there any expansion plans in terms of markets of focus? We have a clear plan to expand geographically and before this year-end you will be able to see our physical presence in KSA and Qatar. In 2023 we will be spreading our locations to the Af rican region as well and to that end, we just had our first partner meeting in Tanzania this month.

We will be launching Fabulix which is the answer to autonomous infrastructure. We have partnered with ISSQUARED which is one of the fastest growing cyber security, cloud infrastructure companies to provide their hyper-converged infrastructure platform in the GCC.

THE NEXT WAVE OF RANSOMWARE

Edwin Weijdema, Global Technologist, Veeam Software discusses the threat of triple extortion from ranwomware attacks and how companies need to invest in cybersecurity solutions better before seek ing insurance

Ransomware as a trend will continue to affect businesses across the world – with attack types and tactics from cy bercriminals evolving all the time. As attacks get more sophisticated, so do the consequences of falling victim to ransom ware and the complexity of the clean-up.

The stakes are therefore higher than ever for businesses when it comes to protecting against ransomware attacks. Organisations need to understand the emerging trends that we will see gather speed, and prepare their defences for the ransomware onslaught.

Make your business insurable: The tension between insurers and businesses affected by ransomware is mounting. In EMEA we have already seen global insurance giant AXA announced that it will stop writing cyber-insurance policies in France that re imburse customers for extortion payments made to ransomware criminals. Furthermore, the Dutch government has considered banning insurers from covering the cost of ransom payments made by businesses operating in the Netherlands. With insurers overwhelmed and frustrated by ransomware claims, underwriters will tighten up their policies to ensure clients are meeting prede

termined conditions such as investing in appropriate cybersecuri ty and employee training before paying out.

Watch out for triple extortion: This technique designed to make businesses pay more and pay faster involves extending the attack to the victim’s customers and partners. Traditionally, ransomware attacks involve cybercriminals locking down and encrypting sys tems then demanding a ransom payment to regain access. In 2019 ransomware strains such as DoppelPaymer gave cybercriminals the ability to lock down systems and exfiltrate data simultaneous ly. Not only can attackers demand ransom money for regranting access to key IT systems, but they can also threaten to publish exfiltrated data online if the victim didn’t pay up. Triple extortion involves a third element – directing the attack beyond its initial target, using multi-layered extortion techniques to harm the vic tim’s customers and partners.

Minimise the threat within: Various studies suggest that over 60% of data breaches and cybersecurity incidents are caused by insider threats. Disgruntled employees understand the power they have in terms of opening the doors to the outside. Equally, perfectly sat isfied employees who do not grasp the importance of practising good digital hygiene can be equally dangerous. Digital hygiene is the first line of defence for an organisation. Using two-factor authentication and restricting file access to only those who need it are ways of limiting the amount of damage a single user can do if security is compromised intentionally or unintentionally. Further more, training and education are vital to making sure employees are confident identifying and reporting potential attacks.

Beware of the slow burn: Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks involve unauthorised users gaining access to a system or network and remaining there for an extended period of time without being detected – waiting for the right opportunity to steal valuable data. Cyber-attackers are clever about choosing the right time to strike and maximising their chances of getting an easy payday by compromising a company when they are at their most vulnerable or when the stakes are highest. For example, an at tacker may be ready to take your systems down and exfiltrate data but know that your company is due to IPO in a few months. It, therefore, makes sense to wait it out and take you down at the moment you need the operational and reputational damage least and will be most willing to payout to end the attack.

Enforce the law: Law enforcers are trying to bridge the imbalance between risk and reward for cybercriminals. Cybercriminals can make huge sums of money with little or no threat of prosecution. This will and has to change. However, given the borderless na ture of cybercrime, governments must agree on an international legal framework for punishing cybercrime. Until then legal action will mainly be directed towards the victims rather than the crimi nals. Many governments are debating whether they should make ransomware payments illegal, so businesses resist the tempta tion to pay ransoms – cutting off cybercriminals’ income supply. Moreover, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, commonly viewed as a

Edwin Weijdema Global Technologist, Veeam Software

hacker’s dream, actually have the potential to help law enforcers bring criminals to justice. Digital ledgers like Blockchain make it easier to ‘follow the money’ as records cannot be altered or deleted. Therefore, once criminals turn their cryptocurrency into ‘real money’, the digital ledger can theoretically unmask them.

Protect your data: Everything from the advancing threat land scape to changes in the way the legal and insurance sectors view ransomware payouts puts the onus on data protection and cyber security. Organisations must consult with their technology part ners about deploying Modern Data Protection solutions that can detect, mitigate and remediate ransomware attacks. Data must be backed up and recoverable across physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS and Kubernetes so that in the event of a ransomware attack, busi nesses can remediate and recover quickly rather than being forced into paying the ransom.

