CXO Insight Middle East - Tales of transformation - March 2020

ISSUE 18 \ MARCH 2020

TALES OF TRANSFORMATION Celebrating visionary technology leaders in the Middle East

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CONTENTS

45

PRODUCTS

TALES OF TRANSFORMATION Celebrating visionary technology leaders in the Middle East

12

36

WHY BASIC RESEARCH 10

IS IMPORTANT 12 JOURNEY TO

SECURING THE 36 SUPPLY CHAIN

THE CLOUD

API ADOPTION CAN 38 HOW BOOST AUTOMATION

16

PREPARING FOR SUCCESS

DE-RISKING YOUR 39 BUSINESS WITH CLOUD

PUTTING THE 20 CLOUD TO WORK

22

TACKLING CRISIS COMMUNICATION

PUBLISHED BY INSIGHT MEDIA & PUBLISHING LLC

DATA MANAGEMENT AN 40 BUILDING ENGINE FOR GROWTH THE CHANGING FACE OF 42 MANUFACTURING

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NEWS

INSIDER THREATS COST MIDDLE EAST FIRMS $11.65 MILLION ANNUALLY: STUDY ROBOT RESOURCE FIRMS TO MANAGE NONHUMAN WORKERS: GARTNER GEMS DUBAI AMERICAN ACADEMY LAUNCHES AI CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE

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EDITORIAL

ALL THINGS DIGITAL

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ast month, we hosted the second edition of our CXO 50 Awards, which in a short time, has already become the benchmark for IT excellence in the region. The winners were picked from a pool of 100 odd shortlisted entries after rigorous scrutiny by an external judging panel and our editorial team.

What struck me most about this year’s winners was the fact that digital transformation is not just a buzzword in the region– it is already deeply rooted in many organisations. Though maturity curves may vary, all of our winners are driving digital change in their organisations with new technologies. Be it the cloud, blockchain, AI, or RPA, many of these visionary leaders are riding the crest of this new wave to take their businesses to new heights, and what is heartening to see is that most of them have a seat at the table now. We will bring their success stories to you in the forthcoming issues of CXO Insight ME because these are worth emulating if you are an IT or security leader looking to

reshape your business into a digital one. These smart leaders are not treating DX projects as a side project for IT and have metamorphosized into digital strategy agents in their organisations.

Perhaps, one of the reasons why most digital transformation projects fail today is because the focus is always too much on the ‘digital’ aspect of it. We have a feature in this edition which exposes the traps IT leaders must avoid during the digital transformation process.

When it comes to cloud adoption in the Middle East, there is no doubt that it is not a question of if but when. The fact that AWS, Microsoft, and more recently, Google, have set up their data centres in the region has instilled confidence in users and alleviated their features around data residency and security controls. In this issue, you can read about the cloud migration strategies that will help you take advantage of this new paradigm in computing.

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

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Designer Anup Sathyan

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

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NEWS

INSIDER THREATS COST MIDDLE EAST FIRMS $11.65 MILLION ANNUALLY: STUDY

across all three insider threat categories, including: careless or negligent employees/contractors, criminal or malicious insiders, and cybercriminal credential theft.

“With an average cost of more than $600K per incident, insider threats must be a leading concern for companies worldwide,” said Mike McKee, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Insider Threat Management for Proofpoint. “Organisational insiders, including employees, contractors, and third-party vendors, are an attractive

attack vector for cybercriminals due to their far-reaching access to critical systems, data, and infrastructure. Given that users regularly work across a wide range of applications and systems, we recommend layered defences, including a dedicated insider threat management solution and strong security awareness training, to provide the best protection against these types of attacks.”

This year’s Cost of Insider Threats 2020 Global Report key findings include: • Globally, organisations impacted by insider threats spent an average of $11.45 million annually—that’s up 31 percent from $8.76 million in 2018.

• More than 60 percent of reported insider threat incidents were the result of a careless employee or contractor and 23 percent were caused by malicious insiders. A total of 14 percent of all insider threat incidents involved cybercriminals stealing credentials.

• The number of incidents has also increased by a staggering 47 percent in just two years, from 3,200 in 2018 (Ponemon) to 4,700 in 2020.

independently or alongside humans. In the future, retailers will establish units within the organisation for procuring, maintaining, training, taxing, decommissioning and proper disposal of robot resources. In addition, they will create the governance required to ensure that people and robots can effectively collaborate.

Many retail workers want to use AI specifically as an on-demand or predictive assistant, meaning the robot will need to work alongside humans. “This means the robot will have to “mesh” with the human team — essentially meaning that both sides will need to learn how to “collaborate” to operate effectively together,” said Marian.

An example is an autonomous robotic kitchen assistant that learns an operator’s specific recipes and prepares them according to the wishes of the operator.

The robot can work in harmony with the operators who, in turn, are having to adapt to changing consumer tastes.

Choosing the right candidate — human and machine — for the job is critical for success. A combined effort from HR, IT and the line-of-business hiring managers will

be required to identify the skills needed to ensure the pair work together effectively.

“Retail CIOs must provide ongoing maintenance and monitoring performance for effectiveness. If not, the team may be counterproductive and lead to a bad customer experience,” said Marian.

The introduction of AI and robotics will likely cause fear and anxiety among the workforce — particularly among part-time workers. It will be vital for retail CIOs to work with HR and business leaders to address and manage employees’ skills and concerns; and change their mindset around the development of robot resource units.

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global cybersecurity and compliance company Proofpoint has released its Cost of Insider Threats 2020 Global Report to identify the costs and trends associated with negligent, compromised, and malicious insiders.

Notably, impacted organisations in the Middle East spent on average $11.65 million annually on overall insider threat remediation and took 77 days to contain each incident.

The report, commissioned with The Ponemon Institute and co-sponsored

by IBM, surveyed nearly 1,000 IT and IT security practitioners across North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Each organisation included in the study experienced one or more material events caused by an insider. Over the last two years, the frequency and costs associated with insider threats increased dramatically

ROBOT RESOURCE FIRMS TO MANAGE NONHUMAN WORKERS: GARTNER Gartner, Inc. predicts that by 2025, at least two of the top 10 global retailers will establish robot resource organisations to manage nonhuman workers.

“The retail industry continues to transform through a period of unprecedented change, with customer experience as the new currency,” said Kelsie Marian, Senior Research Director at Gartner. “The adoption of new digital technologies and the ever-changing expectations of customers continues to challenge traditional retailers, forcing them to investigate new-human hybrid operational models, including artificial intelligence (AI), automation and robotics.”

Gartner research shows that 77% of retailers plan to deploy AI by 2021, with the deployment of robotics for warehouse picking as the No. 1 use case. Warehouse picking involves smart robots working 6

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GARTNER CIO SURVEY IDENTIFIES KEY CHALLENGES FOR GOVERNMENTS

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ifty-eight percent of government CIOs faced organisational disruption during the past four years, according Gartner Inc.’s 2020 global survey of CIOs. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they had also faced a funding shortfall in that same time frame. These figures are higher than those for all other industries.

“Governments are struggling in many areas, following disruptions including changes in leadership, reorganisations and funding shortfalls. For many government CIOs, disruption will affect their IT budget growth, and the funding and launch of new business initiatives will suffer,” said Alia Mendonsa, Senior Research Director at Gartner. “Inflexible funding models exacerbate this issue, due to budgetary processes and cycles within government.”

CIOs of government organisations are still developing their digital leadership skills and strategy. “The government sector is lagging behind other industries in all aspects of strategy, particularly in its ability to communicate a clear and consistent business strategy that articulates how the organisation will

achieve its vision,” said Mendonsa.

The survey found that less than half (48%) of government CIOs said their organisation had a clear and consistent overall business strategy.

“In the absence of a formal business strategy, government CIOs need to incorporate strategic business outcomes into their digital government strategy. Business outcomes will be validated by the business as part of the strategy approval process,” said Mendonsa.

The survey results showed that government CIOs are ahead of other industries in enhancing citizen-centricity by developing and delivering digital services, however they remain slightly behind other industries in most IT process domains. “To fix this, government CIOs should assess the maturity of their IT processes to identify areas of strength and weakness, and then prioritise implementation of improved processes and workflows according to the results,” said Mendonsa.

The survey found that data and analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies remain game-

changers for government CIOs in 2020.

Survey results showed that within the next 12 months the majority of the respondents had already deployed or are focused on deploying cybersecurity (84%), AI (37%) and robotic process automation (33%).

“Government CIOs need to prioritise investment in emerging technologies according to potential value for their institution,” said Mendonsa. “More mature technologies such as cloud and data and analytics offer immediate benefits in terms of capability and scalability for delivering digital government services, and therefore may be prioritised. Experiments with AI and robotic process automation may start small initially, and once their value can be demonstrated, initiatives involving these emerging technologies may be scaled up over time.”

ORACLE LAUNCHES NEW CLOUD REGION IN SAUDI ARABIA As part of its ambitious regional cloud expansion plan, Oracle has announced that its cloud region in Saudi Arabia is now open for business and available in the Oracle Cloud Console. In addition to the facility in Jeddah, Oracle has added local regions in Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Osaka), Canada (Montreal), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam).

Oracle has already opened 10 cloud regions in the last six months, and with these five new regions, the software behemoth now has its Generation 2 Cloud available in 21 fully independent locations.

“We’re well on our way to having 36 cloud regions available by the end of 2020,” said Andrew Reichman, Director

of Product Management, Oracle.

“Customers have told us that to run critical systems of record in the cloud, they need to run workloads across fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes. They also told us

that those multiple sites must be in the same country to meet data residency requirements. To that end, four of these new regions—Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam—give customers a second site within the same country (or, in the case of Amsterdam in the EU, a second jurisdiction paired with Oracle’s existing Frankfurt region). The fifth region, in Saudi Arabia, will be joined by a second region later this year.”

Oracle plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where it operates, and these new regions mark a big step toward this goal. The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020.

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NEWS

GEMS DUBAI AMERICAN ACADEMY LAUNCHES AI CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE

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EMS Dubai American Academy has announced the launch of its new Center of Excellence artificial intelligence and robotics.

