CXO Insight Middle East - Stepping up - April 2020

ISSUE 19 \ APRIL 2020

CONTENTS

44

PRODUCTS

12

18

24

10

SAFEGUARDING THE NEW NORMAL

FOR 28 APREPARING NEW REALITY

16

BUILDING A SECURITY CULTURE

THROUGH 30 LEADING UNCERTAIN TIMES

18

THE FUTURE IS PHYSICAL

32

THE JOURNEY TO UNIVERSAL PRIVILEGE MANAGEMENT

6

NEWS

EMIRATES POST TO UNVEIL DIGITAL LOCATION HAPPINESS INITIATIVE

WE NEED A DIFFERENT HOW SECURE IS 23 WHY APPROACH TO IoT SECURITY 39 THE CLOUD?H

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM ANNOUNCES EXPANSION TO THE MIDDLE EAST

SECURITY FOR HOW TO MANAGE 24 RETHINKING 43 IT AND OT CONVERGENCE LIFESPAN OF SSDS

DEWA MIGRATES ONPREMISE SAP TO MORO

PUBLISHED BY INSIGHT MEDIA & PUBLISHING LLC

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

3

SANS OnDemand SANS OnDemand courses are perfect for students who want the comprehensive content of a SANS course and the flexibility to train without the need to travel or take time from work.

Complete control over the pace of learning fits every learning style. Taught by SANS’s top instructors, our OnDemand courses are available via your desktop, laptop, iPad, or tablet, so you can learn from the comfort of your home, or on-the-go.

With 40+ SANS courses to choose from, you’ll have access to: Four months of content, available 24/7 You’ll have full access to your course content at any time during your training—which gives you control of your own pace, learning environment, and schedule. OnDemand gives you the freedom to train whenever and wherever it’s most convenient for you.

Lectures, quizzes, hands-on exercises, and virtual labs Along with 24/7 access to course content, you’ll also have access to all instructor lectures, class exercises, and the virtual labs associated with each module. With the ability to revisit and review complex or difficult topics, you’ll have plenty of time to master the content and reinforce what you’ve learned through real-world, hands-on exercises.

Subject-Matter Experts SANS Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs) are available at any point during your training to answer any questions you may have and to help break down complex topics. Accessible via online chat, our SMEs are there to ensure your success as a student and build your confidence with the content.

A complete set of books, course media, and course progress reports Everything you need to be a successful student is included with your course. Course booklets are sent to your door after registration; course media—including lectures, virtual labs, and hands-on exercises—are available online at any time during your training; and course progress reports help you stay on track, pick up where you left off, and plan your training schedule accordingly.

GIAC prep OnDemand courses are also a great way to help you prepare for a GIAC certification attempt. With extended access to course content, you’ll have plenty of time to review and master the material and study for the exam with confidence.

Visit sans.org/ online to find your course, check special offers, and get registered today!

EDITORIAL

BE PREPARED

C

ovid-19 is a human tragedy of mammoth proportions, forcing cities around the world into lock-down. Life, as we know it, has come to a standstill.

The global economic impact of Covid-19 is a staggering $2.7 trillion in lost output, and world GDP is estimated to shrink by around 7 percent in H1 2020.

The pandemic has warranted companies to think of leveraging technology for workforce continuity, and remote working is now becoming the new normal. IT leaders have been mandated by their boards to draft contingency plans and ensure IT systems can support a higher number of employees working from home or another location.

During a pandemic such as Covid-19, the go-to solution for many companies is to have their employees work from home. However, extending workplace environments is easier said than done.

While many large organisations may find it easy to embrace new ways of working, small and medium organisations often don’t have the resources or budget to make provision for remote access

infrastructure. The good news is that many tech companies are giving away their collaboration tools to enable people to work from home.

For CIOs, there has never been a more opportune time than now to show real leadership. To combat these uncertain times, Gartner says CIOs to have focus on two high-priority areas of tech – digital workplace resources and digital technologies to serve customer demand.

However, it is important to remember that digital workspace is more than just software and collaboration tools. It requires a total shift in mindset and has to be governed by processes and proper security controls. IT pros will have to look at new attack vectors when work becomes distributed, and tackle the challenge of data management and device sprawl. As the old saying goes, in every crisis, there is an opportunity.

This is a good time for organisations in the Middle East to rethink their risk management and business continuity practices and build in resilience to survive outbreaks like this one, which are expected to become more frequent and ferocious in the future.

Published by

Managing Editor Jeevan Thankappan jeevant@insightmediame.com +97156 - 4156425

Sales Director Merle Carrasco merlec@insightmediame.com +97155 - 1181730

Operations Director Rajeesh Nair rajeeshm@insightmediame.com +97155 - 9383094

Publication licensed by Sharjah Media City @Copyright 2020 Insight Media and Publishing

Production Head James Tharian jamest@insightmediame.com +97156 - 4945966

Administration Manager Fahida Afaf Bangod fahidaa@insightmediame.com +97156 - 5741456

Designer Anup Sathyan

While the publisher has made all efforts to ensure the accuracy of information in this magazine, they will not be held responsible for any errors

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

5

NEWS

EMIRATES POST TO UNVEIL DIGITAL LOCATION HAPPINESS INITIATIVE

Peter Somers, CEO, Emirates Post said, “A basic map pin on a website is just not good enough anymore. In January 2020, according to our GMB Insights data, our 101 Emirates Post Office branches were viewed on Google Maps over 9 million times alone. In addition, we had over 20,000 phone calls to the branches and more than 140,000 Click to Navigate to our various Post Office branches in that same month.

“This Click to Navigate data tells us that our customers find the branch and just go there. Ensuring that each

Emirates Post branch has the correct contact details, address and operating hours and other important data is essential to ensure our customer experience is a happy one. It’s just not Google either, we have visitors from nearly every country in the world who use many different digital platforms.

When these visitors want to buy a stamp or send a package, we want to be there for them to find our branch locations easily, regardless of digital platform or device.”

Emirates Post digital location management program is supported by a dedicated team of digital location specialists who monitor and ensure the accuracy of all the Emirates Post locations year-round. The team updates location operating hours during Ramadan, Eid and other national holidays. In addition, the team monitors for duplicate listings and user generated edits from the community and constantly on the lookout for more digital platforms to share the Emirates Post Office locations.

that was held in Washington DC in the United States. Organised by the Ministry, Invest Saudi, the US Chamber of Commerce and the US Commercial Service, the issuing marks a significant milestone for the California-based developer in the firm’s pursuit to commercialise the technology.

His Excellency Dr. Majed Al-Qasabi, Minister of Commerce and Media, presented the license to Tim Wilkinson, Executive Director, Strategy and Growth at Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO) in the presence of Her Royal Highness Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States, the Honourable John Abizaid, US Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Honourable Wilbur Ross, US Secretary of Commerce.

Wilkinson said, “Receiving the trade license from the Ministry of Investment, which has been a very smooth and swift process, marks a significant

steppingstone in our commitment to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

From here we intend to establish a permanent presence that would better enable us to invest in resources in the region and run our local operations.

The move marks important progress towards the commercialisation of hyperloop technology and could propel the country to the forefront of hyperloop development worldwide.”

The issuing of the trade license follows a recent announcement with the Ministry of Transport and the Public Transport Authority in Saudi Arabia to conduct the world’s first hyperloop study on a national level. Under the agreement, VHO will examine viable routes, expected demand, anticipated costs and explore socio-economic impacts. In addition, hyperloop is expected to create jobs and add to the local GDP and furthers the exchange of specialised knowledge, while creating the infrastructure for a connected Saudi Arabia.

E

mirates Post, the UAE’s postal and express provider, is testing a brand-new offering designed to ensure they are discoverable on today’s mobile digital mapping platforms, apps, search engines and in-vehicle navigation systems across any device.

The provider has embraced a digital location intelligence and management technology platform that enables Emirates Post business listings to be visible on key platforms.

This includes up-to-date contact information, exact location, and other important information that ensures the business will be accurately found on online and offline digital platforms such as Google Maps, Google Search, OK Google, Apple Maps, Siri, Here Maps, Facebook, TomTom Maps, WhatsApp, WeChat, Foursquare, 2GIS, THTC Maps, Instagram, Telegram, Factual, what3words, Careem, and Uber, among others.

SAUDI ARABIA PRESENTS VIRGIN HYPERLOOP ONE WITH TRADE LICENSE Saudi Arabia’s newly established Ministry of Investment (formerly SAGIA) presented Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO), with a trade license at the US-Saudi Arabia Business Forum

HE Dr. Majed Al-Qasabi, Minister of Commerce and Media, presented the trade license to Tim Wilkinson, Executive Director, Strategy and Growth at VH

6

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM ANNOUNCES EXPANSION TO THE MIDDLE EAST

G

oogle Cloud Platform has signed its first strategic collaboration agreement to launch a region in the Middle East with the Qatar Free Zones Authority (QFZA).

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions are the cornerstone of the company’s cloud infrastructure. Over the past four years, the platforms have grown in number to 22, with 67 zones across 16 countries, delivering high-performance, low latency, zero emissions, cloud-based services to users throughout the world.

Recently in a blog published by Google Cloud’s Dave Stiver, Senior Product Manager, GeoExpansion, the company announced expansion plans to newer regions, including Doha, Qatar in the region.

He stated, “The region will launch in Doha, Qatar, allowing new and existing customers, as well as partners, to run their workloads locally. We see

substantial interest from many customers in the Middle East and Africa.”

Stiver added that the company will launch additional cloud regions in Delhi (India), Melbourne (Australia) and Toronto (Canada).

He said, “Over the next year the firm will also open regions in Jakarta, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Seoul, and Warsaw.”

He explained that when it is launched, each region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions, launch with a portfolio of key GCP products, and offer lower latency to nearby users.

From redundant cloud regions to high-bandwidth connectivity via subsea cables, every aspect of the infrastructure is designed to deliver customers’ services to users, no matter where they are around the world, according to the firm.

When considering new regions, the company is prioritising to: • Provide multiple in-country disaster recovery options: Having multiple

AUTOWORLD DIGITALLY TRANSFORMS WITH INFOR CLOUDSUITE EQUIPMENT

Tariq Khoshhal, AutoWorld

Business cloud software player Infor has announced that Al-Jazira Equipment Co. Ltd. (commercially known as AutoWorld), a player in auto leasing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has selected Infor CloudSuite Equipment to help spearhead its digital transformation.

Infor CloudSuite Equipment will help support AutoWorld’s new digital transformation project, SWITCH, which is designed to accelerate the digitisation

of its business processes, particularly those related to operational leasing and maintenance of its fleet of vehicles, to achieve best practices across the board.

The company will use Infor’s solution to get an intuitive and streamlined approach to leasing management, such as a single entry point to manage the complete leasing flow: from leasing quotations, through to contract, vehicle dispatch, return, and invoicing — with built-in support for complex pricing, discount scenarios, bulk leasing, and more.

Moreover, AutoWorld will use Infor’s solution to standardise key business functions across its operations in Saudi Arabia with the aim of building a more effective workforce and delivering enhanced customer acquisition and retention.

“We’re focused on digitising our business in line with Saudi Vision 2030

regions in the same country gives you a secondary site for disaster recovery that lets you meet your business continuity requirements.

• Give you control of your data: The company understands its cloud services need to support the regulatory, security, and compliance requirements of global enterprises. Last year, it shared how to control where you put your data and who can access it, and it will continue to invest in data privacy, transparency, and security.

• Build with sustainability in mind: As more and more enterprises transition to the cloud, sustainable operations are seen as strategic to their business and they select partners who hold the same values.

and the National Digital Transformation Program, with the aim of simplifying, standardising, and transforming our business practices to deliver best-in-class services to our customers as highlighted in our recently developed business strategy, Shift 2025,” said Tariq Khoshhal, CEO, AutoWorld. “The depth and breadth of Infor’s CloudSuite Equipment solution will help us become even more competitive through the increased visibility of critical business information, the smooth flow of data between departments, and streamlined business processes across all of our offices.”

AutoWorld is headquartered in AlKhobar and has offices throughout Saudi Arabia, covering all major commercial and industrial cities.

The deployment of Infor CloudSuite Equipment is being managed by IT consulting firm Wipro and is expected to be live in July. This will lead to several customer service enhancements including improved after-sales service and customer care.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

7

NEWS

DEWA MIGRATES ON-PREMISE SAP TO MORO

D

ubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has migrated its on-premise SAP landscape to Data Hub Integrated Solutions LLC (Moro) to realise innovation, cost efficiency, scalability, speed, and resiliency. This is one of the world’s largest migrations for SAP HEC in the utilities sector. It is also one of the largest data migrations across all industries at the European, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) level.

The project consists of two parts: the migration of on-premise landscape to SAP HEC and the managed services by Moro Hub. DEWA collaborated with Moro Hub and several international IT vendors including SAP, EY and Virtustream to complete the project. DEWA’s SAP landscape consists of 24 SAP modules including business-critical systems like Business Suite on Hana, CRM, SRM, PO,

HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, DEWA

Business Intelligence, Fiori and complex integration along with external entities and third-party systems.

The move is one of the largest of its kind globally. Nearly 250,000 manhours were spent, with more than 150 specialists from DEWA, Moro Hub, EY, SAP and Virtustream working on the project. The project transferred over 100 terabytes of data from 101 systems and tested more than 28,370 business transactions. This migration aims to offer better business support to all DEWA stakeholders; as Moro Hub manages all its information technology operations, IT support, data management, monitoring operational efficiency, maintaining the highest security standards and

GEMS EDUCATION, IBM PARTNER TO UPSKILL UAE SCHOOLS IN EMERGING TECH GEMS Education has announced its collaboration with IBM to launch a pilot programme introducing IBM Digital – Nation platform. Delivered on IBM Cloud, the platform is designed to offer advanced knowledge and skills in key emerging technologies to over 2,000 students and 70 teachers across the United Arab Emirates.

Through this initiative, GEMS Education students will have access to over 75 different courses comprising over 250 hours of learning. The platform will provide a range of programmes, with a focus on highly sought-after advanced IT skills in future and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud, coding, Internet of Things (IoT), quantum computing, data science and analytics, and cybersecurity.

8

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

Hossam Seif El-Din, IBM MEA and Dino Varkey, CEO, GEMS Education

The courses will be offered at three levels – Explorer, Innovator and New Collar – and will be run both as part of the school curriculum and as individual courses that students can take in their own time. Successful completion of each course will earn students IBM digital credentials that will help enhance their university applications and CVs.

technologies in data centres as well as providing support around the clock.

“The migration from on-premises to SAP HEC at Moro Hub is a qualitative shift in digital solutions. DEWA is proud to take the lead in this achievement, which aligns with its efforts in shaping and anticipating the future,” said HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of DEWA. “This project achieves DEWA’s vision as a globally leading sustainable innovative corporation and Moro’s strategic vision to be the most preferred choice and destination for the public and private sectors in the UAE and the region in terms of data storage and cloud-based digital service management.”

“Digital transformation and real-time solutions are optimising DEWA’s costs, scalability, and customer experiences,” said Gergi Abboud, Senior Vice President and General Manager, SAP Middle East South. “We are exchanging global best practices in digital utilities for DEWA to reach visionary heights as a sustainable and innovative world-class utility. We will continue to support UAE Vision 2021’s government-led transformation agenda.”

Each student and teacher will also have their own account with full access to all the necessary tools to create and innovate new solutions.

Digital – Nation Platform is part of IBM’s global push to close the digital skills gap and empower youth with the most in-demand skills, helping them become digital-ready. The platform has an additional functionality of scanning local job recruitment portals and suggesting opportunities relevant to students’ learning mastery and progress.