As well as implementing Modern Data Protection solutions, busi nesses must prioritise improving digital hygiene levels across their entire employee base. Employee education and awareness training can help to create a more digitally secure culture across the organisation. A ‘human firewall’ combined with the right technology can help organisations prepare themselves for the ransomware attacks that will inevitably come their way this year and beyond.

WAKING UP TO THE DAWN OF HYBRID MULTI-CLOUD

This can be due to latency requirements if a particular applica tion’s functionality depends upon it working to a precise number of microseconds, or it can be in order to fulfill upon regulatory compliance rulings and legislation. Potentially, it can be as a re sult of both.

While these requirements can theoretically be delivered from the public cloud, in the vast majority of scenarios these reasons are core justifications for the workloads concerned being located on-premises in private cloud deployments.

CapEx to OpEx in public cloud

Throughout

the rapid evolution of cloud computing from its earliest stages, we have witnessed the development and extension of many different cloud service special isms, applications and optimisations. But however di verse and complex the cloud becomes, we can classify its core DNA into two strands i.e. public and private.

With public cloud services coming from datacentres and offering maximum flexibility, breadth and scope, private or on-premises cloud sits alongside the public cloud in a sort of yin-yang bal ance to provide control, privacy and compliance where needed. Businesses quickly realised that a hybrid combination of the two strands was the most prudent workable approach.

When these same businesses also saw that they could cover a wider multiplicity of use cases and deployment requirements by extending hybrid across multiple Cloud Services Providers (CSPs), we reached the point of hybrid multi-cloud epiphany that characterises the most progressive cloud implementations today.

But what else do we need to know about how hybrid multi-cloud happened and how this technology should be most productively implemented today?

Core validations

Among the core validation points that exist for hybrid multicloud are the need to locate certain workloads in specific geo graphic locations.

For applications that use a lot of compute resources but on a high ly variable basis and only for a short burst of time, on-premises private cloud represents a disproportionate Capital Expenditure (CapEx) outlay with the risk of purchased resources lying idle and unused.

A good example here might be quarterly or annual tax processing; the workload is high and heavy, but essentially intermittent on a comparatively date-specific basis. Running this type of workload in the public cloud enables us to shoulder a cost that specifically tracks the consumption of resources, which is logically an Oper ational Expenditure (OpEx) weighted use case best suited to the public cloud.

Straddling the colocation intersection point

Looking at the middle ground and looking for the deployment sweet spot, we need to think about what happens if we start a new business from scratch with modest capital investment and limited physical equipment or resources.

In this scenario, it of course makes sense to use as many suitable public cloud services as possible in the first instance; they require little or no pre-procurement expenditure and offer the maximum breadth to scale if and when the business flourishes and grows.

On that growth path, there will logically come a point at which workloads are predictable enough (and potentially privacy-re lated enough) to determine the use of some colocated resourc es. This is the straddling intersection point between public cloud

Rob Tribe, VP, System Engineering EMEA at Nutanix elaborates why hybrid multi-cloud has become a kind of de facto industry standard for prudent, strategically tactical cloud implemen tations

and private on-premises cloud - this is hybrid cloud. Further up that growth path, the business can define an increasing number of workloads where on-premises costs can be justified. This is hybrid cloud at a more fully blown scale.

Hybrid multi-cloud reality

If a company has progressed to this point but then opens a new office in a new territory or country, it may very reasonably look to adopt a greater weight of public cloud in its new location.

If a business runs its New York operation with an 80% on-prem ises deployment and a mere 20% of resources located in public cloud to define its 80:20 hybrid split, it is entirely feasible that its new Cape Town office might be 100% public cloud.

This again is hybrid cloud. But if the business finds that it gets a better deal (commercially, or support-related, or platform-relat ed) in one country from one particular CSP, then it may switch some workloads to Microsoft Azure, push some workloads to Google Cloud Platform, others to AWS and still others to any of the smaller tier players in this market. This is hybrid multi-cloud reality.

Many organisations now using hybrid multi-cloud may be com paratively oblivious as to why their mixed usage model has evolved. This disconnect is amplified if the gulf and the commu nication channel between the C-suite management function and the IT department is wide.

Understanding how, why, when and where hybrid multi-cloud deployments have resulted, what the layers and tiers within the deployed matrix of services are tasked with doing inside any giv en working day… and knowing which way business requirements might be developing next, will enable an organisation to manage its hybrid multi-cloud engine room with highest levels of effi ciency.