The establishment of this center is a response to the rapid rate of technological and societal changes in today’s world and aims to drive the changes needed to ensure current models of education remain relevant to the dynamic nature of the industry.

The vision of the Center of Excellence is to promote educational and research activities in the field of AI and robotics.

It bridges the gap between businesses and educators with a distinctive capability to harness the intellectual energy of the academic world with state-of-the-art AI and robotics technologies.

GEMS Education undertook the initiative to strengthen the country’s AI and robotics ecosystem that will serve

as a platform for intelligence-sharing and technology collaboration in the cutting-edge areas of AI and robotics.

Tammy Murphy, Superintendent/ CEO, GEMS Dubai American Academy, said, “Preparing students for the future means having them engaged in technology through hands-on activities. With the launch of the new Center of Excellence for AI and Robotics, we provide students with the tools and conceptual frameworks to engage with AI-enabled technologies.

At GEMS Dubai American Academy, we realise that everything we love about

civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence and robotics has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before.”

The GEMS Dubai American Academy Center of Excellence has a range of cutting-edge technologies such a Mixed Reality Zone featuring Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Augmented Reality (AR) manufactured hardware from Facebook, Microsoft and HTC, with software like Unity 3D. The Center also features a Self-Driving Car, an autonomous customized Renault Twizy fully electric car.

In the robotics segment, the Center showcases the Baxter robotic arm, a collaborative research robotic arm, capable of advanced facial recognition and machine learning using industrygrade ROS (Robot Operating System) and Python coding; and assembly line robotic arms, a Dobot Magician robotic arm industry 4.0 setup, mimicking an assembly line using varied end effectors such as grippers, suction cup as well as laser engravers.

KUWAIT INVESTS IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TO DRIVE IT MARKET

Andy Froemmel, SAP

Kuwait’s customer experience investment is driving Kuwait’s IT market to a record-high of KWD 556 million by 2021, according to Andy Froemmel, the new Managing Director of Kuwait for global technology company SAP. In line with Kuwait Vision 2035’s goals of diversified economic growth, Kuwait’s organisations are investing in real-time analytics software to 8

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transform citizen and customer experiences. As a result, Kuwait’s IT market is set to grow by 20 percent to KWD 556 million by 2021, according to a recent report by Fitch Solutions “Kuwait Vision 2035 and the booming IT market show that organisations are embracing digital transformation and real-time analytics to make services faster, easier, and more effective,” said Andy Froemmel, Managing Director, SAP Kuwait. “As Kuwait Vision 2035 advances, we are especially transforming the government and public sector, banking and finance, and oil and gas.”

SAP has appointed Andy Froemmel as Managing Director of Kuwait.

Andy Froemmel brings more than 18 years of experience working for SAP, including Head of Cloud for Middle East North, and Chief Operating Officer for Saudi Arabia.

In turn, Mohamed Helmy will take on the role of Head of Cloud Business for Middle East North. Helmy will be based out of Kuwait and will continue to support and work with the region’s leading innovators.

Across the region, SAP is seeing strong CIO and channel partner interest solutions running on its S/4HANA real-time business suite, C/4HANA customer experience suite, and HANA in-memory platform.

“By advancing our Middle East North leadership, SAP is supporting digital transformation in Kuwait and the region,” said Ahmed Al-Faifi, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, SAP Middle East North. “Andy Froemmel and Mohamed Helmy have the proven leadership experience, the knowledge of digital business innovation, and the relationships with C-suite executives and channel partners to drive long-term growth.”

CYBERSECURITY VAD CYBERKNIGHT LAUNCHES OPERATIONS

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yberKnight Technologies has announced the launch of its operations in the Middle East. The event took place at the Radisson Blu Media City in Dubai on the 29h of January, in the presence of CyberKnight’s leadership team and over 40 industry stakeholders including vendors and channel partners.

During the reception, CyberKnight’s “Art of Cybersecurity Distribution” concept as well as its Zero Trust Security (ZTX) Framework were unveiled.

CyberKnight Technologies, a company founded in 2019, is a cybersecurity value-added-distributor (VAD), headquartered in Dubai, covering the Middle East with onthe-ground presence in Saudi Arabia and all key Middle East markets. The ZTX (Zero Trust Security) framework incorporates emerging and market-

Avinash Advani and Vivek Gupta, CyberKnight

leading cybersecurity solutions that protect the entire attack surface, by leveraging AI, to help security teams at enterprise and government customers fortify breach detection, accelerate incident response & remediation while addressing regulatory compliance.

Avinash Advani, Founder & CEO at CyberKnight, said, “Launching CyberKnight is a commitment to our regional enterprise and government customers that our team will continue to be their trusted advisors to help them

defend against today’s cyber threats and adhere to local compliance regulations.”

Advani continued, “The vendors that have been on-boarded into our portfolio in such a short period of time are a testament to their belief in our capabilities to become a full extension of their teams on-the-ground, achieve rapid ROI, TTV and market penetration.”

Vivek Gupta, Co-Founder and COO at CyberKnight said, “CyberKnight has built a best-of-breed team of cybersecurity industry veterans that come with decades of combined experience, deep-rooted customer and channel relationships, local experience covering the Middle East, and most importantly the highest levels of expertise, passion and energy. In line with our vision, we strive to change the definition of VAD by keeping our finger on the pulse of innovation and emerging technology.”

VIEWPOINT

WHY BASIC RESEARCH IS IMPORTANT AS NATIONS ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST DEVELOP THEIR DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE, CHARLES YANG, PRESIDENT OF HUAWEI MIDDLE EAST, NOTES THAT SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ADVANCEMENTS THIS DECADE WILL BE A RESULT OF BREAKTHROUGHS IN BASIC RESEARCH

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he strength of industry over the past 1,000 years has come from a consistent focus on what we call “basic research”. This means looking at the foundations of mathematics and mechanics, optics, biology, and physics. Of course all companies need to undertake research and development to ensure that their products remain competitive. Yet this day-to-day innovation is more incremental, and must be contrasted with more disruptive innovation in basic research that leads to entirely new types of industries and services.

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Theoretical advances in basic research triggered the invention of things like the steam engine and the nuclear reactor, and are the types of breakthroughs we must continue to prioritise in the decade ahead. This view was supported in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2019 which noted that shifting the focus from innovation quantity to innovation quality remains a global priority.

Today the tech sector is an unparalleled champion of basic research. Global R&D has been driven most aggressively by the ICT service sector and producers, according to

the 2019 Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. BCG’s annual Most Innovative Companies List has also highlighted the crucial role of technology in innovation, and the impact of digital technologies on both digital natives and more traditional industries. It’s perhaps no surprise that nearly all of the most innovative companies for 2019 were technology brands.

A great example of basic research breakthroughs is the current proliferation of 5G connectivity. The investigation into polar codes by professor Dr. Erdal Arikan—initially

published in 2008 and which was backed by Huawei—defined an entirely new approach to maximising the rate and reliability of data transmission.

That breakthrough in basic research ultimately led to the earlier-thanexpected commercialisation of 5G technologies beginning in 2019.

Looking to the decade ahead, there is much we are still trying to understand with basic research. The ICT industry is running into many bottlenecks after 50 years of highspeed development. The times call for new theoretical breakthroughs and a new innovation strategy. At Huawei, we refer to this as moving from Innovation 1.0 to Innovation 2.0, wherein we look at not just technological and engineering innovations but theoretical breakthroughs and inventions.

For example, there are fundamentals of the AI domain that are still quite nascent, with massive potential for new AI algorithms and chipsets to build intelligent industries. Wireless network research is another important area, as the world seeks to boost spectrum efficiency at a time when billions of people and devices are coming online. The further development of quantum computing will also allow us to reimagine the basic units for storing and transmitting data, enabling us to more quickly solve the problems that traditional computers simply could not.

The good news is that, as the costs of global communication have fallen, the world has benefitted from a surge in the amount and quality of collaborative research between governments, businesses, and academia. This is no more visible than in the Middle East.

Leading technology and engineering companies have shifted to working with the finest scientific minds in university laboratories. At the same time, private companies have been opening up their previously siloed teams to joint innovation programs. We have seen the value of these collaborations firsthand through the establishment of numerous Huawei joint innovation centers in the Middle East over the last decade.

LEADING TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING COMPANIES HAVE SHIFTED TO WORKING WITH THE FINEST SCIENTIFIC MINDS IN UNIVERSITY LABORATORIES. AT THE SAME TIME, PRIVATE COMPANIES HAVE BEEN OPENING UP THEIR PREVIOUSLY SILOED TEAMS TO JOINT INNOVATION PROGRAMS. WE HAVE SEEN THE VALUE OF THESE COLLABORATIONS FIRSTHAND THROUGH THE ESTABLISHMENT OF NUMEROUS HUAWEI JOINT INNOVATION CENTERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST OVER THE LAST DECADE.

Acknowledging the profound value of basic research, organisations and governments in the Middle East would do well to remember the ingredients that lead to breakthroughs.

One huge driver of basic research is the collaboration between private companies and universities.

These collaborations can provide

postgraduate students and researchers with the chance to receive practical training and hands-on experience.

This in turn helps them to navigate the ‘valley of death’—the point in the development journey where a great invention resulting from technologicallyfocused research needs to transform into something tangible that will be successful in the marketplace.

Another crucial force behind basic research today is the development of global innovation networks. The relationship between the US and China is a prime example of this despite recent political positioning. The National Science Foundation in the US recently found that as a share of total crossnational articles published globally, US scientists and engineers published the most articles with Chinese partners, and that US firms spend more on R&D activities in China than in any other foreign country.

For nations in the Middle East, the value of cross-border cooperation is more important than ever in pursuing serious R&D programs. That cooperation is now deepening on the back of numerous efforts to reduce barriers to foreign investment and foreign talent. The Gulf countries in particular have made remarkable progress in liberalising markets, opening up residency programs, revising foreign visa and insurance regulations, and exploring more competitive foreign ownership laws.

These reforms all create a more compelling framework for innovation.

In the end, advances in basic research are a lot like a symphony – one played by thousands of minds one generation after the next. Building a digital, intelligent world takes a joint effort. We must ultimately dissolve boundaries and work together to build an ecosystem that thrives on shared success across a huge number of scientists, professors, craftspeople, and policymakers. There is still a long way to go in our journey toward an intelligent world. But this symphony is one in which all of us have a role to play.