Michael Gernon, Chief Education Innovation Officer, GEMS Education, said, “This collaboration with IBM provides a world-class opportunity for GEMS Education students to learn about the latest developments in technology and how they will impact the society of the future. We are fully committed to bringing the very best experiences and opportunities to our students, ensuring they are optimally prepared for the future.

CISCO ANNOUNCES MULTI-MILLIONDOLLAR AGREEMENT WITH SAUDI’S TRSDC

C

isco and The Red Sea Development Company (TRSDC) have announced a multi-million-dollar advisory agreement to design Smart Destination services, platform and ICT master plan for The Red Sea Project, the world’s most ambitious tourism and hospitality project. The announcement was made following the Cisco Connect event in Riyadh.

The Red Sea Project is Saudi Arabia’s flagship tourism development initiative: an exquisite luxury tourism destination built around nature, islands and culture. It aims at setting new standards in sustainable development and positioning Saudi Arabia on the global tourist map. It is a central pillar in Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, that identifies tourism as a strategic industry for the future of the Kingdom.

The collaboration will see Cisco design a full portfolio of customised smart services for TRSDC. This will include smart tourism, smart environment, mobility, utilities, public realm, administration and many other

John Pagano, The Red Sea Development Company and Salman Faqeeh, Cisco Saudi Arabia

interconnected services The platform will be integral to the destination’s ability to offer visitors seamless, ultra-personalised products and services that set a new benchmark in luxury tourism. In addition, an extensive environmental monitoring, simulation and management network will help protect the natural ecosystems in the region for future generations.

To support the envisioned services, Cisco will design a state-of-the-art intelligent network, data centres and platforms to meet the needs and requirements of discerning visitors, and destination-wide systems to

measure and monitor environmental markers. Cisco will also develop business and operating models that will ensure that TRSDC extracts the full value from its investment in technology.

“Visitors to the Red Sea Project will enjoy a seamless personalised experience from the moment they arrive, to the moment they leave – an experience that will be enabled through the intelligent application of technology,” said John Pagano, CEO of The Red Sea Development Company. “We are delighted to be working in collaboration with Cisco to help us identify and integrate the right technologies to deliver a unique user experience throughout the destination while preserving its stunning natural beauty for generations to come.”

Salman Faqeeh, Managing Director, Cisco Saudi Arabia said, “Cisco will be TRSDC’s partner, forging the path forward and realising his Royal Highness’s vision of a unique destination that will establish the Kingdom as a luxury tourism destination. Our capabilities and vast experience in building smart cities and enabling them with technology will be fully devoted to the success of this project.”

RAQMIYAT LAUNCHES SECURE WORK FROM HOME SOLUTIONS Regional systems integrator and reseller Raqmiyat has announced that it will be offering secure work from home solutions from Sentrybay, an internet data security software solutions provider, in the UAE. The outbreak of COVID-19 has resulted in widespread extended requirements for staff to work from home. However, ‘Work-from-home’ (WFH) practices can lead to huge data security and data pilferage risks as perpetrators can compromise unmanaged end-user owned remote desktops/PCs/laptops that are used as endpoints by the workforce and external partners.

“During these challenging times, organisations struggle to provide secure work-from-home solutions. As

an authorised reseller of Sentrybay, we are providing secured work-from-home solutions to help our customers not compromise their security posture,” said Abhijit Mahadik, Director, Cybersecurity solutions at Raqmiyat.

SentryBay prioritises data security and uses patented technology of antikeyloggers and anti-screen captures to safeguard customers’ endpoints.

The Armoured Browser from SentryBay provides a unique and secured browser on Mac and Windows that offers anti-key logging, anti-screen capture and anti-screen scrap features.

This enables a secured browsing environment for customers to carry out sensitive work without being worried about any breaches.

“We have experienced a huge surge in demand worldwide, especially in the UAE for this niche solution from Sentrybay. Some of our largest banking clients have added licenses in the past week, specifically to enable more employees to work from home,” said Marcus Whittington, Co-founder and COO, Sentrybay.

Additionally, Armoured Browser creates separate user and desktop sessions without leaving any trace upon closing.

With the latest enhancements, it can be installed as a pseudo-remote access solution to lock down the use of, for example, Office365/ SaaS apps/ browsing and so on. It can also be deployed for Citrix, VMware or for any other remote access solution that has been installed.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

9

VIEWPOINT

SAFEGUARDING THE NEW NORMAL NICOLAS FISCHBACH, GLOBAL CTO, FORCEPOINT, ON HOW CEOs CAN WORK WITH CIOs AND CISOs TO COME OUT OF THIS DISRUPTION AS A CYBERSECURITY CHAMPION

F

ire, flood, earthquake or lack of energy supply – these are the four historical horsemen of standard business continuity planning. What these have in common is that they generally affect an individual site, office or business function and are typically isolated, short term or acute incidents which the company can quickly start to recover from in order to get “back-tonormal”. That’s why business continuity plans are also often known as “disaster recovery plans”.

And over the years “cyberattacks” have become the number one systemic

10

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

risk in many businesses, as highlighted in the WEF’s latest Global Risks Reports for 2020.

But what if the situation lasts for 18 months? What if it impacts every country around the world and every aspect of your business?

What if “normal” has changed and this becomes the baseline? The reality is that the world has gotten more connected while the extended enterprise has become more expansive. And yet most plans didn’t account for a longer-term disruption, widespread across the enterprise or globe such as we’re facing now with the

COVID-19 pandemic. Once you’re over the initial scramble to keep the lights on, what’s next?

This unprecedented global event presents organisations with a challenge they’ve never faced before but also an opportunity to come through the event to evolve stronger than before. Security in this next phase will be a competitive differentiator for every company. And those that don’t get it right can expect to see the disruption to their business continue in the form of regulatory fines and productivity losses due to downtime and breaches as bad actors take advantage of the confusion. Those

strategy, platform, and solutions that are flexible to scale with your business and quickly adapt to changing needs. If you do need to source a new supplier, get your legal team to fast track due diligence, contract, certification, and compliance reviews.

that do get it right can expect to come out ahead as a leader and trusted brand.

The CEO’s job is to see around the corner and the path to industry leadership starts at the top, but the CEO can’t succeed alone. As global business moves to a new way of working, how can CEOs not only help but enable CISOs and CIOs to steer towards the path of leadership in what is becoming the new normal?

Evaluate your top 10 company risks As shelter in place orders expand across the globe, companies that are able to do so are sending large numbers of employees to work from home on an extended basis. While working from home or working remotely has become increasingly prevalent over the last few years with the growing gig economy, today’s massive remote work model is unparalleled.

It’s a fact: your people became your new perimeter with hundreds to thousands of workers connecting not only to your corporate networks but also to work with data which moved to newly deployed SaaS applications.

Add the device-busy home internet setup, the possible use of a shared family computer and targeted phishing and you end up with pathways for bad actors to find their way in. Now more than ever, the risk of a breach is very tangible if you’re not focusing on security at the human level. Make sure IT security and information protection is on your executive team radar.

Enable your CIOs and CISOs Different groups need different tools or access in order to work effectively from home. Your customer support teams may need an extra monitor, your finance teams a local copy of confidential data, while your developers that may have been reliant on Linux desktops now need to quickly find a suitable at-home replacement as network jitter is making remote connections ineffective. This may require different kinds of security tools than before. If working from home means increased use of cloud

applications to share files and critical data, your security team will need to deploy a cloud access security broker to gain visibility into employee use of applications and the devices they’re on, if you aren’t already. And often this gets rapidly combined with a data loss prevention solution to address information protection.

While CEOs are focused on managing the top line during these times, it’s also critical to cut through the red tape to enable both the CISO and CIO with the flexibility and funds to acquire needed solutions and resources quickly. And often this means delivering security for the cloud, in the cloud. A clear opportunity to fast-track the digital transformation path you were likely already on.

And an additional consideration as teams mobilise quickly to address new security concerns, it is also important to keep in mind supply chain vulnerabilities. Particularly as teams may require the rapid onboarding of services from new vendors and suppliers which can introduce even more risks and additional complexity for your already busy operational teams.

If possible, use long-term, trusted partners. For cybersecurity solutions, look for those that supply an overall

Elevate the cybersecurity message As CEO you have a unique position – you set the strategy, the business direction and the culture of the company. What you care about, the rest of the company cares about. Once your company is past the first-wave war room stage, it will be up to you to ensure that the business of safeguarding company assets gets a seat at the table.

If it doesn’t exist yet, create a direct line to your CIO and your CISO. Ask for a regular dashboard that demonstrates security and data protection readiness, status and the potential business impact – past and future. It’s not just about risk management, it’s about recognising that these functions are contributing to the business’ success.

It’s also a good time to update and expand your business continuity plan to include what you learned during this time and address your company’s new ways of working. Increase your exposure to those security professionals a few layers down who have their ears to the ground. And take their expertise to the board to help the company make the smart decision for the business path forward. They want to help.

Leverage cybersecurity to take the lead While we’re all doing our best to navigate what is unchartered business territory today, the goal for every company should be to come out on the other side stronger and more secure than before. CEOs should partner with their CIOs and CISOs to understand potential risks and the opportunities to make sure cybersecurity isn’t just there to stave off disaster, but to be a key enabler of your overall business strategy.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

11

COVER STORY

A PROACTIVE APPROACH WHY SECURITY AUTOMATION IS A NECESSITY FOR ENTERPRISES TO DETECT AND RESPOND TO CYBER THREATS WITHOUT HUMAN ERROR.

E

very company in the Middle East is going through digital transformation, which requires them to rethink their cybersecurity strategies. Automation has emerged as key to boosting efficiency, be it application infrastructure, network, and, most importantly, security. The rapid adoption of digital technologies has expanded the attack surface, making it almost impossible for security professionals to monitor everincreasing threats. The most significant promise of security automation is the fact that CISOs can now focus on what

12

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

matters instead of being overwhelmed by the false positives generated by a multitude of security systems.

Nicolai Solling, CTO of Help AG, says increased automation of cybersecurity is a necessity for a couple of reasons. First, the number and complexity of attacks are increasing exponentially. Responding manually to every event would require a parabolic increase in the number of staff needed for effective response, and consequently, an increase in the cost of responding to events. “We are already at the point where the demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals far outweighs the supply.”

Ryan Trost, co-founder and CTO, ThreatQuotient, adds: “The single most powerful driver of security automation is the ability for analysts to regain time previously lost tackling low-level repeatable tasks. By unburdening analysts from tedious and often mundane efforts, analysts can re-focus their time on higher priority assignments. It is an important element to help teams streamline and, quite frankly, ensure tasks are uniformly accomplished without analyst bias. Automation speaks directly to the effectiveness and efficiency of security operations.”

Ryan Trost

Marco Rottigni, Chief Technical Security Officer, EMEA at Qualys, gives an example of the sheer volume of security data that security professionals have to sift through today. It is not uncommon to find — on average — a small organisation use 15 to 20 security tools, a medium-sized one use around 70, and a large enterprise use up to as many as 130 different cybersecurity solutions. Many of these solutions are specialised, offering very niche functionality, but all of them are producing an overwhelming number of events, logs, and data, which could overwhelm even the most structured, resilient, and solid Security Operation Center.

“Now overlay this with a suspicious pattern highlighted by one of the solutions — or alerts when there is a clear indication of an attack in progress — and the deluge of data poses a significant risk to a quick and effective response. The only way to avoid the situation I have described above is security automation, driven primarily by

THE SINGLE MOST POWERFUL DRIVER OF SECURITY AUTOMATION IS THE ABILITY FOR ANALYSTS TO REGAIN TIME PREVIOUSLY LOST TACKLING LOW-LEVEL REPEATABLE TASKS. BY UNBURDENING ANALYSTS FROM TEDIOUS AND OFTEN MUNDANE EFFORTS, ANALYSTS CAN RE-FOCUS THEIR TIME ON HIGHER PRIORITY ASSIGNMENTS. the need to accelerate the execution of repetitive actions where data does not need to be analyzed and understood by a human brain,” he says.

Morey Haber, CTO and CISO at BeyondTrust, agrees that the primary driver of security automation is to remove repetitive tasks and common responses from the daily operations of highly skilled and highly paid individuals. “When this automation is in place, log file collection, account disablement, automated forensics, etc. can be conducted first, and the results presented to security professionals so they can make decisions.

Marco Rottigni

This allows established operating procedures to be implemented without the need for wasting time to perform these common actions.”

According to Rabih Itani, BDM, Security & SD-WAN, MESA at Aruba, a HPE company, there is also a compelling business case to extend automation to the network edge, not just in SOC. “With IoT, there is a growing number and diversity of device types, which is driving organisations to rethink network access control and introduce security automation at the edge.

“Organisations need to think how to dynamically profile the connecting device types with utmost possible accuracy in order to build an automated decision system which is responsible to determine what, when, how and where security network access policies are to be enforced while still aligned with the organisation’s business outcomes and business risk tolerance levels.”

Which security activities should be automated first?

At present, security automation tech is not advanced enough to address complex tasks and CISOs will need to prioritise the processes ripe for automation.

“My general rule is the 80/20 or 90/10 — the more repetitive and frequent the task, the sooner it should be automated.

Of course, some tasks simply cannot be done manually, such as endpoint data and network data analysis, and require a layer of automated analysis to make

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

13

COVER STORY

Morey Haber

sense of the data,” says Yossi Naar, Chief Visionary Officer and Cofounder, Cybereason.

Solling from Help AG points out this highly depends on the customer’s environment. “However, there is often a tendency to focus on low-hanging fruits such as high volume, low complexity tasks – data enrichment of events, or handling phishing email – that could overload security teams. To accomplish this, you need to make the system mimic the behaviour and work process of the security analyst and replicate the same decision tree that a human analyst would take.”

A good example is dealing with phishing mails – It is a high volume type of event as it happens often, and typically an analyst goes through exactly the same process in dealing with the event every single time and the outcome is relatively binary: Either the mail is phishing or it is not.

And the action is also relatively straight forward: Remove access to the mail if it is malicious, he says.

Trost from ThreatQuotient says there is no easy answer as to exactly what tasks should be automated first.

“Security teams should consider the “crawl, walk, run” mentality to ease themselves in and focus on low-level security tasks that are relatively static and fundamentally repeatable.

Teams should not try to start by automating complex workflows because those take years to define and are frequently adjusted based on internal or external factors.”

14

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

Rabih Itani

The human factor There is no doubt automation will change every aspect of cybersecurity and change the role of security professionals. Does security automation mean organisations wouldn’t need skilled individuals or security analysts?

Not necessarily, says Rottigni from Qualys. Because most security teams are very often streamlined, they are currently focused on firefighting. So, leveraging security automation and orchestration will allow these security teams to instead focus on the execution of tasks and decisions that require more noble, brain-intensive, and skilled work.

As such, security automation will actually elevate the overall quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the Security Operations and Incident Response teams, he adds.

The Sophos Labs Threat Report 2020 states that it is expected to see more sophisticated techniques: from the academic machine learning community such as reinforcement learning finally applied to security problems in earnest and at scale, allowing semi-autonomous systems to make semi- or even fully-autonomous decisions in defending networks and endpoints. “As the tempo for attacks and defenses increases, driven by automation, human involvement will likely shift to after-action checking, validation, and critique of the machine learning-driven actions,” says Harish Chib, vice president, MEA, Sophos.

Yossi Naar

What are some of the common mistakes to avoid in security automation?

“I think the biggest mistake is to think that security automation can replace your security teams – you will still need to invest into the capabilities of your teams, and you will still need to invest in cybersecurity technologies, but with a focus on security automation you can ensure that your teams can instead focus their time and efforts on high-value tasks that ultimately add more value to your organisation,” says Solling from Help AG. Itani from Aruba says before automating security, a deep understanding of business requirements and business impact is needed. Also, the right tools and technologies that would enable accurate automated decisions should be made available. Zooming again onto network access control, if automated quarantine response of any device that undergoes a profile change is enforced without accurate tools to understand the context of that change and its risk levels, a critical business disruption might result.