A new de facto standard

If we have learned anything at this point, it is perhaps just how far hybrid multi-cloud has become a kind of de facto industry standard for prudent, strategically tactical cloud implementations. It offers the greatest scope for deployment flexibility, functional dexterity and cost optimisation.

Where we go from here is interesting. We will continue to see all of the ancillary competencies that flow alongside the wider devel opment of cloud now more directly reflect the infrastructure re siliency that organisations can achieve with this model. Skillsets will need to be tuned, bolstered, augmented and extended in line with the specific actions of cloud architects, Site Reliability Engi neers (SREs) and the now cloud-native DevOps developer+oper ations teams that will exist in this space.

As hybrid multi-cloud usage patterns crystallise, so will the most logical migration paths for organisations looking to complete the more advanced stages of their digital transformation initiatives.

On the road ahead, businesses will look to unify their infrastruc ture control mechanisms in order to straddle the full breadth of the hybrid multi-cloud IT stack that they themselves will now

build, manage and operate across an increasingly connected pool of API-centric applications.

Where once we had cloud, we now have cloud multiplicity, con nectivity and an occasional instance of exclusivity. It’s a small but hybrid multi-cloud world after all.

Rob Tribe VP, System Engineering EMEA, Nutanix

27SEPTEMBER 2022 / CXO DX » COLUMN When these same businesses also saw that they could cover a wider multiplicity of use cases and deployment requirements by extending hybrid across multiple CSPs, we reached the point of hybrid multi-cloud epiphany that characterises the most progressive cloud implementations today.

HOW CIOS CAN KEEP DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROJECTS MOVING FORWARD

The global pandemic brought businesses and industries to the brink of collapse and drove digital transformation into the spot light as a necessary saviour. And while or ganizations are to be applauded for taking the first necessary steps, most face chal lenges, which may stem from non-techni cal reasons as well.

The results generated from global research have concluded that digital transforma tion initiatives may stall from a myriad of non-technical reasons. CIOs need to be aware of the multiple non-technical rea sons that can ground digital transforma tion initiatives, often for no fault of theirs, and plan to find ways to work around the points of failure described below.

Limited funding

Many finance heads continue to look at technology and IT spending as an oper ational expense rather than one driving innovation and longer-term strategic ben efit. Hence, when a digital transformation initiative is proposed it may be hard for the CIO to gather the total funding to com plete the project.

Inability to gather sufficient funds to drive a digital transformation project also arises when financial decision making is siloed and fails to see and apportion the benefits of digital transformation across the organization. With such an approach, it may be difficult to justify sufficient funds and may require alternative routes' The way forward is to justify expenditure for digital transformation with the busi ness outcomes delivered. Many times, budgets are available with business heads and may require realignment and repri oritization of the digital transformation initiative, along the business objectives related to that funding.

Delivery of timely business results and

delivery of political benefits if well-artic ulated, can also help to trigger sufficient levels of investment to mobilize the digi tal transformation initiative. Finally, CIOs need to be flexible in identifying and re aligning with multiple funding opportuni ties that may exist across the organization.

Breadth of skills

The successful roll out of digital trans formation initiatives requires having multiple types of digital skill sets across the organization. Some of these core skill sets include cloud migration and orches tration, digital architecture and platforms, data analytics, user experience and de sign, amongst others. Other than technical skills, teams also need to prepare them selves to become agile and flexible, often referred to as digital nimbleness.

The way forward is to build multiple types of digital training programs across

the organization. In addition to training employees with digital skills along their functional job roles, they can also be of fered digital skills training outside their functional roles. This will help them to understand the multifunctional and cross siloed approach of digital transformation.

Another important initiative is to build skills in business areas that are the most impacted by digital transformation. Since digital transformation impacts existing job roles and helps to create new ones, com municating new career paths and skills pro gression based on experience, are another important part of the internal initiatives.

Technology resources

Post pandemic, all industries, and all orga nizations, have experienced an increase in the usage of digital technologies. On the flip side, shortage of IT and technology talent can dampen the enthusiasm of most digital transformation initiatives. The reasons for shortage of technology and business subject matter experts in an orga nization can range from cultural to siloed thinking of the management.

A short-term approach of building skilled resources in low code type of digital trans formation solutions can only go so far. The real benefits for an organization are gained by developing the complete gamut of skills required to manage digital trans formation initiatives of any complexity and scope.

The way forward is to build a continuous program of developing digital skills and culture across the organization that helps in positive roll out of a digital transforma tion initiative. Such a continuous program of skills development and enhancement requires management support and a medi um to long term vision for improvement and transformation.

Any large-scale organizational change initiative will face opposition and CIOs must realize that successful digital transformation requires non-technical skills as well, ex plains Ranjith Kaippada, Managing Director at Cloud Box Technologies.

