Value Plus| October 2017

TECHNOLOGY

DISTRIBUTION RE-IMAGINED Redington Value is a value added distributor for the following brands in parts of Middle East & Africa:

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CONTENTS

08 Defining path to success

26 Beyond the horizon

31 Primed for progress

42 Fortifying the future

04 Interview 10 Dell EMC 14 VMware 16 TCG Digital 20 Cambium Networks 22 Cisco 28 Oracle

Dear Partners,

A

09 Confluence of platforms

30 Innovative solutions

41 Collaborate to profit

32 HPE 36 HPE Aruba 38 Huawei Middle East 44 StorageCraft 46 Red Hat 50 Check Point 52 Fortinet 56 Splunk 58 Malwarebytes 62 Palo Alto Networks 64 Microsoft 68 CyberArk 70 Seclore

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

s the industry expands with many new players entering the space, staying differentiated is increasingly becoming a challenge. However, only by separating yourself from the crowded marketplace will you be able to create impactful and lasting relationships with customers.

The first step to achieving this is understanding your strengths and then leveraging that to your benefit. It is vital that channel organizations identify what their core fortes are and devise a plan to use that effectively. Firms that manage to create a sense of belonging for their customers will be able to remain distinguished for years to come. It is also important that you invest in your workforce and ensure they reflect the company’s values and ethos. This will only happen by creating an employee-driven and positive work culture.

Never compromising on quality is another way firms can make sure they stand out from their competitors.

Redington Gulf has been able to lead the regional distribution space and provide continued differentiated offerings through similar principles. We believe that in order to stay a market leader, it is imperative that we continue sharpening our personnel’s skill sets and stay relevant in a rapidly evolving business environment.

We encourage our partner organizations to stay differentiated and relevant as new-age technologies such as IoT, big data analytics, security, mobility and cloud transform the way we do business. We are optimistic that our driven and innovative partners will be able to adopt and flourish amid the rapidly evolving and competitive IT channel marketplace.

Yours sincerely,

Raj Shankar, Managing Director, Redington Gulf

October 2017 The Value Plus

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INTERVIEW | REDINGTON VALUE

REDEFINING DISTRIBUTION

Over the last decade of operations, Redington Value has strived to be at the frontier of industry transformations. President Ramkumar Balakrishnan is determined to steer the firm head-on into the digital era of computing and unleash its next phase.

H

ow has the regional IT channel transformed over the last ten years?

As a value-added distributor, operating in the region for over a decade, we have witnessed the evolution of the market. We have seen the industry progress from focusing only on products to offering a more comprehensive solutions approach with the backing of services. A solutions’ distributor is someone who engages in an outcome based sale. Many believe solutions distribution is like old wine in a new bottle but that’s not the case. This transformation is happening; however, the industry must have people who can understand, create and go-to-market with a genuine proposition.

Redington Value has had several developments this past year. Can you share some of the bigger milestones?

Over the last year, we have worked towards building our portfolio of offerings in the regional market. We have expanded our operations in all the territories, especially in French and North Africa. Gulf and East Africa have always been high-growth markets for us. We have also onboarded new vendors such as Palo Alto Networks in Egypt, Nokia, Seclore, Nexthink and have gone mainstream with Huawei. In terms of technologies, we have intensified our focus in the security, cloud and hyperconverged space.

Two key initiatives stand out from a strategic perspective – one is the setting up of our consulting arm, which is now a DIC company – Citrus Consulting. We are already in the process of obtaining the first few projects. Citrus will be laserfocused on cloud and analytics.

The second is that our aggregation and

auto provisioning platform, Red Cloud, is going on general availability in the current quarter, which is a big win for us.

Can you elaborate on any updates to key initiatives launched last GITEX such as Red Vault and Red Cloud?

Red Vault has become a serious proposition, considering it now boasts around 35 odd solutions and use cases.

With representation for every single vendor, Red Vault has become mainstream for us.

Now we are attempting to raise it to a different level. We are looking to onboard ISVs and vertical business specific use cases on analytics. This way we can allow customers to have hands-on experiences.

We are definitely in the next phase of developing this solutions center.

To enable cloud services, Red Cloud will be upgraded to the 2.0 version, which will have far more capabilities such as bots, massive amounts of analytics and auto-provisioning among other features

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

that will be added. Once the platform is ready for general availability, we will transition it from the old platform to the new one. We now actively have more than 175 partners, compared to 65 last year, transacting with us through this platform.

Which areas are driving growth for Redington Value’s business in the region?

The growth for the company has been derived largely from the security, analytics and the software-defined everything offering, which includes software-defined data center, networking and storage.

Today we are in the process of constructing the offering towards an OPEX model as compared to CAPEX, which has gained momentum. Also, regional customers are increasingly adopting software-defined solutions in the security, networking and data center space. These are the areas where enterprise uptake is growing, including analytics.

“Only if the reseller takes the driver’s seat and makes that investment in personnel and resources, can he truly take advantage of the opportunity.”

October 2017 The Value Plus

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INTERVIEW | REDINGTON VALUE

65%

of Redington Value’s Q1 revenues have come from software What are the aspects that have enabled Redington to stand out in a crowded marketplace?

What has influenced and contributed to our success is our ability to adopt emerging technologies. We have moved away from the traditional box moving style of business and have more number of people who understand emerging technologies and trends. More than 65 percent of our Q1 revenues have come from software while only 35 percent constitutes hardware. We are considered as a competent partner of choice by all our vendors. Having identified the prospects that emerging trends will have and beginning initiatives around it early on, have helped us to stay one step ahead of the game.

Challenges will always exist but what is important is that we identify opportunities within it. If credit availability in the SMB channel or waning demand in select markets is a challenge, then we should create a contingency plan and address it.

It is necessary to remain driven and proactive.

Today every single person at Redington

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WHILE ONLY

MORE THAN

MARKET EVOLUTION

35% from hardware

Value is a solutions provider. The approach is how to bring together different technologies into one solution to win the marketplace. This change in mindset has also helped us to be at the forefront of the industry.

Are you also trying to translate these ideologies to your partner community?

Yes, absolutely. Today we have a set of smaller channel firms who are viewing Redington Value as a ‘partner’. They don’t look at us as a supplier. The conversations are around how to successfully and jointly win the market opportunities. It is quite different from a few years’ ago. If all we can offer is credit or simply supply the product, then there isn’t much room for a partner to engage. However, if we talk about the opportunity and how we can cohabitate, it would become more interesting for the channel partners. We are looking to help our partners win in the real sense and to enable this, we offer extensive support such as PoCs, hosting customers in our facility and taking them through the journey.

“Today every single person at Redington Value is a solutions provider. The approach is how to bring together different technologies into one solution to win the marketplace. This change in mindset has also helped us to be at the forefront of the industry.”

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

How important is channel enablement to the firm’s overall business?

Channel enablement and education are as important for us as channel acquisitions and promotions. We organize a number of trainings and enablement initiatives throughout the year to help partners be in a better position to seize market opportunities.

How are you helping partners to make the transition to working in a cloud-enabled environment?

We assist partners from understanding the concept of cloud to onboarding them on platforms such as Azure and AWS. We conduct regular workshops and organize cloud cafes and boot camps. We help them get certified and proficient in cloud technologies from a public cloud point of view.

From a private cloud perspective, our expertise on VMware’s private cloud and Red Hat’s Open Stack is extensive. We support them from virtualizing the compute storage and the network layer to setting up a private cloud network in the journey to the public cloud. We enable partners on different segments and have fullfledged training on how to deploy a private hybrid cloud infrastructure and move between public and private environments. With various courses and training labels, we do this extensively across the region in association with key vendors.

How can they prepare their businesses to thrive in the new digital era?

Partners need to take risks. They must put the cart before the horse even in initiatives or areas where the demand

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partners in 2016

may not be 100 percent. Traditionally, resellers will wait for a vendor or a distributor to pass on the funds for a particular technology. But only if the reseller takes the driver’s seat and makes that investment in personnel and resources, can he truly take advantage of the opportunity. The market is fiercely competitive with many new players entering regularly. It is critical to stay differentiated.

This rings true for us as well. We have made several investments where the returns are not expected in the first year. However, we have stayed invested, created the business opportunity and now we are going to accelerate the demand. Partners have to take risk and invest in emerging technologies.

Can you elaborate on your plans for 2018?

Over the course of 2018, we will be massively focused on four areas – mobility, security, cloud and analytics.

There will be a number of prospects around cloud, software-defined data center and hyperconverged technologies. We believe security will

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

MORE THAN

Red Cloud

175

partners in 2017

remain the fastest growing opportunity for us. We also aim to be the most differentiated analytics player by 2018.

By ‘differentiated’, I mean we will have an offering of our own such as analytics-as-a-service.

After 11 years of operations in the region, how do you plan to revolutionize the distribution space?

The next phase for Redington Value is transforming from a distributor to an aggregator. The difference is that as a distributor you are only tied up with the authorization you have to resell particular products and services. An aggregator is someone who can aggregate solutions, products and relationships. We sell to ISVs and telcos but currently we are not route to market to both. Tomorrow we envisage a model where we will be a route to market to sell their services.

We will become an aggregator of products, solutions, services – we will not remain as a distributor. That’s our vision over the next five years.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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VIEWPOINT | REDINGTON VALUE

DEFINING PATH TO SUCCESS

By Sayantan Dev, Vice President, VCG, Redington Value

T

he modern data center goes beyond the four walls of the onpremise establishment to the public cloud. Today servers have been consolidated and fully virtualized with new levels of integration and scalability achieved through converged and hyperconverged architectures. Now the onpremise infrastructure is SDDC-enabled and public-cloud-ready for seamless movement of workloads.

Therefore, the new age systems integrator needs to understand all the tenets of the modern data center strategy, including the latest in data center infrastructure, operations and management.

According to sources, the SDDC market worldwide is expected to grow from $25 billion in 2016 to $80 billion plus by 2021.

The Middle East and Africa market size is expected to be over $5 billion. So, there is a massive opportunity ahead of us in the region. If we break it down to solutions, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is expected to be the highest growth category.

In fact, SDN as a category is expected to grow even faster than the rate at which the

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server virtualization market grew during the early adoption days of virtualization as a technology.

There is a huge opportunity for the channel in this area. Software-defined data center is basically using software to control hardware that brings infinite scalability of resources and services to meet a defined level of service assurance. This is achieved by abstracting the hardware layer to provide compute services as virtual resources to applications demanding them.

This abstraction is achieved through – server virtualization, storage virtualization or software-defined storage, network virtualization or software-defined networking.

Specialized skills in each of the areas will be required to achieve this abstraction. This presents an enormous opportunity for consulting and professional services for the channel partners. The key is to invest early enough to reap the full benefits of this opportunity.

The biggest challenge in this area is the availability of skills. The transformation from a traditional data center to a fully optimized SDDC requires expertise not only in the area of virtualization but also requires understanding of storage, compute and networking, management and cloud. System integrators need to invest in building and acquiring specialized skills to build a future ready organization.

Redington Value has invested and developed competencies in-house in each of these areas. Conducting workshops and boot camps on SDDC overall and individual

“Softwaredefined data center is basically using software to control hardware that brings infinite scalability of resources and services to meet a defined level of service assurance.”

specialties is part of the firm’s regular calendar. Additionally, Redington has hosted several VMUGs focusing on individual specialties. We have also made significant investments in building a state-of-the-art Solution Centre with entire stack deployed in the data center. We encourage our partners to bring in their customers to showcase solutions. In specific cases, we also replicate customer environments to test applications.

We are optimistic about the market and look forward to successfully capturing opportunities together with our partners.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

CONFLUENCE OF PLATFORMS

By Dharshana K, General Manager VCG, Redington Value

H

yperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is a marketing coin, which has captured the industry’s attention in the recent past. The general accepted definition of the term is a combination of compute, storage, networking and management; leveraging the hypervisor to converge these layers on an industry standard X86 platform. HCI has become one of the fastest growing technologies in our region, among the enterprise, midmarket and SMB markets. Customers who were spending huge amounts on standalone technologies or converged platforms are now looking for hyperconverged platforms because they are affordable, easy to deploy and less complex.

HCI technology has captivated customers in this region within a short period of time. Through HCI, they have hosted at least tier-2 applications and services on hyperconverged platforms, with All-Flash capability. Some customers have deployed tier-1 applications as well. Multiple ROI calculations by Gartner or Forrester indicate that the cost of hyperconverged infrastructure is way less than traditional systems. Some studies found that it can even cost less than public cloud expenses.

Few researches showcase Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and Converged Infrastructure (CI) adaptation in EMEA little above 45% in 2016 compared to 25% in 2015. HCI is a technology shift where customers can achieve their objectives in a costeffective way without any compromise.

In the event of Converged Infrastructure or Hyperconverged Infrastructure; conversation between channel partners and end consumers

go much beyond a transactional one. Channel partners must gain an understanding of current environment, ongoing applications and business challenges by wearing a consultative hat. This approach helps partners to pick the right language and open up the possibilities of reaching higher up the value stack to support customers by pitching CI / HCI solutions as well as take part in future digital transformation processes. Adding virtualization layer helps channel partners to bring additional value to their customers such as streamlined IT operations and optimization, reduced spending,

“In the event of Converged Infrastructure or Hyperconverged Infrastructure; conversation between channel partners and end consumers go much beyond a transactional one.”

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

easier backup, disaster recovery, enhanced security, better business continuity and more efficient IT operations.

Redington is coming from a rich hyperconverged exposure. At one point of time, we had in-house HCI assembly plant in the region for one of our strategic vendors. We were trained to assemble, integrate and sell. We have designed our own strategies around go-tomarket, channel and business development.

Our homegrown HCI team can play an effective role in any position in the sales cycle and make the difference. Over the last year, Redington has not only doubled the sales figures in the market we operate in but also developed a focused and committed channel community. Our aim is to continue working on new innovations, which our channel ecosystem will hear about soon.

At Redington Value, we are always taking the upper hand in enabling our channel community, especially on emerging technologies. Our skilled sales and technical teams have committed to disseminate the message of CI and HCI with the comprehensive proof of concepts built in RED Vault - Redington’s state-of-the-art IT experience center. Our in-house discovery mechanism has helped channel partners to discover the next opportunity. We invite all our partners to be a part of this journey.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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DELL EMC

ACCELERATING BUSINESS AGILITY Learn how Dell EMC DSS 9000 can address an organization’s workload challenges effectively.

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The Value Plus October 2017

D

ell EMC is helping carriers and service providers accelerate the shift to software-defined data centers and cloud computing initiatives with the Dell EMC DSS 9000, an open and agile rack scale infrastructure. CenturyLink and Telefonica are among the first customers using the hyperscale-inspired DSS 9000 to address workload demands economically and efficiently.

“Carriers and service providers need hyperscale-inspired infrastructure to balance the need to innovate at the speed of business while spending less,” said James Mouton, Senior Vice President, Extreme Scale Infrastructure,

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

Dell EMC. “With the DSS 9000, we are leveraging our 10 years of experience working with industry titans to make it easier to purchase, optimize, deploy, manage and service infrastructure at scale.”

To increase competitiveness and enable rapid innovation for modern technologies including 5th generation wireless (5G) networks, Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, many carriers and service providers are moving toward software-defined infrastructure, similar to what the largest hyperscale cloud companies employ. With a flexible design and open architecture, the DSS 9000 can reduce TCO by up to 27% over five years.

The DSS 9000 provides compute, storage, networking, power, cooling and open management in a pre-integrated rack scalable up to 96 nodes with Intel Xeon Scalable processors and built to customers’ requirements. With the DSS 9000, carriers and service providers can move toward a future of composable infrastructure and provision and manage at the rack level – as well as across the entire infrastructure – with a single interface.

DELL EMC DSS 9000 IN ACTION CenturyLink, a global communications and IT services company, offers a portfolio of flexible cloud solutions to help customers create, run and scale their applications. The company selected the DSS 9000 as a building block for its public and private cloud offerings.

“Our cloud infrastructure offerings are designed to help customers maintain control, increase visibility and be more agile so they can run both cloud-native and traditional applications more efficiently,” said David Shacochis, Vice President, Hybrid IT product management, CenturyLink. “We chose the DSS 9000 to be a key component of our CenturyLink Private Node offering because of its flexible design and ability to give our customers a buildto-order private cloud solution. Our public cloud offerings are also offered on the DSS 9000, providing a consistent and reliable experience for customers who have both public and private cloud needs.”

DSS 9000 BENEFITS To keep pace with growing digital workloads and the influx of data, carriers and service

The DSS 9000 provides compute, storage, networking, power, cooling and open management in a pre-integrated rack scalable up to 96 nodes with Intel Xeon Scalable processors and built to customers’ requirements. providers need open and agile infrastructure that can quickly respond to rapid growth, while providing a consistent and scalable platform from the edge to the core. The DSS 9000 helps: • Accelerate delivery of new services by provisioning, deploying and managing at the rack level to speed time to value and deliver better total cost of ownership.

• Simplify large scale operations with management based on the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Redfish specification that ensures interoperability with heterogeneous systems.

