ontents
Editorial
Cover Feature - 18
On the ‘digital first’ journey
Need of the hour T
he constant need to innovate in products and services is indeed the greatest challenge that organizations face today. While opportunity to transform comes knocking more than once at times, the urgency of the hour is to embrace change at the earliest and stay in the race or run the risk of being knocked out when it is almost too late to adapt. Smarter companies are enhancing consumer experience. For instance, wherever, you or I as a consumer may have been wowed by the seamlessness of the transaction we may have just completed online, there is no doubt that the credit would in large measure go to some smart systems and processes in the backend of the company that delivered that service. And we will certainly go back to the service provider when new requirements arise because of the experience we recall. The bottomline of any transformational exercise that a company may undertake will be driven by the need to have satisfied consumers because that is what brings in the business again and again. Even if the company may not be a pioneer in adopting new trends that could somehow revolutionize part of the business process, it is essential not to be a laggard because the speed at which innovation is moving, it would be challenging to catch up. Not all companies by themselves may be fully competent to understand how they could transform their delivery models for their products and service in terms of IT solutions. This is essentially why they need a good consultant and where the channel will continue to play that key role in hand holding the company through its ambitious strategy to transform. Bringing in tools of the 3rd platform technologies into their Business processes as required and advised by the consultant, the company can steer ahead confidently into the new future.
R. Narayan Managing Editor
SMB organizations need digital transformation initiatives that improve capabilities to compete and collaborate
News in Detail - 11
GISEC to highlight need for enhanced cybercrime support TechKnow
New ways to protect - 16
Sanjeev Walia, CEO, Spire Solutions discusses some of the newer areas in security technologies they are focusing on at GISEC
On the cloud trail with partners -24
Sage offers flexible, integrated and scalable solutions for organizations ranging from start-ups to scale-ups, to midsized and larger enterprises. Keith Fenner, Vice President
Point2Point
Driving the SMB focus - 14
John Lincoln, Senior Vice President, Small & Medium Business (SMB), discusses how Etisalat is committed to delivering greater value offers to all its SMB customers
Value for the mid-market - 22
Sakkeer Hussain, Director - Sales and Marketing, D-Link MEA opines that the SMB networking segment remains one of the fast growing sectors, offering more opportunities for solution providers
Insight
SaaS and network automation - 28
The success of SaaS is largely due to companies being able to identify and encapsulate in software commoditized business processes writes Lori MacVittie, Principal Technical Evangelist at F5 Networks
Challenges in sharing Threat Intelligence - 30
Vincent Weafer, Vice President, McAfee Labs discusses at length the five critical challenges faced by security vendors and organizations that want to incorporate valuable intelligence into their security operations
Regulars
News Bytes EyeTech Market Stats
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News Bytes
AgilityGrid partners with Intransa AgilityGrid, a Dubai-based Value Added Distributor that provides IP CCTV security solutions for businesses and government bodies across the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Australia, has confirmed that it has signed an agreement with Intransa, an award-winning platform delivering solutions for video surveillance, to represent them in EMEA. AgilityGrid will incorporate the complete range of Intransa’s award-winning servers and storage platforms into their customized security solutions for their partners and their customers across the region. Costa Boukouvalas, CEO, AgilityGrid said, “We are very pleased to represent Instransa in the EMEA region. In keeping with our business ethos, we always want to stay with technology that not only innovates but also delivers the solutions that a dynamic region like the EMEA demands. Intransa’s award-winning products are designed to deliver simplicity, reliability and total cost savings.” Intransa has a long history of innovation and technology leadership in the security industry and the founders of iSCSi protocol and the concept of the IPSAN for IP video surveillance. With this alliance with AgilityGrid, Intransa will spearhead its growth and expansion in the EMEA region offering its servers, storage and appliance platforms based on its award-winning technology to security customers across the region.
4 | May 2017
Microsoft urges upskilling for cloud future Microsoft has called for IT professionals across UAE and the wider Middle East to prepare themselves for a cloud future by sharpening their skills in Microsoft Azure, through the company’s cloud trainings and certifications . Azure trainings and certifications run as a blend of scheduled and on-demand online courses, covering generalised and niche, cloud-focused subject areas for getting up to speed with Azure. IT Pros can choose to learn in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with labs, or study for a test and take a certification exam. Completing any MOOC includes a digital certificate of completion, and passing a certification exam earns IT Pros the related certification and its digital badges. “Microsoft’s cloud trainings allow IT professionals to broaden their horizons by gaining practical, instantly applicable cloud skills,” said NecipOzyucel, Cloud & Enterprise Business Solutions Lead, Microsoft Gulf. “Whether beginner or expert, we have the course to help them level up in their cloud career. We have invested heavily in Azure training, because our global reach and Azure’s versatility means it is a platform that can fit any need, no matter the business scale, no matter the industry.”
Credence Security partners with CensorNet CensorNet, a cloud security company, has selected Credence Security, a subsidiary of Cognosec AB, and the region’s specialty distribution company, as its VAD for the Middle East, Africa, India and Pakistan regions. Credence Security and CensorNet will work together to offer the cyber security company’s advanced cloud security products, including its Unified Security Solution (USS) to enterprises and resellers across the region. The deal further expands CensorNet’s global reach, and addresses the growing demand for Cloud security solutions in the Middle East and across Africa. The partnership provides Credence Security with access to a unique Cloud security solution that consolidates point solutions into one easy to manage platform. Vivian Gevers, Credence Security Managing Director, said, “CensorNet’s Unified Security Solution (USS) with its award-winning Cloud application control makes it an ideal security solution and managed service for our value added channel partners. By partnering with CensorNet, we add a critical best-in-class security solution to our existing portfolio and as such are one step closer to delivering on our commitment of offering our partners and enterprises in the region a one-stop-shop for all their security needs.” USS is a comprehensive cyber security service that combines modules for the security, monitoring and control of web, email and cloud application across an organizations’ network in one single dashboard, meaning that common policies can be easily applied and incidents tracked across different media.
News Bytes
Saudi Cloud Analytics Market tops SAR 280 Million by 2019 The 15-fold growth in the Kingdom’s cloud analytics market will drive Saudi Vision 2030 industry vertical innovation, business leaders announced at the recent SAP Saudi Cloud Day. Through 2019, the Kingdom’s cloud analytics market will top SAR 280 million in 2019, up from SAR 20 million in 2014, according to a recent Micro Market Monitor report. “Cloud solutions enable manufacturers to support Saudi Vision 2030 goals of increased localization and diversified economic growth. With the cloud, Saudi organizations can gain real-time supply chain, customer, and employee insights for better decisionmaking and new digital business models,” said Mohammed Al Nasser, Managing Director and Board Member at the construction conglomerate Al Nasser Trading and Import Company. Recognizing innovative deployments, Al Nasser Trading and Import Company with partner ISYX Technologies, received a gold award in the SAP Europe, Middle East, and Africa Quality Awards. Additional Saudi organizations receiving awards at the Middle East and North Africa level included the General Authority for Zakat and Tax with partner Invenio, Maadaniyah with partner BaasKaar IT Company, and Saudi Electric Company and Tasnee both with the partner Cognizant.
6 | May 2017
Cisco recognizes its ‘Partners for Success’ across 14 categories
Cisco presented awards to its top performing Tier-2 channel partners from the UAE, Oman, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen which form part of the Cisco Middle East’s – East region. These awards were in recognition for their outstanding performance in 2016 across 14 categories and were presented at a gala awards ceremony held at Fairmont Hotel Palm Jumeirah in Dubai. The event was attended by more than 100 delegates from the Cisco 2-Tier channel partner community. "Our theme for the partner event was focused around digital transformation, which we believe presents a high value opportunity for our 2-Tier channel partners now, and in the years ahead. Cisco channel partners can leverage our leading technology solutions from an expansive portfolio to build their role as trusted advisors for enterprises looking at transforming themselves to be able to truly embrace and benefit from digitization,” explained Shukri Eid, Managing Director – East Region, Cisco Middle East, during the event.
