CXO Insight ME - Issue 02 - October 2018

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ISSUE 02 \ OCTOBER 2018

CIRCLE OF EXCELLENCE REDEFINING IT VALUE WITH NEW WAYS OF THINKING

PUBLICATION LICENSED BY SHARJAH MEDIA CITY

CONTENTS

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PRODUCTS NEFFOS X9

LINKSYS CLOUD MANAGER

CIRCLE OF EXCELLENCE REDEFINING IT VALUE WITH NEW WAYS OF THINKING

HP SPECTRE FOLIO

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VIEWPOINT

FEATURE

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HOW TO GET CLOUD APPLICATION SECURITY RIGHT

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WHAT 5G AND IOT MEAN FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS

ERA OF MAN 40 AANDNEWMACHINE

46 BUSTING AI MYTHS PUBLISHED BY INSIGHT MEDIA & PUBLISHING LLC

THE FUTURE OF WORK

18 RETHINKING THE WAN INTERVIEW THE 14 REINVENTING SUPPLY CHAIN LOTTING A SMART 22 PSTRATEGY

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NEWS

IBM LAUNCHES CLOUD TOOL TO WEED OUT AI BIAS ORACLE NAMES NEW COUNTRY LEADER FOR SAUDI DELL EMC TO TRAIN EMIRATI STUDENTS IN AI INDUSTRY CONSORTIUM LAUNCHES BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM FOR TRADE FINANCE UAE TRA INKS DEAL WITH CISCO

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What does progress look like for you?

Your journey into the digital future is unique.

As your software partner we have the vision and industry expertise to help chart your course— and the technology to take you wherever that path leads.

Visit Infor at Stand # CC2-8 outside Hall 6

Designed for progress

infor.com @InforMiddleEast Copyright Š2018 Infor. All rights reserved.

EDITORIAL

HERALDING A NEW AGE

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s Gitex returns for its 38th edition, all roads will lead to Dubai World Trade Centre for the largest tech bonanza in the region. For me, this is going to be my 13th Gitex, and when I reminisce, I am amazed at how this show has accurately reflected the tectonic shifts in technology over the last decade or so.

This year, Gitex is going to shine the spotlight on digital technologies including AI, 5G, robotics, virtual and augmented reality and will feature more than 4000 exhibitors.

Visitors can expect to see some real-world applications and use cases for AI from tech giants such as Huawei, SAP as well as startups in this domain. The organisers claim this Gitex will be the Middle East’s largest AI gathering to date, and I am looking forward to seeing AI and next-generation robots in action.

Out of the new crop of technologies, there is no doubt AI is going to be the most disruptive with an impact on the way we live and work. Both public and private sectors are embracing the technology to automate routine tasks and reduce operational costs. In the UAE, we have a ministry dedicated to AI

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and many government entities have already started AI pilot projects to augment decision making capabilities and improve customer experience.

On the flip side, there are fears, not wholly unfounded, that AI could replace many jobs, and industry pundits predict over the next decade, almost half of today’s jobs will disappear. Is AI a friend or foe? I am reminded of a seminal essay in 2000 by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, titled ‘why the future doesn’t need us.’ Joy argued that 21st-century advances in digital and biological technologies could make the human race extinct in the next two generations.

Are we really going to see an army of robots with superior intelligence gang up and overthrow the human race? There are no simple answers to this question. Eminent people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have already warned us of the potential danger of AI and robots. For now, let us hope that we will have enough protection measures in place long before any of these threats could become a reality and that our fears don’t stymie any technological advances.

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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

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NEWS

IBM LAUNCHES CLOUD TOOL TO WEED OUT AI BIAS

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BM has introduced technology that gives businesses new transparency into AI, enabling them to more fully harness its power. The software service, which automatically detects bias and explains how AI makes decisions – as the decisions are being made – runs on the IBM Cloud, and helps organisations manage AI systems from a wide variety of industry players.

IBM Services will also work with businesses to help them harness the new software service.

In addition, IBM Research will release into the open source community an AI bias detection and mitigation toolkit, bringing forward tools and education to encourage global collaboration around addressing bias in AI. IBM’s new trust and transparency

capabilities on the IBM Cloud work with models built from a wide variety of machine learning frameworks and AI-build environments such as Watson, Tensorflow, SparkML, AWS SageMaker, and AzureML. This means organizations can take advantage of these new controls for most of the popular AI frameworks used by enterprises.

The fully automated software service explains decision-making and detects bias in AI models at runtime – as decisions are being made – capturing potentially unfair outcomes as they occur. Importantly, it also automatically recommends data to add to the model to help mitigate any bias it has detected.

ORACLE NAMES NEW COUNTRY LEADER FOR SAUDI Oracle has appointed Fahad Alturief as the new Country Leader for Saudi Arabia.

In this role, Alturief will be responsible for supporting innovative digital transformation programs for Oracle’s fast-growing customer portfolio across the Kingdom’s public and private sector; identify new growth opportunities and accelerate the company’s efforts to equip young Saudi students in next gen digital skills to support the implementation of National Transformation Plan 2020.

“Saudi Arabia is a priority market for Oracle and we are committed to deploy expert resources to support the development of the country’s digital economy”, said Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice President – Tech, Middle East and Africa. “Fahad has 6

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performed a pivotal role in driving Oracle cloud growth in Saudi Arabia and is ideally placed to lead our business in this important market. Fahad’s career growth within Oracle has been impressive, and is a testament to the opportunities that Oracle offers to talented and committed Saudi nationals.”

Fahad Alturief joined Oracle in January 2005 as a sales representative and quickly moved up the ranks to his current role as the Country Leader for Saudi Arabia. Fahad has gained deep understanding of the enterprise technology landscape by undertaking leadership roles across the Kingdom for various industry sectors including financial services, manufacturing and public sector.

FAHAD ALTURIEF - ORACLE COUNTRY LEADER KSA

DELL EMC TO TRAIN EMIRATI STUDENTS IN AI

Dell EMC has signed a deal with the UAE Ministry of Artificial Intelligence to train 500 Emirati students under a specialised AI programme, supervised by an executive team.

“The agreement aims to develop the skills of Emirati youth in AI technology, and offer graduates an opportunity to shape the future and manage AI processes. This move complements our plans to provide development opportunities to students

in schools and universities through other initiatives such as the UAE AI Summer Camp,” said HE Oman Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence.

This agreement aims at bridging the skills gap in the technology sector and supporting the youth in unlocking their potential to meet the challenges of the future in this rapidly evolving economy. Dell EMC will help these next generation of IT professionals play a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of government organisations by 80%, and achieve a cost reduction of up to 45%, equivalent to millions of dollars.

The programme is scheduled to run for 3 years with the participation of 120 students each year. Dell EMC will select 10 students who will be offered 5-day intensive training to obtain a diploma in Data Engineering and Cloud.

INDUSTRY CONSORTIUM LAUNCHES BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM FOR TRADE FINANCE Fifteen of the world’s largest institutions, including banks, trading companies, an inspection company and an energy major have formed a new venture known as komgo, that will seek to digitalise the trade and commodities finance sector through a blockchain based open platform.

The founders of this new company, managed and operated as an independent entity, include members from: ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Citi, Crédit Agricole Group, Gunvor, ING, Koch Supply & Trading, Macquarie, Mercuria, MUFG Bank, Natixis, Rabobank, Shell, SGS and Societe Generale. The platform will be developed in partnership with ConsenSys. komgo will start with two products, expected to launch before year end.

The first one will standardise and

facilitate KYC process without using a central database: the exchange of documents will be executed in an encrypted way over the blockchain on a need to know basis. The second product will be digital letters of credit, allowing commodity houses or other platforms to submit digital trade data and documents to komgo SA customer banks of their choice.

UAE TRA INKS DEAL WITH CISCO

Cisco has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of the United Arab Emirates (TRA) to accelerate digital adoption and boost cooperation for the UAE’s digital future.

The MoU is a key addition to Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) programme in the UAE, which aims at building and enhancing a strategic relationship with national leadership, industry, and academia to help accelerate the national digitisation agenda.

“Developing the UAE’s digital infrastructure is one of the government’s major drives.

It is closely aligned with the leadership’s directives to provide a favorable environment for technological development that enables future solutions, while contributing to the objectives of the national agenda and the UAE Vision 2021,” said Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, TRA’s Director General.

Under the framework of the MoU, TRA and Cisco selected specific focus areas, in line with the UAE’s national priorities.

These are key contributors to the UAE economy and include smart and lean government, tourism, smart districts, trade and logistics, healthcare and energy.

Cisco will work with the TRA to develop technology projects and demonstrate the value of digital adoption in these areas. The aim will be to realise the benefits of wider digital adoption for the UAE’s citizens and the UAE’s growing economy.

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VIEWPOINT

HOW TO GET CLOUD APPLICATION SECURITY RIGHT MOHAMMED AL-MONEER, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, MENA AT A10 NETWORKS, WRITES ABOUT WHAT IT TAKES TO SECURE APPLICATIONS IN THE CLOUD.

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e’ve all heard about the benefits of cloud infrastructure: improved productivity, cost savings, efficiency, agility and a host of other buzzwords that paint cloud as the be all and end all for IT. Most organisations today either already run workloads in the cloud or plan to experiment with cloud in the very near future. And it’s up to businesses to decide whether they choose cloud infrastructure provided by public cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, or cloud infrastructure maintained by their organisation’s IT team.

In compliance heavy businesses, such as financial institutions, a new trend has emerged: organisations are running an isolated virtual private environment on public cloud infrastructure.

Securing the app No matter where an application is hosted, securing the application delivery remains the primary concern. And it’s

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responsibility of the application owners – and as such, applications should not be deployed in the cloud due to security risks or unless security is properly baked in.

security that is causing a great deal of confusion in the industry. It raises the question: who owns application security in the cloud? Is it the cloud service provider or application teams?

Some believe that applications are secure simply because they’re deployed in the cloud, which would make application security the sole responsibility of the cloud infrastructure provider.

Others feel that security is the

Blurred lines It is well documented by public cloud providers like AWS and Azure that application security is a shared responsibility between the cloud infrastructure providers and the application owners. However, the lines are blurred and the division of ownership is not clearly defined.

Applications deployed in cloud infrastructure are accessed via the network. In this case, viewing the security responsibility from the network infrastructure point of view makes more sense.

Cloud providers control and manage the physical infrastructure resources, hence it’s their job to make sure the application that runs on that infrastructure is secure.

However, with virtual and softwaredefined networks (SDNs), application

Security monitoring is imperative; it’s a must-have.

• Application Vulnerabilities – these are susceptible to attackers looking to exploit and attack an application, either to gain complete control over it, deform it or steal data. OWASP analyses such vulnerabilities and exploits, and regularly publishes a list of its top 10 identified vulnerabilities.

• Malware and Ransomware – another well-known security problem that impacts a lot of users and should be addressed prior to deploying an application in the cloud.

• BOTs - approximately 30 percent of traffic comes from non-useful BOTs (i.e. bad BOTs). While some people don’t consider them a security issue, yet, bad BOTs can wasted 30 percent in server resources, resulting in a huge loss of productivity.

• Application Layer DDoS Attacks (volumetric or protocol exploits) – are also a concern as DDoS attacks evolve in size, scope and sophistication. DDoS protection is a serious consideration for both application owners and cloud infrastructure providers.

CONSIDER A SOLUTION THAT UNIFIES ALL ASPECTS OF THE APPLICATION TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT, APPLICATION SECURITY WITH TRAFFIC AND SECURITY ANALYTICS INTO A SINGLE SYSTEM AND LAYERS CENTRAL MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL ON TOP OF IT. THIS TYPE OF SOLUTION WILL ALLEVIATE MOST OF YOUR CLOUD APPLICATION SECURITY CONCERNS. owners define the virtual networks as per application architecture, referred to infrastructure as code. Thus virtual network security resides with the application owners. Traditionally, application owners have an established set of best practices, and setting up network security is a no-brainer.