Ranjith Kaippada MD, Cloud Box Technologies

TIPS TO CHOOSE YOUR SURVEILLENCE SYSTEM PROVIDER

Rudie Opperman, Regional Manager, Engineering & Training, Middle East & Africa at Axis Communications discusses 4 factors to consider before choosing a surveillence system provider

Asmore businesses in the UAE turn to intelligent video surveillance systems to unlock a host of benefits, it may be time for you to do the same. As with most important decision, you have to weigh up the differ ent options available to you and make sure you understand the consequences. On the one hand, an end-to-end solution is simpler than a multi-vendor system and an excellent all-rounder. In the past a Multi-vendor solution offered more flexability and features but was extremely difficult to roll out successfully. Today, there is a third option to consider and that is to choose an open, scalable end-to-end solution that offers you the freedom to upexpand and therefore accomodate all of your security needs – video, audio, analytics, and access control – with components from a single supplier but not comprimising on open scalability.

If you opt for an end-to-end solution, choosing the right provid er is a defining decision that will greatly impact the degree to

which you achieve your security goals. This is especially true if you need to migrate from multiple providers into an end-to-end solution.

Before committing to a system or a provider, it is important to consider a few key factors.

Cost is key

Taking your budget into consideration is a crucial first step in the search for the right surveillance system provider. Completely upgrading your system can be a costly endeavour, so it’s best to look for providers who offer flexible solutions that will work with your existing infrastructure investments.

It is also important to have a solid idea of what the long-term cost of the solution will be. The total cost of owning and operating a video surveillance solution doesn’t end after the initial purchase.

Therefore, it’s crucial to look at the entire life of the system. One way to keep costs down and ensure that your solution lasts longer is by investing in quality products as they come with solid war ranties, long mean-time-between-failures (MTBF), and advanced video compression functionality.

Solutions should be easy to use and maintain Ensuring that your video surveillance system is well maintained is important for optimal performance and cybersecurity. From a physical maintenance perspective, you need to consider factors like the UAE’s harsh climate – look for equipment that can per form well despite the heat. Cameras are especially prone to ther mal shutdown if exposed to excessively hot temperatures, and a system provider that is knowledgeable on how to maintain equip ment under these conditions is essential.

A provider’s solution should include an intelligent maintenance programme that can automatically inform you and your integra tor when something isn’t right. You need to be alerted to major concerns, such as when a camera goes offline or is overheating, or when you’re running low on storage. It should also notify you when new software or firmware is available to mitigate the latest cyberthreats, and provide an effortless way to update multiple de vices simultaneously.

Robust systems can still offer solutions that are easy for novice or occasional users to manage. A quality end-to-end solution should strike a balance between breadth of features, customisability, ease of use, and maintenance. How you plan to use the solution will determine the functionality needed. So, think about factors such as: who will be monitoring the videos and how; how your privacy policies will affect this; and whether or not you’ll require remote accessibility to the videos.

A feature-rich video management system will allow you to bring everything seamlessly together into one intuitive, simple-to-op erate solution.

Quality technical support is essential

Before committing to a provider, ensure that they will offer you technical support from start to finish.

This could include more practical offerings like allowing for easy swap-outs of cameras, network video recorders, and other com ponents when they reach their end of life or as you free up budget to invest in newer, more advanced technology.

You need hands-on technical support that will streamline your surveillance system. It is imperative that you explore the quality of the technical support offered by the provider before finalising your decision. You can easily gauge this by turning to the ratings of other customers or verifying that the solution is backed by a team of support specialists with in-depth knowledge and experi ence of every component so they can quickly address any issues that might arise.

Finally, it’s paramount that the solutions provider offers tools that will help your integrator easily verify your design and instal lation. Unless you have in-house expertise, you will likely rely

Rudie Opperman Regional Manager, Engineering & Training, MEA, Axis Communications

on an integrator to design, install, and maintain your system to your specifications. When you’re selecting an end-to-end solu tions provider, consider how they can help your integrator ensure a “job well done.” A provider with a complete set of tools really takes the guesswork out of design and installation to ensure ev erything works seamlessly together from the start.

Providers must be able to adapt to your chang ing needs

Above all else, your surveillance system provider should be a trusted and innovative partner for your organisation – a part ner you are confident will work to ensure your investment is well-protected so you can get the most from it for years to come. They should provide you with the tools to easily perform device management tasks and guide you through the processes. With the UAE’s economy set to grow at its fastest rate in years, your busi ness and its related systems must be able to keep up. As your needs change and security threats evolve, your provider should also be able to adapt.

