The Integrator by INTEGRATOR MEDIA

Looking ahead to 2019

ith the year coming to an end it is time to kick back and ponder on our achievements and plan for bigger things for the coming years. Over the course of this year The Integrator has covered all the latest advancements in technology. This year we saw Artificial Intelligence reshape and bring changes to entire industries and how leading organizations incorporate AI into their strategic organization development. With GDPR bring implemented this year, we saw major crackdowns into some of the biggest security threats. 2018 has also seen how important data is and its expected growth over the coming years. From AI to Cybersecurity to Big Data Analytics, we have brought to our readers the latest trending topics in technology. We’ve had some great highlights this year starting with The Integrator celebrating its 75th Edition in May. The 6th Integrator Awards held in June at the Oberoi Hotel was also a great success where we managed to break our previous voting records. We also successfully launched our latest platform – UNEQ products that brings recognition to all the unique products out there. All in all, 2018 has been a successful year for us and we are setting our sights on bigger things for the years to come. In this edition of The Integrator our cover story focuses on Storage and its evolution from classic to virtualization. The story delves deep into how enterprise storage has evolved while keeping up with the latest advancements in technology. With the never-ending explosion of data, there is more need now for storage than ever before. I would like to take this opportunity to wish our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Vivek Sharma Managing Editor

Managing Editor: Vivek Sharma Assistant Editor: Sweta Fernandes Art Director: Faiz Ahmed

ontents

Editorial

Special Feature

Storage – A Journey from Classic to Virtualization – 8

Cover Story

Consolidation, Acquisition, Expansion: An Year of All-round Growth for the OMA Group – 16

News In Detail

A10 Networks Provides Ability for Service Providers to Deliver Cloud Scrubbing Services with Automation and Scale - 18 Fortinet Secures the Global Network of DTDC Express – 19

NetApp Builds on Its Cloud Leadership in Global Markets – 20

Nutanix Introduces Xi Cloud Services for the Modern Multicloud Era – 21

Insight

Cloud Adoption Poses Security Risk to Businesses – 22

Underground Cybercriminal Collaboration to Propel Threat Volume and Ingenuity in 2019 – 23 Sophos Introduces Lateral Movement Protection to XG Firewall – 24

VMware to Drive Adoption of “As-A-Service” Model for On-Premises Data Centers – 25

TechKnow

Meeting the Intelligent Data Management Needs of 2019 - 14

Riverbed Launches SD-WAN Solution with Enterprise-Class Routing Enhancements - 26 Cisco Introduces Solutions for Faster Cloud Adoption in UAE - 28 SAS is Market Leader in Advanced and Predictive Analytics - 29

EnGenius Introduces World’s First 2x2 802.11ax Access Point for Enterprise-Minded SMBs - 30

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News Bytes

ESET is Top Player in Radicati’s ‘Endpoint Security’ Market Quadrant ESET has been identified as a top player with a solid vision for the future, in the latest edition of Radicati’s Market Quadrants. Radicati placed vendors on the quadrant according to two criteria: functionality and strategic vision. Radicati also evaluated vendors’ endpoint security solutions on a number of parameters including deployment options, platform support, EDR, sandboxing, malware detection, reporting, anti-virus removal tools, patch assessment and remediation, web and email security, and more. Sara Radicati, CEO at The Radicati Group said, “Top players shape the market with their technology and strategic vision. We were impressed by the functionality offered by the ESET endpoint security suite, and the way in which the company’s solutions have been designed for ease of deployment and use.” Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET said, “This recognition from Radicati is testament to our ongoing commitment to deliver world-class security solutions to the enterprise market.

Lenovo Introduces ThinkAgile Composable Cloud Platform

Lenovo Data Center Group is expanding its ThinkAgile portfolio to provide customers with the agility of the public cloud and the security of a private cloud. Lenovo, together with Cloudistics, has developed the ThinkAgile CP Series composable cloud platform, a ‘cloudin-a-box’ to offer convenience and ease-of-use of a public cloud environment, secured behind the customer’s own data center firewall. Sal Saglik, Director of Business Development, ICP Corp, said, “The ease of use, rapid deployment and scalability of ThinkAgile CP will allow us to deliver a cloud-like experience in a complete and secure solution without the costs and complexities of the public cloud.” Roderick Lappin, Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer of Lenovo Data Center Group, said “The ThinkAgile CP Series is another example of how Lenovo is driving the industry forward by enabling customers to truly own their cloud experience in a secure, scalable and streamlined way.”

Mellanox Facilitates High Performance Network Solutions at Alibaba Mellanox Technologies has announced that its RDMA over Ethernet (RoCE) 25Gbps ConnectX network adapters have been successfully deployed in Alibaba Infrastructure Services’ production network. Mellanox ConnectX network adapters include a range of RoCE centric accelerations, enabling high performance, scalability, stability and ease of use while achieving significant cost savings compared with non-RDMA based solutions. “High performance network transport technology is critical for Alibaba to achieve the throughput and latency required by our services. We are excited to collaborate with Mellanox to deploy its RoCE technology into our infrastructure,” said Dennis Cai, Chief Architect of Network Infrastructure under Alibaba Infrastructure Services. “Mellanox has pioneered RoCE technology and is now shipping its 7th generation of RoCE capable ConnectX network adapters,” said Amir Prescher, senior vice president of business development at Mellanox Technologies. “Alibaba’s successful large-scale deployment of ConnectX RoCE adapters confirms again that RoCE is a proven technology to accelerate the most demanding workloads in a cost-effective manner. We are thrilled to work with Alibaba to achieve this.”

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FarEye Recognized in Gartner’s Market Guide for Real-Time Visibility Providers FarEye has been mentioned as a representative vendor in Gartner’s recent Market Guide for real-time visibility providers. Gartner has recognized FarEye for its logistics applications that provide real-time visibility, vehicle routing and scheduling capabilities, and a bidding platform for tenders and benchmarking. FarEye builds logistics applications with a drag and drop feature, enabling enterprises to reduce time to build new delivery processes. Gartner further recognized FarEye's digital ecosystems that connect all freight logistics stakeholders on one platform, fostering collaboration and transparency. “Their technology is being used by companies in the 3PL, postal, CPG, metal, mining, cement, automotive and retail industries,” Gartner cites. “We feel honoured to receive the recognition in the Market Guide for real-time visibility providers. We view Gartner mentions as testament to the value we bring in our solutions, which empower our customers with the insights and efficiencies they need to compete in the global market,” says Kushal Nahata, CEO & Co-founder, FarEye.

TechAccess Holds Joint Session with Hitachi Vantara and Veritas

Spire Solutions Establishes Presence in KSA; Appoints New Country Manager Spire Solutions is expanding its business footprint into KSA with local presence in Riyadh. Mr. Ehab Derbas, will direct its operations as the country manager. Mr. Derbas has extensive experience in sales and management, with an emphasis on IT and cyber security. With over 18 years of experience, he helps organisations understand risk and adopt effective defense strategies and solutions. “Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s highest spenders on cyber security. It has a robust economy, a large population, a strategic geographic location, and a strong consumer spending power. All of this makes it an extremely attractive target for cyber criminals, which explains its growing need for security,” commented Ehab Derbas, Country Manager KSA at Spire Solutions. “With its trusted portfolio of services and solutions to defend against cyber attacks, Spire Solutions is well positioned to meet KSA’s security needs. This strategic expansion with local presence in Riyadh and experienced leadership to drive regional operations and sales will help cement our presence in the market.