• Provide greater business agility by disaggregating hardware resources and creating composable systems with Redfish and Intel Rack Scale Design (RSD).

• Future-proof infrastructure with open principles; for example, DSS 9000 is recognized by the Open Compute Project as OCP-INSPIRED and designed with an open networking approach to support NFV and SDN initiatives.

• Deploy workload-optimized configurations with a variety of rack heights that accommodates full, half and third-width compute and storage sleds as well as other standard server, storage and networking options.

“Intel Rack Scale Design enables composable, disaggregated infrastructure solutions, which

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

enables service providers to cost-effectively accelerate data center innovations,” said Figen Ulgen, General Manager, Intel Rack Scale Design. “We have been working alongside Dell EMC on Intel RSD since its inception and are thrilled to see the traction the Intel RSD architecture and software is driving in digital transformation.”

“Dell EMC is focused on partnering with service providers to help architect, design, and deploy rack scale infrastructure and on delivering solutions that target the transformation of the data center, from edge to core, helping accelerate the pace at which service providers can adapt,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, Vice President, Dell EMC Service Provider Solutions. “With the rapid advances in network, compute, and storage virtualization, it is important to have a common underlying infrastructure platform that spans both currently-accepted virtualization principles and incorporates a path toward more advanced tooling and operations such as containers, micro-services, automation, and DevOps.” AVAILABILITY The DSS 9000 with Intel Xeon Scalable processors will be available to carriers and service providers in the Americas in October, and in other regions worldwide in Dell EMC’s fiscal fourth quarter.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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BUILDING AND STRENGTHENING YOUR DATA CENTER SECURITY

Traditional approaches to securing data centers have focused on strong perimeter defenses to keep threats outside the network. Once attackers are inside, it's difficult to stop them.

BUILD A STRONGER DEFENSE with MICRO-SEGMENTATION Divide the data center int o d ist inct securit y seg m ent s, and int eg rat e w it h lead ing t hird -p art y securit y solut ions t o: Define security controls and network services for each unique segment

Restrict an attacker’s lateral movements, even after a perimeter breach

Isolate communication across unrelated networks

Segment communication within a network TRA NSFORM YOUR DATA CENTER w it h NETW ORK VIRTUALIZATION The Software-Defined Data Center ext end s core virt ualizat ion t echnolog ies t o t he ent ire d at a cent er.

Throug h net w ork virt ualizat ion, org anizat ions can d ep loy m icro-seg m ent at ion for t he follow ing use cases:

STRENGTHEN YOUR DATA CENTER w it h MICRO-SEGMENTATION ENABLED BY VMWARE NSX ® W ith network virtualization, m icro-seg m ent at ion has b ecom e a p ract ical and p ow erful realit y w here:

Securit y is everyw here

Core virt ualizat ion t echnolog ies t ransform d at acent er econom ics

Net w ork securit y insid e t he d at a cent er

DMZ anyw here

Secure user environm ent s

A ut om at ion and non-d isrup t ive d ep loym ent p rovid e b usiness ag ilit y

To learn more about micro-segmentation enabled by VMware NSX, please visit vmware.com/products/nsx

VMWARE

OPENING DOORS

VMware’s vCloud NFV-OpenStack offers communications service providers the fastest path to OpenStack for Network Functions Virtualization.

V

Mware has recently announced VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack, delivering the fastest path to deploying production NFV services on OpenStack.

The new vCloud NFV-OpenStack platform includes VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition, VMware’s new OpenStack Ocata-based distribution that is fully integrated, tested, and certified with VMware’s NFV infrastructure platform. Using VMware Integrated OpenStack as an NFV Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM), network architects can easily deploy, upgrade, and operate an OpenStack cloud on top of VMware’s carrier-grade NFVI platform.

Facing unprecedented traffic growth along with rapidly evolving customer expectations, communications service providers (CSPs) are accelerating adoption of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Industry momentum for OpenStack in NFV deployments has continued gaining traction, with telcos seeing the potential for benefits that include use of open architectures, improved flexibility and pace of innovation for cloud-based networks, access to a global community of OpenStack developers and standardized northbound interfaces (NFV Orchestration, VNF-Manager). With the vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition, VMware supports an open architecture for seamless integration and interoperability.

“The release of vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition and announcement of VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition is a major

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step forward in our NFV strategy, given the feedback we received from our customers,” said Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice President, Solutions, Telco NFV Group, VMware. “We are able to offer the fastest path to production OpenStack by providing what nobody else has in the market: the most reliable and rich NFV infrastructure based on VMware’s industryleading virtualization software combined with the openness of standard OpenStack to be optimized with carrier extensions.”

OPENSTACK THAT’S PURPOSE-BUILT AND TUNED FOR CARRIER REQUIREMENTS VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition has been developed specifically to address the requirements of CSPs deploying NFV-based network services on OpenStack. VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack brings native support for container-based Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) through integrated container management, enabling VM and containerbased VNFs to run on a single VIM. The solution leverages Ocata’s specific functionality to give CSPs tools to deploy NFV networks including: Multi-Tenancy and VNF Resource Reservation: provides resource-level tenant isolation and guaranteed resource availability for each tenant, enabling CSPs to deliver on infrastructure SLAs while securing tenants within the network and improved capacity planning.

Dynamic and Elastic Scaling of Network Resources: allows CSPs to create elastic

service constructs that can scale network functions up or down, in and out based on usage patterns in order to respond to realtime network traffic conditions. This enables optimal resource management and lowering of capital and operational costs.

Enhanced Networking Support and Platform Awareness (EPA): delivers carriergrade, low latency data-plane performance, enabling CSPs to maintain network performance to deliver a high subscriber Quality of Experience while optimizing resource utilization through supported methodologies such as CPU Pinning, finegrained NUMA placement settings, support for multiple NIC types and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV).

VMWARE VCLOUD NFV OPENSTACK ACCELERATES AND SIMPLIFIES PATH TO PRODUCTION NFV Leveraging VMware’s rich feature set for NFVI and VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition, VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack offers CSPs: Simplified OpenStack Installation and Deployment: VMware Integrated OpenStackCE allows templated install and deployment of a complete OpenStack Infrastructure within the VMware vSphere Web Client, leveraging advanced management capabilities through vCenter.

Seamless OpenStack Upgrade Experience: Control Plane and Data Plane separation

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

allows for zero network services downtime and service continuity during the OpenStack upgrade process. CSPs can keep up with the pace of innovation through fast upgrades and patching.

Integrated Operations Management: through unique NFVI operational automation and Ceilometer integration, along with proactive and predictive analytics, issue isolation, root cause analysis and fast remediation capabilities. VMware vRealize Operations Manager, Log Insight, Network Insight integrated within vCloud NFVOpenStack, provide operations monitoring, analytics, and a remediation platform via a single pane of glass that reduces operational costs through fast Mean-Time-To-Understand and Repair (MTTU/MTTR).

VMWARE VCLOUD NFV AND THE VMWARE READY PROGRAM With more than 90 NFV deployments by more than 50 CSPs worldwide, VMware vCloud NFV accelerates service innovation and delivery, reduces costs, and simplifies network operations.

The vCloud NFV platform enables organizations to deploy a multi-vendor and multi-function NFV platform today that delivers service automation, secure multi-tenancy, operations management, and carrier grade reliability with 5G readiness. The VMware Ready for NFV certification provides CSPs with the confidence that VMware partner VNF solutions will seamlessly and effectively deploy, run, and interoperate with VMware vCloud NFV. To date, more than 20 VNF partners have been certified on previous versions of VMware Integrated OpenStack, and have committed to

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

certification on VMware Integrated OpenStackCarrier Edition upon GA of the software.

“VMware is making a bold play for the OpenStack market with a new implementation that combines a big tent standard Ocata distro with superior usability and additional carrier-grade extensions,” said Caroline Chappell, Principal Analyst, Analysys Mason. “Carriers that have struggled to make open source work reliably in the NFV environment will want to consider this product carefully, as it marries a slew of VMware-engineered capabilities that are critical to NFV operations with the advantages of OpenStack.”

AVAILABILITY VMware vCloud NFV-Carrier Edition will be generally available in Q3 FY 2018 (ending November 3, 2017).

October 2017 The Value Plus

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TCG DIGITAL

BUILDING MODERN ENTERPRISES Arunava Mitra TCG Digital

T

CG Digital, part of a US$ 4B conglomerate - The Chatterjee Group (TCG), is a leading global IT Consulting, Products and Solutions company headquartered in NJ, US with clients across North America, META, India, Central America and Asia-Pacific. It can be considered as a new-age startup, which has its roots and foundation in providing technology services for almost two decades and brings the desired flexibility, agility and modern technologies that define new-age startups today and helps in building the modern enterprise.

We are one of the few companies that has managed to successfully transform itself from being a traditional application development and support services provider to a digital transformation enablement partner thus ensuring a strong sustainable foundation leveraging our investments in building products and focusing on growth drivers like analytics, mobility and cyber security.

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Arunava Mitra, Director and Leader, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, TCG Digital, details how the firm can assist businesses to go digital.

The last six months have been of critical importance as we have got validation of our focus and strategy from the marketplace and witnessed continuous growth in an otherwise challenging business environment digitally disrupted with game changers including automation, AI, analytics and machine learning.

A 30% plus profitable growth in this period, industry recognitions including “Excellence in Business Analytics” from NASSCOM and “Dream Company To Work For” at 6th Asian HR Leadership Awards held in Dubai and multiple client acquisitions lay testimony to the success achieved.

Our investments during this period have been heavily focused on building the foundation to the Middle East and Turkey (META) business with a local team and a channel partner ecosystem, which will be the fulcrum of our business in the region. Our channel business is of strategic importance to TCG Digital, leading its growth in the non-US market (focus markets being UAE, Saudi

Arabia, Oman and Qatar). Our growth strategy is pillared around our award winning end-toend analytics platform (tcg mcube), which is seeing significant traction in the marketplace.

The Middle East technology market is in a transformational phase focused on data driven investments led with big data analytics and enterprise analytics initiatives. Businesses are driving efficiencies, optimizing costs and increasingly becoming customer centric to differentiate in the market place. We see it as a huge big opportunity for TCG Digital to deliver significant value to clients in the region with rapid implementation at an optimal cost with our core focus in BI and Advanced analytics, a modern analytics platform (tcg mcube) and high performing talent in data science.

We are banking on a channel driven approach to the market. Our channel strategy is extremely focused on ensuring more for less for our partners and customers. We would invest in ensuring partner enablement, training, pre-sales support and most

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

importantly devise a win-win strategy committed to their success, which will drive our growth. We believe that the unique positioning of tcg mcube addresses the biggest challenges faced by enterprises with respect to analytics investments – (i) Stretched time to value (ii) Complex choices in multiple analytics investments will enable them to sell more with lesser effort. tcg mcube has a future proof architecture built on modern technologies that caters to the entire spectrum of the analytics value chain – descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics with a single investment. tcg mcube can work with structured and unstructured data sources and accelerate time to value with pre-built industry specific algorithms and use cases that deliver tangible business outcomes for data analytics initiatives across aviation, retail, insurance, manufacturing, consumers and petrochemicals industries.

We are looking at creating a position for tcg mcube as the enterprise analytics platform of choice in the region. In 2018, we are confident that tcg mcube will have a significant imprint into clients of various sizes due to its ability to deliver business outcomes in quick time.

The biggest challenge currently in the market is that the BI and Analytics space has become quite crowded with various tools catering to specific aspects of analytics like ingestion, processing, reports, dashboards and advanced analytics. However millions of dollars of investments have failed to deliver the promised value in terms of measurable business impact.

The ability of tcg mcube to cater to the entire spectrum of the analytics value chain and helping business users to solve complex business problems specific to their industry will make it a platform of choice optimizing time to value for analytics initiatives and simplifying complexities attached to procuring multiple products and the challenges towards consolidation and integrations as part of the enterprise analytics landscape. Moreover, tcg mcube lays the foundation to an analytics journey and adapts to the “as-is” analytics maturity of an enterprise and helps in the evolution overtime with incremental business

“The Middle East technology market is in a transformational phase focused on data driven investments led with big data analytics and enterprise analytics initiatives.”

value at short intervals as business evolves.

Our key message for our channel partners is our success in the region relies on your success and we are committed to your success! Our analytics platform has proven its ability to solve complex business problems across industries and will help your customer’s achieve end-to- end analytics with a single investment. It not only simplifies their buying process but delivers results in quick time for

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

internal justifications with tangible benefits. In addition, with 100+ industry specific pre-built business use cases, it helps clients relate to their real-world problems and see solutions that can democratize analytics adoption across their business and technical communities. Thus, it makes selling a lot more seamless and value-driven and is perceived as a business analytics solution rather than just a technology or a tool.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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CAMBIUM NETWORKS

THE STRONGEST LINK Ron Ryan, SVP Global Channels, Cambium Networks, describes how the company aims to “connect the unconnected” through compelling channel allies.

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an you share recent milestones from the company?

Technology is the fuel that drives the continued growth of Cambium Networks.

We just recently shipped the one millionth PMP 450 device that has been the flagship of our multipoint technology. That milestone was shortly preceded by the announcement of the industry’s first Massive MIMO, 14x14, outdoor access point that is part of that same family.

Add this to our recent expansion in the enterprise Wi-Fi market with a new line up of our indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi products that are all managed with a cloud-based, single pane of glass. Additionally, we’ve recently surpassed the five millionth network design, using our industry standard ‘LINKPlanner’. Cambium continues to be a leader in wireless innovation.

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What is the firm’s business objective?

What role do partners play in meeting it?

Cambium’s primary business objective is Connecting the Unconnected—People, Places and Things, with a wireless fabric of products that range from two meters to 250 kilometers. The wireless fabric consists of indoor and outdoor products that are engineered to be high quality, yet affordable.

Since Cambium sells 95% of its products through the channel, our partners are a big part of our company strategy and extremely important to our success. Our partners serve thousands of customers in hundreds of vertical applications that give us reach and a strategic advantage for our large portfolio of wireless products.

What are some growth drivers powering your business?

Affordable internet access, including residential, commercial, and industrial, is still underserved in many markets. Those that have it are looking for higher bandwidth, and those that don’t are looking for adequate bandwidth. This application, in its many forms, continues to fuel growth for Cambium’s products.

Where people have been the primary target for internet access, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will significantly exceed this over the next five to ten years. There will be an unprecedented number of things connected to the Internet, most of them still undefined.

Connecting these devices will require networks that are close in proximity and that backhaul product over long distances.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

“Cambium’s wireless fabric includes products that serve all of these vertical applications with affordable quality and a single cloud-management system to operate the network efficiently.”

Ron Ryan Cambium Networks

The commercial enterprise world is focused on office mobility in place of the historical ‘blue wires’ that weave through ceiling structures terminating to a single Ethernet plug under your desk. The new office is focused on Wi-Fi access with roaming capability and high security.

Cambium’s wireless fabric includes products that serve all of these vertical applications with affordable quality and a single cloud-management system to operate the network efficiently. Whether it’s wireless access or transport, Cambium is relevant to the discussion.

Can you elaborate on your channel strategy for the region?

Cambium works through a two-tier channel strategy. The first part is the selection and onboarding of our distributors. The MEA region is no exception; Cambium chooses distributors based on their geographical and vertical market reach. We look for wellcapitalized distributors who can provide adequate sales terms, lead times, and credit facilities to support a growing customer base.

The second part is the recruitment and onboarding of the value-added reseller (VAR) base. Distributors can provide significant value in this process, particularly in identifying and communicating to the VAR base. Good distributors have a standing with VARs in multiple vertical markets and usually have effective ways of bifurcating and communicating based on their individual strengths and capabilities.

The VARs are the customer-facing solution providers to our end customers. It is critical to the success of any region to ensure we have the right partners and to ensure they are adequately trained and enabled to represent Cambium.

How do your distributor partners enable your channel within the region?

Enabling partners is an ongoing multistep process. Training is the obvious first step, but ongoing communication about new products, services, and opportunities is equally important. Some of our best trainers are qualified Cambium Certified Instructors who are employed by our distributors. They are able to set up local, in-market training opportunities that are more difficult for a manufacturer to do on a global scale.

Another critical enabler is providing marketing support and leads. VARs are often smaller organizations that have limited resources for business development and

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

good distributors offer ways to provide that value.

Can you share some channel initiatives that the firm has undertaken?

With the introduction of our new enterprise grade Wi-Fi and IIoT products, Cambium has been on an aggressive partner recruiting effort, signing more than 500 partners globally in the last six months. It has been a collaborative effort with our distributors and one that will likely continue for the rest of this year.

How can your partners successfully sell your solutions? Which are the areas they have to be proficient in?

We encourage all our partners to take the certification courses for the products that fit their vertical markets. Each vertical market has its own context for the application of our products, and VARs are the ones to make that connection. A clear understanding of networks and how to deploy them in a wireless context is a must.

Can you share your plans for the region in 2018?

Cambium will continue to introduce new products in 2018. We have a need to continue recruiting and enabling partners, specifically in the commercial enterprise business segment. Our primary focus will be to support those efforts.