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FEATURE

JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD WHAT ORGANISATIONS SHOULD KNOW WHEN TRANSITIONING TO THE CLOUD.

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ith the arrival of hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google, there has been a significant uptick in the adoption of cloud services in the region. According to Statista, the public cloud services market in the MENA region is tipped to touch $2 billion this year. However, migrating workloads to a cloud-based environment is not a smooth process, and companies face many unexpected hurdles such as governance, cost, and in some instances, applications don’t perform as well as it did on on-prem infrastructure.

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For CIOs considering public cloud migration, there are many steps they must take to ensure a smooth transition and realise the benefits of cloud computing.

“The public cloud service can empower businesses to realise sustainable value, optimise operational costs significantly, and drive competitive advantage, but this is all reliant on the maturity of a business. To reap the benefits of public cloud service at scale, a robust cloud adoption strategy is a must; otherwise, failures are inevitable,” says Tamer Elsawy, Director, IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software.

He says at the very core of cloud adoption strategy, assessment of the workload should devise the deployment strategy. Migrating each workload onto the cloud is blindfolding, which not just dilutes the adoption strategy but exposes the risk of failures. To overcome, it is best to adopt a hybrid multi-cloud strategy that allows to run workloads across on-premise data centres and multiple public cloud service providers.

Mohammad Bin Sulaiman, CEO of Moro Hub, says to realise the business benefits of cloud adoption, it is key for IT and business heads to have a common viewpoint and

Tamer Elsawy

acceptance. “Not all workloads, business applications, and data sets need to be migrated to the public cloud in one instance. The best way forward is to prioritise between business benefit, ease of migration and business criticality. The first two, namely business benefit and ease of migration, move a workload up the ranks. The more business-critical a workload is, the lower it moves in rank.

Getting a trade-off between these and other similar factors is why a dialogue between IT and business is so important, early in the project.”

He adds one way of managing complexity and the possibility of things going wrong is to break down the migration into much smaller projects, reducing the possible impact of failure and generating a higher possibility of success.

Kerrie Jordan, Director – Cloud Product Management and Product Marketing, Epicor, shares a similar

THERE IS AN IRREFUTABLE BUSINESS CASE FOR MOVING TO PUBLIC CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS FOR ORGANISATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BUT, HOW ABOUT HIGHLY REGULATED VERTICALS SUCH AS THE PUBLIC SECTOR, BANKING, AND HEALTHCARE, WHICH FACE MANY REGULATORY HURDLES WHEN IT COMES TO PUBLIC CLOUD ADOPTION? opinion: “Mapping out a vision, starting small, and empowering cloud advocates can make the journey much easier. You’ll need a team that’s willing to evaluate and change business processes that possibly haven’t been touched in decades. This is no small task, so make sure there are some incentives in place.

She says CIOs should identify cloud champions in each functional area of their business and give them the tools they need to advocate and pave the way for migrating to the cloud.

“These individuals will be your voice in the organization, as well as your ears.

Mohammad Bin Sulaiman

They may discover new obstacles that need to be addressed and should be empowered with authority to make necessary changes.”

Approaching the cloud strategically means that companies have to rethink their processes, budgets, skills, and ultimately, it should benefit applications, IT, and business. And most importantly, they have to realise all clouds are not equal. “There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the cloud. Companies are looking at location, capabilities, and commercial considerations in assessing public cloud providers and then also looking deeply into their own requirements and constraints, “ says Patrick Smith, EMEA Field CTO, Pure Storage.

According to him, one of the chief constraints is related to data — understanding data and its sensitivity determines where the business service can be located, be that onprem, in-country public cloud or in any geography. But beyond that, it’s essential that organisations have the flexibility to easily move the data to the right location, either as a one-time activity or with frequent updates to support business processes such as Disaster Recovery or to feed dev/test environments with current data sets.

The right approach The most common approaches for migrating to public cloud environments are rehosting, replatforming, and

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FEATURE

Kerrie Jordan

Patrick Smith

Avinash Gujje

refactoring workloads. Rehosting is also referred to as lift-and shift, which as the name implies, means lifting your stack and shifting it from on-prem to the cloud. As a variation on the lift and shift, re-platforming involves making a few further adjustments to optimise your landscape for the cloud, and refactoring means rebuilding your applications from scratch.

Is lift-and-shift, considered to be the most straightforward approach, the best fit for your cloud migration?

“With some applications, you can use the ‘lift and shift’ model, but with others, you may need to completely refactor or rearchitect them to adapt to a cloud environment. In some cases, the entire application need not be migrated to the cloud ever.

For example, in a financial services organization, for compliance purposes, critical data needs to be stored onpremise or on a dedicated cloud instance that the organization has full control over. Here, hybrid will be the default approach and not just a temporary one,” says Avinash Gujje, Practice Head – Infrastructure, Cloud Box Technologies CloudBox. Moro’s CEO Bin Sulaiman says before we decide on the best migration approach, it is important to segregate if cloud adoption is for brownfield or greenfield applications.

Organisations looking to migrate their existing applications to the cloud

would have a different approach to those looking to leverage cloud for their new digital projects.

“The lift-and-shift approach has meaning for those organisations who want to make a quick jump to a cloud platform, who do not have the risk appetite, human capital, and organisation culture to support significant changes to their organisation,” he adds.

Elsawy from IBM says lift-and-shift is just the very first step towards the pubic cloud ladder. This step is usually followed by application modernisation, where the real cloudnative benefits are realised. “Thus, lift-and-shift can be deemed as one of the initial approaches but certainly not the final. It has also been observed that application modernisation is not dependent on lift-and-shift because you can seamlessly incorporate the hybrid cloud environments and successfully deliver application modernisation.”

There is an irrefutable business case for moving to public cloud environments for organisations in the Middle East. But, how about highly regulated verticals such as the public sector, banking, and healthcare, which face many regulatory hurdles when it comes to public cloud adoption?

Do not get discouraged, says Jordan from Epicor. If your research shows that moving to the cloud is the right strategy for your business, keep moving forward.

While regulatory and compliance issues can make for a more complex move, there are several vendors of cloud applications that have already solved for this issue. Consider investing in legal counsel and independent consultants to help you navigate the decision process — which is good practice anyway given the long-term strategic impact of cloud adoption, she adds.

“Organisations in the banking, public and healthcare sectors are all actively deploying applications and services to the public cloud but only after carefully considering their requirements and constraints, particularly around data privacy. To this end, it is important to ensure that only approved data is used in the public cloud. If, for example, organisations want to use sensitive production data in the public cloud to support development and test environments, they should ensure masking techniques are used to comply with regulations to protect the data,” says Smith from Pure Storage.

Gujje from Cloud Box Technologies sums up: “As we are marching towards the cloud era what we are witnessing is a lot of investments, which are already made by Microsoft and AWS in the region that takes care of regulatory hurdles. The major hurdle of retaining data in the same region is solved. When it comes to data security and integrity, all the cloud service providers are NESA, PCI-DSS accredited.”

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FEATURE

PREPARING FOR SUCCESS HOW TO SIDESTEP THE POTENTIAL PITFALLS SURROUNDING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES.

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or CIOs, navigating through the digital transformation journey can be a daunting task. Organisations embracing digital technologies to drive business growth and operational efficiency have to first map out a clear roadmap as to what it entails. It is estimated that 85 percent of digital transformation projects fail because CIOs, who are under pressure to deliver early results, tend to overlook potential pitfalls.

What are some of the common mistakes to avoid during the digital transformation process?

“There is a number of pitfalls to avoid during a digital transformation journey. Digital transformation is about introducing intelligent automation to selected if not all, processes and tasks in an organisation. Selecting the right process is critical as this brings fundamental changes (both technological and cultural) in an enterprise,” says Mahmoud El Kordy, Business Unit Executive - Middle East and Pakistan, IBM Systems.

He adds companies should avoid focusing on short term goals and considering this change as a one-time project, and limiting transformation to technical change only, disregarding its impact on the overall business.

Dr. Paul Hopkinson, Associate Head of Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University Dubai, says a common misconception is that digital transformation is either solely or primarily concerned with adopting the latest disruptive technologies.

“The reality is that technology is in the majority of cases, merely an enabler, and many of the barriers and problems that afflict digital transformation programmes are cultural in nature.

Achieving the benefits set out above entails shifting mindsets to support new business models and new modes of working as well as recognising the need to breakdown functional barriers when it comes to harnessing data and developing customer insight and more.”

Most organisations are still slowed in their activities by a non-efficient collaboration model between the socalled ‘business’ and ‘IT,’ according to Walid Lebourre, Technical Director of Proven Consult. Digitalisation is about effectively removing the barrier between them. An organisation cannot succeed in this endeavor without placing the same amount of importance and effort on both sides all along the transformation process.

Forcing the heads of departments into IT meetings every month will not generate success for your digital transformation. On the other hand, involvement, proper change planning, change management, and coaching for team members will increase chances of success drastically, he says.

Vijay Jaswal, Chief Technology Officer, Software AG, Middle East, and Turkey, points out another hurdle facing companies embarking on digital transformation projects: “A vital obstacle to a failed digital transformation is the internal culture and its collaborative efforts by the employees. While digital transformation must be part of the mission of the organisation and in the core of its leaders, it is also for all parts of an organisation to be fully aligned with the digital agenda. Every single person needs to be on board and aligned with the digital strategy – from the CEO downwards.”

Checklist for digital transformation success For IT leaders trying to reshape their organisations into digital businesses, it is essential to create a checklist to assess critical gaps and organisational readiness.

“While technological innovation is often the focus of digital transformation strategies, it is essential to remember that the objective of transformation should be to enhance experiences for customers and employees as this is what ultimately drives business outcomes. With this in mind, addressing the human side of transformation by creating the right company culture should be first on any transformation agenda,” says Paul Potgieter, Managing Director at Dimension Data Middle East.

Jaswal from Software AG says companies should plan their digital goals ensuring digital initiatives are all linked to strategy towards business objectives, and analyse current as-is processes and technology in order to ascertain improvements that can be made to future processes and technologies.