TechAccess held a joint partner enablement session with vendors Hitachi Vantara and Veritas. The session was attended by TechAccess’ partner base for Hitachi Vantara in the UAE. The key objective of the session was to inform and educate partners on the joint value propositions of Hitachi Vantara and Veritas, and how their combination can provide complete data management and data protection solutions to organizations across the region. The agenda also covered product-specific sessions on the Hitachi Content Platform and Veritas Archiving Solution and Net Backup. “Partner enablement sessions are a crucial element in helping our partners understand and recognize opportunity to grow their business and help vendors expand their market presence,” said Dimuth Wijeratne, General Manager for Hitachi Vantara, TechAccess. “The joint enablement session with Hitachi Vantara and Veritas helped emphasize the benefits of vendor collaboration and strengthens our role in providing partners access to the best-of-breed technologies under one roof.”

December 2018 | 5

News Bytes

Koreconx Partners With Metis KoreConX has partnered with Metis Management Consultancy, a UAEgrown consultancy firm focused on providing services to SMEs in the MENA region. As part of KorePartner’s ecosystem, the company will ensure small and medium enterprises have all the elements they need to thrive. Using KoreConX’s platform, companies can issue their security tokens (tokenized and digitized securities) and raise capital in multiple jurisdictions. “Blockchain plays a crucial role in everything that we do at KoreConX. Dubai is taking this technology to the next level, by planning to make the city fully powered by Blockchain by 2020,” said Edwin Lee, director of MENA region. “We always strive to provide companies with high-quality consulting services and access to the latest tools” said Nayef Shahin, Founder and Managing Partner at Metis. “It is only natural to partner with KoreConX, a team with a deep understanding of compliance, securities regulations and the only one to create a protocol that is fully tracked on chain through their transfer agent service.” that is fully tracked on chain through their transfer agent service.”

HID Global Introduces HID ActivOne HID Global has unveiled a new subscription-based delivery model which simplifies access to its broad suite of identity and access management (IAM) software and services. The new HID ActivOne is an end-to-end digital identity management and authentication solution for large organizations, securing the identity of people, critical data and assets—all with the flexibility of a subscription. HID ActivOne addresses the problem of digital identity management by providing multi-factor authentication solutions to help protect access to an organization’s network, on-premise applications, cloud applications and desktops/ laptops. “HID ActivOne is leading the industry by providing a complete end-to-end digital identity lifecycle management and advanced authentication solution with a simple peruser fee,” said Brad Jarvis, Vice President & Managing Director, IAM Solutions, with HID Global. “The fact that it is subscription-based means enterprise customers have more choices based on the additional flexible pricing options that open up the power of HID’s IAM solutions to even more users,” he added.

Partners Can Access SAP Cloud Platform for Free SAP has announced free access for partners to the SAP Cloud Platform so they have access to testing, demonstrating, and development licensing services. This open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provides SAP partners with a single framework to build and extend on existing SAP solutions. SAP partners can renew their subscription to the core SAP Cloud Platform for up to 12 months at no charge. New SAP partners can subscribe to one of the options of the core SAP Cloud Platform. In both cases, SAP partners have the choice of one additional service provided by the SAP HANA business data platform for SAP Cloud Platform. “SAP is committed to bringing its partners to the cloud and, as a result, making it easier for customers to bring their business to the cloud as well,” said Björn Goerke, chief technology officer and president, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP. “Now that over 3,700 SAP partners have joined our cloud strategy, the free resources will help them accelerate application development in a way that best fits their customer base.”

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Mimecast in Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Fourth Year Running Mimecast has retained its position as a leader in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving. Mimecast has also been positioned highest on the ability-to-execute axis. Mimecast's Cloud Archive can provide an all-in-one cloud service to integrate a secure data repository, built-in data recovery, storage management, and robust e-discovery and compliance capabilities. “Today’s enterprise demands lightening fast search speeds and easy-to-use tools for compliance, e-discovery and rapid recovery when systems go down,” said Peter Bauer, chief executive officer at Mimecast. “Our vision as a company has always been to integrate multipurpose archiving with security and continuity. We believe Gartner has recognized us for our integrated platform and our ability to offer a comprehensive set of capabilities to improve overall resilience. We believe this recognition is the end result of Mimecast’s product innovation, exemplary customer support, industry-leading search performance, and expertise across archiving, security and business continuity.”

Symantec and Fortinet Partner for Cloud Security Service Symantec and Fortinet have announced an expansive partnership agreement to provide customers with comprehensive and robust security solutions. Fortinet’s Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) capabilities will be integrated into Symantec’s cloud-delivered Web Security Service (WSS). Additionally, Symantec’s endpoint protection solutions will be integrated into the Fortinet Security Fabric platform. The technology partnership provides essential security controls across endpoint, network, and cloud environments that are critical to enforcing the Zero Trust security framework.

2018, A Year of Recognition for Tech Mahindra Tech Mahindra has announced some of the many accolades the company won in 2018. The company was placed at # 15, being the top non-US company in 2018 listings of The Forbes Digital 100 list that ranks the top 100 public companies shaping the digital economy. Tech Mahindra retained its position in the Forbes Asia 50 list, was recognized as a Leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices 2018 for the fourth consecutive year, and won a gold in CEO World Awards 2018 for leading organization-wide re-skilling initiatives. Tech Mahindra also won the bronze award for ‘excellence in the Information Technology sector’. “I would like to thank the CEO World Awards for acknowledging Tech Mahindra and its leadership’s initiatives towards re-skilling and up-skilling our employees across the globe. At Tech Mahindra, re-skilling is core to our strategy. This recognition motivates us to continue investing in empowering our workforce to This recognition motivates us to continue investing in empowering our workforce to stay relevant in the digital future”, CP Gurnani, MD & CEO, Tech Mahindra added.

“As the first step in this technology partnership, we plan to deliver best-of-breed security through the combination of enterprise-class advanced firewall controls to Symantec’s industry-leading network security service,” said Art Gilliland, EVP and GM Enterprise Products, Symantec. “Through this partnership, we hope to provide joint customers the power of Symantec’s Integrated Cyber Defense Platform bolstered by Fortinet’s leading NGFW in an integrated solution that’s easy to use and deploy.” “With today’s announcement, two industry leaders are coming together to provide enterprise-class capabilities across cloud, network, and endpoint security,” said John Maddison, SVP of products and solutions, Fortinet.

December 2018 | 7

Special Feature | Enterprise Storage

STORAGE

A JOURNEY FROM CLASSIC TO VIRTUALIZATION In-keeping with the changing face of business environment, enterprise storage resources continue to evolve

The Storage Timeline

nterprise-scale businesses have large repositories of critical data that require scalable enterprise storage systems. These systems typically store heavy loads—often petabytes—of business-critical data, which is made available through connected networks. Since enterprise storage systems are required to facilitate unlimited connectivity from diverse locations and platforms, they must be compatible with and support multiple platforms. In keeping with the advancements in technology, enterprise storage systems have evolved and covered a long distance over their journey. What was incomprehensible, say 50 years ago, is a

large refrigerators that could store only about 4MB data. The disk size kept shrinking and were put into 'arrays' that could be connected directly to the servers. This is what is commonly known as Direct Attached Storage (DAS) where hard disk drives (or solid state drives) are connected to a single computer or a server. Since DAS is not networked (connected to other computers or servers) either through ethernet or using fibre channel (FC) switches, the server that it is attached to gives high performance. But, it also means that the data stays in isolation and cannot be shared with other servers. Also, since the arrays are connected

1890 : Punch Cards Capacity: 0.08 KB 1932: Magnetic Drum Capacity: 48 KB 1947: Williams-Kilburn Tube Capacity: 128 Bytes (0.128 KB) 1951: Magnetic Tape Drive Capacity: 231 KB 1951: Magnetic Core Capacity: 2 KB 1956: Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Capacity: 3.75 MB (3,750 KB) 1967: Floppy Disk Capacity: 80 KB

In keeping with the advancements in technology, enterprise storage systems have evolved and covered a long distance over their journey. What was incomprehensible, say 50 years ago, is a reality today. reality today. Technological advancements have played a pivotal role in this long journey. Here's a look at the journey of enterprise data storage which has metamorphosed from classic to virtual. Also detailed below are the various approaches that have been used in enterprise storage systems since the humble beginnings in the form of punch cards of 1890s.