Naar from Cybereason sums up: “Most commonly, people try to automate too many complex processes. Automation is a process of optimisation, and the rule for optimisation is that you should look at what is the most time-consuming problem you have and find the simplest way to automate it. Then repeat and iterate until the time spent automating is greater than the time spent on the task.”

INTERVIEW

BUILDING A SECURITY CULTURE THE DUBAI FINANCIAL SERVICES AUTHORITY (DFSA) HAS LAUNCHED A CYBER THREAT INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM TO MITIGATE RISKS. OPERATED AND MANAGED

BY HELP AG, THIS PLATFORM PROVIDES VALUABLE THREAT DATA TO ALL DIFC BUSINESSES TO MITIGATE CYBER RISKS. WE SPOKE TO BRYAN STIREWALT, CEO OF DFSA AND NICOLAI SOLLING, CTO OF HELP AG, ABOUT THEIR PLANS TO CREATE A CYBER-INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.

W

hat are the biggest cybersecurity challenges facing financial services organisations?

Bryan: The future of finance, like many other industries, revolves around data in terms of how it is collected, stored, used, and protected. Cybercriminals have always targeted the financial services industry because they know it is rich in data.

There are several risks that the financial services industry and regulators face right now that are

16

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

not traditional risks. Cyber risk is undoubtedly one of those, as is climate change. Dealing with a non-traditional risk requires a non-traditional approach on the part of regulators. We feel that the best way to tackle climate change and cyber risk is through public-private partnerships because a single rule or regulation, or change in our laws, cannot cure the problem.

There is no silver bullet. You can throw a lot of bullets at the problem, but none of them, on their own, will work.

We believe that the public-private partnership we have with Help AG,

and the industry itself is the best way to deal with these risks in a holistic fashion.

How does the threat intelligence platform work for companies based in DIFC? Nicolai: There are many elements in this solution. From a high-level perspective, think of it as an exchange platform. We exchange threat intelligence the same way you would exchange stocks or bonds. Basically, if someone knows about something that has happened in their environment, we

would exchange that data with other participants on that specific system.

The DFSA regulates around 500 financial services organisations, and these would be potential participants on the platform. What the DFSA has also discussed with the industry is the addition of threat intelligence feeds so that we can deliver value out of the platform to the participants immediately. Vendors such as Recorded Future, Cofense, and Palo Alto Networks deliver enriched data as participants in the platform.

Is there any reason why you have decided to set this up on your own instead of choosing commercial threat intel platforms?

Bryan: We know cyber risk is one of our top five risks and a growing one at that. We had several choices to make this work [but] we decided early on that the public-private partnership was the best approach to mitigate those risks.

We could make this into a global effort and join with other platforms.

In addition to the 500 firms that we regulate, we are opening it up to nonfinancial firms, which brings it up to 2,400 firms that can join our platform.

This is a global risk, and therefore, requires a global solution.

Is this in line with the national cybersecurity strategy because you also have participation from aeCERT and Dubai Electronic Security Centre?

Bryan: Yes. Many people are trying to deal with the same risk, and the more we can do together, the better. We must deal with this in a coordinated fashion because you could have some people who see only one element of the risk profile and not the entire picture. Our platform connects us with those entities in the UAE government as well as international organisations to deal with the risk as a global issue.

Nicolai: If you look at aeCERT, Dubai Electronic Security, and other government organisations, they are producing and supplying threat

WE COULD MAKE THIS INTO A GLOBAL EFFORT AND JOIN WITH OTHER PLATFORMS. IN ADDITION TO THE 500 FIRMS THAT WE REGULATE, WE ARE OPENING IT UP TO NONFINANCIAL FIRMS, WHICH BRINGS IT UP TO 2,400 FIRMS THAT CAN JOIN OUR PLATFORM. THIS IS A GLOBAL RISK, AND THEREFORE, REQUIRES A GLOBAL SOLUTION. intelligence [information] to the DFSA platform. It is all about how quickly you can get down to speed and share something that is known by one organisation with other organisations.

And that’s where a threat intelligence exchange platform comes into play because it is complicated for the likes of aeCERT to have a relationship with every single one of these 2,400 organisations whom they would not necessarily know. When DFSA has onboarded those organisations into the environment, if there’s an alert coming from aeCERT, we would, very quickly, be able to translate that alert into ‘actionable intelligence’.

But statistics show that companies don’t investigate more than 40 per cent of security alerts because they don’t have the resources and skills.

Nicolai: Correct, and that’s the reason why we call them a ‘high-fidelity alert’.

When we push out a specific threat intelligence, we’d also give the context and the data associated that specific event so that the organisation can swiftly make decisions. This is about attribution of the indicators of compromise.

When we send out an alert from this platform, we know this would be matching malicious behaviour. The recipient can choose to trust or not trust that alert, but in general, what we have set out to do is to cultivate trust in the platform over time. And yes, of course, we have plenty of alerts that are not being dealt with on a day-to-day basis in any kind of organisation. But what we hope is to be labelled as something that they would really listen to.

We have a threat intelligence team helping DFSA to curate specific kind of events. We have automated processes to make sure that the data is in the right format. We have tried to automate this as much as possible, but there’s obviously, a service element to it, and that brings us back to your initial question as to why we didn’t choose a commercial threat intelligence platform.

If you look at it from a perspective of the service that we have built with DFSA, at the core of this platform is an open-source project called MISP, which is getting a lot of attention in the cybersecurity industry. We’re delivering all of our services around that to be able to interconnect member companies in the platform and also make sure the data that’s sitting inside that environment is relevant or curated.

Do you think the platform would encourage participating companies to come forward and share information related to breaches and near misses without fearing the stigma attached to it?

Bryan: There’s certainly going to be an element of trust-building with the platform. Just as with human behaviour, I believe companies can enter the platform on an anonymous basis, and it’s not certainly designed to be a punitive measure like “Ha, we got you!” because if we do that as a regulator, we’ll discourage people from sharing.

When any single company shares a bit of intelligence, and if it is particularly valuable, it affects 499 others who could avoid that risk. And we hope that people look at us as a community, in terms of their willingness to share information.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

17

FEATURE

THE FUTURE IS PHYSICAL INDUSTRY EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON THE PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE TRENDS THAT COMPANIES SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO.

D

igital transformation is mandating companies to rethink the way they build and operate their physical infrastructure.

Underpinning this change is the everincreasing data transmission speeds, new applications, and communication protocols. With the advent of technologies such as cloud and IoT, IT decision-makers are now forced to look at their underlying infrastructure and find ways to right-size their networks for optimal performance.

What are some of the global trends impacting physical infrastructure? “We are currently seeing a 18

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

myriad of technology trends and developments that will have a significant impact on physical IT infrastructure and IT infrastructure design. One of these developments relates to Wi-Fi technology. More and more mobile devices with WiFi 6 are now becoming available, but the full potential of Wi-Fi 6 can only be realised if installers follow the recommendations for the wired cabling uplink infrastructure. This includes installation of two minimum Category 6A channels to each WAP,� says Prem Rodrigues, director for the Middle East, Africa & India/SAARC at Siemon.

He adds there is also a rise in edge data centres, due to the rapid increase in IoT devices and the volume of data these devices generate. How quickly these facilities can be set up and deployed, will largely be down to the choice of physical infrastructure solutions.

Pre-terminated copper and fibre optic cabling, for example, can reduce installation time by up to 90 percent compared to individual fieldterminated fibre connections. Preconfigured data centre cabinets can reduce installation time and labour by 30 percent compared to traditional cabinets.

NEW WI-FI 6 TECHNOLOGY PROVIDES SOME COMPELLING BENEFITS, INCLUDING FOUR TIMES FASTER AVERAGE THROUGHPUT THAN WI-FI 5, GREATER THAN 5 GB/S DATA RATES, AND IT SUPPORTS A MUCH LARGER VOLUME OF MOBILE DEVICES, ESPECIALLY IN LARGE PUBLIC ENVIRONMENTS. Nabil Khalil, executive vice president of R&M Middle East, Turkey and Africa, says deployments such as cloud, software-as-a-service, 5G, IoT and smart buildings have changed the network landscape. “IP is becoming a common medium for previously separate systems and structured cabling will increasingly transport data along with power, lighting, security - and more. An ‘All over IP’ approach facilitates this, with building technology and building management devices communicating over Ethernet and IP.” Ehab Kanary, vice president of Enterprise for EMEA, CommScope, identifies AI as one of the trends affecting the physical infrastructure.

“We expect to see the use of AI accelerate this year, as companies increasingly use the data they collect to build and deploy AI models powering new services and generating new business insights. If they hope to keep these companies happy, data center operators need to respond, not just with faster networks and servers in their core, but also at

the edge to enable the deployment of AI models closer to end-users,” Arafat Yousef, managing director – Middle East & Africa, Nexans Cabling Solutions, says another key trend is higher speeds, as the core network moves from 10G to 40G/100G. “We’re also seeing LC connectivity striking back. There’s a new life for duplex LC in low-speed networks, moving from 10G to 25G to 50G. Parallel optics will remain in core networks migrating from 40G to 200G to 400G. Today, there are solutions on the market that require just two fibres and LC connectivity.

Which is good news for many enterprise customers, who prefer to stick with what they already have, which is DLC. Another important trend is the move from a traditional three-tiered approach, with core, aggregation and access switches, to a two-level network approach, with a spine connected by leaf switches to reduce latency. This requires more cabling to connect all switches.”

Cabling for Wi-Fi 6 New Wi-Fi 6 technology provides some compelling benefits, including four times faster average throughput than Wi-Fi 5, greater than 5 Gb/s data rates, and it supports a much larger volume of mobile devices, especially in large public environments.

“Wireless network users, however, can only truly benefit from these advantages, if the wired cabling uplink infrastructure is properly designed, selected and installed,” says Rodrigues.

From a cable selection point of view, Wi-Fi 6 requires a minimum of Category 6A shielded cabling and running two horizontal cabling drops to each wireless access point router.

This is recommended to facilitate link aggregation which will be required by devices connecting into the Ethernet network with two ports or having greater than 5 Gb/s data rates.

Category 6A provides the 10Gb/s performance required by Wi-Fi 6 and the shielded properties mitigate heat

Prem Rodrigues

Ehab Kanary

build-up insight cable bundles, which is caused by remote power delivery to Wi-Fi 6 WAPs and which degrades performance, he says.

Yousef from Nexans offers another perspective: “Current Wi-Fi 6 solutions generally reach 5-6 Gbps downlink bandwidth and come with a 10GBASE-T Uplink port. To be connected to the LAN, they need nothing more than good quality Cat6A cabling. However, this is the situation today, and Wi-Fi development will keep going. Therefore, we need to take into account the fact that cabling will have to last 15 years or longer and see three or four generations of WAP during its lifetime. To prepare for future Wi-Fi generations beyond WiFi6, customers can install two Cat6A cabling ports for each access point to allow Link aggregation to 20Gbps.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

19

FEATURE

Arafat Yousef

This will probably cover one or two more generations of Wi-Fi.” Another important trend that has an impact on how companies choose physical infrastructure solutions is the rise in edge data centres as a result of the rapid proliferation of IoT devices. Industry experts point out companies would need ubiquitous fiber topic connectivity and automated infrastructure management tools to manage these facilities.

“For specific applications, fiber at the edge could offer the most applicable solution to the users’ requirement, be that bandwidth or latency and where the application cannot be achieved using a comparable but more cost-effective solution. Fibre technology moved from the infrastructure backbone to the cabinet in a relatively short period of time, and so its utilisation is dependent on the requirements at the edge. It is conceivable that developments such as vehicle-toeverything (V2X) could require fiber-loaded edge sites to optimize the bandwidth for the volume of data acquisition required for that application,” says Stuart McKay, Business Development Manager, Enterprise Technologies, Panduit EMEA. Bhagwati Prasad, vice president, Schneider Electric, adds: We are already seeing fibre being deployed 20

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

Bhagwati Prasad

to Mobile Edge Computing data centres for 5G ultra-low latency deployments, as 5G is both a wired and wireless architecture. Our own automated infrastructure management service based on our EcoStruxure solution is cloud-based, and we expect more management tools will be deployed remotely.

Servicing of edge micro data centres will require a new approach, which will be heavily dependent on remote management and analytics.”

Khalil from R&M echoes a similar opinion: “Given that the locations at which micro data centers will have to be deploy will be demanding, to minimise risks, application sites will have to be chosen carefully and edge solutions will have to be as robust and maintenance-free as possible. This promotes the need for Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) solutions, which will enable them to run independently without specialist personnel.”

Is the end nigh for copper?

When it comes to data centre cabling, the question everyone seems to be asking is whether copper will have a role in the future of networks.

Khalil from R&M says fibre optic cabling offers several advantages over copper such as greater throughput, space savings, better security and future proofing.

However, one reason organisations

Nabil Khalil

still favour copper is cost as these tend to be cheaper than fiber alternatives. Of course, copper cabling can only be deployed when it can reliably meet the requirements of a specific application.

“Advances in optoelectronics and the need for speeds well beyond the practical limits of copper have given rise to fiber cabling being the dominant media in today’s data centres.

Despite this, copper still plays an essential role in the data center.

More importantly, there continue to be innovations in copper cabling that make deployment and time-to-service easier and faster,” says Kanary from CommScope.

In agreement, McKay from Panduit says with Cat8 availability and its capability to deliver 40Gb on RG45 connectivity, there is still life for copper in the data centre. The key is if the hardware manufacturers and their customers decide whether the alternative cabling systems offer a comprehensive enough solution, in respect of cost and capability to render copper redundant.

Prasad from Schneider Electronic concludes: “The answer is not in the short term. I don’t see copper being replaced on the power side as you will still need busbars and cables. On the communications side, we see more fiber, as leading data centres deploy 400gbs switches.”

Can you get big business benefits for a small price?

INTERVIEW

IN PURSUIT OF GROWTH KENNETH HUNE PETERSEN, CHIEF SALES & MARKETING OFFICER, MILESTONE SYSTEMS, TALKS ABOUT THE TOP TRENDS IN THE VIDEO SURVEILLANCE INDUSTRY.

C

an you tell us about your expansion plans in the Middle East?

Our 2019 results show strong long term, sustainable growth across the region and another record-breaking year for the company. The circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak are obviously affecting people and societies globally. We are, however, dedicated to continuing our expansion in the Middle East, supporting our partners and customers also through this difficult situation.

We recently made a reorganisation, strengthening our efforts in the MENAT region which includes Middle East, Turkey and North Africa. Investing across the board, our regional headquarter in Dubai has expanded to 28 employees, with additional 6 employees being based in Turkey and Lebanon. To support this growth the regional team is moving into new premises in Dubai as we speak, more than doubling their office space. The new office will contain an advanced Milestone Experience centre, which will allow customers and partners to showcase solutions and do proof of concept demos.

What are some of the top video surveillance trends to watch out for in 2020?

Clearly the COVID-19 outbreak is an important development which does have a significant impact on the industry. Beyond connecting people, video is establishing itself as an important tool to mitigate the ongoing situation. From the remote monitoring of sites, public places and warehouses, replacing the need for a large team of on-site personnel who could be put at risk via human-to-human contact. To video technology that can be deployed in the protection of our frontline responders in healthcare. There has been a rise in demand for video surveillance solutions not only for security purposes, but to optimize businesses and tackle societal challenges.

Openness and flexibility are two of Milestone’s core values, and they will continue to be essential for growing

22

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

businesses in the future economy.

When things change fast, you need to keep your choices open so that you can pivot as you see new opportunities, that’s not so easy in a closed solution approach. I believe the open platform approach offered by Milestone gives you the choices you need to keep your business growing and the flexibility to take advantage of them.

software’s native capabilities.