“Do not be afraid of failing, but learn from mistakes swiftly. Think big, start small and scale fast,” he adds.

It is also important to remember that companies need different metrics and change management methods for DX. “Every organisation

Mahmoud El Kordy

Dr. Paul Hopkinson

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FEATURE

Walid Lebourre

in today’s time is going through some degree of digital transformation.

With the involvement of various aspects, such as people, processes, and technology, formulating a single structured change management plan is not simple to achieve,” says El Kordy from IBM. What transformation means vary from one organisation to the other as they need different metrics and KPIs to measure success. It is important that organisations focus on building a trustable framework, in order to be able to manage and measure the effects of change management, he adds.

Lebourre from Proven Consult agrees: “As every company is different, not only with its business model but also practices and culture. Change management should also always adapt to the specific context in order to maximise the delivered value and the satisfaction of all. Of course, there is a few valid frameworks and methods out there to properly design, plan, organise and deliver a digital transformation, but like all methods and frameworks, they need to be tailored to every context.”

Mark Ackerman, regional director – Middle East & Africa, ServiceNow, adds rather than the traditional process of managing by exception or planning for 3-5 years out, change has to be a constant and an integral part of the organisations’ working.

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Vijay Jaswal

JUST AS SHADOW IT PROVED THAT DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CANNOT BE AN IT IMPERATIVE, SO TOO WILL RELUCTANCE TO CHANGE PROVE THAT DX INITIATIVES CANNOT FOLLOW A TOP-DOWN APPROACH. INSTEAD, IT IS ESSENTIAL TO EMPOWER YOUR EMPLOYEES AS THEY ARE KEY STAKEHOLDERS IN YOUR ORGANISATION’S TRANSFORMATION. is essential to ensure that customer/ business/employee outcomes are driven and constantly reviewed.

Who should take the helm?

Digital transformation touches every aspect of the business, which brings up the key question: Who in the C-suite should be driving digital change?

“DX initiatives need to start with the CEO – he or she needs to have a clear vision for what needs to be achieved. Additionally, IT today plays a complex role in all organisations.

It extends well beyond just email,

Paul Potgieter

applications, and internal systems to platforms that enable digital services, customer engagement, sales, and much more. As such, it is not always necessary that a CIO is in charge of digital transformations, and often it is a group of people from across various functions. It is not unusual now for companies to bring in a Chief Digital Officer who has the understanding and knowledge of how to monetise digital transformation,” says Hopkinson from Heriot-Watt University.

Just as shadow IT proved that digital transformation cannot be an IT imperative, so too will reluctance to change prove that DX initiatives cannot follow a top-down approach.

Instead, it is essential to empower your employees as they are key stakeholders in your organisation’s transformation, says Potgieter from Dimension Data.

“There are several ways you can do this. For example, introduce regular hackathons, create virtual innovation teams in the company or set time aside every week for cross-functional, innovative ideas. At Dimension Data, through our Graduate and Fast Track programmes, we openly challenge participants to identify new ways of solving real problems in our business.

As a result, we get tangible, innovative solutions that drive real value to our clients through these initiatives. We make sure we recognise them and celebrate them,” he concludes.

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INTERVIEW

PUTTING THE CLOUD TO WORK HELSINKI-BASED SULAVA OFFERS CONSULTANCY AND TRAINING FOR MICROSOFT’S CLOUD OFFERINGS, INCLUDING OFFICE 365 AND AZURE. THE COMPANY HAS RECENTLY LAUNCHED ITS MIDDLE EAST OPERATIONS BY SETTING UP AN OFFICE IN DUBAI. KIMMO BERGIUS, SULAVA’S CTO, TALKS ABOUT WHY THERE IS A COMPELLING BUSINESS CASE FOR USING THE PUBLIC CLOUD.

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ow many organisations have you migrated to the cloud in Finland so far?

We have moved 700,000 plus seats into Office 365 along the ten years we have been doing this. Finland is a mid-market if you go by Microsoft categorization, and I would say the GCC market is the same. But, the organisations here tend to be relatively much larger. So the largest Finnish organisaiton we have helped with the cloud was Kone, and it was around 50,000 seats. All others in Finland were in the region of between 2500 to 15000 seats.

Initially, when we started moving customers into Office 365, it did not make much of a difference whether you are on-prem or in the cloud in terms of functionalities. Now, it is entirely different. If you look at Microsoft, they are developing most of their new stuff in the cloud. So, a lot of things we talk to our customers about around Teams and collaboration, you can’t even do it on-prem anymore.

Are today’s public clouds really cheap compared to on-prem?

That is a misconception. It is not necessarily cheap, but cheaper. There is a difference in the price, but cost reduction can’t be the only reason to make a move to the cloud. The whole point is you don’t have to take care of your infrastructure anymore and its associated costs. And you are talking

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about turning your IT operations into an operational expense, as opposed to a capital expense. We have made a lot of cost comparisons. If you have 100 servers on-prem and move them to Azure, the cost is going to be around 70 percent of what it would be in your own environment. Obviously, you don’t have to manage or procure hardware because Microsoft takes care of all that for you, which is the same with any other cloud provider. Of course, it will cost you money upfront when you move something to somewhere else. You have to factor in the migration cost as well.

Are you primarily focused only on Azure and Office 365?

If you look at Microsoft’s cloud portfolio, they essentially have three different offerings. One is Office 365, and we do the whole stack. The second part is Azure, which encompasses 200 different services, and we cover them all. And then there is Dynamics 365, for which we do the platform. We don’t do individual modules such as CRM, finance, and HCM because you need specialized skills for that. Besides that, the CRM market in Finland is very mature and tough to get into.

But are you open to the idea foraying into the CRM market here?

We are not opposed to it. One of the things we had decided to do when we were coming here is to leverage the knowledge and experience we have

gathered in Finland. That is going to be our starting point. I am not saying that we will not branch out into other segments of the industry, and it will probably happen down the line. But we won’t do it for now. Many people ask us why we don’t branch off into AWS or Google Cloud. We are thinking about it all the time. However, up until now, the decision has been not doing it. There are two things that we do really well - one is Microsoft, and the other is the cloud.

So, we do Microsoft Cloud.

Is that because all your skill sets are in the Microsoft domain?

It’s got to do with two things. We have an excellent relationship with Microsoft in Finland. The second is the skillsets. It is not so much about the specific skills we have but more about the efforts we have to put in to maintain those skillsets. If you look at Microsoft Cloud, it is evolving rapidly. There were around 200 odd significant functional updates to Office 365 and around a thousand of them Azure. In order to maintain that expertise we have, we like to focus on what we know. We are not saying we are never going to do other cloud environments. We had a long discussion about this at the launch event here in Dubai. When customers ask us if we can do AWS or some other cloud provider, we say we don’t, but we have partners that we know who can help them. That is something we need to establish here as well, and for that, we have to understand what the partner landscape looks like in this region.

Can you get big business benefits for a small price?

INTERVIEW

TACKLING CRISIS COMMUNICATION KARI AHO, CEO OF THE FINNISH COMPANY SECAPP, WHICH PROVIDES A SECURE COMMUNICATION AND MANAGEMENT PLATFORM, ON WHY HOSPITALS IN THE REGION SHOULD EMBRACE CRITICAL COMMUNICATION SOLUTIONS.

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s it time for hospitals to modernise their emergency communications, and why?

The increase in civil unrest throughout the world, more extreme weather conditions, higher demand for safety and security, lack of skilled resources to respond to emergencies, minimisation of costs related to interruptions in services, market, and technological disruption is happening now. Urban societies need communications to maintain essential services, even during emergencies. Secapp is addressing that need with fast responses in crisis communication. In emergencies, immediate action alerting and the response of correct professionals is crucial. Every second that is spent prolonging the alert will mean more extensive damage to assets, loss of lives, and misery. This puts preparedness, response, and recovery procedures, and related tools in a test with authorities, public and private organisations alike.

Let me give you a concrete example.

A terrorist attack took place on the 18th of August 2017, when ten people were stabbed in Turku, Southwest Finland. Two women were killed in the attack, and eight people sustained severe injuries. Police were informed at 16:02, and three minutes later the attacker was detained. The first of October 2019 at 12:37 emergency response center received a call regarding a school attack in Kuopio, Eastern Finland. Eight minutes later, the police apprehended the suspect, but already ten people had been injured and one killed.

In both cases, the situation was over in a matter of minutes at the scene. The aftermath continued hours at the hospital.

The urgency of communication in crises is critical, as even split-seconds can make the difference between life and death.

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adoption of Secapp in various segments, including emergency and healthcare sectors and schools in Finland.

Can this work on both TETRA and smartphones?

Yes, it can. In fact, Secapp supports communication to TETRA, smartphones (app) and legacy phones (sms, robot calls), and desktops such as computers and laptops.

How long does it take to deploy the Seacapp solution, and how scalable is it?

Initiating new pilots and commercial use with Secapp is very straightforward. For a new customer, a personnel contact list (name, phone number, email, possible TETRA number) topped optionally with skill and group information is required.

After that, just an hour or two of online or face-to-face training is required and the pilot is ready to go, and customers can start using state-of-the-art secure communication platform.

Scalability is addressed by building the solution on a modern virtualised environment, which allows unlimited scaling of resources based on its user volumes. Moreover, Secapp offers options for white label and self-hosted versions for cases where our private cloud is not enough in terms of security policies.

How cost-effective is it compared to voice calls and SMS? These examples show our customer returns on investment when Secapp is compared to existing systems that

customers have in place. However, these ROI calculations do not take into account all benefits that Secapp features will provide - in practice, it can save human lives by the faster reaction.

The first example is personnel time savings. Alerting and paging people in a daily situation and especially in larger-scale situations, can take up even 7-8 hours. For instance, if you need to reach 100 people and each call takes five min then in total, it takes 500 mins (over eight hours) to reach all of them. This is a sunk cost of €100-200 a day per person due to time spent on manual alerting. By sending SMS or group message, the traditional services still lack the ability to track and share information: who has replied and how they can react to the situation? Again this leads to valuable time lost. With Secapp alerting, it takes only a matter of seconds, and Secapp compiles quick replies so that the dispatcher knows who can react in what way. The root-cause question is: How many people you have allocated to un-automated communication? That is your cost saving from the first day you take Secapp into use.