When choosing a surveillance system provider, consider whether they can meet your current needs and budget, as well as any fu ture needs you may have. This is a long-term relationship, so they should also be able to scale with your business and its changing requirements.

Cybersecurity Myths that are Harming Your Business

Dan Woods, Global Head of Intelligence at F5 discusses seven myths that are distracting cybersecurity strategies

The significance of this knowledge and why it is important has been playing out in a very public way with the acquisition of Twitter. The value of the company is largely based on its number of users. Elon Musk’s challenge to the company to demonstrate that spam bots and fake accounts are less than 5% is a fair expec tation for any investor, advertiser, potential business partner, and even its users.

I predict that Twitter’s bot number is closer to 50% or more. Companies should be required to validate users are human and effectively manage and mitigate their bot traffic.

Simply stated, the success of malicious bots indicates a security failure. Bot prevention is critical to ensuring the integrity of the information flowing through these sites, but also having accurate data for companies to make important business decisions and for others doing business with them.

Myth #2: Bot prevention is an in-house DIY project.

We've seen good companies with big budgets and brilliant techni cal staff doing battle with bots for years. Yet when we analyse the bot traffic in these organizations, expecting to see sophisticated bots that had evolved to overcome their defenses, it just isn’t the case.

In the past two years, the world has been shocked economical ly, politically, and technologically. Technology advancement has shifted into overdrive from its already dizzying pace.

Against this backdrop, a series of cybersecurity myths have gained traction, often prompting well-meaning security teams to focus on the wrong things. Here are seven of them to keep a watchful eye on:

Myth #1: Only a small number of social media accounts are fake.

A lot of enterprises know they have bots, but the reality is social media companies often don't know and don’t want to know how many bots they really have.

We did a proof of concept with a social networking site some years ago that showed 98% of their logins were automated bots. This company was very proud of their rapid growth and excited for the future, but it turns out they only had a tenth of the sub scribers they thought they had.

Companies have been fighting bots by blocking IPs, regions, and autonomous systems, and here is where we see the evolution of malicious bot traffic—attacks are now coming from hundreds of thousands, even millions of IP addresses. Those network layer defenses only take you so far.

My mantra is that client-side signals are king. You must have be havioral biometrics. You must interrogate the browser and inter rogate the device. All of those signals taken in the aggregate are how you identify not just bots but malicious humans as well.

Companies also think they can hire their way out of this situation, but there is no way to hire enough IT people to fix a problem this vast. The only way to really fight automation is with automation.

Myth #3: Focus should always be on a mysterious new threat on the horizon.

Those of us in security, the tech press, and corporate PR share a common fear of those threat actors who are constantly innovating and staying ahead of us. But in many ways, attacks are still the same with only slight tweaks along the way.

Most of the bots we see today show the same level of sophisti cation that we saw five years ago. They just come from differ ent places. Credential stuffing still works in spite of two-factor authentication and/or CAPTCHA. Attackers won’t innovate new attack vectors as long as the original vector remains successful. All they need to do is come up with a way to dodge new defenses.

Companies do need to consider emerging threats and try to pre pare for them, but the industry also needs to continue to mitigate last year's threats.

Myth #4: Managing multiple clouds is a hard challenge that requires unobtainable talent.

The multiple cloud world is a reality that many, if not most, com panies are living in today. Whether it’s because of an acquisi tion, integration with a partner, or just capturing best-of-breed features, multi-cloud is here to stay.

Yet when I ask companies if they’re in multiple clouds, one an swer I hear repeatedly is some version of, “Yes, unfortunately.”

Companies who operate across multiple clouds sometimes do so begrudgingly and don't embrace the opportunity to get the best of all worlds.

Today there’s no reason that managing and securing your IT es tate across multiple clouds should be arduous. Cloud vendors have built interoperability into their strategies, and there are many other providers whose solutions are designed to remove the burden of integration, abstract their functionality across clouds, and deliver it through a simple, unified interface.

Myth #5: Securing the enterprise’s architecture and devices is enough.

Security teams are focused on the enterprise's infrastructure, their servers, their computers, their desktops—everything inside the organization. What they largely are not focused on is the home networks of all the organization’s employees.

An attacker might want to target the CEO to access mergers and acquisitions insights or other strategic information, but monetiz ing that isn’t as easy as targeting an accounts payable clerk or an IT administrator. At a time when working from home is more common than ever, home networks are an emerging loophole for bad actors.

Myth #6: You can trust your employees.

Insider threats have an enormous advantage simply because it’s human nature to assume the best of those around us. But the fact is you can’t hire 50 or 100 employees without the very real risk of introducing a bad apple or two to the barrel.