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CISCO

NEXT-GENERATION OF NETWORKING Frida Kleimert, Channel Lead, Cisco Middle East and Africa, elucidates how to accelerate digital transformation with the firm’s ‘The Network. Intuitive.’

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here are an estimated 8.4 billion connected devices today and this number is racing ahead to reach hundreds of billions. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts, over 500 billion devices and objects will be connected by 2030. The present and ongoing phase of digital transformation is more powerful and challenging than previous technological transformational phases. Digital disruption is radically changing economies, cities, communities and the landscape of business.

The connected world has become too big and too complex for us humans to effectively administer by our own skills. The networks of tomorrow, with their dense array of devices, sensors, systems, appliances, applications, will not be manually administered. They will be too complex, too cumbersome, too complicated,

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and fast changing, that much more than manual administration will be required. Traditional networking models simply do not scale and perform to meet the expectations of this digital era.

With this spate of challenges, businesses need a new networking framework, that is simplified and more secure to use. IDC indicates that businesses that have invested in modern networks, have improved their rate of growth in revenue, customer retention and profit, by a factor of two to three times. For digital organizations, the network is the foundation of their business and success.

In the connected world of today, every company is becoming a technology company.

While connected devices present useful business opportunities, the complexity of managing the devices and the network itself, in

an efficient and secure manner, is a challenge for present day technologies. This means every company needs to have security, on the top of its boardroom agenda. Organizations that make cybersecurity a critical foundation for their digital growth strategies will accelerate their innovation and reduce their time to market. Security is the most sensitive and critical component of digital transformation.

Increasingly industry analysts now agree that the way forward to tackle security challenges in digital organizations is through the network. It is within the network that people, processes and data collide, and technology itself presents solutions to move forward.

From the field of analytics, machine learning can be used to build complex models and algorithms within networks that are capable of generating forward looking trends. Analytical

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

models inbuilt inside networks can produce reliable and repeatable decisions and can uncover hidden insights through learning from historical relationships embedded in data.

Machine learning can give networks the ability to learn without being programmed. This approach has evolved from pattern recognition and learning theory in artificial intelligence.

Networks with such inbuilt algorithms can learn and make predictions from data. With the help of these algorithms, networks can overcome the limitation of static programming and can make data-driven predictions and decisions, through building a model from data inputs. In the past data mining has been used to discover new trends in wide arrays of collected data. However, in the case of such intuitive networks built on machine learning, algorithms discover known trends that are prevalent in data as it is aggregated.

Networks with in-built machine learning and complex algorithms can establish a pattern of baseline behavior and can successfully flag deviations without supervision. One of the immediate benefits is the ability to successfully build models of optimal network behavior and proactively react without intervention to anomalies and intrusions within.

Such new intuitive networks shift from the traditional manual, time-intensive, static mode of operation, towards one that is capable of continuously learning from the data that it manages for an organization. The more volume of data it manages, the more it is capable of learning through analytics and adapting for automatic and efficient response. The intuitive network automates the edge of the network and embeds machine learning and analytics at a foundational level.

Three fundamentals characterize these innovative solutions. By enabling the ability to move from manual operations to automation, this network can scale to manage millions of devices, establishing its Intent. By assessing data continuously in Context with the rest of the organization, the network can provide better insights leading to proactive security actions and efficiency. By virtue of the actions it takes and

assessment of the results, the network can improve the results of its future insights and also its future action, hence Intuition.

Where does all this lead? The first is, an intuitive network will gain the trust of business and IT executives wanting to select a platform to build their digital business models of tomorrow.

This will be on the basis of its machine learning capabilities, that it is constantly learning and evolving to become highly secure and provide insights. And the second is, the intuitive network is just the stepping stone to a much bigger vision of creating intuitive technology infrastructure.

But for now, the network remains the accelerator and enabler towards this exciting end game.

‘The Network. Intuitive.’ – Cisco’s Next Generation of Networking Marking one of the significant breakthroughs in the history of enterprise networking, Cisco recently launched ‘The Network. Intuitive.’, which is the result of years of research and development by the company to reinvent networking for an age where network engineers managing hundreds of devices today will be expected to manage 1 million by 2020. Designed to be intuitive, the new network can recognize intent, mitigate threats through encryption, and learn over time, thus unlocking opportunities and enhancing business agility.

Our partners are excited about our new intuitive networking platform, which is an end-toend solution - unmatched in today’s market place. It brings analytics, automation, machine learning and AI together, so customers really do get an intuitive network. Cisco’s Encrypted Traffic Analytics solves a network security challenge previously thought to be unsolvable, where malware can be found in encrypted traffic. By utilizing Cisco’s Talos cyber intelligence and machine learning to analyze metadata traffic patterns, the network can identify the fingerprints of known threats even in encrypted traffic, without decrypting it and impacting data privacy.

As the new Cisco network is secure, simple, and based on software, with always-on analytics, partners will be able to help customers to make better business decisions faster, with lower

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

Frida Kleimert Cisco Middle East and Africa costs and lesser risks. To embrace this technology, our channel partners are evolving their networking practices and developing new skills to pursue new business opportunities.

Cisco is helping partners in their efforts by introducing new programs, incentives and tools to help them build networking practices that incorporate software, security, automation and analytics for their customers.

Cisco has created a new portfolio of services that leverage best practices and innovative tools.

Whether customers are looking to transform their entire network or integrate new security and automation capabilities into their existing network, Cisco partners have a life cycle of advisory, implementation, optimization and technical services to help.

The network has never been more critical to business success. Our partners will lead the digital transformation market by selling the most advanced and intuitive digital network available and enabling customers to respond quickly to changing demands. We are excited to be part of this next era and we look forward to making history together.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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Constantly learning.

Constantly adapting.

Constantly protecting.

Only from Cisco.

#networkintuitive

VIEWPOINT | REDINGTON VALUE

BEYOND THE HORIZON

By Cherian John, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure Systems, Redington Value

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s cloud technologies continue to gain traction in the region, organizations are under enormous pressure to optimize and fine-tune the infrastructure to best take advantage of the new technology.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s public cloud services market is projected to grow 22.2 percent in 2017 to total $1.2 billion, up from $956 million in 2016, and will most probably end up at $2 billion by 2020, according to recent figures from Gartner.

The major forces driving the Middle East cloud infrastructure services market are easy access to disaster recovery, faster deployment of infrastructure services and scalability features, and enhanced efficiency and business productivity.

The growth in PaaS and SaaS are indicators that migration of application and workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud, as well as development of cloud ready and cloud native applications, are fuelling growth in the cloud space.

Oracle is perfectly positioned to take advantage of these trends since they have a comprehensive and complete portfolio of cloud offerings supported by more than 19 worldwide data centers, a large team of cloud security experts, and around-the-clock monitoring and support. Oracle provides the best availability and

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security for your cloud infrastructure, ease of moving workloads between on-premise to public cloud at the same time reducing the complexity of operations with the help of solutions such as Ravello.

As the industry’s broadest and most integrated public cloud, Oracle cloud offers bestin-class services across Software as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS). More than that, it also lets customers put Oracle Cloud in their own data centers.

Oracle offers a complete cloud solution for every layer of the cloud technology stack, and the flexibility and ability to move applications and workloads between the cloud and on-premises environments. From PaaS, which includes the Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server; to IaaS, wherein the firm delivers a set of infrastructure services—including elastic compute and storage; and lastly, to Oracle SaaS, which covers everything from customer experience to ERP, human capital management, and many more.

For partners who want to help drive their customers’ innovation and business transformation through Oracle’s cloud solutions, the company offers the OPN Cloud Program.

The initiative is designed to help partners accelerate innovation, lead business transformation and fully realize the competitive advantages offered through Oracle Cloud. The Cloud Program also aims to enable partners to get trained, differentiate their cloud offerings, develop new solutions or move their existing onpremise applications on to Oracle PaaS, integrate these applications with Oracle SaaS and then market and resell these solutions using the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

“We are also setting up Cloud Centres of Excellence (COEs) across the region to showcase and demonstrate Oracle Cloud Solutions, facilitate trainings and workshops.”

As an Oracle partner, Redington Value is focused on the journey towards cloud success, we aim to build internal skill sets and expertise to handle the new trends from a sales and technical perspective. In line with this, we have recently launched our Red Cloud platform, which enabled us to digitize and transform our channel distribution practices. It has allowed us to streamline our channel engagement activities such as recruitment and enablement, presales, consulting and sales, credit, supply chain and logistics, partner and vendor management.

Furthermore, we are also setting up Cloud Centres of Excellence (COEs) across the region to showcase and demonstrate Oracle Cloud Solutions, facilitate trainings and workshops and build use case scenarios among others.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

VENDOR NEWS

NOKIA EASES IOT MARKET ENTRY FOR MOBILE OPERATORS

PIVOT3 FLAUNTS ACUITY CAPABILITIES IN MARKET STUDY

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okia is expanding its Internet of Things (IoT) services, offering to help mobile operators enter new IoT market segments or expand their footprint geographically. In addition, the company has complemented its end-to-end validation and testing services with Nokia TestHub, designed to accelerate new technology launches, such as IoT and the cloud.

Nokia’s WING market entry services is a consultative offering for operators, that determines opportunities in nine IoT market segments, including connected cars, healthcare, and smart cities, as well as connected industry. Once a service is up and running, the Nokia WING managed service model can provide provisioning, device management, operations, security, customer care and billing for all connected applications.

ollowing its launch in April 2017, Pivot3’s HCI solution Acuity has been compared against conventional solutions in the market throughout a three-month period, using industry-standard test tools and similar workloads on similarly-configured HCI systems, while also referencing public data for comparison.

The results of the first phase of comparison testing showed that the platform demonstrated 62 percent faster response times and nine times faster processing of IOs at submillisecond latencies. It also showcased faster application response time, even under heavy workloads, resulting in more satisfied end-users, increased revenue and greater employee productivity.

DIGICERT TO ACQUIRE VERITAS ELEVATES SOFTWARESYMANTEC’S WEBSITE SECURITY DEFINED STORAGE TO MAKE SOLUTIONS IN $950M DEAL STORAGE SMART

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ymantec and DigiCert have recently announced an agreement under which DigiCert will acquire Symantec’s website security and related PKI solutions. Under the terms of the agreement, Symantec will receive approximately $950 million in upfront cash proceeds and approximately a 30 percent stake in the common stock equity of the DigiCert business at the closing of the transaction.

The addition of Symantec’s website security solutions to DigiCert’s offerings will bring together the industry’s top talent and provide customers with an enhanced technology platform, unparalleled customer support and market-leading innovations. DigiCert will gain capabilities to take advantage of growth opportunities in IoT and bring new approaches to the SSL market.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

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eritas Technologies has unveiled a new software-defined storage solution designed for massive amounts of unstructured data, known as Veritas Cloud Storage. This storage solution enables customers to apply analytics, machine learning and classification technologies to stored data, which can help customers extract much greater value from their data, delivering better business outcomes and exceptional customer experiences. Veritas Cloud Storage can also help organizations accelerate their data center transformations with flexibility, agility, lower costs and no vendor lock-in.

To complement this launch, Veritas also announced the Veritas Access Appliance, an integrated software-defined storage appliance that offers long-term data retention with multi-cloud capability. These solutions are available in the coming quarters.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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ORACLE

UNLOCKING POSSIBILITIES Oracle’s expanded IoT cloud portfolio now features built-in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that powers Digital Twin and Digital Thread capabilities.

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The Value Plus October 2017

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racle has announced significant enhancements to the Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud. The offering now features built-in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that powers Digital Twin and Digital Thread capabilities. As such, customers and partners can quickly gain operation-wide visibility and leverage predictive insights from connected assets. These insights can decrease deployment times, reduce costs, improve business outcomes, and accelerate new market opportunities. Combining the power of Oracle IoT Cloud and enterprise applications, Oracle

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

also introduced new industry solutions for digital field service, smart connected factories, and digital fleet management.

“IoT holds the potential to transform today’s siloed operations into a modern, interconnected, digital set of workflows with real-time visibility and responsiveness,” said Bhagat Nainani, Group Vice President, IoT Applications, Oracle.

“Oracle continues to push the boundaries of IoT to help our customers significantly simplify their IoT deployments. By receiving real-time data streams enhanced with predictive insights, they can reach new levels of intelligence and a much quicker realization of ROI.” The expansion follows the recent introduction of new Oracle IoT Cloud Applications for asset monitoring, connected workforce, fleet monitoring, and production monitoring. Also, in the past six months alone, Oracle has more than tripled its IoT application ecosystem of device and systems integration partners. Oracle IoT Cloud is offered both as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, as well as platform-as-aservice (PaaS) offerings, enabling a high degree of adaptability for even the most demanding implementations.

NEW CAPABILITIES INCLUDE: • Digital Twin for Supply Chain Management Digital Twin is a digital representation of a physical asset or equipment that enhances traditional analytics approaches. The object model includes multi-faceted views into current, historical, and predictive data, as well as operational and behavioral dimensions of that asset. This enables remote users to not only monitor the health of that asset to prevent failures before they occur, but also to run simulations of ‘what-if’ scenarios in the context of the business processes. With Digital Twin, organizations have a new operational paradigm to interact with the physical world, allowing lower operational and capital expenditures, minimizing downtime, and optimizing asset performance.

• Digital Thread for Supply Chain Management Supply Chain practitioners have spent millions of dollars in implementing SCM and ERP systems, but most often, data is manually fed

“Oracle continues to push the boundaries of IoT to help our customers significantly simplify their IoT deployments. By receiving realtime data streams enhanced with predictive insights, they can reach new levels of intelligence and a much quicker realization of ROI.” into these systems. Digital Thread is a connected business process framework that leverages IoT and creates a ‘system of systems’ by connecting traditionally siloed elements in real-time throughout the digital supply chain. By providing an end-to-end view of an asset throughout the entire manufacturing lifecycle, Digital Thread seamlessly bridges the entire supply chain process—from product design and order fulfillment, to manufacturing and product life cycle management, to warehousing and transportation, to logistics and procurement.

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Built-in AI and machine learning features are now fully integrated across Oracle’s IoT solutions portfolio. These technologies leverage machine data in the context of business data from applications, such as manufacturing, maintenance, service, and logistics. The built-in operational analytics help detect anomalies, predict equipment failures, and recommend the best course of action. They also provide the intelligence needed to evolve capabilities to increase effectiveness and experiences of applications.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

• Industry Solutions Built on IoT Cloud Applications Oracle IoT industry solutions help customers reimagine and innovate business solutions for the connected, intelligent, context-aware, digital enterprise. New solutions introduced include: Digital Field Service: Showcases intelligent remote monitoring, failure prediction, overthe-air repair, and dynamic technician dispatch.

The solution features IoT Asset Monitoring Cloud, CX Service Cloud, CX Engagement Cloud, and CX Field Service Cloud, plus the use of augmented reality (AR) for guided equipment repair.

Smart Connected Factory: Demonstrates how incident detection, root cause analysis, and smart resolution are performed within minutes in a connected factory. The solution features IoT Production Monitoring Cloud, SCM Cloud and ERP Cloud, and the use of virtual reality (VR) to navigate the manufacturing floor. It can also be used for remote worker training.

Digital Fleet Management: Showcases realtime shipment tracking, risk management, and logistics synchronization. The solution features IoT Fleet Management Cloud and Oracle Logistics Cloud.

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VIEWPOINT | REDINGTON VALUE

INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS

By Kunal Singh, Server, Storage and Networking Head, Redington Value

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he enterprise storage and servers segment has evolved greatly over the last few years.

We have seen a massive shift in the market with respect to the traditional hardware segment as customers’ demands are now more focused on addressing business outcomes.

The IT department is no longer the sole decision-maker for technology related matters.

Business and functional teams are proactively contributing to these decisions today.

The demand for enterprise hardware is being driven by customers’ requirements for comprehensive solution sets to address their specific business needs.

Partners need to change their approach when it comes to selling these products and attempt to view it as part of an overall solution.

They have to go beyond the traditional productbased approach to offer a comprehensive solution to meet the customer’s requirements.

There is also a large influx of small to medium IoT firms that can help address the challenges faced by organizations across different functions and industries. We believe collaborating and building a model around

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cloud and IoT offerings will be the way forward for partners in the coming years.

With the advent of cloud and virtualization technologies, legacy systems integrators are now attempting to construct their business models around these opportunities. In the meantime, we are seeing an increasing number of ‘born-in-the-cloud’ partners and ISVs who are making an impact in the cloud segment. Majority of these companies are able to offer vertical solutions aimed at specific industries. As the cloud opportunity in the Middle East is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, it’s critical for the channel to develop the required model and in-house expertise to present cloud offerings to their customers. We believe that the channel partners’ ability to identify their model of value-add in the cloud era must be at the center of their roadmap and vision.

They also need to invest significantly in improving the skills of their internal talents to ensure they can provide end-to-end solutions to their customers. There is a growing trend of solution companies opting for a more direct model by eliminating the value chain in between. However, partners will still have a significant role to play as they own customer relationships and have a say in the decisionmaking process.