Direct Attached Storage The year 1956 marked the beginning of direct attached storage, or DAS, with the first true enterprise computers—the monolithic IBM mainfraimes. The magnetic hard disks of this era were the size of

to individual servers that need them, each disk needs a separate server to connect. This limits the scalability both in terms of hardware use and performance. Additionally, arrays are scattered all over the data center; and, with an increase in capacities, cable management becomes a nightmare as the length of the cables is a big limitation. DAS also does not support advanced storage management features like snapshots or remote replication. These limitations, therefore, paved the way for emergence of a new solution—the storage area network.

1982: Compact Disc (CD) Capacity: About 700 MB (700,000 KB) 1994: Zip Drive Capacity: 100 MB (100,000 KB) 1995: Digital Video Disc (DVD) capacity: 1.46 GB (1,460,000 KB) 1999: SD Card Capacity: 64 MB (64,000 KB) 1999: USB Flash Drive Capacity: 8 MB (8,000 KB) 2003: Blu-ray Optical Disc Capacity: 25 GB (25,000,000 KB) 2006: Cloud Data Storage Capacity: Unlimited Present Day: Over 2.7 zettabytes of data (2,700,000,000,000,000,000 KB) in the digital universe

Storage Area Network December 2018 | 9

Special Feature | Enterprise Storage

SAN refers to a dedicated storage network of an organization, which is completely independent of the user network. It facilitates data sharing by separating servers from storage. SAN allows pools of disks to be shared with multiple servers enabling semaless data access as if it were attached directly. The key components that enable interconnectivity for SAN are cabling, host bus adapters, and the fibre channel (FC) or ethernet switches. With SAN, IT administrators can manage the storage centrally. This central administration ensures high availability and sharing of data. It also makes data backup and restoration efficient, leading to better disaster recovery (DR) efforts. Also, since SAN provides multiple channels to access data, failure of an individual server does not affect access to the desired data as well as productivity.

Network Attached Storage Often confused with SAN, the NAS is a central pool of network storage that is not only easy to use, but is also highcapacity and cost-effective. One of the important differences between SAN and NAS is that there is a hardware peripheral, often called the 'head', that connects it to the local network. It also receives and authenticates server requests, thus helping management of various file operations on storage devices. NAS allows users and multiple client devices to access data from a central repository. NAS also makes it easier for users to access shared storage on the local area network (LAN).

Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) Further improvements were in order and newer means of connecting and attaching storage in the form of small computer system interface (SCSI) was developed. This system used a parallel bus design and was the preferred means for drive connectivity for over two decades.

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storage, hyper-converged storage, and flash technologies (such as the non volatile memory express, NVMe).

Cloud storage

Technological advancements have led to an increase in storage capacity while reducing the size of storage resources

Serial attached SCSI (SAS) was the next high-performance improvement, which supported duplex signal transmission of 3.0 gigabytes per second. It also provided for redundancy with the inclusion of two data ports. What made SAS superior over SCSI were features such as high speed, multiple ports, and an ability to communicate with SATA and SCSI devices without any problems.

Cut to the Present Technological advancements have led to an increase in storage capacity while reducing the size of storage resources. As a result, enterprises began using storage resources that could be shared among multiple servers. This resulted in businesses using servers to handle applications separately from storage, which also made maintaining and/or upgrading storage resources much easier. Dynamic business needs and evolving technologies have changed the enterprise storage landscape for businesses. These most prominently include the cloud

Cloud is not just a new architecture for enterprise storage, it also has the capability to provide on-demand storage services. There was an initial inertia amongst businesses when it came to cloud adoption. But, with initial hiccups overcome, businesses are embracing cloud adoption with open arms. The cloud adoption rates are steadily rising with data from Statista, a statistics portal, suggesting a growth of 21% in global public cloud services market in 2018. What benefits does cloud storage offer to businesses? There are plenty of benefits businesses can realize from using cloudbased storage. Prominent amongst them being operational efficiency and significant cost savings. Businesses can focus more on their core activities without spending much time and resources on the physical storage infrastructure. Using cloud storage, they can scale their storage capacity in a matter of few minutes, as and when needed. Similarly, they can scale it down when the situation so demands. All this without investing in an inhouse infrastructure. Many businesses are also using cloud storage for offsite archive storage as well. Cloud adoption is especially useful for small and medium businesses who do not have the wherewithal—in terms of both finances and expertise—to create a scalable storage infrastructure. Cloud storage with its pay-as-you-use model helps them stay competitive in this digital era by simply purchasing storage capacity from a cloud service provider according to their need and paying for what they use.

Hyper-converged and converged infrastructure Converged and hyperconverged systems

feature combined infrastructure where the architecture is pre-dominantly virtualization-dependent. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a type of software-defined storage that may integrate storage, compute, and networking all in one. It is an efficient method to run massive virtualized loads. It also involves a virtualization layer and the storage is managed through a hypervisor. Hyper-converged storage allows storage to be pooled across a cluster which provides administrators with efficient ways to better control provisioning in a virtual server environment. Since, more storage and compute resources can be added simply by plugging a new node into the infrastructure, a hyper-converged storage provides enormous horizontal scalability with the capability to scale-out to other virtualization clusters.

Given the rapid digitization and datadriven economic landscape, enterprise storage is also rapidly evolving

HCI supports addition of a secondary data storage to the hyperconverged platforms, providing administrators with a central control over both the environments. This allows them to control data and ensure its security. HCI is particularly useful in reducing data center storage headaches. This is due to lower latency and pathing issues since servers and storage resources are located closer together. On the other hand, converged infrastructure (CI) is a blend of traditional SAN components—storage, compute and networking—in a preconfigured SKU, which can be tweaked according to individual business needs. CI is still a widely used enterprise storage mechanism as it works well in those virtual environments that have unique workloads.

December 2018 | 11

Special Feature | Enterprise Storage

Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe) In order to meet the growing need of increased data transfer speed between servers and SSDs, the NVMe host controller interface and storage protocol was developed. NVMe has been able to drastically reduce latency through elimination of computer-SSD storage communication. This has resulted in a significant increase in IOPS. Adoption of NVMe is an indication of yet another evolution in the storage industry, the storage class memory (SCM). The SCM refers to the latest non-volatile memory types that bring together the best of traditional storage and memory technologies. Compared with the standard memroy, SCM is more scalable and capable of delivering 10x IOPS of NAND flash drives. Another huge benefit of the SCM is the ability to address it at the byte level instead of the block level, which translates into better performance.

The Next Big Thing Given the rapid digitization and datadriven economic landscape, enterprise storage is also rapidly evolving. Container storage, disaggregated and composable storage, software-defined storage, and artificial intelligence/machine learning are some of the areas that have already started making a rumble:

Containers Containers enable packaging applications and infrastructure as units so they can be redeployed. This means vendors can enable full environment and data centerlevel cloud provisioning. A container often consists of numerous—usually hundreds or thousands—related containers that host individual processing modules of an application process. Using containers, one can develop and deploy agile applications without the need for persistent data storage. That said, containers cannot

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provide backup data to applications, they need an orchestration platform at the storage layer. However, owing to the numerous benefits that containers promise including efficiency, scalability, agility, cloud-friendliness and lower costs, enterprises are now more open to embracing container architectures.

