Last year, DNS attacks increased 216%. This year, DNS servers were identified as “the #1 exposure in mobile networks.� Coincidence? We think not. (P.S. The average loss for a 24-hour outage from a DDoS attack was $27 million.)
Visit www.infoblox.com to learn more about securing your DNS.
ontents
Editorial Cover story - 18
Expect more of the same 2
014 accelerated several of the changes that have been anticipated by experts for quite some time now. Expect 2015 to be no different. The adoption of disruptive Technologies has necessitated companies that reigned in the earlier years to review their strategies for the road ahead, probably shedding strategic assets that do not meet the directions of the future and looking for opportunities that can accelerate their Businesses. Inevitably, consolidation scripts will keep playing out through acquisitions, mergers, spin offs and exits. HP is a case in point as it decided to separate the PC Business and its enterprise entities. Distributors will need to reinvent their value and rework their cost structures to stay competitive and also add as many value propositions including enhanced consulting expertise to help their partners. All Businesses in the industry can no longer afford any fat or slack. Integrators will need to look at emerging opportunity niches they can really thrive in but these could be in addition to what they are already good at. 2015 could be the year of Applications all across, from the consumer to the enterprise segments looking for solutions that exceed their expectations in features and performance. Thinking outside the box, there could be room for setting up e-stores for selling simple Business productivity apps to start with and maybe also resell cloud apps from other vendors on subscription basis. For all those infrastructure players, it is perhaps a good time to look at the possibilities in developing competencies in vertical Business applications. As the story of Finesse in this issue illustrates, there is a great opportunity for midsized players who can deliver competently at great prices that customers are looking for.
Early days of SDN adoption
The adoption rates of SDN are modest although it is expected to be widely prevalent in the next two years as an integral part of new generation network rollouts and refreshes
News in Detail
ESET reengineers Business product range - 12
Du to sell Microsoft’s Office 3645 to SMB customers - 14 Feature - 22
Driving DR innovation
Unitrends is focused on back-up, archiving and recovery solutions for both physical and virtual environments. The company is tapping into the needs for DR recover and assurance solutions in the region
Point 2Point
A compelling value - 24
Sunil Paul, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at Finesse discusses how the company is uniquely placed in the application integration space
Building domains of strength - 26
Spectrami, a fast growing VAD, marked its third year of participation at GITEX 2014 and participated with a focus on security and storage solutions from its vendor partners. AnandChouda, MD at Spectrami discusses the company’s progress
Insight
‘Tis the Season for Credit Card Data Theft - 28
Lucas Zaichkowsky, Enterprise Defense Architect, Resolution1 Security provides insights into attacks and addresses how to detect targeted attacks in progress and respond before major damage occurs
DNS Based DDoS AttacksWhat’s in a Name? - 30
Renuka Nadkarni, Director, Product Management - Security at Infoblox discusses how DDoS attacks are disruptive to Businesses and how the latest spate of DDoS attacks is targeting DNS as a key vulnerability
Regulars
R. Narayan Managing Editor
Founder & CEO: Vivek Sharma Managing Editor: R. Narayan Editor: David Ndichu Art Director: Faiz Ahmed Sr. Sales Manager: R. Subramanyan Sales Coordinator: Smitha Jithesh
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News Bytes
“Global” signed as Master-Distributor for ZyXEL Global Distribution has signed a Master-Distribution Agreement with ZyXEL Communications Corporation (Taiwan). Global will distribute ZyXEL’s comprehensive range of networking and connectivity products in the Middle East, as well as Pakistan & Afghanistan. The announcement comes as Global further expands its Solutions Portfolio for the MENA Region, which now covers the key IT Infrastructure pillars, such as Enterprise Storage, High Performance Computing, IT Infrastructure & Physical Security and Software. The new partnership allows Global to distribute all of ZyXEL’s products including: UTM Firewalls, Switches, Routers, Wireless LAN solutions. “Global Distribution FZE has extensive experience in Solutions Distribution and an excellent reputation in Channel Development and Enablement,” said Muhammad Arsalan, VP Sales at ZyXEL Middle East FZE. “We are pleased to have them join our network of Distributors and added us to their comprehensive Solutions Portfolio."
4 | December 2014
SNB IT Distribution Appoints new CEO SNB IT Distribution, a new generation value-added IT distributor focused on data storage, security surveillance, networking and backup solutions, has appointed MunafChouguley as its new CEO. Chouguley has over 25 years of experience in the Middle East region across different industrial sectors. Chouguley will be responsible for developing new market strategies and revenue planning, in addition to managing SNB’s overall operations to ensure availability of resources and the smooth functioning of the business across the region. "SNB is currently in a strong position in the region, and I plan to take the company to the next level where we are global players, through strategic expansion. I also look forward to enhancing transparency with our partners and customers, and setting the stage for the success of the enterprise," says MunafChouguley, CEO, SNB IT Distribution. "Retaining the set standards and empowering our staff with the tools they need to approach the market will ensure SNB reaches new heights." As a new generation value-added IT distributor, SNB IT Distribution has ambitious objectives for the future. The company will leverage the talents of its staff and looks to Chougle to take it beyond the GCC, into the CIS, Africa and US markets. With Chouguley at the helm, SNB IT Distribution also plans to branch out into manufacturing and looks forward to continuing growth, sustainability and profitability that extends well into the next decade.
Sophos expands Cloud-Managed Security Portfolio Sophos has announced the release of Sophos Cloud Server Protection, a high performance malware protection solution designed specifically for servers. The solution expands Sophos Cloud to a comprehensive security platform designed to protect desktops, laptops, mobile phones, tablets and now servers with the most effective and simplest to manage business security offering available. The Sophos Cloud Server Protection solution delivers malware protection, host intrusion prevention and web security, as well as clear visibility into the current security status of all managed servers via a simple web-based interface. The new offering from Sophos is also the only server security product that can continually monitor the server environment, detect new applications on an ongoing basis and intelligently adjust policies to maintain operational efficiency. “If compromising desktops is like stealing a wallet, then hacking a server is like robbing a bank,” said Bill Lucchini, SVP & GM for Sophos Cloud. “Today's businesses need the most up-to-date protection, and Sophos Cloud Server Protection gives overtaxed IT personnel an innovative, high performance and simple to manage solution for securing server environments.”
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News Bytes
Schneider Electric holds successful ‘Power to the Cloud’ event Schneider Electric’s annual ‘Power to the Cloud’ event held last month reiterated the importance of cloud for globally flourishing smart cities. The company also launched the much-awaited prefabricated modular datacentre truck, a model of which was open to all attendees. Held at Atlantis-The Palm on 4 and 5 November, Power to the Cloud this year convened some 1,600 industry professionals and regional customers who discussed the future of smart cities and Schneider Electric’s contributions to innovative, sustainable and energy efficient solutions. Prominent attendees included Schneider Electric’s UAE-based customers Masdar City, RTA, DEWA and Dubai Municipality. His Excellency Mohammed Ahmad Bin Abdulaziz Al Shehhi, Undersecretary for Economic Affairs, UAE Ministry of Economy, inaugurated the event and commended smart city projects that are aligned with the UAE Vision 2021. The event featured 2,500 square meter smart city pavilion with demos.
6 | December 2014
Levtech Consulting gets awards from Microsoft Gulf Levtech Consulting, a leading provider of Microsoft Dynamics solutions and services,has recently received the Microsoft Dynamics Partner of the Year for FY14 awarded by Microsoft Gulf. The company was honored as the leading Microsoft Dynamics partner for demonstrating exceptional quality in sales and implementation of Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM in the Middle East. With a YOY growth rate of 91% in FY 2013, Levtech Consulting was also nominated amongst the top 50 Microsoft partners, also known as the Inner Circle, for Microsoft Dynamics. The award was announced at the annual Microsoft Dynamics partner meet and awards ceremony held at the Armani Hotel in Dubai, UAE. Levtech Consulting was recognized for providing outstanding consulting services, as well as demonstrating excellent all round engagement with customers.
Aruba in joint local initiatives with Brocade Aruba Networks is building upon its global strategic alliance with Brocade that was announced in September last year, and strengthening the collaboration in the Middle East with local initiatives aimed at enabling select channel partners to deliver an integrated and unparalleled wired and wireless solution based on bestof-breed products from the two networking vendors. Bashar Bashaireh, Regional Director, Gulf and Pakistan at Aruba Networks Middle East says, “The Middle East is seeing a convergence of the wired and wireless worlds where customers expect a seamless and secure experience irrespective of what device they are using or from where they connect to the enterprise network. The mobility-centric approach from Aruba and Brocade will help organizations to deliver this end-user experience - enabling improved performance, simplified management and security policy, while lowering total ownership costs for enterprise IT.” Aruba and Brocade will be organizing customer events in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha and Cairo within the next six months. Brocade and Aruba have jointly identified ten partners in the UAE who have the technical expertise to be able to sell the integrated solution. The two vendors recently hosted a channel workshop in Dubai to educate these partners about their collaborative technologies and the various market opportunities that they could tap into in order to create incremental revenue streams.