As mentioned, enhancements planned for 2020 include Meta Data Search and indexing and advanced performance on mobile devices.

Ensuring security and integrity of all XProtect installations remains a top priority for Milestone. As you would expect, security is a core area in our product development. Following our cybersecurity principles, our approach is to minimise customers’ exposure to risk by ensuring that our software and hardware is secure by design, secure by default, and secure by deployment. Our primary goal is to deliver a XProtect that is resilient to all threats and is certification-ready in every market.

Are you leveraging AI within your platform?

In 2019, we increased our development resources by 45 percent to further expand our capacity to deliver new innovative products and services. Our focus was on video processing power, metadata and analytics, and cyber security. We collaborate closely with our partners, for example, Briefcam, who are innovating with AI technology. At Milestone we enable our partners to integrate their innovations with XProtect through our open technology platform, to create tailor made solutions for the customer.

Do you see a demand for video surveillance as a service in this region?

Increasing demand for cloud-based video management solutions motivated Milestone to embark on its journey to the cloud in 2019.

We view the cloud a new, or additional way of deploying a VMS. Video Surveillance-asa-Service (VSaaS) allows users to remotely store, manage, record, play, and monitor surveillance footage entirely on the cloud or on secure servers. It allows users to leverage the VSaaS advantages while still benefiting from XProtect’s rich feature set.

I do believe there will be a market for video surveillance as a service in the MENAT region, although deployment may vary depending on the market’s infrastructure and regulations.

We still see cloud-based VMS solutions as complementary to on-premise XProtect. That means cloud propositions will be added on top of the traditional on-premise solutions.

The open platform will remain Milestone’s core offering and will now be available in a new deployment mode.

In 2020, we plan to introduce several hybrid cloud-based solutions to the market together with partners. These will cater for both the customer’s technical needs, such as available infrastructure, and commercial needs, like performance, scalability needs, and capital investment.

What are the new features you have added to the open platform, and how does it benefit your customers?

Looking into 2020, we plan to continue empowering our partner community members by encouraging them to create and deliver the latest advances in technology. By adding more functionality to our Milestone Integration Platform Software Developers’ Kit (MIPSDK) and our Application Programming Interface (API) such as Rule Engine Support and Metadata Search.

Milestone XProtect is at the core of our platform and will remain the end-user’s main gateway to a solid VMS experience.

To remain a preferred VMS vendor, we will continue to develop and strengthen the

INTERVIEW

WHY WE NEED A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO IoT SECURITY JACOB CHACKO, REGIONAL BUSINESS HEAD – MIDDLE EAST, SAUDI & SOUTH AFRICA (MESA) HPE ARUBA, TALKS ABOUT WHY ENTERPRISES NEED AN EFFECTIVE IOT DEVICE-LEVEL SECURITY

H

ow can IoT organisations and their partners ensure device-level security is optimised?

There are two important ways companies can optimise their device-level security – monitor the devices and protect the network. When dealing with devices, organisations must be diligent. Keep an eye out for vulnerabilities to apply the latest patches as early as possible. The best way to protect yourself from exploits is to reduce the time between the exploits being ‘discovered’ and you being patched against them.

When it comes to the network, malware looks for a beachhead and then works to spread internally. To prevent this, IT teams must make sure each and every IoT device only has permissions to communicate with the devices it needs to. Segment your network through software-driven policies and tighten those policies as much as you can.

What do you see as the key threats?

A key threat is the IoT market itself.

Small IoT devices are relatively cheap to develop, which has created a burgeoning ecosystem of start-ups developing ‘things’ on a daily basis.

Even though we have been talking about IoT for years, this is still a relatively new market that has yet to shake out into the main players. Many of the manufacturers we see in the market today will either have moved on to newer ‘things’ or disappeared from the market entirely. The real risk is

In addition, the historical complexity involved in micro-segmenting networks means there are not enough barriers to prevent exploits from spreading internally. This is a toxic combination of not knowing what’s on your network and then not being able to stop an exploit spreading.

that these devices will remain in use -sometimes because we forgot they were there – vulnerable to exploits and un-patchable because there is nobody developing the patches.

Another potential issue is in company behaviour. IoT devices often fall under the purview of OT (Operational Technology). There is a tendency in OT of ‘if it isn’t broke then don’t fix it’ and the 24/7 world of OT means there is never an opportune moment for downtime for updates. This extends that time between the vulnerability being discovered and being patched against it.

Finally, most organisations do not know 100% what is connected to their networks. BYOD has a part to play in this, but the low cost and ease of implementing IoT devices have led to individual LOBs (Line of Business) going it alone, so IT is never in the picture.

What are the challenges and realities of this – how can a balance between cost, complexity and security be achieved?

The challenge for a lot of companies is that they are not starting from the best place. Many have hard segmented, single vendor, configuration driven networks built the same way they have been for 20 years. The prospect of a costly forklift upgrade to move into this new world is financially unappealing.

It requires a different mindset to embrace these changes. That said there are some practical steps in order to protect your business. Firstly, know what’s on your network – If you know what’s out there you can make an informed decision over what is allowed and start to restrict access. You also need to embrace open standards.

Part of the reason many organisations have not made this move before is because they were tied in proprietary standards that required everything to be upgraded.

Finally, companies must create a collaborative partnership between IT and the LOBs. Avoid LOBs ‘rolling their own’ by understanding their different needs and applying security policies and tools to all needs.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

23

VIEWPOINT

RETHINKING SECURITY FOR IT AND OT CONVERGENCE ANTOINE D’HAUSSY, BD DIRECTOR EMEA FOR OPERATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AT FORTINET ON IMPLEMENTING A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO CYBERSECURITY IN A CONVERGED IT/OT ENVIRONMENT where even a factory production line could now be controlled by malicious actors, cybersecurity is no longer just about protecting emails and users – it’s also about keeping factories, production systems, processing plants, refineries, energy plants, transportation and delivery networks, and other essential infrastructures safely operating. To achieve this, a collaborative approach to security solutions and incident response is essential.

I

n industry, technical evolutions are transforming operations and driving innovation. And at the same time, devices, endpoints, and networks across both IT and OT environments are more connected than ever. In fact, Forrester research commissioned by Fortinet shows that 66% of industrial firms say their factories now run through IP-connected networks. But the road to the future is also filled with potential cybersecurity challenges – and these are only exacerbated by the longstanding divergence between IT and OT security teams.

24

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

For example, despite business environments being more connected than ever, IT and OT security teams still operate in silos – interacting, but falling shy of true integration. Historically, IT and OT have had very different security concerns; OT’s domain generally wasn’t a part of the connected IT world, thereby minimising the threats it faced.

But as OT operations become increasingly digitalised, their networks are being exposed to more cyber risk.

In fact, almost three quarters (73%) of industrial firms believe that the attack surface of their IP-connected factory machines has expanded. So, in a world

Benefits worth converging for The business benefits of converging IT and OT are significant: 66% of firms agree that such collaboration can provide access to real-time data insights from manufacturing operations, while 59% believe it can create new business opportunities via increased insight into production data.

The security benefits of converging IT and OT strategies are also numerous.

Forming effective processes, adopting specific, stringent industry standards, and delivering an orchestrated response is much easier with a consolidated group. It’s not hard to see why 43% of industrial firms feel this convergence contributes to enhanced visibility that can enhance the mitigation of cybersecurity threats.

Convergence can create efficiencies, too. Threats identified by one team can be rapidly defended against by the other, stopping the spread of malicious intent and malware. And it’s undoubtedly more convenient to only have one security system to pay for, configure, manage, and maintain – which is a more likely outcome when IT and OT security approaches are converged.

But the advantages don’t end there.

Merging these teams provides a ripe opportunity for cultural transformation, creating the ideal breeding ground for innovation as two sets of intelligent people collaborate to generate a truly robust and comprehensive security strategy.

Roadblocks ahead There are, however, some serious difficulties in redressing this division – starting with the technical specificities of OT and IT. OT experiences a longer product life cycle and has to grapple with a wide breadth of industrial protocols and environmental constraints due to the nature of equipment used.

Implementing a specific architecture in-line with industry best practice standards is crucial to making sure OT teams are able to thrive in the new converged environment – and getting all of this in place can be time-consuming and complex.

Priorities are also different. IT networks prize confidentiality and data integrity over availability, while the nature of production lines and factory floors demands that availability and the security of personnel be at the top.

As a result of these inverted priorities and very different technologies, there are bound to be clashes when these two groups with differing viewpoints are brought together. People who work in these two teams tend to have different attitudes towards their lines of work. OT workers are often more conservative, focusing on process, output, safety, and availability. In contrast, those in IT are more likely to be early tech adopters, eager to embrace change, and very data-centric.

Blending these two groups together and establishing a harmonious workforce isn’t easy, but it can be done if those involved are willing to embrace a new, third way of thinking.

Fusing IT and OT teams Anyone looking to kickstart this merger will need to sit down and apply their focus to planning strategic alignment on goals.

Driving cultural transformation will play a key role in the success of any

convergence project, with strong leadership needed to ensure culture clashes are dissipated and neither party feels like an afterthought. Be aware that changes may cause friction – so explain what is being deployed and how it will affect the process to ensure that nobody feels left behind or confused by complicated terminology.

Care must also be taken to make technological adjustments to accommodate this merger, such as adopting security tools that cater to both IT and OT requirements. Collaborative tools such as SIEMs (Security Information and Event Management) and SOARs (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) can help security teams manage and respond to threats at machine speed, rather than having to plough through log files and system reports manually, wasting time and leading to a bottleneck of issues to resolve.

It’s not just the amount of new hardware that poses a risk to these newly converged teams – it’s the nature of that hardware as well. The devices used by OT often present a set of unique security liabilities that IT teams may not have had to tackle before. Older systems that may have been in place for years not only have never been updated, they also monitor critical systems, such as thermostats and pressure valves, so they cannot ever be taken offline, even for patching. And ultra-sensitive systems

designed for pristine environments can be affected simply by being scanned.

But as the network expands and becomes more connected, it’s also increasingly important to keep tabs on what’s going on – and increasingly difficult to stay on top of it all. OT threat reports

by Fortinet indicate that threat actors target both IT and OT systems using the same malware, banking on the fact that OT systems often use older technology to ensure a higher success rate.

Dynamic, intelligent processing solutions like Next-Generation Firewalls, secure access, and Network Access Control, combined with OT-specific protocols, can be combined to create a zero-trust network access strategy to ensure accurate control of network traffic combined with high visibility across the new converged team’s operations, allowing easy and centralized management of complex systems.

There’s a wide range of additional tools available to give any team 360-degree protection from cyberattacks, from sandboxing to two-factor authentication.

These are essential weapons against intrusions, such as automated malware that would be otherwise free to roam the expanded network in search of sensitive data to steal.

Do it right – do it once Adopting a ‘safety first’ stance may be more time-intensive, but rushing convergence will only lead to problems down the line. Making the effort to prioritise security at the start will ensure these new converged teams against future disasters without impacting end users. Looking at the bigger picture and embracing a structured and tightly integrated cybersecurity platform can also help reduce the inevitable complexity of the process, while continuously confirming that newly deployed systems are aligned with industry standards and frameworks.

With a combination of a converged vision and the right tools, any business or industry can reap the rewards of IT/ OT convergence. It’s simply a matter of working together. It’s not always easy, but it is worth it.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

25

INTERVIEW

SEIZING THE OPPORTUNITY RACKSPACE HAS EMBARKED ON AN AMBITIOUS EXPANSION PLAN IN THE MIDDLE EAST. THE MANAGED CLOUD SERVICES COMPANY HAS RECENTLY SET UP ITS HUB IN DUBAI TO ENHANCE THE SUPPORT OF LOCAL CUSTOMERS. WE SPOKE TO RACKSPACE’S KEY EXECUTIVES – GEROGE PAWLYSZYN, GM FOR MEA, MARTIN BLACKBURN, MD FOR EMEA AND SIMON CRAWLEY TRICE, VP OF GLOBAL SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES - ABOUT THEIR PLANS FOR THE REGION AND WHAT IS DRIVING THE ADOPTION OF THE CLOUD.

W

hy have you decided to foray into this region now?

George: We have accumulated 500 customers without a presence here, which shows we are doing something right. I have been in this region for the last 12 years and have seen the evolution of data centres, managed services, and especially the cloud.

In the last three years, from the clients’ side, there has been a pivotal shift, and now everyone is trying to take advantage of cloud computing driven by digital transformation. From a regional perspective, we believe the timing is perfect to us to be here. We are making a multimillion dollar investment in the MEA region to support this dynamic market growth in cloud technologies.

Martin: We haven’t had a strong geographical plan because of lot of Rackspace technologies are highly automated, and you can take advantage of it from anywhere in the world.

However, we have realised that we need to grow our business, and also, our clients need physical help to move to the cloud. So in the last year or so, we have been executing on a strong geographical expansion plan.

We have grown the region comprising Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Also, northern Europe, which covers Benelux and Nordics, and now the UAE is a great landing place for us. We are following hyperscalers too. Wherever they land, as they have done here, clients are approaching us to help them migrate to the cloud. We are uniquely positioned to help them because we have our own private cloud and 20 years of experience in moving businesses to the cloud. We have 7,000 engineers, more than half of them are

26

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

accredited on AWS, Azure, and Google. We can give independent advice to our clients on which cloud to move to and how to work in a hybrid cloud environment.

Rackspace calls itself a managed cloud services provider. What makes you different from a hyperscaler?

Martin: If you go and tick some boxes with a hyperscaler, you can spin out equipment very quickly. But, what it doesn’t give you is all the services you require – no control, no change management, no governance, and, most importantly, advice on how to modify your applications. We provide all those and look after it for you. For example, in the UK regulators have made it mandatory for banks to have multi-cloud environments.

They need a provider who is independent and offers all that services back to them, which is where we come in. The hyperscalers like us being here too because they realise that without us, the cloud adoption is going to be a slow process.

Simon: Where we get pulled in by a lot of businesses within the region is helping them get to the cloud. We have services across the whole lifecycle of the cloud journey.

To start, we help them build or validate their cloud strategies. We go in and assess

their applications and modernise them towards microservices and containers so that they can realise the real benefits of moving to the cloud. There is definitely a shortage in skills in the region around migrating to public cloud environments. And in parallel to all these things, it is a very different operative model when you are in the cloud versus your traditional IT model. You have access to lot more features, faster provisioning and if you don’t change your operative model and have the right governance, the cost can quickly spiral out of control and put your business at risk. We are advising our clients on how to build things like cloud management office and operate in the world of public cloud as well.

Contrary to popular perception, many people have now realized the public cloud is not necessarily cheaper.

Simon: This is the key advice we give to our clients- if you lift and shift applications, the public cloud won’t be cheaper. You have to modernise your applications, break them down into microservices and containers so you can auto-scale up and scale down. If you lift and shift a monolithic application, it will not automatically scale, and it will not adapt to the demands of your users and customers.

Breaking down an application into microservices is a straightforward process.

Of course, it can be challenging when it comes to mainframe applications but we help our customers in both cases. If a customer wants to move really fast to the cloud, we will lift and shift their applications to the private cloud first, and over time, modernise some of those applications and then move them to the public cloud.

INTERVIEW

PREPARING FOR A NEW REALITY CHRISTIAN REILLY, CTO AND VP OF CITRIX SYSTEMS, ON HOW NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE TRANSFORMING THE WAY WE WORK AND LIVE.

W

hat are the new trends around the workplace that you have been noticing lately?

I’ve done over a hundred C-level meetings around the globe over the last 18 months, picking up some really interesting trends that I think are a bit different than some things we’ve seen before.

