Cloud Insight

CLOUDINSIGHT

A CXO INSIGHT MIDDLE EAST SUPPLEMENT

T he next

g n i h big t A STRATEGIC GUIDE TO CLOUD MIGRATION

Cloud Insight | 1

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Foreword

How to choose the right flavour of the cloud With the arrival of hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google, there has been a major uptick in the adoption of cloud services in the Middle East. According to Statista, the public cloud services market in the MENA region is tipped to touch $2 billion this year. The fact that mega cloud providers now have a footprint in the region has helped to alleviate fears are data residency and regulations. The factors driving the adoption of public cloud services are rather simple – it has become to the go-to-platform for digital transformation efforts in enterprises. For CIOs, the public cloud offers an opportunity to contribute to business growth by modernizing

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applications and enhancing customer experience. In this age of digital products and cloud-native applications, many IT leaders are making a strategic shift to the public cloud, and we see many real-world examples of their success.

On the other hand, private cloud deployments are also gaining steam in the region. Many businesses are retrofitting their existing data centres with new virtualisation and automation technologies. For companies that don’t want to move their data assets to public cloud environments due to security and privacy concerns, the private cloud offers a compelling value proposition. Industry experts agree that not everything will move to the public cloud, and the future of IT consumption is going to be a hybrid one – a combination of both public and private clouds.

However, for CIOs navigating the complex landscape of cloud services offerings is a daunting challenge as they have to deal with migration strategies, costs, and unshackle from the burden of legacy systems.

To address this, this special supplement with CXO Insight ME features the best cloud computing solution providers in the region and best practices that you should follow before making the shift. This ready-reckoner for IT decision-makers, we hope, will help you separate hype from reality and serve as a foundation for an effective cloud computing strategy.

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Cognizant

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CommScope

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Lenovo DCG

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D-Link

Veritas Technologies

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F5 Networks

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Gartner Cloud Insight | 3

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Roadmap for success

Neeraj Srivastava, Head of Middle East and Vice President, Cognizant, on accelerating the cloud journey for its clients with a riskfree approach.

What is the best cloud migration approach for enterprises in the Middle East?

Across all our ME engagements, we help enterprises seamlessly migrate to cloud leveraging our comprehensive Cloud Steps 2.0 framework. The framework encompasses two key stages of the migration journey: determining the right migration strategy and roadmap; and securely migrating workloads to the cloud, utilizing our migration factory tools and accelerators.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated an accelerated adoption of cloud and helped overcome the hesitation around migrating to cloud. As speed, structure and security are of the essence in these times, cloud adoption is only going to increase. We are enabling enterprises to accelerate their cloud migration process through our rapid assessment and migration offerings.

Can you tell us about your hybrid cloud offering?

Co g ni z a nt ’s hyb r i d c l o ud of fer i ng h el p s ent er p r i s e s orchestrate applications efficiently across multiple cloud landing zones, by delivering a secure, integrated, and managed platform. This offering enables enterprises to dynamically shift workloads and unify underlying a rc h i t e c t u re w i t h i n t e g r a t e d p ro c e s s e s , t o o l s , a n d comprehensive governance.

With COVID-19 putting the capacity of major hyperscalers to test, more and more enterprises will adopt a multi-cloud strategy to allow for interchangeable cloud platform.

Cognizant’s hybrid cloud offering is empowering our customers to effectively mitigate these challenges by providing the capability to quickly scale up or scale down resources across multiple cloud providers, while ensuring maximum control and security, leveraging latest technologies such as containers and microservices.

How does Cognizant help its clients to accelerate cloud adoption as part of their digital transformation journeys?

We help enterprises derive true business value out of cloud while driving digital transformation. It involves partnering with them at every stage of their cloud adoption journey and helping them drive enterprise-wide modernization with cloud across infrastructure, applications and data. We help them improve time-to-market, customer experience, agility and scalability, while addressing governance and cost issues by applying our strong domain knowledge and tailor-made industry solutions. In these times of COVID-19, for example, we are helping customers leverage cloud to drive scalability, flexibility and agility, while also addressing business continuity and capacity issues under remote working conditions.

How do you help clients minimize the risks of cloud migration?