The second example is transactionbased costs vs - fixed costs, and unlimited messaging. Quite often, SMS solutions are used for personnel alerting. Solutions relying only on SMS are costly due to transaction cost: each message is limited to 160 characters. For instance, if SMS costs € 0.10 per message and message length is longer than 160 characters, it would mean that each message would cost € 0.20 per person. If the number of personnel is for example, 300 persons, a single message to all employees costs €60. Assuming that during normal operation, 60 messages are sent per week, it would mean SMS cost of €3600 weekly. In contrast, the cost of Secapp monthly subscription, including all data-based messaging – app, email, and TETRA - would be less than utilising SMS messages for a few days.

VIEWPOINT

THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION DRILL DOWN AS THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY PROGRESSES TOWARDS DIGITAL MATURITY, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CAN OFFER THE BENEFITS OF INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY AND IMPROVED PROFITS EVEN IN THE FACE OF MARKET VOLATILITY, SAYS MOHAMAD AWAD, REGIONAL VP FOR THE MIDDLE EAST, NORTH AFRICA AND PAKISTAN AT AVEVA.

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he ADNOC Group’s Panorama Command Centre is appropriately named. The state-of-theart 50-metre video wall wouldn’t be out of place in a futuristic Hollywood movie. But apart from the fabulous optics, the new Aveva solution gives the Abu Dhabi oil major a significant strategic advantage. A single glance displays integrated, real-time information across the organisation’s operations and distribution network, enabling operations and cost efficiencies.

That’s good news in volatile market conditions, where oil and gas enterprises face increased pressure across the board.

Apart from the challenges presented by uncertain market prices, environmental pressures, increased security threats and heightened regulatory compliance requirements have combined to create a complex, unfamiliar landscape for the industry. In this scenario, digital transformation can drive new and better customer experiences while maximizing value creation across asset and operations lifecycles, delivering improved profitability, higher returns on capital and enhanced productivity, leading to significant competitive advantages overall.

Leveraging digital technologies, such as cloud, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), mobility, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), big data and analytics could cut capital expenditure by up to 20 per cent across the industry, according to estimates from the management consultants McKinsey.

In practice, this transformation can be affected through a series of cutting-edge toolsets designed for hydrocarbon traders and suppliers. There are three main ways that the digital technologies can transform Oil and Gas:

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Process optimisation with a digital twin: As a virtual representation of a physical asset – for example, a pump, motor, turbine or even an entire industrial process or plant – a digital twin enables full lifecycle management of physical assets, from the design stage and extending across the assets’ lifecycle. These real-time digital replicas of operating assets enable the collection, visualisation and analysis of operational data at a single glance, thus helping maximise return on capital and increase enterprise profitability. Computing power can be scaled up or down, user privileges can be added, edited or deleted as needed, and plants and facilities can be quickly adapted to changing legislative and market requirements.

As a result, processes across the business are optimised, allowing operators to evaluate what-if scenarios in batch processing, manufacturing and distribution.

Sharing this information with stakeholders increases their ability to visualise results and key performance indicator data across the process. In addition, enhanced predictive control software helps process operations realise their full potential by moving the process closer to active constraints — reducing process variability while raising profits.

Cloud-based process design: Cloud computing offers several opportunities to reduce process design expenditure. By leveraging the almost infinite processing power and storage available through cloudbased architecture, process design can be accelerated while capital investment costs for modelling and training are reduced.

Cloud-based architecture can offer an open model writing environment, extending simulation benefits to areas not well covered today, such as reactors, polymers and specialties. Digital connectivity can advance the production process continually and incrementally, while accelerating startups

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after plant turnarounds and debugging application design. With process design information centralised into a digital repository in the cloud, it becomes easier to superimpose this data with complementary information and drive the enterprise towards a completely digital planning and operations model. In such a situation, process innovation becomes seamless and efficiency is significantly expanded.

Digital planning and operations: Integrated petrochemical production networks are highly complex and difficult to visualise for planning and operations. At the same time, increasing demand volatility in feedstock extends opportunities for margin improvement. A unified supply chain model connects historically disconnected silos and maximises profitability by overlaying realtime economic and market data with current plant and production status information.

This complete 360-degree view of the digital value chain allows all aspects of the enterprise to be visualised, analysed and optimised so that the impact of uncertainties and data changes to be evaluated and understood in real-time.

In today’s economic environment, capital budgets and overhead are constantly being cut. Oil and gas producers are faced with rising manufacturing costs, global competition, and soaring energy costs. To meet these challenges, companies are forced to optimise manufacturing operations and make performance improvements to positively affect their bottom line. Digital transformation offers new toolsets that enable oil and gas producers to increase their competitive levels in their market and industry.

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CXO 50 AWARDS

HONOURING TRANSFORMATIONAL TECH LEADERS THE SECOND EDITION OF CXO 50 AWARDS CELEBRATED THE SUCCESSES OF REGIONAL TECHNOLOGY VISIONARIES FROM ACROSS DIFFERENT VERTICALS AND FEATURED A HALF-DAY CONFERENCE WITH INTERESTING KEYNOTE SESSIONS AND AN ENGAGING PANEL DISCUSSION.

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he show kicked off with Jeevan Thankappan, Managing Editor at Insight Media and Publishing, explaining the process of the awards, which involved an external judging panel.

The esteemed judges, Ajay Rathi, CIO, Dubai Healthcare City; Jassim Haji, President, Aritificial Intelligence, Society of Bahrain; Sebastian

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Samuel, CIO, AW Rostamani and Sreedhar Reddy, Director-Digital Transformation, Aldar Properties, went through over 100 shortlisted entries to select the final winners, who were judged for their business value delivery and innovation element of their projects.

Sebastian Samuel, CIO, AW Rostamani, presented a keynote session on ‘Navigating the geography

of change’. He shared insights on how to have meaningful conversations in the business world.

He said, “Master the art of changing your mind – instead of focusing on protecting your point, become curious about the insights the other person had, which led him to share his thoughts.”

The next keynote presentation was from Jayakumar Mohanachandran,

CIO, Precision Group, who focused on ‘Strategy beyond technology’. He encouraged everyone in the room to establish human connections in a better fashion.

This was followed by Nutanix Regional Sales Manager Ahmed Mostageer’s talk on ‘Why hybrid cloud for modern data centre’.

Moderated by Insight Media’s Thankappan, the panel discussion on ‘Disruptive technologies and their impact on Middle East Businesses’ featured industry stalwarts such as Aaron White, Regional Sales DirectorMETI, Nutanix; Ayman Mohammad, Major Accounts Manager, Fortinet; Kimmo Bergius, CTO, Sulava and Feras Hani, System Engineer, Middle East, CommScope.

The panel discussed importance of digital transformation and challenges around it, how to focus on innovation during the process, the role cloud and security technologies play and how players can innovate their data centres to be successful in the digital age. The panellists also shared best practices and insights from their

experiences in the region.

The event concluded with the awards ceremony, where an elite set of individuals who have spearheaded innovative and transformative projects in the region, were commended for their drive and forward-thinking. The Awards recognised IT leaders who are driving digital transformation with best

practices, new methodologies and right technology resources.

The CXO event was sponsored

by Gold Partners – Micro Focus, Fortinet, Nutanix, CommScope, Sulava, Help AG and Silver Partners – Check Point, Exclusive Networks, Finesse, Teksalah, ThreatQuotient, SANS EMEA, Western Digital, VisionTech and Huawei.

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Abdalla Al Ali, Dubai Multi Commodities Center

Aditya Kaushik, Adyard Abudhabi

Ahmad Abdoulsamad Alhamadi, Abu Dhabi City Municipality

Ahmed Naeemi, Bahrain Institute of Banking & Finance

Aladdin Saqer, McDonald’s Qatar

Ali Jassim Ahmed Alaradi, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bahrain

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Aliasgar Bohari, Zulekha Healthcare Group

Allan P Cockriel, Petrofac

Anish Thyparambil Varughese, Skelmore Group

Anoop Kumar, Gulf News

Antony Vimal, Emirates Specialty Hospital

Anup Das, Byrne Equipment Rental

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Ashith Piriyattiath, AL Masah Capital

Aus Alzubaidi, MBC Group

Dr. Alaeddin Al-Badawna, ADNOC/Al Dhafra Petroleum

Dr. Ayman Elnashar, du

Dr. Sherif El-Gendy, Central Bank of Egypt

Esam Khamis Alfalasi, Ministry of Economy

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Fadhel Mandani, Air Arabia Group

Hashim Saeed, Union Properties

Khalid Jalal, GARMCO

Fatima Al Mansoori, Department of Municipalities and Transport, Abu Dhabi

Jayesh Maganlal, Majid Al Futtaim Properties

Mario Foster, Al Naboodah Group Enterprises

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Mohamed Roushdy, Dubai Asset Management

Mohammed Bilal Hasan, DULSCO

Mubarik Hussain, Bloom Holding

Mustafa Hassan Qurban, King Fahd Military Medical Complex

Mustansir Aziz, Gulf Diagnostic Center Hospital

Nader Ayoub, Abu Dhabi Health Data Services (Special editor’s choice)

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Neil Menezes, AMAALA Company

Partha Banerjee, Safeer Group of Companies

Riyad Salah, Sharjah Taxi

Ronald Stewart Dsa, OSN

Sajid Lokhandwala, Al Khayyat Investments

Saleem Ahmed S, Sharjah Islamic Bank

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Sameer Khoory, Ministry of Health and Prevention

Samit Jha, Laticrete Middle East

Sanjay Khanna, RAK Bank

Shabeer Mohammed, GEMS Education

Shah E Room Khan, Emirates College of Technology

Shailesh Mani, Flemingo International

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Shijin Prasad, Cure Medical Centers

Soheyl Kadjani, Emirates NBD

Srood Sherif, Kuwait Finance House

Syed Fakruddin Albeez, Dar Al Arkan

Veneeth Purushotaman, Aster DM Healthcare

Venkatesh Mahadevan, Dubai Investments

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Vijay Kumar Jain, Truebell

Vinay Sharma, Gulftainer

Walid Gohar, Zahran Holding

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VIEWPOINT

SECURING THE

SUPPLY CHAIN DR. MIKE LLOYD, REDSEAL CTO, ON HOW TO PROTECT YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN FORM CYBERATTACKS.