Disgruntled employees don’t just leave bad reviews on Glass door. They can throw sensitive files onto a thumb drive and walk right out the door. There's even a growing concern that they might leave malicious software in the system.

I’ve long had a theory that insiders are probably behind a lot of ransomware attacks. An IT administrator can easily create a per sona on the dark web, give that persona access to the system to

install malware, and then issue a demand for ransom—and in turn advocate that the company just pay the ransom. It’s important to note that I’ve not yet seen evidence of this, but the incentive is certainly there.

Myth #7: Our biggest cyber threats come from nation state actors targeting infrastructure.

When the Colonial Pipeline was attacked a year ago, causing long lines at gas stations that inconvenienced consumers on the East Coast, it was major international news.

Yet, there is little to no conversation about the millions who are defrauded every year online, many of whom are elderly and liv ing on their retirement savings. This is a tremendous threat to our social safety net that can have devastating effects on people and their families—much more so than having to wait in line and pay more for gas.

I spent years in law enforcement investigating cybercrime, more often than not with frustrating results, and this issue is a passion of mine. Attacks on our infrastructure are important and very real, but when you listen to the stories of these victims it’s clear that widespread cyber fraud should be getting more attention than it

Dan Woods

Global Head of Intelligence, F5

THE METAVERSE REALITY CHECK THAT YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS

Ram Narayanan, Country Manager at Check Point Software Technologies, Middle East opines that the biggest hurdle to the Metaverse being a secure environ ment is in its foundations

From virtual meetings to immersive 3D customer ex periences or even property tours, the Metaverse will transform the way that companies operate. Gartner predicts that by 2026, a quarter of us will spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse for work, shopping, education, social media and/or entertainment. Some brands are already there today, such as Nike and Coca-Cola, who are using it to drive brand awareness and the purchase of physical products. With so much buzz around the Metaverse, it’s easy to see why more and more companies will start to do business there. But are they thinking about the risks? We will certainly need a different ap proach to security in a virtual world compared to the physical, but what will that entail? Let’s take a look at what the risks are and how to start getting prepared (because you do need to start now).

The biggest hurdle to the Metaverse being a secure environment is in its foundations. The Metaverse is built on blockchain tech nology and we have already seen serious security gaps in NFT marketplaces and blockchain platforms such as OpenSea, Rarible and Everscale. Due to the sheer amount of malicious activity that we already see exploiting services based on the blockchain, we believe it won’t be long before we start to see initial attacks in the Metaverse too. It will likely be based on authorization, and user accounts will get hijacked, so we expect that identity and authen tication will sit at the heart of everything we want to do.

It is tricky though, as people might want to have multiple identi ties within the Metaverse, perhaps one for transacting work con versations and another for personal shopping and entertainment. This adds another layer of complexity because there’s then no single identity that says it's definitely you. The answer could be

in chained identity so, will blockchain then help us understand where we're transacting and who with? This is a major challenge. And since blockchain technologies are decentralized and unregu lated, this makes things like policing the theft of virtual assets or preventing money laundering, very difficult indeed.

Redefining reality

Another key security challenge is in the safe spaces needed to con duct business. Imagine you’re on a Zoom or Teams call. It’s a private meeting space, right? But what will that be like in the Metaverse? How do we know that a chair someone is sitting on isn’t actually an avatar and we have an impostor in our midst? You may think that can't possibly happen, but it's a virtual world. Of course it can. We need to be able to discern between what’s real and what’s fake, and having a safe space to meet and transact will be crucial.

When the Internet first came out, threat actors exploited the av erage human’s unfamiliarity with the tech by creating malicious sites that impersonated banks to obtain financial details. Phishing scams like this still occur, albeit we now see more sophisticated forms of social engineering. The Metaverse is like a whole new Internet, and you can guarantee that people’s unfamiliarity with it, both businesses and consumers, will be exploited.

Interestingly, every transaction that happens on the blockchain is fully traceable, so this will become far more important, especially when it comes to having an audit trail of what has been discussed and any decisions made in a business context. But that leaves a question over how that information is taken from the virtual world to the physical. Are contracts going to be legally binding in the Metaverse? Or will they need to be brought into the physical

world to be signed and then pushed back in? How will that be done securely?

Researchers have discovered security gaps within blockchain and crypto projects which are part of the Metaverse. The vulnerabili ties that been exploited by cyber crime are focused on vulnerabil ities with smart contracts that allows hackers to exploit and drain crypto platforms and around application vulnerabilities inside blockchain platforms that allows hackers to attack through the platforms and hijack users’ wallets balance. There is a danger that we rush headlong into the Metaverse without considering these types of implications.

A lot of the concerns around security in the Metaverse are exac erbated by the huge skills shortage in the cybersecurity sector.