News Bytes
Nutanix announces regional expansion Nutanix, the web-scale converged infrastructure company, is expanding its presence in the Middle East with investment in its local pre-sales and support teams to help grow its steadily growing customer base and channel network across the region. Focused initially on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the investment will allow customers who deploy Nutanix in the region to take full advantage of a simple and highly available virtualised IT infrastructure platform and reduce TCO by as much as 60% within months as opposed to years. Due to the unprecedented demand for web-scale technologies, Nutanix serves 1000+ customers in over 50 countries and recently closed a $140 million Series E funding round, valuing the company at over $2 billion. Dirk Marichal, VP of Sales Europe, Middle East and Africa at Nutanix, commented: “As we grow our business around the world, we see great potential in the Middle East where the government and private sectors are working together to expand and invest in infrastructure. Our strategy is to make sure that we have on-the-ground resources to support our channel network as well as our customers in the region.” Nutanix has appointed Ahmad Qadri as its regional director for the region. Currently Nutanix works through a host of partners that have made considerable investment into resourcing teams to deploy Nutanix in the region. In addition, as part of its global multiple distribution strategy, it will be appointing additional channel partners in the key GCC countries soon.
8 | December 2014
BlackBerry announces broad Enterprise Portfolio BlackBerry Limited has announced new partnerships, enterprise solutions and value-added services that will improve productivity, communication and collaboration for enterprises. The announcements include new partnerships, tools and technologies that further expand BlackBerry’s enterprise portfolio spanning Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), Identity & Access, and Communications & Collaboration. BES12: a cross-platform EMM solutionby BlackBerry serves as the company’s foundation to control access, data and applications across all mission-critical endpoints and devices,supporting all major enterprise platforms. “Our Enterprise Portfolio, with BES12 at its foundation, does so much more than just manage cross-platform devices. Amongst many other capabilities, the portfolio provides easy and safe access to corporate data, manages an array of employee IDs, and offers new ways to securely and conveniently collaborate with colleagues,” said John Sims, President of Global Enterprise Services at BlackBerry. “BlackBerry is delivering on our promise to design and develop enterprise solutions that drive secure communications and collaboration for our customers. Everything we and our broad-based ecosystem of partners, including systems integrators, mobile operators and distributors, do is to deliver greater productivity and efficiency to our customers.”
AccessData Group splits into AccessData and Resolution1 Security AccessData Group has announced the split of its industry leading businesses into two independent, global companies, AccessData and the newly formed Resolution1 Security. The company split will go into effect January 1, 2015. AccessData, a privately held company will continue to develop industry leading solutions, including FTK, MPE+ and Summation, to address the escalating challenges around big data, endpoint and mobile forensics, and the legal investigation and review process.Tim Leehealey, AccessData’s current CEO and Chairman, will oversee AccessData’s strategic vision and business growth. He will serve as Chairman of the Board for both AccessData and Resolution1 Security. “The cybersecurity market has reached a critical point and Resolution1 Security is at the forefront of defining the future of incident response, namely Continuous, Automated, Incident Resolution (CAIR),” said Brian Karney, CEO of Resolution1 Security. “Our business has grown as has the interest and adoption by major companies and enterprises. The split comes at an optimal time for our company to realize its full potential and advance incident resolution for unsurpassed response speed, certainty and incident intelligence.”
News Bytes
Partner Status Quo Breaker’ award for Emitac Brocade, a leading next generation data centre networking solutions provider announced that Emitac Enterprise Solutions (EES), a leading IT infrastructure and solutions provider based in the UAE, is among the first few partners globally to have been presented with the ‘Partner Status Quo Breaker’ award. The award recognizes Emitac’s outstanding partnership in delivering cutting-edge networks, including working closely with the networking vendor in getting competitive accounts and investing in a Brocadefocused team. Miguel Angel Villalonga, CEO, Emitac Enterprise Solutions says, “EES is pleased to be recognized for the ‘The Status Quo breaker’ award from Brocade. We are encouraged and extremely happy to be appreciated for demonstrating vision, cuttingedge technology expertise, intense customer commitment and building complementary value solutions that meet the demanding business needs of our key customers. Like Brocade, we have always been keen to develop and extend value-adding relationships with key partners where we can leverage each-others’ core competencies to reach customers and markets. In that regard, we are continually renewing our efforts across the business and between our sales and services teams to identify, propose and win mutually successful sales together. This award is certainly a testimony to our on-going efforts.”
10 | December 2014
Riverbed unveils Technology Alliance Program Riverbed has launched the Riverbed-Ready Technology Alliance program with 17 charter program members. The program offers technology partners the opportunity to bring new capabilities to Riverbed customers, expand the value and impact of Riverbed solutions in specific industries and markets, and help customers master the technical challenges of the hybrid enterprise. The program framework enables partners to extend the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, the most complete platform for analyzing, diagnosing, and resolving application, network, and end-user performance issues anywhere in the hybrid enterprise. Together, Riverbed and its partners are providing end-to-end solutions that provide deep visibility and control to inspect, direct, and protect workloads across the hybrid enterprise. Riverbed-Ready partners will focus in areas such as security, cloud and virtualization, business applications, network performance management, application performance management, networking, and storage. Partners can leverage Riverbed open APIs and additional development tools to help with customization, integration, and automation. “The new Riverbed-Ready program enhances our ability to offer integrated solutions that create new revenue opportunities for our Riverbed-Ready partners and deliver tested and validated solutions to our joint customers,” said Nino D’Auria, VP Channels EMEA.
Dell growing as Integrated Technology Company As a private company, Dell has accelerated investments in research and development, the channel, the customer experience, and sales to deliver industry-leading growth and innovation. The company had several gains on several fronts. It was the No. 1 storage supplier in the first half of 2014 based on total terabytes sold for internal and external storage, according to IDC data. Dell Software showed impressive double-digit revenue growth as the company continues to build out its global software business, with strength in security and information-management areas, including data analytics and enterprise application integration. Dell maintained its No. 2 share position in the global x86 server market and regained the No. 1 share position in APJ, according to IDC data2. Also, for the second straight quarter, Dell was the only major vendor to generate year-over-year growth in both rack and blade servers according to IDC data. “Today, Dell is the world’s fastest growing integrated IT company in the world. Our strategy is resonating with customers worldwide as they look for a stable, reliable end-to-end solutions provider to meet their business and IT needs,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO. “From the endpoint to the data centre to the cloud, customers and partners value the certainty, ease and predictability of working with Dell.”
News In Detail
Kodak Alaris and NVSS of text end relationship following GITEX
T
he information management challenges faced by organisations today are daunting as people seek to cope with the seemingly mutually exclusive demands to provide high quality customer service quickly yet at lower cost. Add to this the desire to choose technology that is straightforward to implement and easy to use and the challenges only increase. To address this, Kodak Alaris announced that following Gitex it has signed an agreement to extend its existing partnership with NVSSoft to provide bestin-class intelligent information management, capture and document solutions primarily for the healthcare and government sectors. It demonstrates that Gitex truly is the place where the IT industry can meet to create new business opportunities to better serve customers in the region. Martin Birch, Kodak Alaris’ EAMER managing director for document Imaging, says, ”The combination of Kodak Alaris technologies and NVSSoft software provides our customers with comprehensive market driven solutions
covering applications such as digital medical records, CRM and eForms. They improve and streamline business processes, maximise efficiency and improve performance.” Building on a successful relationship that dates back a decade, the two companies will combine NVSSoft’s software with Kodak Alaris’ comprehensive professional services and capture technology including the network-ready Kodak ScanStation 700 Series. This easy to use, walk up device has a 9.7 inch touch screen and requires no dedicated PC. It integrates network connectivity and imaging functionality to make scanning effortless in a shared environment across multiple department or office locations. The new commercial arrangement will initially focus on two fully integrated offerings from NVSSoft and Kodak Alaris: • PractiScan – a networkready scanning solution which simplifies document sharing at point of sale or customer service situations. It is ideal for use by government, financial institutions and
Martin Birch MD, Kodak Alaris, EAMER
telecommunication operators. For example, aNVSSofteForms solution could be installed on a Kodak ScanStation to enable customer applications from branch offices to be managed quickly by scanning passport or ID information locally, attaching it to the eForm and sending the whole application over the network to headquarters for final approval or processing. • MedLogiceHIM - an electronic health information management solution which offers hospitals and medical institutions a comprehensive electronic medical records solution. This covers patient file management, tasks, integrated digital dictation, billing and coding, real-time access to patient charts as well as medical report generator functionality. Self evidently, hospitals shifting away from paper to digital records improve patient
care, reduce operational costs, increase staff productivity as well as avoid the damage, loss or security issues inherent with moving patient paperwork around their local health systems. Working together, NVSSoft and Kodak Alaris will deploy innovative scanning and software – based on MedlogiceHIM – to meet the needs of even the most demanding of medical environments. Mhd. Samer Al Siouty, NVSSoft’s CEO, says, “Customers want an end-to end solution with a trusted partner who can really deliver for them. Given our 20 years track record working in the document imaging industry, plus a much closer working relationship with Kodak Alaris which we’re announcing today, it’s good news for everyone: us, Kodak Alaris and, of course, the customers we jointly serve.” December 2014 | 11
News In Detail
ESET reengineers Business product range
E
SET announced the availability of its new suite of security products for business during December 2014 with global availability in Q1 2015. Supporting Mac, Windows and Android, the all-new ESET endpoint solutions provide security to companies of any size. Statistics on the cost of cybercrime published by the InfoSec Institute last year says that the average annual cost of cybercrime increased by 26% over the previous year to $11.56 million USD, ranging from $1.3 million to $58 million per organization. The report also highlights that recovery and detection as the most costly internal activities. According to Annual global survey of EY, over 37% of companies have no real-time insight on cyber risks. They also lack budget and skills to combat rising cybercrime. ESET conducted in depth interviews with customers and IT professionals around the world to learn more about today’s and tomorrow’s business requirements. These findings are at the heart of ESET’s complete reengineering and redesign of its business
12 | December 2014
products to provide the best protection while lowering the demands on the IT teams. At the core of this new product range is ESET’s all-new remote management console, ESET Remote Administrator. With an improved user experience, a new-look GUI, and seamless functionality, customers can drill down into the smallest details, adjust settings with equal granularity and monitor and control their business’ IT security status via a web console. This new suite of ESET products include features such as below: • Mobile protection without need for additional MDM tools; • Flexible report creation to keep stakeholders up to date with the latest IT security information; • Full regulatory compliance and hasslefree audits for regulatory bodies; • Easy migration for businesses wanting to protect their business with ESET’s awardwinning technology. • A single unilicense to protect all supported platforms The new Endpoint solutions come with a
Neo Neophytou MD, ESET Middle East
number of new protection technologies like an improved Anti-Phishing, Exploit Blocker, Vulnerability Shield and Advanced Memory Scanner, which are well established within ESET IT security line of products for Home users. “The reengineering of our products has been a revolution rather than an evolution. We have engaged extensively with customers to understand the most pressing security needs. From this we have created a suite of products that cater to businesses of all sizes. ESET’s new business products can handle simple and complex network configurations, and local or global operations, including multi-lingual environments, while delivering the highest performance and effectiveness,” said Neo Neophytou, MD, ESET Middle East. According to a report conducted by market analysts IDC this year, ESET now occupies the number two spot worldwide in corporate endpoint antimalware, with a global market share of just under 14 percent. ESET now offers customers a full range of business IT security products, including support for virtual environments with hundreds of thousands of endpoints.