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upply chains have existed as long as we’ve had commerce. The rise of the Internet started a phase of rapid evolution, often making supply networks shallower but wider, with increased specialisation and more participants in global exchange.

Many of these changes improved efficiency, agility, and for those skilled at adapting, offered new ways to outpace competitors. However, looked at from a security perspective, the modern network fabric is also a serious cause for concern.

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What is the issue? It’s about networks of interdependence. We extract major economic benefits from modern supply chains, because each organisation can focus on just its core mission or specialty. This narrowing of focus is very effective, allowing each organisation to be the best at whatever it does — making widgets, transporting them, or adding value by assembling parts made by other specialists. But this same effect — focus on just one aspect of a system — means the system as a whole becomes fragile.

The person responsible for an aircraft carrier can do an amazing job protecting

the vessel and the dockyard, but the ship is still composed out of uncountable parts made outside, under the control of other organisations. So, if the attacker can’t easily compromise the final ship in the dockyard, they focus up the chain, compromising components that are then added to the ship as part of integrating the system. This analogy plays out for non-military applications too. Any large system built out of components is only as strong as the security of the weakest component supplier.

This is why it’s not enough to just allow suppliers to compete on price or

customer satisfaction. Security costs money, so if we just procure everything from the lowest bidder, we will get the (lack of) security we’re paying for.

Security is like quality — you can’t just assume because a supplier delivered a good outcome today that they will do so tomorrow. The supply chain combatted the challenge of repeatable quality through standards and audits — organisations establish baselines of what it takes to make a reliable product, and then build the supply chain around those who can meet the standard. The time has come for comparable efforts around cyber security and digital resilience across the supply chain.

Unfortunately, while the approach to quality is a good guide to what is needed, the details in cybersecurity are quite a bit different. When an organisation specialises in making a thing, or providing a service, they know all about that thing or service, and what constitutes high or low quality. In effect, each player in the supply chain is the expert when it comes to how to achieve quality. Their customers may know

THE SUPPLY CHAIN COMBATTED THE CHALLENGE OF REPEATABLE QUALITY THROUGH STANDARDS AND AUDITS — ORGANISATIONS ESTABLISH BASELINES OF WHAT IT TAKES TO MAKE A RELIABLE PRODUCT, AND THEN BUILD THE SUPPLY CHAIN AROUND THOSE WHO CAN MEET THE STANDARD. THE TIME HAS COME FOR COMPARABLE EFFORTS AROUND CYBER SECURITY AND DIGITAL RESILIENCE ACROSS THE SUPPLY CHAIN. more about what specs or quality levels are needed, but the supplier knows the details of how to meet the bar, where to optimise, and what works. Security is not like that — security problems are abstract, complex, and often divorced from the details of the core mission of the organisation. Malware, and

defense against malware, is not core competence for any typical organisation (except the few companies whose sole focus is making counter-measures).

Social engineering attacks exploit common human psychology problems, and are not unique to any one company.

This is why it’s hard for specialized, optimised, efficient companies occupying a niche in a supply chain to also achieve high levels of security — it’s not their core competence.

So how can this be addressed? The supply chain needs to be resilient against cyberattacks, without all of the individual companies needing to be world-class experts on the evolving threat landscape. That’s just not practical. Instead, we need to focus on measurable standards, and automation to validate compliance. Publishing more security advice hasn’t worked out well for the last 20 years and there are far too many guidebooks on what it takes to be secure. The core challenge is not that we’ve got no idea how to make secure systems. It’s that doing even the basics, consistently and at scale, is extremely hard. This challenge is only amplified when spread across a modern, complex supply chain.

Organisations need to figure out how each company in a supply chain can demonstrate they follow fundamental best practices without having to embed a cyber expert in each company. This is why machine reasoning is required — we can teach software what the rules are, and how to tell a solid security infrastructure from swiss cheese. Software can then automate the assessment, so that not just one company, but the whole supply chain can step up to a higher level of resilience against cyberattacks.

By now, we’ve learned a lot about how to make supply chains that are resilient to natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, etc. To achieve the same resilience in an increasingly online world requires moving beyond questionnaires and checklists, and instead using technology to monitor all the technology our supply chains now depend on.

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VIEWPOINT

HOW API ADOPTION CAN BOOST AUTOMATION LORI MACVITTIE, PRINCIPAL TECHNICAL EVANGELIST, OFFICE OF THE CTO AT F5 NETWORKS, SAYS IN THE FUTURE, THE “A” IN API WILL STAND FOR AUTOMATION

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PI stands for Application Programming Interface.

Over the years, it has evolved from a tightly coupled imperative specification to a loosely coupled declarative model. The most common APIs today are RESTful and used to enable integration. Regardless of implementation and the mode of invocation, APIs tend to be associated with app development.

But another API economy has been steadily expanding. It lies within operations. And in that domain, the “A” in API stands for automation.

What APIs in the operational demesne represent is the ability to automate onboarding, configuration,

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and operation of infrastructure and application services. Thus, the interfaces—the APIs—needed to support operations needs to focus on simplifying automation.

This focus is important as organisations fully enter the second phase of digital transformation and begin to expand automation across the delivery and deployment pipelines. To scale automation requires the ability to develop consistent, repeatable, and predictable processes that embody the deployment pipeline for an app.

A report from Kentik on the State of Automation in 2019 indicated that more than half of organisations (53%) were already using automation for network configuration, and another 40% automated policy management. Our own research shows that percentage much higher—at a super-majority of 86% automating the network. The same research (the State of Application Services), has also found increasing consistency in the state of automation across the deployment pipeline.

The tools organisations are using, too, are shifting. While Python is still one of the most popular options, we are seeing the influence of DevOps and cloud-native apps on IT. The deployment pipeline is increasingly driven by tools like Jenkins and Ansible and triggered by repositories like GitHub and GitLab Enterprise.

Looking into the future, infrastructure and app services will be driven by actionable insights produced by advanced analytics.

It is systems, not people, that will invoke APIs across the deployment

pipeline. Thus, there is an imperative to design operational APIs specifically with automation in mind. That means several considerations.

First, it may be necessary to consider the system from which an operational API might be invoked. The data available from Jenkins or a repository will no doubt be markedly different than that coming from traditional network automation tools and services.

That might mean obtaining data from elsewhere or defaulting to standardised values where possible.

Second, it is critical that we address the need for ‘credentialed machine’ invocation of APIs as separate from ‘credentialed user’ invocation. Most of our authentication systems today assume a “user” that is human.

API keys may be a good option but will require some learning on the operational side of IT to deploy, operate, and manage a system that is designed to maintain machine-only credentials. Still, this is critical as we move toward the third and final phase of digital transformation, where AI-assisted application services and ops will shoulder a larger share of operational burdens.

It’s great that we can use tools to build scripts from which operations can be automated today. But it is important to recognise that in the future, the A in API will almost exclusively refer to automation—at least in the context of operations—because of how it will impact interactions and invocation between machines instead of people.

VIEWPOINT

DE-RISKING YOUR BUSINESS WITH CLOUD DATA MANAGEMENT DANIEL FRIED, GENERAL MANAGER AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, EMEA, VEEAM ELABORATES ON HOW CLOUD DATA MANAGEMENT ASSISTS TO DELIVER A HIGHER LEVEL OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE.

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ver the last decade, technologies like the cloud, mobile and wireless communications have transformed the role IT plays within a business. From the CEO down, business leaders are viewing technology as an enabler rather than a commodity.

As the enterprise technology conversation moves away from the data centre and into the boardroom, businesses are more and more reliant on their digital infrastructure.

While this is ultimately a good thing, it means that one of the top priorities of any boardroom agenda is to derisk.

Pivoting to Cloud Data Management The trend of businesses turning to hybrid and multi-cloud strategies is accelerating.

According to Gartner, hybrid cloud became the standard IT strategy for enterprises in 2019. Furthermore, 81% of respondents to a survey conducted by its analysts said they are already working with two or more providers.

The cloud, as a data management platform, has grown in importance and is growing in complexity. Business leaders, however, are looking for simplicity. As the value of data increases, organisations must finely balance the data availability needs of the business against the demands of data protection regulations like GDPR. Doing so requires a digital infrastructure that is both flexible and reliable – as well as easy to manage.

Cloud Data Management (CDM) refers to the management of data across an organisation’s entire cloud and data management provision. It’s about ensuring that data is always available – regardless

of whether an organisation is using private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure.

According to a survey of IT decision makers conducted by Veeam, threequarters of organisations aim to have adopted CDM by the first few months of 2020. This is partly due to a recognition that CDM is a key component of delivering a higher level of business intelligence. This is also a fundamental part of an organisation’s derisk strategy. On the other hand, any change which requires people to take on new skills, adapt culturally and view their role differently, brings risk of its own.

Changing the way technology infrastructure is managed may take some technical personnel out of their comfort zone.

Therefore, CDM must be viewed as a strategy rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Organisations must choose the right partner to help them deliver on this vision in a way which brings maximum value at minimal risk.

Protecting businesses’ most prized asset The value of data has been compared to everything from oil to gold. Whichever of these descriptions you prefer, it cannot be disputed that when harnessed properly data can deliver value to an organisation that only a few years ago would have been unimaginable. Furthermore, many businesses are sat on a potential goldmine of data, of which the value is 99.9% untapped.

However, the idea that businesses who own and control data have all the power is a misconception. Owning the data means nothing if you don’t know how to use it.

You need to be able to read, analyse and gain insight from data for it to make your

business faster and more effective. To do this, data has to be available to the right people at the right times.

While the rising value of data puts the onus on businesses to ensure they use it to gain better insights and drive operational efficiencies, it also makes protecting data even more vital. International media is awash with stories of companies experiencing irreparable reputational and financial damage. Whether due to lost or stolen data, a ransomware attack or a systems outage resulting in unplanned downtime, businesses cannot afford to take any chances. While becoming more data-driven as an organisation is a priority for business leaders, this is another area in which they must derisk. When it comes to certain types of data, especially personal data or customer records, businesses are merely custodians rather than owners.