Disaggregated and Composable Storage Disaggregated and composable storage are touted to be the next stage of hyper converged infrastructure. This is because

Dynamic business needs and evolving technologies have changed the enterprise storage landscape for businesses. These most prominently include the cloud storage, hyper-converged storage, and flash technologies.

it allows combining benefits of hyperconvergence while allowing addition of storage and compute hardware. Using disaggregation, individual computer components can be made available ondemand to serve specific applications. In a composable infrastructure, components are combined into singular pools of resources for a unified virtual infrastructure.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) More and more storage roll-outs are now using software-defined storage. SDS layer provides intelligence from the underlying storage devices. It is also possible to integrate legacy storage into the centralized management interface using compatible SDS solutions. This allows businesses to strike a balance between using legacy storage on commodity hardware couple with intelligent data services. Since SDS solutions enable policydriven workoad processing and centralized storage management, it proves costeffective. It is normal for big data environments to have large volumes of data from various sources. Storing such dataintensive environments on intelligent arrays can be expensive. SDS not only provides centralized management but also enables integration of different devices on a single dashboard. This translates into significant savings in terms of time and finances. Since SDS supports capacity expansion for growing data, its usage is likely to grow in the future.

Artificial Intelligence Although artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) may sound unrelated to storage, these technologies will likely have a huge impact on the future of enterprise storage. Since these technologies use datadriven analytics, they can allow data

Key Trends in Enterprise Data Storage administrators to use insights and mitigate risks before they can snowball into large-scale damage. Machine learning intelligently learns from a data set and enables improvement in dynamic data placement. This can be especially useful in data centers that have have high rates of data growth. With enhanced analytics capabilities coupled with pattern recognition, these technologies can make data and IT management efficient through new selflearning storage management processes.

What About Backup Storage? There are two major storage-related problems that enterprises are facing. First, with multiple arrays and drives, it is becoming difficult to efficiently use the available resources so they can be used by a bigger set of users. Systems that allow businesses to combine their enterprise storage devices into more usable resources are now being used to address this concern. The second and a bigger problem is backup and recovery of exploding data sets. With more and more businesses embracing infrastructure-as-a-service as their mainstream storage option, backup and recovery of critical business data is emerging as a major challenge. Some cloud providers having foreseen this issue have begun providing backup storage services.

The Bottomline Enterprise storage media have evolved with the changing business requirements in terms of capacity, performance, and availability. With an explosive growth of data, the enterprise storage market is now changing rapidly to keep pace with the evolving business needs. Enterprise storage vendors are leveraging the latest technologies to offer innovative products and services such that they add value to the digital businesses in today's data-driven landscape.

Some of the major trends in enterprise data storage today include:

1 Storage Tiering Businesses continue to tier the data, although with greater sophistication now. SSD tiers are used to ingest active data which is then processed on SSD or HDD and over to nearline storage using online HDD. The aging (but active) data is archived on archive tape or data cloud tiers, while stored data is either archived on off-site tape or cloud-based cold storage for long-term archival.

2. SSD/Flash Growing Fast Since flash is more durable and packs a punch in performance, it is more favorable for high transaction, low latency applications. SSDs continue to pose impressive sales growth despite their higher prices than HDDs. This is largely because of its greater capacity and performance. Also, the price gap between the two (SSDs and HDDs) is narrowing down.

3. HDDs are Not Going Anywhere SSDs may be high on performance but they will not replace HDDs anytime soon. The biggest reason? Price. Although price gapp is narrowing, it is still about seven times costleir than an HDD. Also, HDD vendors are working to increase the capacities.

4. Tape Is Here to Stay Archiving storage data still relies heavily on tapes. Although cloud-based cold storage are fast growing, many tape deployments are still efficient and cost a fraction of other media types.

5. The Ubiquitous Cloud Public, private, hybrid or multi cloud, there's a cloud deployment for every business need. Cloud based storage is growing fast and today's digital enterprises are adopting it with open arms. their customers.

6. Harnessing Data Today businesses possess enormous amounts of data which is largely unstructured and siloed. Businesses must harness this data with technologydriven analytics tools and leverage insights before the data reaches cold storage.

7. Regulatory Compliance Directives such as the General Data Protection Regulation mandate businessesespecially those dealing in dataâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to secure personally identifiable information of their customers. Therefore, it becomes essential for businesses to plan handling of data storage, retention, and archiving, such that they comply to the prevalent regulations.

8. Fighting Fraud In a landscape rife with cyber threats, data is the new currency. Businesses must ensure secure data storage practices in order to protect themselves from fraudsters and cybercriminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities in their business systems to inflict financial and reputational losses. December 2018â&#x20AC;&#x201A; |â&#x20AC;&#x201A; 13

TechKnow | Veeam

Meeting the Intelligent Data Management Needs of 2019 Author: Dave Russell, Vice President for Product Strategy at Veeam

he world of today has changed drastically due to data. Every process, whether an external client interaction or internal employee task, leaves a trail of data. Human and machine generated data is growing ten times faster than traditional business data, and machine data is growing at 50 times that of traditional business data. With the way we consume and interact with data changing daily, the number of innovations to enhance business agility and operational efficiency are also plentiful. In this environment, it is vital for enterprises to understand the demand for Intelligent Data Management in order to stay one step ahead and deliver enhanced services to their customers. I’ve highlighted 5 hot trends in 2019 decision-makers need to know – keeping the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) market in mind, here are my views:

1. Multi-Cloud usage and exploitation will rise. With companies operating across borders

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and the reliance on technology growing more prominent than ever, an expansion in multi-cloud usage is almost inevitable. IDC estimates that customers will spend US$554 billion on cloud computing and related services in 2021, more than double the level of 2016. On-premises data and applications will not become obsolete, but that the deployment models for your data will expand with an increasing mix of on-prem, SaaS, IaaS, managed clouds and private clouds. Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift off-premises, but this transition will take place over years, and we believe that it is important to be ready to meet this new reality today.

2. Flash memory supply shortages, and prices, will improve in 2019. According to a report by Gartner in October this year, flash memory supply is expected to revert to a modest shortage in mid2019, with prices expected to stabilize

largely due to the ramping of Chinese memory production. Greater supply and improved pricing will result in greater use of flash deployment in the operational recovery tier, which typically hosts the most recent 14 days of backup and replica data. We see this greater flash capacity leading to broader usage of instant mounting of backed up machine images (or Copy Data Management). Systems that offer Copy Data Management capability will be able to deliver value beyond availability, along with better business outcomes. Example use cases for leveraging backup and replica data include DevOps, DevSecOps and DevTest, Patch Testing, Analytics and Reporting.

3. Predictive Analytics will become mainstream and ubiquitous. The Predictive Analytics market is forecast to reach $12.41 billion by 2022, marking a 272% increase from 2017, at a CAGR of 22.1%.

Predictive Analytics based on Telemetry data, essentially Machine Learning (ML) driven guidance and recommendations is one of the categories that is most likely to become mainstream and ubiquitous. Machine Learning predictions are not new, but we will begin to see them utilizing signatures and fingerprints, containing best practice configurations and policies, to allow the business to get more value out of the infrastructure that you have deployed and are responsible for. Predictive Analytics, or Diagnostics, will assist us in ensuring continuous operations, while reducing the administrative burden of keeping systems optimized. This capability becomes vitally important as IT organizations are required to manage an increasingly diverse environment, with more data, and with more stringent service level objectives. As Predictive Analytics become more mainstream, SLAs and SLOs are rising and businesses’ SLEs, Service Level Expectations, are even higher. This means that we need more assistance, more intelligence in order to deliver on what the business expects from us.