News In Detail
d
u and Microsoft announced a new partnership, under which du has become the first telecom service provider in the UAE to offer Office 365 cloud-based productivity applications and services directly to its small and medium business (SMB) customers in the country. This announcement leads to the availability of the modern office on the cloud to be provided by a telecom service provider for the first time in the UAE by further expanding the various channels available to SMBs to obtain Office 365, and provides additional value-added services that complement the offering. Inline with both companies’ commitment to providing businesses with technology that empowers them to be more productive in a mobile-first, cloud-first environment, the offering provides SMBs with increased accessibility to cloud-based productivity tools starting from just 20 AED/month. The Office 365-enabled packages introduced support the services offered by du for SMBs, allowing them to now be able to purchase all the services they require from one supplier, through one support center, and in one consolidated monthly bill. Microsoft Office 365 packages are offered by du across all their mobile, device and broadband portfolio from as low as 20 AED/month, added to the customer’s du monthly bill. The offering also provides a simple and easy on-boarding for customers to start using the Office 365, as well as providing a choice of support packages giving the customer complete peace of mind while he focuses on running his core business. The Office 365 business plan packages to be provided by du offer a variety of services, including businessclass email, shared calendars, instant messaging, conferencing, and access to 1TB of storage in the cloud, which is due to become unlimited over the course of 2015. This is all in addition to the Microsoft Office suite. SMBs can benefit from Office 365-hosted solutions with no infrastructure setup or costs on up to 15 devices per user with any operating system, and remain productive
14 | December 2014
Hany Fahmy Aly Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business du
Du to sell Microsoft’s Office 365 to SMB customers on the go without having to pay any IT infrastructure costs. Hany Fahmy Aly, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business, du, said: “SMBs represent the fastest growing segment for us, and we believe that this segment has huge potential for growth. We completely understand the needs and challenges of SMBs, and from our experience we have seen that they are early technology adopters, if products are packaged right. By offering the Office 365 suite of packages across all our core
mobile and broadband services through our new collaboration with Microsoft, our SMB customers will benefit from yet another incredible effort to bring valuepacked, enterprise-grade solutions to this market. We are excited to launch the UAE’s first modern office in the cloud.” Ihsan Anabtawi, Regional Director Microsoft Office Division at Microsoft Gulf said: “Nearly three years ago, we made Office 365 available in the UAE. Today we are continuing our efforts by providing an offering with du that is
News In Detail
designed to meet the needs of SMBs, with a focus on those with up to 100 employees, providing easy, low-cost access to cloud-based technology with no infrastructure costs. Office 365 is transformational for businesses of all sizes, but levels the playing field for SMBs in particular because it makes enterprisegrade tools affordable and easy to set
up and manage. We are pleased to work with du to provide the UAE’s SMBs with communication and collaboration tools which have been designed to enhance productivity, promote collaboration and reduce operational costs. I would like to take this opportunity to thank du for their partnership and commitment as we work together to provide the UAE’s SMBs with
access to the latest cloud collaboration and productivity solutions.” Office 365 is one of the fastest growing businesses in Microsoft history. Microsoft recently increased the amount of cloud storage that it provides to Office 365 accounts to 1 terabyte across the service, bringing more capacity to anyone who pays for Office
A rising focus on ICT services Du has unveiled a series of several announcements in the past few months that underlines the emergence of the telecom provider as a strategic ICT solutions provider. Hany Fahmy Aly, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business, du discusses the service provider’s focus
Please elaborate on the ICT focus for Du? Our strategy is straightforward and simple. We want to be a one stop shop for the connectivity and core Business needs of SMB customers. We don’t want to be an IT integrator which is not our focus. We want to go where it is relevant and is very close to our core Business, where we can add value based on our knowledge, skills and scale. Elaborate on the relevance of du’s value proposition as an ICT solutions provider to the SMB customers? A small enterprise customer is striving to build his core Business and doesn’t want to lose a lot of time thinking about the Technologies that are enabling his Business. They just need to be available. For instance a Logistics company will want to invest in his enhancing his core Business and may not be keen to invest in an IT admin manager that adds to the
16 | December 2014
overheads or a complex IT solution and stresses the cash flow. This is where du comes in as someone who can provide inexpensive solutions on a scale that the customer’s Business requires and which the customer lacks. We want to be a trusted advisor, to bring our scale with companies including Microsoft, Google etcto your benefit. We try to keep it simple with one bill, one support line etc. We try and package it in terms of 2-3 simple options for an SMB user which is convenientvs the large enterprises that want solutions customized to the nth degree. We try and offer a few bundled options for different segments in the SME market to help them facilitate their core Business focus. For us it is a win-win strategy because we understand the customer better as we are already selling connectivity solutions to them. What we offer is focused on and around the connectivity layer, the value added
service layer or the core application layer. We are talking of products that are standardized and cover 90 % of the market. This where we can help them achieve productivity gains. What was the focus on staff and support required for this rollout? We have sales people trained and support staff trained. We have worked on ensuring that we are ready for rolling this out in collaboration with Microsoft. There are anywhere between 250,000 to 300,000 SMEs in the UAE. We believe that we have anywhere between 25-30-% market share of this SME customer base because of our connectivity solutions that they access. We don’t have accurate breakdown of share in terms of IT services because they are so vast. We are not interested in covering the 10-15 % of the SME segment that Microsoft resellers cover. We are interested in the rest of the 85% of the market. Do you collaborate with IT systems integrators? We collaborate with integrators in the large enterprise, when customers have requirements such as Managed services, MPLS connectivity etc. This depends on the specific instances.