According to the 2021 (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study, we are lacking almost 3 million cybersecurity professionals and the current global cyber workforce needs to grow by 65% to ef fectively defend organizations’ critical assets. That percentage is likely to be a lot higher if we also consider the new virtual world.

Is it worth it?

Other cybersecurity risks within the Metaverse abounds such as cyberattacks via the use of vulnerable AR/VR devices, as an en tryway for evolving malwares and data breaches. These devic es inherently collect large amounts of user data and information such as biometrics, making it attractive to hackers. Concerns around data privacy are also a growing voice amongst Metaverse sceptics, with additional data being collected through avenues like Second Life, potentially violating user privacy.

You might be reading this thinking well, why bother if there are so many risks involved? But it is absolutely worth putting the time in now, to get ready for moving across to the Metaverse. Un fortunately, any company (no matter the size) that doesn’t, may find itself in a place where it’s playing catch up and potentially losing out on business or engaging in processes that put the busi ness at risk. You can transition slowly, just like many have done with cloud migration.

Organizations will need to be much more reliant on their partners around the world to help mitigate risk, as this is very much a glob al phenomenon. But there will always be some risk and for those that take them and get it right, there will be huge rewards. At the end of the day though, businesses won’t be able to do it them selves, it will take a great deal of partnering with organizations that work within that space. The Metaverse will hit everyone, and there’s no denying that mistakes will be made, similar to those that were made in the early days of the Internet.

Ram Narayanan Country Manager at Check Point Software Technologies

Top Metaverse security considerations right now:

1. It's coming. You can't put your head in the sand and pretend that it isn't. Business leaders and security professionals need to talk about it and understand what it might mean for them. Under stand the landscape by looking at what competitors are doing in that space.

2. Have a look at how you are currently running services now in the physical world and understand if these services map in any way to the Metaverse. You may find that some of them don't and aren't even secure in this world, such as mobile devices, tablets, cloud and multi-cloud.

3. Understand how to get your identification and authentication done correctly. The answer to that isn't just having a password or two factor authentication. Companies need to really start up ping their game around these two issues. People tend to do things without thinking about security, whereas they should be thinking of security first.

I64 VIDEO DOOR PHONE

Based on SIP and ONVIF protocols, i64 is a video door phone that integrates pow erful functionalities of access control, in tercom, and security protection. Featuring an aluminum alloy design and a lighting numeric keypad, i64 delivers a high-qual ity elegant appearance. With high protec tion level IP66 and IK07, it is waterproof, dustproof and anti-collision in most out door environments. i64 allows users to make audio/video calls via a speed-dial button and a 2 Mega-pixel camera and achieve access control by different modes. With rich input and output interfaces, i64 is easy to link with other security devices and customize into various solutions in apartments, commercial buildings, com munities and industrial parks.

Highlights:

• Designed with aluminium alloy out look, i64 combines technology and art. The numeric keypad with blue backlight enables users to see clearly even in low light conditions

• Featuring highly waterproof and dustproof, anticollision grade, i64 has great performance in different outdoor environments. Anti-tamper will raise alarm and report to the control centre when the cover is opened unauthorised.

• i64 allows users to achieve access control with password, RFILD/IC cards, NFC, indoor switch, remote DTMF and Timed open door. It provides clear video image even in dark with an infrared night-vision camera.

• With rich input and output inter faces, i64 can be connected with 3rd party devices. It is easy to be integrated with security products in different solutions, reducing in vestment cost and safeguarding the security of communities.

EVOLV CONNECTIVITY SOLUTIONS

Corning Incorporated has introduced the latest round of innovations in its Evolv portfolio of network connectivity solutions. The new prod ucts will provide network operators with great er flexibility at every stage of fiber deployment, compared to traditional cable deployment methods.

Corning’s new Evolv connectivity solutions will help operators streamline permitting, accelerate field installation, and optimize network testing.

DXS-F3500-64S

DXS-F3500-64S from D-Link are versatile, high-performance, ultra-low latency switches in 1U rackmount size, suitable for Data Center TOR or Enterprise/Campus Core & Aggregation de ployments.

The DXS-F3500 Series switches feature a modular fan and power supply design for a high-availability architecture. The hot-swap pable design means that fans and power supplies can be replaced without affecting operation. Multi-Chassis Trunking (MCT) en ables multiple DXS-F3500 switches to be configured in a virtual chassis to provide non-stop Layer-3 routing forwarding.