4. The “versatalist” (or generalist) role will increasingly become the new operating model for the majority of IT organizations. While the first two trends were technology-focused, the future of digital is still analogue: it’s people. Talent shortages combined with new, collapsing on-premises infrastructure and public cloud + SaaS, are leading to broader technicians with background in a wide variety of disciplines, and increasingly a greater business awareness as well. Standardization, orchestration and automation are contributing factors that will accelerate this, as more capable systems allow for administrators to take a

more horizontal view rather than a deep specialization. Specialization will of course remain important, but as IT becomes more and more fundamental to business outcomes, it stands to reason that IT talent will likewise need to understand the wider business and add value across many IT domains. Yet, while we see these trends challenging the status quo next year, some things will not change. There are always constants in the world, and we see two major factors that will remain top-of-mind for companies everywhere…. a. Frustration with legacy backup approaches & solutions. The top 3 vendors in the market continue to lose market share in 2019. In fact, the largest provider in the market has been losing share for 10 years. Companies are moving away from legacy providers and embracing more agile, dynamic, disruptive vendors, such as Veeam, to offer the capabilities that are needed to thrive in the data-driven age.

Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift off-premises, but this transition will take place over years, and we believe that it is important to be ready to meet this new reality today.

b. The pain points of the 3 C’s: Cost, Complexity and Capability These 3 C’s continue to be why people in data centers are unhappy with solutions from other vendors. Broadly speaking, these are excessive costs, unnecessary complexity and a lack of capability, which manifests as speed of backup, speed of restoration or instant mounting to a virtual machine image. These three major criteria will continue to dominate the reasons why organizations augment or fully replace their backup solution.

5. The arrival of the first 5G networks will create new opportunities for resellers and CSPs to help collect, manage, store and process the higher volumes of data In early 2019 we will witness the first 5G-enabled handsets hitting the market at CES in the US and MWC in Barcelona. I believe 5G will likely be most quickly adopted by businesses for Machine-toMachine communication and Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Consumer mobile network speeds have reached a point where they are probably as fast as most of us need with 4G. 2019 will be more about the technology becoming fully standardised and tested, and future-proofing devices to ensure they can work with the technology when it becomes more widely available, and EMEA becomes a truly Gigabit Society. For Resellers and Cloud Service Providers, excitement will centre on the arrival of new revenue opportunities leveraging 5G or infrastructure to support it. Processing these higher volumes of data in real-time, at a faster speed, new hardware and device requirements, and new applications for managing data will all present opportunities and will help facilitate conversations around edge computing. December 2018 | 15

Cover Story | OMA Group

Consolidation, Acquisition, Expansion:

An Year of All-round Growth for the OMA Group Omran Sultan Abdullah Al Owais - Chairman, OMA Group

From leveraging cuttingedge technology for a digital banking solution portfolio and a new hi-tech Head Office, to bolstering global presence through acquisitions, the OMA Group came all guns blazing to register a successful 2018. Omran Sultan Abdullah Al Owais, Chairman at OMA Group, shares the success story with The Integrator.

Could you elaborate on how this year has been so far for the company? 2018 has been very successful for us, as we have grown up to 48% this year with a net profit of around 30%. The successful growth of the company has led us to move into a new premise, taking possession of the entire building with all our companies working under one roof. Over the last six months we have decided to acquire all our minority shareholders in companies that we have invested over the past three years. We have already acquired two new companies and are in conversation with a few more as part of our expansion plan. On the solution front, OMA Emirates has focused on the recently introduced digital banking solution portfolio to improve customer experience and introduce different modes of banking services. This includes

16 | December 2018

OMA Emirates has focused on the recently introduced digital banking solution portfolio to improve customer experience and introduce different modes of banking services

solutions like digital wallets, mobile applications, instant account opening and card issuance kiosks, QR code and barcode payments, and biometrics to name a few. OMA Emirates has recently shifted to a new head office. Could you throw some light on this move? We have recently moved into our new office called ‘OMA House’ near King Faisal Mosque in Sharjah. It is spread over an area of 60,000 sq ft and can accommodate over 1000+ employees. We are consolidating the entire group into a single unit and all the companies under OMA Group will be under the same roof, thus having our global management office in UAE. This move is a part of our expansion strategy. It has helped in strategizing better and creating a healthier atmosphere in the office.

Our vision for 2019 is integrating the current payment ecosystem with artificial intelligence and robotics technology. Could you talk about OMA’s technology that is being implemented at the new head office? The company has used its own homegrown solutions in the office to make it a hightech and cashless one. Employees can link their staff identification with the digital wallet that can also be used for attendance management and payment transactions. We have also introduced a cashless facility in our café through which our digital wallet is integrated with the cafe’s backend system and employees can place an order instantly, without a telephone line. A QR code-based system has been introduced, which eliminates the need for a POS terminal. The transactions will be approved based on the QR code scan with a digital receipt sent to the registered email address. This technology integration will help the head office in supporting the go green campaign. Apart from the cafe, we have provided entertainment, sports facilities and have our own in-built gym. These are designed to cater to the welfare of our staff happiness and avoiding a stressful environment at work. We have recently launched our first digital banking concept and the same has been created within our office premises. Digital banking gives a seamless experience of banking and provides excellent customer service using the best of technology. We are also working on a retail store by building a seamless experience. A customer can use his phone to scan items, collect them, pay across, and walk off. OMA has recently tied up with Mawgif to enhance parking payment solutions for Dubai airports. Could you elaborate on this? With the GCC witnessing an increase in customer demands, authorities have been tying up with companies like Mawgif to provide quality service and raise customer satisfaction levels.

At OMA Emirates, we follow a customer-centric approach in providing a payment solution for parking at Dubai airports. We initiated solutions for customer to pay for parking via digital wallets apart from the cards. This alternative payment option provides additional convenience and improved services which are smoother, faster, and hassle free. Could you talk about the company’s latest acquisitions? We have taken over India, Adriatic, and Morocco 100%. We bought all the minority shareholders stakes and are now an independent company. We have already acquired two local companies in the UAE, one of them being Pakistan-based Wemsol International having its presence in the UAE as well. We have acquired majority stake in the company and will be opening multiple offices in different locations in Pakistan. This acquisition brings OMA Emirates closer to its vision of reaching 25 countries by 2020 after a successful entry and acquisition to the Indian market in 2016. By entering into markets like Pakistan, we are also expanding our product line with strategic partnerships,

alliances, and investments and gradually working towards becoming the most trusted technology service provider for various industries in Pakistan. With this year ending, what are your plans for 2019? Are you looking to expand into new markets? We will continue to expand into new markets and acquire companies that can augment what we do. We are looking to enter geographies such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kenya and Senegal soon. We are already present in Malaysia, and have initiated the process of venturing in Tanzania for TPP (Third Party Processing), keeping to issuance and acquiring services. Our vision for 2019 is integrating the current payment ecosystem with artificial intelligence and robotics technology. We are working towards building an integrated payment ecosystem covering all electronic and digital banking functions, from acquiring to issuance along with digital banking. This ecosystem would be a complete core platform that benefits all players in any industry and supports the go green technology.