One is a renewed focus on employee experience, which is predominantly a partnership between IT and HR. What is driving both sides of the equation is not just how do you get the right technology to the employees, but also how do you create a culture of flexible working and a work environment that has a combination of technology plus policy process environment.

And the other one has been more about the willingness to adopt new technologies at very fast rates.

Even in the region here and literally, everywhere I go, there’s this kind of eagerness for the cloud, which just a few years ago didn’t exist. The big cloud providers are getting more and more footprint and that obviously addresses a lot of the concerns around data sovereignty, performance and regulations. The technology barriers are becoming less of an issue and people are not just building technology for the sake of it - they’re building it for a couple of things. One is obviously to try and ensure the employee experience is good, which has a direct correlation to customer

28

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

value, customer success and customer interaction. And then also to build new products and new services and get those to market in a faster way.

Everyone is talking about the future of work and the digital workplace.

What does this mean to you? Is it made up of collaborative apps, chatbots, virtual assistants, etc.?

The way we look at it, it is essentially a mechanism for creating an intelligent workspace. By that, I mean one that is adaptive and understands the context of users and devices and locations. It’s more a case of how do we look at the individual roles and the work and the information that’s needed for those individual roles. And how do we use the technologies to deliver that? So if you think about most of our traditional customers, they have come from a world of virtualized apps and desktops, which of course, has been incredibly successful. But as they’ve evolved their own strategies, now they’ve more web applications, more mobile apps, and more SaaS apps. But that doesn’t always mean that the apps are easier to use. The general consensus is that SaaS applications will be more usable and more intuitive. However, that’s not really always the case. The Sapho acquisition we made 18 months ago was foundational to what we view as the intelligent part of the workspace.

And we talk about that in three ways.

One is to organise work, which is to bring in any digital asset that’s required into the workspace itself. And then to

guide work, which is really to take those applications and break them down into the lowest possible atomic level of work, which is now what we call micro-apps.

And then the third piece of that is to use our analytics platform to drive the intelligence.

The desktop virtualisation market has been stagnant for a while. Do you see that changing now?

I think it depends on how you define VDI, and it means different things to different people. I think it’s an important distinction because in our customer base, we have examples of customers who use full-fledged VDI, which is the Windows 7 and Windows 10 environment or Linux desktop environment. And then we also have customers who use kind of a hosted shared desktop model, which is serverbased VDI as opposed to desktop VDI. And from an end-user perspective, they look the same, right? But it’s an important distinction because there’s a significant number of customers who’ve used the server-based over the full VDI. When you say that its stagnant, I think the promise of full VDI has been around for years, and there are use cases used by customers extensively. I think maybe what’s been interesting in the last 12 months or so is Microsoft’s stance around Windows Virtual Desktop, which is obviously an entitlement within their licensing framework and a delivery mechanism for deploying that on top of Azure. This has played very nicely with our relationship with Microsoft, and I think it will be a kickstart for customers to relook at virtualised desktops.

In my opinion, desktop is a commodity or should be a commodity, and it’s the applications that are valuable. Some of them will continue to be placed inside of a desktop and some won’t. So I think the capability lies in to do both of these, which is the approach we take with the Citrix Workspace. We see lot of customers interested in it for lots of different reasons and different use cases.

the number of devices that you could bring into this kind of unified endpoint management concepts grew as well as the functionalities. And yes, of course, there’s still competition in that space.

But I think the way that we look at it is that workspace from Citrix more often than not requires a companion device.

Whether it is a full desktop, smartphone or a thin client, there’s always a level of management that’s required for that.

Our view on that is that as organisations mix and match corporate-owned devices with BYO, then the technologies that we have in endpoint management should continue to grow to support the different use cases for the workplace.

Do you have a mobile device management component to Citrix Workspace? How does it compare with VMware, which is probably your biggest competitor in this space?

If you think about it from maybe a couple of years ago, there was a number of different vendors -us and VMware included - competing in what used to be the enterprise mobility management space, and the main functionalities were mobile device management and mobile application management. That was primarily born out of a combination of companies who wished to issue mobile devices to their employees. They also wanted to allow BYO and the reason why

MAM became relatively popular was because the employees who had their own devices were not too keen on the company taking over full management of the device. So, that market then shifted pretty quickly into unified endpoint management. And then Microsoft obviously came out with modern management, which was a way of actually using their Intune platform and allowing others to actually manage components of Windows 10 operating system.

Apple did a similar kind of thing to allow you to do iOS management in a slightly different way. Google did the same with the Android enterprise and Chrome. So the footprint and

What is the deployment model available for this? Is it hybrid or hosted on Citrix cloud?

Citrix Cloud is something that we used as a colloquial term inside the company, but it’s really a number of different services that customers can subscribe to build solutions that they need for a specific business outcome.

So, the hybrid model is quite interesting because one of the big things that you’ll hear Citrix people routinely talk about is experience, security and choice. And the the choice element of that really spans a number of things. It’s the device type. We support our workspace app, which is like the client technology that we connect to the workspace on literally any device, any browser, any operating system, and any cloud. Any cloud piece is fascinating because most customers who are moving their virtual apps and desktops to the public cloud don’t choose just one. They’re choosing multiple clouds for reasons of risk, mitigation, data sovereignty, performance, and commercial constructs in some cases. And our commitment was to make sure that our technology from Citrix is deployable and supportable across every public cloud infrastructure as well as, every traditional hypervisor for on premises and as well as hyper-converged infrastructure.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

29

VIEWPOINT

LEADING THROUGH UNCERTAIN TIMES OMER SALEEM, DIRECTOR AND DEPUTY CEO, PROVEN, EXPLAINS HOW FIRMS CAN HELP KEEP THEIR TEAMS FOCUSED DURING UNPREDICTABLE BUSINESS LANDSCAPE.

B

ig businesses grow and adapt as the market environment changes and do so even more rapidly now with the accelerating technology options. With this growth and infusion of technology driven changes comes a new requirement for corporate positions to evolve with the corporation itself. It has become ever more critical for the overall success of entities that every position is filled by an agile employee whose workload is role-based and goal-oriented, the aim being 360 degree success. Today’s COVID-19 scenario is a prime example of how well-functioning corporations can face shocks to business as usual that can fundamentally change service delivery

30

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

with downstream effects touching almost every internal part of the organisation as well as the impact to the business from the overall market itself.

Productivity is synonymous with getting things done efficiently.

Productivity is defined differently for each organisation and subsequently measured uniquely as well. Some organisations will measure productivity through client satisfaction while others may use operational metrics. Internally, each department might have further functionally driven metrics such as employee satisfaction in the HR department or whether the marketing department is targeting the right audience at the right time. Whatever scale your business uses, a structural

understanding of the business and a clear yet fluid job designations must be in place.

In most cases in today’s market, productivity is measured at a departmental level with department specific criteria but a holistic business level productivity review is often missing which often leads to underperformance and diminished value creation from existing resources. It is critical to align to departmental metrics of productivity with organisational goals and subsequent strategy. As the market takes on new situations like an unexpected and fastspreading pandemic, new challenges arise that put all individuals, businesses, the market and the entire world to the test. Productivity must become a

more common topic in the workplace in order to make sure every employee is working at the highest level that helps the business create maximum value.

Internal operations must not revolve around one department’s work in favour of the other. When managers start to feel like their departments are not creating value, they will feel the same way about their jobs and this demotivation will seep into their subordinates. As a business, your highest mission is optimum value creation. This can only be achieved if each role in the organisation has clear visibility of high level company goals and align their personalised goals for their respective roles. It is imperative in the current fast moving environment to have regular communication along with agile, clear goals aligning managers with the company goals which they can then optimise for their reportees to create maximum value.

The same goes for individuals; how will you approach business as usual?

How will your performance lead the business to achieving its goals? Tasks will automatically take long-term and short-term forms, and business tools will document these and set timelines and deadlines for them. As a result, the following elements will play a key part in boosting productivity: Management Managers connect the base of the company pyramid to its vertex; they communicate the large-scale goals and transform them into operational goals.

Managers need to have consistent communication with their employees and help define the priority, duration and outcomes of the operational goals.

The communication needs to be in both directions. Managers should not only provide regular feedback to their employees but at the same time raise their concerns upwards to higher management and serve as their voice.

Productivity is maximised if managers fulfil this role and bridge the gap between higher strategy and operational delivery. The managers should be the key resources during uncertainty to

them. During volatile times open lines of communication will be the pillar on which companies will navigate through the turbulence. The importance of quickly establishing clear communication channels for operations along with other business elements is key. It is critical to keep employees and clients connected in uncertain times. There is a direct relationship between productivity and communication. Effective communication helps inspire everyone to work efficiently and productively.

keep the organisation anchored and play the immense role of mediators and motivators.

Human Resources It is now more important than ever to focus on the retention and development of your employee base. As businesses become more specialised and clients more demanding active knowledge management and employee retention become a key driver of success and productivity.

Identifying high performing employees and putting them in leadership roles will create a culture of growth. Productivity gains can be made by putting a focus on matching employee needs and aligning these with company goals. During uncertain times it is imperative to provide clear guidance for employees so that they may do more than their role job descriptions and take on additional responsibilities according to their skills sets to mitigate costs and increase value creation.

Communication Healthy, open communication channeled properly between stakeholders remains one of the foundations of a successful business. The medium of communication within organisations and between employees if evolving very quickly. If an open culture of communication is established, then organisations can successfully navigate almost any challenge which the market throws at

Technical Support Technology is fast become the backbone of most modern businesses. Service delivery in many instances is solely dependent on the fluid operation of a company’s IT infrastructure. It is imperative that organizations not only pay attention to pairing the right resources with the business needs but also project any fluctuations accurately in order to facilitate business continuity during volatile periods.

Having IT support which fully understands the business and provides ongoing support and solutions to enable business can be an indispensable asset. A seasoned technical support team might seem to be an expensive overhead on a general basis but will yield dividends in maintaining business operations during any volatile periods thereby increasing productivity.

It takes a concentrated and focused approach to build a business which is agile and can navigate through times of uncertainty. The above-mentioned elements are just some of the areas of enablement. Each business is unique and has its own requirements for success.

Navigating unforeseen scenarios requires a business to have synergy between its various elements. It needs to have leadership which is proactive in addressing the needs of the business, its employees as well as clients. Maintaining productivity through turbulent periods many times differs from productivity through business as usual environments.

A company and its leadership needs to stay agile during uncertainty and redefine what it means to be productive depending on the scenario at hand.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

31

VIEWPOINT

THE JOURNEY TO UNIVERSAL PRIVILEGE MANAGEMENT KARL LANKFORD, DIRECTOR, SOLUTIONS ENGINEERING, BEYONDTRUST, SHARES INSIGHTS ON WHY A COMPREHENSIVE PAM SOLUTION THAT GOES BEYOND JUST PRIVILEGED PASSWORD MANAGEMENT, IS ESSENTIAL FOR MODERN CYBERSECURITY DEFENCE.

A

lmost without exception, today’s threat actors leverage readily available automated tools — automation increases the speed and probability that the attacker can find and exploit that initial weak link that gives them a “hook” into an environment.

The good news is that organisations increasingly recognise that to maintain a level playing field, they need automation and purpose-built solutions to protect privileges, and PAM has become a cornerstone of an effective, modern cybersecurity defence. The bad news is that many organisations mistakenly presume that privileged password management alone will solve the problem, when it’s only one part of a necessary, comprehensive PAM solution.

Universal Privilege Management (UPM) The Universal Privilege Management model allows enterprises to start with the PAM use cases that are most urgent to the organisation, and then seamlessly address remaining use cases over time. Each use case, once addressed, will give enhanced control and accountability over the accounts, assets, users, systems, and activities that comprise the privilege environment, while eliminating and mitigating multiple threat vectors. The more use cases that are addressed, the more PAM synergies emerge, and the more impact organisations will realise in reducing enterprise risk and improving operations.

So, here are the 10 use cases on your journey to UPM.

32

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

Least privilege on desktops Another important step to achieving Universal Privilege Management is implementing least privilege on end-user machines. Least privilege is defined as, “the minimum privileges/rights/access necessary for the user or process to be fully productive.”

With a least-privilege approach, users receive permissions only to the systems, applications, and data they need for their current roles. Rather than being enabled, persistent, and always-on, the privileges are only elevated on an as-needed basis and only for the targeted application or process. This is the basis for a just-in-time (JIT) PAM model.

Accountability While not mandated, many organisations find discovering and securing privileged accounts the logical starting point for improving privilege security controls.

But this demands a privileged credential management solution that automatically discovers and onboards the everexpanding list of privileged accounts/ credential types and brings those under management within a centralised password safe. This includes both human (employee, vendor) and non-human (functional, service, application, software robot, etc.) accounts in the environment.

The solution should allow control over which accounts are being shared, by whom, when, where, and why. It should provide mechanisms to find hardcoded credentials and deliver options to replace them with managed credentials. Critically, the solution should monitor, manage, and audit every privileged session regardless of where it originates.

Least privilege on servers Having superuser status is important for administrators and some authorised users to do their jobs. Unfortunately, this practice also presents significant security risks from intentional, accidental, or indirect misuse of those privileged credentials.

Organisations must limit, control, and audit who has access to superuser accounts and privileges, without impairing productivity. Organisations must be able to efficiently and effectively delegate server privileges without disclosing the passwords for root, local, or domain administrator accounts. They should record all privileged sessions to help meet regulatory compliance.

This is conceptually like the removal of administrative rights on desktops, but with the added requirements of supporting server-class operating systems in Tier-1 regulated environments.

Application reputation Application control is essential to

preventing advanced malware attacks, such as ransomware. Whitelisting, blacklisting, and greylisting offer application control strategies that enable organisations to restrict applications to only those approved to execute, with the correct privileges, within the appropriate context.

Another application reputation capability involves empowering organisations to make better informed privilege elevation decisions by understanding the vulnerability of an application or an asset with which it interacts. Applying real-time risk intelligence to privilege delegation and elevation not only stops exploits from becoming a privileged attack vector, but it also blocks drive-by social engineering threats that can leverage vulnerabilities within the environment. Similar to application control on Windows, command filtering on Unix and Linux is a critical security, compliance, and reliability control. For both application control and command filtering, a full audit trail of everything, attempted and allowed, is important.

Remote access The vast majority of remotely launched attacks come from threat actors who are not specifically targeting the organisation, but rather through remote contractors, vendors, and, even remote employees, who have themselves been compromised.

The ideal defence is to extend PAM best practices beyond the perimeter. This ensures only the right identity has access to the right resources in the right context.

It eliminates “all or nothing” remote access for vendors by implementing least-privilege access to specific systems for a defined duration of time, potentially requiring a chaperone when appropriate.

Vendor credentials should be managed through the solution with policies, mandating rotation or single use passwords, and utilising credential injection in sessions so that passwords are never exposed to end users.

Finally, session management and monitoring should be enforced to audit and control all vendor/remote access activity. This approach is far more

secure than traditional protocol routing technologies like VPN. Network devices and IoT Many PAM tools lack the ability to extend granular privileged access controls to non-traditional endpoints, such as medical or industrial-connected devices and control systems.

Organisations need a solution that delivers the capability of least privilege to those endpoints by allowing fine-grained control over the commands sent and the responses received over SSH sessions.

This offers the ability to control the operation of functions like tab completion, restricting access to only those aspects of the endpoint that are appropriate for the user. Administrators and vendors can be constrained within their area of responsibility without impacting their productivity.

Cloud and virtualisation With the accelerated use of virtualised data centres and cloud environments for processing, storage, application hosting and development, organisations have opened new avenues for threat actors to access sensitive data and cause disruption.

From a privileged access management perspective, the options to secure these assets are like traditional desktops and servers as described earlier. However, here are a few unique privileged security use cases for the cloud: • Utilise a password management solution to manage the passwords and keys that are unique to the cloud environment, like the hypervisor, APIs, and management consoles.