We leverage our cloud security solutions to ensure a smooth transition to cloud for our customers while minimizing the security risks of migration. The comprehensive solution employs a three-pronged set of offerings – advisory (assessment and strategy), transformation (design and migration), and management (seamless support and monitoring).

The ongoing COVID-19 situation brings about increased security risks from external attacks. In light of this, we are enabling customers to leverage cloud with confidence and avoid operational disruptions.

Do you work with major mega cloud service providers?

Yes, we have partnerships and significant experience of working with all top-tier cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. We have built specific competencies and skills to deliver services on all these cloud platforms.

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Preparing for the future

Mahmoud Elmadhoun, Systems Engineering Manager - Middle East & Africa, CommScope, on how the cloud is transforming data centres and connectivity..

daily lives from accessing our corporate emails and data to personal media and on-demand entertainment content.

How is Commscope helping its customers to rethink the foundation of their data centres for the cloud?

CommScope is working closely with our customers to help them understand, design and deploy future ready data centre cabling infrastructure to support not only their current connectivity requirements, but also future emerging applications to support their high performing, high bandwidth cloud ambitions.

Do you work with hyperscalers and other cloud service providers from an infrastructure perspective?

Definitely, CommScope is working very closely with some of the main hyperscale players in the market as well as many other cloud service provides across the Middle East and Africa region as well as globally. We’ve helped many cloud operators by supplying state of the art cabling infrastructure solutions to support their business needs from our leading Ultra-Low-Loss Single Mode and Wide Band Multi Mode OM5 fibre optic portfolio to our Automated Infrastructure Management solution. CommScope cabling infrastructure solutions are deployed across the region connecting data centres, campuses and homes.

Do you recommend fiber optic cables for accessing the cloud?

Fibre optic cables provide high bandwidth, low latency performance which is critical for enabling seamless connectivity between cloud content and the consumers network. They also play a critical role within the cloud data center, especially in high performing applications where latency is an issue. CommScope’s Ultra-Low-Loss and High Speed Migration fiber portfolio helps customers build a reliable, future ready fiber optic cabling infrastructure to support their current and future cloud ambitions. On the consumer front, whether at home, the office or at a campus level, CommScope provides an extensive fibre optic portfolio to meet every situation enabling high performance, high bandwidth access to the cloud.

Why is cabling infrastructure important in this age of cloud computing?

The cabling infrastructure is a vital enabler of the cloud.

Whether in the data centre connecting server, storage and network equipment or in our offices and homes connecting our devices to the cloud, the cabling infrastructure provides the means for our devices to reach the content we’re looking for. High-performance cabling reduces latency and increases bandwidth to provide seamless connectivity experience between users and their cloud content. In this age of cloud computing, high speed and performance at every level of the network are critical more so than ever before as we grow more reliant on cloud based content in every aspect of our

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Can you tell us about your cloud-based network analytics service?

Enterprise network operators today have an unprecedented amount of network health and performance data. But harnessing that data for maximum benefit is an immense challenge and requires a modern cloud-supported, machine learning–powered analytics platform. The Ruckus Analytics platform is ideally suited to provide deep levels of insight into Ruckus environments.

Ruckus Analytics is a cloud service for network analytics and service assurance. Its benefits include; delivering comprehensive network intelligence powered by machine learning, accelerating client and network troubleshooting and helping IT teams to meet their SLAs

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The cloud reimagined

Sakkeer Hussain, Director of Sales and Marketing at D-Link, on the new era of personal cloud and a myriad of use cases.

What is the driving the growth of personal cloud in this region?

The explosion of digital content, faster broadband connections and continuing surge in internet and social media usage are among the top factors accelerating the growth of personal cloud market in the region. As digitalization becomes the new norm across enterprises, increasingly personal cloud services are used to enable easy file storage and sharing of personal and professional data. This in turn exponentially drives the personal cloud market growth.

A growing tech-savvy population has further driven the demand for the sector over the recent years, especially because of limited space on gadgets and devices. According to market reports, owning multiple devices is further predicted to boost the adoption of personal cloud solutions among users. Additionally, the growth of smartphones and tablets powered with high quality cameras has resulted in a bigger demand for more secure and higher capacity platforms to store digital media.

Several businesses encourage access and sharing of work data over personal devices to enhance productivity, increasing the need for faster access to stored data. This is especially true in today’s circumstances where remote working is increasingly becoming the new normal.

Globally, the personal cloud market size was valued at $26.80 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach $161.39 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 24.6% from 2020 to 2027, according to a recent report by Allied Market Research How is D-Link leveraging cloud technologies within in its portfolio?

D-Link Middle East is and continues to be a pioneer in cloud solutions and services in the region. As a company, our objective is to exceed customer expectations with groundbreaking technologies and superior products. Increasingly customers are accepting innovations in cloud as they see result-driven use cases in the region.

D-Link leads the smart cloud security camera space with its elaborate portfolio of indoor and outdoor mydlink

cameras. Simplicity, security and seamless user experiences are at the heart of our cloud-based cameras. Customers don’t have to be concerned about network maintenance or burden themselves with purchasing extra storage when it comes to personal cloud cameras.

D-Link cameras are supported by the mydlink app, allowing for remote monitoring, controlling and accessing of the devices no matter where you are. The app is also compatible with all operating systems and helps the user to always stay connected securely.

Cloud technologies are central to D-Link’s advanced product portfolio, whether it is our cloud routers, cloud cameras or cloud-managed APs. What are the top benefits of having a cloud-managed network?

There are many advantages of deploying cloud-managed networks, from scalability to cost savings. Customers have the option to select flexible pay-as-you-grow payment models. Users can be assured of security, efficiency and convenience. It eliminates constraints faced with wired and wireless controllers. Cloud-managed networks enable effortless remote working and learning in a big way. This is relevant for today’s circumstances compelled by the Covid-19 pandemic. It helps businesses to enhance productivity to new levels. Also, it allows them to be agile and quick in decision-making as it allows for easy implementation of infrastructures that are powered with built-in analytics and security.

I believe cloud-managed networks will be the future for businesses as the cloud economy has been growing at a substantial rate.

In terms of your product roadmap, what are the new innovations you are bringing to the enterprise market?

D-Link announced its latest intelligent cameras earlier this year, which included its flagship product – mydlink DCS-8630LH Full HD Outdoor Wi-Fi Spotlight Camera with Built-in Smart Home Hub. These new cameras are equipped with edge-based person detection with AI technology, allowing for more intelligent and personal automation and surveillance for every smart home. The cameras are interoperable with other devices in the mydlink ecosystem, and also work with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, as well as conform to the ONVIF standard.

Moreover, all new cameras feature the latest industrystandard 128-bit wireless encryption, built-in Bluetooth for faster setup, cloud recording, and work with the free mydlink app for remote viewing and management.

D-Link will continue to spearhead innovations in the cloud space. Together with our extensive partner ecosystem, we are well-positioned to assist our customers in their cloud journey and enable them to leverage the technology’s many benefits in the years to come.

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The need for speed

Tabrez Surve, Regional Director – Gulf, Levant & Turkey, F5 Networks, on enhancing application delivery and security in the cloud.

What is F5’ cloud strategy and how are you helping your customers overcome their cloud challenges?

Cloud decisions are often driven by what’s best for the application, even when different apps require different cloud services. Today, multi-cloud solutions aren’t just another option, they’re best practice.

But more cloud environments also mean more complexity.

To help simplify cloud strategies, F5 offers a comprehensive set of multi-cloud application services and management tools that remain consistent across clouds. Importantly, F5 services are highly programmable, API-accessible, and can be integrated with existing automation and delivery systems.

How do you ensure applications are always secure in the cloud?

Whether it’s protecting your application from malicious bots, application-layer denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, API protocol vulnerabilities, or OWASP Top 10 threats, you need advanced capabilities for your cloud apps. “Good

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enough” isn’t good enough. For example, F5 adds significant capabilities beyond public cloud web application firewall (WAF) solutions. Using behavioural analytics, automated learning capabilities, dynamic profiling and risk-based policies, F5 Advanced WAF puts additional security protections in place to prevent even the most sophisticated attacks from ever reaching your application servers. Furthermore, with pre-configured policies out-of-the-box and a repeatable security architecture, you don’t have to be a security expert to put advanced multi-cloud security in place.

How can users deploy and manage applications in a consistent way across multi-cloud environments?

Choosing the right cloud for each application means two things: Your applications are highly performant in their environments; your IT footprint is wide and a little complicated.

When it comes time to make a sweeping security policy update to applications, teams will have to try and manually update every single application, hoping not to introduce any human error along the way. This is likely a very resourceintensive exercise, especially given the sheer number of security and performance policy updates that go out the door on a weekly basis.

To make things more difficult, as application portfolios expand (which is a good thing), this policy update process is going to get more and more complex, heightening the chance of introducing human error and new vulnerabilities.

The key is to provide app development teams with a catalog of easy-to-use, consistent, and vetted security, compliance, and performance policies—built by the security and NetOps teams. This way, app dev teams retain the freedom and flexibility to choose the right environment to host their applications, while security and networking teams can define and enforce a catalog of critical policies that are consistent across on-prem and cloud environments.

Customer challenges aren’t of a one-size-fits-all nature, and neither are our solutions.

How do you plan to allow your customers to use F5 for their cloud-native applications?

We are continually growing our cloud-native application services portfolio with solutions that address a broad range of modern application development use cases with consumption models that resonate no matter where customers may be in their cloud migration journey.

For example, F5 Cloud Services provide high-availability, self-service, and fully managed SaaS solutions that are easily provisioned and configured within minutes on AWS. As enterprise-grade offerings, they are designed to support modern deployment scenarios such as cloudnative applications, microservices, and container-based environments. Consumed as a utility through a pay-as-yougo model in the AWS Marketplace, F5 Cloud Services offer predictable pricing, flexibility, and the ability to auto-scale to meet application workload demands.

Laying the foundation

Richard Wilcox, Regional Director – Middle East, Lenovo Data Centre Group, on driving innovation in cloud infrastructure to accelerate deployment and meeting evolving customer expectations.

UAE’s borders, presents companies with an opportunity to use these facilities to scale up their operations without having to store data outside the UAE. Can you tell us about your cloud infrastructure solutions?

With the support of our ISV partners, Lenovo continues to deliver to its customers the most innovative data centre solutions. Our own on-premise offering with ThinkAgileCP, which has the look and feel of a hyperscale solution, but is an on-premise cloud offering, enables us to deliver an endto-end solution to our customers. Furthermore, through our ThinkAgile portfolio, we are also able to deliver a complete Cloud Stack as well as other cloud infrastructure solutions jointly with Microsoft, VMware and Nutanix. This agnostic approach allows our customers to choose the solution that best fits their companies IT strategy.

Also, Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOCA) has enabled our clients to dramatically accelerate deployment of virtualised cloud infrastructure for both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) communications networks. The LOCA software solution helps to rapidly deploy, optimise and manage communications service providers’ cloud infrastructure for bare metal servers, containers and VMs. How is cloud transforming the data centre?

Transitioning from CapEx to OpEx, the pay-as-you-go structure allows for controlling costs based on consumption, which in turn provides predictable expenses. It also gives the capacity to scale up to meet increasing demand and allow for future growth. As companies implement Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and 5G technologies, an increase in connected devices drives an explosion of data created, analysed, stored and managed from the edge to the core.

With that in mind, we have expanded our portfolio of IT infrastructure solutions by launching the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX1021 and ThinkSystem DM7100. For enterprises building end-to-end applications that leverage Azure, the new Lenovo ThinkAgile MX1021 and ThinkSystem DM7100 provide validated solutions for cloud tiering.

How can CIOs in the region develop and implement a successful cloud strategy?

The ability to deliver cloud-based technology solutions as a service has made it possible to turn IT operations into an operational expense (OpEx), removing the need for any substantial upfront investments and replacing them with predictable monthly fees. Moreover, the OpEx structure doesn’t just allow for predictable expenses, but also provides the capacity to scale up to meet current demand to support an organisation’s growth plans.

With most of the cloud service providers being located outside the UAE, CIOs have been facing a dilemma of storing company data while abiding with the nation’s strict data residency laws. Therefore, the establishment from different cloud providers, whom have opened data centres within the

What are some of the new innovations you are bringing to the data centre?