Operating transparently Data privacy is a basic human right, which different governments, societies and cultures within Europe, the Middle East and Africa have different views towards.

Businesses must be flexible in ensuring they meet the needs of customers and that data is protected at all times.

Transparency is also key. Customers with a growing awareness of their data expect businesses to be clear about how their data is being used. Regulations like GDPR are also beginning to make organisations pay for mishandling data with severe financial penalties. Failing to protect data or be transparent about its use will inevitably erode trust.

So, as businesses look to take advantage of the data at their disposal, but protect it and treat it with care, they are looking to CDM to drive an additional layer of intelligence across the organisation.

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INTERVIEW

BUILDING AN ENGINE FOR GROWTH RAJ SABHLOK, PRESIDENT OF MANAGEENGINE, TALKS ABOUT HOW BUSINESSES SHOULD APPROACH DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND USE IT FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.

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ow do you see the trend of digital transformation impacting businesses?

This idea of digital transformation, we see it on both sides of our business. The application side of the business, which is Zoho, and we see it on the ManageEngine side as well. More and more organisations are pouring their budget into IT to gain strategic business advantage, but at the same time, who does that fall upon? The onus is on IT. When you think about it, when these companies are putting more of their business into technology, they are consolidating risk around that technology.

So, if systems go down, it has a larger impact on your business. If there’s a breach, there’s even more significant impact on your business. This is all coming back to IT and it becomes their responsibility. However, IT has always been an under-invested organisation, and business leaders expect technology folks to figure out a way to scale it. And the reality is, it’s hard to do it unless you’re building in automation techniques.

The ability to allow IT to do more with less - that’s what ManageEngine’s all about. Let’s cover all this technology that’s being deployed, make sure that it’s highly available and performing well, and secure.

Those are some of the key tenets that are driving our business. I will say that security tends to be on top of my priorities still.

It is not really a surprise because security is permeating into all areas of businesses. A good example is we see a lot more utilisation of mobile. Whether

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it is mobile apps or access to company information via mobile devices and as a direct result of that, we see a massive growth in endpoint management business. That’s probably our fastest growing area of the business.

Last year, you told us the cloud is a big focus area. Is that still a growth area for you?

What’s interesting is there’s a couple of dynamics with the cloud. One, from an IT operational perspective, we’re seeing continued interest in the cloud, and

WHAT SECURITY IS TODAY IS BASED ON A LOT OF MACHINE DATA, AND HUMANS CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THAT. GATHERING ALL THAT MACHINE DATA AND THEN THROUGH AI AND ML, WE’RE ABLE TO BUBBLE UP POINTS THAT ARE REALLY OF INTEREST. I THINK, IN SOME SENSE, IT ALSO DEPENDS ON THE COMFORT LEVEL OF ORGANISATIONS TO FIGURE OUT HOW MUCH AUTOMATION THEY WANT TO TURN OVER TO AI SYSTEMS.

companies request us to manage their cloud infrastructure, whether it is private, public, or hybrid. We’re also seeing is a rise in IT using cloud-based applications.

So, our ServiceDesk Plus on demand is a good example, and it is a fast-growing product offering for us. Another fastgrowing product line in the cloud is our operations tools called Site24x7.

Would you cloudify the whole portfolio of ManageEngine?

It’s heading that way, and you will see a lot more of our endpoint management suite moving in that direction along with Active Directory management and the rest of the security tools.

There is lot of buzz around AI and ML. Is that something you are looking to leverage withing your portfolio?

It’s already built into a lot of our applications. We are doing things in the ManageEngine suite that does anomaly detection, which is AI-based. We have also embedded AI into our root cause analysis tool. It’s really easy to see the use cases for AI within IT. Chatbots are another form of AI that’s being leveraged throughout our product line.

What is the level of automation you are building into your tools?

We’ve done a lot of automation over the last few years, but with AI, it’s really smart automation. So we’re able to make decisions based on predictive data, and we take automation to another level with AI. For me, the last few years have been very productive in terms of automating

a lot of functions within IT. But layering it with AI makes it smart automation.

Is it a good idea to automate security as well?

A lot of it is already automated today.

What security is today is based on a lot of machine data, and humans can’t keep up with that. Gathering all that machine data and then through AI and ML, we’re able to bubble up points that are really of interest. I think, in some sense, it also depends on the comfort level of organisations to figure out how much automation they want to turn over to AI systems. But for now, the focus is on being able to sift through a lot of this machine data very quickly and figure out what’s really should be important for the IT organisation.

Does your endpoint management suite cover IoT devices as well?

We don’t have a packaged IoT solution, but you know our history with webNMS, which is essentially IoT. In fact, we were

doing IoT before IoT was cool because we had all these agents that could instrument all these devices. In the UAE and other parts of the Middle East, webNMS is fairly popular, and we are seeing it being deployed in smart city initiatives, government initiatives in terms of energy management and facility management.

In terms of R&D, what is your focus for 2020?

We have all these product groups within the organisation, whether it is ServiceDesk plus, Active Directory, or endpoint management. But then, one thing that is pretty unique and a great advantage for us is that several years ago, we set up what’s called Zoho Labs.

And Zoho Labs is the one that’s doing all the forward-thinking in terms of new technologies and building solutions around them. What happens is that various product teams can kind of pick and choose what they want to use within their product offering. Most of the time, product organisations get so focused on

the current point in time of their product and responding to feature requests or bug fixes or things like that. It’s very difficult for them to be looking three years or five years out and so Zoho Labs does a lot of that for us, and then the product teams get the advantage of that. So, when you think about AI being incorporated in Site24x7 or chatbots being incorporated into ServiceDesk Plus or user behavior analysis built into AD360, all of those technologies come out of Zoho Labs.

On the software side, we’re doing a lot of stuff around AI and ML in Zoho Labs.

We are also doing a few things around blockchain. In fact, we have delivered this technology into our Zoho Sign offering, which is an online signature tool that leverages blockchain distributed ledger.

Even on the hardware side, we’re doing a lot of research and development around how do we optimise our data centers and hardware platforms that it runs on. So we’re also doing some research related to chip design and hardware related encryption.

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VIEWPOINT

THE CHANGING FACE OF MANUFACTURING AMEL GARDNER, REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT – MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA & INDIA, EPICOR, ON HOW TO MANAGE THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF INDUSTRY 4.0 ON MANUFACTURING

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or Middle East manufacturers, or any business in general, the success of digital transformation isn’t just about investing in the right technology. As with any large-scale project—from a change in working location to a company merger—the impact on the people involved needs to be a key consideration when putting a strategy and implementation plan in place. However, in a bid to keep up with the latest technology trends, regional manufacturers could be shooting themselves in the foot by not addressing the change management and cultural aspects from the outset.

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In fact, recent research has found that only a quarter (26 percent) of businesses consider change management strategies to be an important part of the move towards Industry 4.0 and the connected enterprise. This suggests that a large proportion of manufacturers are not putting steps in place to manage the impact of such a change on corporate culture, which could affect the ultimate success of any digital transformation project.

Six steps to success Despite pressure on Middle East businesses and individuals to remain

at the cutting edge, no one wants to be an early adopter and get it wrong.

A recent report from Deloitte into Industry 4.0 readiness found that even in today’s technology-driven world, senior executives are not as prepared as they think they are to reap rewards from digital transformation: “Faced with an ever-increasing array of new technologies, leaders acknowledged they have too many options from which to choose and, in some cases, they lack the strategic vision to help guide their efforts.

Organizational influences also challenge leaders as they seek to navigate Industry 4.0. Many leaders

an overwhelming prospect, breaking it down into bite-sized, digestible sessions will be invaluable rather than overloading people with too much information from the outset.

It is also worth considering that everyone learns in different ways, so whilst an online demo or training manual might be right for one person, someone else might prefer more visual tools like a video or a step-by-step animated guide, for example.

reported their companies don’t follow clearly defined decision-making processes, and organisational silos limit their ability to develop and share knowledge to determine effective strategies.”

To make Industry 4.0 a success, no matter how big or small the change, manufacturers need to put key measures in place to manage the transition. This includes undertaking the necessary groundwork to ensure that whatever technology businesses invest in, they can get the best out of it.

Step one—Be realistic Despite digital transformation being very much an industry buzzword, local manufacturers don’t need to take everything on at once. Assess what needs to be automated and why. If something is working and the process efficient, it might not need changing just yet. The key to getting it right is to prioritise adoption rather than change for changes sake. A phased approach will be beneficial for everyone in the long term.

Step two—Get stakeholders on board Following an assessment of priorities, manufacturers need to map and plan out what needs to happen next—from procurement to implementation and beyond. This ensures that all stakeholders from every department affected are clear about what is happening, why and when. Only then can everyone involved be prepared and plan for the roll-out.

Step three—Keep talking Communication at every stage is essential—particularly before implementation. Users need to feel they are part of the process and can raise any concerns or questions before a new way of working is thrust upon them. Taking time to address any potential issues at the start of a project will ensure users are bought into the process, understand what is expected of them and avoid any pitfalls further down the line.

FOR A PROJECT TO BE A TRUE SUCCESS, ANY TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT NEEDS TO BE REVIEWED AND ASSESSED REGULARLY. IS IT BEING USED TO ITS FULL POTENTIAL? ARE THERE ANY GAPS IN TRAINING? WHAT MORE COULD THE BUSINESS GET FROM IT? WHAT IS THE DATA SHOWING? CAN IT BE ANALYSED TO IMPROVE FUTURE BUSINESS GROWTH? Step four—Factor in ongoing training and support For efficiencies and productivity to be realised, users need to have a good understanding of how the technology impacts their working practices. This can only be done through comprehensive training and ongoing support. While this could be

Step five—Take your time The choice of new technologies can be overwhelming and daunting for even a seasoned professional. Never lose sight of why you are investing in technology and keep your business objectives in mind—what your competitor is doing might not be the right approach for you.