Cover Feature | SDN
Early days of
SDN adoption
The adoption rates of SDN are modest although it is expected to be widely prevalent in the next two years as an integral part of new generation network rollouts and refreshes
S
oftware defined network (SDN) deployments are expected to be part of next generation networks rollout that will need to be future proof and are more agile. One of the significant changes being brought in by SDN innovation and adoption would be the decoupling of hardware and software that improves the nature of network designed as well as how they are managed and evolved. There are challenges including high initial costs, integration with existing systems, security etc, which are some of the top concerns to adoption as found in a recent survey by Juniper Networks. Most networking vendors today have their SDN strategy in place and there are a variety of solutions and approaches. However, the pace of adoption continues to be modest. The lack of speed also has to do with low levels of market awareness. "I believe it is in the early stages of
18 | December 2014
the learning curve. Awareness is not yet as expected. Early adopters of SDN are currently investigating a wide range of applications and use cases that include network virtualization, large-scale data center infrastructure management, traffic engineering, and Wide Area Network (WAN) flow management. SDN is still at a conceptual stage in this region,” says Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, MEMA at Brocade Communications. The benefits of SDN deployment will include network virtualization, programmatic control of the infrastructure, automation and dynamic configuration, on-demand service insertion and payper-use, all through standards-based software orchestration tools. Cloud service deployment cdan be faster, data centre management, simpler and network operation, easier. Yarob adds, “The growth in the SDN
market will be driven by companies working towards solving existing problems with networks – security, robustness and manageability and by innovating new revenue generating services on network infrastructures. Ultimately, the goal is to provide a highly flexible cloud-optimized network solution that is scalable within the cloud. In our view, this “new” network will be powered by fabric-based architectures, which provide the any-to-any connectivity critical to realizing the full benefits of SDN. Mario Georgiou, Regional Partner Director for ME&A at Juniper Networks believes that 2015 may well become SDN’s year. This he says can be partly attributed to providers starting to build on their promise of rolling out this fresh approach to the network. He adds, “The emergence of SDN in the region is a potentially disruptive trend, but one that opens up significant opportunities.
Keeping pace with the cloud In the era of growing adoption of cloud based Technologies, there is a need to embrace SDN because legacy network architectures cannot provide the scale
Mario Georgiou, Regional Partner Director, ME&A, Juniper Networks
Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director MEMA, Brocade Communications A few years ago the focus was on Cloud-asa-Service but today SDN is the technology that everyone is talking about and they are intimately linked. As service providers and enterprises move to refresh the backend technology and move towards major investment in infrastructure overhauls, SDN projects are being considered, but with cautious thought.” Juniper has multiple solutions available. These include Contrail, an open, and agile, SDN solution which orchestrates the creation of scalable virtual networks, making it easy to quickly connect clouds and data centers. Juniper also brings NorthStar, an SDN Controller for the WAN and transport networks. HP has supported a growing community of developers to start enabling applications and functions with SDN enhancements, and HP is making these applications available through its SDN App Store. Farhad Ghoreishi, Marketing Manager, HP Networking EMEA at HP says, “According to Gartner, by the end of 2016, more than 10,000 enterprises worldwide will have deployed SDN in their networks, a tenfold increase from end-of-year 2014. SDN is
an inevitable technology approach which will be prevalent by 2017, so any network refresh and further investment made today which is not OpenFlow-ready and SDN enabled, would be a missed opportunity and may well result in further catch-up costs down the line.” He adds, “SDN, based on OpenFlow, the adopted industry standard, is already a proven technology and is certainly ready for mainstream adoption. In fact, it has been deployed by a number of our customers to improve the security credentials of their networks and also to enhance their unified communications user experiences with Microsoft Lync.” For VMware, the NSX network virtualization platform provides the critical pillar of its Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture. NSX network virtualization delivers for networking what VMware has already delivered for compute and storage. The NSX is a nondisruptive solution that is deployed on any IP network, including existing data center network designs or next generation fabric architectures from any networking vendor. NSX enables virtual networks to be created, saved and deleted and restored on demand without requiring any reconfiguration of the physical network. The result fundamentally transforms the data center network operational model, reduces network provisioning time from days or weeks to minutes and dramatically simplifies network operations. Deepak Narain, Regional PreSales Manager, VMware MENA says, “We already have a large number production deployments of VMware NSX worldwide. But, it’s true that we’ve only scratched the surface of SDN with network virtualization and much more interesting work remains to be done by the ecosystem as they ramp up their solutions to take advantage of the programmability of the SDN.”
that SDN can potentially bring to the infrastructure. Farhad says, “SDN is necessary for sustaining the pace of cloud adoption Without SDN, there cannot be a meaningful and efficient cloud solution. In order to make the cloud work in the scales that we know are coming up, SDN, virtualization and NFV will be essential architectural and functional transformations in supporting the adoption and development of cloud computing.” Enterprises are noticing that as they implement cloud services internally and for the customers - the network may not be responding. The road to virtualising the legacy network architectures cannot be achieved overnight. While Businesses in the Middle East are aware that they need to advance their networks, they don’t need to re-engineer them from scratch according to Juniper’s Mario. He adds, “SDN is designed to merge the network into the age of the cloud, and we have seen a shift locally in the appetite for this technology. However, SDN can never be considered a true replacement of the physical infrastructure. But SDN can December 2014 | 19
What’s at stake In the next two years, SDN deployments should gather momentum significantly in the enterprise segments and even likely penetrate the SMB space. Farhad says, “According to analysts, by 2017 SDN will be deployed broadly in most enterprises. HP believes this will extend, if not be spearheaded by the midmarket and SMB segments. Once again, Service Providers can use this as a fantastic opportunity to deliver higher levels of programmable and personalized services to the edges of their networks and their customers. Those Service Providers will include enterprise IT organizations which increasingly need to behave like Service Providers within their companies.” Both the customer segment and the partner segment should be aligned to the trends emerging in SDN as they cannot make a transition overnight, the former in terms of adoption and the latter in terms of equipping themselves with the necessary resources to take these Technologies to market. SDN vendors believe the next two years will unravel how SDN adoption
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goes mainstream at an accelerated pace. That will likely bring in great opportunity for SDN focused vendors and network infrastructure integrators. Partners need to build up competencies and help customers understand the benefits of SDN deployments in the longer term for productivity gains. Mario says, “The next two years offer a window of trial where companies such as Juniper Networks need to work closely with their customers and partners and offer tangible use cases as to how SDN can harness these trends, solve critical business problems and help fuel new business opportunities.” He adds, “Education and understanding the technology is critical to further establishing SDN services. Resellers and solution providers need to review the readiness of their current networks to support intelligent, effective SDN deployment. Also, ensuring skills are developed in the region and matched to those skill sets found across the rest of the world is vital in the deployment and long-term success of SDN.Once SDN is understood, it’s time to learn how SDN can
Deepak Narain, Regional PreSales Manager, VMware MENA
truly bridge the gap and help to evolve outdated networks. " Brocade has undertaken to evolve its entire portfolio, decoupling and opening up the data, control, and management planes across multiple product lines in order to deliver truly cloud-optimized networks. Yarob says that Software-Defined Networking (SDN), has emerged as the foundation for Private Clouds. He adds, “SDN enables Private Clouds to share infrastructure resources, scale them on demand, automate operations, and be more responsive to dynamic business demands while maximizing resource utilization. SDN and NFV provide the networking capabilities to truly automate cloud computing. As a result, SDN and cloud computing go hand in hand no doubt there will be increased adoption of both these technologies in the years to come.”
Farhad Ghoreishi, Marketing Manager, Networking EMEA, HP
Cover Feature | SDN
solve real problems. This is why Juniper is now focused on working with its customers with use-cases that can be applied in the real-world today.” For the Middle East, the next two years offer a window of trial - pilot and proof of concept (POC) says Yarob. This is the period when partners must identify “high value-high reward” areas of the customer’s businesses where SDN may solve actual business problems or drive new business opportunities. He adds, “Given the timeframe channel organizations can make great headway in preparing for the inevitable shift towards SDN and similar and related solutions. Nurturing and developing the right skill sets during these formative years will allow the partner to rapidly gain market share in this emerging field and guarantee its position as a 'trusted advisor' and solutions provider.” The next couple of years therefore looks like the build-up time for SDN mainstream adoption to pick up. Leading up to then, partners need to skill up and engage with early adopters and drive awareness with their larger base of customers.
Feature | Unitrends
D
ata backup and recovery has seen a dramatic shift away from traditional models and today requires a holistic response to the needs to manage requirements of heterogeneous environments that scale from physical to virtual and hybrid architectures. Unitrends, a US based company with a portfolio of virtual, physical and cloud solutions sees a sizeable and growing opportunity for its range of solutions that meet these needs for adaptive protection by organizations worldwide.. Kevin Moreau, Managing Director – EMEA, Unitrends says, “We started foraying into international markets about 2-3 years ago. We opened our office in London over a year and half ago to cover EMEA operations. We have added over 22 people since then in our team. As we have been around for 25 plus years, we offer support for all types of different OS and Applications. We have a market reach for resellers targeting similar opportunities and for customers with very heterogeneous environments.” The company entered the Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances’ this year. At the end of 3rd quarter 2014, the company had seen 23 consecutive quarters of growth. Kevin says, “We have multiple capabilities, supporting the physical and the virtual environments with one solution. The delivery is in the form of integrated physical appliances that integrates compute, store and backup software. There is also an all software solution supporting different virtual environments.This is quite important for the Middle East because although virtualization is being embraced, the consolidation is not as much in the US or Europe. We can meet a diverse set of needs from customers looking for solutions for branch offices to solutions for datacenters, both physical and virtual.” The company’s Recovery-Series is a wide range of purpose-built physical backup appliances for enterpriseclass virtual, deep virtual, physical protection, and unified compute protection. Further to its acquisition of PHD Virtual Technologies end of 2013, it also offers ReliableDR, an innovative disaster recovery solution which automates recovery to meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs).The acquisition of PHD Virtual Technologies has helped the company consolidate its offerings for automating DR testing in virtual environments, a critical piece. Kevin says, “Once you have replicated a VM, you still need testing. In some sectors like Banking where they have strict rules around VM testing and every year they end up spending thousands of dollars around that. We have a simple solution that helps testing and automates VM recovery down to application level against recovery time and recovery point objectives and automates failover.”