Because the network is part of the infrastructure, cloud providers will provide tools for virtual network security and also for the implementation.

Cloud providers, however, have no visibility into what happens at the

application layer and have no way to help the application owners in this area.

The application security layer is the responsibility of application owners.

Application security challenges in the cloud Before we can evaluate a solution for application security, we need to understand the following challenges: • Security Monitoring – there are numerous questions about the solution’s capability, but monitoring the security should not be one of them.

Solving these challenges Fortunately, there are solutions available to overcome the security challenges associated with cloud applications.

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), for example, can handle the common vulnerabilities listed by OWASP. And IP reputation and other signature databases have been created to combat malware and bad BOTs. Many Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) bundle application security solutions with load balancing and other key application services. Having a complete set of application delivery tools along with security and visibility in a DDoS resilient architecture can create a complicated deployment architecture.

Consider a solution that unifies all aspects of the application traffic management, application security with traffic and security analytics into a single system and layers central management and control on top of it. This type of solution will alleviate most of your cloud application security concerns.

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FEATURE

THE FUTURE OF WORK ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION TECHNOLOGY WITH ITS PROMISE TO UNLOAD REPETITIVE AND MUNDANE TASKS TO SOFTWARE ‘ROBOTS’ THAT CAN DO IT BETTER AND FASTER IS GAINING STEAM IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

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ooking to make your employees happier and more productive? If yes, you are a prime candidate for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which uses artificial intelligence, or “robots” to handle tedious, mundane tasks and streamline business operations.

Though adoption is still in early stages, many enterprises are starting to test the waters as RPA offers many benefits and few risks. According to an Everest Group study, the RPA software market witnessed a growth of 97 percent last year to reach $480 million and is expected to grow 90 per annually up to 2019. The study reveals among current deployments, desktop automation is the most prevalent, followed by server deployments, which typically sees robots run according to pre-defined schedules or process-related automatic triggers.

The proponents of the technology say RPA offers a compelling business case for enterprises of all sizes.

“RPA is the software technology that employs software “robots” to take over repetitive, laborious, rule-based office tasks that were so far done by employees.

Administration processes, such as entering orders or allocating invoices to accounts, are diminishing productivity and carving out from the employee’s time spent in strategic tasks. Think about manual data

entry, data extraction, swivel-chair type of activities, system integration tasks or processes. RPA takes and digitises these by creating automated workflows executed by software robots,” says Ahmed Adly, alliance and channel lead at UiPath.

He points out that as compared to the human workforce, robots can work 24/7 which saves companies time and money. The amount of work is not only 3 to 5 times bigger, but also delivered with almost zero errors. These allow organisations to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. Equally important, RPA is freeing employees from repetitive administrative activities while boosting the quality of their jobs – professionals spend more time on strategic work, such as data analytics, interacting with clients, making judgment calls and getting more creative.

Daniel Schmidt, senior product manager at Kofax, says the beauty of RPA is there are no specific IT skills required to build robots. It is as simple as showing the robot what activity it has to perform, and the robot will use the existing IT infrastructure to communicate with business applications.

This eliminates the need for tedious programming of interfaces between different systems. With RPA, departments have a powerful tool for automating hundreds of complex manual processes with no coding or expensive integrations required, he adds.

RPA IS TRULY INDUSTRY AGNOSTIC. WHEREVER THERE ARE RULE-BASED REPETITIVE TASKS IN AN ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS, SOFTWARE ROBOTS CAN ASSUME THESE TASKS AND WORK 24/7, SAVING COMPANIES TIME AND MONEY, ERADICATING ERRORS, AND IMPROVING THE SATISFACTION OF BOTH EMPLOYEES AND CUSTOMERS. Ahmed Adly, alliance and channel lead at UiPath

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FEATURE

AUTOMATION CAN BE TRICKY IF NOT PLANNED WISELY. THE MAJOR FALL TENDS TO OCCUR WHEN COMPANIES OPT FOR PREMATURE PROCESS AUTOMATION PLANNING OR OVERLOOK THE DIRE NEEDS OF A BUSINESS PROCESS. Sunil Paul, COO of Finesse

Though RPA can help you reap efficiencies and reduce costs, its implementation can be fraught with pitfalls with no guarantee of success.

If organisations don’t follow best practices from early adopters, it may create more problems than companies have bargained for.

“Automation can be tricky if not planned wisely. The major fall tends to occur when companies opt for premature process automation planning or overlook the dire needs of a business process. The automation is best when structured in accordance to the business perspective,” says Sunil Paul, COO of Finesse.

Binu Koshy, CEO of 10XDS, says it’s important to focus on the bigger picture and evaluate the vendor landscape. “With RPA being a buzz word, there is a definite “me-too” rush in this space. It is extremely important to select the right partner who has the depth and breadth of experience in RPA. Someone who has “got their hands dirty” with strong implementations and clientele to back them. Moreover, they should have done at least few implementations on building of a Center of Excellence.”

He adds another critical aspect of the implementation is selection and qualification of the right processes. A process/group of processes must be carefully filtered, sieved and checked for “automatability.” Again, the possibility of 12

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re-engineering should also be explored along with clear documentation of the “as-is” and “to-be”.

RPA is continuing to advance into many industries with BFSI being the pioneer of the technology. Adly from UiPath says his company now has

automation, there are fears that the technology might eat into jobs and robots will replace people. Industry experts allay such fears and say RPA creates technical and non-technical jobs.

“RPA is here to help us improve businesses and transform processes with speed and accuracy. Automation is a friend who simplifies tasks for employees. Technology won’t eat jobs, it’s here to stay with a profound role to play, innovate and streamline businesses,’ says Paul from Finesse.

Schmidt from Kofax says the primary goal of RPA is to support employees in their work, complete tasks faster and achieve more accurate results. Robots are like that hard-working employee who always raises his hand for the most boring, time-consuming, mindnumbing jobs, and then gets them done in record time, accurately. In our experience, the number of employees

ROBOTS ARE LIKE THAT HARD-WORKING EMPLOYEE WHO ALWAYS RAISES HIS HAND FOR THE MOST BORING, TIMECONSUMING, MIND-NUMBING JOBS, AND THEN GETS THEM DONE IN RECORD TIME, ACCURATELY. Daniel Schmidt, senior product manager at Kofax

customers in insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, public administration, telecommunication, and aviation. “RPA is truly industry agnostic. Wherever there are rule-based repetitive tasks in an administrative process, software robots can assume these tasks and work 24/7, saving companies time and money, eradicating errors, and improving the satisfaction of both employees and customers.”

While there is no doubt RPA promises to be the future of business process

in companies is rarely reduced after the introduction of RPA. “Rather than replace humans with robots, we’re seeing organisations shift the type and amount of work that people can do. The future of work—from the back office to customer engagement to creating a competitive advantage—is combining robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and your human resources to create a smarter workforce,” he adds.

INTERVIEW

REINVENTING THE SUPPLY CHAIN HOZEFA SAYLAWALA, DIRECTOR OF SALES -MEA, ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES, EXPLAINS HOW DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS BRINGING A SEA-CHANGE IN HOW COMPANIES DELIVER PRODUCTS OR SERVICES TO CUSTOMERS

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ow does Zebra Technologies enable digital transformation?

Zebra is an innovator with solutions and partners that enable businesses to gain a performance edge, helping companies across industries digitise their operations and improve their performance. While innovation began at the core of the enterprise, today it is exploding at “the edge,” where employees make real-time decisions and interact directly with the people they serve. With expertise in technology that transforms the way work gets done,

WHILE INNOVATION BEGAN AT THE CORE OF THE ENTERPRISE, TODAY IT IS EXPLODING AT “THE EDGE,” WHERE EMPLOYEES MAKE REAL-TIME DECISIONS AND INTERACT DIRECTLY WITH THE PEOPLE THEY SERVE.

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Zebra is empowering the front line to be better, faster, and smarter.

Together with our global ecosystem of partners, Zebra’s products, software, services, analytics, and solutions are used to intelligently connect company assets, data and people in collaborative mobile workflows. Zebra offers customers purpose-driven design for the enterprise and datapowered environments delivered by a solution ecosystem. As a result, businesses can sense

what’s happening, analyse or anticipate the implication, and make best-action decisions based on real-time guidance.

Zebra is certainly playing a central strategic role by creating the fundamental visibility of assets required to enable this transformation process from the core of the organisation and then supporting innovation and driving performance at the intersection where business, people, products and processes meet the customer – what we describe as the ‘edge’ – the critical points of customer interaction and experience, and of data capture.

Is innovation moving out of the core to the edge?

Innovation now permeates the entire organisation and is ubiquitous; previously, it was all about ERP, databases and collecting information.

Big Data has arrived and all organisations are using it to some extent. Digital transformation is all about analysing that data, producing actionable insights and then diffusing transformative innovation across the organisation to empower people with a focus on the edge, to achieve better business outcomes.

Digital transformation is driving performance and operational efficiencies in the supply chain industry; logistics companies have been filling their trucks with parcels of different size and shape with no system to provide visibility and information on the efficiency of the utilisation of the cargo space. The result was that only 70 percent of space in trucks was being utilized. Zebra now has solutions and data-powered analytics that give you comprehensive visibility into loading operations and space utilisation. Just recently, we worked with a very large logistics company and our solution helped them to optimise space and efficiency in order to ship less air and reduce truck movements by 1 in 5 – a 20% reduction in trucking What does it take to digitally transform supply chain operations?

Companies are turning to digital

BY 2021, HANDHELD MOBILE COMPUTERS WITH BARCODE SCANNERS WILL BE USED BY 94 PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS FOR OMNICHANNEL LOGISTICS. THE UPGRADE FROM MANUAL PEN-ANDPAPER SPREADSHEETS TO HANDHELD COMPUTERS WITH BARCODE SCANNERS OR TABLETS WILL IMPROVE OMNICHANNEL LOGISTICS BY PROVIDING MORE REAL-TIME ACCESS TO WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS. technology and analytics to bring more automation, merchandise visibility and business intelligence to the supply chain to compete in the on-demand consumer economy. Although an estimated 73% of consumers are omnichannel shoppers today (and they spend more than single-channel consumers), only 39% of supply chain respondents believe they’re operating at an omnichannel level, a recent Zebra Technologies study revealed.

The results of our Future of Fulfillment Vision Study gives us some insights on how manufacturers, transportation and logistics (T&L) firms, and retailers are preparing to meet the changing and growing needs of the on-demand economy. The study revealed that 78

percent of logistics companies expect to provide same-day delivery by 2023 and 40 percent anticipate delivery within a two-hour window by 2028. In addition, 87 percent of survey respondents expect to use crowdsourced delivery or a network of drivers that choose to complete a specific order by 2028.

Next generation supply chains will reflect connected, business-intelligent and automated solutions that will add speed, precision and cost effectiveness to transportation and labour. Executives surveyed expect the most disruptive technologies to be drones (39 percent), driverless/autonomous vehicles (38 percent), wearable and mobile technology (37 percent) and robotics (37 percent). Only 39 percent of supply chain respondents reported operating at an omnichannel level.

Is real-time visibility into supply chains possible with the current crop of technologies such as barcode, RFID and RTLS? According to our Future of Fulfillment Vision Study, although 72 percent of organisations utilise barcodes today, 55 percent of organisations are still using inefficient, manual pen-and-paper based processes to enable omnichannel logistics. By 2021, handheld mobile computers with barcode scanners will be used by 94 percent of respondents for omnichannel logistics. The upgrade from manual pen-and-paper spreadsheets to handheld computers with barcode scanners or tablets will improve omnichannel logistics by providing more real-time access to warehouse management systems.