OMA Emirates closer to its vision of reaching 25 countries by 2020

December 2018 | 17

News In Detail

A10 Networks Provides Ability for Service Providers to Deliver Cloud Scrubbing Services with Automation and Scale

10 Networks has announced the availability of A10 Thunder Threat Protection System that will allow service providers to deliver more profitable DDoS scrubbing services to their enterprise customers. Thunder TPS reduces total cost of ownership via intelligent automation capabilities, continuous machine learning, and greater scale. The solution will enable service providers to protect their enterprise customers at scale and increase revenue by delivering profitable scrubbing services with faster mitigation times, lower operating costs, and service delivery options tailored to different business needs. The Thunder TPS comes with intelligent automation capabilities and provides automated service discovery, dynamic attack pattern recognition (DAPR), and always-on adaptive learning. “Traditional DDoS protection systems lack the advanced automation and large scale of A10’s Thunder TPS solution,” said Lee Chen, Founder and CEO of A10 Networks. “As a result, costly and complex horizontal scaling of numerous

18 | December 2018

appliances is required by service providers. Without truly intelligent automation, running a complex security operation center can be prohibitively expensive, and difficult to staff due to the skill shortage of trained security professionals. The Thunder TPS solution addresses these challenges for operators.” “The ability to automate and scale the delivery of differentiated services could have a major impact on the quality and economics of DDoS scrubbing services. A10’s innovations are significant advancements,” commented Bart van der Sloot, Managing Director of Leaseweb Network. “All types of service providers are well-positioned to drive revenue growth by delivering value-added DDoS defense services to their business customers,” said Jeff Wilson, Senior Research Director at IHS Markit. “These services require DDoS multi-tenant solutions that automate protection and tiered service levels. A10’s latest solutions will help service providers offer these services profitably and at scale.”

Fortinet Secures the Global Network of DTDC Express

ortinet has announced that DTDC Express Ltd, an Indian express distribution and logistics company, has bolstered its existing Fortinet Security Fabric deployment over 30 global

offices and 450 branches in India by modernizing its data center and branch firewalls. DTDC Express has also upgraded its existing firewall implementation to segment and control its network. The refreshed Fortinet Security Fabric deployment allows DTDC to secure its network and datacenter with intrusion prevention and detection, content filtering and web filtering, application control and two-factor authentication to protect its web and mobile based tracking applications. "Fortinet’s security solutions have been protecting our network for over 12 years now. The FortiGate 3000D NextGeneration Firewall is a simple-to-manage yet comprehensive security solution that helps us to control access with policies that segregate users based on their roles,” said Mrinal Chakraborty, Executive VP Technology and Innovation, DTDC Express Ltd. “Technology is the backbone that holds together our operational services and we have been investing extensively to ramp up our infrastructure to enable our business expansion. The Fortinet Security Fabric has helped us achieve our goal to create consistent policy and enforcement across the network,” said Anil Kumar K K, Assistant General Manager IT, DTDC Express Ltd. “DTDC Express has been our customer for 12 years, and we are pleased that through this latest deployment, we can continue to support their digital transformation efforts with our cutting-edge technologies. With Fortinet’s unique Security Fabric architecture and our FortiOS 6.0, DTDC has the option to add 200 new security features and capabilities for continuous risk assessment via automation,” said Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice

The Fortinet Security Fabric deployment allows DTDC to secure its network and datacenter with intrusion prevention and detection, content filtering and web filtering, application control and twofactor authentication to protect its web and mobile based tracking applications.

President, India & SAARC, Fortinet.

December 2018 | 19

News In Detail

NetApp Builds on Its Cloud Leadership in Global Markets

NetApp is leveraging a combination of technology, partnership, business model, and vision to position itself at the forefront of delivering integrated and consistent data services for the hybrid cloud.

etApp has recently announced new data services and solutions that enable customers to innovate in the cloud. These new offerings include the expanded availability of the Microsoft Azure NetApp Files preview, expanded availability of NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform and NetApp SaaS Backup for Salesforce. The bulk of businesses around the world now rely on data as a strategic advantage. Therefore, it is essential to leverage the cloud to make better decisions, improve customer experiences, and develop new revenue streams. Navigating the cloud, however, requires organizations to integrate, protect, and optimize data in a post–General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) world. This challenge requires the hybrid and multi cloud expertise. “Organizations are shifting steadily toward cloudfirst strategies. For organizations undertaking digital transformation at the business level, cloud isn't just about

20 | December 2018

picking among a specific set of products or service delivery models such a public, private, or hybrid cloud,” said Stewart Bond, director of Data Integration and Integrity research at IDC. “NetApp is leveraging a combination of technology, partnership, business model, and vision to position itself at the forefront of delivering integrated and consistent data services for the hybrid cloud.” “Building on the many products that we launched at NetApp Insight Las Vegas in October, this year’s European event is a key example of the continent’s dynamic and diverse approach to data-driven transformation,” said Alex Wallner, NetApp senior vice president and general manager EMEA. “Just as GDPR now acts as a blueprint for data regulation around the world, our data-conscious customers are flexing to implement best practices by safeguarding, enriching, and optimizing their data. We are proud to meet this challenge with the expansion of NetApp cloud offerings.”

Nutanix Introduces Xi Cloud Services for the Modern Multicloud Era

utanix has announced availability of Xi Cloud Services, a

visibility and insight into their infrastructure deployments across

new suite of offerings designed to create a unified fabric

platforms to monitor costs and ensure compliance.

across different cloud environments, so that IT teams

Nutanix Xi Leap is a native extension of the Nutanix Enterprise

can run their applications on an optimal platform which is not

Cloud Platform that provides disaster recovery as a service. It is

restricted by technology limitations. Xi Cloud Services comprise

a turnkey and integrated service that rapidly and intelligently

five distinct offerings—Xi Leap, Xi Frame, Xi Beam, Xi Epoch, and

protects the applications and data in a Nutanix environment

Xi IoT.

without the need to purchase and maintain a separate

A seamless hybrid cloud that allows IT to make strategic workload placement decisions is the goal of many businesses.

infrastructure stack. “As we move into the multicloud world, a fundamental

According to the recent Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, enterprise

challenge for all businesses is running IT applications seamlessly

workloads running in both private and public clouds are expected

across platforms,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO, Nutanix. “It has been

to jump nearly 20% in the next two years. Through Xi Cloud

our mission to make infrastructure invisible to our customers so

Services, Nutanix will make it easier for companies to integrate

they can focus on their applications, not where the applications

cloud services into their multicloud deployments, either by

reside. Xi Cloud Services is the next evolution in that journey as

natively extending their Nutanix environment beyond the

we help our customers achieve invisible, together.”

boundaries of a traditional datacenter or by finally gaining the

December 2018 | 21

Insight | Kaspersky Lab

Change is happening fast, but according to Kaspersky Lab's survey, it is fraught with risk, with 58% CISOs saying uncontrolled cloud expansion is the top security concern. Maxim Frolov Vice President of Global Sales Kaspersky Lab

Cloud Adoption Poses Security Risk to Businesses

ven though cloud adoption is in full swing, with about 73% enterprises having at least element in the cloud, IT departments are feeling the pressure to migrate 100% to the cloud. Change is happening fast, but according to Kaspersky Lab's survey, it is fraught with risk, with 58% CISOs saying uncontrolled cloud expansion is the top security concern. Although, cloud allows multiple benefits, it brings cybersecurity challenges especially when the cloud infrastructure is hosted by a third-party. CISOs are, therefore, facing headaches to keep their data secure and protect company finances while facing lack of skilled cybersecurity

22 | December 2018

personnel. For CISOs, this results in staffing problems: more than a third (38%) claim it is difficult to recruit specialists to cope with this ‘cloud zoo’. Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security keeps businesses secure by protecting applications and data in physical, virtual and cloud workloads. It provides API-based integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and supports the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, allowing customers to securely move data and applications across their IT environments. It also provides a unified management and security orchestration console to manage IT security on-premise and in the cloud — which partially alleviates the

problem of a lack of personnel. Maxim Frolov, Vice President of Global Sales at Kaspersky Lab says, “Safeguarding data and workloads in the cloud environment, in addition to supporting the native security capabilities of a cloud platform is crucial. Protection layers should therefore include: the capability to monitor application behavior and ban any suspicious activity; prevent exploits by using the latest threat intelligence; and find and automatically patch vulnerabilities. The best solutions also provide orchestration capabilities, so that IT teams can control what workloads are being accessed and processed, on and off-premise.”

Insight | McAfee

Underground Cybercriminal Collaboration to Propel Threats Next Year

cAfee has released its predictions for the cyberthreat landscape in 2019 in its

latest report entitled 'McAfee Labs 2019 Threats Predictions Report'. According to the report, it is expected that malwareas-a-service families will strengthen, which will energize the market for attack outsourcing and the evolution of increasingly innovative and agile attack methods. As a result, corporate data, home IoT devices and brand reputations will be under greater siege, with cybercriminals largely using social media, the cloud, and mobile phones as increasingly prominent attack vectors. “In 2018, we witnessed even greater collaboration among cybercriminals through underground alliances,” said Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee. “This collaborative mentality has allowed for efficiencies in underground technologies and tactics, and the evolution of bad actors into some of the most organized and agile adversaries in

Raj Samani Chief Scientist McAfee

the world. However, while we expect the underground market collaboration to continue, the year 2019 will also see cybersecurity alliances of defenders continuing to mature and further fortify defenses.”

that will lead to use of artificial intelligence in sohphisticated evasion

Some of the key predictions from the report include: • Cybercriminal underground to consolidate and collaborate through stronger partnerships • Prevalence of attack outsourcing

tactics • Bad actors will combine multiple attack types to create synergistic super threats • Cybercriminals to use bots, negative social media campaigns to

extort brands • Significant increase expected in data exfiltration attempts from the cloud • Digital assistants to become the next vector for home IoT attacks • Data-rich social media platforms will continue to be popular attack targets by cybercriminals December 2018 | 23

Insight | Sophos

Dan Schiappa Senior Vice President & General Manager Sophos

Unfortunately, many business environments could have blind spots on their network switches or LAN segments, and these can become secret launch pads for attacks. The new features in Sophos XG firewall prevents threats from spreading, even where the firewall doesn’t have direct control over traffic.

Sophos Introduces Lateral Movement Protection to XG Firewall

ophos has announced that its next-generation Sophos XG firewall now includes lateral movement protection to prevent targeted, manual cyberattacks or exploits from infiltrating further into a compromised network. The new lateral movement protection exposes blind spots on network switches or LAN segments with Sophos Synchronized Security technology. The Sophos XG firewall automatically interacts with Sophos’ endpoint products, including its new Intercept X Advanced with Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), to deliver this new layer of protection. There has been a rise in targeted ransomware with cybercriminals targeting

24 | December 2018

weak entry points and brute-force Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) passwords. Once in, they move laterally, working one step at a time to steal domain admin credentials, manipulate internal controls, disable back-ups and more. “Many organizations are set up to protect against automatic bots, but not interactive, human-driven attacks. If active adversaries get into a system they can ‘think laterally’ to troubleshoot roadblocks, evade detection and move around. It’s hard to stop them unless the right security measures are in place,” said Dan Schiappa, senior vice president and general manager of products at Sophos. “Most lateral movements happen on

the endpoint, which is why synchronizing security is important. Attackers will attempt to advance using nonmalware techniques, such as exploits, Mimikatz and privilege escalation. The network needs to know to respond and automatically shut down or isolate infected machines before anyone or anything spreads further. Unfortunately, many business environments could have blind spots on their network switches or LAN segments, and these can become secret launch pads for attacks. The new features in Sophos XG firewall prevents threats from spreading, even where the firewall doesn’t have direct control over traffic,” said Schiappa.

Insight | VMware

VMware to Drive Adoption of “As-A-Service” Model for On-Premises Data Centers

Mware has announced delivery of two new offerings—VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and VMware Cloud Foundation for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that will run on AWS Outposts. These will enable customers to build and deploy customer data centers in an “as a service” model with enterprise-class capabilities. Both solutions will leverage AWS Outposts, new fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with Amazon Web Services (AWS) hardware allowing customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while connecting to the rest of AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud. Together these offerings will enable a consistent infrastructure and operational experience to customers across all VMware and AWS cloud environments. “VMware’s vision is to provide customers with consistency of infrastructure, operations and developer experience, enabling them

As part of our broader hybrid cloud strategy to deliver Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) infrastructure as an endto-end service across the data center, cloud, and the edge, on industry-leading hardware, we are pleased to extend our collaboration with AWS and the value we can deliver our joint customers.

to build and run any application wherever the business requires. This empowers them to maximize the value of their IT investments and achieve better business outcomes,” said Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. “As part of our broader hybrid cloud strategy to deliver Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) infrastructure as an end-to-end service across the data center, cloud, and the edge, on industry-leading hardware, we are pleased to extend our collaboration with AWS and the value we can deliver our joint customers.” “VMware Cloud on AWS has seen great momentum since we introduced it together in 2017, and this marks another step forward in our collaboration to enable customers to run VMware Cloud on AWS locally on AWS Outposts,” said Sandy Carter, vice president, EC2 Enterprise Workloads, Amazon Web Services. December 2018 | 25

TechKnow | Riverbed

Riverbed Launches SD-WAN Solution with Enterprise-Class Routing Enhancements

iverbed has announced significant enhancements and new subscription pricing for its SD-WAN solution. With this latest release, Riverbed has completed its WAN

Edge solutions in the market, integrating advanced SD-WAN functionality with application acceleration, security and visibility capabilities all in a single streamlined device. Riverbed’s solution enables businesses to experience fast, agile, and secure access to all applications across the hybrid IT landscape with greater efficiency and reliability. Riverbed now delivers a next-gen infrastructure that is software-defined and allows customers everywhere to take advantage of the cloud and to maximize digital performance. “Organizations across every industry are striving to digitally transform their business in order to stay competitive. Consequently, limitations of legacy networks have become roadblocks to truly fulfilling these digital strategies,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Riverbed’s

Paul O'Farrell Senior Vice President & GM Riverbed

Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit. “By delivering a next-gen architecture with new flexible subscription pricing and enhanced routing capabilities, Riverbed has raised the bar in helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and implement a software-defined networking approach for increased agility, greater efficiency and ultimately, better financial results. And now with 1,000 SD-WAN customers worldwide, Riverbed has established itself as a true leader in the SD-WAN market.” With this release, Riverbed’s SD-WAN solution delivers the enhancements including enterprise-class routing, subscriptionbased pricing, in-field upgrades, and a simple and complete integration.

26 | December 2018

Organizations across every industry are striving to digitally transform their business in order to stay competitive. Consequently, limitations of legacy networks have become roadblocks to truly fulfilling these digital strategies.

TechKnow | Z Services

Z Services and McAfee to Transform Cloud-based Security Offering

in the MENA region, and McAfee, the device-to-cloud

environment of constant security threats, organisations in the

cybersecurity company, will bring the first in-country Cloud

MENA region need a solution that assures security across multiple

Security solution to organisations across the Middle East and

cloud applications and protects data. The addition of the McAfee’s

North Africa. This solution is powered by McAfee’s MVISION Cloud

MVISION Cloud to our cloud-based offering demonstrates our

and will be available through Z Services’ in-country multi-tenant

commitment to innovate with customer needs in mind and offer

cloud security infrastructure.

newer layers of security that regional businesses may not even

Services, a cloud-based cybersecurity solutions provider

The Z Services Cloud Security, powered by McAfee MVISION Cloud, includes a range of pre-integrated applications that make

Nidal Taha, President, Z Services, said, “Operating within an

have considered yet.” Nigel Hawthorn, EMEA Director of Cloud Security at McAfee

it easy to securely adopt cloud application services. With the

said, “This Cloud Security solution will enable businesses across

addition of this solution, Z Services will extend its cloud-based

MENA to leverage the cloud, like never before. McAfee’s MVISION

customer offering and enhance its data protection and threat

Cloud was built in the cloud, for the cloud. It gives businesses the

prevention capabilities across SaaS, IaaS and PaaS platforms such

ability to better protect valuable information from cyber attacks

as Office 365, Box, Dropbox, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. The in-

by enforcing policies with enhanced visibility of data and user

country solution also enables customers to remain compliant with

behaviour across cloud services and devices to stop security

regulations around data storage.

threats.”

December 2018 | 27

TechKnow | Cisco

Cisco Introduces Solutions for Faster Cloud Adoption in UAE

Osama Al-Zoubi Chief Technology Officer Cisco, Middle East & Africa

28 | December 2018

isco is unifying its security and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies to help organizations in the UAE and the region embrace the cloud faster. The WAN is undergoing a transformation and the way people work has also changed. Organizations host their applications in multiple clouds – public, private and SaaS, and rely on the Internet to connect users to business-critical applications. This has resulted in a new Cloud Edge – the intersection of networking and security. Until now, organizations had to choose between application experience or security with their SD-WAN solutions. The new SD-WAN portfolio from Cisco aims to address the new realities of the Cloud Edge. Cisco SD-WAN can help IT deliver better application experiences and make users more productive with simplicity and scale. And, best-of-breed security can be easily enabled anywhere it is needed, from the branch to the cloud. “The emergence of the new Cloud Edge is disrupting our customers’ network and security architectures. Today, every WAN device must become software-defined and secure,” said Osama Al-Zoubi, Chief Technology Officer, Cisco Middle East and Africa. “Cisco’s SD-WAN makes it easy for customers to get the very best of networking and security. We are building a bridge to a new business world that speeds our customers’ ability to unlock the power of the cloud — faster with less risk.” Cisco's SD-WAN comes with integrated security that can be managed through a single pane of glass. By integrating with Cisco umbrella, the solution simplifies cloud security deployments and blocks access to malicious destinations. With open APIs, Cisco SD-WAN provides service providers and partners the opportunity to create unique new services. In addition, Cisco is helping customers accelerate SD-WAN deployments and decrease risk via a new SD-WAN Quick Start Service.

TechKnow | SAS

SAS is Market Leader in Advanced and Predictive Analytics

Shukri Dabaghi Vice President, ME & Eastern Eruope SAS

AS has again emerged leader in predictive and advanced

number of competitors entering the market. SAS’ tools now

analytics supply market with a 30.8% market share in

make it easier for users to develop in open source tools and then

2017 according to IDC's report entitled Worldwide Big Data

integrate their models into the SAS platform. Capabilities like this

and Analytics Software 2017 Market Shares: Healthy Growth Across the Board. The report reveals that the company posted a 5 percent revenue growth in 2017. SAS has led in the predictive and advanced analytics

help SAS stay at the top of the category.” “We continue to work closely with our customers to transform a world of data into a world of intelligence,” said Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. “Over the years, SAS has developed and refined an

category since IDC started tracking the market in 1997 and has

incredibly deep set of capabilities in advanced analytics that has

exhibited continued growth every year in the category. In 2017,

propelled us to the top of the market.”

SAS devoted 26% of its overall revenue of $3.24 billion into developing AI, IoT, data management and analytics software. “SAS has been able to retain authority in the advanced and

“Over the years, SAS has been able to retain its authority and establish a strong position in the industry, which continues to grow at an aggressive rate” said Shukri Dabaghi, Vice President

predictive analytics market and continues to grow year-over-

- Middle East and Eastern Europe, at SAS. “These results are an

year,” said Chandana Gopal, Research Manager for Business

indicator that our actions have a positive impact.”

Analytics at IDC. “This is not an easy feat given the rise in the

December 2018 | 29

TechKnow | EnGenius

EnGenius Introduces World’s First 2x2 802.11ax Access Point for Enterprise-Minded SMBs Powered by the most Qualcomm Technologies’ chipset, EWS357AP is built to deliver enterprise-quality Wi-Fi service to budget-conscious small and medium-sized organizations

nGenius International Dubai, a leading provider of best-in-class voice and data solutions, launched the industry’s first 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) 2x2 access point EWS357AP. The new member of the EnGenius family brings next-generation cutting-edge features within reach of forward-thinking SMBs. Early adopters will no longer have to wait to take advantage of enterpriselevel features. With its unique capabilities, EWS357AP helps forward-thinking SMBs take advantage of some of the most sophisticated wireless technology in the world. This revolutionary 2x2 11ax access point fulfills the Wi-Fi connectivity demands of small and midsize organizations by: • Matching the needs of the majority of today’s clients, which are 1x1 and 2x2 • Enabling advancements within a network without demanding a significant restructuring • Supporting existing and future device and application needs • Being backward-compatible with legacy Wi-Fi • Re-energizing the capacity and reach of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies Equipped with Qualcomm Technologies’ newest chipset, the EWS357AP features 11ax technology, which deepens and expands the capabilities of Wi-Fi as well as fortifies small and midsize business networks. The new 802.11ax technology (Wi-Fi 6) builds upon real-world deployment of 802.11ac. As the next-generation Wi-Fi, 11ax is no longer just about speeds but also about stronger, steadier, and more efficient wireless connections. The First 2x2 11ax Access Point in the Industry SMBs using the EWS357AP can take

30 | December 2018

Alishan Zaidi Regional Sales Manager EnGenius MEA

advantage of 11ax technology, which enables more efficient channel use, reduces latency between AP and client devices, and provides other groundbreaking features, such as: • OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access for more efficient channel use) • Uplink and downlink of MU-MIMO (ensures optimal signal and reception reliability) • BSS Coloring (tags packets with a “color” to differentiate between adjacent basic service sets) • Target wake time (a power-saving feature that allows for scheduled wake times) A sleek, low-profile 2x2 access point, the EWS357AP is packed with enterpriselevel management features, such as

mass configurations of access points, so businesses can quickly and easily install future-proof devices into existing networks. Loaded with new advanced hardware components and support for powerful computing, the access point runs more efficiently and consumes less power, making it ideal for SMBs. They also can immediately deploy the EWS357AP into existing switch infrastructures without suffering a major blow to their budgets or resources. EnGenius has a solution for SMBs located in higher-density environments, too. The popular manufacturer of data networking and telephony products is also launching an 802.11ax 4x4 access point. The new EWS377AP is in place to enhance the new 802.11ax technology offering a mix of applications to EnGenius’ clients. “Here at EnGenius, we believe that the newest Wi-Fi technology must be accessible to small and mediumsized organizations too instead of just enterprises,” said Mr. Zaidi, regional sales manager at EnGenius MEA. “The 2x2 EWS357AP access point puts the power of 11ax in reach of early adopters from the SMB space.” “The variety of devices competing for wireless connections in the modern workplace demands a cure for slow or congested network performance,” said Nick Kucharewski, vice president and general manager, wired/wireless infrastructure and networking, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “By leveraging Qualcomm Technologies’ Wi-Fi 6 technology, EnGenius is delivering a 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 solution designed to address the demand for capacity on enterprise networks, while optimizing wireless performance for more devices and users than ever before.”