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Kevin Moreau MD, EMEA, Unitrends
Driving DR innovation Unitrends is focused on back-up, archiving and recovery solutions for both physical and virtual environments. The company is tapping into the needs for DR recover and assurance solutions in the region.
Kevin adds, Reccently, the “Disaster recovery company enhanced "The integration of certified disaster recovery as a service is a the software is a key message that we want to focus on in this market. getting a huge powering Unitrends The ability to not only backup replication and archiving attach rate in the Recovery-Series, the but also that of orchestration of disaster recovery US for instance company’s family because we of physical backup capabilities towards service level objectives is key." are bundling on and recovery premise backup appliances, and add service capabilities on ground.” and disaster recovery along with disaster Unitrends Enterprise Backup, its softwareOn competition in the region, Kevin recovery as a service. Growing of course only virtual appliance. The latest software reflects that Unitrends is ideally placed from a smaller base, the traction is includes support for third-party cloud because of their unique propositions that significant in that space. In the Middle East, storage archives and continues to push straddle both the physical and the virtual the integrated appliances with storage, virtual, physical and cloud data protection spaces. compute and software included offering and disaster recovery to new levels of He says, “The competition is not as on-premise DR solutions is seeing the scalability and performance. dense as in other regions. Symantec is greatest traction but we can offer the same Also in the quarter, the company a major player in the physical space and solutions as a virtual solution as well for launched Unitrends Virtual Backup (UVB) Veaam is a rising player in the virtual Hyper-V or VMware.” 8.0, a purpose-built virtual appliance space but none of them have the range The company’s focus segment in the providing hypervisor-level protection of capabilities that we offer in terms of region is the enterprise segment. for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V one solution for both physical and virtual “We focus on the mid-market and Citrix XenServer. UVB 8.0 enables environments. The focus here is disaster traditionally. That is for the US where the organizations to back up entire multimid-size businesses are much larger. If we hypervisor environments in just four mouse recovery in on premise environments currently.” transpose that for the region, the focus is clicks. Arguably, with UVB 8.0, backup and Unitrends sees a significant potential actually on many of the enterprise sized recovery can be performed up to 20 times for its Recovery Assurance solutions that customers. We have some solutions for the faster, using 66 percent less storage space provide actual testing of recovery from SMB but don’t focus on that.” and 75 percent less virtual resources than backups, archives, and replication for single The vendor is looking to have its competing systems. server, or virtual-machine-level backups own office moving in the near future. It The company has been cementing or entire site-based application-level continues to work with its VAD in offering its presence in the region and the recent infrastructure backups. the channel its support and has a focused participation at GITEX was further step Kevin says, “The integration of certified partner program. towards that. It is looking at partnering He says, “We continue to leverage our with a select number of value add resellers disaster recovery is a key message that distributor in offering partners pre-sales through its distributor, that bring some core we want to focus on in this market to our partners and their customers. The ability to support. We have a margin rich certification expertise in terms of support capabilities not only backup replication and archiving program for channel partners that depends for customers.Bridge IT solutions & but also that of orchestration of disaster on their ability to take us to new customers Distribution is its distributor in the region. recovery capabilities towards service level and also their capabilities to train on “We were at GITEX last year as well objectives is key.” our products. We have three levels of and were focused on organizing our While the company also has cloud certifications of resellers and the higher distribution for the region. Bridge IT is our based DR services, it is not yet seeing the they are, there are more margins to make. biggest distributor in the region except momentum in the region. The company The typical partner is a mid-sized systems Saudi. All our Business is based on the two offers Unitrends Cloud, a disaster recovery integrator but that doesn’t deter us from tier systems of distributors and resellers. working with some of the largest sized We are not doing any direct business in the and business continuity offering that takes the capabilities of its Recovery-Series and integrators.” region.We have partners working for us the Unitrends Enterprise Backup backup The outlook looks buoyant for the in Africa as well.We are still new entrants products and enhances them with cloud vendor who has chalked up many to this market, by and large. So we are capabilities. Unitrends Cloud is available consecutive quarters of growth globally. recruiting more partners to serve more in three editions: Metered, No Limits With a comprehensive product portfolio customers.While we already have some Cloud, and Disaster Recovery as a Service and a committed channel strategy, there is active SI partners, we are keen to engage (DRaaS.) a lot riding in the vendor’s favor. with some more partners who have value
December 2014 | 23
Point2Point | Finesse
Sunil Paul Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Finesse
Finesse is a fast growing integrator with solution offerings are primarily focused on three areas including, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Enterprise Content & Business Process Management as well as Governance, Risk & Compliance areas. The company represents represent most of the industry leaders in the application space including Oracle, IBM, Open Text, Software AG, Qlik, Tagetik, Metric Stream among others. Sunil Paul, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at Finesse discusses how the company is uniquely placed in the application integration space
A compelling value Discuss the application software integration segment and how Finesse is positioned? In the application software integration Business, there are very large global companies and then there are large regional companies that are focused on perhaps not more than two product partnerships.Most systems integrators in the Application integration space in fact are large sized. This is where Finesse is ideally placed because there is hardly anyone of our size. We come in as an affordable mid-sized SI with almost all of the skillsets that you would expect from the largest global SIs and bring in a boutique approach with best practises. Finesse brings in the unique value proposition of being an application integrator that has expertise across multiple domains and
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technologies, which are essential for successful integration. For instance, in Banks there is a huge array of applications deployed and each needs specific understanding. Further, different banks may be using different ERP systems or so.To be successful, an SI should have knowledge and expertise across these multiple technologies, understand specific customer requirements, integrate and build solutions that orchestrates better functioning. We have been able to achieve this. Which have your largest growth verticals? BFSI sector continued to be the major focus segment. 70% of our business today comes from the Financial Services domain where we started.
After achieving a clear lead in the BFSI domain, we have expanded to other sectors as well. Education and Healthcare is also growing for us. We have introduced innovative solutions such as Digital Concierge to hospitality industry which is attracting a lot of interest from the region. Comment on some recent project successes? We have been winning projects by being able to demonstrate the skillsets that as a company we have. It can be challenging with some of the largest customers who may not have worked with mid-sized integrators but we are winning over more customers. For instance, we have won a recent project with a large Logistics company that has acquired a company. The acquisition
enterprise clients. requires complex "We come in as an affordable mid-sized SI We have won integration. After several industry the evaluation with almost all of the skillsets that accolades. We process, they you would expect from the largest have started decided to award global SIs and bring in a boutique approach offices in Canada the project to with best practises." and Singapore us because of and set up our the technical offshore center competencies based in Bangalore India. we could demonstrate. Since they Have most of you projects so far In terms of turnover, from 5.4 have never before worked with a been executed in the region? million USD that we clocked last year, smaller sized integrator such as us and We have delivered about 100 projects we are closing in on 8.5 million USD therefore the approval process was so far, with around 80 % of them in for the current year.We are looking complex.However, we have delivered the region over the past four years at achieving a target of 15 million what the bigger integrators could offer since our start. We won 98% of these USD turnover by end of next year. We but at a competitive pricing. They are projects on the strength of customer have a plan to cross 100 million USD happy with the first phase that has references. in the next 6-7 years by maintaining been completed and now we have the pace of growth. We are confident moved on to the second phase. What are the challenges in the of achieving those targets because of We have also been winning more application integration space? the plans in place and because of the projects from Banks in recent times, Winning the project and delivering opportunities we see in the market. who are becoming more confident the project arequite challenging in the We believe this is possible because we in the capabilities we offer. Further, application space as it needs great have put different Businesses place and they find us quite approachable with detailing and attention.There are long a strong leadership team that is gestation periods in the Business. Deal- we have different leaders as well under the Leadership program. responsive. closing time is anywhere between 9-18 months typically. Elaborate on the Leadership What have been the growth areas in terms of applications and how have Do you also focus on IT infrastructural program? We have been investing in aleadership you enhanced your capabilities? integration? program over the past year and these We have doubled our numbers in We believe the application space has leaders will start creating their own the areas of Business Intelligence, great potential and consumes most of Business domains.Each of those leaders Data Analytics and Performance our time and focus. We are focused have core expertise in their domains. monitoring. We have also added a in this space because we believe that We are in fact looking to create 100 few more solutions in this area to our there is a significant value proposition leaders in the next 10-12 years. Under portfolio. Financial Institutions have that we have to offer the market. We this ambitious leadership program, each realized the value of Analytics and might look at other areas including leader can become a dollar Millionaire. how it can redefine their business. infrastructure later on. Even the bigger We are working towards that. Banks and financial institutions have global SI players aren’t focused on the started implementing Analytics and infrastructural integration business but Does the company have a CSR Performance monitoring tools to drive on the services business. However, we revenue, reduce risk and to get deeper have taken up infrastructural integration initiative in place? It has not been just about the insights. in past when customers insist that we We have added exciting solutions to include that as well in our engagement. company’s growth always. We are passionate about our CSR initiatives. We our portfolio including CPM (Corporate are spending 1% of our annual turnover Performance Management), GRC Comment on your growth achieved on CSR activities. We have initiativesin (Governance, Risk & Compliance, Energy and the initiatives that are helping India including distribution of drinking Sustainability, Customer Experience the company stand apart? water to 10 schools and are planning Management and Social Media. We We have been growing consistently to expand these activities in 2015. We have also introduced FATCA, Fraud since our first year of operations. We are also giving back to the society as Management, Treasury, Signature have a staff strength almost touching we grow. Management to our BFSI offerings. 200. We have acquired over 100