As the IT industry undergoes this transformation, at Redington Value, we are ensuring we are leading the space with innovation. For example, our state-of-the-art

“As the cloud opportunity in the Middle East is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, it’s critical for the channel to develop the required model and in-house expertise to present cloud offerings to their customers.” solutions center Red Vault showcases technologies addressing different business outcomes across verticals. Our consulting arm, Citrus Consulting is supporting partners on building the cloud roadmap for end-users. We aim to continue collaborating with vendors on comprehensive solutions around IoT and Smart City solutions.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

PRIMED FOR PROGRESS

By Rashad Baradie, General Manager, KSA, Redington Value

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he economy of Saudi Arabia is characterized by a number of special features, the most important of which is that it is the biggest economy in the Middle East.

Redington Value has had an exceptional growth year in the Saudi market. The main factors for our growth have been the government’s Vision 2030 announcement along with the uptake of technology game changers such as cloud, mobility, Internet of Things, converged infrastructure, Big Data and analytics, in the Saudi market.

One of the noteworthy milestones for Redington Saudi Arabia Distribution has been the fact that we have evolved from being a product-centric to a solutioncentric firm over the last few years. We boast the largest portfolio of IT products and solutions, which span across the traditional technology domains such as networking, voice, servers, storage, software, security and infrastructure.

We aim to grow even more aggressively over the next year.

We believe partners have several areas where they can invest to sustain a profitable business in 2018. We encourage our partners to focus on solutions around Internet of Things, mobility, cloud and hyperconvergence.

They can maximize the opportunity by

attaching services to all these technologies, which will help them improve their margins greatly. This will also enable them to retain customers for a long-term. Partners should invest in developing lasting relationships with their customers by ensuring they are consultative in their

“We are bullish of our growth strategies in place and urge our partners to take the lead and transform their businesses to the requirements of the digital era.”

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

approach. They must think beyond just selling and become an advisor for their customers’ businesses.

Over the course of 2018, our partners will see us reiterating our position in the market. Following the immense success of the Red Vault in the UAE, we are aiming to launch the solutions center in Saudi Arabia next year – Red Vault Saudi.

The solutions center will be fully integrated with more than 40 different solutions from numerous vendors, thereby making it the only such facility in the Saudi market with a multi-vendor environment.

The innovative new solutions center will create a platform for existing as well as new partners and customers to get trained on vendorauthorized training centers.

We are bullish of our growth strategies in place and urge our partners to take the lead and transform their businesses to the requirements of the digital era.

We will continue to offer in-depth support and back our partners to keep up with market evolutions. We are excited for a prosperous 2018 ahead.

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HPE

CHANGING THE GAME Nigel Upton, General Manager, IoT and Global Connectivity Platform, HPE, explains why Industrial IoT must move from optimization to transformation.

Nigel Upton HPE

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ndustrial IoT (IIoT) can be seen as a way to optimize existing processes and business models, for instance by achieving higher degrees of automation, or by avoiding outages with help of predictive maintenance.

However, IIoT can and must be more than that. We have seen how new digital business models have disrupted industries like media, retail or travel – and the same will happen over time to industries like manufacturing, chemicals or energy. Thus, at its core, the IIoT is not about achieving some percentage points of efficiency. It’s about which companies will capture which portion of this trillion-dollar opportunity – and which companies will become an extended workbench of a predominantly digital value creation.

This means that adopting the IIoT must go beyond optimization – it has to be a transformation. It means introducing new data-enabled processes in R&D, production, marketing and sales, new forms of

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cooperation in the supply chain, new ways of creating and commercializing products and services – all backed by a technology architecture that enables interoperability between “things” and provides data insights with the required speed.

Together with Industry of Things World, one of the leading IIoT conference series globally, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) conducted a survey to find out to which degree company leaders approach IIoT as optimization or as a transformation, how successful they have been, and what the biggest obstacles are. We also wanted to know which technology architectures they implement – how important will the public cloud be for IIoT, and which role will Edge Computing play?

OPTIMIZATION GOALS PREVAIL, MIXED SUCCESS RATE OF IIOT PROJECTS Asked about the business goals they want to achieve with their IIoT initiatives, by far most respondents (64%) named “increase efficiency”.

Similarly, other high-ranked IIoT goals like increase flexibility (48%) and reduce time to market (35%) rather aim to optimize the existing business, not create the new. In comparison, transformative goals like establishing new business models (34%), improving marketing (27%) and product development (26%) with help of IoT data, or the transformation from product sales to an as-a-services model (25%) ranked relatively low.

To be clear, increasing efficiency or time to market are important business goals – however, the dominance of optimization goals in the context of IIoT can be seen as an indicator that many companies have not yet fully embraced the transformational nature of this concept.

Can we as a consequence expect that the IIoT projects of our respondents have not been entirely successful? Yes, we can. 53% said their IIoT projects in the past 12 months either met or exceeded their goals, while 47% did not reach their goals – a small portion of which even say their projects were a complete failure.

So, for which reasons did companies struggle with their IIoT projects? Respondents named the lack of skills and the culture within their own company as the biggest obstacles (both 38%). This clearly underlines the fact that being successful with IIoT requires a company transformation, a central aspect of which is that you need new skills and mindsets. This is a challenge to many companies, as well as transformational issues like missing organizational structures (27%) and wrong governance and management (21%).

The survey makes clear that transformation also applies to the technology that underpins IIoT initiatives. You can’t just buy IIoT technology – IIoT requires a fundamental redesign of the information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) architecture.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

YOU CAN’T JUST BUY IIOT TECHNOLOGY – YOU HAVE TO TRANSFORM YOUR TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURE Closely after skills and culture, missing standards (36%) is named as one of the biggest IIoT roadblocks. This refers to the difficulty of making the “things” in the IIoT speak with each other – be it a Kuka robot speaking with an ABB robot, a production machine speaking with an IT systems, or a manufacturing plant speaking with an energy supplier. This requires common standards as well as new technology architectures which create convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT).

Accordingly, the number one skill companies are looking for is the ability to design new common architectures for IT and OT (45%), and number three is the ability to create a unified approach to the operations and support of IT and OT (32%). The fact that software development is also one of the most desired skills (42%) shows that we need new types of IT/OT software which in many cases are not available on the market as a packaged application.

EDGE AND CLOUD COMPUTING WILL GROW EQUALLY STRONG We also asked which role edge and cloud computing will play for IT/OT architectures in the coming years. Many market observers have emphasized the crucial role of the cloud for the IIoT. However, as our survey shows, edge computing is as important and will grow equally strong.

Edge computing means that compute and analytics resources are not running in a central datacenter or a cloud, but near to the things or in the things themselves – think of the IT embedded in a car, IT systems embedded in a machine, running on the factory floor or on an oil rig.

First, if we look at how much of the sensor data is today analyzed on IT systems close to the data source (i.e. the edge) and in the cloud, the percentages are quite low on both ends, with more than half of companies analyzing less than 30% of sensor data at the edge and in the cloud. The rest of the sensor

“To realize the promise of the IIoT, we have to deeply transform our traditional IT architectures, and we need both the edge and the cloud capabilities to make that happen.”

data is processed in a traditional company datacenter.

But if we look five years ahead, these numbers will change significantly, the ratios will be turned on their heads, with the majority of companies planning to analyze 30% to 70%, or even more than 70% of the sensor data at the edge and in the cloud.

This might seem to be a contradictory result, but it is not. In order to realize the promise of the IIoT, we have to deeply transform our traditional IT architectures, and we need both the edge and the cloud capabilities to make that happen.

TOP-THREE REASONS FOR EDGE COMPUTING: SECURITY, LATENCY, BANDWIDTH Why is this the case? We also asked that question.

First, the three most important reasons for using edge computing in the IIoT are security (52%), latency (41%) and bandwidth (35%). Let’s look at latency and bandwidth first. Imagine a self-driving car driving with 100 kilometers per hour towards an obstacle on the road – the IT systems in the car

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have to analyze mega- and gigabytes of sensor data within milliseconds to avoid a crash. There is simply no time to send that sensor data to a remote cloud and wait for an answer. This equally applies to production machines and other things.

And security: sending all that data via the network opens a big attack vector for hackers, so it’s better to analyze the data on site and only send selected and encrypted data to the cloud.

Similarly, there are important reasons to use the cloud, the top three being correlation analysis (66%), deep learning (51%) and horizontal integration (36%). It’s not enough to have intelligence in one machine, car or plant – you can create more value if you bring the data of these machines, cars or plants to one central place to be able to compare and correlate their behavior.

Then you are able to derive deep insights from the data – i.e. do deep learning – which you can play back to the things and enable them to perform better, adapt to new and unknown situations better, and avoid outages. This also allows us to better coordinate cars, machines and plants, enabling things like swarm intelligence in traffic or highly automated supply chains.

This means the IIoT will be a hybrid world. And one of the key tasks will be to create integrated architectures that bridge from the edge to the core datacenters to the cloud and all the way back.

ENCOURAGING RESULTS, BUT STILL A LOT OF WORK TO DO Again, the journey towards the IIoT goes beyond optimization – it is a transformation which requires change on all company levels: technology, architecture, processes, people, and business models. Overall, our survey results show that the industry is still in the learning curve in that regard. However, we have to consider that IIoT is an emerging concept, and therefore it’s encouraging to see that transformational approaches already play a significant role in the way companies plan and execute IIoT. Similarly, I’d suggest to talk about a 53% success rate, not a 47% failure rate. The glass is half-full, not half-empty. This also means there’s still a lot of work to do. My appeal to the industry is: embrace and master transformation – and accelerate your journey, because there’s not much time.

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Stu & Mitch IT Team of Two Retailer 198 Employees Technology: HPE Aruba Access Points and Switches HPE StoreVirtual HPE ProLiant Servers

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Make the Connection:

BRINGING ORDER TO DIGITAL DISRUPTION Digital disruption is driving innovation in business models, optimizing internal processes, unleashing new products and services, and radically changing how organizations engage with customers. Organizations must adapt to this multi-device, multi-mode world where quality is measured not by schedules, budgets, and defects, but by user experience. A “one size fits all” strategy is no longer an option.

A new approach to your network is critical so you can access:

• Real-time comprehensive network visibility • Automation and speeding of network tasks • Insights to optimize structured workflow The time is now for a modern campus architecture from the edge to the core.

Learn more at www.arubanetworks.com/digitalworkplace

HPE ARUBA

ENABLING THE MOBILE ERA Aruba to demonstrate its Intelligent Mobility Solutions at GITEX 2017.

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t GITEX 2017, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, will be demonstrating its mobility and IoT solutions that empower organizations to serve GenMobile – mobilesavvy users who rely on cloud-based business apps for every aspect of their work and personal lives – and to harness the power of insights to transform business processes.

Jose Vasco, Managing Director MEMA and CCEI, Aruba, said, “We are in the midst of a huge transition away from networking technologies that were designed for the 20th century before mobile, IoT and cloud existed. The surge in mobile and IoT means that the network must deliver more than just connectivity. It is expected to provide actionable insights about the use of mobile

New Aruba 8400 core switch

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The Value Plus October 2017

and IoT to justify future investments, so that businesses can adopt new technologies and serve the needs of GenMobile – while keeping the network secure and taking into account cost efficiencies.”

On display at GITEX will be the latest innovation from the company – the Aruba asset tracking solution that is fully integrated into the Aruba Wi-Fi infrastructure and helps organizations easily track valued assets and automate inventory management, resulting in improved organizational efficiency and lower capital and operational costs associated with misplaced assets.

The company will also be demonstrating the latest Aruba 8400 Core Switch Series, purpose-built for emerging mobile-cloud business applications and changing traffic patterns that are being driven by the massive flood of data sources and growth in IoT. The switches deliver a breakthrough in campus core and aggregation, extending intelligence from the edge to the core and allowing CIOs to derive better business outcomes from their networks. While the Aruba 8400 provides the carrier-class availability and performance that

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“Aruba was born in the mobile, cloud, and IoT era of networking and Aruba Mobile First Networks are optimized for the ‘Digital Workplace’. We focus on designing secure, intelligent edge networks - not fixed, monolithic, and proprietary networking, with a view to support modern digital experiences of GenMobile, from the edge-in rather than taking a ‘network out’ approach.”

Jose Vasco HPE Aruba

organizations need in a core switch, the innovation goes beyond table stakes to address the need for immediate visibility, greater security, better insights into troubleshooting, and easier automation, giving enterprises true business agility as they move to mobile-first, cloud, and IoTenabled businesses.

Aruba will also be demonstrating its entire range of mobility and IoT solutions under the umbrella of the company’s ‘Mobile First Platform’ including: • ArubaOS, the operating system for all controller-managed wireless LANs • Industry leading 802.11ac wireless access points; mobility controllers that offer centralized network engineering, IP services, security and policy controls, and app-aware platforms • Access switches that bring performance and reliability to the mobile-first campus • Aruba AirWave for network management giving granular visibility into wired and wireless networks • Aruba ClearPass that offers policy management for mobile and IoT • Aruba Central that manages, monitors

and secures wired, Wi-Fi and wide area networks from the public cloud and • Aruba Meridian mobile apps that enables location-based services powered by Aruba Beacons, where business leaders can get also get access to beacon powered presence analytics and success rate of pre-defined goals.

“Aruba was born in the mobile, cloud, and IoT era of networking and Aruba Mobile First Networks are optimized for the ‘Digital Workplace’. We focus on designing secure, intelligent edge networks - not fixed, monolithic, and proprietary networking, with a view to support modern digital experiences of GenMobile, from the edge-in rather than taking a ‘network out’ approach. With Aruba’s acquisition by Hewlett Packard in 2015, we bring our industry-leading wireless LAN infrastructure to the access layer, complementing HPE’s strong position in wired LAN,” said Vasco.

Aruba has had a close association over the years with GITEX and the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC), where the event is

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held. Over the past seven years the company has partnered with DWTC to provide ‘always-on’, secure and high speed wireless internet access across the venue during GITEX Technology Week. This is a major demonstration of Aruba’s superior wireless technology in a venue requiring world-class wireless connectivity – WLAN that is secure, reliable, capable of handling client diversity and density, can support spikes in connections at peak hours and have the backing of world class support.

Vasco said, “We have been participating at GITEX for many years due to the importance of this regional event where many of our customers and partners attend. HPE Aruba’s senior leadership from the US and Europe will attend the show together with the company’s regional leadership in order to drive key discussions with customers and partners. Our objective is also to reach out to new potential clients and grow our regional business across key verticals such as education, hospitality, healthcare, government and retail.”

Aruba will be exhibiting from the HP stand number CLD-6 in Hall 7.

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HUAWEI MIDDLE EAST

POWERING DIGITAL COMMUNITIES Hazem Bazan, Vice President, Channels and Commercial Sales, Huawei Middle East on building an ecosystem for a better connected world.

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s we advance into the Digital Age, enterprises and governments are re-inventing themselves to cope with the new demands from a digitally empowered community. But having adequate ICT infrastructure is not sufficient for a nation to achieve digitalization. Without a digitally fluent population that is comfortable adopting new technology, innovative solutions will be left to languish in conferences and labs, useless to the wider population. A technologically advanced workforce is a key factor in advancing the agendas set for national development.

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Organizations need to recognize that investing in human capital is as important as investing in innovation and technology. For this reason, Huawei’s Transforming Together 2.0 strategy aims to create an ecosystem of trusted partners, vendors, and resellers who can lay down the foundations for a Better Connected World. Huawei has taken the lead in creating training and educational initiatives across the Middle East. Through partnerships with universities, internship programs, and the ICT Skill Competition, Huawei is ensuring the youth of today is ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow. But digitalization is

happening today, not tomorrow. Nations of the world cannot afford to wait for the young to mature, nor do they need to—there is already a large pool of talent in the workforce ready to take on the mantle of digitalization.

Huawei has been targeting this demographic with a two-pronged approach: firstly through the creation of training programs and certifications for professionals, and secondly by familiarizing businesses with its portfolio of solutions through OpenLabs and industry alliances. Both of these methods empower partners by enabling them to better serve their customers’ needs.

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A key element of the first approach is the Huawei Certified Sales Professional (HCSP) certification. The HCSP familiarizes VAR account managers with Huawei’s products, services, and solutions in order for them to better understand how Huawei’s portfolio can be adapted to and enhance their clients’ businesses.

Huawei also offers technical ICT skills certifications in the form of the Authorized Learning Partner (HALP). To successfully complete the course, professionals must demonstrate a working knowledge of how to use Huawei routing and switching devices to

assist in the design of individualized smalland medium-sized networks. Over 60,000 engineers worldwide have earned Huawei ICT certifications, demonstrating their ability to use Huawei technology to deliver better solutions to customers.

Those who have demonstrated exceptional ICT skill level can tackle the Huawei Certified Internetwork Expert (HCIE) technical certification, the most specialized certification Huawei offers. The HCIE curriculum provides professionals with a comprehensive understanding of how to operate both large and medium-sized networks. Those who receive the certification will have proved themselves able to use Huawei routing and switching devices to create individualized enterprise networks.

The HCIE is a highly technical certificate, and so far, 2,500 engineers have successfully completed the course.