At the same time, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology and inventory management platforms are expected to grow by 49 percent in the next few years. RFID-enabled software, hardware and tagging solutions, offer up-to-the-minute, item-level inventory lookup, heightening inventory accuracy and shopper satisfaction while reducing out of stocks, overstocks and replenishment errors.

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CASE STUDY

CUTTING THE CORD AT ALDAR PROPERTIES, MOBILITY IS A REQUIREMENT RATHER THAN A CONVENIENCE.

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ldar Properties is the leading real estate developer in Abu Dhabi with a diverse portfolio spanning across properties, asset management, malls, and hotels. Aldar has developed some of the iconic projects in the Emirate including its HQ building in Al Raha, Gate Towers in Shams Abu Dhabi and F1 circuit in Yas Island.

As one of the largest listed real estate developers in the MENA region with a massive footprint, Aldar uses cuttingedge technology to digitise and mobilise its business operations. With an evergrowing mobile workforce, Aldar’s IT team has the mandate to make sure employees have continuous access to business applications on the go to gain an edge in a highly competitive industry.

With the increasing demand to provide mission-critical applications on businessgrade WiFi, the company’s IT team faced a daunting challenge - its aging wireless network was based on infrastructure from a vendor which exited WLAN business.

It meant no technical support to solve issues and an upgrade to the newest WLAN standards impossible.

“We decided to rip the old network out and replace it with a new WLAN solution to cater to the demands of our workforce. However, with the explosion of smartphones, tablets, and other portable devices, designing and implementing wireless networks can be challenging. We had to make sure that our WLAN design factored in specific business needs and the physical environments,” says Sreedhar Reddy, CIO of Aldar Properties.

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Reddy and his team started deployment of the new wireless network from Aruba in schools owned by Aldar Academies first. “This was to support our chairman’s vision of promoting more interactive, self-driven and collaborative learning in schools. We wanted to empower the way teachers teach and children learn,” says Reddy.

Today, every classroom is equipped with an access points that can support up to 250 users with 1.7 Gbps of bandwidth, allowing more than 7000 students and 1000 staff in eight schools to take advantage of new e-learning tools.

THIS WAS TO SUPPORT OUR CHAIRMAN’S VISION OF PROMOTING MORE INTERACTIVE, SELF-DRIVEN AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN SCHOOLS. The deployment also features centralised management features that prevent unauthorised network access by students. “We made sure that WiFi is not a costly distraction for students by putting in place advanced content filtering and DLP solutions so that they can access only education-related content. Though we do allow students to bring their own devices, wireless connectivity is limited to one device per student, which is issued by the school,” says Reddy.

After a smooth roll-out at Aldar Academies, Reddy’s team went on to implement an enterprise WLAN at the corporate headquarters, remote office sites and Yas Mall. “Our corporate wireless network supports more than 600 employees spread over 20 locations including Al Ain, and Yas Mall was a complete greenfield project with more than 350 access points. Since it’s a network designed primarily for the public use, it was set up differently from the network deployed for employee access,” says Reddy.

Aldar’s high-bandwidth WLAN is designed to ensure optimal signal coverage across the network even if the device density goes up in the future. “Wireless has become the preferred access method for our employees, and we do capacity reviews often. A major benefit of the wireless implementation is the seamless connectivity it provides; all our employees use a single SSID for access across all our office locations without having to change any settings and enjoy similar experience,” says Reddy.

For Aldar, security has also been a major factor from the outset while deploying the enterprise wireless LAN right. “Our WLAN is combined with Aruba’s ClearPass network access control solution in the backend to enable network segmentation and access layers across both wired and wireless networks.

It has provided us with a flexible platform with end-to-end protection to ensure only legitimate users have access to networks and sensitive information,” says Reddy.

WE HELP YOU BUILD A DATA-CENTRIC STRATEGY We’re in a new world: data is now a strategic asset, and enterprises will need data-centric strategies to succeed and thrive. So it’s time to re-think IT infrastructure from the bottom-up.

Visit Pure Storage at Gitex 2018: Booth A7-10 Hall 7

purestorage.com

FEATURE

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RETHINKING THE WAN

SD-WAN IS ALL THE RAGE IN ENTERPRISE NETWORKING TODAY WITH THE MARKET POISED TO HEAT UP OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS. HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM THE TECHNOLOGY, WHICH PROMISES BIG BANG FOR YOUR IT BUCKS AND IMPROVED NETWORK PERFORMANCE.

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he market for softwaredefined WAN is on an upward spiral as enterprises look to provide better network connectivity to their employees in remote branch offices. According to IDC, SD-WAN sales are expected to hit $4.5 billion by 2020, as a result of companies modernising their wide area networks to provide better user experience for a range of cloud-enabled applications.

IDC report points out that SDWAN offers compelling value for its ability to “simplify and automate WAN operations, improve application traffic management, and dynamically deliver on the cost and efficiency

benefits associated with intelligent path selection.”

For enterprises, managing a WAN through software has many benefits because it provides a simple interface and supports multiple types of connections – from MPLS to broadband to LTE. It’s not just the ease of deployment, manageability and reduced costs driving the increasing adoption of SD-WAN. “While applications have become so advanced, unfortunately, network infrastructure hasn’t kept pace.

Networks remain complex to manage, they are fragile and inflexible, and there is a lack of visibility.SD-WAN transforms traditional networks into intelligent software-defined transport mechanisms

TODAY IT’S IMPERATIVE FOR GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISES TO LIBERATE THEIR APPLICATIONS FROM THE COMPROMISES AND CONSTRAINTS OF EXISTING WAN APPROACHES BY SHIFTING TO A BUSINESS-FIRST NETWORKING MODEL. Simon Pamplin, direct of technical sales at Silver Peak

designed and orchestrated by plainlanguage policies to deliver applications from anywhere to anywhere in the most efficient, optimised and secure way possible,” says Charbel Khneisser, regional presales director at Riverbed.

Simon Pamplin, direct of technical sales at Silver Peak, says traditional router-centric WAN approaches can’t keep pace with today’s rapidly changing business requirements. The fundamental nature of applications has changed, and security needs are different when everything is open and connected in the cloud. Today it’s imperative for geographically distributed enterprises to liberate their applications from the compromises and constraints of existing WAN approaches by shifting to a businessfirst networking model.

“SD-WAN provides geographically distributed organisations with the ability to securely and directly connect users in branch and remote sites to applications hosted in the data centre and cloud. An SD-WAN provides the flexibility to use any combination of transport connectivity and logically bond multiple links into virtual overlays, giving every application the network resources required to deliver the highest

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quality of experience to end users. With a business-first SD-WAN, the network now enables the business, rather than the business conforming to the constraints of the network,” he adds.

Mohannad Abuissa, head of sales engineering at Cisco Middle East, says today’s digital businesses are hamstrung by their conventional WANs, which take cost and time to provision new sites. “A key part of IT that needs to evolve and lacks flexibility to meet today’s business requirements is legacy WAN. Organisations are only as agile as their least agile IT component, which today, is the conventional WAN.” There are many different options and varying approaches available for enterprises looking to deploy SD-WAN. So, what are the key considerations when choosing a SD-WAN solution?

“Distributed organisations should seek a unified SD-WAN Edge that has been designed as one to deliver SD-WAN, firewall, segmentation, routing, WAN optimisation and application visibility and control in one platform. They should also seek an SD-WAN that offers centralised orchestration with complete observability of the entire WAN through a single pane of glass. Deployment options should also be flexible with hardware and virtual appliances and provide the ability to deploy instances in the cloud,” says Pamplin.

Abuissa from Cisco says SD-WAN’s key characteristics should include automation, orchestration, zero-touch provisioning and analytics. “Digital

WHILE APPLICATIONS HAVE BECOME SO ADVANCED, UNFORTUNATELY, NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE HASN’T KEPT PACE. NETWORKS REMAIN COMPLEX TO MANAGE, THEY ARE FRAGILE AND INFLEXIBLE, AND THERE IS A LACK OF VISIBILITY. Charbel Khneisser, Regional Presales Director, METNA at Riverbed transformation will require network infrastructure to seamlessly connect any user to any application with the best user experience. This will require SD-WAN to work across the branch, campus, data cenre and cloud with open and programmable architectures for vendor interoperability.”

How secure is SD-WAN? “When selected and implemented correctly, SD-WAN can make your network more secure than traditional MPLS networks. It allows you to establish centralised control of networkwide business and security policies and solution management dashboards which offer unified views of the network topology, including registered and online appliances and new events,” says Khneisser from Riverbed.

Pamplin from Silver Peak says not only can an advanced SD-WAN solution

A KEY PART OF IT THAT NEEDS TO EVOLVE AND LACKS FLEXIBILITY TO MEET TODAY’S BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS IS LEGACY WAN. ORGANISATIONS ARE ONLY AS AGILE AS THEIR LEAST AGILE IT COMPONENT, WHICH TODAY, IS THE CONVENTIONAL WAN. Mohannad Abuissa, Head of Sales Engineering - East Region, Cisco Middle East

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replace conventional routers at the branch, it can also replace the firewall in most typical branch environments.

The biggest draw of SD-WAN is its promise to remove the constraints of legacy connectivity technologies, mainly MPLS. Can SD-WAN potentially replace MPLS networks? The jury is still out on this one.

“For any distributed organisation with multiple branch offices across several geographies, embracing the cloud will often result in MPLS no longer being sufficient to address today’s WAN requirements,” says Pamplin.

When it comes to MPLS global connectivity, major issues present themselves - the cost is high, it takes time to deploy, and is not designed for cloud and SaaS connectivity.

Khneisser from Riverbed says we need to give tried-and-tested MPLS networks its due credit as it offers predictability. Besides, packet loss and latency statistics are far more consistent and much lower than those of the public Internet—the medium used for SD-WAN. “SD-WAN is a solution that offers organisations the agility and flexibility they need when provisioning new branches with a faster time-to-market and lower cost. I would say, SD-WAN and MPLS will work hand-in-hand for the coming years, and we will witness more organisations leveraging MPLS and Internet connectivity in their branches while in the long run, when the Internet becomes more reliable, organisations will make the shift entirely,” he adds.

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INTERVIEW

PLOTTING A SMART STRATEGY AHMED MOHAMMED KAJOOR, SENIOR MANAGER OF TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AT DUBAI MUNICIPALITY, TELLS US HOW THE CIVIC BODY IS EMBRACING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO CREATE AUTOMATED DECISIONMAKING CAPABILITIES AND STREAMLINE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.

approvals and improve the productivity of our employees. The new system will help us make better decisions and keep track of laws, planning regulations and identify issues before they arise.

Are you planning to use natural language processing and speech recognition, etc.?

These are the basic use cases of AI, and we are aiming for something bigger.

Where we need help from experts in this field is how to leverage AI to build a city with energy-efficient buildings and better utilisation of space. In other words, we want to use AI for better urban planning and governance and solve problems efficaciously.

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hat is your game plan for AI? We are in the process of implementing AI in phases. We are starting with an AI system in our call centre, where one of the challenges we face is different people calling about the same issue multiple times. Using AI, we can mine data and identify if it’s a new problem or an existing one.

Now, that is just a primary application of AI, and we are planning to roll it out on a bigger scale to handle building construction application process. We have a massive database of building information systems, and we will apply AI and machine learning to this data asset to reduce the processing time of

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How do you plan to contribute to Dubai’s vision to become a Smart City?

If you look at how we plan our cities, most of the time it is a lengthy process.