December 2014 | 25
Point2Point | Spectrami
Which are the domain of focus for Spectrami and the vendors you are associated with presently? Security and storage are two domains that we have looked into. Actifio and Violin Memory are two vendors we are associated with on the storage front. On the security side, we have partnerships with vendors including General Dynamics Fidelis Cybersecurity Solutions, Tenable, Xceedium, Good Technology,and LogRhythm. Discuss the areas of security focus covered by the solutions you carry? General Dynamics Fidelis Cybersecurity Solutions is a leader in advanced threat defense, incident response and breach services.LogRythm is into SIEM log and event management solutions Tenable Network Security provides continuous network monitoring to identify vulnerabilities, reduce risk and ensure compliance, whose family of products includes SecurityCenter Continuous View and Nessus.GOOD Technology’s core focus is to secure mobile applications. The solutions include Enterprise Mobility Management, Mobile Device Management, Mobile Application management, Mobile Access and Identity Management etc. Xceedium is into privileged identity access Management solutions for traditional, virtualized, and hybrid-cloud enterprises with its Xsuite. Xsuitevaults privileged account credentials, implements role-based access control, and monitors and records privileged user sessions and with unified policy management, the Xsuite platform enables the seamless administration of security controls across systems, whether they reside in a traditional data center, a private cloud, on public cloud infrastructure, or any combination thereof. Which are the areas of significant traction in the region? Customers are looking at securing mobile applications. Mobile security is an area of focus for us with Good Technology
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Anand Choudha MD, Spectrami
Building domains of strength Spectrami, a fast growing VAD, marked its third year of participation at GITEX 2014 and participated with a focus on security and storage solutions from its vendor partners. Anand Choudha, MD at Spectrami discusses the company’s progress
delivered security solutions. There "In the first 9 months of the year, we had solutions in the has been good region? traction with other achieved what we done in the whole As has been technologies we of last year. Q4 is usually the biggest Business observed, the focus on as well. quarter of the year and we expect to close first level of We have seen great the year with sizeable sales growth." acceptability interest as well as for cloud based traction in Tenabledelivery has been Vulnerability for non-critical applications. Security is a the ideal environment for strengthening Management, FidelisCybersecurity very critical component and will take time relationships, building collaborative sales Solutions and LogRythm’s SIEM log and to move to the cloud. Users will be more strategies and aligning efforts. event management solutions. Our comfortable with security on-premises and partners primarily cover the Banking & with experts to monitor. Security may not What resources and tools have you Finance, Telcos, Oil &Gas, Governments move so quickly to the cloud, especially introduced to make your channel and enterprise sectors. in this region. Of course we all have to relations more effective? go with trends and at some point, cloud The new partner enablement program How is the market responding to security will be more acceptable and is effectively designed to impart skill, adoption of these Technologies reliable. train and hand hold our channel in the includingMobilesecurity and what is initial stages. Tech workshops are being your go to market strategy? How has the current year sales been? organized regularly to update our reseller The market and the customers are In the first 9 months of the year, we had partners recognizing the benefits these new achieved what we done in the whole technologies bring by optimizing the Was your participation at GITEX this year of last year. Q4 is usually the biggest utilization of resources and give better Business quarter of the year and we on a bigger scale? ROI. BYOD is a reality with the new expect to close the year with sizeable Our vendors showed more interest in smart phones and tablets coming into sales growth.This year has seen a GITEX this year. It has always been a the corporate network. Spectrami is substantial growth in business as the good platform to network with customers proactively working on introducing the customer continue to invest in security and partners. We wanted to give the solutions through our reseller network that and storage solutions. Spectrami has message strongly that we are committed address customer concerns and protect expanded and increased its presence to this market. And we wanted to their networks from the new emerging in KSA and opened up South Africa greater visibility to vendors to customers targeted attacks. We have trained and operations this year. and partners from the region and look certified engineers to support our channel. at creating a pipeline of leads from Regular training session at our new Discuss the different channel partner customers and partners for the next 6-8 training certifications are carried out to profiles you engage with? months. That was a key objective just like impart skill and do the knowledge transfer There are three categories of partners last year but on a bigger scale because of to our channel partners.We certainly think we work with. For larger systems larger presence in terms of the stand that these new areas are going to expand and integrators who are involved in larger was 35% bigger and our broader suite of drive the markets further. project deployments and where our vendor solutions. The smaller integrators have to adapt solutions form a part of the larger and re-innovate to make themselves scheme of things, they need a different Were there any recent partnerships more relevant to the customers. This is level of support. The second set of announced? something critical for their growth and partners are resellers who focus and Our partnership with Xceedium was Spectrami is working closely to help them invest in training and carrying our announced recently . They already have with this transition. products. We work with them very some big customers here but we have closely. Then, there are also opportunity been engaged to bring in the strengths of Discuss your partner meet? based partners who may come to us the two tier channel ecosystem and also Confluence is an eventthat we hold on an with ad-hoc requirements and we beef up the support mechanisms for their annual basis. We hold it at the start of the ensure we have a streamlined channel customers. year to help connect with partners and structure in place to support those understand their focus and align right at Do you see growing acceptance of cloud requirements as well. the start of the year. It helps in creating
December 2014  |  27
Insight | Resolution1
A
lthough news stories on large scale data breaches often focus on malware and how the attackers got in, what goes on behind the scenes is much more elaborate. There’s much that can be learned by studying the full attack lifecycle to identify an intrusion in progress and put a stop to it. Although there are well-established phases of an attack in the data forensics and incident response world, I’m going to focus on a simplified version with three: initial infiltration, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. Initial infiltration is the point of entry where an attacker gains unauthorized access to your network. Most legacy security investments attempt to prevent any and all systems from being compromised. Although this may have worked 15 years ago when selfreplicating viruses and worms were all the rage, those days are gone. Time has proven that preventative defenses amount to barriers with limitations. Additionally, organizations can only secure what’s under their administrative control which makes things tough in an age of BYOD, remote workers, contractors, third party service providers, and connections to trusted partners. Initial infiltration can be anything from a backdoor delivered by spear phishing to a web application exploit to compromised user credentials. Lateral movement is what an attacker does once they’ve accomplished initial infiltration. If security today is failing miserably, this is the stage where it’s happening. Attackers perform reconnaissance
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inside the network. They steal passwords for users, administrators, and service accounts. They create their own accounts. They access the network using VPN or another normal mode of access to blend in. They plant various backdoors on dozens or hundreds of systems to ensure persistent access. They snake their way to the data they’re after. Even in the most secure environments using two-factor authentication and tightly limited access, attackers will find overlooked paths, systems they can pivot from, and even modify network device configurations if they have to. Meanwhile, companies secure and monitor servers housing sensitive data. They tend to forget that regular workstations and non-critical servers are a paradise for hackers to work from, avoiding detection. The data that attackers are after is accessible through means other than compromising specific servers. There’s always a data flow to and from servers with access mechanisms. Advanced attackers excel at uncovering and exploiting access to data flows. Sometimes they plant specialized software for RAM scraping, network sniffing, and keystroke recording. Other times, they modify production code to make copies of the data as it passes through. Sometimes they can simply connect to a server using stolen credentials and send the right commands to retrieve data. Data exfiltration is what the attacker does to transport data from the point it’s being stolen from to a location outside the corporate environment. They’ll
Lucas Zaichkowsky Enterprise Defense Architect, Resolution1
‘Tis the Season for Credit Card Data Theft Lucas Zaichkowsky, Enterprise Defense Architect, Resolution1 Security provides insights into attacks and addresses how to detect targeted attacks in progress and respond before major damage occurs often move stolen data inside the network to a seemingly random system used as a staging ground, then upload it from there to a server on the internet. This goes undetected by obfuscating or encrypting the data, then blending in with normal web traffic. If the attacker made it this far unnoticed, there’s a good