Schneider Electric holds innovation summit
Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation, showcased its concept of an experiential smart city at the annual Innovation Summit, an IoTpowered event demonstrating innovations and technologies that cater to the future of energy management, industrial efficiency and environmental sustainability. Over 2,500 people from the MEA region attended the two-day event held from 11thto 12thApril at Atlantis The Palm in Dubai. Esteemed regional speakers included His Excellency Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of DEWA, His Excellency Eng. Yasser El Kadi, Minister of Communications and Information Technology - Egypt, Mamdouh Raslan, Chairman and CEO, Water and Waste Water Egyptian Holding Company, Osman Sultan, CEO of du, and DrBadr Al Badr, CEO of Dur Hospitality. During the plenary, FrédéricAbbal, Executive VP of Energy Business at Schneider Electric, spoke on co-creating a new decarbonised, decentralised, digitised and more electric world with innovation at every level. He highlighted the benefits of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure architecture and platform that delivers IoT-enabled solutions at scale for building, grid, industry and datacentre customers. The event’s Innovation Hub showcased solutions that integrate IT and OT (operational technology) across connected products, edge control and apps, analytics and services.
News Bytes
Sage partners with First BIT in UAE Sage, a leader in integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems, has appointed First BIT as an authorized partner for distribution of the Sage 300 business management solution and Sage 50 Accounting in UAE. First BIT helps customers transform business processes through comprehensive business automation solutions and a full range of ITrelated services. Operating across five countries and in 42 cities, First BIT has been involved in over 150,000 successful automation projects around the world. Through our partnership with Sage, we will be able to offer a new set of world-class business management solutions to clients in a wide range of industries. The power of the Sage portfolio is that it offers flexible, integrated and scalable solutions for organizations ranging from start-ups to scale-ups, to mid-sized and larger enterprises,” commented Aleksandr Smolianinov, Managing Partner, First BIT. “We are excited to partner with First BIT. Its wide-ranging experience in the deployment of business management solutions across the globe and particularly in the UAE, in various industries will helps us reach new customers and serve the market even better,” commented Keith Fenner, Vice President – Sage Enterprise Africa and Middle East. First BIT is a global IT company with European roots that provides business automation and IT solutions worldwide. The company has 80 branch offices in 42 cities in 5 countries (Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Canada, and the UAE).
8 | May 2017
InfiNet Wireless holds 8th international Partner Conference
InfiNet Wireless, a global leader in fixed broadband wireless solutions for Mobile operators, Internet service providers, video surveillance and public safety solutions, recently held its 8th International Partners Conference in sunny Colombo, Sri Lanka. Bringing together 72 attendees from over 25 countries, the two-day conference, with a mix of presentations, success stories, practical workshops and team-building activities, gave the InfiNet team an opportunity to share its financial results for 2016, global strategy for 2017 as well as some exciting new product developments. It also gave several partners a chance to showcase some of their successful implementations and share best practices. In his keynote address to attendees, Kamal Mokrani, Global Vice President, InfiNet Wireless said, “2016 was another strong year for us as we managed to grow 16% yearon-year. The Middle East outperformed most other regions, growing at over 22%, and today is our second biggest market behind the CIS region."
ManageEngine scores high with ServiceDesk Plus ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, announced that ServiceDesk Plus, its flagship ITSM product, has been recognized as a Champion in the Info-Tech Research Group Mid-Market Service Desk Vendor Landscape report. ManageEngine’s inclusion and placement in the report is a testament to its leadership status in the IT service management market and its ability to provide best-in-class ITSM solutions with enterprise-ready capabilities for mid-market companies. “As organizations mature, they have to continuously innovate to get more business value from their IT operations and are constantly looking for tools that deliver results,” said Rajesh Ganesan, director of product management at ManageEngine. “We at ManageEngine realize this need and have purpose-built ServiceDesk Plus with the optimal balance of features, customization and programmability, all without compromising ease of use. We thank Info-Tech Research Group for this recognition which we believe will help many mid-market companies make the right choice.” Vendor Landscape reports by Info-Tech Research Group recognize outstanding vendors in the technology marketplace. By assessing vendors on the strength of their offerings and their enterprise strategies, Info-Tech Research Group’s Vendor Landscape reports pay tribute to the contributions of exceptional vendors in particular categories. This report evaluated 13 vendors in the service desk market. ManageEngine came among the top three vendors ranked on the Value Index, which scores each vendor’s product offering and business strength relative to its price point.
News Bytes
Avaya unveils new framework Avaya has introduced an innovative framework to help enterprises deal with the security and efficiency challenges arising as the IoT, Big Data, and Digital Transformation push compute functions out to the edge of the network. The Avaya framework for the Everywhere Data Center addresses these challenges, introducing the Avaya Pivot operating platform and the Avaya Arc orchestration engine. Avaya also announced the Avaya VSP 8600, a modular Ethernet switch specifically designed to complement the unique capabilities of Avaya Pivot and Avaya Arc. The Avaya Pivot operating platform creates the ability to deploy virtualized network functions (VNFs) anywhere in the network. With the Avaya Arc orchestration engine, these functions can be automatically chained together into full-featured services using centralized policy-based tools. “The Avaya Pivot operating platform provides native NFV support on virtual machines or containers, including support for virtualized Network Operating Systems. As the complementary orchestration component, Avaya Arc provides a means to automate service deployment and create intentbased service chains. Ultimately, the Everywhere Data Center can reduce latency, cost and risk while preserving or enhancing scalability,” said Maan Al-Shakarchi, Head of Networking in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific, Avaya.
10 | May 2017
Sophos boosts capabilities to combat ransomware Sophos announced, that its next-generationantiransomware CryptoGuard technology is now available with its SophosServer Protection products. With this optimization, Sophos Server Protection now has signature-less detection capabilities to combat ransomware - similar to Sophos Intercept X for endpoints. In September 2016, Sophos launched SophosIntercept X with CryptoGuard, which stop the spontaneous encryption of data by ransomware within seconds of detection. By adding CryptoGuard to server security, Sophos is closing a critical gap by preventing ransomware attacks that could come in through rogue, guest or remote access users or other weaknesses in a company’s network. For example, if a company allows bring-your-own-laptops on the network, remote access for employees or is victimized by an insider cyber threat, servers become highly susceptible to ransomware. Additionally, network shares on servers are high-value targets as they contain proprietary financials, personally identifiable information and other key data, and should be protected as such. Dan Schiappa, senior vice president and general manager of Sophos’ Enduser and Network Security Groupssaid,“Anti-ransomware technology is a critical layer for the protection and ongoing accessibility of the information that resides on servers. Sophos has optimized its Server Protection products with CryptoGuard, adding another layer of next-gen protection to block this pervasive and highly-damaging cyber threat.”
Red Hat unveils OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native container application platform. While enabling enterprises like Swiss Railways, Produban and Pioneer to actively embrace cloud-native applications in mission-critical roles, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 also helps enterprises retain existing IT investments through expanded support for traditional business applications. As a leading contributor to both the docker and Kubernetes open source projects, Red Hat provides an enterprise-ready container platform based on Kubernetes 1.5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the integrated docker container runtime through the latest version of Red Hat’s container application platform. OpenShift provides a single platform designed to support both traditional and cloud-native applications, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 expands this broad application support with new capabilities. Ashesh Badani, GM, OpenShift, Red Hat says, “While containerized applications and associated infrastructure present a vision of enterprise IT’s future, traditional applications still function as the workhorse for modern businesses and should not be left behind as enterprises add next-generation services to their technology mix. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.5 provides a Kubernetes-based platform for traditional and cloudnative applications with the tools, greater security features and capabilities designed to retain existing IT investments while planning for future needs and business growth.”
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News In Detail
GISEC to highlight need for enhanced cybercrime support C
yber security experts from across the region and globe will discuss, debate and highlight the latest smart cities technology and service innovations at the Gulf Information Security Expo and Conference (GISEC) - the Middle East's largest cyber security event – which will run concurrently with the Internet of Things Expo (IoTx) from 2123 May at Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC). With an increasing number of cybercrimes and cyberattacks on regional government entities and private organisations, GISEC 2017 will shine its heavyweight spotlight on the need for MENA-based public and private companies operating across diverse industry verticals to invest in and establish solid cyber security framework. The Middle East Cyber Security market is projected to be worth USD22.14 billion by 2022, according to a MarketsandMarkets report. The pressing regional
12 | May 2017
need for enhanced cybercrime support infrastructure and further investment in cybercrime defence solutions has seen GISEC attract strategic government-level support from major public sector entities including Smart Dubai, Dubai Police and the recently-formed National Cybersecurity Centre for Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is responsible for shaping cyber security policy and spend in the region’s largest consumer market. A further 70 delegations from regional government departments responsible for cyber security and smart tech spend are confirmed to attend the events. GISEC 2017 will host more than 500 international delegates and 75-plus highprofile speakers from entities including GCHQ, the UK Government’s Communications Headquarters, the US Cyber Consequences Unit, HSBC, EasyJet, Wells Fargo and GSK among others. More than 6,000 visitors are expected across the three-day events.
In addition to sharing international best practices required to address the growing concern of cyberattacks and the rising number of high-profile hackings, GISEC 2017 will also debut an all-new ‘Start-up Pavilion’, where more than 50 start-ups, based or incubated in the UAE, will feature the latest cutting-edge products and solutions driving innovation in the smart tech sphere. Representatives from several start-ups will also be given the floor during a dedicated session at the GISEC Conference, where they will pitch their evolutionary concepts direct to the gathered audience. On a macro level, the GISEC Conference will explore opportunities, challenges and market needs across the regional cybersecurity sector. Specific focus topics will be on protection of critical fintech infrastructure, transportation, cyber investments, big data and more. “As Dubai and regional cities pursue their ambitions to become smart cities that
are more interconnected, cybersecurity issues have become a critical consideration, which require greater vigilance,” said Trixie LohMirmand, Senior Vice President, Exhibitions & Events Management, DWTC. “GISEC brings together world-leading figures and visionaries under one roof to discuss the best way forward to tackle various threats. Crucially, this year’s event has attracted strategic government-level support from a cross-section of the region’s largest ICT, smart tech and cybersecurity spenders – we are anticipating three days of insightful knowledge sharing, networking and dealmaking.” Key sponsors include DARKMATTER as the Cyber Security Innovation Partner, Digirobotics as the Smart Manufacturing Partner, Gulf Business Machines as the Official Security Solution Sponsor, Cisco and Spire Solutions as the Platinum Sponsors and Infowatch as the Panel Sponsor.
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Point2Point | Etisalat
of SMB products and services and driving visibility of these products. In addition, we have a dedicated team of agents for outbound sales. All together, these make up our comprehensive SMB go to market. Etisalat is the only telco in the region where about 45,000 of its 300,000 SMB customer base are managed by dedicated account managers.
John Lincoln Senior Vice President, SMB Etisalat
Driving the SMB focus John Lincoln, Senior Vice President, Small & Medium Business (SMB), Etisalat discusses how the service provider is committed to delivering greater value offers to all its SMB customers allowing them to run their businesses smoothly, build relationships and provide them long-term benefits. Elaborate on the SMB Business focus at Etisalat? We truly believe that Small and Medium Business (SMB) is an important segment for the country as it accounts for around 60% GDP of the UAE and employs around 90 % of the workforce. In the past few years, we have a dedicated unit for the SMB line of business. Typically, SMBs have been laggards in IT and we see a huge opportunity in driving their adoption of ICT and Digital services. If they digitalize their business, they will realize significant improvement in
14  |  May 2017
productivity benefits and profitability. What is your go to market strategy for SMB? We have been blessed to have the largest number of SMB customers in the UAE at about 300,000. They come in all sizes and requirements. We take the top Tier 1 SMB customers and they are managed by our own internal direct sales force. Their requirements are complex. Our internal direct sales force are based across the emirates. The next Tier 2 customers are also managed and have dedicated Account
Managers for them. Instead of doing it by ourselves, we have 8 premium business partners that have been selected on the basis of their capabilities as well understanding of the IT and telecom markets. Between them, there are roughly about 250 account managers to manage these Tier 2 accounts. For the rest of our SMB customer base, we use a pure acquisition model via our channel partners, and we have about 500 sales people that go door to door. Along with that, we have a Business Retail organization that is into dedicated selling
Elaborate on your current set of partners. Would you be adding more partners? The premium business partner model was launched in January this year prior to which we had only the acquisition partner model. Our current premium business partners are companies typically with several lines of businesses with an adequately sized workforce for sales, support etc. there is a VP to manage the SMB premium business partner sales force; he has a team who manage and support these partners. The P&L of each partner is known to us; how they are hired and the compensation to be paid to them- we insist on these terms for an optimal structure which we are best placed because of the expertise we have had. While the number of partners is sufficient for the moment, we will look at adding more partners as the penetration of the market increases and the trend towards digitalization of businesses increases, to reach out to companies that are IT laggards in terms of adoption of such solutions. As we go about educating SMBs the need to digitalize their business, more skills would be required.
"While the number of partners is sufficient for the moment, we will look at adding more partners as the penetration of the market increases and the trend towards digitalization of businesses increases, to reach out to companies that are IT laggards."
We will bring in more partners and are starting our formal ICT and digital partnership program. We will be happy to talk to more companies that are interested in serving the SMB market. They can take advantage of the fact that we already have an installed base of 300,000 SMB customers and are looking at various ways of enhancing our value propositions to our customers. We are looking for new partners for the ICT and digital line of business because the capabilities of many of our partners are in Telco and fixed solutions and while they are coming to speed with the new ICT and digital services capabilities, it is also important to bring in the experts from the ICT domain.
What are the major requirements that you see from SMB customers that you are ideally placed to offer? As I see it, SMBs typically have three kinds of needs. The first is their concern for value for money services that will offer predictability and transparency with a fixed outgoing amount per month. Since, cash is a constraint for most businesses, they want to free up their cash and focus on investment. So they want every capital cost moved to the OPEX model. The second need of SMBs is convenience; they don’t want to different vendors for different products and want to focus on their business. In short, they would prefer a onestop shop for solutions. The third aspect is that
SMBs want the complexity of IT taken away. They want someone to manage that. This is a universal need for SMBs. They may not typically have an in-house IT manager to fix the complexities while the larger ones may have and yet it would be a challenge to manage the IT side, which is easily achieved by getting someone like us to manage their IT services. What are the additional services you offer for SMBs? Today, we offer broadband service which gives you different symmetric and asymmetric speeds with dynamic IP; there is another product IDA (Internet Dedicated Access) with multiple speeds that customers require. There are specific requirements from customer for both speeds to be symmetric –uplink and downlink have to be equal. Their requirements are more complex usage compared to simpler broadband usage at home. We have a product which is called IDA Plus under which we manage the customer’s Internet connectivity end to end including the router. This service offers static IP addresses to enable you to host your own corporate email and web servers. We monitor the connectivity 24 by 7 from our NOC (Network Operations Center). We recently launched ‘Business in a Box’ for SMB
customers. For SMBs, the cost of installing a PBX and then going after the AMC for it is tedious. Then there is depreciation of the PBX. So we are offering an all-inonesolution which includes high-speed Internet, advanced telephony, zero upfront business devices, office applications and end-toend security. All the voice connections are managed and monitored by us. For every extension line a customer takes, we manage three of the customer’s devices. We also offer applications support. It is a very comprehensive offering finally a box that ticks all the boxes for SMBs! We are also going to offer other managed services soon one of which is managed security service which will include email security, web security, IPS etc or a combined Unified Threat Management solution. We are also going to soon look at offering virtual computing, with storage, backup options. There is an end to end services possibility for managing from computing to storage, security etc, which is why we are looking at partners with enhanced ICT expertise. What is your outlook about adoption of ITC and digital in SMB? I am quite bullish about this. We have hardly scratched the surface; only around 100,000 of the 300,000 SMB customers have business-grade fixed
broadband services. Maybe some are on mobile Internet. Possibly only around 15 % of them have proper websites for their businesses. Data will continue to explode which will increase the complexities. Most of these companies haven’t invested in new tools including CRM to manage sales or mobile device management which is a critical requirement in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) era. Smaller companies are at bigger risk than some of the larger ones. In the long run, such investments will bear profitable growth for their businesses. The UAE government is also investing in making the country an attractive hub for SMB companies. Digitalization technologies that enable better connectivity and access will be quite critical in achieving these objectives. How do you view your advantages in the Managed service segment? For pure core telecom services, we have only one competitor but for IT services, the competition is wide. There are many providers of managed services. But the question is who is best placed to offer these services starting from voice and internet access. To offer capex to opex options in the SMB segment, you need to make significant investments and take significant risk and we are best placed as an end to end provider. Our strategy is to offer much more for a little bit more to our SMB customers. So the focus is on adding more services and value. May 2017 | 15
TechKnow | Spire Solutions
New ways to protect Spire Solutions has been a Platinum sponsor of GISEC in the past and continues to be this year as well. Sanjeev Walia, CEO, Spire Solutions discusses some of the newer areas in security technologies they are focusing on at GISEC Sanjeev Walia CEO Spire Solutions
What are likely to be specific areas of focus on Spire’s agenda at GISEC? We see a great value from our participation in GISEC since the event brings in a focused set of visitors, including both prospective end users and partners. This year,our focus is to showcase technologies that will help enterprises take a proactive and methodical approach to secure their information. Our expert team along with key technology partners will be available to discuss and addresssome of the most pressing issues in and around cyber security. Among our specific areas of focus, one would be Deception Technology, which is arevolutionary new way to detect stealthy, targeted cyber-attacks that don’t involve malware. A second focus area would be Endpoint Security and Automated Threat Hunting that will look to prevent compromises, stop ongoing attacks and to automate the hunt for the next generation of attacks. Finally, Closed Loop Vulnerability Management, the ability to monitor vulnerabilities across infrastructure, cloud instances and all endpoints is also a key area.
16 | May 2017
Have you added any new solutions? We’ve recently partnered with Endgame to introduce endpoint protection and threat hunting to the Middle East region. Endgame is the only endpoint security platform that stops advanced attackers at the right time to prevent any data theft or damage.Endgame’s endpoint security platform combines full stack prevention, detection, and threat hunting in a single dissolvable sensor to eliminate new and already-entrenched adversaries without prior threat intelligence. Which verticals have been looking proactive in terms of spending on IT security? We have seen interest from all the verticals – the fear of becoming victims of next big cyber-attack is a major reason for businesses willing to spend more on cybersecurity tools and services. There are some enterprises who have come forward with increased budgets to combat cybercrimesconsidering the recent hacks in the region. There will be significant investments in security services such as managed detection and response, as
organizations are facing challenges in deploying, managing and using tools to detect the next generation of attacks. There region presents a significant opportunity to us as there are many organizations that still need to boost their network security infrastructure. What are the major highlights from the year in terms of partner engagement initiatives? We have recently introduced a new rewards program (we believe the most generously rewarding in our area) to partners for the business value they bring. The Spire Partner Rewards Program is open to channel partners in the Middle East and Africa. It allows partners to sell eligible solutions from our portfolio to earn significant rewards. The launch of this rewards program is an exciting addition to our partner engagement initiatives. As part of our channel partner program, all our partners have access to a range of benefits including exclusive product information and sales tools, special invitations to events and conferences, technical enablement and pre-sales support.
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Cover Feature | Digital Transformation
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On the ‘digital first’ journey SMB organizations need digital transformation initiatives that improve capabilities to compete and collaborate
18 | May 2017
or a Business, digital transformation is about enabling itself by adopting various disruptive, relevant technologies to leapfrog in terms of capabilities and grab the opportunity to be one of the industry’s best. The opportunity is much more salient for an SMB to help it scale up and compete. While digital transformation may vary from company to company, there are some pivots around which the transformation hinges which are popularly referred to as 3rd platform technologies (cloud, big data/analytics, social, and mobile). According to Ralph Hauter, President of Microsoft Asia, data, cloud and analytics are the three pillars which are driving the transformation wave. He refers to the impact as an unstoppable force enabling digital disruption, which will impact all organizations, all industries, all roles. Digital transformation revolves around the adoption of IT transformation, by adopting tools of the 3rd platform. The Businesses that are laggards in adopting these new tools run the risk of falling behind peers. A recent study conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG ) and commissioned by Dell EMC shows 95% of survey respondents indicate their organisations are at risk of falling behind a smaller group of industry peers that are transforming their IT infrastructures, processes and delivery methods to accelerate their goals of becoming digital businesses. Siloed infrastructuresand rigid legacy architectures are seen as being barriers to undertaking a successful digital
transformation. Embedding capabilities in the organization to leverage IT resources in accelerating product innovation and time to market needs to be part of the transformation objectives. According to Mohammed Amin, Senior Vice President, Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Dell EMC, “These findings mirror how the vast majority of customers are telling us they need to optimise their existing infrastructures to take advantage of digitalage opportunities. However, the research shows that most respondents are falling behind a small and elite set of competitors who have cracked the IT Transformation code, and they’re competing more vigorously because of it. As organisations progress in their IT Transformation investments, they can overcome the conflict between legacy IT and digital business initiatives to realize their goals, speed time to market and increase competitiveness.” IT transformation is indeed a key pillar in the transformation initiatives, towards helping streamline Business processes and enhance customer interactions and experience. According to Shadi Salama, Channel Leader – Middle East, Cisco, “Technology has changed the way we work and live. Businesses are becoming more efficient, consumers are making better-informed decisions and whole industries are being transformed as the real impact of technology becomes clear. From healthcare to transport and beyond, the shift to digital ways of thinking is helping to
streamline processes, remove inefficiency and create better experiences for patients, passengers and the general public alike.” For mid-market companies grappling with the need to transform towards the new ways of doing Business, there is a need for having a scalable infrastructure in place and the cloud is the easiest way to go about having this. Khalid Khan, Director of Midmarket and Cloud, MEA & APAC, Avaya says, “Midmarket companies face the same challenges from digital disruption as larger enterprises but too often vendors either focus on their larger enterprise customers, or provide consumer-level solutions that don’t deliver the scalability companies need. While very small companies are often able to take the plunge and leverage new trends such as the cloud, mid-market companies may not have as much flexibility and agility to adapt.” He adds, “However, mid-sized companies are clearly moving to the cloud today with the objective of streamlining processes and restructuring their business models for the purpose of greater profitability and to gain that competitive advantage. The good news is that moving to the cloud doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience. Cloud migration is not a blackand-white, in-or-out decision, it can be a continuum.” Along with cloud technologies that have radically transformed the way IT is purchased and consumed, one of the other transformational drivers is the rapid increase
Shadi Salama Channel Leader, Middle East Cisco
in the number of connected devices. This is expected to continue expanding data volumes that is generated. Cisco forecasts that connected devices will grow to 50 billion by 2020. From buildings to buses, energy grids to wild life, everything is being connected and what that means is the massive, unprecedented rise in the number of sources of data intelligence that can impact Business operations and customer experience. “Almost everywhere, opportunity awaits – not just in tech-friendly vertical sectors such as energy and retail but in arts and entertainment, manufacturing, agriculture waste management, financial services, real estate, and education to name some. The Internet of Things (IoT) is introducing a new era of technology which will
transform nearly every industry including the SMB segment to change the way we live and work,” opines Shadi. IoT is a game changer as it takes networking technology to places where it was once unavailable or impractical and allows Businesses to extract intelligence for operational benefits from different sources of data. However, the challenge for companies is to build the right infrastructure, says Shadi and adds that small businesses face changing requirements of scale and data management, and need standards-based infrastructure that is highly secure and interoperable. Shadi says, “The connection of devices, machines, and things allows small businesses to dynamically generate, analyze and communicate intelligence data, increase May 2017 | 19
Cover Feature | Digital Transformation
Five steps SMBs should take to ensure both shortand long-term success (by Shadi Salama, Channel Leader – Middle East, Cisco)
1. Become a Digital Company Digital transformation will enable them to innovate faster and achieve their desired business outcomes. Digitization should be across technology (data), people, and processes. Data analytics will be an important element to ensure availability of high-quality, actionable, trusted, and complete data.
Khalid Khan Director, Midmarket & Clolud, MEA & APAC Aavaya
2. Develop a Workforce for the Future Must become agile enough to compete in the IoE era, where employees must possess an optimal mix of technical skills, industry knowledge, and business acumen.
3. Integrate IT and OT Companies could improve end-to-end business efficiency when they integrate the IT and OT (operational technologies) segments of business. They must begin to build a culture of communication, collaboration, and coordination between these teams, strongly supported by company leadership.
4. Ensure End-to-End Cybersecurity To help mitigate cybersecurity risks, as well as prepare for future industry developments, companies need to put a strong security policy in place and deploy threatcentric security solutions that will help them gain visibility of the assets, protocols, users, applications, and traffic patterns on the control network to develop a picture of what is “normal” for that environment. They need to classify assets and systems based upon their value to maintaining operations, and build out defenses for the critical assets and systems first. Regularly test, review, and update defenses and policies. Being “secure” is temporal, as threats and attack techniques constantly evolve. Therefore, defenses should be regularly tested and modified, as needed.
5. Innovate for Growth SMBs must always look beyond their horizons for opportunities to innovate and create growth.
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operational efficiencies, and power new and greatly improved business models. The IoT is creating value by lowering costs, improving employee productivity, generating new revenue avenues and enhancing citizen benefits. For SMBs, the benefits include improvements in innovation, supply chain and asset utilization.” SMB entities are ramping up capabilities to compete and collaborate. UC technologies play a key part as well in these efforts. According to Khalid, in the communications and collaboration space, they are witnessing strong interest in hybrid deployments – with companies looking to maintain their legacy investment while looking at moving new applications such as voice, video, and contact center, into the cloud. “With Avaya IP Office, we offer a solution that can fit the needs of 98 percent of all businesses out there, and we can offer it in on-premises,
hybrid cloud, or pure cloud models. That means businesses can move to the cloud at their own pace and path, adding new features and capabilities to the cloud as they become needed, or while leveraging their existing investments,” he adds. With possibly covering the largest number of Businesses in the country, the SME segment is often seen as the key segment contributing to economic growth and employment. The need to boost the competitiveness of the Businesses in this segment is therefore an urgent concern, which the path towards a digitalization of their businesses can greatly address. Khalid says, “The SME sector has the potential to be one of the key drivers in the country where the Expo 2020 is rightly believed to bring massive opportunity to the sector. The sector in this region is one of the fastest evolving sectors and has become crucial in promoting competitiveness and introducing new products
or techniques to the changing market dynamics around the world.” Accompanying this growth and evolution are issues that were previously considered only in larger enterprise organizations. Security challenges, customer experiences etc are factors coming to the fore that need to be addressed. “New technologies are today powerful drivers of middle market empowerment and the SME sector today is looking to have enterprisegrade solutions that provide the right kind of security and agility they need. While the government is equally supportive of the growth of this sector and actively encourages innovation and enables productivity, costs remain a key concern. In order to shoulder this responsibility of innovation, this sector is increasingly recognizing the importance of the adoption
“The SMB in this region is one of the fastest evolving sectors and has become crucial in promoting competitiveness and introducing new products or techniques in response to the changing market dynamics around the world.”
of digital transformation as a must to deliver the customer experience that tech-savvy consumers in this region expect with cost-effective, scalable solutions that can evolve as the SME grows.” According to Shadi, IoT is offering a whole new level of opportunity in technology leadership for SMB sector companies. IT is in the spotlight to enable actionable information, build new connections and open new revenue streams for SMB organizations throughout the Middle East region. As SMB’s continue to invest in technology today and in the future, the implications, he says will be transformational and he elaborates on how Cisco is enabling SMBs on this journey. “Cisco helps SMB’s develop
business agility by providing solutions to manage and store data in the cloud and data center that can improve productivity and operational efficiency today, while laying the foundation for tomorrow's IoT opportunities, Cisco takes care of it all. With our IoT products, organizations can expect new operational efficiencies, improved safety and security, distributed intelligence and control, faster and better decision making and new business opportunities and revenue streams.” The opportunity is quite ripe for Businesses to move rapidly towards adopting new ways of doing Business. And partners who themselves need to accomplish digital transformation milestones in their Businesses would
have a larger role in enabling the large number of diversified SMB/ SME companies travel on this journey towards digital transformation. “To better enable our channel partners to meet the needs of their customers for this migration, we’ve recently launched the “Powered by Avaya” cloud offering.The “Powered by Avaya” cloud offering enables channel partners to deliver Avaya’s unified communications (UC), contact centre (CC) and video conferencing (VC) solutions in the way that best meets their end-user customers’ needs.” In sum, the need of the hour for SMB companies is to identify objectives and target milestones in achieving a digital transformation in the ways they transact Business or face the threat of being left out of the reckoning to be among their industry’s best.
Transformation as a top priority
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n unsettled global political environment has not shifted CEOs' focus on profits and growth in 2017. Growth is the No. 1 business priority for 58 percent of CEOs, according to a recent survey of 388 CEOs by Gartner. This is up from 42 percent in 2016. Product improvement and technology are the biggest-rising priorities for CEOs in 2017. According to the agency, almost twice as many CEOs are intent on building up in-house technology and digital capabilities as those plan on outsourcing it (57 percent and 29 percent, respectively). Forty-seven percent of CEOs are being
challenged by the board of directors to make progress in digital business, and 56 percent said that their digital improvements have already improved profits. According to Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner Fellow, "CEO understanding of the benefits of a digital business strategy is improving," said Raskino. "They are able to describe it more specifically. Although a significant number of CEOs still mention e-commerce or digital marketing, more of them align it to advanced business ideas, such as digital product and service innovation, the Internet of Things, or
digital platforms and ecosystems." CEOs have also progressed in their digital business endeavors. Twenty percent of CEOs are now taking a "digitalfirst" approach to business change. "This might mean, for example, creating the first version of a new business process or in the form of a mobile app," said Raskino. "Twenty-two percent are taking digital to the core of their enterprise models. That's where the product, service and business model are being changed and the new digital capabilities that support those are becoming core competencies." May 2017 | 21
Point2Point | D-Link and are still adding more products to the portfolio. Elaborate on how you are enabling resellers who have been largely on the volume business upskill to SMB Business with your solutions? SMB is one of the key segment in the region because a large majority of the businesses fall into the SMB category. This offers huge opportunities for our partners to offer affordable solutions to their customers. Understanding each SMB’s business requirements and developing some domain expertise will lead to partners offering the right solutions that help these small businesses to thrive and increase productivity. At D-Link we have been rolling out training initiatives and certification programs for resellers to help them develop domain expertise that aid them to implement our solutions at the end user competently and with confidence.
Sakkeer Hussain Director - Sales & Marketing D-Link Middle East & Africa
Value for the mid-market Sakkeer Hussain, Director - Sales and Marketing, D-Link Middle East and Africa (MEA) opines that despite the tough prevailing market conditions in the Middle East IT industry, the SMB networking segment remains one of the fast growing sectors, offering more opportunities for solution providers to provide products and services to their clients Discuss SMB solutions focus by D-Link in region and initiatives you had launched over the past few months? SMB solutions have been one of the key focus areas for D-Link since long time. We have unveiledSMB products and have developed partner programs to cater to the segment’s requirements. We have a dedicated SMB solutions team within D-Link and with our distributors to serve the region. There are various training programs targeting both partner and end customers that are conducted regularly. We have a dedicated training and product experience zone in our office in Jebel Ali.
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There are also various promotions and incentive schemes in place regularly to help our partners to help them sell. Elaborate the major verticals that you are focusing on in terms of opportunity – is IP surveillance for instance a significant focus? IP surveillance, wireless and switching are key areas where most of the SMB requirements are focused now and we forecast a big leap in surveillance business in the near future due to latest policy in the region. We already have a huge line-up of surveillance range of products
Discuss new recent or upcoming launches across SMB product lines? We keep expanding our product portfolio on a regular basis. We have a couple of models added recently in our smart switches family and we are getting affordable IP Camera range to compete with CCTV camera models with aggressive pricing. Also you will see large NVR with H.265 features available in our portfolio soon. Elaborate on the next business day warranty replacement program? Next business day replacement will be the first of the kind initiative by a vendor in the region as the service comes free of cost for the end customer. The service is part of the value-added services D-Link is offering channel partners to help them grow and strengthen their customer relationships by providing them with the ability to differentiate themselves among other competitor brands. End-user customers can now maintain their critical networks with minimum down-time without the added costs of purchasing extra NBD replacement support and can directly register themselves for the D-Link NBD program for free.We will expand the NDB support to other regions and include more business products to the list later this year.
Point2Point | Sage
Keith Fenner Vice President Sage Enterprise, MEA
On the cloud trail with partners Sage offers flexible, integrated and scalable solutions for organizations ranging from start-ups to scale-ups, to mid-sized and larger enterprises. Keith Fenner, Vice President Sage Enterprise Africa and Middle East discusses the company’s cloud first focus and partner enablement
Discuss the cloud focus at Sage It is definitely cloud first strategy for us. Having said that, wholesale transition to cloud is not a possibility and our customers aren’t interested in that anyway. We are pegging our money in three market segments on three cloud products. The enterprise product will always be available as on premise version as well as a multi-tenancy cloud product. Then there is the enterprise cloud which would be the private cloud product for customers who have their own development environments, test environments. The interesting thing Our R&D roadmap for Sage X3 delivers to cloud first in iterative updates. Every week, every 2 weeks, every month, the cloud is being updated as you can imagine; it is elastic R&D. Every 6 months to 12 months, we collect all of those updates and create an on-premises patch. So this is an instance of cloud first focus. While our focus is the cloud for the future, we know that our customers are going to move to the cloud at their own pace. Which is why we still offer onpremises options, in the enterprise space. What is the feedback from customers on cloud adoption? Every customer conversation we are having in the region now involves cloud, whether they are transacting cloud or not. They typically are keen to know about Sage’s cloud strategy, when they could take cloud on, whether they can come off cloud if they don’t like it and what is our strategy towards data in the region with legislative requirements. Our strategy is to deliver to the UAE and Saudi data centers for now which covers large part of the region. In short, our cloud is strategy is quite focused and we are offering a choice that other vendors aren’t. However, at the moment, most transactions are still with on-premises editions. How will the cloud delivery model unfold and how does the channel
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Point2Point | Sage
"The focus now with the roadshows we have been doing is to build up the brand in the enterprise segment. We want to become regarded as an enterprise player along with the names that have been traditionally considered as enterprise players."
benefit? We have an agreement with a provider that runs the datacenter in UAE and Saudi Arabia and are in process of authentication and certification of the data centers. Within the cloud model, the contract is between us and the customer. We have worked towards the model wherein Sage is the contractor where it is our responsibility for the data center, obviously on a back to back agreement. As our business model is via the channel, we are protecting the partner who still has the margins and does the services. While it does take some consulting time off for the partners with the software being preloaded on the cloud, we hand it to the partners for all further services. How has the public cloud model worked until now for Sage in the region? What options do you offer to customers? Prior to now, customers in the region have had the choice of running our X3 cloud from Amazon AWS. But there have concerns about need for data to reside in local data centers with reference to local legislative requirements in some countries. We have to be vigilant on that and deliver solution to address the challenges. There have also been issues of latency in some countries as well. If customers are comfortable of running the solution in the public cloud, they can do it. We also offer the private cloud options for customers who want customization and then there is the local hosting option to round off.
How are you enabling partners in the cloud Business? We have been explaining to partners the importance of moving to a cloud based services model from the traditional way of Business. We have our ways of enabling partners towards the cloud model. All partners, technically, can sell both cloud and on premises options.
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However, there is a difference in just flaunting a cloud logo and in being actively involved in driving the digital transformation towards the cloud in the market place. We are committed to this education towards helping them make this transformation. We have some great business incentives to encourage the transition. And I would reiterate the point that we are a channel focused company and in the cloud model, while we are the contractor, the channel is the services element behind the contract. Discuss the customer preference for private cloud deployment? Customers running for critical environments tend to prefer private cloud options. For ERP covering big sites with a lot of integrations and significant customization, where our customers are stepping out of Sage X3 best practice processes and are building their own best practices or changing them a bit, they probably have a large IT team and will want to control their upgrade path, have a sandbox up in the cloud, have their test and development services etc. That is a different world altogether and they are quite comfortable with the private cloud which offer them better security, backup as well as DR options etc. How do you see yourself across the different customer segments? What is the emphasis on the enterprise part? We have three distinct segments for our products- start-up, scale-up and enterprise. Sage 50 which is Peachtree is for start-ups. We have four versions which are Sage 50 US, Sage 50UK, Sage 50Canada and Sage 50Middle East. The strategy is to get every customer in the region to get on to the Sage-Middle East version which does transactions upto 3 decimal places. That is a process which
will take time as it involves a huge number of customers. The change would be the introduction of the cloud based start-up product Sage One in the region when we do it. We have some work ahead of that including Arabisation and we would like to hit the road to the market hard when we have it ready and look at offering a difference. In the scale up segment, Sage 300 is growing in the region and has a lot of partners transacting. The cloud version is Sage live. In fact, for long, the scale up and the start-up segments have been the traditional strongholds for Sage and we have been regarded as a mid-market player. The focus now with the roadshows we have been doing is to build up the brand in the enterprise segment. We want to become regarded as an enterprise player along with the names that have been traditionally considered as enterprise players. Our brand awareness needs to be enhanced on the enterprise side but having said that, we have been closing some great enterprise deals in the region. In Africa, we are pretty strong on the enterprise and we will look to replicate that here. Discuss outlook for growth and the partner focus? We grew our business globally by 74% last year and partners are a key part of our growth focus. In the cloud model, while Sage is the contractor ultimately, in services the channel is involved. While we don’t have a post sales team but we do run a quality team that will check the integrity and sign off the project milestones, which gives the assurance to customers. We have some very larger partners that are making sizeable investments in growing the business. We have around 25 consultants that are responsible for consultation, implementation, BPR, change management etc.
Insight | F5 Networks
Lori MacVittie Principal Technical Evangelist F5 Networks
SaaS and network automation The success of SaaS is largely due to companies being able to identify and encapsulate in software commoditized business processes. The same holds true for network and infrastructure teams inside the business writes Lori MacVittie, Principal Technical Evangelist at F5 Networks
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aaS (Software as a Service) is the largest of the “cloud” markets today. In spite of the excitement around IaaS (like AWS and Azure and Google Cloud), the reality is that SaaS has far outpaced all other forms of “cloud” in terms of adoption rates and continued growth.
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And it hasn’t shown signs of stopping. A poll in early 2016 illustrated this continued explosion of SaaS, with respondents reporting that the number of SaaS apps officially supported by IT growing 50% in merely one year, rising from 8 in 2015 to 12 in 2016. The
report predicts that number will grow again, hitting 17 in 2017. Considering that “cloud” is now ten years old, that’s some pretty impressive adoption rates for what are traditionally considered pretty standard applications. We are talking about CRM, ERP, CMS, and productivity-related office suites and file sharing sites. You’re probably wondering what SaaS has to do with automating infrastructure. These are apples and steak, after all. Automating provisioning and scale in the network is not anything like SaaS. Except it kind of is. Bear with me a moment, I’ll explain. See, one of the common themes running through all SaaS applications is commoditization of function. Drag and drop for file sharing is a pretty well-understood paradigm for sharing files, whether it’s on the desktop using shared folders on the network or using a browserbased interface. Same thing for documents and presentations, and even publishing content. There’s a pretty well-defined process that defines how one goes about doing X or Y, and whether the interface is a web-browser or a stand-alone app doesn’t really change the process, just the icons and interface. Many business functions, too, are highly standardized (commoditized). The process a customer service representative (CSR) follows upon answering your very important call (and it really is, they all assure us it is) is likely very much the same regardless
of who you’re interacting with. Calling the cable company or a retail firm about an order nets you a fairly standardized experience. But don’t take just my word for it, here’s a great article from Harvard Business Review (from 2005) discussing this very convergence on process standardization that would, shortly thereafter, lead to the phenomenon now known as “SaaS.” “Standard processes also allow easier outsourcing of process capabilities. In order to effectively outsource processes, organizations need a means of evaluating three things in addition to cost. First is the external provider’s set of activities and how they flow. Since companies have not reached consensus on just what comprises cost accounting or HR benefits management, for example, it remains ambiguous what services should be performed between buyers and providers. Therefore, organizations need a set of standards for process activities so that they can communicate easily and efficiently when discussing outsourced processes. These process activity and flow standards are beginning to emerge in a variety of businesses and industries. Some are the result of efforts by process groups such as the Supply-Chain Council, which has more than 800 businesses as members.” Source: The Coming Commoditization of Processes, HBR June 2005 Once any process is standardized (commoditized) it becomes pretty easy to
codify and slap a front end on it that you can sell. And I’d posit that it was the underlying commoditization of those business functions that helped propel early SaaS providers to stardom. With a basic data model and interface, it was pretty easy to provide the minimal customization required by customers to make the process match the customer’s needs. Voila. Instant success. Now let’s apply that to infrastructure and the network. There are quite a few processes related to provisioning, management, and scale that are so commoditized across applications that netops can type the commands required in their sleep. The only
deviations are applicationspecific variables like ports and IP addresses and routes. These are the changes that change review boards like, because they don’t have to think about them. “Oh, you’re going to add a firewall rule for that app. Approved.” Like the attention required of netops to execute them, their approval requires very little consideration because it’s been done a hundred times, the process is always the same, and everybody knows what’s going on. They’re consistent, predictable, and repeatable.
Approved. These are the commoditized processes internal to IT that
are ripe for automation and orchestration. These are the best places to start if you’re looking for quick wins to prove out the business value of investing in automation efforts. Build an interface atop that commoditized process, and shim it into the process (integration) in place of the manual methods being used today. Voila. You’ve reduced the costs of executing that process and as an added benefit, it’ll go faster because you didn’t have to wait for the next change control board meeting (you might be able to skip it, in fact, which is like a benefit all to itself). Yes, it requires time and probably money (and maybe investment in tool and
training) but the short time costs are going to pay off in the long run. Automating time consuming, commoditized processes frees up engineers and architects to work on other projects. Projects that aren’t likely to be automatically approved by the change control board. SaaS wins when it looks at a business, understands a common process, and provides an easier, faster way to navigate it. That was true in 2006 and it remains true today. The same is true for infrastructure automation efforts. Find the common processes and provide an easier, faster way to navigate them – whether it’s for the “end user” or other engineers.
May 2017 | 29
Insight | McAfee Labs
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Vincent Weafer Vice President McAfee Labs
Challenges in sharing Threat Intelligence Vincent Weafer, Vice President, McAfee Labs discusses at length the five critical challenges faced by security vendors and organizations that want to incorporate valuable intelligence into their security operations
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utomated threat intelligence sharing is not new but it is still in its early years. During the past several years, the industry has invested in machine generation and machine consumption of tactical threat data. Most data consists of event logs and indicators of compromise such as file hashes, suspicious URLs, and IP addresses. These indicators are very time sensitive, and lose value almost immediately. At the same time, the volume and quality of this data creates new challenges. It is hard to identify high-quality, actionable indicators among the flood of information, making triage difficult for security analysts. Although the industry has built tactical intelligence sharing capabilities, especially among each company’s own products, the industry still fails at sharing high-level, contextually rich intelligence, such as advanced campaigns, at a meaningful level and with other industry participants. Five critical challenges face security vendors and organizations that want to incorporate this valuable intelligence into their security operations. They are volume, validation, quality, speed, and correlation.
Volume During the past few years, the deployment of enhanced and verbose security sensors and defenses has resulted in a high volume of data fed into threat intelligence tools. Big data analytics and machine-learning tools consume this data and add their analyses to it. The net effect is an improvement
in internal capabilities to detect potential attacks and a marked increase in internal threat detection, but a massive signal-to-noise problem remains to be solved. Although the systems are getting better at detection, we have not yet seen a corresponding improvement in the capability of human analysts to triage, process, and act on the intelligence. Vendors are working on solutions to address this problem, from access monitors on sensitive data to sophisticated sandboxes and traps that can resolve contextual clues about a potential attack or suspicious event. Further automation and process orchestration is essential to augment human capacity.
Validation Disinformation and fake news are not new. Adversaries may file false threat reports to mislead or overwhelm threat intelligence systems. As a result, it is essential to validate the sources of shared threat intelligence, from both inside and outside the organization. Outside validation is perhaps the more obvious requirement, ensuring that incoming threat intelligence is being sent by legitimate sources and has not been tampered with in transit. This is typically accomplished with encryption, hashes, and other methods of digitally signing content. Internal validation is a different problem, not so much validating the sources as analyzing and evaluating the content to determine if it is a legitimate attack or a
"Five critical challenges face security vendors and organizations that want to incorporate this valuable intelligence into their security operations. They are volume, validation, quality, speed, and correlation."
noisy distraction to draw attention and resources away from a quieter, stealthier threat.
Quality Related to source validation is the quality of the information we share. Legitimate sources can send anything from definitive indicators of attack or compromise to their entire event feed, which may be of little or no relevance to the receiver. Although more threat intelligence is generally better, much of it is duplicated, and too much low-quality intelligence is of little value. Many threat exchanges are coming online, but they are only as good as their inputs and sensors. Vendors need to rearchitect security sensors to capture and communicate richer trace data to help decision-support systems identify key structural elements of a persistent attack. Filters, tags, and deduplication are critical intake tasks to automate in order to increase the value of threat intelligence and make it actionable. An early, promising effort to improve threat intelligence
quality will come online in 2017 through the Cyber Threat Alliance. Threat intelligence coming from CTA members will be automatically scored for its quality, and members will be able to draw out threat intelligence only if they have provided sufficient quality input.
Speed The speed of transmission, or more accurately, the latency between a threat detection and the reception of critical intelligence, is also an important attribute. Intelligence received too late to prevent an attack is still valuable, but only for the clean-up process. This is one reason why open and standardized communication protocols, designed and optimized for sharing threat intelligence, are essential to successful threat intelligence operations. The propagation of attacks between systems happens within a minute or two of a machine’s being compromised,
so communications between sensors and systems within the enterprise have to operate in near real time. Meanwhile, advanced persistent threats and sophisticated, targeted campaigns often go after multiple organizations in the same vertical market, so communications from one organization to another, usually involving an intermediary or exchange, have to take place within a few hours of the first indication of an attack.
Correlation Finally, as threat intelligence is received, correlating the information—while looking for patterns and key data points relevant to the organization—is the most critical step. Although some organizations treat the raw data as a proprietary or competitive advantage, the ability to collect data is not a critical factor. It is the processing that turns data first into intelligence and then into knowledge that can inform
and direct the security operations teams. The ability to validate data in near real time, correlate it across multiple operating systems, devices, and networks, use it to triage the event, prioritize the investigation, and scope the response is critical to provide effective detection and corrections actions. The goal is to leverage technologies and machine capabilities to triage event data, distil it into highquality events, and scope and prioritize the incidents so that security analysts can focus their attention on the highestrisk items. Together, these issues describe threat intelligence sharing’s “last mile” problem: taking this information and converting it to controlled action. To cover this last mile we need to find better ways to share threat intelligence between a vendor’s products and with other vendors, improve methods to automatically identify relationships between the intelligence collected, and employ machine assistance to simplify triage.
Focus on cyber threat research
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cAfee LLC, announced it will increase investments and resources in cyber threat research. As a proof point of this commitment, McAfee released evidence that a series of Shamoon malware campaigns targeting Saudi Arabia are the work of one coordinated force of attackers, rather than that of multiple independent renegade hacker groups.
McAfee’s new investment will focus on investigations of the global threat landscape’s most sophisticated cyberwarfare and cybercrime campaigns. In investigating the latest threats, their design, and how they are built into cyberattack campaigns, McAfee will then look to help customers better understand the technology and tactics of their adversaries.
Areas of increased focus will include advanced malware, ransomware, financial fraud, general cybercrime, cyber espionage, cyberwarfare, and protection of industrial control systems. McAfee will also provide cyber security professionals the McAfee Threat Landscape Dashboard, an overview of the latest, most significant threats tracked by McAfee researchers. May 2017 | 31
EyeTech
A10 Harmony Controller Overview: A10 Networks has unveiled the A10 Harmony Controller, a solution that bridges data center and multi-cloud environments and takes application performance and security analytics to the next level. The new platform is the industry’s only multi-cloud, multi-service solution that centrally coordinates secure application services and opensource solutions across hybrid environments. The new A10 Harmony Controller is built on microservices and container technologies to deliver a true multi-tenant and highly scalable controller architecture that delivers real-time, per-application analytics and centralized management and orchestration of secure application services across physical data centers and public, private and hybrid clouds, including VMware powered clouds, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. The result is unrivaled agility and flexibility in how secure application services are managed today and in the future. Key features: • Granular visibility empowers better security decisions, while achieving better application performance, which ultimately leads to improved customer satisfaction and swifter ROI. • With Harmony, from a single dashboard, system administrators can gain insight into application performance and proactively add scale and optimize infrastructure before there is any degradation to the end user experience. • Analytics are available across the customer’s entire application delivery infrastructure and available for A10 Lightning, A10 Thunder ADC and HAProxy open-source load balancers. • Per-application, per-URL and per-request analytics allow seamless management of application workloads across all modern hybrid deployments and data centers.
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WD Purple10TB HDD Overview: Western Digital announced the availability of the WD Purple10TB HDD, the newest meber of its high-capacity hard drive line for surveillance applications. With increased capacity and proven leadingedge technology, the WD Purple 10TB HDD is optimized for 24x7 video surveillance systems and up to 64 high-definition (HD) cameras in home and small business security environments. Optimized to withstand the demands of always-on DVR and NVR recording environments, 10TB WD Purple hard drives offer low power consumption, exclusive WD technologies and many advanced performance features Key features: • AllFrame 4K technology enhances ATA streaming support to helpreduce video frame loss with proprietary cache policy management technology to improve overall data flow and playback. WD Purple10TB HDDs include exclusive firmware enhancements that help protect against video pixilation and interruptions within a surveillance system. • Enabling higher storage capacity and lower power consumption, the WD Purple 10TB HDD uses thethirdgeneration of HelioSeal technology, which has been shipping for over three years and on over 12 million drives as of December 2016. • Designed for 24x7 operations with support for multi- bay systems with an annualized workload rating of 180 TB/year and tarnish-resistant components, WD Purple 10TB drives are ready for use in demanding high-performance, high-definition small- or large-scale surveillance systems • WD Purple hard drives are designed and tested to surveillance-class standards and are compatible with industry-leading chassis and chip-sets. Without a current industry standard, WD worked closely with surveillance partners to develop a proprietary benchmark to define and demonstrate performance in surveillance systems.
DiskStation DS1517+ and DS1817+ Overview: Synology has launched DiskStation DS1517+ and DS1817+ together with the Expansion Unit DX517. The powerful and scalable 5-bay and 8-bay tower servers offer a highperformance, reliable, and versatile network-attached storage solution for tech enthusiasts and small/mediumsized businesses. DS1517+ and DS1817+ offer tech enthusiasts and small businesses more storage options that bring outstanding performance and flexibility for intensive storage tasks. DS1517+ and DS1817+ are Synology's first two NAS supporting M.2 SSD, designed to solve the performance bottleneck for heavy workload applications and significantly reduce the I/O latency.Featuring a wide range of applications for backup, network management, and productivity, DS1517+ and DS1817+ can serve an integral role in office IT infrastructure. Synology has received numerous media accolades, such as topping the mid-range NAS category in TechTarget's storage solution survey Key features: • The exciting new feature in DS1517+ and DS1817+ is the inclusion of a PCIe slot, which allows users to install an optional 10GbE network interface card or Synology's new M2D17 M.2 SATA SSD adapter. • DS1517+ and DS1817+ both come in 2GB and 8GB memory configurations, which can be upgraded to 16GB thanks to the easily accessible memory compartment. • Installing an additional network interface card allows enthusiasts and businesses to take advantage of up to two 10GbE ports to boost maximum throughput. • When combined with the Intel Atom quad-core 2.4GHz processor and equipped with optional dual channel memory, DS1517+ and DS1817+ can deliver sequential throughput performance up to 1,179 MB/s reading and 542 MB/s writing speeds.
Genetec Security Center 5.6
Overview: Genetec announced general availability of its unified security platform Security Center 5.6. Key enhancements include more cybersecurity measures, a new HTML5-based web client, integration of SimonsVoss electronic locks and the Mercury Security MS Bridge, and the ability to enroll license plates as access control credentials with the AutoVuSharpV camera. Security Center 5.6 is now available globally. All Genetec Advantage subscribers will receive this update as part of the Genetec Lifecycle Management program. Version 5.6 stays consistent with the Genetec commitment for cybersecurity and ‘hardening’ measures and standards which address the changing nature of cyber threats and hazards. Key features: • The Security Center Web Client has been redesigned with HTML5 to offer users a more fluid and modern web experience. • With Genetec Plan Manager, operators can now monitor the live status of intrusion areas. And, embedded support for ESRI ArcGIS software adds rich layers of visual data so organizations benefit from greater context and insights of their surroundings. • Having recently become a Mercury Security Platinum Elite partner, Security Center 5.6 introduces a new integration with the Mercury MS Bridge to help end users migrate from proprietary or ‘integrated’ access control systems to a fully unified security platform. • Always expanding its ecosystem of access control hardware partners, Genetec has also integrated the SimonsVoss family of digital locks, and added a technology and distribution partnership with STid, a manufacturer of RFID contactless door readers. May 2017 | 33
Stats & Trends
Massive shift to hybrid infrastructure services underway
T
he growth of cloud and industrialized services and the decline of traditional data center outsourcing (DCO) indicate a massive shift toward hybrid infrastructure services, according to Gartner. In a report containing a series of predictions about IT infrastructure services, Gartner analysts said that by 2020, cloud, hosting and traditional infrastructure services will come in more or less at par in terms of spending. "As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organizations will shift toward more industrialized, less-tailored options," said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner. "Organizations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimize costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multisourced environment." Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities. The traditional DCO market is shrinking, according to Gartner's forecast data. Worldwide traditional DCO spending is expected to decline from $55.1 billion in 2016 to $45.2 billion in 2020. Cloud compute services, on the other hand, are expected to grow from $23.3 billion in 2016 to reach $68.4 billion in 2020. Spending on colocation and hosting is also expected to increase, from $53.9 billion in 2016 to $74.5 billion in 2020. In addition, infrastructure utility services (IUS) will grow from $21.3 billion in 2016 to $37 billion in 2020 and storage as a service will increase from $1.7 billion in 2016 to 2.7 billion in 2020. In 2016, traditional worldwide DCO and IUS together represented 49 percent of the $154 billion total data center services market worldwide, consisting of DCO/IUS, hosting and cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This is expected to tilt further toward cloud IaaS and hosting, and by 2020, DCO/IUS will be approximately 35 percent of the expected $228 billion worldwide data center services market. "This means that by 2020 traditional
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services will coexist with a minority share alongside the industrialized and digitalized services," said Mr. Mishra. A 2016 Gartner survey of 303 DCO reference customers worldwide found that 20 percent use hybrid infrastructure services and 20 percent more intend to get them in the next 12 months. Gartner also predicts that through 2020, data center and relevant "as a service" (aaS) pricing will continue to decline by at least 10 percent per year. From 2008 through 2016, Gartner pricing analysis of data center service offerings shows prices have dropped yearly by 5 percent to 7 percent for large deals and by 9 percent to 12 percent for smaller deals. More recently — from 2012 to the present — prices for the new aaS offerings, including IaaS and storage as a service, have dropped in similar to higher ranges. Traditional DCO vendors will exit the DCO market due to price pressure, while others will develop solution capabilities and continue to compete. Buyers will have the ability to choose between many more vendors, choose traditional or new solutions and achieve price reductions year over year through 2020. By 2019, 90 percent of native cloud IaaS providers will be forced out of this
market by the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-Microsoft duopoly. Over the last four years, the public cloud IaaS market has begun to develop two dominant leaders — AWS and Microsoft Azure — that are beginning to corner the market. In 2016, they both grew their cloud service businesses significantly while other players are sliding backward in comparison. Between them, they not only have many times the compute power of all other players, but they are also investing in innovative service and pricing offerings that others cannot match. According to Gartner, it is only in new markets that the dominance of AWS and Microsoft will be challenged by businesses such as Aliyun, the cloud service arm of Alibaba, the top player in China. "The competition between AWS and Azure in the IaaS market will benefit sourcing executives in the short to medium term but may be of concern in the longer term," said David Groombridge, research director at Gartner. "Lack of substantial competition for two key providers could lead to an uncompetitive market. This could see organizations locked into one platform by dependence on proprietary capabilities and potentially exposed to substantial price increases."
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