But, if you combine data with artificial intelligence capabilities, you can help an engineering and city planners with new tools to improve infrastructure and predict what can happen. To give you an example, when real estate developers give us concepts and models to study from either a licensing or engineering perspective, it is a time-consuming manual process. There are many components and processes involved in the design and construction of new buildings. Imagine you have a system that knows about all the structures

in Dubai, layouts, materials used in construction and all phases of the approval process. If you apply AI and machine learning to this wealth of data, you can streamline the whole process and create new ways to plan our cities more efficiently and effectively. This is what we are going to do, and for me, AI is all about amplifying the human effort.

Do you think AI will replace jobs?

We heard this when computers were introduced but that didn’t happen.

Instead, we became more efficient, and it created new job opportunities.

AI and automation will do the same – it will complement the way we work and create new jobs that will far exceed any job loss due to automation.

Do you have plans to use blockchain technology?

What blockchain has brought to the table is independent consolidation of information, which was missing earlier.

It has created a stronger network to process data more securely and transparently; it allows you to make decisions that will not be tampered with.

Blockchain will help public sector entities like ours to exchange information quickly, offload some processes and become more efficient. We will have the ability to keep track of transactions in a better way and eliminate fraud at the same time. However, for me, blockchain is not a new technology.

CASE STUDY

WIRELESS HEALTHCARE ZULEKHA HOSPITAL RAISES THE BAR IN CLINICAL CARE WITH ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES

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ith facilities in Sharjah and Dubai, Zulekha Hospital is home to some of the most advanced technologies, all designed to improve the patient experience and healthcare delivery. The technology programme for the hospital follows a lofty goal – to become a genuinely digital hospital of the future.

“We define digital transformation as the integration of digital technologies into all areas of the business, resulting in fundamental changes as to how we operate and deliver value to customers.

In the world of the healthcare industry, Zulekha Hospital goes beyond infrastructure to ensure that every touchpoint offers progressive and compassionate care. We are committed to a holistic approach to healthcare,” says Aliasgar Bohari, IT director of the hospital.

Zulekha Hospital has invested heavily in technology – from patient-facing mobile apps to healthcare information systems in its quest to break barriers in terms of healthcare offerings. Being an industry veteran, Bohari knows that improving efficiency and cutting costs in healthcare means collaborating with patients.

“Internet is everywhere, and it is something you cannot do without. Highquality wireless connectivity has become a norm in modern hospitals today as patients expect a WiFi connection to stay in touch with family and friends during their treatment,” says Bohari.

However, the reality is most hospitals are not designed with wireless networks in

mind, and many were caught unprepared by the sudden surge in devices accessing their wireless networks. “We faced the same issue because our old wireless network had many coverage holes, and we started facing poor performance of the network. This was when we decided to upgrade our WLAN infrastructure with Aruba,” says Bohari.

Zulekah Hospital’s IT team started scouting around for a future-proof wireless solution that would allow it to leverage the latest advances in technology and establish robust and secure WiFi connectivity for staff and patrons.

“Patients carry multiple devices, and we wanted a solution that we could evolve to provide free WiFi to patients and at the same time promote our mobile app,” He adds that though the short-term objective was to provide better Internet connectivity, the overarching aim was to establish a network that would improve patient safety and boost employee productivity. “Whether administering first-aid or performing life support, efficient communication can mean the difference between life and death in a hospital. This is one of the reasons hospitals need to have a robust, and reliable communication solution for customer service representatives to deliver clear, precise information to improve patient care,” says Bohari.

Today, free WiFi is available to patrons through the Zulekha mobile app, which also doubles up as a wayfinding tool, guiding patients through various departments and helping them navigate the building floors. “With more than

25000 downloads, the Zulekha mobile app allows patients to utilise their waiting time outside OPD or at fast track lounges with free Internet access, allowing us to provide a better patient experience and also promote our campaigns and events,” says Bohari.

Another significant benefit of wireless connectivity was the deployment of VoiP WiFi phones, which allow the hospital’s customer service managers, nursing and administrative staff to carry their SIP extension anywhere inside the premises, making them reachable through calls, message or broadcast announcement.

“In code blue situations, wireless VoIP allows us to contact clinicians, no matter where they are, eliminating the need to track people down. By promoting fast and better collaboration, this has helped us to improve staff productivity,” says Bohari.

Zulekha Hospital is now in the process of deploying Aruba’s 802.11ac Wave 2 access points integrated with Bluetooth Beacons at its new facility in Dubai. “We are also planning to use Aruba’s heat mapping services, which will assist in finding the best location for each AP. It is very crucial for us to ensure the availability of WiFi coverage across the building because of the implementation of over 60 WiFi phones. Any hole in coverage will result in the breakdown of communications, which we cannot afford with patients’ lives hanging in the balance,” says Bohari.

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G PLAN TO PROTECT IT IS OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE TO HAVE AN INCIDENT RESPONSE PLAN IN PLACE BEFORE A BREACH HITS YOUR COMPANY.

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iven that there is no way to prevent every cyber-attack in today’s world, organisations must now plan to fail and mitigate the damage attackers can cause. A security breach is a question of ‘when’ than ‘not if,’ which is why it is essential for CISOs to have a robust incident response strategy in their defence playbook.

By basic definition, incident response is a detailed plan, which entails the steps organisations should take when they respond to a breach; its key attributes include time to detect a security incident, time to investigate and time to respond to restore business operations quickly.

“No organisation is fully immune against cyber-attacks or data breaches. They must always be prepared to tackle and respond to such attacks through a proactive incident response plan. How efficiently you respond to a security incident can often lead to the difference between a minor disruption and going out of business,” says Sameh Ahmed, channel pre-sales systems engineer at Infoblox.

Harish Chib, vice president-MEA, Sophos, agrees that proactive Incident management helps organisations to anticipate issues and respond

Harish Chib, Vice President, Middle East & Africa, Sophos

effectively. “Unlike ransomware, which is necessarily obvious and noisy because of its financial demands, many advanced threats are extremely stealthy. These APTs are specifically designed to penetrate their targets silently, often by exploiting device or system vulnerabilities. Having gained a foothold, they can spread to all corners of a compromised network, quietly exfiltrating sensitive data or performing other malicious tasks under the radar.”

Though it is the best defence against determined adversaries, not many companies properly budget for a robust IR plan. “With so many competing security priorities (compliance, application security, etc.) and not an unlimited budget, CISOs are forced to make hard choices and while incident response is important, it is not the most ‘pressing’ security item on any given day,” says Marc French, chief trust officer, Mimecast.

Whatever methods companies use to detect threats, there are some key steps to a successful IR implementation. It’s imperative for CISOs to involve people across the enterprise while developing an IR plan and hold regular test runs.

“First comes preparation, which is to assess the fragile points and gaps that has the risk for failure within the environment and should be addressed by making sure that the optimum tools are in place as well the availability of trained

Marc French, Senior Vice President and Chief Trust Officer at Mimecast

Sameh Ahmed, Channel Pre Sales Systems Engineer, MEA at Infoblox

IT’S IMPERATIVE FOR CISOS TO INVOLVE PEOPLE ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE WHILE DEVELOPING AN IR PLAN AND HOLD REGULAR TEST RUNS. resources for such tasks,” says Ahmed.

French from Mimecast urges security leaders to build a plan and test it first.

“You do not want to be building and testing your plan mid-incident. Model out scenarios, build playbooks, and test them with mock drills. One critical point – make sure that these drills/playbooks include business folks. CISOs tend to focus on the technical response, but in actuality, 65% of the incident response involves the business teams and not the technical organisations.”

Morey Haber, CTO of BeyondTrust, echoes a similar opinion: “Creating a plan, never testing it, and filing it away so you can check the box on a regulatory compliance form is just pathetic. We have fire drills for a reason. We need to learn how to survive when a life threating event occurs and cybersecurity incidents can be life threating to the business, your job, and depending on your line of work, the country or well-being of others.”

He adds that incident response plans need to evolve past being a documented procedure. They need to be a working

part of any business, and the success of the plan should be measured with appropriate metrics—from response time to loss of services and revenue.

While this might not always be the case, and the incident may be trivially minor, the potential for a catastrophic incident can happen to any organisation.

With the advent of AI and machine learning, now the question facing many CISOs is whether it is a good idea to automate incident response. The manual nature of IR work and shortage of security skills is now making IR automation a hot topic. “I think that it is a requirement at this point. The number of attempted attacks on an average organisation is going up each day, and the subsequent response activities are likely well beyond their resource capabilities. The only prospect to stay ahead of this is to introduce AI/ML to remediate things and focus limited human resources on those threats that require analytical skills beyond what AI/ML currently can provide,” says French.

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BEST OF BOTH WORLDS TERENCE SATHYANARAYAN, CIO AND CISO AT DRAKE & SCULL, EXPLAINS WHY IT IS IMPORTANT FOR IT LEADERS TO PLAY A DUAL ROLE IN THE DIGITAL AGE.

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hy is it essential for CIOs to play a dual role and prioritise security?

The CIO wears many hats today - CTO, CDO, and CISO. Of course, this depends on the type of the organisation, its size and most importantly, which phase are they at the transformation journey.

The CISO role has moved from reactive to strategic and is required to be a visionary to ensure security is embedded within enterprise architecture even before technology is acquired or deployed.

For securing digital assets, the CISO will need to get involved in the design stage; this carefully designed

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space is then handed off to the CIO/ CTO to acquire and implement. Once deployed, it’s handed back to the CISO to monitor and defend.

Is security now a boardroom level discussion?

Security is not just related to digital assets or information, but people too.

Technology needs to be innovated not only to ensure systems are secure but the safety of the people using it as well.

To achieve a perfect balance between people, processes, and technology you need top-down leadership with bottomup ownership. This is most useful when the tone for cyber risk monitoring is set from the top and cascaded to the executives as a priority.

What is the importance of basic cyber hygiene?

Many IT executives that I have interacted with wait until a budget is sanctioned to implement a prevention technology. Although technology investment is required prevention can be achieved through a sound strategy.

I have always been an advocate of “defense in depth” strategy to secure systems and facilities. It dates back to early 200 BC, which was originally a military strategy, that seeks to delay rather than prevent the advance of the attacker, buying time, stressing the attacker’s logistics and allowing for room to launch a counter-attack; it is about establishing layers of defense mechanisms comprising people, processes and technology.

The moot point is enough can be done with people, processes, and hardening of existing technology before any investment is committed.

Cyber hygiene is about first identifying high-value assets, and then prioritising them for sanitisation followed by the rest. Sanitisation by hardening or vulnerability management is essential to avoid being targeted by amateur perpetrators. No matter what strategy one subscribes to if there is a backdoor left open due to unpatched code, this would be the ‘chink in the armor’.

A good place to start is the SANS 20 critical security controls and for more mature organisations with regulatory obligations ISO 27002 implementation would address this necessary practice.

How do you see the CISO role evolving?

The role of the CISO was forged out of necessity. Initially, the evolving threat landscape defined the need for a resource that had only one objective – protect. Now, the role is gradually changing from protection to prevention and defense to counter offense.

Unless the CISO adapts to the imminent threat landscape and adjusts the security posture of the company dynamically, they may need to consider settling for a more relaxed and comfortable role.

This is not for the fainthearted.

VIEWPOINT

WHAT 5G AND IOT MEAN FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS THE CONFLUENCE OF 5G AND IOT REPRESENTS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS TO BREAK FREE FROM STAGNATING REVENUES AND DECLINING MARGINS INTO TOMORROW’S DIGITALLY TRANSFORMED ERA, EXPLAINS ALI AMER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, GLOBAL SERVICE PROVIDER SALES OF CISCO MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA.

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ince the invention of industrial electrical engineering, no manufactured electronic device has overshadowed the cellular mobile phones in terms of popularity. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), 6.8 billion people had access to cell phones in 2013. This is more than those who had access to toilets, according to the United Nations.

Significant growth rates in shipments of connected mobile devices including smartphones and tablets is continuing to drive the usage of video as a preferred content. This is fueling the growth of mobile data transfer rates.