Huawei also seeks to familiarize a broad network of enterprises with its solutions offerings through the creation of OpenLabs, which act as a bridge between talent and technology. These labs are a space where local partners can collaborate with Huawei to co-innovate solutions, and also give enterprises an opportunity to become more comfortable using Huawei solutions. As of July 2017, there are seven OpenLabs in operation around the globe, with the Middle East’s first launching in Dubai earlier in the year. Huawei plans to invest $200 million over the next three years, to have twenty OpenLabs operating by 2020.

The final element of Huawei’s strategy to create a strong end-to-end value chain in the Middle East is the establishment of regional industry collaborations. One illustration is Huawei’s partnership with the GSM Association (GSMA) to create a NarrowBand-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) Forum.

Internet of Things is gaining traction worldwide, and Huawei is one of its most vocal evangelists. The Forum aims to continue to convert industries to the advantages of NB-IoT, thus driving forward economic growth and digitalization.

Huawei’s firm belief in the importance of developing human capital is demonstrated

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Hazem Bazan Huawei Middle East

by the amount it spends in training and educational initiatives. We invest over $5 million annually to develop and deliver our educational programs. Our drive to create recruit, enable, and activate an ecosystem of trusted partners was rewarded in 2016 with one of the most prestigious regional awards for ICT vendors—Reseller Middle East’s Best Partner Excellence Program. Janees Reghelini, Editor of Reseller Middle East, commended Huawei’s channel partner program for its “excellence in empowering partners to identify new avenues and growth and enhancing their business.”

More rewarding than any award, however, is the knowledge that Huawei is contributing to the development of its regional partners and helping to build an ecosystem of trusted professionals ready to pave the way to the Digital Age. Developing a global pool of talent is paramount to creating a Better Connected World, and Huawei will continue to invest to turn vision into reality.

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REDINGTON VALUE | VIEWPOINT

COLLABORATE TO PROFIT

By Rajesh Mathrani, General Manager Sales, Middle East and North Africa and Director Operations, Redington Value

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t the macro level, the IT industry is undergoing tectonic (techtonic) changes. This includes the emergence of new trends in IT budget utilizations along with customers becoming more demanding because of pressures on costs and the need to enhance productivity. Models are evolving from bulk capital purchasing to OPEX, IT-as-a-service, IT-in-the-cloud and pay-as-you-grow. Market advancements have also compelled OEMs to gradually transform into these newer models.

Emerging technologies such as IoT, Big Data Analytics and blockchain computing, with security as the core component for all, are further accelerating the transformation in the industry. Reliance India’s Mukesh Ambani terms this shift as the Industrial Revolution 4.

Considering these developments, we are seeing that the pie for the channel, between the OEM and end customers, is reducing in terms of product delivery and sale. There is also a wide gap between the skill set available within the channel today and the skill set requirement for the future, which needs huge investments and a longer ROI. Therefore, the regional channel market is affected and is currently under these immense pressures. This has led to competition becoming fiercer than before with the risks of smaller channel members collapsing. Survival of the fittest will once again come into play over the next two years.

The channel partners need to acknowledge and accept these changes as the new reality. The need to innovate and transform has never been so urgent before.

For partners, reskilling is the need of the hour. Those partners who stay invested and have enough working capital to manage this transition and enhance credibility in the books of vendors and suppliers will stand to emerge as winners in this

“Those partners who stay invested and have enough working capital to manage this transition and enhance credibility in the books of vendors and suppliers will stand to emerge as winners in this competitive market.”

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competitive market. Ultimately, partners who have transformed their businesses into these new models will also receive more support. The others will tend to lose out and be forced out of the game.

The challenge for channel is to transform their organization into the new models while maintaining the current business profitability and ensuring consistent growth. All this can come from the channel recognizing the need to reskill their team and identifying opportunities to contribute towards the new models of business.

We believe that collaboration presents a massive opportunity for channel partners to flourish and remain competitive. Many partners have key accounts that offer relevant and significant prospects for other partners, and together they can introduce innovative solutions for end customer organizations. Going forward, we will execute business in a collaborative eco system. Channel partners who can move towards this sooner rather than later will see great benefits in the long run. It’s not possible to acquire all new skills and make it feasible. Therefore, collaboration is the way forward.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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VIEWPOINT | REDINGTON VALUE

FORTIFYING THE FUTURE

By Hishamul Hasheel, Vice President, Software and Security, Redington Value

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iddle East firms have suffered bigger losses than the other regions last year because of cyber incidents that have ranged from the actual theft of data to coordinated spam emails and phishing attempts.

Often victims find it difficult to identify when an attack has taken place. Most only discover it when third parties or clients report suspicious messages or requests for funds. Many organizations still believe that the IT departments have the silver bullet. However, cybersecurity has outgrown the traditional realms of technology and is now multi-dimensional.

Awareness is equally important and companies must begin investing in employee education.

The region has seen heavy investments going in procuring products and solutions. It is now time to focus on other dimensions as well, namely process and people. Simultaneously, the boards of organizations have to get involved. Currently, the strategies and policies laid out by most organizations are too IT specific and do not address the business IT mix.

One of the challenges companies face is how to measure the success of an investment in this

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area. This can be directly proportional to the security incidents, not necessarily just within the IT space but from other dimensions too. It is critical that the organization can measure or have visibility on the incidents as they happen. One of the approaches could be to run an Operational Risk assessment that encompasses all digital aspects of the firm and then introduce people-processtechnology parameters to address.

The first step to devising security strategies is accepting that the space is highly dynamic.

There has been a paradigm shift in the IT decision-making. It used to be the IT managers but now it is the business users who drive the changes. So, it is now no longer an IT project or a use case discussion. Instead, it is a ‘business outcome’ dialogue. The resellers have to realize this change and align their business operations accordingly. As the cloud adoption increasingly gains momentum, there is a plethora of opportunities for security businesses from DevOps security, IAM, Data protection and CASB. The region will soon witness introduction of stringent compliance and regulation requirements that will be a shot in the arm for security businesses.

As a focused IT security, value-added distributor, it has been our constant endeavor to bring in advanced and innovative security technologies and products early on into the market. We will continue to equip and enable our reseller partners in addressing the full life cycle of customers’ Information Security demands in the region. We provide end-to-end support to our partners in sales, pre-sales, consultancy and professional services

“We will continue to equip and enable our reseller partners in addressing the full life cycle of customers’ Information Security demands in the region.” engagement in multiple areas of security technologies and solutions.

While we will continue to focus on empowering our channel community and end customers in combating legacy security challenges, moving into FY18 there will be a lot more focus in addressing the cloud security, IoT security and SOC services by bringing in the best-of-the-breed solution portfolio in this space. We will be launching a comprehensive enablement program for our channel designed around cloud and IoT integration challenges focusing on security compliance, governance and shared security responsibility model for the future enterprises. We look forward to a prosperous 2018 with our partner ecosystem.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

Business Continuity Starts Here DATA ANALYTICS SCALE OUT STORAGE BACKUP & RECOVERY

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EMBRACING BUSINESS ENDURANCE How enterprises can leverage All-Flash Storage and Business Continuity solutions from StorageCraft.

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aving a back-up and Disaster Recovery plan is crucial for enterprises of all sizes as there is no discrimination when it comes to data breaches. Companies need to protect themselves against data loss and downtime, which can happen as a result of human error, hardware failure, software corruption, natural disasters, ransomware, and many more. In IT circles, we often say, “It’s not a case of if disaster happens, but when disaster will happen”.

Based on findings in the US last year, downtime that lasts for one hour can cost small companies as much as $8000, mid-size companies $74,000 and $700,000 for large enterprises. According to the National Archives and Records Administration, more than 90% of companies that experience at least seven days of data centre downtime go out of business within a year. Yet some 65% of all businesses currently have no backup or recovery solution in

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place! Analysts Forrester and Gartner have reported that 60% of businesses see data backup and recovery as a critical priority, but that only 35% of businesses actually have any form of disaster recovery plan in place. As data volume continues to increase with big data, cloud computing, BYOD and IoT, it remains a huge challenge for businesses to protect their own data.

Recovery and backup operations more critical and more challenging than ever before Business Continuity has become more critical than ever before for the following reasons: • Digital transformation, big data analytics and 24/7 business operations make rapid recovery and the elimination of downtime an essential business differentiator.

• Highly virtualized environments and exponential data growth are making it harder

to meet today’s ambitious recovery objectives using traditional hard disk or tape solutions.

A logical solution to address backup and recovery challenges would be to use all-flash storage in conjunction with a solid Disaster Recovery software solution. If companies could use all-flash, they could conceivably eliminate performance issues across business-critical applications when backup images are needed for fast recovery. The challenge, of course, has been cost. All-flash arrays can cost 10 or even 20 times more than hard disk arrays for comparable capacities, depending on the configurations.

With that, the idea of paying so much extra for the equivalent of an insurance policy has been impossible for many companies.

Introducing a new category of all-flash storage Companies of all sizes can now choose from a unique scale-out all-flash array for backup and

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

recovery without paying a premium for the additional performance capabilities they can achieve. The availability of this new approach represents a significant breakthrough for backup and recovery applications—particularly in highly virtualized environments.

The architecture of this new breed of array brings enterprise-grade all-flash storage to a price point that was previously impossible. At less than 50 cent per effective gigabyte, it is comparable to hard-disk drive (HDD) or hybrid arrays for backup and recovery scenarios. The solution uses several innovative design techniques to achieve this breakthrough, including: • Giving customers the ability to purchase standard enterprise-grade solid-state drives (SSDs) at retail prices without the traditional mark-up charged by the leading array vendors. This results in significant cost savings without impacting performance, reliability or functionality.

• An architectural design that combines a distributed file system that is tightly integrated with a fine-grained object store. It delivers a scale-out architecture with seamless capacity for backup and recovery options.

• Industry-leading data reduction technologies, including inline, variable length deduplication and compression. The combination of these technologies delivers a storage reduction ratio of 10:1 in backup environments.

This new all-flash array was developed by the leading backup and recovery provider StorageCraft. It is called Exablox OneBlox and is designed for a wide range of use cases, not only backup and recovery. OneBlox is also aimed at organizations looking for cost-efficient scaleout all-flash storage solutions for all their tierone production environments.

Traditional HDD storage arrays tend to crumble under the pressure of the I/O blender, which is one of the key reasons why all-flash arrays have become the go-to solution for many tier one business critical applications.

But what happens in a Disaster Recovery or other downtime scenario? If dozens or hundreds of VMs are recovering at the same time from an HDD— or, worse, a tape backup— it is going to take an extremely long time for the business to get back up and running.

In this environment, business continuity is an essential competitive differentiator. However, the challenge to improve business continuity comes at a time when data growth is accelerating and IT teams are under pressure to improve recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Using all-flash storage to dramatically improve business continuity Because every minute of downtime has a huge impact on the business, IT leaders are seeking solutions that improve RTOs and ensure that they can complete backups within the required backup windows.

A logical solution to address backup and recovery challenges would be to use all-flash storage in conjunction with a solid Disaster Recovery software solution.

If companies could use all-flash, they could conceivably eliminate performance issues across businesscritical applications when backup images are needed for fast recovery.

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

In virtual environments, backup applications aim to deliver near instant recovery of virtual machines. They do so by booting directly off backups without waiting for restores to complete. (available with StorageCraft ® VirtualBoot™). Booting is just one piece of the puzzle. The recovery process still needs to be done with data recovered from backup images.

During recovery operations, the virtual machines that are booted off the backup images need to be production-worthy and performance needs to be similar to what they would get from their primary storage.

With Exablox, organizations can recover the entire virtual infrastructure literally in seconds or minutes and keep it production-worthy.

Additionally, Exablox lets organizations expand storage dynamically over time by incrementally adding SSDs or additional appliances: “Pay-asyou-grow” with no forklift upgrades involved.

This is even possible without having to make application configuration changes. No other solution on the market offers a comparable level of affordable performance for backup and recovery.

StorageCraft: The ideal Storage and Business Continuity partner The StorageCraft Recovery Solution, known for its outstanding reliability, provides the tools to back up systems, applications, and data, replicate them locally or in the cloud, and restore everything from a single file to complete systems throughout a network.

Physical or virtual, Linux or Windows, desktop or server, Office 365 or G Suite, all are protected by fast, reliable, file and folder or complete system and data recovery.

The availability of a new class of all-flash array, represented by the development of Exablox OneBlox by StorageCraft, represents a breakthrough in backup and recovery for virtualized (and other) environments. With it, organizations have access to much higher levels of performance than legacy disk solutions, at a comparable price point. IT can achieve RTOs that deliver dramatic improvements in business continuity at a time when organizations of all sizes in all industries strive to reduce downtime and support new initiatives such as digital transformation.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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RED HAT

CLOSING THE GAP Oliver Horn, Senior Solutions Architect Alliances, Red Hat, explains how IoT has the potential to bring operational and IT infrastructures together.

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oT represents the beginning of a new era of networked systems in which highly developed applications intelligently monitor and control sensors, mobile devices, and machines in production environments and elsewhere.

As a result, the IoT will eliminate the division between the traditional operational control systems of Operational Technology and business-oriented Information Technology.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will make Operational Technology (OT) – and hence the hardware and embedded software for monitoring and controlling physical devices, processes, and events – fit for the future. It has the potential to fundamentally transform almost every industry, whether production, energy supply and distribution, transport and haulage, or healthcare. The networked sensors, measuring devices, and actuators monitor and control the status of resources and machines.

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For historical reasons, IT and OT still remain separate Most IT companies still treat IT (Information Technology) and OT as separate areas and develop, maintain, and use the two for different purposes: • The CIO is responsible for general company applications, such as ERP, CRM, and BI solutions.

• The operations or production manager is in charge of production control and other special applications, such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Energy Management Systems (EMS), and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems (SCADA).

IT and OT solutions emerge independently of each other over time. They solve different problems and use different system architectures and communication protocols.

For example, IT systems were developed to connect applications and enable data sharing,

and they generally use an open, standardsbased architecture. Operational control systems, on the other hand, are devised as standalone systems and were not originally designed for connection to the outside world or for external access; OT systems are frequently self-contained and proprietary.

Interlinking OT and IT systems Department managers and IT architects see the IoT as a catalyst for change. They want to deploy standards-based operational control systems as an important component of IoT projects, thereby replacing standalone measuring devices, sensors, and actuators with intelligent, IP-based devices. By interlinking OT and IT solutions on the basis of established protocols and modules, companies can link heterogeneous systems and processes, thereby eliminating redundancies.

When attempting to link OT and IT systems, system architects are faced with a number of functional requirements:

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• Scalability: Intelligent systems record and analyze large quantities of data from a variety of endpoints and require highperformance computing, storage, and networking capacities to do so.

• Availability: Many intelligent systems are designed to be deployed in environments where system failure might lead to reduced productivity, unsatisfied customers, or even loss of revenue. In the case of critical applications such as medical applications, monitoring solutions, and smart grid implementations, system failure may even result in severe damage to health or the environment.

• Security: Intelligent systems frequently depend on the publicly accessible Internet or use cloud-based computing and memory resources. To protect against loss or theft of data or a denial of service attack, the new solutions have to be optimally secured and easy to maintain. This means, among other things, that it must be possible to apply security patches quickly. OT is not traditionally configured to support this.

Ensuring high scalability and reliability To achieve optimal scalability and reliability, Red Hat recommends using a hierarchical, intelligent system architecture consisting of a device tier, a gateway tier, and a data center or cloud tier.

The device tier includes endpoints such as IPcapable measuring devices, sensors, displays, actuators, medical devices, antennas, machines, and vehicles, where data is collected and then transmitted. The data center or cloud tier consists of computing or memory capacities, for example, for industrial process monitoring and control. But it also includes integration into the existing IT infrastructure, the deployed ERP systems, and other business-oriented company applications. The connection to the company’s value chain is made here.

IoT gateways build a bridge between OT and IT systems The gateway tier serves as an intermediary between the devices and the data center or the cloud. It aggregates device data and can buffer it before relaying it to the data center. In addition, it transfers controlling information to the device on the basis of open messaging

standards. It also serves as a buffer for data that is required for tactical analysis or regulatory requirements. Furthermore, gateways can facilitate a direct, local reaction, as required – without going through the data center.

Therefore, the gateways can be situated in the factory hall, a train station, or a hospital wing.

IoT gateways optimize the performance of a solution by collecting real-time data from operating procedures at the place of origin and performing initial processing. In this way, they disburden the applications in the data centers and the cloud and facilitate efficient development by introducing an abstraction tier between the devices and the application.

Furthermore, by separating the devices from the applications, they enable new endpoints to be added more quickly and easily to a configuration.

The IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) area provides a good example in this context: here, gateways are used due to different communication technologies and can deliver value-added services at the intersection of IT and OT. In this use case, data often needs to be converted between fieldbus systems - for example the Modbus - and TCP. In doing so, data can also be aggregated and machine conditions for example are only reported when there is a change.