The DXS-F3500 Series switches support several core components of Data Center Bridging (DCB) such as IEEE 802.1Qbb, IEEE 802.1Qaz, and IEEE 802.1Qau. IEEE 802.1Qbb (Priority-based Flow Control) provides flow control on specific priority to ensure no data-loss during network congestion. IEEE 802.1Qaz (En hanced Transmission Selection) manages bandwidth allocation amongst different traffic classes, while IEEE 802.1Qau (Conges

Highlights:

tion Notification) provides congestion management for data flows within network domains.

The DXS-F3500 Series has a variety of features to ensure traffic stability and integrity. Port mirroring is in place for Bandwidth Control, coupled with Broadcast, Multicast & Unicast storm con trol. Single-Rate Three-Color Marker (srTCM) and Two-Rate Three-Color Marker are both also implemented for defining burst sizes and bandwidth limitations.

Highlights:

• 48 x 10Gbps SFP+ & 4 x 40Gbps QSFP

• 2 x AC/DC Hot-Swappable Power Modules (1+1 with Load Sharing)

• 5 x Fan Modules

• 1.28Tbps Switch Capacity

• 960Mpps Max Forwarding Rate

• Multi-Chassis Trunking (MCT) support of Virtual Switch ing Unit (VSU).

• Lossless Ethernet (via DCB) and 802.1Qau/az/bb

Like all products in the Evolv portfolio, the newest solutions give operators an expanded toolkit to deploy ever-expanding fiber net works efficiently – which is vital in a time of accelerating bandwidth demand and public in vestments in broadband.

Corning’s compact, easy-to-install Evolv ter minals can be deployed in the ground, on a pole or facade, or on a strand. Pushlok Tech nology enables simple one-handed drop in stallation, with tactile and audible feedback. The ease of installation and optimized field handling reflect

• Planning: Corning’s new augmented-reality app, Evolv AR Visu alizer, allows operators to show how terminals will be placed pri or to a deployment. This capability can help facilitate more effi cient permit approvals – particularly in façade environments such as historic districts, where building-owner approval is required.

• Field installation: New Evolv terminal options offer additional de ployment flexibility. Paintable covers allow operators to install ter minals on facades with minimal aesthetic impact. Additionally, the Evolv One-Fiber Pushlok™ Connection Kit lets operators easi ly connect Pushlok drops to one another, simplifying deployment.

• Monitoring and testing: New Evolv terminal-port reflectors can be paired with Optical Network Monitoring technology to enable automated mon itoring throughout a network. This allows technicians to easily isolate segments of cable for preventive maintenance and troubleshooting.

Conversational AI Will Reduce Contact Center Agent Labor Costs by

By 2026, conversational artificial intel ligence (AI) deployments within contact centers will reduce agent labor costs by $80 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. World wide end-user spending on conversational AI solutions within contact centers is fore cast to reach $1.99 billion in 2022.

“Gartner estimates that there are approx imately 17 million contact center agents worldwide today,” said Daniel O’Connell, VP analyst at Gartner. “Many organizations are challenged by agent staff shortages and the need to curtail labor expenses, which can represent up to 95% of contact cen ter costs. Conversational AI makes agents more efficient and effective, while also im proving the customer experience.”

Gartner projects that one in 10 agent in teractions will be automated by 2026, an increase from an estimated 1.6% of inter actions today that are automated using AI. Conversational AI can automate all or part of a contact center customer interaction

through both voice and digital channels, through voicebots or chatbots, and it is expected to have transformational benefits to customer service and support organiza tions within two years.

“While automating a full interaction – also known as call containment or de flection – corresponds to significant cost savings, there is also value in partial con tainment, such as automating the identifi cation of a customer's name, policy num ber and reason for calling. Capturing this information using AI could reduce up to a third of the interaction time that would typically be supported by a human agent,” said O’Connell.

Technical Complexity and Fragmented Vendor Landscape Limit Adoption

While the benefits of conversational AI are compelling, the technology is still maturing. A fragmented vendor landscape and complexity of deployments will result

in measured adoption through the next two years.

“Implementing conversational AI re quires expensive professional resources in areas such as data analytics, knowl edge graphs and natural language under standing,” said O’Connell. “Once built, the conversational AI capabilities must be continuously supported, updated and maintained, resulting in additional costs.”

Complex, large-scale conversational AI deployments can take multiple years as more call flows are built out and existing call flows are fine-tuned for improve ment. Gartner estimates integration pricing at $1,000 to $1,500 per conver sational AI agent, though some orga nizations cite costs of up to $2,000 per agent. Therefore, early adoption of con versational AI will be primarily led by organizations with 2,500 or more agents with budget for the requisite technical resources.

"Conversational AI can automate all or part of a contact center customer interaction through both voice and digital channels, through voicebots or chatbots, and it is expected to have transformational benefits to customer service and support organizations within two years."

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