Mobile video traffic already accounts for 60% of total mobile data traffic.

By 2021, 78% of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video, and this will 28

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be further accelerated by 5G mobile technologies.

Along with video traffic, the volume of mobile data traffic will expand by another seven times, reaching nearly 12 billion mobile devices and connections and generating 49 Exabytes of mobile traffic by 2021. At this point of inflexion, we will see the industry transitioning to 5G mobile technologies.

However, at the present rates of mobile video usage and adoption, a new digital infrastructure will need to be created to support high definition video, ultra-high definition video and rich media telecom. Supporting infrastructures of cloud-based applications, storage, and the next generation of the Internet are also required. Other than consumer demand for mobile video content, it also has benefits in multiple and diverse business to business use case scenarios.

However, service providers investing in such large-scale compute infrastructures to support mobile video content need to be able to build viable business and monetisation models to generate returns on their investments.

This is especially pertinent given that as global internet bandwidth has been growing over the past few years, global telecommunication revenues continue to face downward pressures.

ITU latest report reveals that mobile broadband subscriptions have grown more than 20% annually in the last five years and are expected to reach 4.3 billion globally by end 2017. The report also indicates that, in most developing countries, mobile broadband is more affordable than fixed-broadband services.

While growth is being driven by mobility, Internet access and video

content, for many service providers it is insufficient to compensate for declining legacy revenues. Digital and IP based services have much lower prices points than their legacy counterparts, due to technology efficiencies. And while their volumes continue to scale impressively, their associated top line revenues remain depressed compared to legacy revenue streams Service providers therefore need to build innovative revenue models to generate sufficient returns on the compute investments they are making to replace legacy revenue streams.

For service providers the biggest challenge remains the viability of their current business model and the task of discovering, building, and migrating to a transformed and more relevant one.

The confluence of Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G mobile technology by 2020 represents an opportunity for service providers to start afresh with radically transformed business models. The development of 5G and IoT ecosystems will fuel each other and drive their adoption forward. While the global drivers for 4G mobile adoption have been fast growing connected device shipments and mobile content access, for 5G, it will be IoT and awareness of user, location and content across the network.

By 2019, connections into the Internet of Things will surpass smartphones, tablets and PCs combined, and by 2021, account for 638 million modules compared to 381 million for all other devices. The IoT will add an expected 50 billion connected devices to the Internet by 2020. This will include sensors and devices in every type of consumer, industrial, urban and rural environment.

In addition, smartphones will grow from 29% of mobile devices globally in 2014 to 40% by 2019, while the total number of devices and connections will grow from 7.4 billion in 2014 to 11.5 billion by 2019.

This unprecedented growth rate in the number of connected devices will require high levels of reliability, performance, scalability and security, built into the supporting service provider networks.

The IoT uses virtual and cloud infrastructure, intelligent edge services

WHILE THE GLOBAL DRIVERS FOR 4G MOBILE ADOPTION HAVE BEEN FAST GROWING CONNECTED DEVICE SHIPMENTS AND MOBILE CONTENT ACCESS, FOR 5G, IT WILL BE IOT AND AWARENESS OF USER, LOCATION AND CONTENT ACROSS THE NETWORK. and distributed computing model, to generate data insights into these billions of devices. By successfully integrating IoT into 5G mobile technology networks, service providers can commercially exploit the availability of data insights from each of these billions of devices.

The confluence of 5G and IoT therefore represents an opportunity for service providers to build new and more relevant business models and generate additional returns on their digital and compute investments. In reality, 5G mobile technology represents the next step in the digital transformation journey for service providers and their installed base of subscribers and users.

5G mobile technology represents an opportunity for service providers to provide innovative services by combining different types of connectivity platforms into a unified delivery network service. 5G is therefore not just about higher speeds or new technology platforms, but also ability to integrate these new platforms more cohesively while delivering innovative services based on data insights.

Since the launch of mobile virtual network operators and mobile Internet access, there has not been much innovation in the business models of service providers. While there have been attempts to build new models around content and WiFi-only access, these have been insufficient to veer dramatically from the existing models of WiFi-at-home and WiFi-at-office access, as well as mobile video content services.

Future possibilities lie in the integration of virtual and augmented reality content and gaming services into 5G networks, and 5G based Internet access.

5G mobile technology is expected to drive an exponential growth in data traffic. Development of 5G mobile technology standards is being driven by use cases that require higher scalability, mobility, wider coverage, capacity, performance, lower latency, affordability, and vertical market specialization. This is required since the average traffic per 5G connection is expected to be higher by 5x relative to a 4G connection.

On the flip side, the biggest inhibitor for the roll out of 5G mobile technologybased networks remains the absence of use cases and innovative business models for service providers, that cannot be supported on existing, advanced 4G mobile technology based networks.

According to GSMA, another setback for service providers in the adoption of 5G mobile technology, will be the continuous drop in the average revenue per user, as the roll out happens.

This will happen due to the wide spread usage of mesh-based, low power, wide area networks to support IoT. Meshbased networks complete most of the transactions at the edge of the network in an automated fashion, rather than hopping across the network or between multiple service provider networks, thereby reducing the opportunity to increase the revenue per transaction.

Notwithstanding the pros and cons of 5G mobile technologies and the IoT, service providers as an industry will need to come together to ensure that the next generation of platforms still under development, can interoperate and deliver the expected level of innovative services to move forward from the present-day reality.

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GITEX 2018:

WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT?

GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK IS RETURNING TO DWTC FOR ITS 38TH EDITION, UNDER THE THEME OF FUTURE URBANISM. THE 5-DAY SHOW WILL FEATURE SOME OF THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS FROM BRANDS ALL OVER THE WORLD AND WILL SHINE THE SPOTLIGHT ON FOUR MAJOR AREAS – SMART CITIES, AR AND VR, IOT AND SMART MANUFACTURING. HERE IS A SNEAK PREVIEW OF WHAT VISITORS CAN EXPECT TO SEE AT THIS REGION’S BIGGEST TECH BONANZA.

ARUBA Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, will be exhibiting under the theme ‘Delivering better experiences through digital transformation’ and demonstrating its Mobile First Architecture – a revolutionary, next 30

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generation networking architecture for the software defined enterprise, designed to be mobile first and deliver a network that is open, secure, and autonomous.

The Mobile First Architecture is purpose-built for the digital era and enables enterprises to rapidly innovate and transform their network so that they can deliver amazing experiences and simplify IT. It provides a secure, intelligent, non-stop networking experience on a single, open, software-defined architecture that extends from data centre to branch environments for a consistent IT experience across the entire enterprise.

Commenting on the importance of the company’s participation at Gitex, Jose Vasco, Regional Director, MEMA at Aruba says, “Gitex is firmly established as the Middle East’s largest tech exhibition and networking platform – last year attracting over

100,000 visitors from 140 countries.

We have been participating at Gitex for many years due to the importance of this regional event where many of our customers and partners attend.

HPE Aruba’s senior leadership from the US and Europe will attend the show together with the company’s regional leadership in order to drive key discussions with customers and partners. Our objective is also to reach out to new potential clients and grow our regional business across key verticals such as education, hospitality, healthcare, government and retail.”

Aruba will be exhibiting at stand number A7-01 in Hall 7 alongside Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

AVAYA Avaya will demonstrate several industry-first platforms that unify UC

and CC to drive holistic and impactful customer and employee experiences incorporating cutting-edge technologies via an open ecosystems approach.

With use-cases demonstrating the seamless transition of communications between customerfacing employees and internal teams, Avaya says its UC and CC solutions and the convergence between them is ‘softening the lines’ between UC and CC and delivering the ability for every employee to impact the customer experience. Attendees will experience a detailed overview of innovations in workflows, convenience of engagement, and management within each of the solution areas.

“In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, gaining and maintaining customer loyalty demands consistent, high-quality service levels across every touch point,” said Nidal Abou-Ltaif, President, Avaya International.

“Similarly, to maximise productivity and engagement, employees require powerful tools that enable them to collaborate seamlessly, irrespective of their location, device, and communication channels. Avaya’s years of experience as a leading provider of UC and CC solutions enable us to understand these needs and deliver the next-generation

of communication platforms that facilitate human-centric experience.”

Avaya will be located at stand Z1C10 in Zabeel Hall.

well as its broad partner program enhancements, which helps partners simplify, streamline and scale their offerings to customers.

Wael Mustafa, Area Vice President at Commvault, said: “At Commvault our ability to deliver value across the Middle East is founded on having the most robust and strategic channel-orientated ecosystem. We are continuing to develop, nurture and expand our partner networks in the region, offering an extensive range of industry-leading, simplified data management solutions to a broad range of local customers.”

Commvault provides integrated solutions for data storage to customers across a range of sectors in the Middle East region, including: Dubai Police, Dubai Municipality and Emirates Steel, as well as forging new partnerships with the likes of SETS in Lebanon.

Commvault will be exhibiting at stand number B5-20 in Hall 5

COMMVAULT At Gitex 2018, Commvault will discuss the findings of its recent IDC customer value survey; showing that customers can achieve faster, more reliable backup and restore operations, reduced downtime and increased productivity.

Commvault will also discuss its four new simplified product offerings for complete, scalable backup and recovery and modern data management solutions, as

F5 NETWORKS F5 Networks is set to loudly champion the Middle East’s potential for multicloud-driven digital transformation at GITEX 2018.

The cloud and application security expert will showcase a raft of news services, as well as present original research on how multi-cloud business and consumer realities will

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evolve over the next five years.

F5’s multi-cloud positioning comes at time of growing cloud receptivity in the region. Earlier this year, the company commissioned another research agency, Think Positive, to conduct one of the GCC’s most in-depth cloudrelated study involving board-level decision-makers. Almost all GCC businesses (99%) believed the cloud can have a positive impact on market share and help to displace competitors.

90% also stated that it can improve brand perception, and 89% praised its capacity to improve innovation. A clear consensus was also reached on the cloud’s potential to enhance the overall customer experience (90%).

“The Middle East is in a fantastic, globally enviable position to harness the cloud in all its incarnations.

Governments are already activating world-class plans to change the way people live and work, and there is a huge pool of tech-savvy youngsters set to enter the workforce. These are exciting, game-changing times.

At GITEX, we expect showcase our most compelling vision yet on how new digital realities will unfold in the region and, against this transformational backdrop, how to best deploy, secure and optimise applications in a multi-cloud context,” said Diego Arrabal, VP – Middle East, Turkey & Africa, F5 Networks.

will further enhance our digital portfolio and we will be showcasing our business solutions for Analytics, Blockchain and RPA to our visitors at our booth 709, Hall No.7.”

“Netcetera has been working extensively on exploring the potential of blockchain technologies in solving business challenges. This is a strategic partnership for us. Together with Finesse we will be able to apply our blockchain solution to the right business through our new product n-blocks”, says Kiril Milev, Managing Director at Netcetera Middle East.

F5 will be present at stand number C 6-10 in Hall 6

FIDELIS CYBERSECURITY FINESSE This GITEX, Finesse will present blockchain and digital transformation solutions along with its partner Netcetera in order to match the demands and needs of their customers using blockchain technology.

Expressing his delight on hosting Netcetera as their Strategic Digital Partner for GITEX 2018 Sunil Paul, Co-Founder and COO of Finesse said, “Our partnership with Netcetera 32

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Fidelis Cybersecurity will highlight its latest managed detection and response (MDR) service that sports round-the-clock threat monitoring, hunting, detection and response capabilities. The Fidelis MDR service provides a team of highly-skilled security experts, who leverage patented Fidelis technology, to analyze rich network and endpoint metadata, content, behavioral and asset characteristics, as well as enterprise IoT devices to aid in hunting and investigations.

“A recent industry report found that Middle East countries, particularly Saudi and the UAE, face some of the highest number of cyberattacks, globally. Couple this with the shortage of strong cybersecurity talent—estimated to be 1.8 million cybersecurity workers by 2022—and it is easy to understand why security teams are overwhelmed. In fact, according to findings from a survey we conducted earlier this year, 83% of companies can’t triage half of their daily security alerts,” said Ivan Dolensky, Vice President, International

Sales at Fidelis Cybersecurity. “To help mitigate these challenges, we are seeing more and more organizations turning to managed security service providers (MSSPs). But while these MSSPs can provide basic security capabilities, they do not necessarily have the expertise and/or the technology to detect and respond to advanced threats.”

At the heart of Fidelis’ MDR service, and also on display at Fidelis’ booth, is the Fidelis Elevate platform. Fidelis Elevate is an automated detection and response platform that dramatically improves the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations by delivering comprehensive network visibility, breach detection, intelligent deception, automatic alert validation and endpoint detection and response. The Fidelis Elevate platform includes Fidelis Deception, Fidelis Network, and Fidelis Endpoint — all of which are available via on-premises or cloud deployments.

Fidelis Cybersecurity will be exhibiting at stand number SR-F5 in Sheikh Rashid Hall

Transformation (DX) initiative.

“The digital transformation or DX wave appears to be sweeping away everything that stands before it, and cybersecurity worries have emerged as a significant obstacle to the transformation process,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East, Fortinet. “Currently, four areas stand out as particularly acute cybersecurity pain points for organizations adopting a DX approach; cloud computing and in particular multi-cloud environments, IoT, a burgeoning threat landscape, and rising regulatory pressure. It is crucial to understand that while organizations are turning to DX to achieve growth as well as associated business objectives, the process also requires an equivalent security transformation. We are utilizing our presence at GITEX 2018 to demonstrate how the Fortinet Security Fabric brings together multiple security technologies to deliver comprehensive and collaborative security capabilities across the whole network and enable security transformation.”

Fortinet will be present in the Enterprise Networking and Security section in the Sheikh Rashid Hall Stand SR- C4.

INFOR

FORTINET Fortinet’s focus at the show is on encouraging organisations to adopt a Security Transformation (SX) approach to complement their Digital

Infor will showcase its workforce management and science-based recruitment applications to support business competitiveness at its stand CC2-8, located in the concourse outside the Cloud Hall.

“In order to succeed in today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, organizations need the right talent to give them a competitive edge.

At GITEX, we’ll demonstrate how organizations can effectively hire to the benchmarked qualities of their best performers thereby transforming sales, performance, and culture to better drive vital business

goals,” said Jonathan Wood, general manager, IMEA, Infor.

Supporting Middle East organizations in their digital talent, Infor will showcase Infor Talent Science, a cloud-based predictive talent analytics solution which helps organizations put the right people in the right positions to achieve business objectives.

GITEX visitors will be able to see how Infor’s science-based solution leverages large quantities of behavioral and performance data. With real-time insights, talent managers can customize predictive models that let organizations better select, retain, and develop the right talent across the entire employee life cycle.

Infor Coleman AI will also be featured at GITEX demonstrating the future ‘voice UX’ to Infor applications providing users with information and the ability to execute tasks wherever they are.

“With digital transformation sweeping the region, GITEX Technology Week is an ideal platform for CIOs to exchange best practices in using cloud-based technology innovations to optimise operations and costs, and to reduce complexity,” added Jonathan Wood.

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PREVIEW

NEXANS Nexans will be participating at GITEX 2018 to showcase its Data Centre Innovations and Fibre-to-the-Office (FTTO) solutions in addition to highlighting its LAN cabling solutions.

Senior executives will be available at the event to share their knowledge, insights and success stories with visitors while experts from the company will hold product demonstrations for customers and partners.

“At Gitex this year, Nexans will bring forth its expansive portfolio of LAN cabling solutions and demonstrate the features of our best-of-breed products to customers and partners visiting our stand from around the world. GITEX Technology Week not only offers us the right platform to share our world-class innovations but also serves as a means to demonstrate our level of commitment to the region, our customers and partners. Our returning presence at this event reiterates our long-term plan to firmly support them in the region and reinforces our leadership in offering the latest and best technologies,” said Tarek Helmy, Regional Director Gulf and Middle East, South & East Africa at Nexans Cabling Solutions.

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The company will also promote its LANactive solution, which is based on Fiber-to-the-Office (FTTO)-switch in both, office and harsh environments.

“FTTO is an advanced technology that proved to have lower opex and capex compared to standard LAN infrastructure networks. LANactive is an ideal solution to serve large areas like hospitals, airports, universities, and any facility requires lot of Floor Distribution racks or Telecom Rooms, in addition to refurbishments of old buildings in which putting standard LAN cabling is not an option due to space constraints and old infrastructure,” Helmy explained.

Nexans will be exhibiting with its distributors, Mindware at Stand D31, Hall 3 and Malco at Stand SR-G2, Sheikh Rashid Hall.

NUTANIX Nutanix has announced its participation at Gitex under the theme ‘Freedom to Build’ – with the company giving enterprises the freedom to build modern data centers with unlimited choice of best-of-breed technology, simplicity and flexibility.

Gitex trade show attendees will be given a demonstration of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software that makes data centre infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that power their business. The solution blends webscale engineering and consumer-grade design to natively converge server, storage, virtualisation and networking into a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence.

Aaron White, regional director, Middle East at Nutanix says, “The enterprise data centre is evolving—from legacy hardware intensive systems to software defined infrastructure that runs on commodity servers powered by a cloud OS. It’s about taking IT to the next level by combining the agility and consumer grade simplicity of the public cloud with the control, security, and predictable economics of a private cloud. And that’s exactly what our market leading Enterprise Cloud OS platform delivers. With our company’s promise of the ‘invisible infrastructure’ (just works, without constraints, while eliminating guesswork), we intend to help regional organisations in the Middle East achieve their consolidation goals in a simpler way.”

Nutanix will have its own dedicated stand, number A7-20 in Hall 7 at DWTC.

SOFTWARE AG Software AG’s booth at GITEX will feature interactive showcases and relevant use cases that harness the power of Internet of Things (IoT).

The demos from Software AG at the event will include BPMs, Digital Twin, Integration & API, Agile Process Digitization and Service Visibility Platform.

In addition, highlighting its focus on Cumulocity IoT and smart industries, the company will also display real time information providing advanced analytics and dashboards that rely on important KPIs. Specifically, the Smart Goods demo will throw light on supply chain visibility and help elucidate how Cumulocity is enhancing traceability of sensitive goods, by resolving challenges involved in the movement of sensitive and expensive goods from manufacturer to customer over various terrains. Sensors in the goods will monitor conditions such as rapid accelerations, loading, delivery, temperature and humidity and transmit this data in real-time back to the IoT Platform for analysis.

Rami Kichli – Vice-President, Gulf and Levant – Software AG, said: “GITEX Technology Week has become a leading regional platform

that presents market leaders with a unique opportunity to share their innovations, exchange expertise and best practices, and to collectively address the challenges faced by the IT industry today. This is the second time SAG is participating at GITEX. This year, we will be showcasing our innovative products and smart solutions, including the digital business platform, Cumulocity IOT and cloud solutions at the exhibition under the theme #EXPERIENCEEVERYTHING.”

Ahmed Auda, Managing Director – Middle East and North Africa, VMware, said: “Now is the time for organisations to build their digital foundation. Digital transformation is the top priority for Middle East CIOs, and GITEX offers a great opportunity for us to showcase our solutions that deliver secure and exceptional digital and mobile experiences, which ultimately are critical for driving regional business competitiveness.”

In line with GITEX’s theme of ‘Experience Future Urbanism’, VMware will be helping customers and partners understand how its compute, networking, storage, and management capabilities can help optimize workload performance and capacity across hybrid cloud environments. This applies to all sectors, with a particular focus on public and private-sector organisations that are looking for ways to manage monitor, and secure their IoT infrastructures, in response to the continued investment in smart cities projects by the Middle East.

VMware will be present at stand number A7-14 in Hall 7

Software AG will be exhibiting at stand number B7-20 in Hall 7

VMWARE At Gitex, VMware will be showcasing its latest innovations in cloud, networking & security and digital workspace technologies that are seen as critical to the successful digital transformation of Middle Eastern organisations.

VMware will also be displaying its latest achievements across its VMware NSX networking and security portfolio, to help regional customers implement a more secure, end-to-end software-based network architecture through a Virtual Cloud Network.

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INTERVIEW

FUELLING THE FUTURE OF SECURITY DENNIS LANAHAN, DIRECTOR OF WORLDWIDE CHANNEL PARTNERSHIPS & INTERNATIONAL SALES, OWL CYBER DEFENSE, DISCUSSES THE TRENDS SHAPING CYBERSECURITY IN THE OIL AND GAS COMPANIES.

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hat does digital transformation really mean for the oil and gas industry?

Digital transformation is all about improvement through data. The more you know about the past, present, and potential future operation of your systems, the more efficient, productive, and safe you can make them, and the better you can predict what might happen next. For the oil and gas industry, that means higher outputs, less downtime, and complete visibility into all aspects of the upstream, midstream, and downstream processes. However, with increased visibility and access comes the potential for cyber-attacks and interruption of service which is why companies are investing so heavily in cyber protection.

What are some of the opportunities for oil and gas companies around new technologies such as blockchain, AI and IoT? As operational data becomes more abundant and available, predictive analytics allow oil and gas companies to predict when their devices and equipment might break down, diagnose abnormal behaviors, and find new opportunities for growth. AI and the IoT (and IIoT) are bringing these types of insights to the next level, with machine learning and advanced modeling that can be done faster and

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easier than ever before. It sounds cheesy, but computers really can help oil and gas companies “see into the future” and stay at the forefront of their industry.

What are the main challenges in implementing the digital oilfield concept?

Updating equipment can be challenging without introducing costly downtime and change management. Standardising software and protocols can also be painful, especially when supplanting an existing or aging infrastructure. One of the biggest challenges that comes up over and over is cybersecurity. From lack of integration expertise to lack of security personnel, not to mention the huge range of equipment, devices, and infrastructure involved across the entire industry, it can be a massive hurdle to overcome for an industry that is just now getting to where many other industries have been for a while in terms of digital maturation.

What are the top cybersecurity risks in the oil and gas industry, and what are your tips for overcome them?

Most OEMs still don’t build cybersecurity into their products, so unless every piece of connected equipment and firewall is constantly patched and monitored, it can be an exhausting, frustrating task trying to keep everything secured. That’s

why you’re seeing a lot of operators move to less time and effort-intensive security, like data diodes, that they can basically set and forget as they continue to grow their digitised operations. There’s substantially less risk in a hardware-enforced device than a software-based security system, because it basically trusts nothing outside the secured perimeter – even cyber insurance costs can be lowered in some cases.

How different is OT security from that of IT security?

Today, the primary difference is what needs to be protected. For OT it is the equipment and operations, for IT it is data. Financial data, personal data, and PHI are far easier to exploit for monetary gain and is what IT security focuses on. In the OT space attackers are looking to cause harm to the systems themselves, not steal data, so the focus tends to be more on securing the network than the data itself. OT also tends to have more of an emphasis on efficiency and safety rather than security and confidentiality. This means that there are almost always less cyber security personnel to help improve and oversee the security of OT systems.

However, over time the difference between OT and IT may become more semantic, as they become increasingly entangled and as OT catches up to the sophistication of IT.

INTERVIEW

CLEAR AND H PRESENT DANGER ANKIT SATSANGI, CISO OF AZIZI DEVELOPMENTS, OFFERS TIPS ON HOW TO PROTECT YOUR ENTERPRISE FROM HACKERS AND MALWARE.

ow do you defend against advanced threats and ransomware?

While we are moving fast into the digital age, it has never been as a difficult as it is today for organisations to map out their respective digital environment. While still many organisations go by a single point of defence, we take the layered approach to be able to defend against advanced threats at every layer of the network and the endpoint.

Getting some of the basics right like making sure the systems are up-to-date with the industry security standards, patching and updating systems on time can help boost your defence. Leveraging machine learning to be able to understand the context of the attack and defend against an incoming threat proactively is now becoming a common practice for defence against ransomware.

Do you think AI and machine learning will drive the future of cybersecurity?

While AI is a hot topic right now, I don’t think one should have their security rely on such an intelligent system entirely. Human intervention is required with AI to maintain a level of control and review actions by the intelligence platform; this will also help in reducing the chances of machines replacing humans. I think a combination of AI and ML with humans overlooking will surely make an excellent defence model.

What can CISOs do to gain more mindshare from the board for security?

The role of a CISO has evolved from being technically focused to now a management player. CISO’s have to be able to sync cybersecurity strategies with business operations, frame security risks from a business risk perspective. Developing strategies on security but framing them to a business level is of key importance for a CISO to succeed.

What is your advice to aspiring security professionals?

While maintaining the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability) is important, it is even more critical to understand which holds more importance in your nature of business.

Pay attention to the insider threats in the form of disgruntled employees, as they can cause serious damage. And continue developing new skill-sets and certifying on the industry recognised certifications.

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VIEWPOINT

A NEW ERA OF MAN AND MACHINE ANDY COUSSINS, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND HEAD OF INTERNATIONAL, EPICOR SOFTWARE, WRITES ABOUT HOW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES ARE TRANSFORMING THE MANUFACTURING WORKFORCE.

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t has been suggested that over one third of skills considered important in today’s workforce are likely to no longer be relevant in the near future.

Manufacturers will soon require quite different expertise from their workforce to master new technology. In fact, according to a 2018 report by Accenture Strategy, businesses that fail to upskill their workforces, so they can effectively collaborate with modern machines and technology, face the risk of missing out on revenue and growth.

Challenging and training employees to acquire new expertise can be a cost-effective way to manage staff resourcing, provide a boost to employee engagement, and ultimately have a positive impact on a company’s productivity. To this end, there are several areas manufacturers should consider when reviewing the training needs of their workforce and providing opportunities for upskilling.

Breaking down barriers between departments With the current trend for automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, it is time to re-imagine work practices and stop relying on working in operational silos that have been created around job descriptions. Instead, manufacturers need to review tasks—including labelling, packaging, and shipping—rather than job roles, to reap the benefits of digital data sharing. Software platforms, such as modern enterprise resource planning (ERP), provide employees across departments with real-time information and a 360-degree picture of what’s happening in the business.

By allocating tasks to both machines and people, manufacturers

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can ensure an efficient level of automation, freeing up employees’ time to focus on new, less manual and more skilled tasks that deliver greater value to the business.

Identifying where upskilling needs to happen Beefing up engineering talent on the shop floor is, without a doubt, vital; however, skills gaps higher up in the business are just as pressing.

Manufacturers should therefore think about technical knowledge and skills gaps, but also consider potential gaps in management and leadership skills.

It is worth remembering that leadership skills and human ingenuity will become more important than technical knowledge, and as we dive deeper into Industry 4.0, this will become clearer. Bringing in a development and training specialist can help manufacturers perform a skills gap analysis to ensure that any training plan is not only going to address the current pressure points, but also future-proof the company.

Aligning training to the overarching business strategy Forward-thinking leadership teams are developing their workforce upskilling strategy—a task that has historically been the responsibility of HR—as an integral part of their strategic business planning process. This planning process includes a comprehensive review of how external trends are affecting existing structures, jobs and skills across the business. It considers which roles are strategic and core to the business, which ones will appear, and which will change or disappear completely.

Technology can play a key role in this strategic planning process, using realtime, data-driven insight to analyse and review where training is required across an entire manufacturing business.

Specifically, software such as modern enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and manufacturing execution systems (MES), can deliver actionable insight on a company-wide scale—from

HELPING EMPLOYEES TO UPSKILL IN THIS FASTCHANGING WORLD OF WORK ALSO NEEDS TO HAPPEN AT SPEED AND TO SCALE. THE SKILLS REVOLUTION THAT WE ARE SEEING GOES HAND-IN-HAND WITH INNOVATIONS, AND AS NEW TECHNOLOGIES EMERGE, THE SKILLS REQUIREMENTS WILL CHANGE. core business processes, to interactions with customers and manufacturing operations.

By using the insights that data from these systems can offer, businesses can uncover opportunities to educate the workforce at every level.

In addition, using new technologies can also help drive recruitment.

Recent research from Epicor Software revealed that nearly half (41 percent) of young people want to work with the latest innovations, demonstrating that implementing new technologies can make businesses very attractive to an emerging pool of new, digitally-skilled talent.

This underpins the need to implement training in time for the arrival of these new technologies on the shop floor, for both existing and incoming staff—it could even become the new competitive advantage in the Industry 4.0 era. Manufacturers need to do their research to understand which are going to be the key skills profiles needed for future success, and then develop a people-centric work environment to help the business thrive.

Understanding the scale and timeframes Helping employees to upskill in this fast-changing world of work also needs to happen at speed and to scale. The skills revolution that we are seeing goes hand-in-hand with innovations, and as new technologies emerge, the skills requirements will change. In order to keep pace with changes in the sector, manufacturers need to consider

upskilling an ongoing long-term investment and develop strategies for continuous upskilling, or ‘lifelong learning’ of their employees.

This upskilling process does not have to mean traditional classroombased training. In this digital age, personalised learning opportunities, such as on-demand training and e-learning, allow manufacturers to cater for a large workforce where individual employees are at different stages of learning and acceptance of new technologies.

As the pace of technological change increases, manufacturers need to act to ensure they are not constrained by an increasing gap between supply and demand for talent. To address the growing skills gap, smart organisations will consider turning to their current workforce and investigating the transferable talent and skills it holds.

Technologies like modern ERP and MES solutions are fast becoming the foundation for digital transformation in manufacturing by functioning as the fabric that connects people, processes, data and things in an intelligent and strategic manner. A skilled and agile workforce that can successfully use these technologies can enable manufacturers to rise to the challenges presented by Industry 4.0. These companies will then, in turn, be in a strong position to navigate the ever-changing economic and international business environment, improve productivity, and drive future business growth.

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VIEWPOINT

THE IMPORTANCE OF CYBER RESILIENCE KAWTHER HACIANE, PROJECT EXECUTIVE, IBM SECURITY SERVICES, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, ON WHY CYBER RESILIENCE IS A TOP BUSINESS PRIORITY IN TODAY’S DYNAMIC THREAT LANDSCAPE

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ast year saw not only several large-scale cyber-attacks including WannaCry, NotPetya, and BadRabbit but also reputable organisations that have been breached. All of these attacks have generated billions of losses in all sectors across the globe.

The question is no longer “Am I going to be the next target?” but rather “When I get hacked, will I be prepared?”. In other words, “How to become a cyber resilient organisation?” This is a reality that we all need to accept.

A cyber crisis can have major consequences for organisations such as costly drawn-out litigations, distracting regulatory actions, trickledown operational disruption, impaired strategy execution, and increased insurance liability, all of which diminish corporate value.

Preparing for, responding to, and emerging stronger from major crisis events becomes vital. To do so, organisations need to develop crisis management reflexes by regularly simulating crisis exercises.

Here are some recommendations: Incident or crisis? What’s your response strategy?

A cyber-attack does not necessarily create a crisis. It can be key to start defining your response strategy: “What are the crisis triggers?”, “When would an incident become a crisis?”, “How would you lead?”, “How would you prioritise?” and “How would you

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communicate during incident response and crisis management?”

Organisations must develop their risk-based response strategy based on their business and operational responsibilities. A sound strategy frames a cost-effective, wellresourced, organisation-wide approach to addressing cyber incidents.

Invest in technologies Organisations must invest in incidentresponse technologies such as automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence and orchestration that will help address the increase in the severity and volume of cyber-attacks.

From a risk and compliance perspective, it is crucial to have forensics capabilities in order to perform a structured investigation while maintaining a documented chain of evidence and find out exactly what happened.

Mobilise your corporate crisis team To effectively manage a cyber crisis, it is necessary to define a corporate crisis team with clear roles and responsibilities. Generally, this includes a crisis manager, a CISO, a public affairs advisor, a legal advisor, a corporate risk advisor, a medical advisor, a human resource advisor, and a health, safety, security, and environmental advisor.

The crisis can occur at any time. It is, therefore, important to prepare all members of the corporate crisis team on how to collaboratively manage and contain a crisis.

Simulate with realistic cybersecurity exercises At least once a year, to be closer to reality, it is recommended to test the organisation response capabilities to reduce the impact of a cybersecurity breach.

An incontestable way to constantly update and refresh the cyber incident plan is to perform cybersecurity incident simulation exercises which will allow learning in a safe and low risk environment.

They are often the most costeffective and rapid way to test certain business continuity activities and in particular the best way to test immediate response to a sudden cybersecurity situation.

Scenario-based exercises will not only demonstrate how the corporate crisis team will fulfil their roles but how effective their coordination is as a team.

The more comprehensive and tested the cyber incident plan, the better the management’s response will be.

Prepare technical response plans The cyber incident lifecycle strategies are generally organised around four key steps: Detection, containment, remediation, and recovery. To save valuable time in the case of cybercrime, it is recommended to prepare scenario-based response plans before proceeding with these four steps. For example: DDoS, ransomware infection, website defacement, theft of personal data and intrusion – can improve the organisation’s ability to cope with a wide range of situations.

of all industrial organizations experienced a network breach in the last year

of industrial cyber breaches originate at a third party or vendor

of industrial control systems exposed to the internet are vulnerable to cyber attack

But it doesn’t have to be.

PREVENT UP TO 98% OF NETWORK SECURITY BREACHES

DATA DIODE CYBERSECURITY From

owlcyberdefense.com/oil

VIEWPOINT

THE ROLE OF NETWORK INTELLIGENCE INDRANIL DAS, HEAD OF DIGITAL SERVICES AT ERICSSON MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA, SAYS NETWORK INTELLIGENCE WILL BECOME A NECESSITY TO ACCOMMODATE NEXT GENERATION TECHNOLOGIES.

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n the midst of a global digital transformation, widespread integration of next generation technologies like 5G and IoT is just over the horizon. As these technologies become more prevalent, demands of the networks supporting them will grow and evolve in the same stride, necessitating an increase in network complexity and capacity to boot. In order to capitalise on these trends and the new revenue streams they present, and to handle the complexity of diversification at the same time, networks must become scalable, intelligent, and automated.

Network intelligence and automation are crucial to the evolution of 5G, IoT, and industrial digitalisation on every front. As 5G-enabled technologies develop, operators will need to increase their network capacity – but with additional capacity also comes additional complexity. To meet these new challenges, operators must introduce engineered solutions that combine machine learning and human

intelligence to enable networks to self-learn, self-optimise, and deliver an optimal user experience.

The complex reality of today’s telecommunications systems will only accelerate further with the introduction of next generation technologies.

Machine Intelligence, using machine learning and other AI technologies, is vital to handling this complexity with more efficiency. As such, engineered network intelligence gives operators the ability to scale-up and automate operations in parallel with the growth of their network, resulting in significant performance and efficiency advantages.

In achieving network intelligence, Machine Intelligence must first be implemented from multiple angles.

Machine Intelligence, which combines the strengths of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, offers a means of reinventing network operations and redefining the operator product portfolio to create new business opportunities in 5G and IoT. It will enable algorithms to predict traffic patterns and dynamically put cells into dormant mode without impacting user experience; it will help prevent future malfunctions my providing actionable recommendations and reducing dispatches of service technicians; it will enable detection and optimisation in analytics, drastically reducing customer service calls; and much more.