There are use cases in the transportation sector. It might be necessary to amalgamate data from the tractor, the trailer and the cargo directly at the vehicle - again either to react locally, when having an unstable data connection to the data center or because there are heterogeneous technologies for vehicle, trailer and cargo that cannot be controlled by one tool. The hierarchical architecture addresses the strict requirements regarding IoT scalability, availability, and security. The number of gateways can be increased incrementally, thereby enabling cost-efficient growth. To avoid single points of failure, companies can implement redundant architecture components at every tier. This ensures service availability, for example, in cases where an individual component malfunctions.

Specific security measures that cover a comprehensive spectrum of threats and vulnerabilities should be implemented at every tier.

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Oliver Horn Red Hat Through a convergence of OT and IT environments, companies can improve their performance and reduce the total cost of ownership. However, detailed preliminary analysis and planning is required to reconcile various departments, disciplines, and business processes optimally with each other. In most companies, different organizational units have previously been responsible for OT and IT functions – with different targets, budgets, and strategies.

The OT department implements and supports highly specialized process control systems that ensure continuous availability of applications. Yet, the IT department implements and supports comprehensive, complex, open systems that depend on standards-based networks and servers running virtualized applications that partly rely on cloud services.

The two organizational units have to coordinate their activities in order to benefit from a convergent OT/IT environment with a uniform IoT architecture.

Unlike traditional, manufacturer-specific control systems, modern OT solutions use standards-based IT infrastructures and communication protocols; as a result, they can achieve greater flexibility and scalability while remaining cost-efficient. Thanks to the convergence of previously separated OT and IT environments, companies might now be in a position to increase performance while reducing complexity and infrastructure costs.

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Wherever you are. Wherever you go. Whatever the future brings.

Check Point keeps you one step ahead.

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE OF CYBER SECURITY CLOUD

MOBILE

T H R E AT

PREVENTION

Learn More: checkpoint.com

CHECK POINT

APPROACHING SECURITY PROACTIVELY Check Point launches new research online platform and releases mid-year cyber-attack trends report.

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heck Point Software Technologies has launched a new online platform, Check Point Research, providing cyber threat intelligence insights to the greater community. Check Point Research is a platform to inform the threat intelligence community on original Check Point research, top trends in the cyber security space, and details on the current threat landscape.

Coinciding with the launch of this new online research platform, Check Point also released its Cyber Attack Trends: Mid-Year Report. The report provides a comprehensive overview of the malware landscape in the top categories of ransomware, banking and

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mobile threats - based on threat intelligence data drawn from Check Point’s ThreatCloud World Cyber Threat Map between January and June 2017.

Astonishingly, the research finds that in the first half of 2017, 23.5% of organizations were impacted by the RoughTed malvertising campaign, and that 19.7% of organizations were impacted by the Fireball malware. In addition, ransomware attacks in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) were nearly double that detected in the same timeframe last year.

The report highlights a number of key trends during the period: • Mutation of adware: The Fireball malware

has led to a major change in the approach to stop adware, especially adware owned by massive, seemingly-legitimate organizations. In parallel, mobile adware botnets also continue to expand and dominate the mobile malware arena.

• Nation-state cyber weapons: The leak and consequent availability of key nation-state hacking tools, zero-day vulnerabilities, exploits and attack methods now enables any potential hacker to carry out sophisticated attacks.

• Evolution of macro-based downloaders: During the past six months, new methods for exploiting Microsoft Office files have been detected. Those methods no longer

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require victims to open the door for the attackers by enabling macros.

• A new wave of mobile bankers: The perpetrators combined open-sourced banking malware code with complex obfuscation techniques to successfully and repeatedly bypass protections, making it difficult to detect.

• Ransomware Surge: The percentage of ransomware attacks in all three regions, Americas, EMEA and APAC, almost doubled in the first half of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016—from an average of 26% to an average of 48% of the three main attack categories worldwide.

“Organizations are struggling to effectively counteract the abundance of threats now in play. Hackers are making malware more sophisticated, and so the ability for unskilled hackers to inflict damage has risen dramatically,” said Maya Horowitz, Threat Intelligence Group Manager, Check Point. “With all the cyber threats in circulation, many organizations still do not have the right security defenses in place, and are focusing on a detection approach rather than implementing a proactive prevention solution that would block the attacks in the first place.”

The Check Point research team collects and

Major cyber breaches in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA)

January 7, 2017 E-Sports Entertainment Association League, a popular video gaming community owned by the Germany-based eSports company Turtle Entertainment GmbH, suffered a breach, revealing gaming servers’ data and users’ personal details. According to researchers, the number of users affected by the breach may have reached 1.5 million.

January 12, 2017 Cellebrite, an Israeli company known for developing mobile forensics and hacking tools, was breached, leading to the theft of 900 GB of customer data. According to its announcement, the breached web server contained basic information of customers registered for alerts and notifications for Cellebrite products, as well as hashed passwords of customers that had not yet migrated to Cellebrite’s new end-user license management system.

April 9, 2017 Wonga, a UK-based loan firm, suffered a breach affecting up to 270,000 customers, most of them in the UK. According to Wonga, the leaked data may include e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, partial credit card numbers and bank account numbers.

analyzes global cyber-attack data stored on Check Point’s Threat Cloud to keep hackers at bay. Check Point Research publications, such as the Cyber Attack Trends Report, fuel a conversation around new cyber threats, trends

and additional threat security insights. Check Point Research is designed to be a resource for organizations to better understand the threat landscape and protect themselves against cyber threats.

GLOBAL MALWARE STATISTICS | 8

MOST PREVALENT MALWARE IN EMEA

Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) 25

25

Americas

23.4%

APAC

EMEA

100

100

19.3%

20

80

20

80

94%

78%

72%

69%

66%

40

5.8%

5.5%

5.4%

WannaCry

Conficker

Zeus

40

6.1% Nivdort

7.0% Hacker Defender

5

7.8% CryptoWall

8.4% RIG Exploit Kit

5

10.9% Kelihos

10

10

60

60

Fireball

RoughTed

15

15

4%

0

0

0

0

Most prevalent in EMEA Figure 4: Mostmalware Prevalent Malware in EMEA

Asia-Pacific

11%

20

20

2% 4% iSpy

12% Kometaur

Cryptoload

16%

14%

19%

naKocTb

Cerber

Figure 5: Topmalware TargetedinMalware Top targeted EMEA in EMEA

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25

24%

18%

October 2017 The Value Plus Americas

APAC

EMEA

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FORTINET

SECURITY FIRST STRATEGIES Alain Penel, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Fortinet, elaborates on how partners can prime customers for the digital transformation era by proactively including security in their business approaches.

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here are countless examples of companies and industries that failed to adapt to technological disruptions at their outset, and as a result have become obsolete. Consumers now expect a dynamic experience in which they can access and change information and services at a moment’s notice, from any location. Consumer and employee expectations are driving what is being called the digital transformation. Digital transformation refers to the dramatic change in business products, services, workflows, and operations required to leverage available – and future – technology to its fullest extent in order to meet the demands of customers, streamline business operations, and respond immediately to shifting market demands. These changes aren’t optional.

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They are necessary to ensure that companies remain competitive. This is affecting every business, including those served by our channel partners.

As organizations map out their digital transformation strategies, it’s important that they understand how these changes affect their overall technical infrastructure – especially as it pertains to security.

To assist our channel partners in guiding their customers through their digital transformation efforts, we’ve outlined three of the major objectives companies need to focus on, how these efforts can impact their network security, and how Fortinet can help mitigate these risks.

1. Internet of Things (IoT) adoption The advantages that the Internet of Things provides to consumers and organizations through such things real-time information, customized transactions, device-to-device communications, and intelligent automation is continuing to drive its adoption at an unprecedented rate. Incorporating IoT devices, or connected web applications through smart devices is necessary for businesses to stay competitive in today’s market. Additionally, organizations will have to provide regular updates and new features to these connected devices – making continuous deployment processes integral to successful digital transformation. Unsecured devices, vulnerabilities in off-the-shelf IoT devices and software, and an increasing number of endpoints attempting to access your customers’ networks can overwhelm existing network and security infrastructure and create gaps in security that can lead directly to data breaches.

2. Big Data Analytics Given the trajectory of the expected growth in connected devices, it’s clear the aggregate amount of data collected and communicated from IoT devices will be enormous. Successfully digital transformation depends on making this data actionable, using those data driven insights to customize user offerings and services and optimize business operations. At the same time, storing large quantities of personal and device data, or the development

of new digital tools like effective data analytics algorithms will make your customers more appealing targets for cyberattacks.

3. Transitioning into the cloud Cloud adoption across industries will likewise continue to accelerate digital transformation.

With such large amounts of data being generated and requested, the cloud’s elasticity is quickly gaining traction as the best way to meet expanding data processing needs and deliver essential services in a more cost effective way than building out internal infrastructure. The cloud is simply more efficient at processing data, responding to queries, and expanding digital resources in real time to meet spikes in demand.

In addition, storing and processing data and applications in the cloud can also hinder visibility into network activity.

SECURING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Securing the distributed network brought on by digital transformation requires end-to-end protection that spans from endpoints, such as IoT devices, through the physical network, and out to the cloud – be it private, public, or hybrid. This not only means perimeter defenses, but also internal segmentation, endpoint protection, and web application firewalls.

Customers must have a flexible security infrastructure in place that can dynamically expand and contract as the cloud responds to demands. Fortinet’s Cloud Security Solution offers scalable, segmented protection for every cloud environment. An integrated combination of physical and virtualized solutions means that as your elastic cloud infrastructure expands or shifts, your security moves with it. Segmentation allows you to logically break up your network, allowing greater visibility into lateral data movement, and driving visibility and control deep into the network to ensure that if a breach occurs, it will not affect the data stored in your customer’s cloud environment.

Fortinet’s Application Security Solution secures customers from highly targeted application vulnerabilities using web application firewalls (WAFs). These WAFs harness both local and global threat

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Alain Penel Fortinet

intelligence to stop malicious code from exploiting the latest application vulnerabilities, detect bots, and stop DDoS attacks. This is a critical feature, as hacked IoT devices can be used to form botnets to carry out such things as distributed denial of service or distributed ransomware attacks.

Each of these features can also be woven into Fortinet’s integrated Security Fabric to deliver a comprehensive security framework which make it the ideal security solution to facilitate your customers’ digital transformation.

As customers come to rely on digital assets to remain competitive, security cannot be an afterthought. The inherent infrastructural changes that come with digital transformation will alter and increase the attack surface of their networks. It is important that as your customers undergo these changes, such as cloud adoption, increased data collection, and IoT adoption that they assess how these developments will impact their cybersecurity strategy, and make adjustments to ensure consistent, end-to-end protection.

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VENDOR NEWS

VEEAM TO SHOWCASE AVAILABILITY SUITE V10 AT GITEX 2017

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eeam Software has reiterated its commitment to helping Middle East enterprises meet the requirements for 24.7.365 availability, by announcing its participation for the seventh consecutive year at GITEX Technology Week.

The company will demonstrate the new Veeam Availability Suite v10, which drives business continuity and agility to new levels, and bridges the ‘availability gap,’ which the

company defines as the gap between users demand for uninterrupted access to IT services and what businesses and IT can deliver.

According to the latest Veeam Availability Report, 82 percent of enterprises in the Middle East admit to suffering from this ‘availability gap,’ which is impacting the bottom line to the tune of $21.8 million per year. In addition, almost two thirds of respondents admit that this is holding back innovation.

Veeam has experienced a great deal of success and accelerated growth in the region, as evidenced by the company’s Q2 results, where it achieved a 41 percent year-on-year total bookings revenue growth. Looking to build on this, Veeam hopes to use GITEX as a platform to educate CIOs and IT managers about the need to re-think their IT strategies and service models, and move away from legacy backup and recovery solutions as they virtualize their infrastructures and move to the cloud.

TREND MICRO STRENGTHENS SECURITY OFFERINGS

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n an age where safety is key, whether it be in a car, airplane or on a computer, consumers are continuing to push for enhanced safety and functionality. In line with this, Trend Micro is strengthening its portfolio with the release of Trend Micro Security for 2018. The latest version of software integrates Trend Micro’s XGen security with machine learning, to better protect consumers against the latest evolving threats by providing multi-layered protection. This new offering has expanded capabilities that safeguard users from

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ransomware and malicious threats by providing reliable protection that blocks 250 million threats a day.

XGen security, which powers all of Trend Micro’s solutions, is a new class of security software that addresses the full range of ever-evolving threats – now and in the future.

It offers a unique blend of multi-layered protection including proven and advanced threat defense techniques and intelligently applies the right technique at the right time, delivering maximum protection and efficiency.

What’s more, in a recent industry test, ‘AV Comparatives Real-World Protection Test February – June 2017,’ Trend Micro was the only vendor to achieve 100 percent effective protection rate on a test based on sample size of nearly 2,000 cases.

With more than 5,000 employees in over 50 countries and more than 25 years of security expertise, Trend Micro is now recognized for delivering top-ranked data protection across physical, virtual and cloud environments, ultimately enabling users to enjoy their digital lives safely.

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FUJITSU TECHNOLOGY SMOOTHS HITACHI ENTERPRISE CLOUD CO-CREATION ACROSS MULTIPLE PROVIDES NEW CHOICES IN LOCATIONS MANAGED SERVICES

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H

IVANTI LAUNCHES SESSION PERSISTENCE SERVER

NEXTHINK LISTED IN FORRESTER RESEARCH’S REPORT ON COGNITIVE OPERATIONS

DC Research reported a significant increase in Android devices purchased in 2016 from the year prior, bringing the Android market share up to 37 percent of rugged mobile computers. In line with this, Ivanti’s Session Persistence Server, a server that ensures telnet task workflows are protected against data loss from network connectivity issues, offers secure, persistent connections for Ivanti’s Velocity applications. This free add-on, previously named ConnectPro, is now available for any Android deployment.

Session Persistence Server allows organizations to avoid dropped connections and automatically reconnects their Android apps and legacy systems by acting as an intermediary connection server between the client device and the host application server.

exthink has announced that it was included in Forrester Research’s newly published ‘Vendor Landscape: Cognitive Operations.’ The report, which examines the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in IT operations and application performance management, listed Nexthink as claiming the four benefits of cognitive operations. These benefits include: reduced discovery effort, faster reaction and resolution of problems, proactive prevention of problems, and providing meaning to business impact.

According to the report, “Technology has grown too much and too quickly for humans to monitor and operate it effectively. While computer-assisted analytics helps firms react to and resolve problems faster, predicting and preventing them is the Holy Grail.”

ujitsu has recently expanded its Creative Digital Space UserInterface (UI) technology, which turns entire rooms into digital space. In the field of manufacturing, for example, the concept of a virtualized project room offers a way to quickly and efficiently share issues on the ground and find solutions by connecting different places, including design facilities, manufacturing facilities, and quality assurance departments.

Fujitsu has also developed technology that smooths co-creation activities across multiple locations.

Its distributed data sharing technology stores data locally at multiple locations, not in the cloud. Depending on network latency between each location, this technology only synchronizes necessary differences in data, while eliminating unnecessary data, such as trajectory data when content is moved, providing smooth data usage across multiple locations.

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itachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, has announced the expansion of its Hitachi Enterprise Cloud portfolio to address DevOps and container use cases. The Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize Automation now provides expanded services offering for DevOps and Container Support for hybrid cloud deployments inclusive of cloud-native architectures. In addition, a new Hitachi Enterprise Cloud Container Platform provides hybrid cloud resources for DevOps that utilize microservices architecture with a turnkey, end-to-end container as a service environment.

With expanded support for DevOps and Containers, Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize 7.3 automates the creation, deployment and management of container hosts and cloud-native applications as a service, across a multi-vendor, multi-cloud infrastructure.

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SPLUNK

TAKING THE WHEEL

Matthias Maier, EMEA Director of Product Marketing, Splunk, highlights that organisations need to actively manage cybersecurity to ensure limited damage and fast recovery.

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ver the course of 2017 we have seen a massive increase in public hacks and threats hitting the news. Organisations around the world were impacted by WannaCry ransomware which encrypted files, resulting in UK hospitals being immobilised, causing outages of Deutsche Bahn display panels, forcing Honda to take production plants offline and resulting in hundreds of speeding fines have become invalid caused by infected speed cameras.

Shortly after this, cyber threats were again in the news as when the UK’ s Parliament

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was hit by an attack in which malicious actors tried to gain access to e-mails. This was followed by yet another hack, named Petya, which had a massive impact in the Ukraine, bringing down monitoring systems around the former nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, as well as many cash machines.

These examples demonstrate that IT or digital security can no longer be just an ITSecurity System Admin problem, focused on installing and configuring new network firewalls, deploying endpoint protection solutions and next generation spam filters.

For example, the organisations effected by WannaCry that “simply” kept their systems up to date with the latest patches were resilient against it. In the case of the UK parliament, a business decision had to be made to disconnect a critical digital communication service for security reasons, heavily interrupting parliamentary operations. This is beyond the usual remit of an IT Security System Admin, and shows that security has to be approached from a business perspective.

What should organisations be doing?

• Maintain basic security hygiene • Proactively monitor access to critical services • Define an incident response process and team Establishing a data driven security strategy underpinned by machine data is the foundation required to support all of the above initiatives. To monitor whether basic security hygiene is being maintained and to identify weak areas that no one is looking after, a security information and event management (SIEM) solution is a good choice. It will aggregate information and let businesses run regular reports such as which systems are patched, provide information from vulnerability scanners, update them on the status of endpoint protection solutions as well as alert to any notable security anomaly happening, such as a virus event or a new service being installed on a system.

If we look at user authentication, it’s no longer enough to simply rely on the inbuilt security of Microsoft Active Directory and its lockout policies. Organisations need to dive into each digital service, figure out how that service is exposed externally, understand how people log on, how they reset their passwords, how new users are created and then identify the machine generated data required to get those insights. They can then learn the specifics of that data and set up monitoring to proactively detect any outliers. By maintaining basic security hygiene and proactive monitoring companies can reduce risks to a minimum and during the process identify white spaces in their environment.

However, nothing in life is 100 per cent secure – so businesses need to think ahead to a potential breach/hack. What’s the organisational process? Which people need to take immediate action? Who can help answer questions about what happened? What do we need to do to stop it? Who was impacted, and who takes the important decisions such as taking services offline, notifying the authorities or communicating to the media?

This exercise goes beyond the ITSecurity System Admin role with more mature organisations already having crisis and risk planning for “cyber-risks” included within operational planning. The people involved in this are required to find answers to the above questions regarding the breach and must think about which systems they can find their answers in and how long it would take. This information can mostly be found in machine generated data/log data, which should be stored in a centralised platform where they can ask any question in a flexible way. This makes the process scalable and efficient as technical security investigations can often become a bottleneck during a crisis. Even in the British Parliament example the ability to collaborate and work with others to answer questions was a core

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Matthias Maier Splunk

requirement. In an instance such as this, a centralised platform with all your machine data is a real strength. SIEM solutions like Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) provide organisations with this ability and enable them to find the answers they need to quickly detect and respond to internal and external attacks. This is completed as Splunk ES provides one centralized platform for machine data generated by security technologies such as network, endpoint, access, malware, vulnerability and identity information to feed into.

With more focus from authorities being place on cyber-security in light of recent threats, organisations of all types have to sit up and take a more active approach to the the way they secure their digital assets.

October 2017 The Value Plus

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MALWAREBYTES

TURNING POINT

Agthia Group gains sustainable protection against ransomware through Malwarebytes Endpoint Security.

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The Value Plus October 2017

For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

A

gthia Group is a leading Abu Dhabi-based food and beverage company, committed to the highest standards of sustainability and quality at every stage of the food chain— from field to fork.

With ransomware becoming a billion-dollar concern for businesses worldwide, Agthia Group chose Malwarebytes to increase endpoint protection across its organization.

Business challenge Fighting multiple flavors of malware Agthia Group operates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Egypt, and Turkey.

More than 3,000 employees are engaged in manufacturing, distributing, and marketing water, flour, animal feed, juices, dairy, and assorted frozen food products. Recently,

“We found Malwarebytes to be the right solution for countering malware threats and also to be cost effective.

Malwarebytes gave us the additional protection we were seeking with remediation capabilities that save time and increase effectiveness.”

however, the flood of ransomware, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), and multi-stage malware began targeting Agthia Group. In several incidents, ransomware attacked various users and servers. The conventional, signature-based antivirus solution wasn’t able to timely and effectively stop these aggressive new forms of malware.

“We urgently needed a more effective way to stop ransomware and other advanced threats,” said Zeeshan Khalid, Group IT and Information Security Manager, Agthia Group.

“With operations spread across multiple locations, we began looking for a cost-effective, centrally managed way to deploy additional protection and monitor threats trying to gain entry.”

The solution Malwarebytes Endpoint Security The Agthia Group’s primary requirement was to identify, block, and quarantine malware and ransomware while complementing its existing security infrastructure. Beginning with solutions recognized by Gartner in the antimalware market, Khalid and the Agthia Group team conducted an extensive evaluation and deep technical analysis of several potential solutions. After a proof of concept, Agthia Group chose Malwarebytes Endpoint Security.

“We found Malwarebytes to be the right solution for countering malware threats and also to be cost effective,” said Khalid.

“Malwarebytes gave us the additional protection we were seeking with remediation capabilities that save time and increase effectiveness.”

Khalid also said that Malwarebytes integrated smoothly with Agthia Group’s existing security infrastructure.

The Malwarebytes team worked closely with Khalid’s team during the proof of concept and implementation. As a result, Malwarebytes immediately began detecting, blocking, and quarantining malware and exploits.

Achieving daily benefits Khalid said that Malwarebytes actively blocks exploits every day. The Malwarebytes Management Console provides the team with instant visibility into endpoints to make sure that they are protected, regardless of where

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INDUSTRY Food and beverage BUSINESS CHALLENGE Identify, block, and quarantine malware and ransomware while complementing the existing security infrastructure IT ENVIRONMENT Traditional antivirus product, standard corporate protection measures from endpoints to network perimeter SOLUTION Malwarebytes product suite RESULTS • Gained visibility into endpoints for monitoring malware and other threats • Saved time with built-in remediation and notification • Reduced threat of ransomware and malware

the endpoint is located. The team can monitor status at a glance and easily push updates.

Malwarebytes also notifies them of any issues that require further investigation, but otherwise automatically remediates malware trying to enter their environment.

Real return on investment Ease of use, effectiveness in stopping malware and ransomware, budget friendliness, and time savings add up to a solid return on investment for Agthia Group. Combined with Malwarebytes support, Agthia Group can respond instantly to address malwarerelated threats.

“The Malwarebytes team is very responsive, and issues are typically resolved well before the agreed SLAs,” said Khalid. “We plan to continue using Malwarebytes and look forward to adding new capabilities as they become available.”

October 2017 The Value Plus

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750,000,000 IT hours saved

10,000+

Business Protected

605,000

Threats blocked every hour

Malwarebytes.com/business

PALO ALTO NETWORKS

POWER OF TEN

Palo Alto Networks outlines top 10 considerations for securing public cloud workloads.

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ey considerations to effectively protect data and applications in the public cloud from a multitude of ever-evolving security threats that often mirror those faced in a traditional, on-premise data center are:

Ideally, security and DevOps should work in tandem to understand the scope of public cloud projects and ensure the architecture of the application deployments meets business development needs while mitigating security risks.

1

3

EMBRACE THE SHARED SECURITY MODEL Public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, make it clear security is a shared responsibility. In this model, the provider is responsible for ensuring the platform is always on, available, up to date and so on.

In fact, most believe the cloud provider’s global data center infrastructure is more secure than their own. What gets lost is the fact that you, the customer, are responsible for protecting your own applications and data running within the public cloud.

2

ENGAGE WITH BUSINESS GROUPS AND DEVOPS EARLY Many public cloud projects are driven by business groups, such as DevOps, that quickly spin up new products or functional prototypes.

Challenges arise based on two things: general availability of new application approaches, and the security team, which is often brought in to assist with deployment. Both identify possible architecture-based security holes.

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KNOW YOUR POTENTIAL EXPOSURE Public cloud usage is often referred to as “shadow IT,” given how easily an account can be established. Employees doing what is “right for the business” may create security holes if the environment is not configured properly. It is imperative to know who in your organization is using the public cloud and to ensure the environment is configured correctly.

• Monitor Public Cloud Usage: Perhaps the quickest and most accurate way to determine usage is to call the local public cloud provider sales representative and ask how much your organization is using AWS or Azure.

• Ensure Proper Configuration: Configure the environment with security best practices in mind.

• Enforce Two-Factor Authentication: To minimize the risk of an attacker gaining access using stolen credentials, two-factor authentication should be applied.

• Lock Down SSH: Secure Shell is a preferred method to securely control cloud services, yet this is often left exposed in AWS and Azure environments. A cybercriminal with

SSH access can easily use an organization’s cloud infrastructure to launch his or her own botnet-based attacks.

4

UNDERSTAND THE ATTACKER Attackers leverage automation to find potential targets within minutes. Once identified, they look for weaknesses, checking default passwords, probing for SSH misconfigurations and so on. This is why security is critical in the public cloud.

5

EVALUATE YOUR SECURITY OPTIONS There are several security options to choose from when moving to the public cloud, most of which are similar to the options for physical networks.

• Native Public Cloud Security: Cloud service providers offer native security services including security groups and web application firewalls (WAFs). While these tools help reduce the attack surface, there are security gaps. o Security groups are essentially port-based access control lists, providing filtering capabilities. However, you will not be able to identify or effectively control the specific applications being allowed, nor will you be able to prevent threats or control file movement. o WAFs only protect HTTP and HTTPS applications, and ignore all other traffic. They are also not always required, whereas a

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firewall is always critical. WAFs cannot protect applications, such as Microsoft Lync, SharePoint or Active Directory, that use a wide range of contiguous ports to function properly. Further, they are not an effective means of identifying and controlling remote management or access tools, such as SSH or Microsoft RDP. • Point Products: One of the more common approaches to securing the public cloud uses a host-based point product to detect and prevent threats. The popularity of this approach is driven by the notion that native security, combined with an IDS or an IPS, is sufficient to protect your deployment. In reality, an IDS is counterintuitive to the speed and agility of the cloud as it requires manual intervention and remediation. An IPS only looks at known threats, and may miss zero-day or unknown threats. Neither provides a holistic view of your public cloud environment.

• Do-It-Yourself Security: Some organizations choose a DIY approach to securing public cloud workloads, using scripting and visibility tools to protect deployments. Potential disadvantages to this strategy include inadequate resources, lack of expertise to manage the security implementation and operations, and nonexistent support in the event of a security breach. Organizations that rely on internal personnel to manage public cloud and security deployments must be prepared for attrition. Typically, only a few engineers know the environment well, but they don’t necessarily have time to keep proper documentation or manage knowledge-sharing requirements. If even one of those engineers leaves the company, the organization may not be well-positioned to effectively manage security needs moving forward.

• In-Line Virtualized Appliances: An in-line virtualized appliance, such as a virtualized next-generation firewall, provides a foundation to gain visibility into all traffic in your cloud deployment. By employing integrated next-generation security, organizations can elevate protection for applications and data in the public cloud, using application-, userand content-based identification technologies to understand

exactly what is being accessed, by whom and for what purposes. With this understanding, dynamic security policy can be enforced to safely enable applications, content and users regardless of location, as well as protect data and applications in public cloud deployments from targeted and inadvertent threats.

6

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER Personal branding consultant John Antonios once said, “knowledge plus action is power.” In public cloud security, knowledge begins with safely enabling all traffic traversing your environment, spanning mobile, network and cloud.

The magnitude of digital data traversing these environments is immense. By utilizing a virtualized next generation firewall as part of a natively integrated, comprehensive security platform, organizations gain necessary insight into traffic identity and characteristics so they can make more informed policy decisions to protect applications and data from threats.

Native public cloud tools provide little visibility at the application layer. Further, in some cases, indepth networking knowledge is required to interpret the data accurately.

7

BELIEVE IN PREVENTION There are those who believe the attackers have already “won,” and thus choose to implement a detection and remediation approach. However, with complete awareness of your environment, a prevention philosophy is indeed possible. Enabling the prevention of successful cyberattacks in the public cloud requires four key capabilities – complete visibility, reduce the attack surface, prevent known threats and prevent unknown threats.

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TAKE A CLOUD-CENTRIC APPROACH The public cloud enables your organization to address business challenges with an agile, more scalable approach. To take full advantage of the cloud, recommended best practices include “applying the concepts of the data center to your deployment, while leaving the traditional constructs behind.” This way, organizations can achieve high availability and scalability.

The cloud centric approach utilizes the cloud provider fabric and its inherent resiliency

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features, such as load balancing, to quickly and seamlessly accomplish the end goal of HA.

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USE AUTOMATION TO ELIMINATE BOTTLENECKS Automation is a central tenet of the public cloud, where rapid change is common. When security best practice change control is followed, the delay may induce friction, slowing deployments or, worse, weakening security if the deployment does not “wait” for change control to work. By automating security in the public cloud, organizations can eliminate security-induced “friction” and take advantage of the flexibility and agility benefits offered in the public cloud. automation tools that organizations should look for in their public cloud security include touchless deployments, bidirectional integration with third-party resources and “commitless” policy updates.

Automation features like XML API and Dynamic Address Groups allow you to drive dynamic security policy updates as workloads change.

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ENFORCE POLICY CONSISTENCY THROUGH CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT To maintain effective security for data and applications in the public cloud, policy consistency is essential. Controlling your distributed network of firewalls, physical and virtualized, from one central location and applying a single, consistent security rule base from the network to the public cloud is critical to maintaining security functionality and efficiency. Centralized management provides insight into traffic and threats network-wide, simplifying management and helping you minimize security policy lag as workloads in the public cloud change.

Organizations are boarding the public cloud train to achieve more efficient time to market, improve overall business and continue carving a competitive edge. However, as businesscentric groups continue to drive adoption, security teams are not always involved in the process. Based on common experiences, these security considerations are designed to be educational and informative. Ideally, the goal is to encourage dialogue between the security and business groups to achieve a public cloud architecture and deployment that accounts for both groups’ demands.

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MICROSOFT

GUIDING THE NEW ERA Microsoft helps customers digitally transform their businesses with cloud, AI and mixed reality — while also advancing the next frontier of computing.

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icrosoft Corp. welcomed over 25,000 business customers to its annual IT event, Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, Fla., last month, where the company showcased how it is infusing cloud, AI and mixed reality across it products to help customers visualize and create the future of business. Microsoft also shared how quantum computers could help solve some of our planet’s biggest challenges. News spanned Microsoft’s commercial businesses — Office 365, Windows 10, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AI — with a focus on how the company is empowering people and organizations to succeed in a rapidly evolving workplace, and enabling customers to harness data, AI, hybrid and cloud technologies to evolve business process and innovate for the future.

“Digital technology is impacting all aspects of our society and economies, creating unprecedented opportunity for organizations of all sizes,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “I’m optimistic and inspired by the ingenuity of customers, partners and developers everywhere that are pushing the frontiers of what’s possible with mixed reality and artificial intelligence infused across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure, to transform and have impact in the world.”

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THE NEXT FRONTIER OF COMPUTING Following 12 years of investment in its vision to create a scalable computer based on quantum physics, Microsoft has announced the creation of a new programming language optimized for exploiting scalable quantum computers and deep integration of the programming language into Visual Studio, providing developers debugging and other support and state-of-the-art simulators that can run locally or on Microsoft Azure. The tools will be available for free by year’s end.

EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES AND FOSTERING A NEW CULTURE OF WORK Microsoft announced the expansion of Microsoft 365 with two new solutions to empower firstline workers and education customers. The company also introduced Microsoft 365 F1 and Microsoft 365 Education giving users what they need to create and collaborate security. New intelligent search capabilities, a vision for intelligent communications centering on Microsoft Teams, and security and IT management enhancements to help customers stay secure and compliant, including meeting the General Data Protection Regulation.

Also introduced was New LinkedIn in Microsoft profile cards that now provides the ability to see information from LinkedIn

profiles in Microsoft apps and services. This new experience, rolling out now for first release customers enhances the way you collaborate and build relationships by providing insights about the people you’re working with, inside and outside your organization, right from within Office 365.

MODERNIZING BUSINESS PROCESSES WITH CLOUD AND AI Microsoft expanded Dynamics 365 with new AI solutions that transform critical enterprise scenarios and apps and services to help business users reinvent the processes they use every day. Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI solutions are designed to tackle high-value, complex enterprise scenarios and tailored to existing processes, systems and data. The first solution includes an intelligent virtual agent for customer care, an intelligent assistant for customer service staff and conversation management tools, all powered by Microsoft AI. Modular apps for Dynamics 365 to help customers quickly transform high-impact processes by integrating with existing systems and augmenting them with workflow and insights from Dynamics 365, LinkedIn and Office 365. The first two modular apps, Attract and Onboard, will help companies recruit the most qualified candidates and ensure their success with personalized onboarding. Both will be

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available as part of Dynamics 365 for Talent later this year.

Deeper integration between PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and Office 365 and Dynamics 365. Now, any business user familiar with InfoPath forms, Access databases or SharePoint can build apps that extend and automate their business processes with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

ADVANCING THE ENTERPRISE CLOUD Microsoft Azure is driving new levels of organizational productivity, intelligent datadriven experiences powered by Azure Machine Learning and deepened business trust—all via a consistent, unique hybrid cloud approach across data, apps and infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

The announcement includes shipping of Azure Stack through OEM partners including Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo. Also, made available was SQL Server on Linux, Windows and Docker availability with SQL Server 2017 GA. SQL Data Warehouse delivers a new optimized-for-compute performance tier, significantly improving performance of analytics in the cloud. This new computeoptimized performance tier also scales further than before, up to 30,000 compute Data Warehouse Units. The preview will be available in the fall. Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server will let customers maximize existing license investments with discounted rates, further extending the promise of hybrid across our customers’ data investments. Azure Cost Management services by Cloudyn will help

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manage and optimize cloud spend via a single, unified view across multicloud environments.

Customers and partners will be able to use the service to manage their Azure spend for free.

Microsoft also made Updates to Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of intelligent APIs that allows developers to easily add AI capabilities to their applications. New updates include the general availability of text analytics, a cloud-based service for language processing, such as sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and language detection of text.

Next month, we will also make generally available Bing Custom Search, a customized search experience for a section of the Web, and Bing Search v7, which will provide more relevant results using Bing Web, news, video, image search, as well as a new version of autosuggest and spellcheck.

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Securing the Cloud Generation We Are The Cloud Generation. The Cloud Generation is everyone who lives and works in this unique era— as computing breaks the boundaries of desktops and data centers to embrace the mobile, social, global, crowd-sourced, always-on realities Copyright © 2017 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved.

of modern life. It’s a time when critical data, applications and infrastructure are shifting from “behind the firewall” to “running on the cloud.” Some of us are “all in.” Some are only 20% there.

Yes, it’s liberating. And yes, it’s chaotic.

Symantec is here to help.

SECURE PRIVILEGE. STOP ATTACKS. ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE • IN THE CLOUD • ON ENDPOINTS

Unsecured privileged accounts add risk to your business anywhere they exist—100% of advanced cyber attacks involve them. Seamlessly protect privileged accounts across the enterprise— on premises, in the cloud and on your endpoints with CyberArk. Visit Redington Value in Hall 4 to learn why the world’s leading organizations prioritize privileged account security with CyberArk to detect and mitigate threats.

CyberArk.com

©2017 CyberArk Software Ltd. All rights reserved.

CYBERARK

LEAVE NO LOOPHOLES William Udovich, Head of Strategic Accounts, EMEA, CyberArk, emphasizes the significance of having technology solutions that can detect behavioural deviations from both, humans and non-humans.

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very large organisation should assume that they have been breached. If there is a lesson from recent high profile attacks, it is this; in every case, from retail giants like Target to financial institutions like the Bangladesh Central Bank, the attacker had been present in the network long before the breach was discovered, looking for ways to move around, using higher and higher access credentials to get to the end goal.

If companies do not buy into this way of thinking, they stand little chance of being able to prevent a targeted attack. It is by luck alone that they are not admitting, on live TV or in a national paper, the extent of the breach that their focus on the ‘wrong’ type of IT security has wrought.

Credentials themselves are often thought of in a warped way.

When credentials are discussed, they are often understood as user credentials; a standard, locked-down user or a privileged user, with higher data access and network operation privileges. In other words – humans.

What is important to remember, though, is that the goal of attackers is not to impersonate people. The goal is to get to something. Data of some kind that can be used to make money (mostly) or to obtain some kind of information advantage, or even operation privileges, simply to cause havoc in the network.

In order to get to the goal, attackers will use any type of account credentials. And accounts are not just used by humans, they are used by automated process also – the machines and devices inside the network that control backup, scans scripts and many others.

When we connect a new machine to a domain, an account is created and certain services are automatically defined for that machine. This is to enable network connections from the machine to other resources in the network, such as to retrieve configurations from a domain controller, and to enable access to file shares on the machine itself.

Any function that is automated is also associated with an account. It is important to

note that while many services are configured using machine accounts, services and applications can also be configured using user-defined accounts. For example, a human-created account can be used for a SharePoint or Exchange service.

And herein lies the problem.

These types of accounts are often not subject to good security practices like regular password replacement. Another problem is that the permission levels of these accounts are defined by humans. These levels – what privileges the service account has in the network - are often too high. A common scenario is that the service experiences a problem, doesn’t work properly, the administrator seeks a solution online and stumbles on “you probably have a permissions problem, just join the service to the admins group” – then elevated permissions are granted and never revoked.

Your CEO might have elevated permission levels to a specific resource, because he or she has kicked up a fuss about something and it’s easier for IT to acquiesce. But the CEO would never be given domain level access. With applications though, especially those on which the business relies for proper operation, it is really important that they work. If they don’t, and elevated permissions is what is takes to fix the issue, then elevated permissions are going to be granted.

Other bad practices include using the same account for multiple services on multiple servers, storing privileged credentials in scripts on endpoints, using privileged domain-level credentials for local system services and many others.

This is very lucrative for attackers. They can scan the network, find script-embedded domain admin credentials, and then the game is up.

Several companies have been breached using this exact method, with the attackers getting into the network and scanning all shared drives and finding multiple VB scripts with domain-admin level usernames and passwords. This enabled them to completely

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William Udovich CyberArk

control the network and - for example - steal credit card details from Points-of-Sale.

So, it is key to understand that everything has an account and that there are two types of account; machine and user. Human accounts should be separated from service accounts. Accounts should only be used by a single automated process, with granular permissions.

Instead of granting them privilege levels that are too high, manage them.

Introduce a way to regularly change passwords. Make these complex and specific, not global in nature. Protect and monitor all accounts. Step beyond those technology solutions that just detect malicious human behaviour but are challenged in detecting deviations in behaviour from non-humans.

And then your CEO might not have to stand up in public to tell the world why your company didn’t protect your data better.

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SECLORE

I THE PERFECT STORM

n a world where information is regularly shared beyond the organization’s perimeter with advisors, vendors, prospects, outsourcers and partners, the exposure to a security breach has never been higher.

Couple that with growing regulatory compliance demands, and the need to leverage the latest technology trends (cloud, file-sharing, mobile devices), and you have the perfect security storm.

Seclore discusses why traditional information security solutions are not meeting the needs for secure collaboration.

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Why aren’t traditional security solutions stopping data breaches?

Current security solutions focus on protecting the perimeter, network, devices and applications. In spite of the huge spend on these traditional security solutions, organizations are still experiencing costly data breaches and leaks. So, what’s the problem with the existing security technologies?

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First, none of these solutions solve the problem of persistently protecting information that needs to be shared with third parties beyond the perimeter.

Second, none of them address the situation where a trusted employee leaves with sensitive intellectual property in that they cannot revoke access once given.

Third, none of these solutions can control the use of a file at a granular level: what a user can do with a file (view, but not edit, where they can access the document from (only within the corporate network e.g..) and when (revoke or set expiration).

Fourth, none of the traditional solutions can control a file even while it is being worked upon within the native application.

Fifth, the traditional solutions lack the ability to track every action against a file, even when it is outside of the corporate network.

The new way forward: Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM) One of the primary solutions organizations are beginning to implement to address the need to protect and audit information wherever it travels is Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM).

EDRM enables organizations to persistently protect and track information wherever it travels. The usage policies enforce exactly what a recipient can do with the file (view, edit, cut/ paste, screen share, print and more), when (set expirations or revoke access), and from where to support geo-fencing (by IP address, device).

All usage actions including unauthorized attempts are recorded for audit and regulatory reporting.

So why aren’t all organizations using EDRM? While EDRM has been around for years, it wasn’t until recently that some of the primary barriers to widespread adoption were solved.

Here are some of the key capabilities in the latest generation of EDRM systems that are making the promise of EDRM a reality: 1. Agentless Data-Centric Security: One of the barriers to adoption of EDRM has been the

One of the primary solutions organizations are beginning to implement to address the need to protect and audit information wherever it travels is Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM).

need to download agents. The need for an agent was especially problematic when an employee wanted to share a sensitive document with a third-party outside of the corporate boundaries. Seclore Rights Management features a fully browser-based solution for the person protecting a file, the person receiving the protected file and for those administering the solution. Enterprises can now easily leverage the full power of data-centric security without the need for downloads or agent installs, ensuring widespread adoption.

2. The Anyness Factor: Next generation EDRM solutions enable organizations to protect any type of file, use any type of application natively (Word, Adobe, AutoCAD, etc.), on any device. Expanding the coverage of files that can be protected and utilized in the native application on any device is essential to closing the security gaps inherent in external collaboration.

3. Automation: If you are relying on employees to manually protect files as they are shared via email or file sharing services, you will end up with minimal adoption. The latest EDRM solutions feature connectors to DLP, ECM, File Sharing, email, CASB and ERP systems.

Through these connectors, files are automatically protected with granular usage

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controls as they are downloaded, shared, and discovered.

4. Simplified Policy Administration: Policy Federation, or the ability to leverage and map access policies maintained in other core solutions with the granular usage controls offered by EDRM makes it easy to seamlessly add data-centric security to an existing infrastructure with less overhead.

Whether it’s between employees, partners, contractors or customers, collaboration has never been more important. It’s a necessary part of business, and one that should not be hindered or restricted because of security concerns. Seclore Rights Management is leading the way to making data-centric security easy to adopt and administer, ensuring that collaboration is secure and compliance is attainable.

Rights management that works In a world where collaboration with third parties is essential to doing business, your data and files are increasing at risk of getting into the wrong hands. Seclore Rights Management, the first fully browser-based solution, makes it easy for employees and third-party recipients to collaborate freely and securely. Protect your information to the last mile with Seclore.

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VENDOR NEWS

ALGOSEC ALIGNS SECURITY MANAGEMENT WITH BUSINESS PROCESSES

AMAZON WEB SERVICES MAKES AWS GLUE AVAILABLE TO ALL CUSTOMERS

lgoSec has recently released the AlgoSec Security Management Solution version 2017.2, which intensifies its focus on delivering new capabilities that align security with business processes. The solution seeks to enable business continuity and digital transformation by enhancing and extending support across the hybrid cloud and on-premise enterprise network.

This latest version uniquely maps and correlates security vulnerability data to their respective applications and processes, providing users with the information they need to prioritize any necessary remediation efforts based on business priorities and audit requirements.

Enhanced security device support in version 2017.2 includes both Cisco Firepower and Microsoft Azure Network Security Groups.

WS Glue, a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that has recently been made available to customers by AWS, makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data onto various Amazon services and databases. Customers simply point AWS Glue at their data stored on AWS, and it discovers the associated metadata (e.g. table definitions) and classifies it, generates ETL scripts for data transformation, and loads the transformed data into a destination data store, provisioning the infrastructure needed to complete the job.

With AWS Glue, data can be available for analysis in minutes.

What’s more, as the service is serverless, customers only pay for the compute resources they consume while executing data preparation and loading jobs.

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BARRACUDA AMPLIFIES REBRANDED MSP FOCUS

ENTRUST DATACARD JOINS THE VMWARE MOBILE SECURITY ALLIANCE

ince Barracuda’s acquisition of Intronis, it has expanded its commitment to the managed services marketplace through international growth, new offerings, and partner support models. The company has recently renamed its MSP business unit, which was formerly known as Intronis and now rebranded as Barracuda MSP. Over the past two years, Barracuda’s MSP business has increased billings, expanded the partner base by 25 percent, and entered the European market. In addition, the business has added data protection solutions; e-mail security, archiving, and backup for Office 365 environments; and next-generation firewalls to its MSP solution-set.

ntrust Datacard has recently joined the VMware Mobile Security Alliance, which integrates the industry’s leading mobile security solutions with the VMware Workspace ONE digital workspace platform powered by VMware AirWatch technology — creating a powerful alliance that unifies threat security for business mobility against cyber-attacks.

The technology collaboration enables both companies to leverage the new Entrust Datacard mobile derived credential offering which embeds a virtual smartcard, derived from the user’s certificated based identity, into native apps and services such as mail, WiFi and secured applications — all via the technology in VMware Workspace ONE.

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MICRO FOCUS FLAUNTS EXPANDED SECURITY PORTFOLIO

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icro Focus has recently announced new innovations across its expanded security portfolio at Protect 2017, following the successful spin-merge with HPE Software. Micro Focus’s comprehensive security solutions spanning security operations, application security, identity and access management (IAM), and data security help organizations strike the right balance between easy access to critical business data and mitigating risk.

New innovations include ArcSight Data Platform (ADP) 2.2, which brings native, realtime log parsing, security data enrichment and normalization into security operations that scales to any data volumes.

In addition, Micro Focus has begun delivering ArcSight Investigate 2.0 with built-in security analytics displayed in predefined dashboards that are powered by Vertica to provide actionable intelligence for front-line analysts.

Launching SecureData Cloud for AWS allows organizations to accelerate the deployment of hybrid cloud workloads with sensitive data at DevOps speed, while maintaining compliance to regulations such as PCI and GDPR. Micro Focus has also announced automation advancements to the Fortify application security portfolio that empower developers, testers and operations teams to implement security testing and remediation faster. The updated portfolio is fully integrated into any DevOps tool chain.

MOBILEIRON’S APPLE RELEASE TO BRING ENHANCED SECURITY TO MAC OS

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obileIron has recently announced its Apple Release which addresses the growing need for enterprises to provide employees with the option of using a Mac. The release is designed to bring MobileIron’s security and access model to macOS to increase Mac security and reduce the complexity of IT operations.

The release also features day zero compatibility support for iOS 11, which

has just been made available to Apple users, and its impact on the enterprise highlights Apple’s continued commitment to businesses by providing more options for organizations that are in the process of replacing older PCs. As desktop and mobile operating system architectures are converging, IT teams should be looking to reduce the number of technologies they use to manage their endpoints. MobileIron’s

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Apple Release hopes to make it possible to secure and manage all modern endpoints with the same, easy-to-use console.

The MobileIron Tunnel will protect data as it leaves a Mac, which provides per-app VPN and eliminates the need for a separate third-party VPN. The Release will also protect data in the cloud by enforcing trusted access through MobileIron Access, blocking unauthorized Macs from reaching services like Office 365 and Salesforce.

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ALM Octane A Application Dev/Test

Do you need to bridge for hybrid application development today?

Support choice in the enterprise application portfolio with Micro Focus Application Delivery Management.

As you transform your enterprise application portfolio from waterfall development to Agile and DevOps based delivery, a tool that supports Project Agile will not deliver to enterprise scale. This is why an integrated application lifecycle management toolchain matters. Manage complexity across the portfolio, to continuously deliver quality applications at scale. Discover the New. Start your free trial today. microfocus.com/alm-octane

THE SILOED X. THE UNSEEN X. THE EVER-CHANGING X. Solve it with XGen™ security.

Go beyond Next-Gen with XGen™ security.

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WHAT’S YOUR ?

VENDOR NEWS

NCOMPUTING LAUNCHES VERDE VDI 8.1 SOLUTION FOR ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS

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Computing has launched VERDE VDI 8.1, a purpose-built desktop virtualization solution for enterprise and SMB. The launch of the new VDI, follows NComputing’s acquisition of VERDE Workspaces during Q1 2017.

The VERDE VDI, according to the firm, incorporates a dynamic provisioning model that protects users by making unsanctioned changes non-persistent. It also prevents malware, virus attacks, data leakage and unauthorized access to the internal network.

NComputing also highlighted that the VDI solution has been designed with ease of use and efficiency in mind. It leverages a stateless server architecture for easy infrastructure management and a gold master image management model that dramatically streamlines the process of provisioning and managing users. VERDE VDI 8.1 is available in multiple deployment modes - on-premise, cloud and hybrid.

TRIPP LITE RACK ENCLOSURES NOW AVAILABLE ON BIM ONLINE PLATFORM

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ripp Lite, a manufacturer of power protection and connectivity solutions, has made 10 of its rack enclosures available on bimobject.com.

The BIMobject platform is a digital content management system for building information modeling objects. The cloud-based platform provides architects, builders, engineers, designers and students with robust and accurate 3D representations of components used in building and interior design.

With Tripp Lite’s enclosure available as BIM objects, racks and data center designers will be able to incorporate photoreal drawings of the racks with confidence that the geometry and appearance of the racks is represented accurately within their plans.

FIDELIS CYBERSECURITY TO SHOWCASE AUTOMATED DETECTION AND RESPONSE SOLUTION

SONICWALL REGISTERS STRONG FINANCIAL GROWTH, REPORTS INCREASED PARTNER PROGRAM SIGN-UPS

idelis Cybersecurity has announced its participation in GITEX Technology Week 2017 to be held at Dubai World Trade Center.

The company will demonstrate how its latest platform, Fidelis Elevate, can empower security teams and raise an organizations’ security posture by providing automated detection and response across both networks and endpoints.

Fidelis Elevate, according to the firm, offers content rich network and endpoint visibility to detect both known and unknown threats. Enterprises can utilize its automated detection and response capability to ensure protection from security incidents happens immediately, and historical data is delivered to security analysts for subsequent action.

Through the platform, security teams can triage, investigate, remediate and forensically analyze security incidents to fully protect their enterprise.

onicWall, the private network security company owned by Francisco Partners and Elliott Management, has surpassed its financial and operational metrics across sales, partner engagement and support, including shipping its three millionth firewall.

The company introduced innovations to the partner community to strengthen those relationships, such as the SecureFirst Partner Program for channel partners of all types, including resellers, integrators, managed security service providers and security consultants. Since the program’s launch in November 2016, it has experienced a surge in partner growth and sales. Currently, more than 15,000 channel partners across 90 countries have registered for SecureFirst, 4,000 of which are new to SonicWall.

In addition, SonicWall highlighted that active engagement with its SecureFirst partners and SonicWall University have achieved 50 percent growth in partner deal registration, which reflects $330 million in the firm’s new pipeline.

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