Digital Bulletin - Issue 33 - Oct 21

DIGITAL BULLETIN Issue 33 | Oct ’21

ZOOMING AHEAD

EVOLUTION OF THE CIO

Zoom’s Darren Pattie on the company’s rapid ascent and plans for Zoom Phone

The CIO Survey shows the need for scale, agility and innovation

THE

ARCHITECT Chief Data Architect, Harveer Singh, speaks about spearheading Western Union’s cloud migration and how the 170-year-old organisation will benefit from increased speed and agility

JAMES HENDERSON Content Director

W

hen it comes to global payments, it doesn’t get much bigger than Western Union.

For much of its 170-year history, it is a company that has had it all its own way.

But as the world has become better connected, a number of agile upstarts have disrupted the payments space.

Western Union, and indeed every other financial institution, has been faced with a choice - modernise or die.

This month’s cover feature details how Western Union has faced up to that challenge head-on, rolling out a company-wide public cloud migration and putting processes in place to become nimbler, more agile and better prepared to take on the fintechs that have been born in the digital era.

“It was realised that the on-prem environment would not let us scale the way we wanted to,” Harveer Singh, Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering, told Digital Bulletin.

“Procuring new hardware, managing new hardware, taking it out, and then

taking it back, maintaining the enormous staff across the board was becoming very, very challenging and difficult, and was cutting into the margin of the organisation.”

It represents a sea change for a company that has spent decades building its own infrastructure, but it is a decision that Western Union believes will pay dividends, allowing its people to focus on its core products and services.

Elsewhere, we take the temperature of the semiconductor market. The shortage is well documented and impacting myriad industry sectors.

Against that backdrop, the likes of Apple, Tesla and Google have decided to bring much of their chip design and development in-house. We speak to two experts to see how these dualling trends will develop.

We also have insights from Zoom, Celonis and Snyk, as well as a deep-dive on the trajectory of quantum computing.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

PUBLISHED BY STRANGERS MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 DIGITAL BULLETIN

TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

Contents 06

Month in Review

20

Case Study

38

Future

48

News, regulations and analysis

Western Union A payments technology transformation

20

A quantum leap for tech

People The evolving role of the CIO

06

38

64

8 82

+

86 54

Debate

64

Connectivity

74 74

+

How to best protect critical infrastructure

The rise and rise of Zoom

Funding Snyk’s founder on its $530m raise

82

A Life in Tech

86

Closing Bulletin

Serial entrepreneur Paul Christensen on his career

An exclusive column from Wipro’s Priya Bakthisaran

MONTH IN REVIEW

NEWS UPDATE Digital Bulletin rounds up the news that shaped the enterprise technology space over the last month

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NEWS UPDATE

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS 365 for individuals, families, schools, and businesses,” said Chris Pratley, Corporate VP, Office Media Group.

Headline: Financial software platform Intuit has agreed a $12bn deal to acquire customer marketing company Mailchimp.

Info: Intuit said that the deal will power its ambition to become the “centre of small business growth” and “disrupt the small business mid-market”. Mailchimp has 2.4m monthly active users, and 800,000 paid customers; with 50% of customers outside of the US. Headline: Microsoft has acquired videoediting tool Clipchamp, with the intention of integrating it into Office 365.

Info: The addition will allow users to create and edit videos using manageable tools. “Clipchamp is a natural fit to extend the cloud-powered productivity experiences in Microsoft

Headline: Fivetran has announced a significant acquisition and closed a super-sized funding round.

Info: The data integration company has agreed a $700m deal to buy HVR, a provider of enterprise data replication technology, which it says will allow it to “provide breakthrough database replication performance”. In addition, it has also closed a $565m Series D round, which takes its value to $5.6bn.

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MONTH IN REVIEW

FUNDING Headline: Technology giants Amazon Web Services and Microsoft both participated in Databricks’s most recent funding round.

Info: Databricks confirmed its $1.6bn round of funding, which puts the company at a $38bn post-money valuation. The Series H funding will be used to accelerate innovation and adoption of the lakehouse as the data architecture’s popularity across data-driven organisations increases.

Headline: Cloud networking and security company Aviatrix has completed a $200m round of funding led by TCV. Info: The Series E funding raises Aviatrix’s valuation to $2bn, which has more than doubled in six months since 8

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the previous round. “Enterprises need the visibility and security controls they had on-prem, but with the operational simplicity and automation of cloud,” said Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix.

Headline: UK-based cloud integration platform Matillion has achieved unicorn status after a $150m funding round took its value to $1.5bn.

Info: The round was led by General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm, with participation from Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It follows an earlier funding round in 2021, bringing total to-date to $310m.

NEWS UPDATE

PEOPLE Headline: ​​Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer has announced he will be stepping down from his role in 2022.

Info: He will be replaced by Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who is currently the head of Facebook’s social media company’s augmented reality and virtual reality efforts. The news comes shortly after Facebook faced criticism for failing to address numerous problems affecting its users.

Headline: Microsoft has confirmed that it has hired long-time AWS executive Charlie Bell.

Info: Reports emerged earlier this month that Bell was set to make the jump. In a LinkedIn post, he confirmed he would be taking on a cybersecurity remit dealing with fraud, ransomware

and data exposure. AWS still hasn’t sanctioned the move because of a non-compete clause, however, so Bell is yet to start work.

Headline: Ford Motor has hired away former Tesla and Apple executive Doug Field to lead its emerging technology efforts.

Info: He was known for leading the development of Tesla’s Model 3 and for serving as vice president of special projects at Apple, which reportedly included its secretive car project. Field will lead “Ford’s efforts to develop the next-gen Blue Oval Intelligence tech stack”, the company said.

Stay right up to date with the latest news shaping the enterprise technology sector with The Bulletin, available at digitalbulletin.com

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MONTH IN REVIEW

China takes on Big Tech Each month, Digital Bulletin analyses one of the digital policies that countries are enforcing with the goal of regulating the online world. In this issue, we look at China’s tech crackdown

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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DIGITAL POLICY

A

s governments are engaged in discussions regarding the need to regulate Big Tech, China has already begun taking action towards this goal.

Following a period of relatively lax regulatory oversight, in 2020 the Chinese Community Party completely transformed its attitude towards the tech industry and opened a series of investigations into the alleged anti-competitive behaviour of large technology companies.

“The wave of new regulations has cascaded and grown since the initial response to the Ant Group IPO,” says

Brian Bandsma, Asia-Pacific Portfolio Manager at Vontobel Quality Growth. “At the time and into the following weeks, there was no indication this would expand in so many different directions.

Each time it seemed like we were near the end, something new came along.”

In November 2020, Ant Group’s initial public offering - which would have been the largest ever in history - was suspended. Since then, Chinese regulators have introduced anti-monopoly legislation that affected a huge range of companies, from ecommerce to food delivery, as well as new laws pertaining to data security and protection.

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But Ant Group was not the only large Chinese company to feel the impact of the regulations. Ecommerce giant Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion after being accused of anti-competitive behaviour and ridehailing firm Didi was forced to stop user registrations following a cybersecurity review. In addition, Tencent is currently under investigation regarding its policies to protect minors in its WeChat app.

The decision to take on WeChat is part of China’s aim to reduce the power of “super apps”, mobile applications that can provide a huge variety of services to their users, from ordering food, ridehailing taxis and booking plane tickets.

Many experts believe that the decision to place these apps under regulatory scrutiny stems from concerns regarding the huge power that they hold over consumers.

Mike Rhodes, CEO and Founder of ConsultMyApp says: “China typically exerts a much larger degree of influence

Mike Rhodes CEO and Founder of ConsultMyApp

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over the behaviours of its citizens - for instance, the restriction recently brought in to limit the amount of time children can play games each day. It is therefore not unsurprising they are looking to curtail certain businesses and apps that are able to deliver a large number of public services in one box.

“Having so much functionality (a la WeChat) gives one company a large amount of one-on-one interaction with members of the public throughout the day, allowing them to some extent control their day-to-day existence; this may be a little too much as far as the authorities are concerned. In fact due to the intimate companion relationship between app and user it’s no surprise clampdowns such as these are coming, not just from China but also other governments across the globe. Too much control and influence given to entities outside government inherently weakens the government and, quite simply, limits their ability to govern effectively.”

The latest of these regulatory changes has been the banning of cryptocurrencies. On September 24th, the People’s Bank of China deemed all virtual currency-related business activities illegal, claiming they “seriously endangers the safety of people’s assets”.

Although China has been issuing warnings since 2013 regarding its plans to ban cryptocurrency, the country

DIGITAL POLICY

Brian Bandsma Asia-Pacific Portfolio Manager at Vontobel Quality Growth

continues to be a key player in the field, mainly due to people’s easier access to affordable hardware and electricity. The new regulations will constitute a huge blow for the industry, but its decentralised nature might allow it to survive.

“I don’t think it will be possible for crypto transactions to be stopped in China following the ban, although businesses might start facing stricter restrictions,” says Vlad Faraon, Co-Founder and CBO at Coreto. “As a consequence, some might migrate to the USA or other European countries that are more flexible.

China is an important player, but it’s not the only one.

“Long-term, the crypto transactions and the technology behind them are here to stay. We see more and more countries starting to look into finding uses for blockchain at an institutional level, and this is likely to become a key focus for all moving forward. But until stricter regulations are issued to protect the investors in what can be a volatile,

speculative market, my advice for people and businesses is to find reliable sources of information to base their transactions on.”

The result of the regulations has been the creation of a climate of uncertainty regarding the Chinese market, as investors wait for the next wave of regulations. And, although it is unlikely that other countries follow China’s example, the eyes of the world are set on the Asian country.

“Whilst I doubt the US or UK would be the first to say they are following the example of China here, I am certain controlling the influence of Big Tech is on the minds of governments behind most major economies,” Rhodes says.

Countries like Australia, the US and the UK have proposed policies that would limit the activities of technology giants.

However, so far neither of them has been able to implement measures that have the potential to transform the whole industry to the extent that China has. Or, at least, not yet.

Vlad Faraon Co-Founder and CBO at Coreto

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MONTH IN REVIEW

SHIFTING SANDS FOR SILICON The semiconductor shortage is having a seismic effect on global industry. But a secondary trend - tech giants bringing design and development of chips in-house - could have a longer lasting impact

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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NEWS ANALYSIS

T

he global semiconductor market is in a state of flux, with shortages having an adverse impact on major industries such as automotive, mobile phones, personal computers and servers. Production numbers are being cut and supply warnings issued. As things currently stand, it is a problem that is likely to endure well into 2022.

At the same time, we are seeing a generational shift in how the semiconductor market operates, the ramifications of which could change the face of the sector altogether. We’ve seen a number of technology’s leading names, including Apple, Tesla, Amazon and Facebook, bringing much of the design and development of computer chips in-house. It marks a dramatic change, of course, moving away from the tried and tested route of buying chips off the shelf from top-tier semiconductor players Samsung, TSMC and Intel.

Wayne Lam, Senior Director at CCS Insight, says the trend for custom silicon represents a “genie out of the bottle”.

“Both Apple and Tesla went down similar paths; starting off sourcing the chips from Samsung and Nvidia respectively and then deciding to vertically integrate with their own designs.

“This strategy is clearly to achieve market differentiation by ‘owning the whole stack’ from silicon to pixels on the screen. Expect more brands to become

more active in owning their entire stack and look for ways to stand out, differentiate and compete more effectively.”

The shortage of chips is a well-documented issue, but Lam says that the trend for in-house design and development and the dearth of semiconductors should very much be viewed as two entirely separate issues. The actions of Apple, Tesla and the like are unlikely to have any discernible effect on availability, in the short-term at least.

“From the perspective of the global semiconductor supply chain and manufacturing capacity, the move from third-party chips to in-house chips has largely a net-zero effect as chips that otherwise would be purchased are now directly sourced by the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer),” he says.

Wayne Lam

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MONTH IN REVIEW

THE FORWARD FORECAST IDC expects the semiconductor market to grow by 17.3% in 2021 versus 10.8% in 2020. According to IDC, the industry will see normalisation and balance by the middle of 2022, with a potential for overcapacity in 2023 as larger-scale capacity expansions begin to come online towards the end of 2022.

Growth is driven by mobile phones, notebooks, servers, automotive, smart home, gaming, wearables, and Wi-Fi access points, with increased memory pricing. IC shortages are also expected to continue easing through 4Q21 as capacity additions accelerate.

Despite the current Covid-19 wave, consumption remains healthy.

IDC reports that dedicated foundries have been allocated for the rest of the year, with capacity utilisation at nearly 100%. Front-end capacity remains tight but fabless suppliers are getting the production they need from their foundry partners.

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“However, depending on the OEM, this dis-aggregation of scale - meaning previously either Samsung or Nvidia had the scale to secure manufacturing capacity - will likely create more logistical challenges as foundries like TSMC has to juggle the same demand for chips not from only a handful of clients but a larger group of clients.”

Madhav Durbha, Vice President, Supply Chain Strategy at Coupa Software, says: “These companies aren’t bringing chip design in-house in order to ease their supply chain challenges.

They’re doing it because every company wants its own ‘secret sauce’ for the specific needs it has, and bespoke chip

NEWS ANALYSIS

design can help to achieve that.

“However, what will help reduce the shortages is the investments being made by the chip manufacturers such as Intel, TSMC, and Samsung among others to increase their manufacturing capacity. This is not a short-term fix by any means – as it takes such a significant length of time and billions of dollars to get the manufacturing capacity in place. Even where capacity exists, the lead time to make a chip from raw materials is about 85 days.”

But while some of technology’s biggest companies want more control of their chipsets, actually building their own facilities to own the manufacturing process isn’t on the cards.

“Manufacturing semiconductor chips is an extremely capital intensive process, and most big tech companies will steer well clear of building their own foundries. It’s likely that chip manufacturing will continue to remain the realm of the established players given the extraordinarily high barriers of entry, and the scale advantage that the big players have,” says Durbha.

“A more pragmatic approach for these companies is to strive to become preferred customers of the foundries by sharing better visibility into future order patterns, respect the contractual terms by making timely payments, sand building executive contacts at the foundries.”

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In addition, says Durbha, companies should be bolstering their digital technologies to get an end-to-end view of their supply chain processes and navigate through future disruptions.

“Being informed, nimble and prepared will be vital for companies looking to weather the supply storms ahead. In case of constrained supply situations such as what is seen with chips right now, companies that catch trends early can get a lock on the short supply.”

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Unsurprisingly, there are geopolitical issues at play in the semiconductor market, with China and the US at the centre, with the fall-out being that Chinese outfits are frozen out of market when it comes to the advanced, bespoke chips that US businesses are looking to develop.

“SMIC, China’s leading semiconductor foundry, is being prevented in acquiring new manufacturing tools and technologies to advance to process nodes like 10nm, 7nm and 5nm. This essentially

NEWS ANALYSIS

would keep SMIC from competing with TSMC, Samsung and Intel,” says Lam. “The semiconductor industry has to be viewed from a larger supply chain perspective. Critical technologies developed by the likes of ASML in the Netherlands are essential to be able to keep on the leading edge of silicon technology.

Currently, China is being barred from those toolsets and technology.”

The future two or three years are likely to be bumpy and Lam says that the current course is not a particularly positive one for the semiconductor ecosystem. It will, he believes, take intervention from the powers-that-be to create a more balanced market. With so much self-interest, the likelihood of that is up for debate.

“The wider trend I expect is to see the widening of the gap between the top

Madhav Durbha

silicon manufacturers (TSMC, Samsung and Intel) and the rest of the pack (i.e.

Global Foundries, UMC, SMIC).

“As it takes scale to keep investing in new technologies, only the top players can afford to keep up that game of investment. What that would mean is that leading-edge silicon fabrication will be more centralised within that handful of top players while the rest of the industry will attempt to pick up the more mature products.

“Clearly, this widening of capability is not ideal for a healthy semiconductor industry but there doesn’t seem to be a way out at the moment unless governments get involved and promote more competition in the top segment of the industry.”

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CASE STUDY

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WESTERN UNION

DRIVING WESTERN UNION’S TECH TRANSFORMATION An undisputed leader in the global payments space, Western Union is driving a company-wide technology transformation, underpinned by migrating its infrastructure from on-prem to the cloud. Here, its Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering, Harveer Singh, reveals how the initiative will give the organisation the speed and agility it needs to continue to thrive in the digital age PROJECT DIRECTOR: Chloe King AUTHOR: James Henderson VIDEOGRAPHER: Fraser Harrop

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F

or more than 170 years Western Union has been helping people send money all over the world.

Its reach is staggering: present in more than 200 countries and territories, transacting in 130+ currencies, with approximately 150 million people having used Western Union to either send or receive funds over the last year.

But for all its success, Western Union is undoubtedly a legacy player in a market that has been truly disrupted in recent years, with smaller and more agile outfits making waves in the increasingly digitised payments space. While the pace of change has been considerable, the leadership team at Western Union has been focused on implementing a large-scale technology transformation.

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At its core is a migration from on-prem to a cloud-based infrastructure, which it believes is key to allowing the organisation to scale and evolve into a company with the clout of an established financial institution combined with the agility and flexibility of a modern FinTech.

The scale of change this represents for a business like Western Union is not to be underestimated; the company employs around 11,000 people and has more than 550,000 retail agents locations within its global financial network, as well as a global online presence.

As such, when Western Union embarked on its technology transformation, it was keen to recruit personnel who could help achieve its vision. One of its most high-profile hires was Harveer Singh, who

WESTERN UNION

was appointed as Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Engineering and previously co-led EY’s Next Generation architecture & solutions for Financial Services.

“The pandemic really accelerated the digital transformation journey; the plan was for it to be rolled out in three years but that timeframe became 18 months,” Singh tells Digital Bulletin.

“The reason for that is due to the huge increase in demand for our digital services as lockdowns were implemented across many different geographies. Originally, the capacity of our on-prem environments wasn’t projected to hit capacity until 2022, but we could see that point was going to be reached in 2020, so that meant a real acceleration.”

Singh was brought in to help facilitate that leap, drawing on his expertise with business transformations, technology management, data architecture and collaborative working, backed up by various consulting roles at Deloitte, IBM and Accenture.

“There was a need to accelerate the process we wanted to undertake, I have that experience of transformation projects happening on a massive scale. The organisation was looking for somebody with a fresh perspective who could challenge the norms, bring people together to show them the value of what we’re doing and basically create an environment that’s a little bit different to your usual corporate set-up.

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The pandemic really accelerated the digital transformation journey; the plan was for it to be rolled out in three years but that timeframe became 18 months” Harveer Singh

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WESTERN UNION

“You have to recognise that you’re taking a massive journey as a company because it has always relied on data centres. And it’s not something you can achieve really quickly, it’s a multiple-year process. In the same way that they say it takes a whole village to raise a child, it takes an army of people with the right skillsets and approaches to undertake a challenge like this. My role was to bring all of these different teams together and instil a culture that recognised it wasn’t just about how fast we were going, but also about the quality of the product we’re delivering.”

Singh was given autonomy to mould his teams, combining the skills already at Western Union with external talent, many of which were from a consulting background, resulting in a diverse and varied team, which he says proved invaluable.

Industry experts were also drafted in to create the “army” that was required for this technology mission.

Singh describes the team he assembled as being “super-powerful,” and says he often refers to it as his “three-in-box” strategy, owing to the various areas for which he recruited. “They’ve complemented each other really well and been able to almost mentor each other, as well as building great relationships with the product groups. It’s been a great combination.

“What I’ve tried to do is look at each of the groups and find out who the strong

players in each of them are, the leaders that are vocal and very straightforward in conversation. When you see those people who are proactive and have aspirations, you are able to almost make them role models and build really effective ecosystems around them.”

Having got the right people in place, Singh and his team set about building a partner network to supercharge Western Union’s technology evolution. He praises the vendor support and namechecks first AWS for enabling the organisation to quicken the pace of its procurement process and spin up workloads to the cloud faster than had originally been anticipated. He also praises Snowflake’s adaptability when it came to dealing with huge capacity increases.

A hugely significant piece of the transformation has come from rethinking how Western Union communicates with its vast customer base. To that end, Singh has built on an existing relationship to forge a highly valuable partnership with Salesforce and oversee the roll-out of its industry-leading Marketing Cloud. Singh estimates that the project has reduced how much it spends on talking to its customers by a quarter, while markedly improving this critical function.

He reveals that Western Union was using multiple companies for each of its email, in-app and SMS communication channels.

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“Salesforce has a value proposition that was immediately interesting because it allows you to build a single omnichannel journey that can be managed really efficiently - when I want to make a change I only need to do so in one place. Salesforce has been such an important part of the digital experience journey.”

Having found great success with its Marketing Cloud, Singh outlines his longer-term vision to connect a number of Western Union’s central products.

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“Looking ahead, the Sales Cloud will be connected to the Marketing Cloud, which in turn is connected to our Care Cloud, so that whenever something happens across any of those products we are able to react in a way that suits that customer.

It’s an ecosystem of complementary platforms that enable a seamless, single customer experience - I think that’s such a powerful proposition.”

A large proportion of Western Union’s infrastructure has been migrated to the

WESTERN UNION

In Partnership: Salesforce Western Union has leveraged Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to streamline its communication channels and messaging with its large-scale customer base.

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A lot of our big data environment is still on-prem and the mission is to move that completely to the cloud by the end of the year”

cloud, and Singh reveals a timeline to complete the programme of work. When fully realised, he says, it will give Western Union the agility it is seeking, while also having a positive impact on its bottom line.

“A lot of our big data environment is still on-prem and the mission is to move that completely to the cloud by the end of the year. We know there are certain systems that we cannot just move to the cloud straight away such as the AS400 IBM mainframe, but we’ve managed to take 30

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the ecosystem that surrounds our legacy technology and move it to the cloud and we think we can get everything to the cloud before the end of the year.

“Achieving that is going to give Western Union agility, stability and resilience and allow us to focus on product development, because we know that our technology is going to sit in the cloud and take up a lot less of our time.

“The strategy is also to reduce costs; on-prem infrastructure and people

WESTERN UNION

running it is expensive and you need back-ups of everything, especially in financial services. That’s not to say cloud is always cheap, it can be expensive but we have a very stringent Review Board to keep our costs in check, so cost reduction is something about which we are confident.”

As a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, Western Union has to comply with a huge number of financial

regulations. It works with Talend to streamline data movement in compliance with GDPR across financial, reconciliation, auditing and trading partners.

“The partnership with Talend has evolved over the last few years and was originally established to provide our business and technology teams a fast and efficient way to build data pipelines. It has become one of the leaders in Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) technology and the majority of the data ISSUE 33

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moving across our ecosystem is now powered by Talend.

“It’s one of the most widely used platforms from a data perspective and we’re expanding our relationship with Talend to start using some of its data quality products as well.

Data quality is so important to us, we need to know who we are marketing to and that means our data has to be of the highest quality.”

The relationship with Talend has enabled Western Union to help its global customer base in times of real need.

After the catastrophic explosion in Lebanon in 2020, the two companies worked together to build data pipelines to help those affected by the incident and provide support to agents in the area.

Talend’s technology was used to bring various sources of data from different locations into a single place in rapid fashion, helping make decisions such as waiving fees for those sending funds to people caught up in the explosion.

Talend’s technology has been used similarly in response to people impacted by floods in Haiti and to Indian citizens at the

height of the country’s COVID-19 crisis.

“We are also launching new products into the market, including a pilot for digital banking services in select markets in Europe and a revamped loyalty programme, which require us to capture data from our central warehouses to drive decision making, marketing and customer acquisition. Talend is our backbone for that work and have really evolved their product to meet our needs.”

While Singh and his team have been occupied with the technology transformation taking place at Western Union, the breakneck speed at which the financial services and payments industry is changing means they also have to be planning for the longer-term. Western Union is a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and is a leading voice in the conversation of how to build a global payments ecosystem, which is stable and where remittances can be made much faster.

Singh is a proponent for a Central Bank Digital Currency, which he says is

Something that is ripe for discussion among many of these discussion groups is the idea of a digital dollar, which could be made transferable all around the world with vendors and partners”

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WESTERN UNION

In Partnership: Talend Talend is a key partner to Western Union, with its ETL platform enabling effective data movement and consolidation from different locations.

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significantly different to the digital assets such as BitCoin and Ethereum, which can fluctuate wildly in value over short periods of time.

“What we are talking about is not cryptocurrency, it is not something that has to be mined. It is far more stable than that and can be used for near instant settlements across the board, while providing liquidity to Reserve Banks. With my work with WEF, 36

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I was lucky enough to sit around a table recently with some important people and talk about how we can take this forward.

“Something that is ripe for discussion among many of these discussion groups is the idea of a digital dollar, which could be made transferable all around the world with vendors and partners.”

Singh also sees huge potential in the use of blockchain for specific use cases

WESTERN UNION

within financial services and payments, for example, helping with the Know Your Customer (KYC) process that is important to stopping money laundering and fraud and eliminating many of the checks that currently hold up crossborder payments.

“Once a customer notarises their documents, they can be stored in a safe location and distributed across the

blockchain network, so any regulatory authority or government can access that information. This does have privacy implications and hence needs to be vetted out with regulatory authorities around the world.

With the blockchain environment, there may be value in the technology as it becomes more mature and efficient. We continue to experiment with the technology and time will tell if it offers a better alternative to traditional rails.”

Reflecting on the transformation to-date, Singh is clear that it hasn’t come without its challenges. Having to maintain two sets of procedures— on-prem and cloud—for 18 months to ensure business continuity is chief among them, while teams have had to escalate a company-wide transformation during a pandemic.

“There were definitely times I was looking at costs and thinking how I was going to explain to finance, or my CFO,” he says. “But they’ve been hugely supportive and as we’ve hit milestones, such as moving significant infrastructure completely to the cloud or achieving significant savings with the Marketing Cloud, we have built that business case.

“Now we are on track to achieve those gains and benefits that come with being more agile and being able to grow at scale, we can really begin to look forward and reap the rewards of the transformation.”

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FUTURE

THE QUANTUM

REVOLUTION

IS NOW Zapata Computing CTO Yudong Cao and ColdQuanta President Paul Lipman tell Digital Bulletin how the quantum computing revolution can be accelerated with a change of mindset

AUTHOR: Stuart Hodge

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QUANTUM COMPUTING

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ome 40 years ago now, the brilliant Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman implored humanity to build the first quantum computer.

That famous conference of 50 top thinkers hosted jointly by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM, gave birth to Feynman’s most famous quote: “Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.”

It certainly hasn’t been easy but everyday quantum computing is gradually moving towards becoming a reality, and now two of the top voices in the space are insisting the time has come for the dawning of the quantum revolution to become more widely embraced by enterprise and by society at large.

A couple of years ago, quantum computing properly emerged into the mainstream consciousness as Google’s Sycamore quantum computer performed a mathematically-designed calculation that it would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years to do in less than five minutes.

Effectively, this made the Sycamore machine, which completed the task in 200 seconds, 158 million-times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer.

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The potential is staggering and quantum computing is in the hugely exciting stage of innovation where so many contrasting approaches and methodologies are being formulated, invested in and designed and tried out, all with the aim of accelerating the arrival of the time when quantum computers become the norm. But in order to get to that point more quickly, Zapata Computing CTO and Co-Founder Yudong Cao insists that there needs to be a change in mindset from enterprises.

“People are still thinking that ‘no, quantum computing is early, we need to do the research first, and then we go to production’,” he says. “But I think,

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only by going to production, that you can really identify the bottlenecks, and really identify what truly are the things that matter.

“Can you use that as a forcing function? It’s something I believe is unique about this paradigm, which is that we not only care about the science, but also we want to go to production and then use the customer challenges as a forcing function that drives our priorities, and research and engineering and everything else.

“At Zapata, we believe that there are fundamental software engineering issues, in many cases, even IT issues that need to be resolved before we

It’s the potential for solving a class of problems that are out of our reach today, and the impact that could have on the world – when we think about things like climate change, material science, drug discovery and probably a whole range of things we can’t even imagine” Paul Lipman

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can begin thinking about quantum computing. This, I would say, is really the rubber meets the road moment.”

Zapata is very much focused on the software side of the space. The company’s quantum platform Orquestra combines a powerful software platform and quantum algorithm libraries to deliver advances in computational power for which can be applied in a real-world context.

On the hardware side, there are multiple modalities at play – some that are very much real today, some that are more speculative and with an eye on the future.

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One of these approaches is cold atom quantum computing. This is where atoms are cooled to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, and they then take on quantum properties.

Lasers are used to arrange the atoms, hold them in place, run computations on them, and read out the results.

Quantum calculations, communications, and sensing are the result.

That is the approach adopted by ColdQuanta, whose President Paul Lipman shares the view of Cao, whom he calls “one of the smartest technical minds in the quantum software area” that a change in mindset is needed

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from the business world when thinking about the quantum space.

“There’s a kind of mystique and romance around this concept of quantum, it’s almost like in the same category as time travel,” says Lipman.

“There have even been TV shows where the quantum computer is kind of this, this all-seeing, all-knowing machine that can travel back and forward in time. We need to challenge that general kind of almost science fiction nature of it.”

Lipman points to the example of AI, and how it moved from being thought of in somewhat of a similar way a few decades ago as an example of how the

thinking can change around something after a fallow period.

“If you go back to the 80s or the 90s, there was this AI winter where there was a great promise of AI but it never panned out and the overall level of interest waned,” Lipman continues.

“But for the AI revolution to then actually come to pass, it was a combination of three factors. Firstly, the fact that the hardware evolved, and we had these enormously powerful GPUs that could do matrix multiplication on a great scale or linear algebra on a great scale.

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Yudong Cao learning and, then, number three, there was this great abundance of data with the explosion of the internet. And now you could actually train these models.

“The net result of those three factors was kind of the AI revolution we see today. I think there’s going to be a similar revolution that happens in quantum. You’ve got the evolution of the hardware, a massive evolution on the algorithm side, and then, I think it’s about the use cases. It’s the early adopters who are exploring, ‘Okay, how do we use a quantum computer to solve a problem in chemistry? How do we use a quantum computer to optimise a machine learning process?

How do we use a quantum computer to do financial simulation?

“I think it’s those three factors in parallel, which is why you’re seeing 44

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so much partnering going on between the hardware companies and software companies and businesses. And the net result of those three will herald the quantum revolution.”

There’s definitely a healthy mix of competition and coopetition in the space but how do you move the needle in terms of changing the thinking of enterprises to bring forth that revolution more quickly?

Lipman believes it will probably become part of the workflow, rather than replacing the workflow in the first instance before improvements will see it take a more prominent role in ways we can’t even probably conceive yet.

Cao, whose eyes light up at the mention of quantum computing’s potential, believes that one key issue needs to be tackled before anything else.

“What we have noticed about our enterprise customers is that it doesn’t matter what industry they’re in, they ultimately face the problem of complexity and I think that’s true for most of the problems humanity is facing,” he says. “That sort of scale and complexity, not only manifests in the sort of sheer amount of resources needed – how many people or computers are needed – but also the sort of inherent mathematical intractability of the problem.

“A common flavour of these complex

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problems that arose in enterprises is when, for example, you want to optimise a logistic system, you typically want to sort of maximise a particular target, but then at the same time, you have all these conflicting constraints that are in your way. This is what makes a problem hard.

“Those are incredibly complex problems, especially when you get to a very large scale, and no computer, no algorithms are known to solve these general problems efficiently.

“The complexity that’s manifested in the enterprises and also probably in humanity at large, often can be translated into these inherently intractable mathematical problems.

That is the place where enterprises, or the world, will look for any computational solutions that offer even an incremental improvement.”

The key question that arises then is: how do you build the link between quantum technology and correlation and addressing that complexity?

“One of top contenders, I think, is AI, as it provides absolutely the shortest path for bridging that gap,” Cao suggests. “Because there are many machine learning techniques which essentially use some source, some sort of statistical power to infer correlations in data and also to generate new data points.

“If you can then imagine there’s a back-end quantum computer that supplies statistics that are driven by the superposition and entanglement. and then at the front end, you can produce points in a data space, you can reach points in a data space that are otherwise would have been very hard to reach with a classical solution.

“Then you can take that ability to navigate the data space, further into optimisation. Let’s say, for example, a quantum-driven solution can discover a logistic supply chain design that was previously not uncovered by any classical algorithms; or quantum computers may be able to discover

AI is absolutely the shortest path to make an impact in the real world with these sort of large-scale problems” Yudong Cao

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a drug molecule structure that wasn’t previously attempted.

“The good thing is that we already have the legacy of the past 20 years of all these AI systems and algorithms that we can build on top of so I think AI is absolutely the shortest path to make an impact in the real world with these sort of large-scale problems.”

Lipman, on the other hand, believes that it will probably be an amalgam of different approaches which helps to lead to the point where businesses are regularly exploiting quantum computing technology.

“I was talking to somebody the other day, and they were asking should enterprises be sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to settle out in terms of which approach to quantum computing will ‘win’?” Lipman says. “And I told them that’s like imagining your business in the 70s, waiting to see whether DEC or VAX, in terms of which computer standard, will win out.

“The reality is, we probably can’t even foresee what things will look like 10 years down the line and there may well be different kinds of quantum computers that prove to be most useful for certain kinds of applications.

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industry seems to be guiding businesses is: now is the time to get involved. It’s not that you’re going to flip a switch at some point and all of a sudden, we’re going to be at this concept of quantum advantage (Quantum Advantage is the concept whereby a quantum algorithm will have exponential speed advantage over a classical algorithm).

“One of the big misconceptions about quantum computing is there’s going to be this point in time and the switch will get flipped and, all of a sudden, we’re in the world of quantum advantage. That’s just not how it’s going to play out. It’s going to happen in different ways, with different use cases across different industries. It’s going to be a gradual process and it’s going to happen incrementally.”

Another important aspect in bringing quantum computing to the forefront is ensuring that people know what it is, and how the machines work. This is an area which has seen a lot of growth in the past couple of years in particular, and Lipman is heartened by that.

“One of the things that’s going to be necessary for this industry to continue to thrive is a talented and educated workforce,” he says. “And we’re seeing quantum education and the emergence of quantum computing programmes in universities, and even sometimes at high school level, and it’s very gratifying.

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It’s the potential for solving a class of problems that are out of our reach today, and the impact that could have on the world – when we think about things like climate change, material science, drug discovery and probably a whole range of things we can’t even imagine” Paul Lipman

“There’s the promise of a really kind of transformational new way of computing.

It’s not that we’re going to have faster video games or better calculators or, but it’s the potential for solving a class of problems that are out of our reach today, and the impact that could have on the world – when we think about things like climate change, material science, drug discovery and probably a whole range of things we can’t even imagine.

“I think that’s critically important for

us to educate people to have a healthy and thriving industry. And it’s not just on a technical side, but also business people and even the general public needs to understand what this technology is. They don’t need to understand the science necessarily, but they need to understand what these technologies are about, what their applications may be, what the challenges are and what the risks are, because it’s going to affect all of us eventually.”

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LOGICALIS

THE EVOLVING ROLE OF THE

CIO Logicalis has launched the eighth edition of its Global CIO Report. Toby Alcock, CTO speaks to Digital Bulletin about the main findings, the impact of COVID-19 and the importance of embracing digital

INTERVIEW BY: James Henderson

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T

he CIO report was launched at the end of September; firstly, how much of an impact has the pandemic had on the responses you got from CIOs do you think?

The Logicalis Global CIO Report is now in its eighth year and these results are the most compelling yet. The pandemic altered business priorities with digital transformation, security, business continuity, and resilience thrust into the spotlight. These responsibilities fell into the laps of CIOs as they are now tasked with revolutionising business infrastructure to tackle the modern, and increasingly digital, world. Our survey discovered that 79% of CIOs spend more time on innovation. We asked the same question last year, before the pandemic, and the figure was 51%. The pandemic has shifted the role of the CIO, so their responses have evolved alongside their change in responsibilities.

The CIO is no longer tasked with keeping the IT lights on but rather seen as an agent of change and a highly valued member of the boardroom” 50

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Could you tell us about what you think are the key takeaways from the report?

There are several key learnings from the report for CIOs and business leaders including:

•C IOs must innovate and prioritise the

digital customer experience by leveraging technical ability to interpret data and unearth hidden insights.

• Businesses are increasingly outsourcing technology services to drive a successful digital transformation strategy.

•O rganisations must update their approach to innovation and encourage company-wide collaboration and communication to gain a competitive edge.

•B usinesses should adopt a holistic approach to security to fully protect hybrid workforces.

Toby Alcock

LOGICALIS

The modern workspace is evolving – if you haven’t been making changes, you are already falling behind” I’m sure this is also linked to the pandemic, but how is the role of the CIO changing?

The CIO is no longer tasked with keeping the IT lights on but rather seen as an agent of change and a highly valued member of the boardroom.

Senior leadership teams understand that IT and digital transformation will help the business prepare for the digital workplace, keep ahead of the competition, deliver for customers and ensure business continuity in the post-pandemic economy.

survey respondents planning to find new ways to increase agility in the next five years. However, just 48% of CIOs are using data to raise agility in their operations. The businesses that leverage data will gain a competitive advantage and equip their leaders with insight to drive informed decisions and create unparalleled business agility.

Could you speak about the need for scale and agility to drive business acceleration – and how CIOs are doing this/where their challenges are?

Scale and agility are key differentiators for organisations and crucial elements to business acceleration. CIOs are aware of the need for agility to drive business acceleration with 85% of our

How important is innovation for the new digital workplace and how CIOs are performing/falling behind competitors?

Innovation is essential for the emerging digital workplace. Our CIO survey this year finds that 79% of CIOs spend more time on innovation. It also reveals that 77% are investing more of their ISSUE 33

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day in strategic planning to help create modern technologies that will help their businesses meet objectives such as better customer engagements.

Businesses that don’t update their approach to innovation will not be able to support new customer demands and risk an increase in employee churn as today’s workforce evolves from boomers towards digital natives.

Adaptable infrastructure is going to be key moving forwards, how can CIOs best go about developing them?

The cloud is fast becoming the dominant IT model as it delivers choice, efficiency, and flexibility to match changing business needs and support rapid growth. But often, organisations assume this move will be faultless – which isn’t the case. The journey of achieving an optimised infrastructure model is complex. Working with an expert partner

As technology, data and innovation continue to drive business success, CIOs will be an integral part of any organisation’s leadership team”

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can help businesses build a solution that guarantees a secure, agile, adaptable, and resilient model mapped to their unique business needs and objectives.

Do you believe that improving customer experience is the single greatest challenge for CIOs in the coming years?

It is certainly one of the top challenges to overcome for CIOs. Our findings support this, with 73% of CIOs stating the importance of customer experience has increased and this isn’t slowing down any time soon. Additionally, the report reveals over 81% of respondents believe that their focus on redefining the customer experience will grow over the next five years. This provides an opportunity for CIOs to revolutionise business infrastructure to tackle the encroaching modern world and increasingly digitally based interactions.

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What would you say to a CIO that has been slow to grasp the importance of digital experience?

The modern workspace is evolving – if you haven’t been making changes, you are already falling behind.

Seventy-nine percent of respondents in this year’s survey believe their organisation is falling behind competitors because of the pace of changing processes. CIOs can take the lead on this shift to the digital world and workplace and act as agents of change.

As agents of change, CIOs must collaborate with wider exec teams to help organisations update interactions with customers. This includes using infrastructure to create data-driven customer engagements and turn falling behind into getting ahead.

The report certainly shows a challenging landscape, but are there reasons to be optimistic for modern CIOs? In its own 2021 CIO survey, Gartner found that the role of a CIO is becoming more important than ever as CEOs recognise the value of technology to the organisation and its impact on business outcomes. As technology becomes essential in the emerging digital economy, an organisation’s success depends on whether the CIO can move from being a functional leader to a strategic business leader. Forward-looking

CIOs, along with other members of the leadership team, that embrace change to become more strategic, increasingly have the CEO’s ear and can positively impact the bottom line.

Are we increasingly seeing the CIO moving to the centre of the C-Suite and do you expect this trend to continue?

For CIOs, it is no longer enough just to keep the technology engines running.

Instead, they must take their place in the driver’s seat, steering technology strategy towards an adaptable future.

In a recent report by Deloitte, the Global CIO accurately said: “The role of a technology leader is not to develop a digital strategy or vision—it is to embed digital in the business strategy.” In fact, 77% of CIOs are already investing more of their day in strategic planning to help create modern technologies that will help their businesses meet objectives.

As technology, data and innovation continue to drive business success, CIOs will be an integral part of any organisation’s leadership team.

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PROTECTING

CRITICAL

INFRASTRUCTURE Five industry experts weigh-in on this month’s big question: “How would you improve protection of critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks?”

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Isolate critical areas

Elizabeth Green

Cybersecurity & Resilience Specialist at Dell Technologies

One of the most regularly proven methods of protecting national infrastructure is to isolate critical data and operations of the network. In 2017, a global shipping company, responsible for 76 ports and vessels representing close to a fifth of the entire world’s shipping capacity, came under a debilitating ransomware attack that caused significant financial and reputational damage for the business and logistical problems around the world.

Although a cyber resilience strategy had been in place, IT staffers tasked with rebuilding the shipping giant’s network had one seemingly insurmountable problem. Although they had backups of almost all their individual servers, they could not locate its domain controllers – the map that governs the rules that determines which users have access to which systems. Mercifully, a lone surviving domain controller in Ghana was eventually found. Days before the ransomware attack, a blackout had knocked this solitary data centre offline and remained disconnected from the network until days afterwards. By complete accident, the

singular known copy of the business’ domain controller had been ‘air-gapped’ allowing IT to bring the shipping giant’s core services back online.

The organisation had in effect air-gapped a copy of its most important data – a lifeline that allowed them to begin the difficult process of recovery.

More sophisticated technology solutions have since entered the market that create an offline, air-gapped copy of data, storing valuable business data sets in a vault. This vault is physically and logically isolated from the production network, leaving it virtually impossible to penetrate or attack. Engaging in measures such as data-vaulting is not a fatalistic approach to cybersecurity.

In the wake of a targeted, sophisticated cyberattack, air-gapping critical infrastructure ensures that the data most critical to resuming operations – such as high street banking, public food and energy supply– can continue while full recovery procedures continue.

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solutions wouldn’t meet all future business challenges. A further 72% lacked confidence that business-critical data could be recovered in the event of a destructive cyber-attack or data loss. With threats from cyber criminals increasing in number and sophistication, these statistics are concerning, especially when we consider that the technology both exists and is in operation safeguarding national infrastructure around the world.

Last year, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre issued a warning about attacks on millions of routers, firewalls and devices used by infrastructure operators and government departments.

Despite this, many businesses continue to view investing in proactive, reactive and failsafe cybersecurity measures as a ‘sunk cost’, rather than a strategic investment. The ramifications of cyberattacks on national infrastructure go far beyond the usual reputational and financial damage felt by non-essential businesses.

National infrastructure providers should implement air-gapped data vaults as one measure in a wider arsenal so that if a catastrophic incident occurs they can keep cash in people’s hands, keep their fridges stocked and keep the lights on.

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Define and act on vulnerabilities Dominic Trott

UK Product Manager, Orange Cyberdefense

Thwarting cyber-attacks against critical national infrastructure (CNI) should be seen as a crucial national and international issue. The events of the past 18 months, during which healthcare services have been stretched to near breaking point, have only made the situation more overt. The ransomware attack suffered by the Irish Healthcare Service in May was serious enough to interrupt operations and appointments, showing that cybersecurity risk can literally have a life or death impact. This was also a stark reminder that, even during a global health crisis, healthcare remains in the crosshairs, with key facil-

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ities worldwide being constantly probed by cybercriminals for weaknesses.

This year, we also witnessed an attack against Oldsmar’s water supply in the US, which was widely seen as precisely the kind of assault on CNI that cybersecurity experts have been fearing for years. It is frightening to think what might have happened if it was not for the vigilance of one of the plant’s operators.

Fortunately, the incident went down as yet another near miss, but it is clear that CNI will remain a key target for hackers inaction can no longer be tolerated.

Unfortunately, a significant number of CNI organisations are still running

on out-of-date and vulnerable IT systems. For those still running obsolete technology, it is a case of when, not if, cybercriminals will exploit the weaknesses in their systems. In order to improve protection of CNI from cyber-attacks, organisations must prioritise patching their systems and addressing vulnerabilities.

In today’s highly volatile and increasingly sophisticated cyber landscape, organisations also need to understand the nature of the evolving threat. Crucial to this is ensuring that the employees responsible for operating and managing CNI are aware of the threat. By implementing simple measures, such as avoiding opening attachments or clicking on links unless they are from a legitimate source, can go a long way to reducing the risk of potential breaches of CNI security.

Finally, on a larger scale, organisations must take responsibility for the securing of the CNI itself, ensuring that a layered approach to cybersecurity is in place.

Security teams within CNI organisations must focus on installing the most appropriate technology to manage the risk that they face, supplemented by investment in both people and process.

Through these measures and the right combination of safeguards, we will observe a shift in the security of CNI, and reduce the risk of a calamitous cyber breach in the future.

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There’s no silver bullet Paul Balkwell Vice President of International at Zix

With the scope and sophistication of those attacks increasing all the time, it’s unlikely that anyone can prevent all attacks on infrastructure. But with the right tools, policies, and procedures in place, it can ensure that any attacks it does experience aren’t crippling and that infrastructure can be rapidly returned to service when attacks do happen.

The best hope of preventing and mitigating cyber attacks on critical infra-

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structure relies on a mix of the right technology, employee education and communication. While the right use of technology can go some way to preventing breaches, it’s important to remember that the technology used by cybercriminals is advancing all the time too.

Many infrastructure attacks begin with phishing attempts and email is the most popular channel for these to be delivered.

With cybercriminals increasingly capable of spoofing both internal and external communications, it’s imperative that organisations in the infrastructure space

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remind employees and customers of what they’ll never ask them to do via email or any other form of communication. Additionally, organisations should emphasise that employees be doubly cautious of any email that asks them to click a link, open an attachment, or verify their details.

It’s also important that organisations make it clear how and where to report suspicious emails. The faster an organisation’s security team is alerted, the more quickly it can respond and intervene to warn employees and shut down spoofed websites.

This kind of education shouldn’t just be policy at the organisational level, but should be baked into cybersecurity prevention and mitigation efforts. To avoid simple errors that could lead to attacks and data theft, organisations should also make it a habit to deploy regular security audits to identify vulnerabilities and other suspicious behavior, allowing them to ensure sensitive data is routinely being backed up.”

Finally, given that half of European infrastructure attacks in 2020 were ransomware based, the importance of backing up cannot be overstated. Your backup provider should be able to address the unique needs of laws such as GDPR and any others that impact the jurisdiction you operate in. This includes, but is not limited to, its choice of data centre, data encryption, at-rest and in-transit

rules, and the ability to purge backups.

Additionally, adopting a backup provider shouldn’t impact on your organisation’s ability to do business.

The solution you choose should therefore offer simplified employee on-boarding and off-boarding with bulk activation, automated addition and deletion of users, and backup of inactive accounts. Additionally, it should offer an out-of-the-box setup with zero adoption effort, no matter what SaaS platform you use.

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A 360 view is essential Mike Fabian

Principal security consultant, Synopsys Software Integrity Group

Just because an incident hasn’t happened within a nation’s critical infrastructure environment, doesn’t mean that it won’t happen in the future or that you can postpone or underfund cybersecurity activities. While I wouldn’t say we’re facing any sort of “Cyber Pearl Harbor,” I do believe organisations operating both IT and, particularly, OT systems need to put a conscious effort into securing these systems - not only from a security standpoint, but also in terms of quality, safety, and reliability.

Although OT industries face a similar set of problems as traditional IT, the overall application of security programs and technologies is quite different in OT, and there is even more differentiation based on the characteristics of each vertical. That said, there are best practices in key areas, both technical and organisational, that can help mitigate risk to infrastructure environments.

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security posture for a given environment.

It is nearly impossible to secure an environment if you’re unaware of what is in it, how everything is connected, what data it uses (or generates), and how it affects your bottom line.

And then there’s patch management.

One of the prevailing issues in operational technology (OT) networks is the lack of technical solutions and organisational practices for patching. This is particularly relevant if the application sits on a commercial OS, as most do. Developing and maintaining a strong patch management strategy is one of the most effective activities an organisation can undertake.

It’s also a daunting undertaking.

We must also consider network segmentation. Many OT systems are deployed in a flat network topology or without any segmentation between systems that should not be able to interact. There are two reasons for this.

First, due to a misunderstanding about which systems need to communicate with one another, and the second, as

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a result of deploying systems from multiple vendors or integrators over time. After assessing the network topology and data flows, you will need to develop network segmentation policies, which are similar to various industry standards language describing the zones and conduits of controlling access. The goal of these policies is to mitigate the damage potential of

breaches or issues related to anomalous network traffic.

One ever-growing concern involves the supply chain. In many OT environments, vendors maintain an aspect of control over the technical implementation of the solutions they provide through support contracts and changes that must be validated and certified to ensure the safe operation of a given system.

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Multi-layer approach is key Avin Talabani

Head of Transformation at William Russell

The grim reality of cyber-attacks should be well known with frequent headlines about businesses locked out of their systems, having valuable customer data stolen and leaked, or suffering serious losses through invoice fraud. That has not stopped a stubborn and significant minority of businesses adopting an ostrich strategy, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping the multiple threats will pass them by.

Cyber risk is now one of the key existential threats to business and its slow take up is increasingly mystifying. Casting a long shadow across this already very mixed picture is the last year of lockdowns, office, shop and factory closures and working from home.

In terms of frequency, the main risks remain ransomware and business email compromise. However, the scale and sophistication of higher end attacks is increasing with incidents like SolarWinds, Accellion, and Microsoft Exchange. Incidents such as the Blackbaud hack also show that cloud-based 62

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providers can be vulnerable despite assurances to the contrary.

In insurance, every day deal with data from clients’ driving licences, passports and utility bills often sitting in their systems alongside bank details, making us readymade identity packages. So, a multi-layered approach to cyber protections is highly recommended. The combination of a series of barriers to cyber-crime, is far more effective than any one part on its own, however strong, and up to date.

Examples include use of firewalls and anti-virus to stop intrusions. Detection

software to alert the business to any infiltrations. Password complexity and management to keep that form of authentication strong, and a further randomly generated code, to form multi factor authentication, making access as difficult as possible to criminals.

Additional methods include restricting user privileges, so staff can only access what they need to perform their duties.

Stopping use of users own equipment and blocking use of removable media stops vulnerabilities being introduced.

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ZOOM

TO ZOOM OR NOT TO ZOOM How did an unknown video platform take over our lives? Darren Pattie, Head of Zoom Phone for EMEA, speaks to Digital Bulletin about the company’s astonishing rise, and its plans for growth as the world moves towards hybrid work

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

T

wo years ago, very few people had ever heard of Zoom. At the time, video conferences were rare and remote work was an exceptional circumstance. Now, the video platform has become so entrenched in our daily lives that its name has turned into a verb.

During the long months of lockdown, Zoom calls allowed people to work, study and socialise, from a distance. The company, virtually unknown in the mainstream, grew exponentially in the span of

a few months. While three million people participated in a Zoom meeting during the whole of 2013, by March 2020 this number soared to 200 million a day. The following month, the company had increased its revenue by 169% and “zooming” had become the word on everyone’s lips.

From the other side of a Zoom call, of course, Darren Pattie, Head of Zoom Phone for EMEA, speaks to Digital Bulletin about the company’s astonishing rise, and its next steps as the world moves into the era of hybrid work.

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We’ve helped educators to teach, we’ve helped doctors to care and we’ve helped governments to govern” Darren Pattie

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“It’s been an extraordinary two years,” he says. “We’ve seen circumstances, which I hope are once-in-a-lifetime events. But, from a Zoom point of view, we’ve been very humbled and privileged to be able to provide a solution which enables people to connect with loved ones, family and friends and helped businesses to survive or thrive.

“We’ve helped educators to teach, we’ve helped doctors to care and we’ve helped governments to govern.

And the fact that we were running 300 million meetings globally per day during the height of the pandemic just shows you how much value we were able to bring.”

Its impact is obvious. In only a few months, phrases like “I’ll zoom you later” or “zoom school” have made the company’s name a verb as common as “googling” or “photoshopping”.

Pattie recognises that the pandemic has not only helped grow Zoom’s business but it also had “a significant impact” in the company’s brand awareness. That raises the obvious question: How did a brand that was so little known rise above tech giants of the likes of Google and Microsoft?

Despite having similar products, Google and Microsoft’s video-meeting platforms fell millions short of Zoom’s number of daily users during the lockdown and, although successful, they have never

ZOOM

been unable to catch up to its success.

In Pattie’s view, the key to the mystery is simple: Zoom listens to what customers want and develops products that meet those demands.

“We can deliver new widgets and new functionalities to market really quickly, and we do that because we listen to what’s important to our customers,” he says. “If you understand what’s important to them and why, you can then help them solve problems quicker, or you can help them address their customers in a better way or be more competitive. And that’s part of the reason why we’re different, because we’re

not slowed down by a legacy technology debt, which many of the competitors in the marketplace are. We dealt with the most difficult thing first.”

Live video is a very technically difficult product to provide, not only because of the huge amounts of storage space, network bandwidth, efficient algorithms, and resilience that it requires, but also because of the likelihood that something somewhere will go wrong and the meeting will stop.

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it. Its founder, Eric Yuan, first envisioned Zoom in the 1990s, when he got fed up with taking a 10-hour train journey to visit his now-wife from Shandong University of Science of Technology in China, where he was studying. When, 10 years later, Yuan pitched his idea for a mobile-friendly video system to Cisco - where he worked at the time it was rejected. Yuan decided to go for it anyway and the rest is history.

“Zoom’s ability to innovate with pace is impressive,” Pattie says. “Eric’s vision about the value that Zoom’s platforms can bring to organisations to run their business, safely, securely and collaborate is inspiring.”

As part of this innovation process, back in 2019 and only months before the company’s initial public offering, Zoom launched a cloud telephone service called Zoom Phone and completed its transformation from a web meeting platform to an all-around business communication service.

“Zoom Phone is an extension of the single platform,” Pattie says. “It’s not a change in the strategy, it’s a continuation or an acceleration of the strategy.

Zoom Phone is a cloud-based enterprise-grade Private Branch Exchange (PBX). Its key aspect is that it is seamlessly integrated within the Zoom app, facilitating what Pattie deems as “the best-in-class user experience”. When 68

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users add Phone to a paid Zoom account, a new tab appears where you can make and receive calls, record calls, hear voicemails and send text messages, without requiring additional training. It has all the benefits of a traditional phone, without the need for a separate physical phone device.

Despite only having launched two years ago, the service already has over a million paid users. Its success raises the question of whether in-app

ZOOM

Zoom Phone is an extension of the single platform.

It’s not a change in the strategy; it’s a continuation or an acceleration of the strategy”

phone services are the future of telecommunications.

“The traditional on-premise PBX with PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) is really audio routine,” Pattie says “That served the way that people used to work in a nine to five office environment very well for many years, many decades in fact; but it is only one way to connect your people to your customers and your partners. That was the old world; now we need to think about

moving onto the next generation of PBS (Public Broadcasting Service).”

This new world is one that will be cloud-based. The cloud allows companies to expand in a cost-efficient way, with agility and flexibility, and without the costs of setting up a large team of people to support those capabilities in-house or buy expensive software upgrades. Zoom has been one of the companies to take full advantage of the benefits that the cloud offers from the start.

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“[Cloud] is basically future-facing and agile at the cost of ownership and it allows you to run your business the way that you need to,” Pattie says.

However, Zoom’s gigantic growth has also been accompanied by large levels of concern, particularly when it comes to privacy and security.

Zoom has come under fire for stating that it provided end-to-end, 256-bit encryption to secure users’ communica70

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tions when in reality it provided a lower level of security. In addition, the company’s product suffered from several flaws, including a vulnerability that allowed an attacker to remove attendees from meetings, spoof messages from users and hijack shared screens.

Last month, Zoom paid $85 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of violating user’s privacy rights by sharing personal data with

ZOOM

Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, and letting hackers disrupt Zoom meetings in a practice known as “zoombombing”. Zoom denied the accusations, but it promised to bolster its security practices.

Zoom Phone has so far avoided any security scandals. When asked about these issues, Pattie emphasises the importance that the company places on security when developing its products.

“When Zoom Phone was being developed and as designed and as we go through different enhancements of our innovation, we do that absolutely with security, reliability, and quality of service at the front of our minds,” Pattie says.

Security concerns - as well as the company’s alleged connection to China - are the reason behind the increased scrutiny over Zoom’s latest and largest acquisition, also considered one of the 10 largest US enterprise software transactions on record, currently pending government review.

If granted regulatory approval, Zoom’s $14.7 billion acquisition of Five9 will allow the communications company to begin its journey to become a cloudbased fully-fledged contact centre.

Similarly to Zoom, Five9 has seen huge growth since the pandemic, as companies seek call centre technology that would allow representatives to do their jobs from home. The acquisition

Zoom has a massive part to play in a better return to work and in facilitating a hybrid work style” of the company - which has amassed over 2,000 customers worldwide including Citrix and Under Armour and processes over seven billion minutes of calls annually - will clear the way for Zoom’s entry into the $24 billion contact centre market.

“We continuously look for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers,” Eric Yuan, the company’s CEO, said about the deal.

Pattie is sworn to secrecy regarding any details of the purchase, but he stresses the value that Zoom’s products could bring to the call centre industry.

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“We haven’t transitioned to a cloud commerce centre service strategy because we’ve always had that,” he says. “What I can say is that Zoom Phone has a number of features and functions and a number of those features and functions are what you would classify as contact centre requirements.

“Typically organisations that have more simplistic ways of serving their customers and they don’t want the 72

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complexity or the costs of a fully-blown contact centre solution, they partner with organizations who are contact centres, best-of-breed players, of which Five9 is only one of those. So we have the capability with our current platform and we have partnerships if people want more than that.”

Despite these bumps on the road, Zoom reportedly still expects the acquisition to go through in early 2022, and the company continues to grow

ZOOM

strong as it looks into new opportunities for worth in the era of hybrid work.

“Zoom has a massive part to play in a better return to work and in facilitating a hybrid work style,” Pattie says.

“We’ve been very inspired by the innovation of our customers. We’ve listened to what’s important to them and we’ve been able to innovate and develop our platform to deliver that differentiated value so they can build back better with confidence.

“Work is very much about what you do. It’s not about where you go. I think that, as a lot of analysts will say, the pandemic has really accelerated change in the dynamic of how people work and what’s important. And we’ve played a significant part in that. We now look forward to building out on that success as people come out of a pandemic and they look to build forward better with confidence and support hybrid and different ways of working.”

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Securing development teams Fresh off a bumper funding round, Snyk’s Founder & President Guy Podjarny tells Digital Bulletin about his plans for its developer security platform and makes his case for open source

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SNYK

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ongratulations on the Series F funding round, what are your initial thoughts on the raise?

We’re all very happy with the adoption and momentum that drove these great investors to this Series F. Snyk has experienced great success to date, but, with an estimated 27 million software developers worldwide today and 45 million by 2030, we strongly believe there is still an exponential growth opportunity in front of us. This funding represents an investment in the future of security. $530m is a significant raise, how are you going to put that money to work and how is it going to benefit Snyk?

This latest investment allows us to accelerate growth at every level. On the product side, the funding allows us to serve the fast-growing global demand for Snyk’s Developer Security Platform. This demand is driven both due to the explosion of digital transformation, as every company seeks to become a technology company and accelerate innovation, and the unique nature of our platform. Snyk’s is the only platform that is truly committed to and proven to get developer love and adoption, and to cover the full scope of modern applications, including the application code, open source libraries, container infrastructure and infrastructure as code.

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Is geographic expansion and recruitment on the agenda?

Geographic expansion and recruitment are definitely high on the agenda - our amazing team is what got us here, and we need more amazing people to grow.

We just hired two great executives, Dino Marino as Chief Revenue Officer and Adriana Bokel Herde as Chief People Officer, and are continuing to build the team across regions. We’ll reach 800+ employees worldwide by the end of 2021, having already added 320 this year, and specifically fund growth in APJ, which has grown from two people to 30 this year.

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Snyk’s is the only platform that is truly committed to and proven to get developer love and adoption, and to cover the full scope of modern applications” Guy Podjarny You’ve just mentioned Dino Marino, who’s joining from Mimecast. What do you expect him to bring to the table?

We’re really pleased to have Dino on board. He’ll focus on continued global expansion, advancing the build out of priority go-to-market initiatives and further strengthening our capabilities in the financial services and federal government verticals.

Could you speak to us about some of the highlights from 2021 to-date?

We’ve achieved a number of significant milestones in 2021, such as the expanISSUE 33

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sion into Asia Pacific Japan earlier this year and increasing Annual Recurring Revenue by 165% year-over-year (i.e. grew it by 2.65x); other highlights include growing the customer base to more than 1,200 companies, from established enterprise leaders to new hypergrowth technology players; delivering more than 40+ new product features into the Snyk Developer Security Platform; and success78

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fully acquiring FossID to expand license compliance and C/C++ capabilities.

Could you tell us a bit about how Snyk’s platform works and is being utilised by developers?

Today’s developers need solutions that focus on empowered developers and help them own and build security in. Our Developer Security platform does just

SNYK

vulnerabilities. Our threat intel systems constantly listen to feeds across social, research and open-source channels, find vulnerability related mentions and funnel them to our analysts who filter and curate them in the DB. Our platform packages deep security expertise, so developers don’t have to be security experts themselves.

that - it seamlessly integrates into their existing dev tools, analyses the application they’re building, flags vulnerabilities and helps developers prioritise and fix them. We cover the full scope of the cloud native app, including code, open source dependencies, container images and infrastructure as code.

The platform relies on Snyk intel, the industry leading database of known

Why are you targeting developers rather than security teams?

Security needs to shift to developer-first, where it is built into the development process early rather than waiting to pass over to a separate security team when development is done. If companies want to build a secure product, it needs to be addressed as it is developed, not seen as an afterthought. Getting developers to embrace security, and build it into the fabric of software development is key to ensuring that security can keep up with the pace of modern development, and a fundamental requirement for securing our digital lives.

Snyk has been busy with the acquisitions of FossID and before that Deepcode and Manifold - can we expect to see more M&A activities in the near future?

These acquisitions have strengthened our offering and allowed us to serve more of the world’s developers. As we ISSUE 33

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look to the future and continue on our mission, we’ll continue to review where acquisitions make strategic sense.

You’ve also teamed up with Trend Micro this year - can you tell us a bit about that partnership?

We partnered with Trend Micro to provide security operations teams visibility and tracking of vulnerabilities and license risks in open source components. The partnership already includes container image security scanning that leverages our vulnerability database.

The solution we announced this year, Trend Micro Cloud One – Open Source

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Security by Snyk, provides continuous insight into open source vulnerabilities to enhance risk management and drive data-driven remediation decisions. Together we’re investing in the future of the cybersecurity industry, so security and development teams can effectively work together to make their organisations safer.

Most modern software utilises open source, but what are the risks involved for enterprises in terms of vulnerabilities?

The case for open source software is compelling. So much so that it has now

SNYK

Our ultimate vision is to empower every one of the world’s developers to build amazing things quickly while always staying secure”

become a standard part of the application development process. But there are still risks of open source software that should be considered when selecting projects for your stack. One way to evaluate an open source project is to look at such metrics as maintenance and security. Evaluating those parameters and comparing similar open source projects will help organisations make more educated decisions when it comes to security.

Snyk is growing quickly, but could you outline the long-term vision for the business?

We’re on a mission to make the digital world a safer place. Thousands of companies all over the world already use Snyk to help their engineering teams develop faster, and more securely. Our ultimate vision is to empower every one of the world’s developers to build amazing things quickly while always staying secure.

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A LIFE IN TECH

A life in tech Paul Christensen is a serial entrepreneur who formerly worked for Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank as Head of Strategic Investments. Here, he tells Digital Bulletin about getting a company ready for investment, the evolution of machine learning and why he founded Previse

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PAUL CHRISTENSEN

I

would describe myself as energetic, optimist, relentless, curious, kind.

What attracted me to technology was impact. Simply the realisation that technology has huge potential to make an impact by changing things for the better.

I am massively future positive and believe that humans can solve our problems, and technology will be a large part of any solution. In my view, the two biggest challenges of our time are inequality and the climate emergency, and technology can be the key to solving both.

My parents were a huge influence.

They are both terrific role models of mission-driven people. They each, separately, left their lives in New Zealand (Mum) and Australia (Dad) to make a difference to the people of Papua New Guinea. My mother as a nurse in Bougainville, and my father improving agriculture in West New Britain (where I was born). They taught me that life is about making a difference. Be a missionary, not a mercenary.

My hope is that we reflect on COVID-19 in two primary ways, which at first blush may appear antithetical, but are actually entirely consistent. Firstly that

What attracted me to technology was impact.

Simply the realisation that technology has huge potential to make an impact by changing things for the better” we became more human, and secondly that technology can make life better, and serve that first purpose, if used wisely.

I think that the pandemic has made it clear that many business functions can be performed just as effectively remotely. While that may be true, there is still much value to be derived from face-to-face interaction with colleagues, clients, and partners.

Ultimately, I think we will see a hybrid of remote and physical working, at least for the foreseeable future. Digitalisation was well underway before the pandemic and will no doubt continue, albeit at a much faster rate than before.

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months to get paid. This is a huge, global, macro-economic inefficiency.

And in this day and age, there is a better way. Previse was founded in 2016 by a small group of people who believe that business can be done much better. We believe that technology can change this, and that the answer is in the data.

The evolution of machine learning methodology has been incremental in the last few years, but the applications of machine learning have evolved significantly. It is now heavily utilised behind the scenes to enhance many products and services that we interact with every day, such as search engines, e-commerce, medical diagnosis, drug discovery, financial services, digital photography, traffic management, weather forecasting and much more.

This has been made possible by the evolution and maturity of free and open-source machine learning tools, better availability of data, and cloud computing platforms making computational power more scalable, cost-effective and accessible.

Companies looking to invest venture capital are looking for three things: team, TAM (total addressable market) and traction. The product or service doesn’t necessarily have to be completely mature 84

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- and it often isn’t for startups - but the idea itself and the problem it is looking to solve should be sound.

The people are critical and having a strong leadership team that understands their respective industry and is passionate about it will always help. An often under-appreciated attribute of the team is resilience - because building a startup is far harder than anyone who hasn’t done it can ever appreciate. We are blessed at Previse that we now have a brilliant and resilient team, the biggest TAM there is, and now we are proving the traction.

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An often under-appreciated attribute of a team is resilience - because building a startup is far harder than anyone who hasn’t done it can ever appreciate”

My advice to aspiring technologists would be: Remember, that at the end of the day, it’s all about the people!

I have a wonderful family - a wife and two teenage children - who do a great job of keeping me grounded and present. We are all vigilant about literally “switching off” - extended periods where no technology is allowed. I meditate, run, swim, do yoga, surf and ski. The ultimate for me is surfing - being immersed in the ocean.

Previse’s core focus will always be the problem of slow supplier payments. But, there are so many pain points that SMEs

face in securing and maintaining cash, that invite many solutions in turn.

Slow payments bankrupt small businesses and are a huge culprit for frail supply chains.

The problem is worsening, but the solution is obvious and the technology is ready. We just need businesses to adopt it.

I’d like to be remembered as a husband/ father/ friend/colleague, who was kind, curious and left the world, in some small way, a better place!

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Priya Bakthisaran, General Manager & Head, Automation, iCORE-CIS, Wipro, on the four steps to maximising value from automation

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here has been a lot of hype around automation. With promises of reducing the burden of mundane tasks on employees, allowing them to be more efficient and concentrate on their roles more strategically, there are clear ways that further digitisation of tasks should result in business value. Yet for business leaders, they have seen lots of time and investment go into digitisation which hasn’t always paid off.

Today’s CIOs are faced with a hybrid ecosystem where the technology they depend on is part of a fragmented technology landscape consisting of pre-existing legacy systems as well as 86

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emerging technologies from multiple providers and toolsets.

Additionally, social media links the world connecting businesses with their customers 24/7. This has skyrocketed customer experience as an important driver for digitisation. Now, people expect businesses to be ‘anywhere, everywhere and always-on’ – and that’s exactly what is needed from IT infrastructure.

This leaves us with one big question: How can businesses get real value from investment in technology and automation?

The key is that automation is not just about tools and technologies, it’s intimately linked to business strategy

PRIYA BAKTHISARAN

and the people working there. The way to maximise value from automation and all technology is actually very simple.

Using the main questions asked of every business project will allow leaders to approach tech investments in a holistic way. Below, the basic four-pronged approach to capture maximum value from our technologies is laid out.

1. Why – Every business leader knows that justifying the reason for doing something is critical at the outset.

As a first step, the value a project or change will bring should be identified in both business and human terms so there is clarity on what one gets out of one’s investment. For example, automating a task can save employees a certain amount of time every week which has a clear cost/ value attached.

I n today’s rapidly digitising world, more and more tasks can be automated - many more than current business leaders will recognise at the outset. But through creative thinking and through drawing on the expertise of digitisation professionals, businesses can automate many regular operations. In a scenario where technology drives IT operations, the processes may need to be simplified in order to be able to automate

People expect businesses to be ‘anywhere, everywhere and always-on’ – and that’s exactly what is needed from IT infrastructure” them. Skills need to be streamlined based on patterns or technologies depending on what fits the organization. Tribal knowledge will need to give way to knowledge banks, deep learning technologies and analytics based inferences and resolutions.

2. What – Now that you know why you are seeking to automate, recognizing what technology you need to enable this is the second step. Here, businesses can investigate available technology which can help them get where they want to be and what more is needed to achieve an end-to-end automation. One way to think of this is to create a futuristic roadmap – laying out the journey a business strategically wants to go on and identifying the end goal.

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Organisations must plan for rapid adoption programmes, training and incentives in order to bag the maximum out of their technology investments” This should start with the creation of an infrastructure blueprint. This blueprint must be developed keeping in mind future business needs as well as considering architectural standards. It also must provide for the phasing out of old components.

Timely review of the blueprint to ensure its relevance with changing business needs is necessary to ensure that infrastructure is not a constraint, but a promoter of business growth. Lastly, the roadmap must provide a clear line of sight from business strategy to business objectives to business processes to applications and systems to data structures and infrastructure.

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integrated. The key here is to embed all digitisation into a business from the get-go. Fragmented infrastructure and siloed work culture are a bane to extracting value from digitisation. Disparate technologies, however powerful, will fail to deliver value unless integrated. There must be a seamless flow between various components. Every decision, be it investment in a technology or KPIs must trace back to the business imperative. It is important to continuously capture value realised through automation as a process in order to understand the impact of automation which in turn would help in future strategies.

4. Who – Most importantly, are employees using the new technology? If workers don’t draw on the resources available to them, then the investment was wasted.

Therefore, technology adoption is the paramount factor in every digitisation project. Any investment in technology or automation is bound to fail if the workforce refuses to embrace these changes. Organisations must plan for rapid adoption programmes, training and incentives in order to bag the maximum out of their technology investments and encourage rapid adoption.

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astly, strategic partners must be L brought along on the automation journey. These partners will need to cater to the end-to-end infrastructure management landscape employed by a business with a comprehensive set of automation touchpoints, including various day-to-day operational processes.

Beyond the above strategy, automation-for-value should be based around technology agnostic solutions and maximising readily available tools. Integrating automated analysis of incident and service request data can enable rapid deciphering of

automation patterns and their value. Meanwhile, predictive and proactive sensing coupled with selfhealing automation use-cases have been known to avert many high priority incidents, which saves business profit by averting risk.

In the future, businesses will employ a hybrid workforce of human and digital colleagues. In order to promote a cohesive organisation, where robots perform repetitive tasks based on learning and humans draw on their unique abilities, businesses must remember the above four-pronged approach to create a strategy for this automation to be successful.

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