Not only does Machine Intelligence improve network performance, but it also substantially increases efficiency across the board. With automation and domain specific AI, the intelligence built into the network platform

provides superior performance while optimising the use of scarce radio network resources. As such, Machine Intelligence solutions can help operators provide the highest performance and the most seamless and intuitive network operations for customers.

In line with this, Machine Intelligence facilitates the creation of intelligent networks. Ericsson recognises that the time to implement a smart approach to 5G-enabled technologies has arrived; and the operator has been working to engineer network intelligence that provides new levels of efficiency and performance. By way of network intelligence, network services will be twice as easy to deploy, field dispatches will be reduced by up to 30 percent, and required field instructions will be accessible in under one second. Further, inter-frequency handover of network products will happen twice as fast, OPEX for future RAN transport will be cut in half, and energy consumption on the node level will be reduced by 10 percent.

Operators need engineered intelligence to handle the coming paradigm shift. As businesses continue to adopt next generation technologies, the demands placed on networks will shit, creating an opportunity for the operators that can most as fast as their fastest customers. If they can switch to a continuous improvement process in an increasingly complex world, they will stand to win entire industries. At present, this journey has just begun – but it accelerates with every passing day, requiring operators to disrupt the status quo by providing leaps in efficiency, speed, and customer experience.

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VIEWPOINT

BUSTING AI MYTHS MICHAEL XIE, FOUNDER, PRESIDENT AND CTO AT FORTINET, ARGUES THAT AI DOESN’T ELIMINATE JOBS, BUT IT INSTEAD CREATES THEM.

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ver the past two years, as the debate over immigration policies has grown increasingly heated, an argument was often introduced as a counter to some of the more abrasive stances. At first glance, it may have appeared to be a fact-based response to the animosity and divisiveness that defined the debate. For those of us with deeper, first-hand knowledge though, it was just as fear-based and misinformed.

At Fortinet, we have been investing in artificial intelligence (AI) for years. It is an incredible technology that presents extraordinary opportunities for how to protect networks and,ultimately, the Internet.

As AI become more common and more sophisticated, it consistently clarifies an important truth: The value,

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power and efficiency of AI does not arise from its ability to replace human beings.

In fact, AI does just the opposite. Both automation and AI underscore how central and critical human insight and expertise are to success.

Arguments and headlines that cast technology as an encroaching threat, widening social divides and limiting opportunities may provoke stronger reactions (and more clicks), but in general, innovation is not additive or subtractive — it is multiplicative. It creates exponentially more opportunities for more people in more ways than even those most directly impacted by it can often imagine at first.

Has email replaced the post office? While the number of total career employees declined from 2007 to 2016, it is now just a bit more than it was in 1965. The volume of marketing mail and first-class mail have

DID ATMS REPLACE BANKS? NO — BY LOWERING THE COST OF OPENING A BRANCH, ATMS HELPED INCREASE THE NUMBER OF BANKS

BY MORE THAN 40%. IN FACT, THEY DIDN’T EVEN REPLACE BANK TELLERS, WHOSE RANKS INCREASED TO MEET THE DEMAND OF MORE BRANCHES.

decreased, but the volume of total shipping of packages has increased from 3.3 billion to 5.2 billion packages.

Delivery points have increased from 148 million to 156 million and there are also thousands of additional delivery trucks on the roads.

Did ATMs replace banks? No — by lowering the cost of opening a branch, ATMs helped increase the number of banks by more than 40%. In fact, they didn’t even replace bank tellers, whose ranks increased to meet the demand of more branches.

It is especially important to recognise these facts in light of the particularly callous argument that the only jobs that AI kills are the ones nobody would want. All of us value the job that provides for our families and lives.

If anything, the rise and spread of AI forces us to take a closer look at how charging employees to do the only kinds of tasks that AI is good at — repetitive, precise, controlled tasks that require no reasoning, higherorder thinking or even common sense — represents an outdated, divisive management style.

It is hard to imagine an industry more heavily reliant on digital technology

than cybersecurity. As of Q3 2017, our cybersecurity tools and technologies were responsible for neutralising 91,000 malware programs, blocking access to 150,000 malicious websites and resisting 4.4 million network intrusion attempts — per minute.

In a digitally driven world that is teeming with threat actors — from malicious pranksters to criminals, ideologically motivated sects to state-sponsored cyber terrorists, threatening everything from our individual identities to the critical infrastructure of our society — there is no way to protect data without self-learning AI and automation. For effective cybersecurity, we must utilize AI to do time-consuming tasks such as data mining and parsing data logs — while allowing cybersecurity teams to focus on the much higher-order tasks of threat identification and elimination.

And yet, one of the gravest challenges our industry faces is a shortage of talent.

Our industry’s unemployment rate stands at 0%. In 2016, one million new cybersecurity jobs were created and estimates project an increase of five or six million over the next few years.

In 2015, there was a 74% increase in cybersecurity job postings, half of which went unfilled.

Across industries, 45% of organizations claim to experience a problematic shortage of cybersecurity skills. As a result, cybersecurity teams must race from one crisis or breach to the next, with little time for strategic planning or continued learning to keep up with threat sophistication.

These are certainly business challenges — and increasingly costly ones at that. The demand itself is driving an expensive bidding war for talent, and the cost of cybercrime is estimated to reach $2.1 trillion globally by next year. These are also national, global security risks, with everything from financial systems to healthcare to critical infrastructure in the crosshairs.

Automation and AI are not eliminating jobs, they are creating them — high-paying, high-level and secure ones at that — at an unprecedented rate. As the levels of data continue to grow, that will create even greater demand.

We will never be able to fill these jobs without greater awareness of the need for them, early training in middle school and high school and more outreach to veterans and college students — particularly women, who currently comprise just 14% of the cybersecurity workforce.

There are definitely clear causes of wage stagnation and job loss — from who disproportionately benefits from economic gains to the impact of wealth creation through capital management rather than goods or services to the funding and priorities of our educational system to an increasingly volatile financial system to the impact of rapid globalisation. Those are all extraordinary challenges, and it is far easier to scapegoat technology than to address the challenges it presents.

Blaming innovation will not solve real problems or prevent crises. It will only drive misunderstandings and clicks in an increasingly unsafe digital landscape.

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COLUMN

PUTTING THE CUSTOMER FIRST IN THE SECOND PART OF THE SERIES, VENKATESH MAHADEVAN, CIO OF DUBAI INVESTMENTS, EXPLAINS WHY CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IS KEY TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SUCCESS.

T

his is a number one success factor for any digital transformation initiative, and I don’t even think this is open for negotiation.

In today’s age and time, it is the customer who is driving your change.

Today’s customer expects to be served in the most appropriate, if not accurate, fashion. Due to the customer wanting to stay “always connected,” organisations will need to embrace technology that will enable them to deliver superior customer experience.

A lot of CEOs of global corporations have already shifted their focus to improving customer experience.

Organisations need to work towards embracing technology in a fashion that enhances and delights the customer.

If your organisation’s digital transformation project does not feature your customer as the focal point, then please scrap it and go back to the drawing board. What you also need to bear in mind is that since these digital transformation programs are long winding, you need to revisit this nerve centre and ensure the customer stays there and has not moved away. So, as a strategic player and an enabler, keep

re-visiting this periodically to ensure the customer is there, exactly where you want, at the centre.

A lot of organizations have concentrated on new ways of interacting with customer on the web store front by providing good looking visuals, efficient order taking, etc., but that is not enough in today’s digital age. It is important to decipher the customer’s needs in a way that you deliver effectively what the customer wants and expects. Companies that have succeeded in this paradigm shift are the ones that are profitable and will stay around much longer.

What your board and you need to remember is that a lot of business’ future will be digital. These are the businesses for whom digital transformation is imperative. They have to transform or will perish. Hence, a top-down approach is the key to success.

Another critical factor to remember is that digital transformation is not about improving efficiency alone. With so much technology changing at such a rapid pace, the question uppermost is, are organizations adapting enough to keep pace? Efficiency is the by-product or result of your digital transformation programme. Focus on the business

model of the future and develop a ‘customer delight’ model.

I see a lot of organizations improve their business processes and efficiencies during the transformation.

While this is good, I would urge the leaders to rethink their business models and the opportunities that exist for their industry and business in the coming years and how the ecosystem is going to change. This needs to be the first step in any digital transformation process, and a company that goes about just improving efficiency is probably not going down the right path.

You need to figure out a way to stay relevant in the coming years and how can you manage to get the customers to stay with you and increasing your base all along, while the market place dynamics are changing at a rapid pace. What are the new opportunities? What are the new business models that are emerging in the coming years? What can you do as an organisation to bring in new value to the marketplace? What transformation is happening with the advent of new technologies? And which technology is going to wipe out or transform your business model completely?

Then ask yourself the million-dollar question: Will your organisation survive the digital era?

Your entire digital transformation strategy must be centred around the above questions, and the end product should be futuristic and scalable as well.

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PRODUCTS

LINKSYS CLOUD MANAGER

NEFFOS X9 neffos, the smartphone brand of TP-link, has launched 4 models - X9, C9, C9A and C7A. neffos X9 boasts an 18:9 aspect ratio with 5.99-inch HD+ display and a dual rear camera system.

The dual rear camera pairs a 13-megapixel f/2.0 lens with a 5-megapixel lens and offers real-time Portrait Mode with background blurring feature.

On the front there’s an 8-megapixel wide-angle selfie camera that has AI-beautify mode.

The neffos X9 features an Octa-core processor supported by 3GB of RAM. It has 32GB internal storage and a microSD card slot for expandable storage. It also has face unlock that verifies the user’s identity by scanning facial details using AI technology. It also has an option of fingerprint sensor at the back that allows you to unlock the phone.

Linksys Cloud Manager is a cloud-hosted WiFi management platform purpose-built for small business environments that reduces costs and increases operational efficiencies. The solution offers centralised visibility, management and control of a wireless network without the cost and complexity of traditional hardware controllers, overlay software, or annual hosting costs.

Linksys Cloud Manager enables IT administrators and other authorised users to remotely monitor, manage and troubleshoot single or distributed wireless networks in real time via a single dashboard and sign-on. This plug-n-play platform helps provide secure remote access to Linksys Business Wireless-AC Access Points, which are built with enterprise-grade, high-performance hardware, and is competitively priced with no licensing or maintenance fees for five years. The included cloud license fits any budget and provides a complete solution for IT solutions providers and their SMB customers.

Linksys Cloud Manager is preinstalled on select Linksys Business Wireless-AC Access Points, which will be available in October 2018.

HP SPECTRE FOLIO Said to the world’s first leather convertible PC, HP Spectre Folio blends craftsmanship with the latest technology.

To achieve a thin and light design in this new form factor, the Spectre Folio incorporates one of the smallest motherboards in the industry, capitalizing on 8th Gen Intel Core i5 and i7 (Y-series) processors.

Additionally, fanless thermal design leverages the unique qualities of leather to create an experience that feels both cool and comfortable in the lap. HP also worked closely with the 50

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renowned global audio and lifestyle brand Bang & Olufsen to expertly tune the four front facing speakers for a superb audio experience in any of the device positions.

Other features include up to 16 GB of memory, up to 2 TB of SSD storage, and either a 300-nits FHD display or a low-power, 1W 400-nits FHD option for ideal viewing in any lighting condition.

A 4K UHD display panel option will be available later this year.

The device also supports dual eSIM, with an optional nano-SIM slot under the display and an optional embedded

digital eSIM to easily and quickly connect to their cellular networks for blazing fast Internet and data.

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ISSUE 02 \ OCTOBER 2018

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