• Implement a PAM solution with session monitoring for all administrative or root access into cloud providers, regardless of whether they are SaaS, PaaS, or IaaSbased.

• When performing RPA or variations on DevOps, utilise a password management or secrets store to protect application-to-application secrets used in the cloud DevOps and DevSecOps DevOps delivers condensed development

and deployment cycles through automation, frequently leveraging the scale of the cloud. The downside is that DevOps processes can also “automate insecurity,” creating massive risks as well as compliance and operational gaps.

The right solution can discover all privileged automation accounts (including for CI/CD tools, service accounts, RPA, etc.) and replace the credentials with trusted API calls. The automatic retrieval and injection of the proper tool credentials helps protect developers, operations teams, and applications from attacks when privilege accounts are used for automation.

Privileged account integration Modern PAM solutions must communicate with the rest of the IT security environment. By unifying privileged access management and other IT and security management solutions, IT teams benefit from a single, contextual lens through which to view and address risk by activity, asset, user, identity, and privilege.

Identity Access Management (IAM) integration Access to an organisation’s resources is ideally managed through an IAM solution, which offers capabilities such as single sign-on, user provisioning/deprovisioning, role-based user management, access control, and governance. But managing a heterogeneous environment that contains silos for Unix, Linux and macOS, plus a Microsoft or cloud environment, leads to inconsistent administration for IT, unnecessary complexity for end users, and a vast sprawling of alias accounts.

The ideal solution is to centralise identity management and authentication and provide single sign on across Windows, Unix, Linux, and macOS environments by extending a directory store like Microsoft’s Active Directory with single sign-on capabilities to non-Windows platforms.

By evolving PAM capabilities using this UPM model, organisations will not only reduce the threat surface, eliminate security gaps, improve response capabilities, and ease compliance, but will also deter many attackers, who are still largely opportunistic in seeking to exploit the easiest prey.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

33

VIEWPOINT

THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE OSSAMA EL SAMADONI, SR. DIRECTOR – SALES, MIDDLE EAST, RUSSIA, AFRICA AND TURKEY - DELL TECHNOLOGIES, ON THE RISE OF THE MODERN DATA CENTRE.

O

ver the past 15 years, IT has worked in a pretty predictable manner. In order to automate critical business processes, companies have been implementing packaged applications from established software vendors. In turn, IT departments have focused the bulk of their efforts on building and managing the infrastructure needed to run such applications, as well as developing the skills needed to deliver guaranteed service levels across the business. As a result, companies have invested heavily in infrastructure related to enterprise applications, peaking in recent years at around $2.7 trillion.

But all of this has started to change.

With the rise of mobile devices, cloud computing, social media, the Internet of Things and other disruptive forces, the way applications are built, deployed and utilized has transformed significantly. In order to capture digital revenue streams, develop smarter products and deliver the vastly improved experiences that customers expect, companies - including their IT departments - need to undergo significant transformation. Along with running large enterprise applications for automation, companies need to continuously develop the consumer34

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

grade mobile applications and embedded software that will transform their products, their services, and the ways in which they engage with the world. All of this must be done, while simultaneously lowering costs and refining the performance of older applications and the infrastructure on which they run.

The only way to achieve both of these goals - innovate and optimise - is to transform the technology we use to deliver IT services. This begins with bringing down the cost and effort involved in running the older automation software packages - so that IT can shift its human and financial resources toward other investments that help make possible the more transformational aspects of the business: ever-changing mobile experiences, better data analytics, and deeper innovation around products and services.

The tension that arises between modernising as rapidly as possible is a challenge for most companies. To succeed on both fronts, IT leaders are realising that they must undergo significant transformation across the organisation, from re-evaluating on- and off-premise infrastructure investments to making changes in staffing and skills training, engaging more deeply with different departments and upping the commitment to IT-as-a-Service delivery.

In most cases, this is new territory and many are looking for guidance to navigate as effectively as possible.

The first step toward supporting these often-conflicting IT priorities is to modernise the infrastructure components on which IT is built or, rather, to become a Modern Datacenter. In the past, IT departments built their infrastructure and bought their applications, but now they’re increasingly looking to invert that model.

They want to buy simple, easy-to-deploy infrastructure platforms on which they can quickly build and run core business applications that differentiate their

businesses, while also providing a platform for deploying next-generation applications.

Converged infrastructure allows for both. All-in-one storage, compute, and network platforms simplify, speed up, and radically transform the traditional IT process of building things out component by component. It reduces the time and cost of procuring, deploying, configuring, and managing hardware and software components separately, accelerating time to value for IT investments. Additionally, it’s essential that converged systems are built on technologies that are third-platform ready - such as flash, scale-out, softwaredefined, and cloud-enabled systems.

Once a plan is made to modernise data center infrastructure, the next step is to automate everything. Any manual process that is done as a predictable, repeatable step must be ruthlessly eliminated via management and orchestration tools up and down the IT stack. Fullscale automation is the single most transformative change in IT delivery today.

Once full-scale automation processes are in place, full-scale IT transformation can proceed. And while IT services can be modernised and automated using hardware and software approaches to deliver the true well-run hybrid cloud experience that supports multiple CIO priorities, IT itself must continuously transform the people and processes that deliver business outcomes.

All of this only begins to tell the story of where businesses and IT teams are heading in the transformation process thanks to rapid digitisation and market opportunity. The paradigms associated with data centre technology will continue to evolve dramatically and as they do, new skills, tools and resources will come into play. There is no end point for transformation - it’s as constant as human creativity and innovation - but there is a beginning. And that is the journey of the modern data centre.

VIEWPOINT

IT’S TIME TO ENSURE BUSINESS CONTINUITY TAJ EL-KHAYAT, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, MENA, CITRIX, ON WHY THE NEED FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN IS BECOMING MORE CRITICAL.

I

nterruptions to the routine operation of a business can come from anywhere. Whether you are a large or small organisation, there will be events that occur that disrupt the ability for employees to be productive. These disruptions can be caused by anything from natural disasters to IT incidents to power or telecommunications outages and many more. The question is, how prepared are you?

While an organisation’s disaster recovery plan may focus on those core technology elements, data centers, critical infrastructure and systems; 36

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

a business continuity plan takes a broader, organisational wide view on how to minimise, or prevent altogether, the impact to business operations in the event of a disruption. Consider a situation where IT systems are 100% available, but employees can’t get to them? They either can’t physically get to the office and do not have the ability to work remotely. How do they work?

Business Continuity Planning Business Continuity planning is a critical process for any sized organisation and provides a framework on how to deal with disruptions to the normal business

operations. Here are some guidelines to consider when thinking about business continuity: Build resilience into your business from the outset.

Whether its key IT infrastructure and systems or business processes; design and build them with disruption in mind.

It’s always easier to include the ability to handle disruptions when you are first setting things up than trying to bolt on a fix later on.

Putting technology aside, consider also the workflows performed by employees to get work done. There

systems or processes being added or even new business functions.

are many business processes that only exist in the heads of employees. Critical business processes should be identified, documented and if possible automated.

Assess and Prioritise Functions for Recovery When your business is disrupted, you won’t necessarily be able to have all services available. You need to identify and prioritise the key functions to allow your business to continue to operate.

Ensure you take a wider lens on the business operations beyond just IT, what if employees can’t physically get to the office, do your key suppliers have a business continuity plan?

Consider the different ways your business could be disrupted and what the impact would be in the different elements of your business operations. Once you’ve identified the key functions and assessed the impact, you need to work out the approach to mitigating the risks for each of these. In some cases, the answer may be switching to manual processes, in others it could be a specific technology solution. Identify what the alternative mode of operation would be and build this in the business continuity plan.

Build the Plan It’s imperative that a clear business continuity plan is documented and hosted in a location that is easily accessible by everyone who needs it and importantly accessible from anywhere. There’s no point having the plan hosted on a server in the data centre that you can’t access when you’re not in the office!!

The plan should include: • Identification of key stakeholders and the chain of command when the business continuity plan is invoked.

• A clear communication strategy of how to stay in touch with employees, contractors, executives, suppliers.

Essentially anyone who needs to know what’s going on.

• Processes for how key business functions will continue to be operate.

This should also include the order in which functions should be enabled to ensure high priority services are available first.

REMOTE WORKING NOT ONLY PROVIDES BENEFITS TO THE ORGANISATION

BY ENABLING EMPLOYEES TO BE PRODUCTIVE FROM ANYWHERE; IMPORTANTLY, IT ENABLES EMPLOYEES TO BALANCE THEIR OWN PERSONAL NEEDS WITH THEIR WORK NEEDS. WORK/LIFE BALANCE IS CRITICAL TO DRIVING POSITIVE ENGAGEMENT AND ULTIMATELY DELIVERS A BETTER EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE. • How employees and any dependent stakeholders are educated on the business continuity plan so they are aware of how things will operate.

And finally, business continuity planning is not a one-off exercise. It needs to be a live document that is always evolving as the business changes, whether it’s new

Making Business Continuity Business as Usual Now this is the traditional approach to business continuity. It gives a business an alternative method of operating when a disruption occurs. However, being a different way of working, it needs to be maintained, alternate solutions may need to be deployed and employees need to be trained to work differently under this scenario.

But why does this have to be the case.

For certain disruptions where employees can’t physically get to their office, they just need to be able to work remotely.

Why can’t this capability be built into the way they work every day. Why should a day when I work from home be any different to working in the office, at a cafe, at an airport, wherever? Conferencing services like GoToMeeting or Teams means I can meet and collaborate with people from anywhere. Workspace technologies like Citrix Workspace mean that I have access to all the apps, data and workflows I need to be productive.

Remote working continues to gain more and more popularity. And in some cases, it’s being forced upon organisations. Bloomberg refers to the situation with the Covid-19 pandemic now as “the world’s largest work-fromhome experiment” as organisation are being pushed to enable employees to be productive from home. A similar situation occurred in Australia as well with the recent fires pushing organisations to have their employees work from alternative locations.

Remote working not only provides benefits to the organisation by enabling employees to be productive from anywhere; importantly, it enables employees to balance their own personal needs with their work needs. Work/ life balance is critical to driving positive engagement and ultimately delivers a better employee experience.

The way I work remotely should be the same way I work from anywhere.

Remember, work is not a place, it’s a thing we do.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

37

VIEWPOINT

SECURING OPERATIONAL TECHNOLOGY LEGACY POWER AND DISTRIBUTION GRIDS CAN NO LONGER COPE WITH MULTIPLE TYPES OF ENERGY PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS, MAKING THEM VULNERABLE IN THE SHORT TERM AS THEY ARE TRANSFORMED, EXPLAINS MAHER JADALLAH, REGIONAL DIRECTOR – MIDDLE EAST FROM TENABLE.

W

ithout intervention, the Middle East is fast heading towards disruption to energy production and distribution systems. To address this, the emphasis on long term sustainability, investments into the generation of solar and wind power are already visible in GCC countries including UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. Another area that has seen significant Investment is the introduction of smart grids across MENA, expected to reach $20B over the next seven years according to the Energy and Utilities Market Outlook Report 2020.

While grid system modernisation is critical to manage the disruption taking place in energy production, distribution, and consumption, it is also opening up the front door of those control systems to malicious threat actors. Grid-based industrial cyberthreats present risks to safety, reliability and business continuity.

With cybercriminals typically looking to target low hanging fruit to gain entry, it is inevitable that we will continue to see attacks aimed at the perceived least defended infrastructure. This might include a smaller substation or transfer location rather than the core of any one grid. These smaller stations are frequently linked to a larger network, for example a regional grid, which could result in a domino effect whereby an attack compromises the entire network.

Security initiatives must extend beyond core and HQ locations to encompass remote and distributed locations.

Here are four trends and what can be done to counteract them: Industrial to IT attacks will become reality: As previously mentioned, it is

38

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

highly probable that threat actors will look to compromise less defended industrial environments to traverse into IT data repositories — for example customer databases.

When protecting regular IT networks, security professionals are used to thinking in terms of exploits, malware and backdoors. While these risks are certainly relevant for power grids, industrial attacks can be as simple as issuing regular commands in a documented protocol.

Organisations should create an ecosystem of trust between industrial systems and IT security for information sharing to quickly detect this type of attack and prevent intrusion. When a security incident occurs, timely resolution depends on immediate availability of accurate inventory including every bit of information all the way from a device model down to the firmware version.

Shared responsibility for security: Energy organisations must recognise that security is a shared responsibility between industrial and IT teams. In a number of industrial markets, there has been a move for IT teams to take ownership for industrial security given their experience defending networks.

While industrial teams have objected to any IT intervention in control systems, this must change. That said, given the traditional approach to IT security differs from industrial security, there needs to be a melding of the two approaches.

Boundaries between systems dissolving: Whether or not systems are perceived to be air gapped, industrial attacks present a real and present danger. The mantra of set it and forget it is no longer the way to administer industrial environments. Failure to identify all systems creates blind spots where some systems are potentially insecure.

Energy providers can’t depend on costly, error-prone manual network inventories that may be out of date soon after they are collected. Instead, automated solutions are needed to identify and characterise converged IT/OT systems. A unified, riskbased view detailing what is exposed, where and to what extent across the combined IT and OT environments.

Industrial and IT skills gap: It’s recognised that there is a global shortage of skilled security professionals.

Organisations should conduct a rigorous skills assessment of both their industrial and security teams and begin crosstraining programs targeted to address each of the gaps. Embrace this as an opportunity. Recruit new talent from universities or hire less experienced candidates with a willingness to retrain.

While it might seem overwhelming, identifying weaknesses within Industrial environments is critical to understanding risk. Energy production and distribution organisations will need to look at technology, people, and culture to prepare for the disruption and transformation in the months ahead.

VIEWPOINT

HOW SECURE IS THE CLOUD? OPTIMAL CLOUD SECURITY REQUIRES A DISTINCT WAY OF THINKING ABOUT IT INFRASTRUCTURE, SAYS MOHAMMED ABUKHATER, VICE PRESIDENT SALES, META, F5 NETWORKS.

B

ack in the day, the theft and loss of backup tapes and laptops were a primary cause of data breaches.

That all changed when systems were redesigned and data at rest was encrypted on portable devices.

Not only did we use technology to mitigate a predictable human problem, we also increased the tolerance of failure.

A single lapse, such as leaving a laptop in a car, doesn’t have to compromise an organisation’s data. We need the same level of failure tolerance, with access controls and IT security, in the cloud.

In the cloud, all infrastructure is virtualised and runs as software. Services and servers are not fixed but can shrink, grow, appear, disappear, and transform in the blink of an eye. Cloud services aren’t the same as those anchored on-premises.

For example, AWS S3 buckets have characteristics of both file shares and web servers, but they are something else entirely.

Practices differ too. You don’t patch cloud servers – they are replaced with the new software versions. There is also a distinction between the credentials used by an operational instance (like a virtual computer), and those that are accessible by that instance (the services it can call).

Cloud computing requires a distinct way of thinking about IT infrastructure.

A recent study by the Cyentia Institute shows that organisations using four different cloud providers have one-quarter the security exposure rate. Organisations with eight clouds have one-eighth the exposure.

Both data points could speak to cloud maturity, operational competence, and the ability to manage complexity. Compare this to the “lift and shift” cloud strategies, which result in over-provisioned deployments and expensive exercises in wastefulness.

So how do you determine your optimal cloud defence strategy?

Before choosing your deployment model, it is important to note that there isn’t one definitive type of cloud out there.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) definition of cloud computing lists three cloud service models infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS). It also lists four deployment models: private, community, public, and hybrid.

Here’s a quick summary of how it all works through a security lens: Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) cloud is an application service delivered by the cloud. Most of the infrastructure is managed by the provider. Examples include Office 365, Dropbox, Gmail, Adobe Creative Cloud, Google G Suite, DocuSign, and Shopify. Here, you are only responsible for your logins and data. Primary threats include phishing, credential stuffing, and credential theft.

These can be controlled via solutions such as multi-factor authentication, application configuration hardening, and data-at-rest encryption (if available).

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud is a platform to build applications into before they are delivered by the cloud.

The provider manages the platform infrastructure, but you build and run the applications. Examples include AWS S3 buckets, Azure SQL Database, Force. com, OpenShift, and Heroku. You are only responsible for your logins and data. In addition to SaaS threats (access attacks), there is a need to secure the application itself against web app attacks. In this model, you are likely to have exposed APIs

and service interfaces that could leak data if unsecure. Controls include User/Role Rights Management processes, secure API gateways, Web App Security, Web App Firewalls, bot scrapers, and all the referenced SaaS controls.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud is a platform to build virtual machines, networks, and other computing infrastructures. The provider manages the infrastructure below the operating system, and you build and run everything from the machine and network up. Examples include AWS EC2, Linode, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine. You are responsible for the operating systems, networking, servers, as well as everything in the PaaS and SaaS models. In addition to the threats targeting SaaS and PaaS models, the main security concerns are exploited software vulnerabilities in OS and infrastructure, as well as network attacks. This calls for a hardening of virtualised servers, networks, and services infrastructure. You’ll need all the above-mentioned controls, plus strong patching and system hardening, and network security controls.

On-Premises/Not Cloud is the traditional server in a rack, whether it’s in a room in your building or in a colocation (Colo) facility. You’re responsible for pretty much everything. There’s less worries about physical security, power, and HVAC but there are concerns related to network connectivity and reliability, as well as resource management. In addition to threats to networks, physical location, and hardware, you’ll have to secure everything else mentioned above.

If you have a hybrid cloud deployment, you’ll have to mix and match these threats and defenses. In that case, an additional challenge is to unify your security strategy without having to monitor and configure different controls, in different models and in different environments.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

39

VIEWPOINT

HARNESSING TECH TO SAVE LIVES DR. JASSIM HAJI, PRESIDENT OF BAHRAIN’S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOCIETY, ON HOW AI AND ML CAN ASSIST US TO PREVENT AND RESPOND TO PANDEMICS SUCH AS COVID-19

A

s the global epidemic of the COVID -19 plagues the world, we are in danger of not learning from many of our past disasters and utilising the many fields where AI and machine learning are beginning to make an impact.

Implemented in the right way, AI can assist and inform first responders, as well as communities affected. AI can be leveraged to save lives in these turbulent times.

AI can support the enrichment of optimisation strategies, which are much needed as the turmoil around the world reaches unprecedented proportions. The need of the hour is research on the use of machine learning to evaluate and optimise strategies for social distancing between communities, cities, and countries to control the spread of epidemics, detecting patterns, forecasting, and prediction.

AI in detecting patterns AI can pinpoint patterns in a passel of data and make predictions, and the hope is these tools could identify drug prospects to test on humans within months. As coronaviruses such as COVID-19 mutate, a drug candidate will have to be effective against a broad spectrum of possible forms.

Work is now underway worldwide to use AI in pursuit of a vaccine.

AI will, without a doubt, speed up vaccine development, but these technologies rely on large quantities of accurate training data.

A new, highly infectious disease for which there is limited data poses challenges for even the more sophisticated AI techniques.

AI can also be used to identify and locate commonalities within localised outbreaks of the virus, or with micro-scale adverse health events that are out of the ordinary.

The insights from these events can help answer many of the unknowns about the nature of the virus.

AI In forecasting Its primary strength is the way it increases

40

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

and distribute information where it’s most needed. Or AI could be used to scrape data from millions of social media posts and clue rescue workers into the hardest-hit areas and people in the most need.

our capacity to predict and plan for events and circumstances. Considering that one of the most important ways to save lives in disasters is to have early warning, there’s a lot of good the technology can do.

The mere potential of AI isn’t just in predicting that a disaster will happen but in; forecasting where it will have the most impact, which systems are likely to fail, and what communities are in the most danger.

This data can be used to improve decisionmaking about the issuing of building permits and insurance.

AI could prove invaluable to tracking and reporting the efforts as well as providing critique in the maintenance of critical equipment and systems.

AI on the ground during a disaster Over the years where a natural disaster has occurred, people on the frontline have often turned to social media and ad-hoc volunteer groups in addition to, and sometimes instead of, relying on aid from the government or traditional charitable organizations. Local and broader communities have proven that they’re capable of coming together in the face of a disaster when assistance doesn’t come quick enough.

Nearly all social media platforms already rely on machine learning algorithms for advertising, but additional AI functionality could be of great assistance during disasters, helping both ordinary people and first responders keep up to date and organized. Deployed in the right way, existing timeline algorithms could be used to deliver

AI is needed to keep up With unmanned robots being used to great effect in every aspect of disaster response, it is now time to make the best use of robots and our ability to gather more data, our data collection and analysis techniques must keep up. As big data grows, we need to ensure the capability to draw conclusions from it to increase response time.

Autonomous machines and AI algorithms, when combined, act as a significant force multiplier in our ability to protect people and property in the face of disaster.

Recently, a robot helped doctors treat an American man diagnosed with the novel coronavirus. The robot, which carried a stethoscope, helped the patient communicate with medical staff while limiting their own exposure to the illness.

We see AI is currently being leveraged in diagnosing the illness. Several hospitals in China are using AI-based software to scan through CT images of patients’ lungs to look for signs of Covid-19, the infection caused by the novel coronavirus.

We also see in this time, the coronavirus epidemic has also inspired several drug companies to use artificial intelligencepowered drug discovery platforms to search for possible treatments. That process can involve using AI to find entirely new molecules that might be capable of treating the pneumonia-like illness or mining through databases of alreadyapproved drugs (for other diseases) that might also work against COVID-19.

Importantly, while AI drug discovery might speed up the process of finding candidates for new drugs and treatments, there’s no guarantee that the technology will come up with anything better than what human scientists could discover on their own.

VIEWPOINT

WINNING THE BATTLE MARTIN MACKAY, SVP EMEA AT PROOFPOINT, ON HOW TO COMBAT ADVERSARIAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A

rtificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Once thought to be a technology that would struggle to find its place in the real world, it is now all around us.

It’s in our phones, our cars, and our homes. It can influence the ads we see, the purchases we make and the television we watch. It’s also fast becoming firmly embedded in our working lives – particularly in the world of cybersecurity.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are both countries that are committed to the development and implementation of AI technologies. According to a report by PwC, the potential impact of AI for the Middle East’s economy is expected to be US$320 billion by 2030.

The UAE, in particular, is aiming to become a global leader in AI by 2031, with AI technology forecasted to contribute 14% to the national GDP in 2030. Additionally, in Saudi Arabia, AI is expected to contribute approximately 12.4% to the country’s GDP in 2030.

However, as with any advancement in technology, AI is not only used for good.

Just as cybersecurity teams are utilising machine learning to ward off threats, so too are bad actors weaponising the technology to increase the speed, effectiveness and impact of those threats.

We now find ourselves in an arms race.

One that we can only be won by embracing this rapidly evolving technology as part of a broad, deep defence.

What started out with fairly simple yet effective use cases, such as the email spam filter, has now expanded across every function of the cybersecurity team.

Today, AI is a vital line of defence against a wide range of threats, including peoplecentric attacks such as phishing. Every phishing email leaves behind it a trail of data.

This data can be collected and analysed by machine learning algorithms to calculate the risk of potentially harmful emails by checking for known malicious hallmarks.

The level of analysis can also extend to scanning attached files and URLs within the body of a message – and even, thanks to a type of machine learning known as computer vision, to detecting websites that impersonate the login pages of major phishing targets.

The same machine learning model can also be applied to other common threats such as malware – which grows and evolves over time and often does considerable damage before an organisation knows what it’s up against.

Cybersecurity defences that employ AI can combat such threats with greater speed, relying on data and learnings from previous, similar attacks to predict and prevent its spread.

As the technology continues to develop, so too will its prevalence within cybersecurity defence.

Artificial intelligence – in attack Unfortunately, while AI is making great strides in defending against common threats, it’s making it far easier for cybercriminals to execute them too.

Take phishing: AI has the potential to supercharge this threat, increasing the ease, speed and surface of an attack.

Even rudimentary machine learning algorithms can monitor correspondence and credentials within a compromised account. Before long, the AI could mimic the correspondence style of the victim to spread

malicious emails far and wide, repeating the attack again and again.

When it comes to malware, AI can facilitate the delivery of highly-targeted, undetectable attacks.

AI’s speed will also likely prove to be a major boon for cybercriminals, as it is for those of us defending against it.

Machine learning could be deployed to circumnavigate and break through cybersecurity defences faster than most prevention or detection tools could keep up.

And AI will not only exacerbate existing threats – it’s already creating new ones.

Sophisticated machine learning techniques can mimic and distort audio and video to facilitate cyberattacks. We have already seen this technology, known as DeepFakes, in the wild.

Winning the AI arms race When you find yourself in an arms race, the only way to win is to stay ahead. For the cybersecurity industry, this is nothing new.

While the tactics and technologies may have changed, the battle to stay in front has raged for decades.

In this latest standoff, to keep pace with AI-powered threats, we must embrace AIpowered defence. That being said, AI should not be considered the universal panacea.

There’s no doubt that machine learning technology is both sophisticated and incredibly powerful, but it is just one piece of the puzzle.

When it comes to successfully defending against modern cyber-attacks, there is no silver bullet – AI or otherwise.

A strong defence must be deep, multifaceted and, despite the ‘rise of the machines’, people-centric.

Regardless of what is attacking them, it is still ultimately your people that are being attacked. That’s why – along with the latest tools and protections – your cyber defence must include regular and comprehensive employee education around attack methods, threat detection and threat prevention.

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is now a hugely important line of cyber defence. But it cannot and should not replace all previous techniques. Instead, we must add it to an increasingly sophisticated toolkit, designed to protect against rapidly evolving threats.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

41

VIEWPOINT

HOW 5G CAN CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS DR. CHRIS COOPER, GM AND DIRECTOR LENOVO DATA CENTRE GROUP, EXPLORES HOW CUSTOMERS CAN SUCCESSFULLY NAVIGATE THEIR BUSINESSES IN THE ERA OF 5G AND EVOLVING COMMUNICATIONS.

C

onsumers are eager to experience the muchhyped benefits of 5G, even as telecommunications companies are figuring out how to deploy this new technology and stay profitable. Much attention has been focused on how to ramp up network speed and power on the edge, far from a centralised data centre and closer to the end users who create the data.

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) network architecture supports edge-based applications that require high bandwidth and low latency.

Because of the MEC platform’s ability to interact with the Radio Access Network (RAN) directly, MEC will relieve bandwidth congestion. This offers better performance for high-bandwidth applications such as augmented reality, 42

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

local content distribution and pretty much anything that contributes to the quickly growing collection of the Internet of Things. MEC also opens up new markets for developers who are creating the innovative, new applications and services that run on the edge.

All this puts pressure on telecommunications companies to build an edge and cloud-based infrastructure faster. To be successful, communication service providers must figure out how to use this new infrastructure to save money and generate new revenue streams.

Managing and scaling decentralised edge computing is a huge challenge for telecommunication companies. Lenovo is directly addressing this challenge with a single platform and architecture that deploys, automates and manages edge computing solutions from one place.

T-Systems, the largest IT services company in Germany, operates 30 data centres around the world, running business-critical applications on 65,000 virtual machines for its large enterprise customers. When it used Lenovo’s Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) solution to reduce the time to provision the entire end-to-end system from weeks to hours, it made a huge difference, and not just for the customers who got their private clouds up and running that much faster.

LOC-A is the end-to-end cloud automation platform to plan, deploy, manage operations and benchmark distributed cloud infrastructure with support for Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, OpenStack and VMware

Cloud Foundation. The LOC-A solution decreased T-Systems’ operational expenses by 40%. LOC-A combines the advantages of a public cloud-like rapid scalability, flexibility and high speed to service, with the private cloud advantages of data protection and security — the seamless integration that’s needed to leverage the full potential of 5G. As a cutting-edge provider, T-Systems can rapidly onboard new customers with various environments.

LOC Automation software streamlines the process and simplifies operations across different clouds. In fact, a study by Roy Chua at AvidThink found that communication service providers can see: • A return on investment of $1.36 NPV over three years for every dollar spent • A reduction of up to 81% time on initial deployment lead times • A labor reduction for cloud implementation of 11X Customers can leverage the automated deployment of Red Hat OpenStack, OpenShift, VMware Cloud Foundation and Kubernetes to reduce the time to incremental revenue.

Digital transformation continues to be at the forefront of economic growth and development in the region. According to the latest findings of IDC, governments in the Middle East and Africa spent a total of $12.8 billion on information and communication technologies (ICT) in 2019. This figure is set to grow to cross the $15 billion mark by 2023. As 5G coverage continues to grow in the wider Middle East region, companies are increasingly looking to update their current IT infrastructure to accommodate 5G technologies.

5G may present the telecommunications industry with new challenges, but it is also bringing new opportunities. Lenovo is well suited to help customers figure out how to thrive in this new era of communications by ensuring network deployment, expansions and maintenance perform reliably.

VIEWPOINT

HOW TO MANAGE LIFESPAN OF SSDs PASI SIUKONEN, TECHNICAL RESOURCES GROUP TEAM LEADER AT KINGSTON TECHNOLOGY, SHARES INSIGHTS ON SOLID STATE DRIVES (SSDS) AND WHY IT IS CONSIDERED TO BE THE FUTURE OF STORAGE.

T

raditional hard drives are fast becoming a thing of the past, as we see an influx of more Solid State Drives (SSDs) as the main storage devices in most systems world over. Compared to hard drives, SSDs provide superior and enhanced performances, making them the future of storage.

The lifecycle of an SSD is determined directly by how much and how often data is written to the drive. Most computer systems run on SSDs as the main storage device, and it is important to take certain measures in order to increase the lifespan of the drives.

What kind of SSD does your computer support?

There are several considerations to be taken into account while buying SSD’s, the primary being knowledge of the system. All SSDs are built for specific purposes, thus one kind might not be suitable for all systems. There are client (desktop/notebook), server/enterprise and industrial/special purpose drives so it is important to determine which SSD suits your organisations needs the best.

Utilising the right SSD technology will make the SSD last longer as it is serving the correct purpose.

Picking the right drive makes a difference for what endurance or longevity is achieved. Just like you wouldn’t install notebook hard drives into servers, you don’t want to use client SSDs in those environments, where workloads are more demanding.

What capacity do you need?

Storage of the SSD is another

consideration for users. Lower capacity SSDs tend to have slower performance as the memory modules are less. Heavy programs that are not intended to be used on a particular SSD will quickly deplete the drive space. The 250 GB drives are comparatively cheaper than the larger capacity drives but these have limited storage space. Drives at 500GB capacity level occupy a sweet spot between price and roominess, although 1TB drives are becoming increasingly appealing. 1TB and 2TB drives are fast, and have ample room for future media collections and software.

How to prolong SSD usage?

SSDs may have decreased writing speed performance when the drive reaches full capacity. When the drive is near full capacity, it requires more time to find an available space and move files around.

Thus it is ideal to have at least 25% free space set aside, consuming only 75% of the drive space to achieve adequate writing speed performance and to keep the right balance between performance and space utilisation.

SSDs save data as blocks and can read the blocks anywhere within the drive regardless if it’s scattered or not. Therefore, it is not necessary to run defragmentation, the process will shorten the life of the SSD due to heavy read/write action. In the past, it was recommended to disable scheduled/ automatic drive defragmentation in the OS. Currently Windows detects whether the drive is a HDD or SSD, and optimises it accordingly so this is no longer a major concern. However, any defragmentation operations should still be avoided on SSDs, as the process is only relevant for hard

drives where data fragmentation leads to performance reduction. That’s not the case with SSDs. It is also necessary that SSD owners should let the OS configure the drives accordingly, ensuring the OS is updated and that the drive is an SSD, checking SMART health data on the drives on a regular basis, and running benchmarks to see that the drive is running optimally.

Lastly, it is suggested to continue using SSDs for all day-to-day operations, and use spinning disks for backups, large file libraries, etc. Some SSDs are designed to offer great burst performance, such as the Kingston A400, some SSDs are designed for consistent performance for video equipment and data centres.

What controller should your SSD have?

The controller can be thought of as the processor of the drive. It routes reads and writes, while performing other key performance and maintenance tasks.

Controllers are of different types and specs and like most PCs, more cores are better for higher-performing, highercapacity drives.

The SSD controller plays a big role in performance, as they maintain the health of the data by internal wear levelling, garbage collection and other functions, as well as ensuring through ECC that errors are corrected at all times. Overall SSD technology has reached maturity over the past decade and provides a reliable long-lasting experience and performance boost for storage, for consumers to enterprise customers.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

43

PRODUCTS

NOKIA INTRODUCES NEW WI-FI 6 MESH ROUTER

Genetec Announces New Mobile License Plate Recognition System

Nokia has added a new Wi-Fi 6 Beacon to its whole-home WiFi portfolio, helping operators to deliver a powerful user experience. Providing a high-capacity, high-performance in-home solution, the new Beacon 6 uses Wi-Fi 6 to deliver 40 percent faster speeds than previous Wi-Fi generations.

To further enhance the in-home experience, Nokia is also adding low-latency technology built on Nokia Bell Labs innovations to its Wi-Fi portfolio. Drastically improving residential Wi-Fi networks, the Nokia Beacon 6 provides operators with an easy to install solution that can support lowlatency applications such as gaming and gigabit speeds essential for creating a seamless end-to-end 5G experience.

The Beacon 6 is the first Nokia WiFi device to showcase several new technologies working seamlessly together.

This includes: • Support for Wi-Fi 6 which improves the overall speed, performance and latency of a Wi-Fi network with OFDMA, a modulation scheme used in 5G that allows the access point to talk to more devices at once.

• The Beacon 6 introduces Wi-Fi Certified EasyMesh and is fully interoperable with third party Wi-Fi Certified EasyMesh products for easy install. Nokia’s new mesh controller capabilities ensure the best Wi-Fi performance is achieved in the home by managing channel selection and adding advanced interference capabilities that are unique in the market.

• Nokia Bell Labs low-latency innovations including PI2 algorithm (available 2H20) that consistently improves latency even in congested environments. With PI2, latency is reduced from hundreds of milliseconds to 20 milliseconds which can be further reduced to <5 milliseconds when paired with L4S in the core network. L4S is currently being standardised by the IETF and builds on Bell Labs innovations that eliminate jitters and delays that can impact the user experience in low-latency applications like gaming and virtual reality.

Genetec, a technology provider of unified security, public safety, operations, and business intelligence solutions has announced the immediate availability of its next-generation mobile automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) system. The new AutoVu SharpZ3 goes beyond traditional license plate identification and brings new levels of insight in vehicle analytics, situational awareness, and accuracy.

Ideally suited to meet the needs of parking managers who use mobile ALPR as part of their enforcement activities, the new SharpZ3 can help them track the types of vehicle (car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle) in parking lots or around the city, and analyse the evolution of the mix of vehicle types over time.

For law enforcement officers who use mobile ALPR to aid investigations, the SharpZ3 allows patrols to flag vehicles based on vehicle type and colour where no license plate was identified by a witness.

The AutoVu SharpZ3 is among the first specialised in-vehicle ALPR systems in the world to use Intel’s latest machine learning and computer vision technology to unlock new insights through innovative analytics. The AutoVu SharpZ3 system will not only be able to improve the accuracy of license plate reads in difficult environments (such as bad weather, heavy traffic, and fast speeds), but will also be able to record additional vehicle characteristics such as, vehicle type, colour, and more, in realtime, and without requiring large amounts of bandwidth.

Designed with a third optical sensor, the AutoVu SharpZ3 can accurately capture multiple plate designs in complex urban environments. These include flat, embossed, reflective and nonreflective license plates. The extra sensor will also allow more precise positioning of vehicle data on maps to provide more precise occupancy data than before.

Schneider Electric Unveils UPS Solutions For IoT And Edge Computing Schneider Electric has announced the availability of two new categories of UPSs from APC by Schneider Electric.

The first is Smart-UPS Lithium-ion, which offers trusted, premium power protection to ensure network and data availability. Designed for local edge environments and micro data centres, the Smart-UPS with Lithium-ion ensures consistent and reliable connectivity at the most critical moments. Increased UPS battery life, lower maintenance service costs, and fewer onsite visits provide up to a 50% lower total cost of ownership over 10 years.

44

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

Due to higher energy densities, Li-Ion batteries have a much smaller footprint and weigh about 30 percent less than sealed lead acid batteries.

With double the battery life, the amount of maintenance and associated costs required over the life of the UPS is reduced by up to 53 percent.

APC’s proven record of safety and bestin-class design and adherence to safety regulations (UL 1973, UL1642/IEC62133) provides added peace of mind.

Available with a preinstalled Network Management Card (NMC) option, this solution can enhance visibility of edge environments with monitoring and control capabilities.

The second UPS launch is for the APC Easy UPS 1 Ph Online, which is a versatile, high quality, cost competitive UPS developed to handle a wide voltage range and inconsistent power

conditions; delivering the quality millions of IT professionals trust around the world.

The APC Easy UPS 1 Ph Online protects critical equipment and connected loads from unpredictable power disturbances such as spikes, surges, blackouts, and brownouts, providing assurance, reliability and certainty.

Key benefits and features of the Easy UPS 1 Ph Online include: • Wide input voltage range protects against high fluctuations in power • Generates clean power via double conversion online technology • Recharges quickly (90 percent capacity in four hours) to protect against frequent outages • Intuitive LCD/LED interface provides UPS status for fast diagnostics • EcoMode provides increased unit efficiency

Huawei Announces New P40 Series Smartphones Huawei Consumer Business Group (BG) has announced in China the HUAWEI P40 Pro+, HUAWEI P40 Pro and HUAWEI P40, the new HUAWEI P40 Series flagship smartphones featuring cutting-edge designs with camera innovations that radically expand mobile photography and video capture possibilities.

The HUAWEI P40 Pro will be available in the United Arab Emirates from 9th April with preorders starting from 2nd April.

The HUAWEI P40 Series come with a large 1/1.28-inch sensor, which has a binned pixel size measuring 2.44µm to massively boost light intake for enhanced low-light performance, while a new periscope design realises 10x true optical zoom. The HUAWEI

P40 Series is powered by Kirin 990 5G and supports high-speed 5G and Wi-Fi 6 Plus.

The advanced hardware is embedded in a compact enclosure featuring the HUAWEI Quad-curve Overflow Display that delivers outstanding responsiveness.

The HUAWEI P40 Pro and HUAWEI P40 Pro+ are equipped with the HUAWEI Quadcurve Overflow Display. Inspired by the art of motion, the display takes on a curved edge on all four sides, creating a shape that is reminiscent of water on the cusp of overflowing from the rim of a filled cup. The super narrow bezels and streamlined round corners ensure an ergonomic hold and a near borderless look, while an enhanced in-

screen fingerprint reader offers 30 percent faster biometric authentication.

The devices are available in three glossy glass finishes – Ice White, Deep Sea Blue and Black – and two innovative refractive matte glass finishes – Blush Gold and Silver Frost. HUAWEI P40 Pro+ features an exquisite nano-tech ceramic back panel that is polished to ensure it stands the test of time with incredible durability and timeless style.

Ring Announces Next-Gen Battery-Powered Video Doorbell Ring has unveiled its new, next-generation Video Doorbell, Ring Video Doorbell 3. With improved motion detection and enhanced dual-band wifi, alongside the features users trust, including a 1080p HD camera and two-way talk, Ring Video Doorbell 3 is the latest addition to the company’s Video Doorbell lineup.

Ring has also announced the redesigned Ring Chime and Chime Pro for users who want to hear their Ring notifications inside their homes. All three new devices will be available for purchase in June.

The Video Doorbell 3 builds upon the great features of the Ring Video Doorbell 2 to now also include a new, adjustable motion zone, called near zone, that can detect motion within five to 15 feet of the front door, as well as enhanced dualband 2.4Ghz/5Ghz wifi for improved connectivity. With Alexa compatibility, users can simply say, “Alexa, show me the front door,” to see their Video Doorbell 3’s Live View, or say, “Alexa, answer the front door,” to begin speaking with whoever is at their door. Users can also link their doorbell to compatible

ASUS ZenBook Flip 14 Now Available In The UAE ASUS has announced the 14-inch ZenBook Flip 14 (UX463), the latest 2020 models in its ZenBook Flip convertible laptop series.

The ZenBook Flip 14 features the ScreenPad 2.0, an intelligent touchpad that incorporates a secondary LCD touchscreen.

ScreenPad 2.0 enhances both productivity and creativity, with an improved smartphonelike interface that makes ZenBook Flip even more versatile, said the company.

Ring Cams to create an integrated, whole-home security system.

The newly designed Chime and Chime Pro provide customers with audible notifications throughout their homes; and Chime Pro includes a built-in nightlight, as well as a Wi-Fi extender to improve and expand Wi-Fi connectivity across users’ Ring Doorbells and Cams.

Both new Chime devices are compatible with all the company’s Doorbells and Cams and provide real-time audio notifications when a Ring device detects motion, or when someone rings the doorbell, ensuring users never miss a moment.

The new Video Doorbell 3 includes Privacy Zones, which allow users to exclude areas of the camera field of view from video recording. Similar to all of the firm’s Doorbells and Cams, the new Video Doorbell 3 features toggles that allow users to turn off video or audio recording for an extra layer of privacy, at any time.

Ring Video Doorbell 3, Chime and Chime Pro will be available for purchase in June from Amazon.ae, Jumbo, Sharaf DG and Virgin Megastore for AED 839, AED 139 and AED 239.

The slim-bezel NanoEdge touchscreen on both models ensures compact dimensions. Powerful performance across the range is provided by the latest 10th Generation Intel Core processors, combined with up to 16 GB RAM, discrete NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, ultrafast PCIe SSD storage and the latest Intel WiFi 6 (GIG+ 802.11ax).

The new ScreenPad 2.0 upgrades the traditional laptop experience, adding an interactive secondary touchscreen that enhances productivity and creativity,

making ZenBook Flip even more versatile.

The intuitive smartphone-like interface on the new ScreenXpert software lets users easily manage tasks and create their own seamless multitasking workflows.

There are also useful quick controls that improve the interactions between the main display and ScreenPad 2.0.

APRIL 2020

CXO INSIGHT ME

45

BLOG

A STRATEGY FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY SUNIL PAUL, COO AND CO-FOUNDER OF FINESSE, ON HOW TO MITIGATE RISKS RELATED TO BUSINESS DISRUPTION.

O

n 12 March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially confirmed the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak as a pandemic. The WHO defines an epidemic as ‘the worldwide spread of a new disease’ for which “most people do not have immunity.”

From its epicentre in Wuhan, China in December last year, Covid-19 has spread to 191 countries as of 23 March, infecting 332,966 people and killing 14,511, according to data reported to WHO. As its director-general had noted, “Every day, Covid-19 seems to reach a new and tragic milestone.”

J P Morgan Global Economics Research said that “it expects the global economy to experience an unprecedented contraction during the first half of the year as containment measures are driving deep collapses in monthly economic activity.”

There nary a doubt that global businesses are getting hit on all fronts as countries shut down, supply chains splinter, travel restrictions and quarantines hit people and cargo movements, and employees are exposed to the risk of infections.

More than half of companies (51%) around the world have no business continuity plan or protocols in place to combat the coronavirus outbreak, according to a recent study by global consultancy firm Mercer.

With a higher-than-average number of illness and deaths in age groups different than what is seen in typical flu outbreaks, with no vaccine or proven antiviral medication, and a possibility of multiple outbreaks, Covid-19 could be the feared ‘single biggest threat’ to business continuity.

Traditionally, business continuity plans have focused on threats like natural disasters, technical disasters and malicious acts that affect a specific geographic area, facility, or system. They also assume that once the event has occurred, it is over and, while the effects may linger, recovery can begin.

However, a pandemic is fundamentally different from traditional business continuity

46

CXO INSIGHT ME

APRIL 2020

threats in that it is worldwide in scope, of indefinite duration and can be a moving target in that companies may need to adjust as things change; and most importantly, it is not infrastructure but mainly people that will become unavailable due to absenteeism.

In the case of Covid-19, as the virus spreads rapidly across countries and continents in a matter of weeks, people are finding they are unable to report to work due to governmentmandated public health measures, city lockdowns, travel restrictions, social distancing and quarantine norms if they aren’t infected.

While actual estimates vary, the cycle from disruption to recovery from a pandemic is expected to last anywhere between six months at the minimum to 12 or even up to 18 months it strikes in waves. Gartner analysis has noted that companies should factor staff absenteeism exceeding 40 percent for extended and sequential periods.

The focus of BCP, therefore, should be to ensure that companies can maintain core business activities for several weeks or months with limited staff.

Covid-19 pandemic has expanded the boundaries of how far organisations thought flexible workplace policies could stretch.

Multi-location enterprises would inevitably be more affected than those with a single location. BCP strategies should focus less on infrastructure protection and more on the protection of employees and their ability to conduct business, which includes moving to virtual workspaces and practices.

The Covid-16 outbreak has seen many companies shut down their principal and satellite offices, asking their employees to start working from home for the foreseeable future. A virtual workspace concept can make the transition to work-from-home a smooth and hassle-free affair.

At its core, a virtual workspace includes many of the same elements as a physical one: places to collaborate, share ideas and get work done. For example, they would need to provide secure remote access to the company’s internal network/intranet; ensure

stable and reliable internet access and VPN; access to corporate emails and sharing larger files. In other words, organisations need to ensure that employees have basic technology as well as access to the right collaboration and communication tools to be effective in a virtual environment.

A virtual space workstation can replicate the physical office environment through the integration of various software and systems would enable the organisation to conduct their daily work activities like chats, project management, web and video conferencing, collaboration and prototyping, scheduling and workflow automation in a hassle-free environment.

Today, major PABX systems provide APIs and Plugins to integrate with all CRM and ERP for routing calls and generating reports. These can be coupled with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) applications; server and database virtualisation and remote management tools enabling document management, employee monitoring, video conferencing, digital authorisation through APIs and modules to achieve a complete solution.

At the same time, remote workforces are also susceptible to cyber-attacks. Therefore, a virtual workspace solution should also facilitate measures such as multi-level validation and login options, user creation and assigning of viewing, accessing and delete rights at various levels; digital authorisations and permissions; integration with Active Directory and prevention of data loss and secure data migration.

To conclude, traditional BCP and pandemic planning require management to follow a cyclical process of planning, preparing, responding, and recovering. However, pandemic planning requires additional actions to identify and prioritise essential functions, employees, and resources within the institution and across other business sectors.

Providing the capabilities to work remotely would be critical to a company’s capacity to survive a pandemic.

Phone: +971 4 8863850, E-mail: info@asbisme.ae, www.asbisme.ae

Simplify your Wi-Fi world Managing your entire WLAN ecosystem is easy!

Try Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi free for 60 days.

Contact MEAMarketing@commscope.com or learn more at explore.commscope.com/trial

Š 2020 CommScope, Inc. All rights reserved. AD-114458-EN 04/01