The trend that we are seeing is that we move more and more towards edge computing. At a time where speed is critical to the success of many of our client’s business operations, we experience that they demand faster and increasingly more powerful solutions – such as our Azure Stack HCI Edge Solutions, the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX1021 or our Unified All Flash Storage Array, the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM7100. Whereas, for clients that do not require timesensitive solutions, we see that our ThinkAgile cloud portfolio remains popular. As part of this portfolio, we continue to offer a wide range of answers to cater to the needs of our customers through private cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud or customised cloud solutions.

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Dealing with data

Arthur Dell, Director of Technology Sales, Emerging Region at Veritas Technologies, on how the cloud impacts data protection and management.

How are you simplifying cloud backup and recovery?

Creating a single pane of glass across the entire the estate, whether it be in the cloud, multicloud, or on-premises is key. Doing this at scale in enterprise grade environments, supporting mission-critical workloads with robust security and workload mobility with features such as data and infrastructure analytics for policy based data-tiering, ransomware protection and simplified management offer significant benefits.

What are the advantages of cloud-based storage?

The ability to quickly provision storage elastically b a s e d o n d e m a n d w i t h o u t m a s s i ve c a p i t a l e x p e n d i t u re i s o n e of t h e m o s t co m p e l l i n g advantages. Furthermore, being able to trade Capex and Opex budgets based on business priorities along with the ability to classify data. This allows organisations proportionally b u d ge t a g a i n s t d at a c r i t i c a l i t y a n d e n s u re service-levels meet business priorities.

Can you tell us how Veritas is making it easy for its customers to manage data in the cloud?

Cloud-native tools generally have limited functionality across multi-cloud or hybrid cloud estates. Having global visibility of where data sits and whether data is being protected is aligned with business priorities and cost.

Moving from on-premises to the cloud or from cloud to cloud in an any-to-any model provides organisations with the freedom to apportion operational and capital expenditure to the right places.

Do you see a demand for backup-as-a-service in this market?

Organisations consider security, the ability to support a multi-cloud scenario and simplified management and automation capabilities as paramount. The realisation that cloud providers do not assume responsibility for protecting organisations’ data is rapidly accelerating the demand for backup-as-a-service. A primary consideration for most leading organisations i s s e l e c t i n g a ve n d o r w i t h a re p u t a t i o n a s enterprise market leader, and a long track record of success, specifically in the enterprise data backup market.

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Understanding cloud adoption in government Neville Cannon, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner on five ways government CIOs can optimise cloud deployment

In 2020, the worldwide public cloud services market will grow by 17%, according to Gartner. The expected $266.4 billion increase, up by 10% from 2019, continues to spur the adoption of public could. Yet, many national and regional governments and agencies remain in the adoption or policymaking phase.

The adoption of the public cloud cannot be excluded for long. Although government CIOs who have safely migrated encountered challenges — such as a lack of an enterprise cloud strategy, internal skills, or access to an external talent pool — they succeeded nonetheless.

The next step for government CIOs: Optimise your cloud adoption by learning how to enhance its deployment. Here are five actions to take now.

1. Create a policy, strategy and adoption plan At a national or state level, government agencies must understand the intent, direction and roadmap of their cloud

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migration to avoid any wasted effort and deliver a smooth cloud deployment. Ensure that each department or agency’s cloud policy, strategy and adoption plan is well-articulated and made available across all business units.

2. Establish a cloud center of excellence Create a cloud center of excellence (CCoE) to lead cloud adoption and governance. The CCoE maintains a cloud computing knowledge base and code repository, and actively solicits contributions from across the organization. It is a key ingredient for cloud-enabled IT transformation and is typically tasked with helping drive that transformation.

3. Build essential skills The skills needed for cloud management, cloud architectures, etc., are often insufficient, lack funding, and are overlooked or deprioritised. Hire or retrain employees who are willing and able to learn new technologies and the processes that go with them.

4. Expand SaaS use Software as a service (SaaS) is the cloud-based service most adopted by businesses, so not deploying it is not an option.

While government CIOs need to broaden its adoption, some risks will need mitigating. When you acquire SaaS, ensure that you implement a management and integration plan to maintain and guarantee a coherent and manageable approach to application and data integration.

5. Increase the adoption of cloud policy across the enterprise A cloud-first policy does not solely affect IT. Government CIOs influencing or creating new or updated policies must ensure the instructions for using public cloud encompass the entire government agency, including all relevant professional disciplines such as procurement, finance and legal.

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