chance they’ll continue to steal data unnoticed until you either get lucky and self-discover the compromise or until they start selling the stolen card data on the black market. Statistically, you’ve got about a 1 in 3 chance of self-discovering at best. How to detect targeted attacks in progress and respond before major damage occurs
Kill chain, "In targeted financial crimes, initial entry is intelligence, and usually accomplished by exploiting a web application analytics are officially in fashion, or compromising the credentials of a vendor that has hot on the heels of access into your environment. Knowing that, you Advanced Persistent can focus on those two points of entry for system Threats (APTs). hardening and access control." Bonus points if they’re in the cloud scheduled tasks to execute Access to immediate with the Internet of Things. commands against remote information on recent threats, Here’s how organizations can systems. They use well known cybercrime syndicates and proactively hunt for attacks into staging directories like the industry resourcesprovide uptheir networks. Windows help folder and to-date intelligence on APT and Kill chain analysis and the root of Recycler. As you their attackers. Open source attacking the kill chain are better understand the attacker intelligence resources name a part of intelligence-driven methodology, you can perform off hacking tools commonly defense, popularized by the the same steps in your lab encountered during the lifecycle smart people at Lockheed environment, document of an attack such as specific Martin. The kill chain is based indicators, then monitor on the core premise that attacks families of RATs and credential everywhere possible. stealers. Poison Ivy, Gh0st RAT, follow a lifecycle or sequence During the process, you Windows Credential Editor, of progressive steps committed may identify places to harden pwdump are just a few tools by the threat actor during an your system and network still commonly used. Samples intrusion. By cataloging and configurations to slow an of other tools such as RAM studying the tactics, techniques, attacker down and frustrate scrapers are available from and procedures of threat actors, them. You can set up tripwires places like KernelMode.info you can effectively prioritize to detect attempted hacking and Contagio. Once gathered, preventative defenses and activity that aligns with their incident responders can analyze detect an attack in progress. methodology. One good trick all these nasty binaries in a lab After all, attackers are human is to have emails sent to environment to identify key and predictable. They’ll reuse observable traits: what they look administrators whenever their hacking tools and repeat what’s admin accounts are being used. like in memory, network traffic worked for them in the past. Authoring indicators and patterns, endpoint changes, and Even personal habits such as putting them to good use logged activity. naming conventions tend to get may seem like a lot of work, Next, take the data and repeated. but it puts you in a position transform it into indicators of In the case of targeted where you’re able to detect compromise, documented using financial crimes, initial entry a real world attack while it’s standards like CybOX, YARA, is usually accomplished by still in progress. This provides or OpenIOC. Monitor as many exploiting a web application or the ability to contain, scope, endpoints as possible, network compromising the credentials and remediate before major traffic, logfiles, and application of a vendor that has access into damage is done. data for matches against your your environment. Knowing Analytics on the other indicators. that, you can focus on those hand means mining datasets, Follow the kill chain model two points of entry for system pivoting, and correlating to by gathering intelligence on hardening and access control identify patterns and outliers. their attack methodology such while increasing additional By searching for outliers (aka as targeting domain controllers monitoring mechanisms to be Frequency analysis), you can and servers where many on the lookout for suspicious find unknowns that might users authenticate in order to activity coming from those not belong. Creative thinking harvest user credentials en sources should they become skills are very important masse. Attackers like to use compromised.
for performing analytics. Marketing teams have been doing it for years to study consumers. Security practitioners need to do the same, but in their own context. One of the most effective ways to identify compromise is to perform analytics with the goal of identifying persistence mechanisms (backdoors). Pull back autoruns from every system and sort by frequency of occurrence from least to most, then focus on the uncommon entries in your environment. In fact, if you’ve got limited time to look for compromise, I’d recommend doing this before developing and chasing down indicators of compromise. There will be a lot of noise the first time, but it’s worth the energy. You’ll create a baseline useful for making autoruns frequency analysis a less painful regular activity, effectively focusing only on what’s changed since the prior search. If you don’t have an enterprise tool to do autoruns frequency analysis, you can still squeak by with a hack job involving SysinternalsAutoruns, Trend Micro HiJackThis, or Mandiant Redline. Execute those tools remotely against systems, piping the results out to text files then merge and mine it with the help of a decent programmer or DBA. Be careful to protect the privileged account you use to connect to systems remotely. Increase your proactive scans and hunts for suspicious activities. Happy holidays and good luck in your quest to find an attack in progress! December 2014 | 29
Insight | Infoblox
ecent press has shown a marked increase in DDoS attacks on ISPs around the world. According to Network World, DDoS attackers seem to have switched their attention from banks to gaming hosts, ISPs and even enterprises. At Infoblox our customers have been telling us the same thing, as DDoS attacks have intensified among our ISP customers. Initially everything was lumped together under the ‘DDoS’ heading. Then they became known as ‘NXDomain’ attacks, but as we sifted through the PCAP files of the actual attacks across different customers in different regions, a number of unique patterns emerged. ISPs are especially sensitive about DDoS attacks. Not only are these attacks extremely disruptive to the business – they consume time and effort to understand and mitigate – but they can also affect the ISP’s brand reputation if attacks continue and degrade the user experience. Like every service provider they want to avoid costly customer churn. And DNS is critical to the customer experience – if DNS is slow, the customer will undoubtedly notice. Let’s take a look at six new attack types and how each one works: 1. Basic NXDomain Attack The attacker sends a flood of queries to a DNS server to resolve a non-existent domain (NXDomain). The recursive server tries to locate this non-existent domain by carrying out multiple domain name queries but does not find it. In the process, its cache is filled up with NXDomain results. What is the impact? When the DNS caching server’s cache is full, users experience slower DNS server response time for legitimate DNS requests. The DNS server also spends valuable resources as it keeps trying to repeat the recursive query to get a resolution result. 2. Random Sub-domain attacks on Legitimate Domains The attacker tries to exhaust the number of outstanding concurrent DNS queries by flooding the DNS server with requests for
30 | December 2014
Alain Penel, Regional VP, ME, Fortinet
R
Renuka Nadkarni, Director, Product Management - Security at Infoblox discusses how DDoS attacks are disruptive to Businesses and how the latest spate of DDoS attacks is targeting DNS as a key
Renuka Nadkarni Director, Infoblox
vulnerability
What’s in a Name? multiple non-existent domains - that he creates using randomly generated domain strings. For example: xy4433.yahoo.com aj323bc.yahoo.com etc . What is the impact? The responses never come back from these non-existing domains and the DNS server, as before, spends compute resources waiting for the responses. The attacker thinks he is attacking the domain usda.gov but he is in fact impacting the infrastructure of his ISP – so the impact is doubled: 1) The recursive DNS server has an upper limit on the number of outstanding DNS queries. The flood of randomly generated queries rapidly exhausts this limit. 2) The authoritative DNS server of the target domain is subjected to a denial of
service attack 3. Phantom Domain Attacks In these attacks, the DNS resolver is forced to resolve multiple domains that are “Phantom” domains that have been setup as part of the attack. These domains do not send responses, causing the server to consume resources while waiting for responses, eventually leading to degraded performance or failure. What is the impact? The DNS resolver waits for responses that never arrive - from these phantom domains. This consumes resources leading to degraded performance or failure. 4. Lock-Up Domain Attacks Resolvers and domains are setup
by attackers to establish TCP-based connections with DNS resolvers that request a response. These domains don’t send the correct response expected by the DNS resolver but instead keep them engaged with random packets. They are also deliberately slow in responding to requests from the DNS resolvers and keep the DNS resolvers “tied-up” or “hanging”. Advanced attacks also involve adaptive techniques to keep the DNS resolver “coming back” to check for responses. These domains might send a SERVFAIL at the end. What is the impact? The DNS resolver establishing these connections with the misbehaving domains exhausts its resources. 5. CPE-driven DDoS attacks in the ISP network There are open DNS recursors or DNS proxies on customer premise equipment (CPE) devices. A significant proportion of the open DNS recursors utilized for DNS reflection or amplification attacks are CPE devices. Some devices ship with a local,
caching-only DNS server or DNS proxies open to the world. Users enable portforwarding to open DNS recursors on their home networks.
including SYN flood, UDP flood, DNS query flood, and GET floods.
What is the impact? Exhaustion of ISP DNS resources or slow servers.
What is the impact? The malware-infected CPE devices effectively form a new botnet, enabling the botnet controller to generate DDoS traffic on demand against selected targets.
6. DDoS attacks using Malware-infected CPE devices Akamai's Prolexic Security Engineering and Research Team (PLXsert) is tracking the spread of Spike, a new malware toolkit that poses a threat to embedded devices, as well as Linux and Windows systems . From the advisory: Binary payloads from this toolkit are dropped and executed after the successful compromise of targeted devices, which may include PCs, servers, routers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices (i.e., smart thermostat systems and washer/dryers) and home-based customer premise equipment (CPE) routing devices. The toolkit has multiple DDoS payloads,
Conclusion While no single mitigation approach is bullet proof – and the vendor community is working hard to help customers as much as possible - it is clear that the latest spate of DDoS attacks is targeting DNS as a key vulnerability. DNS-based attacks can be either the heavy flood variety such as DNS reflection and amplification attacks, which typically grab the headlines, or they can be low-volume stealth attacks that evade traditional flood detection defenses. We are working with our ISP customers and their enterprise customers to help them protect their DNS infrastructure and discuss the best ways to address these new DNScentric DDoS attacks. We will continue to share what we learn in future blog postings.
December 2014 | 31
eyetech
VM5404HHDMI Matrix Switch Overview: The VM5404H 4 x 4 HDMI Matrix Switch from ATEN is a distinct HDMI solution that offers an easy and affordable way to route any of 4 HDMI video sources to any of 4 HDMI displays, with a quick view of all port connections via the front panel LCD. The VM5404H includes seamless switching that employs a FPGA matrix architecture that ensures continuous video streams, real-time control and stable signal transmissions. With a built in high-performance scaler, the VM5404H easily converts various input resolutions into various output display resolutions, giving viewers the best video and picture quality across all displays. The switch integrates video wall functionality with an easy to use web
GUI that lets you create 8 connection profiles that can be customized into different video wall layouts. The VM5404H is an ideal solution for applications that require multiple HDMI displays with multiple HDMI sources to be conveniently setup in multiple locations, such as for stage presentations, competitions, control centers, and installations that require real-time reports. Key features: • Connects any of 4 HDMI sources to any of 4 HDMI displays • Long Distance Transmission – supports up to 15 m (24 AWG) • HDMI (3D, Deep color); HDCP 1.4 compatible • Video Wall – provides up to 8 connection profiles that you can customize into layouts using the web GUI • Features a built in high-performance scaler for the best image quality • Easily switch between mulitple sources and multiple displays • Seamless Switch – provides continuous video streams, real-time switching and stable signal transmissions • Built-in EDID wizard – provides an easy way to customized EDID settings
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3CX Phone System Overview: 3CX is the developer of the award-winning 3CX Phone System, a software-based IP PBX for Windows. 3CX Phone System provides a feature-rich Unified Communications solution, including fully integrated web conferencing with 3CX WebMeeting. Features include: presence information, instant messaging and CRM integration, as well as softphones for Android, iPhone and iOS included as standard. Designed with the IT administrator in mind, 3CX Phone System is easy to install and manage and can cut a businesses’ call costs by up to 70%. In addition, as an open standard solution businesses can choose from a variety of popular IP phones, VoIP providers and gateways to create their ideal phone system at a costeffective price. Key Features: • 3CX WebMeetingutilisesWebRTC technology to enable video and voice communications to take place through the internet browser without the need to download any additional software or plug-ins. • 3CX Phone System 12.5 will offer WebRTC-enabled click-to-call, offering customers the ability to call a business for free through the internet browser. • 3CX offers a number of add-on modules allowing businesses to create a phone system tailored to their needs. With 3CX Phone System Pro businesses can benefit from CRM integration and advanced call centre features. For those in the hospitality industry, the 3CX Hotel Module can be used to transform 3CX Phone System into a hospitality PBX. • As a software-based solution, 3CX Phone System can be easily integrated into a business's existing IT infrastructure and can be virtualised with Hyper-V or Vmware.
SmartNode VoIP Solutions Overview: Scaling from 2 to 2048 voice calls, SmartNode VoIP gateways, routers, IADs, Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and SmartMedia SS7 gateways integrate
seamlessly with existing POTS and ISDN telephony systems. Proven interoperability with just about every softswitch and makes it easy for carriers and enterprises to deploy future-proof VoIP services quickly and profitably today. Tens of thousands of SmartNode products are up and running in enterprise networks and carrier deployments worldwide, including one of Europe’s first-line VoIP services. Featuring Patton’s Gold-Standard Free Support, touch-less auto-provisioning, high reliability, and proven interoperability with all the major-brand softswitches and IP-PBXs, SmartNode offers every industry-standard interface, including T1/E1, PRI/ BRI STM-1/OC3, DS3, FXS/FXO, V.35/X.21, Ethernet, G.SHDSL, ADSL2+, and more. Patton’s advanced DownStreamQoS™ technology delivers clear, tollquality voice on every call. Key Feature: • Complete portfolio of VoIP gateways, VoIP routers, VoIP IADs, Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and SmartMedia SS7 TDM+VoIP gateways • Products scale from 2 to 2048 VoIP or Fax calls • Industry-renowned SmartNode set-it-forget-it reliability • Patton’s auto-provisioning solution for carrier- providers • SmartNode Unified Communication Agent provides any-to-any multi-path switching for simultaneous SIP, H.323, ISDN, and POTS calls with routing and conversion between TDM/PSTN and IP/Ethernet networks • Proven interoperability with all the major-brand softswitches and IP-PBXs
IE200 Industrial Ethernet switches Overview: Allied Telesis, a global provider of secure IP/Ethernet switching solutions and an industry leader in the deployment of IP Triple Play networks, announced the release of the IE200 Series of Industrial Ethernet switches. Available in both Fast Ethernet and Gigabit versions, the IE200 Series is ideal for applications in challenging environmental conditions such as elevator engine rooms and external or harsh environments. The IE200 Series meets the high reliability requirements demanded by industrial applications such as IP video surveillance, Intelligent Transport Systems, and building management integration for both indoor and outdoor use. The Allied Telesis IE200 Series has been developed to support a broad range of critical infrastructure applications and environments. Key features: • The IE200 Series is available in 6- or 12-port models, with or without PoE+ support, and includes a broad range of features and functionality. Both models are DIN Rail mounted, resulting in reduced space, mounting complexity, and cost compared to a standard rack. • As many new applications today are IPv6 ready, and with the number of connected devices expected to boom, the IE200 Series will feature native IPv6 support, in a future release of firmware, to ensure support for the largest number of devices across a broad range of applications. • Along with support for more traditional features such as port-based VLANs, IEEE 802.1p QoS, 802.1x port security, link \aggregation, and port mirroring, the IE200 Series also supports innovative features such as Ethernet Protection Switched Ring (EPSRing) and Allied Telesis Management Framework (AMF). • EPSRing provides greater ring resilience in comparison to traditional technologies, ensuring network functionality is restored in the event of failure with negligible impact on users or applications. • AMF assists network managers by providing a technology that reduces their daily workload by automating many common management tasks such as replacing failed units, modifying configurations, upgrading firmware, or extending the network.
December 2014 | 33
Stats & Trends
Billions (AED) of Value for Dubai from "Internet of Everything" by 2019
D
riven by Dubai Smart City, Dubai’s public and private sectors can achieve a potential AED 17.9 billion (USD 4.87 billion) in value by 2019, according to a new Cisco study authored by Cisco Consulting Services released at the Dubai Smart City Forum. The Forum which focused on the Internet of Things opportunity for Dubai, was hosted by the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government and included a panel of experts speakers . The Cisco executive speakers, outlined how new levels of automation and connectivity are fuelling the next Internet of Things era which Cisco defines as the Internet of Everything (IoE). The IoE is the networked connection of people, process, data and things that generates value as “everything” joins the network. Several technology transitions – including the Internet of Things, increased mobility, cloud computing, and the growing importance of big data and analytics, among others – are combining to enable IoE. IoE will create value by
lowering costs, improving employee productivity, generating new revenue, and enhancing citizen benefits. In the private sector additional benefits include improvements in innovation, supply chain and asset utilization. IoE’s value potential is likely to strongly appeal to Dubai’s smart city ambitions, which span six key pillars (life, society, mobility, economy, government, and environment), and more than 100 initiatives focusing on transport, communications, infrastructure, electricity, economic services, and urban planning. Among 17 public sector use cases examined for Dubai, the top three seeing the most value are mobile collaboration (USD 259 million / AED 950 million), public transport (USD 157 million / AED 575 million), and smart transmission grid (USD 148 million / AED 544 million).
over the next 10 years. Part of this value can be achieved through the following city operations use cases: • Smart buildings (USD 100 billion) can lower operating costs from reduced energy consumption through the integration of HVAC and other systems. • Gas monitoring (USD 69 billion) can reduce meterreading costs and increase the accuracy of readings for citizens and municipal utility agencies.
• Smart parking (USD 41 billion) can provide real-time visibility across a city, enabling improved planning and demand-based pricing. • Water management (USD 39 billion) can connect the household water meter to an IP network for real-time insight on any device. • Road pricing (USD 18 billion) can implement automatic payments for vehicles entering busy zones of cities, improving traffic conditions and raising revenues.
Global IoE Value at Stake City operations are an important part of the IoE future and are expected to could contribute the following values
Software spending for the MENA Banking and Securities Firms to Grow
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anking and securities companies in the Middle East and North Africa are on pace to spend approximately $13.1 billion USD on IT products and services in 2014, an increase of 2.4 percent over 2013 revenue of nearly $12.8 billion USD, according to Gartner, Inc. This forecast includes spending by banking organizations on internal IT services
34 | December 2014
(including personnel), IT services, software, data center technologies, devices and telecom services. Telecom services will be the largest segment in overall IT spending in the banking and securities market at $5.7 billion USD in 2014. This segment is forecast to increase 0.8 percent compared to 2013. Software and IT services are the
fastest growing segments with 9.7 and 8.4 percent increases in 2014, largely due to the expansion strategies of banks across the region and to modernization and replacement projects of the back-office that require much consulting and system integration. Outsourcing is also picking up, as it’s one of the fastest growing segments within IT services.
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