Jumping on the bandwagon or adopting new technology too quickly could be detrimental in the long-term, if the process is not well thought through or fit for purpose.

Step six—Undertake regular reviews While following steps one to five will ensure the business has the best chance of successfully adopting new technology, it will all be in vain if you miss out step six. The hard work doesn’t stop when you reach go-live—in fact, that is only just the start of the digital transformation process.

For a project to be a true success, any technology investment needs to be reviewed and assessed regularly. Is it being used to its full potential? Are there any gaps in training? What more could the business get from it? What is the data showing? Can it be analysed to improve future business growth?

Only by following these six steps will the Middle East manufacturing industry bring the whole business along for the digital transformation ride and ensure that Industry 4.0 is a success.

Having a clear change management and implementation strategy will enable businesses to realise the full value of technology, whilst guaranteeing strong ROI and user acceptance.

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PRODUCTS

Kodak Alaris Announces Ibml FUSiON 7700 Scanner The new ibml FUSiON Series distributed by Kodak Alaris in EMEA as part of the Kodak Alaris offering ignites the fusion of disparate capture processes into one streamlined solution, using in-line intelligence at blazing fast throughput speeds up to 730 A4 pages per minute and 938 checks per minute.

As the world’s fastest, intelligent, scalable document capture platform, ibml FUSiON accelerates customers’ mission-critical applications by extracting information from documents to digital processes, thus

enabling digital transformation. ibml FUSiON Series sets new benchmarks for high-volume intelligent capture, which include these key highlights: • Real-time, in-line intelligence that helps understand documents, extracting data early in the process to minimise errors downstream.

• The fastest throughput in its class; ibml FUSiON is 67 percent faster than its predecessor and allows customers to do mission-critical jobs in tight timelines

and handle greater volume, driving better productivity and lowering costs.

• New patent-pending ibml iQpro image processing technology optimizes image capture for better accuracy of data extraction from images.

Western Digital Unveils Gaming Portfolio In The Middle East Western Digital has introduced a portfolio of external storage solutions in the Middle East purposebuilt for PC and console gamers.

Building on the toptier performance of the WD_Black SN750 NVMe SSD currently on the market, the five new solutions introduced by Western Digital have been designed to address storage challenges. They provide the performance, capacity and reliability to help PC and console gamers to drive their game and play without limits. The solutions include the WD_Black P50 Game Drive SSD, a first-to-industry SuperSpeed USB (20Gb/s), USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 device.

The WD Black portfolio is currently available in the UAE at select Western Digital retailers, e-tailers, resellers, system integrators, and theWD store. The WD_Black P10 Game Drive comes in capacities of 2TB up to 5TB and ranges from AED 349 to AED 549. The WD_Black P50 Game Drive comes in capacities of 500GB up to 2TB and ranges from AED 784 to AED 2249. The WD_Black D10 Game Drive 8TB capacity is AED 899. The WD_Black P10 Game Drive for Xbox One will come in capacities of 3TB up to 5TB and ranges from AED 429 up to AED 599. All prices vary depending on model and capacity.

Philips Unveils New 144Hz IPS Gaming Monitors In Egypt MMD, the display specialist and brand license partner for Philips monitors, has announced the launch of two new 144Hz IPS Gaming Monitors in Egypt. Both the new models 242M8 (23.8 inch / 60.5 cm) and 272M8 (27 inch / 68.6 cm) from Momentum series of Philips monitors are powered by AMD FreeSync Technology that

New products in the WD_Black gaming portfolio are: WD_Black P10 Game Drive: - HDD with up to 5TB – holds up to 125 games - Portable form factor with a USB 3.2 Gen 1 port - High-performance to optimise the console or PC gaming experience - Three-year limited warranty WD_Black P50 Game Drive: - SSD featuring a first-to-industry USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port for a game drive with speeds up to 2000MB/s - Up to 2TB of additional storage to keep cherished games and save new ones - Five-year limited warranty WD_Black D10 Game Drive: - HDD comes with up to 8TB capacity – holds up to 200 games - Speeds up to 250MB/s and rated at 7200RPM with active cooling technology - Three-year limited warranty WD_Black D10 Game Drive for Xbox One: - HDD comes with up to 12TB to save and grow an Xbox One gaming collection – holds up to 300 games - Included for free with purchase is a three-month membership of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate - Speeds up to 250MB/s and rated at 7200RPM with active cooling technology - Three-year limited warranty WD_Black P10 Game Drive for Xbox One: - HDD with up to 5TB – holds up to 125 games - Two-month membership of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate included with purchase, giving access to 100+ game titles on Xbox One and PC, as well as Xbox Gold Live - High-performance to help optimise the Xbox One gaming experience - Three-year limited warranty

boosts 144Hz refresh rate with a response time of 1ms MPRT to offer smooth and uninterrupted gameplay for even the fastest action scenarios. The Full HD IPS panel with resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels brings games to life with Ultra Wide-Color technology.

With the new Philips monitor, customers can get fluid, artifact-free performance at virtually any frame rate with AMD FreeSync technology, smooth quick refresh and ultra-fast response time.

No matter if users are playing an intense, competitive gaming or they demand display with lag free, ultra-smooth images, this Philips display redraws the screen image up-to 144 times per second, effectively 2.4x faster than a standard display.

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BLOG

FIGHTING PANDEMICS SUNIL PAUL, COO AND CO-FOUNDER OF FINESSE, ON HOW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS AI AND DATA SCIENCE CAN HELP US MITIGATE THE CORONAVIRUS THREAT.

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n 2003, after the outbreak of SARS, when the Hong Kong Department of Health decided to prepare for the next pandemic, it turned to algorithms to modernise its analytics platform. As Michael Hagstrom, Executive Vice President, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, SAS recounted in his December 2019 article published on World Economic Forum’s website, the ability to identify hotspots and forecast where the disease was likely to spread helped the department fight an outbreak of Dengue fever with no lives lost.

The lessons learned have contributed to helping Hong Kong manage the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic well compared to mainland China of which it is a special administrative region, with only three deaths reported to date against 3,136 deaths in China.

COVID-19 differs from other 21st-century coronavirus outbreaks like SARS and MERS in that it is far more contagious, spreading mainly through contact with contaminated surfaces, and more ominously, it can spread before it causes symptoms. On the flip side, analysis indicates that SARS and MERS were relatively deadlier than COVID-10 with SARS killing around 10 percent of people who became infected and MERS killing 35 percent.

In the case of COVID-19, 3.4 percent of the people infected worldwide had died, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

So how does one control the spread of COVID-19, which has claimed 5,436 lives and infected 124,578 people (at the time of writing this blog)? And more pertinent, is there a role for information technology in containing its spread?

To contain pandemics, essential requirements would be early detection, forecasting its trajectories, monitoring the spread, disseminating correct information that promotes trust while eliminating misinformation, and managing the supply chain of medical equipment and materials needed to combat the outbreak.

For example, Taiwan combined its national health care and immigration

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databases to generate automated alerts based on travellers’ potential for being infected, according to a recent report by the Wired magazine. Singapore, which has a high success rate in combating COVID-19 fatalities, is using frequently updated websites as well as a government WhatsApp account to disseminate information to the island state’s population, according to the report.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), telemedicine, remote patient monitoring and consumerfacing AI-based chatbots are some of the digital tools that governments are turning to contain COVID-19 outbreak in their countries.

An oft-cited AI example is of Canadian firm BlueDot’s early-warning system, which alerted the company’s customers about COVID-19 at the end of December even before the WHO. The system uses AI, including natural-language processing and machine learning, to track over 100 infectious diseases by analysing about 100,000 articles in 65 languages every day.

Epidemic risk modelling firm Metabiota had determined that Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had the highest risk of seeing COVID-19 show up more than a week before cases in those countries were reported partially by looking to flight data.

AI is also being used to confirm the presence of COVID-19 infection. Nikkei’s Asian Review had reported that Alibaba’s AI-based system could detect coronavirus in CT scans of patients with an accuracy of up to 96 percent in less than 20 seconds.

Apart from detection, AI-based algorithms are being used in tandem with clinical-grade sensors to remotely monitor patients who have already been diagnosed with COVID-19 or who are suspected of being infected in order to support clinical decision-making.

Monitoring these patients remotely with clinical-grade sensors and collecting data on numerous physiological signals could improve clinical decision-making. AI-based chatbots have been launched by in India, US, Japan to answer frequent questions

posed by the public about COVID-19 about symptoms, hygiene measures and treatment procedures, and in some cases, even connect them to remote doctors.

Telehealth systems can help critical patients get the treatment they need without endangering doctors. For example, 5G technology, which offers high bandwidth and low latency, can make remote diagnosis and treatment more efficient and convenient, as demonstrated in China.

In January, Chinese firms ZTE and China Telecom joined hands to build a 5G-based remote consultation system for diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, the epidemic’s epicentre.

Chinese firms have also harnessed blockchain-based applications to combat the virus. For example, Alipayowned insurance firm Xiang Hu Bao is using blockchain technology to process coronavirus claims, which has helped reduce back and forth paperwork involving clinics and the insurance company. Alipay has also collaborated with Zhejiang Provincial Health Commission and the Economy & Information Technology Department to develop a blockchain-based app that allows users to track allocation and donation of relief supplies, as well as the review, recording and tracing of demand and supply chains of medical supplies.

In the 21st century, epidemics are becoming a fact of life. As WHO notes in its ‘Managing Epidemics’ manual, they are sparked either by the re-emergence of pathogens that have been familiar for a long time, but now threaten new, immunologically vulnerable populations, or are newly-emerging ones. They come in a daunting array of species of bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. In such a scenario, information technology could serve as a force multiplier to the government’s efforts to contain and eliminate epidemics.

2010

2020

$16 M +

Founded in Helsinki

Founded in Dubai

Turnover

700 K +

40 %

500 +

Seats moved to Microsoft cloud

Of working population moved to cloud

Leading customers operating in 100 + countries

Fortinet Fortinet Security Security Fabric Broad.

Broad.Integrated.

Integrated. Automated.

Automated.

ForMore MoreInformation Informationwww.fortinet.com www.fortinet.com For

Copyright Š 2020 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright Š 2020 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved.