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While the leading hyper scalars are not expected to change, their positions, alignment, ecosystem of customers and partners are expected to transform.

The new world of cloud experiences

ARUN SHANKAR EDITOR A R U N @ G E C M E D I A G R O U P. C O M

Cloud is the first and most powerful platform for business disruption. In the pre-Covid days, events were face to face, requests were face to face, and business decisions were usually made between people, face to face.

Does this still hold true? With meetings virtual and disembodied from reality, what is today’s equivalent of the face to face chemistry? Is it the immersive Zoom call? Is it the digital marketing credentials? Is it market intelligence reports? What is replacing the ability to get a gut feel that used to be so much a part of many decisions.

This year’s Future IT Summit 2020 was staged in a virtual arena. Visitor logging in had the choice of entering the auditorium and viewing ongoing sessions; or visiting the exhibitor area; or spending time in the networking lounge. All real-life extensions. But that is where the similarities ended.

Inside the auditorium, the attendee can choose the sessions and attend at ease or catch up with the post session recording. Inside the exhibitor area, the attendee can select the booth, play an introductory video, scan the available documents, post an inquiry or request a follow up. Better the digital rendering in terms of explanatory content, the more likely there will be a positive takeaway and transfer of a marketing impact.

The same applies in the networking lounge. Matchmaking is the fastest way to engage in a digital community. The more details you plugin and the more you use the platform, better are your chances to make the right deal. Details, details, details and engagement, engagement, engagement!!

Do we have a replacement for the face to face chemistry?

Moving to our lead feature of the month, comments Alex McMullan at Pure Storage: If we look at why organisations are opting for cloud models it is a combination of the experience, economics and operational model that goes with it. In terms of customer experience, people want to be able to do self-service. They want to be able to set some policies and let the cloud work it out after that and they want a consistent experience, whether they are doing it in AWS or Azure or Google.

Traditional customers are looking at a way of spending less on technology, with three or five years of sunk investment, and looking at different ways of spending that capability. They are looking for a better utility model than the old school ones, because the old school utility models are just a lease wrapped up in a different capitalised structure.

Second generation public clouds are now powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimise workloads, reach optimum utilisation of cloud infrastructure resources, and provide protection against security threats, according to Ayman Al Shaikh at Red Hat. Turn these pages to learn what the other public cloud hyper scalars have to say including Alibaba, AWS, Microsoft, Nutanix and Oracle.

Good reading and good learning. ë PRINTED BY SALES AND ADVERTISING Ronak Samantaray ronak@gecmediagroup.com Ph: + 971 555 120 490

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CONTENTS OCTOBER 2020 | VOLUME 08 | ISSUE 03

50-64 COVER STORY

l Pure Storage: Moving performance flash arrays into cloud service l Red Hat: Hybrid, automated, vendor agnostic, cloud suite l Microsoft: Boosting digital transformation through datacentre migration l Alibaba: Extreme scalability, performance, machine language, AI l Oracle: Leveraging second generation cloud infrastructure and ERP cloud l AWS: Scale, breadth, depth, community of cloud services l Nutanix: Compute, networking, storage in a cloud cluster

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REAL LIFE

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CHANNEL NEWS

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CLOUD NEWS

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ANOMALI: BUILDING CONTEXTUAL SECURITY AWARENESS OUTSIDE AND INSIDE OF BUSINESS

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5G VS WI-FI 6, DEMYSTIFYING THE TECHNOLOGY There is a lot of understandable confusion about the role Wi-Fi will play in the 5G era, or how they might work together, says Aruba’s Jacob Chacko.

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he hype continues to grow for 5G technology, with many carriers promoting it as a way to target the enterprise networking and IoT markets with an end-to-end service that spans indoor and outdoor coverage.

But will 5G be the answer to all decisionmakers’ prayers? There is a lot of understandable confusion about the role Wi-Fi will play in the 5G era, and how they might work together.

Although carriers are just beginning to deploy 5G networks, customers need to decide whether it is worth hanging around for 5G offerings, or whether it won’t actually deliver what they need.

IS 5G MORE SECURE THAN WI-FI?

JACOB CHACKO,

Regional Business Head, MESA, HPE Aruba.

Wi-Fi 6 can match 5G in terms of speed, latency, spectral efficiency, connection density and reliability.

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There is a misperception that cellular technologies are more secure than Wi-Fi. Although LTE is relatively secure, it’s not perfect. According to researchers at the University of Iowa and Purdue University, LTE is vulnerable to a range of attacks, including data interception and device tracking. 5G improves upon LTE security with multiple authentication methods and better key management. At the same time, Wi-Fi security continues to advance.

It’s also important to keep in mind that that enterprises have made enormous investments in security and compliance solutions tailored to their specific needs. With cellular networks, including 5G, enterprises lose the ability to deploy their chosen security and compliance solutions, as well as most visibility into traffic flows. With macro 5G, from a security perspective, you get what you get.

DOES 5G HAVE MORE FEATURES THAN WI-FI? When comparing 5G to Wi-Fi 6, the most important functional difference is 5G’s ability to offer macro-area coverage and high-speed mobility. Wi-Fi was not designed to incorporate either of these capabilities. Conversely, Wi-Fi economics are more favourable from both per-square-foot and lifecycle cost

The reality is that Wi-Fi and 5G are both evolving to better serve end users. perspectives, devices that only need Wi-Fi are cheaper than those that also have LTE, which would also have the added cost of having to manage SIM cards/subscriptions. So, if a customer values macro coverage and high-speed mobility, and is willing to pay the additional cost for them, 5G is a better fit.

WHICH IS MORE RELIABLE? Both Wi-Fi 6 and 5G are extremely reliable when deployed correctly. Although macro 5G is deployed using licensed spectrum, which is less subject to interference than unlicensed spectrum, operating on licensed spectrum doesn’t always translate to higher levels of reliability. Numerous enterprise Wi-Fi customers have achieved extremely high levels of reliability and performance in demanding environments, such as large, sophisticated manufacturing plants. Wi-Fi 6 improves reliability even further.

The reality is that Wi-Fi and 5G are both evolving to better serve end users, and both markets will grow to address the macro trend of connecting devices and analysing the data generated by these devices. 5G will serve applications requiring high-speed mobility and macro coverage, while Wi-Fi 6 will continue to prove its value as a reliable, secure and cost-effective access technology for most enterprise applications. ë

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THE ENTERPRISE BATTLE BETWEEN MOBILE PRIVACY AND SECURITY One of the key sticking points is that employees use their devices for both personal and professional reasons, says Lookout’s Bahaa Hudairi.

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BAHAA HUDAIRI,

Regional Sales Director META, Lookout.

C-suite needs to bridge this gap between enterprise security and the privacy of its workforce

ver the past decade, in line with developments in working culture, we’ve seen a monumental rise in the number of mobile devices entering the workplace. Tantamount to the benefits of flexibility and accessibility they provide, they present an increasing risk to the security and privacy of employees and their employers by containing and allowing users to share sensitive proprietary data in inconsistent and unsecure ways. With business continuity, reputations and personal safety at risk, organisations need to develop a better understanding of mobile security and a policy that reflects this.

One of the key sticking points is that employees use their devices for both personal and professional reasons. This presents enterprises with a problem: how can they seek visibility and uphold security while the employee demands privacy? Clearly, BYOD policies aren’t going away any time soon, so the C-suite needs to bridge this gap between enterprise security and the privacy of its workforce.

With the right to individual privacy becoming increasingly important to users, businesses are being forced to change the way they monitor and analyse mobile devices.

From an employee’s perspective, scrolling through WhatsApp or Messenger, or calling a loved one, is part of their everyday routine.

Equally, when working, they will regularly use Skype, DropBox and Slack as a way of communicating with colleagues and increasing productivity. While these apps are essential, they also present different security issues when used on mobile devices, and outside the scope of the IT department.

Another layer to this dilemma is the requirement to comply with General Data Protection Regulation. Unfortunately, there are a number of mobile-related risks that can violate GDPR. For instance, a malicious app leaking data, a threat such as spyware monitoring online activity, apps that can gain extended permissions to access sensitive information, and

With business continuity, reputations and personal safety at risk, organisations need to develop a better understanding of mobile security. even network compromises, which lead to man-in-the-middle attacks. However, regardless of the risk or threat that causes a data breach, whether it be employee negligence or malicious intent, the organisation will still be held accountable and fined accordingly. The financial and reputational damages are far too severe for mobile security to be treated any less diligently than the protocol that protects desktops and the employees that use them.

Enterprises want to ensure the corporate perimeter is fully protected but at the same time are challenged with trying to offer the privacy to an ever-expanding mobile workforce.

Thankfully, this can be achieved with dedicated advanced mobile security which works together to enable enterprises to protect data from threats and risks present on endpoints.

Through continuous conditional access, it enables enterprises to constantly assess device health and allow employees to authenticate to corporate resources over any network. This works across all the organisations’ endpoints while, just as importantly, protecting employee privacy. ë

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COPING WITH LEGAL AND SECURITY CHALLENGES OF TRANSFORMATION The combined impact of digital transformation and the pandemic is impacting the fabric of data security, explains Cloud Box Technologies’ Rohit Bhargava.

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he process of adopting digital transformation is disrupting organisational structures, organisational workflows, organisational business models. The pace of change in business is fast outpacing the pace of change in legal compliance, regulations, and governance. So, what can organisations do to ensure that while they focus on repositioning themselves for customers, they do not run afoul with the regulatory fabric of the business’ ecosystem.

The comfort zone of having formal teams sitting in office workspaces and being managed by legacy administrative processes is now over, and many say, forever, in the post-pandemic workplace. However fragmented teams, working remotely through multiple networks and devices, bring with them additional challenges of data fragmentation, weak controls and ownership. So is the organisation really in control of the data it is creating in the new post-pandemic workplace?

ROHIT BHARGAVA,

Practice Head, Cloud and Security, Cloud Box Technologies.

The pace of change in business is fast outpacing the pace of change in legal compliance, regulations, and governance.

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#1 MANAGING THIRD PARTY RISKS One impact of digital transformation is, driving the increased use of specialised third party suppliers to fill the gaps that adoption of emerging technologies bring with them.

The risk of using third party suppliers can get amplified across various departments including information technology and security, supply chain, procurement, finance, quality control, legal and privacy. The impact of integrating third party suppliers is complex and sometimes difficult to predict. Enterprises need to focus on using third partner management technology tools including marketplace platforms.

#2 DATA PRIVACY AND CONTROL Digital transformation and the increased usage of remote workers working from remote locations, is also fragmenting the creation, storage and management of enterprise data. In which global data centres is the data residing

Digital transformation is driving the increased use of specialised third party suppliers to fill the gaps. and does the enterprise have visibility and control of customer data that it is capturing and retaining? This is the question and risk that enterprises will increasingly face in the fallout of the pandemic and the accelerated investment into digital transformation.

While regional enterprises have not yet been severely impacted by the implementation of Global Data Protection Regulation or any other regional consumer privacy acts, this is likely to change with the accelerated adoption of digital technologies in the post-pandemic workplace. As regional enterprises begin to operate cross-border through remote teams, and not just in-country, data management challenges and the possibility of privacy infringement increases.

#3 AUTOMATING LEGAL ASSISTANTS Robotic process automation when applied to legal and compliance practices drives the emergence of virtual legal assistants. Most routine practices, responses, workflows can be mapped through artificial intelligence into automated assistants or chatbots. It is the unique processes of the organisation that are challenging and require security oversight as well. Top executives of legal and compliance firms need to engage with specialised vendor partners to map their core competence into secure automated processes. ë

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ADOPTING RISK-BASED VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT APPROACH Security teams need to focus on the vulnerabilities that affect critical assets first, instead of being distracted by the rest, says Tenable’s Adam Palmer.

ADAM PALMER,

Chief Cybersecurity Strategist, Tenable.

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rganisations have embraced cloud-based technologies to support a distributed workforce, particularly during the current health crisis. These new technologies are mixed with traditional IT systems rife with data silos and outdated operational processes. The challenge is that legacy security approaches weren’t designed to handle an attack surface of this size and complexity.

While it might feel insurmountable, the majority of cyberattacks can be traced back to unfixed, yet known vulnerabilities. To put things into perspective, there were 17,313 new

vulnerabilities disclosed in 2019, yet attackers leveraged only a small subset of these for attacks.

Security teams need to focus on the vulnerabilities that affect critical assets first, instead of being distracted by those that are unlikely to be exploited nor pose a significant threat to the business’’ ability to function.

Here are five reasons organisations should adopt a risk-based approach to vulnerability management: Context based decisions Correlate and analyse essential vulnerability characteristics along with other key contextual elements, including the criticality of the assets affected, threat and exploit intelligence.

Organisations can also conduct an assessment with a view of current and likely future attacker activity. This helps organisations understand the actual business risk posed by each vulnerability.

Don’t get distracted Prioritising remediation efforts using the common vulnerability scoring system, CVSS, alone isn’t enough. This is because CVSS is limited to a theoretical view of the risk a vulnerability could potentially introduce, rather than the actual risk it poses to the organisation.

CVSS doesn’t take into account whether the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild, or if the vulnerability impacts a business-critical service or system.

Risk-based vulnerability management helps organisations understand all vulnerabilities in the context of business risk so that data can be used to prioritise remediation efforts. The ability to do so empowers security teams to move beyond the inherent problems of using CVSS in isolation.

See everything Organizations need to be able to assess modern assets, as well as traditional onpremises IT environments, to eliminate the blind spots that plague legacy tools. By having visibility into the entire attack surface, security teams can determine which vulnerabilities to prioritise for remediation based on risk,

There were 17,313 new vulnerabilities disclosed in 2019, yet attackers leveraged only a small subset of these for attacks.

regardless of where they reside in the network.

Strategic and purposeful By limiting assessments to assets that fall within the audit scope can cause critical systems to be ignored. Instead, continuously discover and assess the risk associated with all business-critical assets across the attack surface. Security teams should also employ analytics that dynamically assess changes in vulnerability, threat and asset criticality data to determine risks in real-time.

Keep disruption to a minimum By leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to instantaneously digest feeds from various sources, security teams can build a picture of the enterprise that focuses on the business’ critical assets and the actual threat they face. These insights empower security teams to adjust their remediation strategy in near real-time. This proactively addresses the vulnerabilities that pose the most risk to the organisation, while minimising disruptions from new vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits that gain media attention. ë

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FILE ANALYSIS HELPS BATTLE DATA GLUT, DRIVES GROWTH Lack of information might prolong the process of identifying vulnerable data, which could be a potential threat, explains ManageEngine’s Ranjith Raj Gnanapragasam. and enhance their performance capabilities.

Adopting an effective file analysis tool can help them address important risks that mismanagement of data might otherwise raise. Like cracks in a building, these risks can gradually result in serious damage of the operational structure.

This article aims to educate CIOs, entrepreneurs, IT heads, and employees on the four key benefits that a robust analysis tool can offer in managing data.

IMPROVE DATA EFFICIENCY

RANJITH RAJ GNANAPRAGASAM,

Product Manager, ManageEngine.

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rganisations spend exorbitantly on data storage mostly because of mismanagement. In most of the companies, IT admins do not even have information on where an employee saves their files, both personal and professional. This understanding is important to take precautionary steps to identify and protect sensitive data. Lack of information might not just put the organisation’s security in risk but might also prolong the process of identifying vulnerable data, which could be a potential threat.

ROLE OF FILE ANALYSIS File analysis can be a game changer in helping organisations optimise their data storage

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File analysis helps organisations steer clear of redundant, obsolete, and trivial data. Redundant data includes duplicate files, and obsolete files are old, stale data that has not been managed. Trivial data comprises personal files saved by employees. Analysis helps maintain real time updates on data and segregate data based on the frequency of usage, the owners of a particular folder, and external parties who have access to this data. Analysis-driven insights will help the data administrators clear ROT data from their repository.

COST OPTIMISATION The cost of buying storage is very high and usually organisations spend millions in just acquiring storage space. Given the significant investment, it is important to ensure that the money is spent wisely. As per ManageEngine estimates, a midsize organisation storing 5TB of data can save approximately $3,500 per year by spending approximately $1,000 on analysis.

With 10TB of data, it can save approximately $20,000 per year by spending approximately $2,000 on analysis. Optimising data storage has helped companies cut down costs dramatically.

MITIGATING SECURITY RISKS THROUGH REALTIME ANALYSIS Security is one of the biggest IT concerns for organisations, especially those in banking, retail, and healthcare sectors. It is critical

File analysis can be a game changer in helping organisations optimise their data storage and enhance their performance capabilities.

for organisations to ensure that either files created by former employees are deleted or the ownership of those files is shifted to a current employees to minimise the risk of unwarranted accesses and privilege abuse. Managing data helps understand where information is stored.

BETTER MANAGEMENT LEADS THE WAY TO FASTER GROWTH For any business to continue its operations, data management can no longer be an option.

It has become a prerequisite . This is even more pressing in the current scenario when organisations are looking at a hybrid model of working. It is imperative for companies to prioritise data analysis and have a better understanding of the data repository they own. This clarity will help the leadership teams make better and faster decisions and help IT teams identify vulnerable data and remove duplications. ë

SPECIAL REPORT

A tour of

The Future IT Summit 2020’s virtual convention centre

Can an event traditionally held at convention centres and exhibition halls be successfully replicated in the virtual world? Well, the FITS 2020 virtual convention centre showed exactly how it can be done.

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ver the years, The Future IT Summit has emerged as a powerful platform for networking, branding, lead generation, impromptu meetings, product demos, training sessions, solution showcase, keynotes and much more. But in 2020, the 6th edition of The Future IT Summit is different on one key front. Yes, in keeping with the new normal, the event has gone virtual.

But can an event traditionally held at convention centres and exhibition halls be transported online and successfully replicated in the virtual world? Well, after virtually visiting The Future IT Summit 2020 venue, the answer appears to be an emphatic yes!

The tour began outside a convincing replica of a convention centre, where visitors saw an animated crowd walking around. Also lined up along the path to the entrance were hoarding and billboards of the event sponsors.

Clicking on the entrance loaded the main lobby of the virtual convention centre. And this is where visitors found everything that

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one would expect at a real convention centre, including a few fun features. This included: l A virtual photo booth where visitors could pose against the backdrop of FITS 2020 and upload their picture to a photo wall. l A treasure hunt, where easter eggs were hidden all over the convention centre and visitors finding these were awarded points.

Visitors also got points for other activities done in the virtual convention, such as downloading content or exploring its various features. l Leaderboard. These points helped participants climb up on a leaderboard, and at the end of two days of FITS 2020, the top entries went on to win Amazon gift vouchers. l The expo halls. The convention centre had multiple levels of expo halls, each filled with virtual booths where vendors could showcase their products and services. l Virtual booths. Customised virtual booths were created for each vendor. Each reflected the brand’s image and colour scheme, and vendors could choose from various booth sizes, too. These booth also offered product

brochures, videos and details about each vendor. l Chat modules. Vendors could interact with visitors at their booth, and address queries. l Auditorium. This is where visitors spent most of their time, watching an impressive line-up of speakers imparting key insights on a broad range of topics that were covered at FITS 2020. l Swag bag. Visitors could download virtual freebies and documents put up by vendors. l Survey zone. FITS 2020 had an area where visitors could participate in an online survey.

This too fetched points. l Networking area. This is where visitors could interact with other guests at the convention centre, start conversations or exchange contact details. l Hall of fame. The FITS 2020 virtual convention centre hosted an area celebrating past events and winners. l Virtual workshop. Vendors could hold demonstrations and sessions at the virtual workshops.

Here is a visual tour of the venue.

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Eventstub, Where Virtual Events Become Real

EventStub is a GEC Media Group company that helps event planners and organisations conduct online and physical events to connect with audiences and cost-effectively meet various business objectives.

EventStub specialises in hosting branded event websites, creating mobile apps for events, organising business matchmaking, virtual conferences, conventions, trade shows, fairs and much more.

EventStub has successfully transformed hundreds of events into experiences for companies likes Microsoft, Dell, Veritas, Automation Anywhere, Ingram Micro and others. EventStub also offers turnkey solutions for events, whether physical or virtual.

This includes event marketing, attendee registration, social media promotion, event production and event setup.

In short, EventStub is a one-stop-shop for all your event needs.

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Distance is NO BARRIER

Introducing D-Link Smart Wireless Solution for Point-to-Point Deployment

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Intelligent Rate Control Improving stability of Bandwidth

Self Healing Useful in extreme noisy area

Connect to more |

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GLOBAL CIO FORUM RECOGNISES INDUSTRY TRAILBLAZERS AT CATALYSTS AWARDS 2020 Over 90 individuals, which included more than 65 CIOs, were honoured at The Future IT Summit 2020.

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he Future IT Summit 2020 concluded with the highly-anticipated announcement of the winners of Catalyst Awards 2020. These awards are amongst the industry’s most coveted, and they recognise trailblazers who have been uplifting the brand and reputation of their respective organisations in these difficult times, by leveraging various cutting-edge initiatives, platforms and market penetration. The individuals who won these awards are, in short, truly acting as catalysts in an ever-changing market landscape.

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CATALYSTS AWARDS 2020 WINNERS, MARKETING CATEGORY Apart from honouring CIOs with Catalysts Awards 2020, The Future IT Summit 2020 also acknowledged the role played by marketing teams in helping navigate their organisations through these challenging times. The winners in the Marketing category of the Catalysts Awards 2020 were those who responded to the new challenges with creative campaigns and initiatives that aligned with and furthered business goals.

These individuals are trailblazers who have been uplifting the brand and reputation of their respective organisations, by leveraging various cutting-edge initiatives, platforms and market penetration. In short, they are truly acting as catalysts in an ever-changing market landscape.

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EVENT NEWS

26 countries, 3000+ CIOs, 250+ sessions: The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2020 is coming Global CIO Forum has announced the eagerly-awaited 2020 edition of The World CIO 200 Roadshow. Bigger, broader and more engaging than ever before, the event will unfold over November and December 2020. This year, the roadshow will cover 27 countries and provide a platform for 100+ exhibitors and 250+ engaging sessions. More than 3000 CIOs and IT heads will be recognised in the 2020 edition.

The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2020 will also feature exclusive invitation-only country specific briefings, celebration of the contributions of local CIOs and offer post-event networking opportunities. Moreover, participants can tap into the collective wisdom of advisory boards and subject matter experts.

WHAT’S NEW THIS YEAR

The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2020 will offer a choice of over 10 certification courses for IT heads to hone their skills and get certified, while earning credentials. The event will host an array of training sessions and visitors will have the option to pick and participate in the ones that are most relevant to them.

Another interesting feature is the CIO 10 in 10, where a circle of 10 CIOs will gather in virtual rooms, chairing a topic and interacting with like-minded thinkers. And that is not all!

This year, the Top 3 CIOs in each country will be honoured for projects that have been a turning point not only for their organisations, but stand as an exemplary case study and reference point for the entire sector.

In short, The World CIO 200 Roadshow 2020 is set to be a unique and unrivalled opportunity for participants to understand market dynamics and latest trends, gather intelligence and insights, or become a part of a growing community of thought leaders.

ABOUT THE CIO 200 SUMMIT

Established in 2017, The CIO 200 Summit is a multi-country CIO felicitation ceremony that recognises achievements of digital leaders. The CIO 200 Awards are not a competition but a celebration of the amazing lives of CIOs and their game-changing careers.

The 2019 edition of the event toured 15 countries and gathered over 3000+ delegates over a span of three months. Key stakeholders tabled roadmaps for strategic decision making and identified yardsticks that are the key drivers of growth in the digital world.

The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 concluded over December 09-10 with a gala event at the Double Tree Hilton in Ras Al Khaimah.

The two-day event witnessed engaging thought leadership from all speakers.

Exemplary engagement with the delegates was seen from Dave Crane, Award Winning International Speaker; Venkatesh Mahadevan, CIO, Dubai Investments; Sobha Singh, Director, Oracle Corporation; Dr Erdal Ozkaya, Cybersecurity Advisor and Head of Information Security at Standard Chartered Bank; John Mattone, Executive Coach of Steve Jobs; and Dr K Hari Prasad, President Apollo Hospitals Group, India.

The workings of The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 was advised by the INSPIRE committee including Dr Esam Al Falasi MOE UAE, Venkatesh Mahadevan Dubai Investment, Ajay Rathi DHA UAE, Yahya Al Mawali, Dr Jassim Haji AI Society Bahrain, Mohammed Mahnashi MOF Saudi Arabia, and Ashith P from Almasa Capital.

The official ribbon cutting and inauguration of The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 event was done by senior government leaders from the GCC including Dr Esam AlFalasi, Director of IT, Ministry of Economy; Mohammed Mahnashi, ICT Advisor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Saudi Arabia; Dr Ali Jassim Al Aradi, Director of IT, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bahrain; Eng Suleiman Al Kharashi, Deputy Minister of Finance, Saudi Arabia; and Dr Thalaya AlFozan, Director IT, Ministry of Finance, Kuwait.

Sponsors of The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 event included Dell Technologies, Intel, Guardian One Technologies, Mindware, StorIT, Spectrum Networks, Netapp, Purestorage, Tahaluf Al Emarat, Nutanix, Rittal Middle East, Sai Global, Spire Solutions, BITS, Veritas, Rubrik, EMT Technologies, Techneplus, Datacare, Exclusive Network, Cloudhost, Finesse, Logicom, Zebra.

Supporting partners of The World CIO 200 Summit 2019 event included MCIT Saudi Arabia, Shura Council Bahrain, CIO Klub India, Ghana Chamber of Technology, Tech Pakistan, NIC, AI Society Bahrain, LOCO Service Pakistan, Awwal. https://globalcioforu m . c o m / c i o - 2 0 0 /

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COUNTRIES

3000+

C-LEVEL EXECUTIVES

250+

ENGAGING SESSIONS

WORLD’s BIGGEST CIO LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE AWARDS NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 2020

INFLUENCE INTEGRATE IMPACT

100+ EXHIBITORS

EVENT NEWS

GCF, Automation Anywhere host summit on intelligent automation in HR

On September 29, Global CIO Forum in association with Automation Anywhere, successfully hosted The Digital Workforce Rescues HR with Intelligent Automation WebSummit. The virtual websummit discussed how HR professionals can leverage Robotic Process Automation combined with Artificial Intelligence.

Human Resources organisations are at the nexus of business demands and the employee experience. HR is challenged to deliver on both fronts amid accelerating change with fewer resources.

Robotic Process Automation combined with AI is designed to free HR professionals by handling manual, repetitive, data-intensive work 10x faster and with 100% accuracy. Today, Intelligent Automation enables HR to automate repetitive tasks, access data from legacy HR systems, and enhance HR service delivery.

TOPICS COVERED

l Streamline HR operations: Automate manual HR

administration to focus on the high-value HR initiatives such as employee development and analytics. l Accelerate talent acquisition: Recruit, screen, and onboard new hires more quickly and efficiently.

Safeguard Employee Data: Ensure accuracy and completeness of employee information across the enterprise.

GCF, Cloud 4C host summit on digital transformation through IT modernisation

On September 29, Global CIO Forum in association with Cloud 4C, successfully hosted the IT Modernisation for Cost Effective Digital Transformation WebSummit. The virtual websummit discussed how organisations can achieve the digital edge required for business transformation.

Only with a robust, secure, and stable foundation can a business truly transform. By taking advantage of powerful, agile and scalable Azure architecture, organisations are able to recoup time previously spent managing servers and hardware, and put efforts into supporting other business critical challenges and key opportunities.

TOPICS COVERED

l IT frameworks for cloud and business transformation to adopt new

edge in new normal, with better TCO and compliances l Cloud4C Cloud Adoption Framework focusing on cloud adoption, cloud governance, application modernisation, operations efficiency and security l How Cloud4C can help achieve the digital edge required for business transformation l About Cloud4C Managed Services — AIOPs, DevOps and CoE — and Managed Security Services l Case studies

THE SESSION

The keynote speakers for IT Modernisation for Cost Effective Digital Transformation WebSummit were Karim Kalaawi, EVP Alliances, Cloud4C; Ravi Tank, Vice President, Cloud Practice, Cloud4C and Tushar Kumar, Cloud Solutions Architect at Cloud4C. The presentation was followed by a Q&A round.

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EVENT NEWS

GCF, Red Hat, Ingram Micro host summit on automation and containerisation

On September 28, Global CIO Forum in association with Red Hat and Ingram Micro, successfully hosted the Pace Up to the Digital Future with Automation and Containerisation WebSummit. The virtual summit discussed how automation and containerisation together can speed up the pace of innovation.

The paradigm shift to containers is more than just a wave in technology. This change has had its root in a deep-driven cultural change amongst the IT leaders in an organisation. According to RedHat, as businesses start to adopt more container technology and even build on it, they become more interested in how to combine this tool with virtual machines, where most workloads are currently running.

Containerisation has a great role to play in shaping the digital future. It not only helps companies to accelerate and ease the onboarding of applications but also significantly improve the training of DevOps teams, and deploy AI and data workloads.

TOPICS COVERED l l l l

Challenges and best practices for digital future in existing IT industry.

How automation helps customers design rapid go-to-market strategies New trends in app development and scaling How automation and containerisation together can lead to faster innovation

THE SESSION

The keynote speakers for the Pace Up to the Digital Future with Automation and Containerisation WebSummit were Waeil Eldoamiry, Senior Solutions Architect at Red Hat and Kalyan Pola, Business Unit Manager, IBM & RedHat, at Ingram Micro. Their presentations were followed by a Q&A round.

GCF, Automation Anywhere host summit on intelligent automation in healthcare On September 21, Global CIO Forum in association with Automation Anywhere, successfully hosted the Powering the Healthcare Industry with Intelligent Automation WebSummit.

The virtual summit discussed the increasingly critical role played by automation in healthcare, which is set to drive as much as 50% of various processes in just the next few years.

Health is an important word at this juncture, and it has become mandatory to create safe environment for ourselves and people around us. With the experience of health stakeholders, whether hospitals, pharmacists, insurance companies, diagnostics,

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healthcare providers, government or technology providers in preparing response and mitigating the different health disasters, risk protection has become crucial.

So, whether it is digitisation of health records, health insurance, patients testing, immunisation or medicines, organisations must be prepared for everything for ensuring safety and secure treatments.

Intelligent Automation makes it easier. Automation is no longer a piece of fiction, today it is widely applied across organisations to augment human thinking and potential, reduce costs, increase scalability, improve accuracy, generate greater value from resources and deliver seamless operations. Automation is being applied to computerise repeatable tasks, identify new opportunities for automation by extracting and understanding concepts and relationships from data patterns and prior experience, and deliver hyper personalisation in services, solutions and customer engagements. With cognitive automation, healthcare organisations can address the challenges of efficiency, patient-centricity and growth.

TOPICS COVERED

l Discover how to harness the power of RPA to efficiently process healthcare

data. l Virtually eliminate human error and stay audit-ready. l Improve clinical and financial outcomes by tapping into different data sources. l Add machine learning capabilities through advanced cognitive automation.

THE SESSION

The keynote speaker for the Powering the Healthcare Industry with Intelligent Automation WebSummit was Sumeet Pathak, Digital Workforce Evangelist, IMEA at Automation Anywhere. The websummit also hosted a panel discussion that included Shantanu SK, Global Head for Cognitive Robotics and CIO for Enterprise Systems and Processes at IQVIA; Tarek Mostafa, Sales Engineer at Automation Anywhere; and Sumeet Pathak.

EVENT NEWS

GCF, Riverbed and Mindware host summit on advanced networking in Saudi Arabia

On September 14, Global CIO Forum in association with Mindware, successfully hosted the Saudi Arabia edition of the Network Transformation and Cloud Readiness WebSummit. The websummit discussed the upcoming wave in network transformation in Saudi Arabia.

With government measures to control the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic still in effect in Saudi Arabia, organisations have had to prioritise IT investments that enable their employees to work from home.

The transition of employees to remote working arrangements has also meant that organisations must now ensure seamless and secure access to applications and data across the Internet and home networks.

WEBSUMMIT TOPICS

l How organisations can maximise network efficiency and expand

network capacity with market-leading WAN optimisation technology l How a unified performance monitoring solution provides deep and broad visibility and analytics l How organisations can ensure the fastest, most reliable delivery of SaaS, cloud and on-premises applications l How organisations can modernise their network with a softwaredefined architecture that delivers cloud-ready agility and cost savings

THE SPEAKERS

The keynote speakers for the Saudi Arabia edition of the Network Transformation and Cloud ReadinessWebSummit were Salman Ali, Regional Technical Channel Manager, Middle East, Riverbed Technology and Mohammed Al Ghali, Territory Sales Manager, Riverbed Technology.

The presentations were followed by a Q&A session.

GCF, GFI Software, Ingram Micro host summit on real-time network monitoring

On September 8, Global CIO Forum in association with GFI Software and Ingram Micro successfully hosted a WebSummit titled Think You Need More Network Bandwidth? The virtual websummit discussed the benefits of a real-time network monitoring solution, and participants also saw a brief demo of GFI Software’s Exinda Network Orchestrator solution.

Do you know how much one episode of infrastructure or application failure could cost? A recent IDC study puts the price between $100,000 and $1 million. Not per day. Per hour. It is no surprise that better network management is such an important goal, especially for businesses who often lack resources to deal with poor network performance in a timely way. Network management solutions are among the most critical solutions for small and medium sized businesses. Proactive network management can prevents downtime, decreases revenue losses and improves customer satisfaction.

TOPICS COVERED

l The value of conducting regular network performance assessments

and how to quickly l identify and remediate common performance roadblocks l Recognize the traffic, perform quality reports, create QoS policies l Why buying more bandwidth won’t solve your performance problems l About SD-WAN

THE SESSION

The keynote speaker for the websummit was Jozef Kacala, Sales Engineer, GFI Software. His specialisation is network security and networking, where he has more than seven years of experience. His presentation was followed by a Q&A round.

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EVENT NEWS

Global CIO Forum, ARCON host virtual roundtable on Privilege Access Management

On September 7, Global CIO Forum in association with ARCON, successfully hosted The Privilege is all Yours virtual roundtable with cybersecurity professionals from the BFSI sector in Saudi Arabia. The gathering discussed the critical role played by Privilege Access Management in protecting organisations.

As cyberattacks become increasingly sophisticated and devastating, it is critical that organisations have granular level control over privilege accounts.

Privilege Access Management is, therefore, one of the most critical factors today in building unified access controls and governance framework, thereby making it one of the topmost priorities of CISOs and CIOs today.

TOPICS COVERED

Manage, monitor and control privileged accounts seamlessly Ensure secure access to target systems and applications Implement deepest levels of granular level control over privileged accounts Strengthen authentication mechanism with multi-factor validation and password vaulting l Offer a centralized policy framework l l l l

THE SESSION

During the Privilege is all Yours virtual roundtable, Anil Bhandari, Chief Mentor and Thought Leader at ARCON fielded a diverse set of questions from the participants. The session was interspersed with multiple polls, and lasted over an hour.

Global CIO Forum, Riverbed, StarLink host advanced networking summit

On September 1, Global CIO Forum in association with Riverbed and StarLink, successfully hosted the Qatar edition of the Network Transformation and Cloud Readiness WebSummit. The websummit discussed the upcoming wave in network transformation in Qatar. With government measures to control the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic still in effect in Qatar, organisations have had to prioritise IT investments that enable their employees to work from home.

The transition of employees to remote working arrangements has also meant that organisations must now ensure seamless and secure access to applications and data across the Internet and home networks.

WEBSUMMIT TOPICS

l How organisations can maximise network efficiency

and expand network capacity with market-leading WAN optimisation technology l How a unified performance monitoring solution provides deep and broad visibility and analytics l How organisations can ensure the fastest, most reliable delivery of SaaS, cloud and on-premises applications l How organisations can modernise their network with a softwaredefined architecture that delivers cloud-ready agility and cost savings

THE SPEAKERS

The keynote speakers for the Qatar edition of the Network Transformation and Cloud ReadinessWebSummit were Salman Ali, Regional Technical Channel Manager, Middle East at Riverbed and Shahzad Hussain, Senior Presales Consultant at StarLink. The presentations were followed by a Q&A session.

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CHANNEL NEWS

Spectrum Networks becomes AWS Training Partner in the UAE Spectrum Networks, a front-runner in corporate B2B trainings and certifications, has announced that it has become an Amazon Web Services, AWS, Training Partner, to provide AWS certified training courses in the UAE. This complements Spectrum Networks’ existing portfolio of end-to-end trainings on specific job roles and verticals, and enables it to be a one-stop-shop for the finest of technology trainings in the market.

Organisations need individuals with cloud skills to help transform their business. AWS Training and Certification helps people build and validate their cloud skills in order to do more and maximise their returns on cloud. Delivered by AWS Authorized Instructors, Spectrum will provide the entire line-up of AWS trainings on technologies like cloud computing, storage, database, AI and more. These include trainings all the way from the one-day foundational courses to advanced job role courses that enable candidates to certify right up to the associate and professional levels. A wide variety of specialty courses are also being covered.

chat, and social media such as Instagram, Google Play, Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp. It has pre-built integrations with all significant industry-grade CRMs. Ameyo’s solutions are ready to support businesses in the UAE and Oman with various options, including on-premise deployments in customer-centric data centres or through the cloud-like AWS, Azure, Oracle, or D-Link cloud. Ameyo’s solution is being used by several brands in UAE and Oman like DAMAC, Alfardan Group, Al Ansari Exchange, Ajman Executive Council, D-Link has announced that it has entered into an exclusive partner- Holiday Factory, HolidayMe, ship with Ameyo, a provider of omnichannel customer engagement INAYA, and many more. solutions. D-Link is Ameyo’s only cloud partner in the UAE and D-Link has been an early Oman. Ameyo helps consumer-facing brands implement resultsadopter of cloud technology with its mydlink services launched focussed engagement with customers across mediums like voice, email, chat, social media, and video for sales, onboarding, customer back in 2008, its migration to its Nuclias Business cloud-based service, and collections use cases.

Its product suite includes Omnichannel Contact Centre solusolutions covering wireless, tions, helpdesk and ticketing software. Ameyo provides strong switching, surveillance, and omnichannel capabilities of voice, IVR, ACD, dialers, email, SD-WAN.

D-Link, Ameyo to launch contact centre in the UAE and Oman

SANJEEV SINGH, MANAGING DIRECTOR, SPECTRUM NETWORKS.

AVEVA launches programme for industrial channel partners ANAND CHOUDHA, CEO, SPECTRAMI.

AVEVA has launched AVEVA Select, a new programme designed for partners to gain full access to AVEVA’s comprehensive software portfolio. The new AVEVA Select programme is designed to help customers accelerate their digital transformation agendas by leveraging the breadth of the AVEVA software portfolio across its install base. The AVEVA Partner Network today boasts over 5,000 members providing opportunities for alliances, systems integrators, distributors, solution providers and technology partners to participate in the AVEVA community.

With programmes designed to suit every product and solution specialisation and industry,

AVEVA Select aligns to both market and technology trends helping companies simplify design, optimise production, reduce energy and maximise performance. Its programmes and support initiatives are designed to promote the variety and value of applications developed and delivered on the AVEVA platform worldwide.

With AVEVA Select, partners will be able access the entire AVEVA portfolio through the channel that they have known and trusted, often for as long as 30 years. The programme will expand AVEVA’s reach to a wider distribution of industries, outside its previous core customer base of mid/downstream Oil & Gas, heavy chemical, power generation and distribution, to incorporate many other sectors including Food and Beverage, Consumer Packaged Goods, Smart Cities and Infrastructure, Mining, Paper and Pulp, Utilities, Water and Waste and discrete industries like automotive and electronics.

The expanded AVEVA Select customer base will be able to leverage their installed Monitor and Control, and Planning and Operations solutions from AVEVA to address new challenges, create opportunities and improve the performance of their industrial operations.

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CHANNEL NEWS

Spectrami to distribute Menlo Security’s cloud platform

Spectrami has recently been appointed Menlo’s sole distributor for the Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, METNA, region after an extensive selection process.

Menlo Security’s Cloud Secure Web Gateway, SWG, platform with Isolation Core delivers a fundamentally different approach to security; moving the fetch and execute functions of web browsing away from your network and isolating it in Menlo’s cloud platform, so only safe, malware-free rendering information is delivered to a user’s device whilst maintaining a completely native user experience.

Menlo’s Proxy Platform built on an Isolation Core is a cloud-native solution that requires no endpoint software and can be utilised on any device, OS or browser.

Their cloud and virtual appliance offerings are licensed via an annual subscription, and its Global Elastic Cloud allows deployment at infinite scale to completely eliminate the threat of malware from web sites, email and documents. This 100% malware protection guarantee is backed up by a money-back warranty of up to $1 million for any customer that experiences an infection from malware that passes through Menlo, the first of its kind from any Isolation or Cloud Proxy vendor.

With this partnership, Spectrami continues to help organisations’ navigate the journey towards secure digital transformation. Spectrami is authorised to distribute Menlo Security’s portfolio across the Middle East, Turkey and North Africa.

ANAND CHOUDHA, CEO, SPECTRAMI.

(left to right) Nandini Sapru, Vice President of Sales and Naresh Kumar, Director of Regional Business Development, emt Distribution.

emt Distribution announces support for OPEX model projects emt Distribution, a specialty IT and IT security products distributor has announced that it will be supporting customers and partners for selected products and regions with OPEX model options for purchase. While speaking to channel partners and customers through the intensive months of Covid19 lockdown, emt Distribution found that they were in need of good IT infrastructure and information security products. Unfortunately due to unfavourable market conditions, there were delays, gaps and budget cuts at end user companies.

After discussions with our vendors and partners, emt was able to work out split payment and special payment options for our clients. emt encourages partners and customers to ask for these options as applicable to specific products in the portfolio. emt managed service programmes place a company’s information technology infrastructure under the management of experienced specialists to ensure high levels of availability for all mission-critical systems. A complete managed services portfolio is available to help manage IT so that the company can manage the rest of its business. emt MSPs partners have the ability to invest in capabilities that enable them to expand into new market areas or overcome periods of economic crisis.

WILLEM HENDRICKX,VICE PRESIDENT OF INTERNATIONAL SALES, VECTRA.

Vectra, Exclusive Networks partner on security platform Vectra AI has announced the expansion of its distribution channel in the Middle East by partnering with Exclusive Networks. Powered by AI, the Cognito platform from Vectra automatically detects and prioritises cyberattacker behaviours

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in real time while empowering threat hunters to perform conclusive incident investigations.

The Cognito platform provides 360-degree visibility into hidden threats in cloud, data centre,IoT, and enterprise infrastructures, leaving attackers with nowhere to hide.

The security of networked data, services and infrastructure is a high priority as organisations worldwide migrate computing resources and corporate assets to the cloud for greater operational scale and cost efficiencies. This year alone, organisations are expected to spend about $1.9 billion on enterprise information security in the Middle East and North Africa region.

But the cloud has its challenges and it is vital to navigate this transformation cautiously. Cloud architectures suffer from security vulnerabilities across infrastructures, platforms and applications. And as the threat landscape across cloud, data centre, IoT, and enterprise networks continues to change and expand, organisations are faced with a global shortage of cybersecurity talent to stay ahead of cyberattackers.

CHANNEL NEWS

CorporateStack partners with Roshan in Afghanistan

(left to right) Mohamed Abdin, Co-Founder, CorporateStack and Osama Mortada, Founder and CEO, CorporateStack.

CorporateStack has announced that it has partnered with Roshan, Afghanistan’s telecom operator, to expand its footprint in the country. Recently the top management of both the companies, CorporateStack and Roshan, got together in Dubai to sign a partnership agreement at an official signing ceremony. Under the agreement, Roshan will represent CorporateStack in Afghanistan and it will be exclusively responsible to distribute and resell the CorporateStack’s award winning software solutions such as sales, CRM, HR management, asset management, finance, and ERP across the country.

Roshan has been a pioneer in leveraging its robust network infrastructure and technology to support the government and the people of Afghanistan. Roshan is also authorised exclusively to market and sell the entire suite of CorporateStack solution across Afghanistan. The telecom provider is also trained to offer Level 1 support to all customers at the local level.

In line with the global expansion policy, the company is excited to enter the Afghan market. Roshan with its customer base of over 6.5 million provides us a perfect platform to introduce solutions in the Afghanistan to help thousands of enterprises automate their processes and transform them digitally to be at par with the rest of the world.

Ooredoo, Nutanix to offer VDI-as-a-Service in Kuwait

Ooredoo Telecom has signed a partnership with Nutanix to offer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, VDI-as-a-Service to businesses in Kuwait. The telecom service provider has implemented Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform combined with Citrix Virtual Desktops software in its datacentre with a view to provide a fully supported solution for desktop virtualisation to SMBs and enterprise customers. Ooredoo will offer VDI-as-a-Service on a subscription basis out of its state-of-the-art data centre facilities that offer integrated networking, security, service SLAs and a host of other solutions to business in Kuwait.

Physical desktops and laptops are becoming a poor fit for today’s dynamic, digital workplace. Intelligent digital workspaces, delivered by VDI, enable users to access applications and information from anywhere while data remains secure, making them ideal for end-user computing needs. The advantages of VDI-as-a-Service are around flexibility, scalability, security and cost savings with the OPEX model being highly favoured by businesses looking to save on high up-front infrastructure costs.

BILAL AGHA, B2B MARKETING DIRECTOR, OOREDOO KUWAIT.

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CHANNEL NEWS

Credence Security’s roadshow combines virtual and real interactions Credence Security announced that the fifth edition of its roadshow involved a blend of face-to-face and virtual interaction, in light of travel restrictions and public safety concerns during the Covid-19 crisis. The Credence Security Roadshow 2020 had been specially designed to give delegates a blueprint for building cyber resilience in the digital era. The event took place September 15-16 and was targeted at a global audience, with face-to-face networking taking place, on a smaller scale than usual, with focus vendors in Dubai, Riyadh, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Hyderabad, and Lagos.

Sessions were split into four tracks:

GARRETH SCOTT GROUP MD, CREDENCE SECURITY.

Continuous Adaptive Risk Assessment; Data Security and Governance; Digital Forensics and Incident Response; and Identity, Payments and Digital Security.

Eight customer case studies, one for each track, over two days, gave attendees further insight into the state of play across the threat landscape, as did keynotes by leading voices from the region’s cybersecurity industry, including the CISO of the UAE’s leading Islamic Bank, the Head of Security for Emirates Global Aluminium, and the leader of one of the largest digital-forensics labs in the Middle East.

Online exhibits included virtual lobbies and interactive spaces, as well as vendor stands, networking rooms, auditoriums, and technical sessions. Credence specialists conducted real-time conferences with vendors through various tools, and held gamification sessions such as pop quizzes, leader-boards, and polling, with prizes and giveaways throughout the two-day event.

Qualys, Ivanti partner to enhance patch remediation process Ivanti and Qualys have announced an expanded partnership to provide for the integration of Ivanti Patch Management technology within the Qualys VMDR, Vulnerability Management Detection Response, platform.

The next phase of the integration will allow Qualys customers to patch MacOS systems, as well as over 70 third-party Mac applications, directly through Qualys VMDR. The Ivanti and Qualys partnership provides for tight integration of Ivanti Patch Management into Qualys VMDR to automate and simplify the patch remediation process. As a result, customers will be able to quickly detect vulnerabilities, from endpoint to datacenter, and automatically deploy expertly pre-tested Mac patches across dozens of third-party applications.

Current Microsoft patch coverage includes both security and non-security content for all supported products, operating systems, and applications, including Microsoft Office.

The Ivanti patch catalog is one of the industry’s most comprehensive catalogs currently securing over 180 million endpoints globally.

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Qualys VMDR provides an all-in-one cloud-based app that automates the entire vulnerability management cycle across onpremises, endpoints, cloud, mobile, containers, OT and IoT environments, significantly accelerating the ability for organisations to respond to threats and prevent breaches.

Deployment for the cloud-based app is easy, and pricing is asset based, which makes it simple to procure. Ivanti Patch Management technology is available today as an integrated component of Qualys VMDR. Ivanti Patch Management technology for OEM partners, marketed as Ivanti Security Controls SDK, is provided to partners through a series of SDKs that allow rapid integration of a complete patch management solution into existing security solutions.

These SDKs cover the patch management life cycle from endpoint assessment to patch packaging to patch deployment. This allows partners to deliver a full application security solution with patch content that covers Windows OS, MacOS and Linux variants as well as thousands of third-party applications.

SUMEDH THAKAR, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, QUALYS.

CHANNEL NEWS

(left to right) Nicholas Argyrides, General Manager, Gulf, Mindware and Peter Lacey, Commercial Head, Middle East, Acer.

Mindware to distribute Acer’s portfolio in the Middle East Mindware has announced that it has signed a commercial distribution agreement across the Middle East with Acer. This will include the vendor’s commercial and education portfolio including Windows based laptops, Chromebook devices, accessories, projectors, Enduro and ConceptD devices. The main focus will be on the Travelmate Series, specifically designed both for the corporate world and the public sector. Mindware will drive the market penetration of these devices by mobilizing its extensive channel network across the region.

As part of the strategy to engage more closely with the enterprise sector, vendor and distribu-

tor will work hand-in-hand to educate the market on the latest commercial and education focused best practices and technologies.

Acer Middle East has achieved great success in the education market with a 92% market share in Chrome OS devices for Q1’ 2020 in UAE, as per latest statistics from research and consulting firm Futuresource Consulting. In 2019, Acer Middle East achieved the number one position in the region with 71% Market Share.

Acer Middle East and Mindware will work closely together in conducting events and webinars so as to interact and engage with

resellers. This will give channel partners a better understanding of the capabilities of the various products so that they can propose the best solutions to end customers.

Acer Middle East will be offering the channel the opportunity of joining its Synergy programme, which provides business rewards for supporting the Acer line-up. They will also bring the well-established Reliability Promise to the market. With a complete service, support and marketing back office based in Dubai, the vendor will be able to offer the region attractive promotions as well as International Software Vendor programmes.

Kodak Alaris, UiPath to enhance information capture with RPA

VANILDA GRANDO, DIRECTOR GLOBAL SALES DEVELOPMENT, ALARIS DIVISION OF KODAK ALARIS.

Kodak Alaris has announced a global alliance with UiPath to enable both companies’ channel partners and customers to leverage Kodak Alaris’ information capture solutions and UiPath software to accelerate digital transformation by automating and streamlining business processes. The companies also introduced their integration via the Alaris Capture Pro to UiPath Orchestrator Connector, which provides a seamless connection between fully indexed, high quality images from Kodak scanners and UiPath bots.

RPA is the key to working smarter and for many organisations, in particular, those most reliant on paper-based processes, has the potential to be truly transformative when used to modernise information and data capture. The alliance between UiPath and Kodak Alaris will generate new business opportunities for system integrators and software vendors, helping them expand RPA projects and deliver intelligent scanning and information capture solutions to customers in sectors including Government, Financial Services, Logistic and Healthcare.

RPA starts with usable data, which in turn starts with high quality images. Perfect Page Technology from Kodak Alaris optimises the image quality of every page for more accurate information extraction and up to 20% better OCR read rates, while Capture Pro Software quickly converts batches of paper into high-quality images — the foundation for accurate, streamlined data and decision-making.

The UiPath RPA platform automates sequences of repeatable processes, minimises disruption, uncovers efficiencies and provides insights, making the path to digital transformation fast and cost-effective.

Once information is captured via the scanner, software robots complete repetitive, rules-based tasks such as moving files and folders, extracting structured data from documents and executing processes with it.

On July 29th, Kodak Alaris hosted a virtual event where keynote speaker Jim Walker from UiPath and Joe Yankle from Kodak Alaris shared tips for helping organisations automate business processes, connect their digital workforces and drive better business outcomes.

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CHANNEL NEWS

Anas A Abdul-Haiy, Director and Deputy CEO, Proven Consult.

Cihat Kahraman, Business Development Director and Co-Founder, VSight.

Proven Consult to offer VSight’s AR tools in ME Proven Consult has announced a strategic partnership with VSight. As per the terms of the agreement, Proven Consult will be VSight’s exclusive partner in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain.

VSight specialises in AR to eliminate physical boundaries and enhance productivity in remote environments. As an artificial intelligence solutions provider, Proven Consult will deliver consulting services for VSight’s offerings to customers across verticals such as manufacturing, oil and gas, telecom, energy,

utilities, automotive and machinery. Proven’s experienced technical team across the GCC will assist customers to address their remote work challenges through VSight’s AR driven solutions.

A recent report by research firm IDC earlier this year said that enterprises are moving to augmented and virtual reality majorly driven by leading use cases with $31.2 Billion spend by 2023. As a provider of AR remote support and remote assistance software platform, VSight enables customer organisations to easily

share knowledge to perform operations such as maintenance, repair, inspection, training remotely.

The technology provider offers its state-of-the-art AR-enabled remote support and remote assistance software platform VSight Remote. Developed for enterprises, VSight Remote integrated with smart glasses provides a hands-free approach for field workers to perform their tasks effortlessly and offers a huge potential for efficiency gains. With VSight Remote and smart glasses, businesses can collaborate their experts and workers online by removing the geographic boundaries.

StarLink, Commvault partner to offer agile IT data strategy

Nidal Othman, Co-founder and Managing Director, StarLink.

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StarLink has announced a distribution partnership with Commvault for META with plans to empower progressive enterprises to rethink data management. In the wake of the current pandemic, the security landscape has become even more challenging and organisations are faced with serious uncertainties about their data.

This includes how data can be managed and rapidly recovered in the event of a cyberattack or breach. This new normal has created the need for an even greater robust data protection, cloud, and information management solution.

Commvault can help businesses move, manage, recover and use an organisation’s most critical asset, data, in exciting new ways.

The flexible and comprehensive data management platform helps deliver actionable insights from data stored across the IT infrastructure, enabling enterprises to redefine backup and recovery.

The two companies will jointly collaborate to distribute Commvault’s Enterprise Data Management and SAAS Backup and Recovery product suite and under this agreement, StarLink pledges to deploy its Business Development, Technical and Marketing expertise in building stronger brand awareness and to expand Commvault’s market share.

CLOUD NEWS

Oracle to be the secure cloud provider for TikTok

SAFRA CATZ, CEO, ORACLE.

Oracle has announced that it was chosen to become TikTok’s secure cloud technology provider. This technical decision by TikTok was heavily influenced by Zoom’s recent success in moving a large portion of its video conferencing capacity to the Oracle Public Cloud. Oracle Chief Technology Officer, Larry Ellison, noted that TikTok picked Oracle’s new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure because it’s much faster, more reliable, and more secure than the first generation technology currently offered by all the other major cloud providers.

In the 2020 Industry CloudPath survey that IDC recently released where it surveyed 935 Infrastructure as a Service customers on their satisfaction with the top IaaS vendors including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud, Oracle IaaS received the highest satisfaction score.

As a part of this agreement, TikTok will run on the Oracle Cloud and Oracle will become a minority investor in TikTok Global. Based on decades of experience securing the world’s most sensitive data, the Oracle Generation 2 cloud was built from the ground up to fully isolate running applications and autonomously respond to security threats. Oracle will combine its secure cloud technology with continuous code reviews, monitoring, and auditing to provide unprecedented assurance that US TikTok user data is private and secure.

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CLOUD NEWS

Aruba finds orgs to invest more on cloud-based networking In response to the pandemic, IT leaders in EMEA are now investing more in cloud-based and AI-powered networking technologies as business recovery plans take shape, according to research from Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. The findings in a new global report Preparing for the post-pandemic workplace, suggested that IT leaders are responding to the challenges associated with enabling a highly distributed workforce and the emergence of the hybrid workplace, with people needing to move seamlessly between working on campus, at home and on the road, and as such are looking to evolve their network infrastructure and shift away from CapEx investments towards solutions consumed as a service.

JACOB CHACKO, REGIONAL BUSINESS HEAD, MESA, HPE ARUBA.

ServiceNow announces integration with Cisco DNA Spaces

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The average proportion of IT services consumed via subscription in the UAE will accelerate by 49% in the next two years, from 39% of the total today to 58% in 2022, and the share of organisations that consume over 50% of their IT solutions as a service will increase by approximately 56% in that time.

The report, which surveyed 2400 ITDMs in over 20 countries including the UAE and eight key industries, looked at how they have responded to IT and business demands in the wake of Covid-19, what investment decisions are being made as a result, and the consumption models now being considered. A number of key findings stood out: Impact of Covid-19 has significant implications ITDMs report that the impact of Covid-19 has been significant both on their employees and short-term network investments: l In the UAE, 25% describing the impact on their employees as significant, widespread furlough or layoffs, while 43% considered it moderate, temporary reductions in some functions, and 23% low, very few jobs impacted. l In EMEA, Russia, 27%, UAE, 25%, Sweden and France, both 24%, ranked highest in terms of significant impact with Spain, 13%, and The Netherlands, 15%, significantly lower.

ServiceNow has announced a new integration with Cisco DNA Spaces to enhance contact tracing with its Wi-Fi-enabled Proximity Reporting app. This integration will help businesses returning employees to the workplace by monitoring their workspaces closely for physical distancing.

The company also added new capabilities to its ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite, making travel for business safer and more manageable.

The integration with Cisco DNA Spaces will allow joint customers of ServiceNow and Cisco to seamlessly import location-based data into the ServiceNow Contact Tracing app and identify potential interactions with an affected employee.

Proximity Reporting from Cisco DNA Spaces allows customers to better understand the extent of each interaction and potential exposure to floors and buildings across the workplace.

This is based on employees’ Wi-Fi network connections to laptops or mobile devices, so case managers can take immediate and informed actions. The new integrated solution will help to reduce workplace transmission of infectious diseases, like Covid-19, by identifying on-site employees who might have been in contact with an affected employee.

CLOUD NEWS

Riverbed launches acceleration solutions for Microsoft apps Riverbed has added new cloud-based offerings into its arsenal of Riverbed Application Acceleration Solutions, all specifically built to help significantly accelerate and provide a consistent user experience for Microsoft collaboration, productivity and video streaming applications. As companies continue to provide broader flexibility for employees to work from anywhere, organisations can run Riverbed’s flexible SaaS offerings to optimise performance and productivity for SaaS apps across multiple office locations and for remote users regardless of location, bandwidth or latency.

RIVERBED SAAS ACCELERATOR

The release of SaaS Accelerator will provide new support for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Stream live events and on-demand video, delivering increased performance for the best experience for users in any office, accessing video from any device. Microsoft has seen an

explosive growth in collaboration and video applications, with Teams reporting more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day and over 75 million daily active users, with two-thirds of users having shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams.

SaaS Accelerator eliminates the networking headaches inherent with corporate video communications with an enterprise-class SD-eCDN that can be deployed in minutes, reducing up to 99% of video data from corporate networks, enhancing the overall user experience. The SaaS Accelerator Manager delivers comprehensive analytics for network teams and event owners, including bandwidth savings, quality of experience, reach, viewing duration and more.

Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, a fully cloudbased service, enables enterprises to ensure fast, consistent performance and user experience as demand for always-available enterprise SaaS applications continues to

Tech Mahindra launches cloud operations platform

Tech Mahindra has announced the launch of its intelligent cloud operations and subscription management platform, iCOPS, for global enterprises. The platform simplifies and streamlines cloud operations to improve efficiency by leveraging AIOps and analytics with data security and cost optimisation. iCOPS reinforces Tech Mahindra’s capabili-

ties to deliver unified management experience across hybrid and multi-cloud operations with a focus on enhancing compliance and security for enterprises. The platform leverages AIOps, Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, and analytics to provide insights for cloud operations including capacity utilisation and continuous cost optimisation across all cloud

DANTE MALAGRINO, CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER, RIVERBED.

grow, and now scales to meet the needs of the largest enterprises in the world to support 50,000 concurrent users per accelerated app. In addition to adding new support for Microsoft Teams and Stream, SaaS Accelerator now also supports Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Additionally, Riverbed SaaS Accelerator continues to accelerate and boost the performance by up to 10x of other top enterprise collaboration applications.

environments. The end-to-end platform will help enterprises get the benefits of simplified cloud operations, reduced cloud spends and comprehensive visibility across operations.

Tech Mahindra’s iCOPS platform comprises of pre-configured core and integrated software for public cloud operations as to gives a unified view across enterprise IT operations be it cloud operations, infrastructure operations or network operations. Amalgamation of iCOPS with Tech Mahindra’s infrastructure operations platform, TACTiX, hybrid and multi-Cloud management platform, mPAC 3.0 and NetOps. ai will support enterprises to build a single view across enterprise IT operations. iCOPS Platform focus areas include: l TechOps. Focus on automated day-to-day tasks and deployments for zero downtime; for proactive problem resolution l SecOps. Focus on zero vulnerability with operations security for hardening, backup, monitoring, operations and Cloud platform governance l DevOps. Focus on zero manual interventions with integration with DevOps l FinOps. Focus on continuous cost management and metrics driven cost optimisation

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CLOUD NEWS

Linesight targets new data centre contracts in Saudi Arabia International construction consultancy, Linesight, is targeting Saudi Arabia’s data centre pipeline as the country works to build an economy based on technology and knowledge as laid out in its Vision 2030. Having recently announced several new data centre contract wins in the Middle East, growing the value of its active projects to over $500 million, Riyadhbased Linesight is now preparing for an influx of new data centre contracts in the fastest-growing cloud adoption market in the region.

Managed services such as data storage, data maintenance, and remote access to applications have seen significant growth in Saudi Arabia in recent years. This is in line with Saudi Telecoms Company’s plans to build 12 new data storage facilities by 2022 to replace their legacy systems, while the country’s private sector businesses look to take advantage of the opportunity to outsource operations to reduce in-house operational costs related to managing data.

Meanwhile, the growing volume of big data generated each year in the country is primarily driven by the implementation of a new ICT strategy; an expanded rollout of fixed broadband, fibre and 5G; the adoption of smart city initiatives, and advances in technology, e-government, and e-commerce.

the support of an appealing and functional website. Yet, creating one from scratch can be overwhelming, especially if the website is to be in another language other than SELINA BIEBER, SENIOR REGIONAL English, which is most commonly DIRECTOR FOR MENA, used.

TURKEY, AND SOUTH AFRICA, GODADDY. With GoDaddy’s new Arabic website builder, customers can build and publish a professional looking and fully functional website in Arabic language, for Arabic entrepreneurs across the MENA region. They can now design content, incorporate customer-friendly features such as mobile-friendly site design and a PayPal button, GoDaddy has launched its Arabic website builder to enable and develop the website entirely in Arabic-speaking customers to build a website and e-store Arabic with ease and precision. entirely in their native language. Now more than ever small The Arabic website builder tool businesses need an online presence and e-store. E-commerce also allow customers to connect retail sales are expected to reach $49B in 2021, as more people their website to their respective shop online as a result of the pandemic. As shopping trends business-social media accounts around the world shift, the demand for online brand presence such as Facebook, Instagram, and e-commerce stores are increasing with studies indicating an and Twitter. Customers can average annual growth rate of 25% in e-commerce in the region, also integrate an Arabic e-store higher than the global average. within the website to sell physical Additionally, recent studies have shown that 48% of UAE products, digital products, and/or and Saudi Arabia consumers are getting their shopping ideas services. Additionally, GoDaddy and inspirations online, with more than 60% of shoppers in customers can create a multilingual the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and 43% in Egypt, completing an website by adding other languages online transaction at least once. Entrepreneurs today aim to and having Arabic as the website’s enhance their business and maximise customer retention with main language.

GoDaddy launches Arabic website builder and e-store

AVEVA unveils Cloud-First strategy to boost response

CIARAN MCCORMACK, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, LINESIGHT MIDDLE EAST.

RAVI GOPINATH, CHIEF CLOUD OFFICER AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, AVEVA.

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AVEVA has unveiled Cloud-First, a key component of its long-term software portfolio strategy to focus on providing core services in the cloud to ensure high uptime and availability, user management and the flexibility to try new solutions. The strategy includes the introduction of scenario-driven integration between products for rapid time to value. As part of this strategy, AVEVA has also announced significant new advances to its cloud platform, AVEVA Connect, AVEVA Unified Engineering and AVEVA Insight Guided and Advanced Analytics. These new solutions, accessed in the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership, help users to improve efficiency and enable decision support with infused industrial Artificial Intelligence.

Designed to securely host AVEVA software solutions in the cloud, AVEVA Connect already enables more than 1,900 customers and over 25,000 users to access multiple products from one platform with a single sign-on. Connecting teams, data and processes in the Cloud is a key differentiator for AVEVA today given the changes in working patterns, the massive amounts of data being generated by industries and the need to bring many disparate processes together via one source. It facilitates improved user management across all assets as well as the capability to monitor usage of subscription credits across the entire AVEVA software portfolio.

SECURITY NEWS

Cloud Box Technologies launches new security practice Cloud Box Technologies, CBT, has announced the expansion of its business with the launch of its new security practice, with an expanded team of cybersecurity specialists and an end-to-end security solutions and services portfolio. With the large-scale increase and emphasis on digital transformation in the post-pandemic workplace, threat, risk, and vulnerability levels have also increased across enterprises. CBT has adopted a holistic approach in offering its cyber security services and believes this is a business enabler for enterprises in the region that are tackling transformation technologies in the new normal.

The additional cyber security services offered by CBT is being delivered by a team

RANJITH KAIPPADA, DIRECTOR, CLOUD BOX TECHNOLOGIES.

managed by Rohit Bhargav and Saddiq Ameen. Rohit Bhargav, Practice Head, Cloud and Security at Cloud Box Technologies, has an international networking and systems engineering background of over 15 years. He is also experienced in enterprise networking and security. He previously worked at Dimension Data, Chatsworth Products and Huawei.

Unit 42 warns of ransomware targeting state-run orgs On July 6 and July 9, 2020, the Unit 42 team at Palo Alto Networks observed files associated with an attack on two state-run organisations in the Middle East and North Africa that ultimately installed and ran a variant of the Thanos ransomware. The Thanos variant created a text file that displayed a ransom message requesting the victim transfer “20,000$” into a specified Bitcoin wallet to restore the files on the system. Unit 42 does

not have visibility into the overall impacts of these attacks or whether or not the threat actors were successful in receiving a payment from the victims.

The ransomware was also configured to overwrite the master boot record, which is an important component loaded on a system’s hard drive that is required for the computer to locate and load the operating system. The ransomware overwrites the MBR to display

Saddiq Ameen is a Senior Cyber Security Professional specialising in security engineering, risk management and security monitoring, with over ten years of experience in the region.

He previously worked at CyberSafe, Paramount Computer Systems, and Ingram Micro.

According to Gartner, cybercriminals are operating highly sophisticated organisations with a variety of low-cost, readily available hacking tools. A lack of relevant skills and low cybersecurity budgets means that organisations are falling behind in their attempts to counter the growing number of cyberattacks.

CBT is attempting to fill this gap for additional resources, to mitigate the threat of cyberattacks, that can lead to data breaches, loss of intellectual property and regulatory exposure.

The portfolio of cyber security services from CBT now includes system protection, network and data protection, cloud security, identity and access governance, and managed and professional security services. To deliver these cyber security solutions and services, CBT has partnered with global vendors such as Fortinet, Sophos, Pulse Secure, Digital Insights, Forcepoint, Tenable Security, Symantec, amongst others.

the same ransom message as the previously mentioned text file, which is a technique Unit 42 does not see often. Overwriting the MBR is a more destructive approach to ransomware than usual.

Victims would have to expend more effort to recover their files, even if they paid the ransom. Fortunately, in this case, the code responsible for overwriting the MBR caused an exception because the ransom message contained invalid characters, which left the MBR intact and allowed the system to boot correctly. This means that even though the ransomware was configured to overwrite the MBR, the threat actors were unsuccessful in causing the computers they infected with the Thanos ransomware not to boot.

The Thanos ransomware has a builder that allows actors to customise the sample with a variety of available settings. The fact Thanos is for sale suggests the likelihood of multiple threat actors using this ransomware. However, Unit 42 believes with high confidence that the same actor used a Thanos variant in attacks on two state-run organisations in the Middle East and North Africa.

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SUPPLEMENT OF ENTERPRISE CHANNELS MEA

SUPPLEMENT OF ENTERPRISE CHANNELS MEA

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION FEBRUARY 2020

THE CHANGE TO FUTURISTIC BUSINESS

biznesstransform.com

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION SEPTEMBER 2018

THE CHANGE TO FUTURISTIC BUSINESS

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EXCLUSIVE AVEVA

ARRIVAL OF DIGITAL TWINS

Craig Hayman, CEO Aveva.

CYBORGS CAN WE REBUILD THE HUMAN BEING Developments in bioengineering have opened the doors to overcome human limitations.

AVEVA’s end to end tracking of industrial asset performance through digital solutions is making digital twins a reality in the region.

Andy Brocklehurst, Cisco

Osama AlHaj-Issa, HPE Aruba

Mahmoud AlYahya, Xerox

NEIL HARBISSON Cyborg and designer of artificial senses

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W w

Ali Sajwani, DAMAC Properties.

BLENDING INNOVATION, TECHNOLOGY INTO CULTURE

Ektaa Sibal

SELF-BELIEF LEADS TO EXCELLENCE

Suzanne Adnams, Gartner

CIOS NEED TO MANAGE ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

Amel Gardner, Epicor

CHANGE MANAGEMENT DURING IR4

Manishi Sanwal, Voiceback Technologies.

CREATE CUSTOMER DELIGHT BY USING ANALYTICS

Henrique Vale, Nokia

HOW TELECOS NEED TO MANAGE BIG DATA REPOSITORIES

David Warburton, F5 Networks

WHY THE BITCOIN BLOCKCHAIN IS TOO LARGE TO BE HACKED

Srinivasan CR, Tata Communications

WHY BANKS NEED TO START CONSIDERING OUTSOURCED SOCs

Morey Haber, BeyondTrust

IF YOUR APPLICATION IS HACKED SO CAN YOUR BLOCKCHAIN

CELEBRATING

MONTHS

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BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION OCTOBER 2018

THE CHANGE TO FUTURISTIC BUSINESS

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ARBISSON

ial senses

BLOCKCHAIN Which regional industries will be early adopters

ION IS YOUR

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HPE ARUBA, TECH MAHINDRA

BUILDING TRANSFORMED

EDGE ENTERPRISES AT THE

Jacob Chacko HPE ARUBA

Ram Ramachandran Tech Mahindra

The edge of the network is closest to the digital customer, consolidating analytics in real time, while intelligently orchestrating with the core.

Deborah Alvord, Gartner.

WORKSPACES WILL NEED TO TRANSFORM

Farhan Syed, KPMG.

REALIGNING THE BANKING ENTERPRISE

Tom De Waele, Bain.

STEPS CEOS MUST TAKE TO COPE WITH PANDEMIC

Ranjith Kaippada, Cloud Box Technologies.

E-RETAILERS CAN NO LONGER DELAY AI

Ektaa Sibal.

WORDS, THOUGHTS, MINDSET

COVER FEATURE

PUBLIC CLOUD

INNOVATION, SPEED, SCALE

Players are fixed but positions are not. Speed, innovation, scale, alignment, partnerships, dominate the jostling and maneuvering taking place.

n A l ex M c M u l l a n , C TO , P u r e S t o r a g e n Ay m a n A l S h a i k h , S e n i o r M a n a g e r, S o l u t i o n Architect, Middle East and Africa, Red Hat n Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Group Le a d , M i c r o s o f t U A E n P a u l o P e r e i r a , D i r e c t o r S y s t e m s E n g i n e e r i n g , E m e r g i n g M a r ke t s and Eastern Europe, Nutanix n P h i l l i p L i u , G e n e r a l M a n a g e r, M i d d l e E a s t a n d A f r i c a , Alibaba Cloud Intelligence n A b d u l R a h m a n A l T h e h a i b a n , S e n i o r V i c e P r e s i d e n t Te c h n o l o g y, M E A a n d C E E , O r a c l e . n V i n o d K r i s h n a n , H e a d o f M i d d l e E a s t a n d N o r t h A f r i c a , AW S ( Le f t t o r i g h t , t o p t o b o t t o m )

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DYNAMICS OF THE PUBLIC CLOUD HYPER SCALAR MARKET PLACE Traditional buyers are looking at spending less on technology, a better utility model, flexibility to go up and down, and not being locked into multi-year commitment.

BY ARUN SHANKAR

T

he leading public cloud hyper scalars are only just a handful today including Alibaba, AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Tencent, among others. But cloud adoption is still in its early years and much of the world has still to begin their journey into cloud adoption.

To be a leading public cloud hyper scalar, whether dominating through Saas, Paas, Iaas, private, or hybrid cloud, the formula for survival is extreme levels of innovation, a winning pay as you go billing model, global presence, enterprise marketplace, extraordinary performance to price ratio, and ease of management and orchestration.

Comments Alex McMullan, CTO Pure Storage: If we look at why organisations are opting for cloud models it is a combination of the experience, economics and operational model that goes with it. In terms of customer experience, people want to be able to do self-service.

They want to be able to set some policies and let the cloud work it out after that and they want a consistent experience, whether they are doing it in AWS or Azure or Google.

Second generation public clouds are powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimise workloads, reach optimum utilisation of cloud infrastructure resources, and provide protection against security threats, according to Ayman Al Shaikh, Senior Manager, Solution Architect, Middle East and Africa, Red Hat. Besides offering better scalability and charging models, they also help deliver more advanced services

that users can consume, such as serverless computing and container platforms.

Adds Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Group Lead, Microsoft UAE: Microsoft’s efforts to accelerate digital transformation, economic development and innovation are the key drivers behind its opening of two cloud regions in the UAE. With more than 150+ datacenters across more than 50+ regions including two regions in the UAE, one Abu Dhabi and one in Dubai, Microsoft cloud holds the broadest global coverage and offerings.

And this month in October, Oracle announced availability of the first of two planned second-generation cloud regions in UAE. The addition of the Dubai Cloud region marks the availability of 26 Oracle Cloud Regions worldwide. The opening is part of Oracle’s plan to have 36 Cloud regions by July 2021.

Located in Dubai, the new Cloud region will offer all Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud Applications, according to Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice President Technology, MEA and CEE, Oracle.

Says Paulo Pereira, Director Systems Engineering, Emerging Markets and Eastern Europe, Nutanix: Nutanix was designed from day one with hyper scale in mind, providing natively the ability to seamlessly provision and add compute, memory, networking, and storage resources to a given node or set of nodes that make up a larger cluster.

Nutanix delivers a hybrid and multi-cloud

platform with natively integrated networking between private and public clouds that allows seamless application migration and license portability across all environments.

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is among the world’s top three IaaS providers, according to Gartner. It is also the largest provider of public cloud services in China, according to IDC. Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and public services, according to Phillip Liu, General Manager, Middle East and Africa, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

Says Vinod Krishnan, Head of Middle East and North Africa, AWS: For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for various solutions. These include compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality, media, and application development, deployment.

As global enterprise race forward in their cloud migration journey in the years ahead, it is only obvious that the relative position of hyper scalars will also change as they jostle for market share. It is anybody’s guess what the lineup is likely to look like a few years from now. ë

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COVER FEATURE

ABDUL RAHMAN AL THEHAIBAN,

Senior Vice President Technology, MEA and CEE, Oracle.

ORACLE

LEVERAGING SECOND GENERATION PLATFORM AND CLOUD SUITE

Oracle has displayed commitment to customers with consistent cloud management and range of choices across hybrid, multi-cloud architectures.

A

lthough the cloud service provider market is mature, with many providers having more than 10 years of experience offering cloud services, Oracle is relatively new to the cloud provider market. Its cloud offering was released in November 2016. Oracle is a vendor that has benefited from the cloud becoming used for more mission-critical workloads. Enterprises are now evaluating the ability of cloud vendors to support mission-critical workloads.

Oracle benefits from a large portfolio of software applications including ERP, CRM, SCM, HCM, which provides a potential market for its cloud offerings. In addition,

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Oracle’s Autonomous Database, amongst its latest developments is available as a service on its second-generation platform. This is another key driver for overall OCI adoption and utilisation.

Oracle has a reputation for reliability, with more than 99.99% availability uptime.

Oracle has built its second-generation cloud infrastructure to ensure that this reputation is not compromised. On average, Oracle only requires four minutes per month for maintenance work, according to a report published in May 2020 by Omdia Consulting.

Oracle’s strategy is to adapt towards a multi-cloud world, and through partnerships

it has positioned itself in the market to meet this demand from enterprises. The Oracle and Microsoft alliance announced in June 2019 enables customers to deploy mission-critical enterprise workloads that both Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud environments.

The Microsoft-Oracle partnership brings significant customer benefits and demonstrates maturity of thinking about how cloud will be adopted and deployed in enterprise accounts.

The Microsoft-Oracle partnership enables enterprises to access best-of-breed capabilities in the cloud that are best suited to the needs of complex business applications.

The Microsoft-Oracle partnership man-

COVER FEATURE

n

Oracle’s strategy is to adapt towards a multi-cloud world.

Oracle benefits from a large portfolio of software applications. n

Oracle has a reputation for reliability, with more than 99.99% availability uptime. n

Oracle requires four minutes per month for maintenance work, according to Omdia Consulting. n

The Microsoft-Oracle partnership demonstrates maturity of thinking about how cloud will be adopted and deployed. n

As a late entrant into the public cloud marketplace, Oracle has a created a detailed catch-up plan. n

Oracle’s cloud strategy is anchored by its self-driving Autonomous OS and Gen 2 Oracle Cloud Services. n

Oracle Cloud Management architecture is becoming more open. n

ages the challenges of interoperability and provides interconnection between the two clouds platforms.

Omdia Consulting believes this approach by Oracle, towards managing future workloads for its enterprise customers, through a combination of cloud platforms, is increasingly making it an influential enterprise-class cloud provider.

As a late entrant into the public cloud marketplace, Oracle has a created a detailed catch-up plan across the medium-term horizon. Oracle’s strong commitment towards innovating cloud solutions and building the second-generation Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has also earned it a high level of commitment amongst its customers. According to Omdia Consulting, approximately 80% of Oracle’s customers have committed to Oracle Cloud for between one and three years, and 21% of customers have made a greater than three-year commitment.

Oracle has emphasised its commitment to providing customers with consistent cloud management capabilities and a wide range of choices for building, deploying, running, and managing applications and databases across hybrid, multicloud architectures.

Oracle’s overall cloud strategy is anchored by its self-driving Autonomous OS and Gen 2 Oracle Cloud Services portfolio that spans on-premises

customer-managed engineered systems, on-premises remotely managed Cloud@Customer platforms, and a rapidly growing worldwide network of OCI public cloud datacenters that are expected to cover 36 regions by the end of 2020.

According to a report by IDC, titled Oracle Management Strategy Underscores Commitment to Hybrid, Multicloud Choice, Oracle is acknowledging that customers will continue to run workloads on VMware platforms and may choose to deploy applications on third-party public clouds such as Microsoft Azure. The evolving Oracle Cloud Management architecture is becoming more open and is taking steps to ensure that Oracle management tools and services have consistent visibility and control across Oracle platforms and third-party clouds.

GLOBAL CLOUD REGIONS Oracle announced availability of the first of two planned second-generation cloud regions in UAE. The addition of the Dubai Cloud region marks the availability of 26 Oracle Cloud Regions worldwide.

The opening is part of Oracle’s plan to have 36 Cloud regions by July 2021. Located in Dubai, the new Cloud region will offer all Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle

Cloud Applications.

Oracle opened eight Cloud Regions in 2020 and currently operates 26 regions globally - 20 commercial and six government and multiple dedicated regions for US intelligence services - the fastest expansion by any major cloud provider. To help customers build true business continuity and disaster protection while meeting in-country data residence requirements, Oracle plans to establish at least two regions in almost every country where it operates.

The US, Canada, EU, South Korea, Japan, India and Australia already have two cloud Regions. Upcoming Cloud Regions include second regions in the UK, Brazil, UAE, Saudi Arabia; additional EU regions in Italy, Sweden, and France; as well as new regions in Chile, Singapore, South Africa, and Israel.

Oracle has a dual region strategy that enables customers to deploy resilient applications in multiple geographies for disaster recovery and compliance requirements – without having sensitive data leave the country. Customers that want to run critical systems of record in the cloud need fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes with multiple sites in the same country to meet data residency requirements.

Oracle has established a digital hub in Dubai, focused on driving cloud adoption across the country’s mid-sized businesses.

In line with the UAE’s Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, Oracle has also established a first of its kind innovation hub in Dubai to accelerate the implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE. Oracle has also initiated a collaboration with UAE’s Higher Colleges of Technology to help prepare 1,000 students for the digital economy by training them in emerging technologies. ë

Source: SWOT Assessment Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Omdia Consulting; Oracle Management Strategy Underscores Commitment to Hybrid, Multicloud Choice, IDC Link.

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ALEX MCMULLAN, CTO, Pure Storage.

PURE STORAGE

MOVING PERFORMANCE FLASH ARRAYS INTO CLOUD SERVICE Ability to manage storage configuration, whether more or less capacity, faster or slower access, cloud or off-cloud, are drivers for Pure’s latest offering.

W

hy have Pure-as-a-Service?

The rational for Pure-as-aService is that the success of the public cloud model has rippled its way back into hybrid and into private cloud. It has changed the way in which financial structures as well as technology structures are facing the world outside.

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Traditional customers are looking at a way of spending less on technology, with three or five years of sunk investment, and looking at different ways of spending that capability.

They are looking for a better utility model than the old school ones, because the old school utility models are just a lease wrapped up in a different capitalised structure. People

have moved away from that because they like the flexibility to go up and down and they do not like being locked into multi-year commitment.

The reasons why storage-as-a-service is attractive is that people are spending less on capital investment, particularly in 2020. Everybody is reflecting on their capital base — where they should be investing for digital transformation. Storage can also be quite wasteful, if it is not being managed to the last Byte.

If you can look at all of your storage devices from the cloud or from your own personal device and see everything is well, or even make changes from that device, that level of simplicity is why people are more confident in investing in Pure-as-a-Service, because they do not have to be a storage expert.

There is three layers of capability inside Pure Storage devices. The first of those is at the bottom, which is the NAND layer. Oure Storage makes its own drives, because it is the most efficient and the most secure way of doing that.

Next, there is a compute layer, which again is

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custom blades for the running of the application itself. The top layer is Pure software, which has a protocol layer for network interfaces and then a key value store, which actually stores the consumer data.

Evergreen is where everybody else struggles in the market.

Pure Storage has a competitive advantage because if the vendor wants to make an array bigger or faster, everybody else has to put a new one in. We do not have to do that. We simply take out one of the controllers and then replace it with a new controller which is more powerful, more CPUs, more DRAM, that then becomes part of the system.

The Pure Storage array is then 20% faster or 30% faster or 100% faster, depending on the upgrade. And we do that non-disruptively so we can flexibly make an array bigger and faster, and also smaller and slower. Customers have the ability to flex up and flex down without a financial penalty. If we look at why organisations are opting for cloud models it is a combination of the experience, economics and operational model that goes with it.

In terms of customer experience, people want to be able to do self-service. They want to be able to set some policies and let the cloud work it out after that and they want a consistent experience, whether they are doing it in AWS or Azure or Google.

Managing upgrades are all done online. You can add capacity, you can make the array faster. You can also shrink it and take capacity away or move capacity from one array to another. Pure Storage acts as the first line monitoring for all these devices.

You already have a support team dedicated to keeping the array running if it does go wrong.

The billing model for Pure as a service is simple - you pay for what you use. And if you want to burst up for end of year or end of month or some other kind of special case, you can spend up and then just charge that burst capacity for what you use. Capacity can be consumed on premises or in the public cloud, or more than one public cloud, in exactly the same way. The standard agreement is for a year.

In terms of consumption, end users can flexibly choose whether to have a lower rate and higher commitment or a lower commitment and higher rate. They can always flex up or flex down and Pure Storage automatically keeps a 25% buffer in terms of extra capacity. Risk Management is also an important thing, particularly in the year 2020, requiring the ability to start small.

With Pure as a service, there is nothing to write off and nothing to depreciate. There is no impact on the profit and loss, because it is a proper operational expense. This is very attractive for smaller companies, growing companies or even startups who are looking to be acquired.

Pure Storage can install the arrays remotely. It can be unboxed in the customer data center and plugged in. Pure Storage uses video technology with smart hands to walk the end user through the installation process. This is a huge competitive benefit.

Automatically patching and updating the array software is a huge value add because most customers do not want to invest in storage-as-a-service management. They simply want to be consumers.

In terms of the customer experience, there is a low barrier to entry. Easy to start, easy to consume, easy to grow and almost no management overhead from Pure Storage. ĂŤ

Success of the public cloud model has rippled its way back into hybrid and into private cloud. n

Traditional customers are looking at a way of spending less on technology, with three or five years of sunk investment. n

Traditional customers are looking for a better utility model than the old school ones. n

End users like the flexibility to go up and down and they do not like being locked into multi-year commitment. n

If we look at why organisations are opting for cloud models it is experience, economics, operational model. n

In terms of customer experience, people want to be able to do self-service. n

There is three layers of capability inside Pure Storage devices. n

Evergreen is where everybody else struggles in the market. n

Pure Storage has a competitive advantage because if we want to make an array bigger or faster, everybody else has to put a new one in. n

Capacity can be consumed on premises or in the public cloud, or more than one public cloud. n

Pure Storage can install the arrays remotely. n

With Pure as a service, there is nothing to write off and nothing to depreciate. n

Managing upgrades are all done online, add capacity and make the array faster. n

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COVER FEATURE

AYMAN AL SHAIKH,

Senior Manager, Solution Architect, Middle East and Africa, Red Hat.

RED HAT

HYBRID, AUTOMATED, VENDOR AGNOSTIC, CLOUD SUITE Red Hat Cloud is a bundle of solutions that includes Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualisation, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat OpenShift.

B

uilding an effective cloud strategy begins with identifying goals.

The necessary technologies for meeting these needs are not tied to legacy software stacks or rooted in expensive proprietary technologies. Instead, the answers will be driven by open source innovation,

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enabling organisations to take advantage of cloud-native platforms everywhere, from the edge and on-premises data centers to multiple public clouds.

With open source technologies like Linux and Kubernetes, organisations not only have access to innovation that can help them build

and ensure they remain at the forefront of their industries. They can also automate, adapt, and scale existing operations across IT environments with greater flexibility than proprietary vendors.

Red Hat provides IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS options that customers can combine to form a cloud-computing environment that offers the necessary infrastructure, platform, and applications without associated hassles and distractions.

Red Hat Cloud Suite combines tightly integrated Red Hat technologies customers can use to build their cloud infrastructure, develop cloud-native apps, and orchestrate deployments across hybrid IT environments.

It is a bundle that includes cloud infrastructure products, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualisation, Red Hat Satellite, and our container orchestration platform Red Hat OpenShift.

Furthermore, to simplify buying and managing enterprise software, Red Hat Marketplace offers automated deployment of certified software on any Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

Red Hat solutions are mainly built to enable hybrid cloud models for customers. Red Hat offer platforms that can be deployed and hosted by the major public cloud vendors, which extend the public cloud offerings’ capabilities and provide customers with the freedom of choice when it comes to running their workloads.

Red Hat focuses on isolating workloads from the infrastructure or platform used, removing the dependency so that the workload becomes platform agnostic and can move freely between different infrastructure and platforms either on cloud or on-premise.

To enable a valid hybrid cloud strategy, customers are adopting the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to seamlessly develop, deploy, and manage existing and containerbased apps across physical, virtual, and public cloud infrastructures.

OpenShift helps app development teams with provisioning, building, and deploying applications and their components in a self-service fashion. It features automated workflows and integrates with continuous integration and continuous delivery tools, making it an ideal solution for any organisation.

Furthermore, it is the cornerstone of

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container-optimised solutions, such as Red Hat JBoss Middleware and application services, business process management software, API management, Red Hat Mobile, advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, and Red Hat container storage.

Red Hat offerings are found to enhance public cloud platform capabilities with more services and features that customers can leverage while moving away from restricting customers to a specific public cloud platform. One of the biggest challenges is one size does not fit all.

Red Hat offer solutions in different shapes, such as SaaS or dedicated, to adhere to varying customer requirements, provide the same user experiences, and ensure workloads run unchanged, whether on a public or private cloud.

Red Hat solutions are a significant catalyst in helping customers transition from being locked-in to a single vendor. In addition to enabling them to capitalise on their investments in public and private cloud environments, end-users can run their applications on all the major public cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, IBM, Google, and Alibaba cloud.

Second generation public clouds are powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimise workloads, reach optimum utilisation of cloud infrastructure resources, and provide protection against security threats. Besides offering better scalability and charging models, they also help deliver more advanced services that users can consume, such as serverless computing and container platforms.

Red Hat solutions and platforms are compatible and certified to run on major second-generation cloud platforms, enabling customers to capitalise on more benefits when combining Red Hat solution offerings with second generation cloud platforms.

With Red Hat Cloud Suite, customers can build and run all types of workloads, move to a scale-out cloud infrastructure, and accelerate new cloud-based services for private cloud and application development. Furthermore, our operations team can deliver public cloud-like services to developers and the business while maintaining control and visibility.

Red Hat Cloud Suite provides customers with the ability to develop, build, and run any workload concerning IoT, big data, machine learning, analytics, NFVs, billing solutions, Kubernetes, and Windows and Linux virtual machines.

Red Hat has a unique position amongst public cloud vendors. The Certified Cloud and Service Provider programme includes hundreds of clouds, system integration, and managed service providers, along with software developers and hardware manufacturers that customers can use to run Red Hat products, host physical and virtual machines, and set up private and public cloud environments.

At the same time, Red Hat is continuing to build more partnerships and alliances to boost our capabilities even further and increase customers’ adoption of solutions such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and other platforms that many ISVs nowadays are using and relying on for own their products and solutions. Í

Red Hat Cloud is a bundle that includes Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualisation, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat OpenShift. n

Red Hat Open Hybrid Cloud, helps customers build applications and deploy with consistency and flexibility using hybrid cloud models. n

With Linux and Kubernetes, organisations can automate and scale existing operations across IT environments. n

Red Hat provides IaaS, PaaS, SaaS options that customers can combine to form a cloud-computing environment. n

Red Hat Marketplace offers automated deployment of certified software on any Red Hat OpenShift cluster. n

Red Hat solutions are a significant catalyst in helping customers transition from being locked-in to a single vendor. n

End-users can run applications on all major public cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, IBM, Google, Alibaba. n

Red Hat solutions are built to enable hybrid cloud models for customers. n

Red Hat offer platforms that can be deployed and hosted by the major public cloud vendors. n

Red Hat focuses on isolating workloads from the infrastructure or platform used, so that workloads becomes platform agnostic. n

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COVER FEATURE

NECIP OZYUCEL,

Cloud and Enterprise Group Lead, Microsoft UAE.

MICROSOFT

BOOSTING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH DATACENTRE MIGRATION The great advantage in leveraging Azure is moving and scaling up datacenters to drive innovation with AI, IoT, Blockchain and even quantum computing.

M

icrosoft’s efforts to accelerate digital transformation, economic development and innovation are the key drivers behind its opening of two cloud regions in the UAE. Both Cloud and Microsoft Ecosystem combined will generate over 55,000 jobs in the UAE by 2022, according to a study conducted

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by IDC. With more than 150+ datacenters across more than 50+ regions including two regions in the UAE, one Abu Dhabi and one in Dubai, Microsoft cloud holds the broadest global coverage and offerings.

Microsoft Azure, offers IaaS and PaaS along with a comprehensive marketplace with

technology, partner and industry solutions.

This wide range of applications makes digital transformation journeys accessible for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

In terms of Saas, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, deliver workplace, productivity and business solutions. This global offering provides a safe, secure and trusted environment to empower businesses and organisations.

More and more organisations are recognising the advantages that Azure offers. Capabilities range from all sorts of aspects from reference architectures, example scenarios, and solutions for common workloads – empowering businesses.

The great advantage in leveraging Azure is moving and scaling up their datacenters to drive innovation with AI, IoT, Blockchain and even Quantum Computing. Building brand new applications with the power of cloud can provide scalability, agility and cost benefits.

Microsoft UAE datacenter regions in Abu Dhabi and Dubai also address data residency and latency needs.

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Microsoft Cloud is hosted across 150+ datacenters and 50+ regions including two regions in the UAE. n

Microsoft Azure, offers IaaS and PaaS along with a comprehensive marketplace with technology, partner and industry solutions n

Azure helps to scale datacenters driving innovation with AI, IoT, Blockchain and Quantum Computing. n

Microsoft sees strong adoption of datacenter migration to Azure from many of Microsoft customers. n

Data workloads such as moving data platforms, data warehouses, AI and IoT projects are common. n

Microsoft Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, two-thirds of them have shared files on Teams. n

One of the advantages of Microsoft cloud platforms is scalability, suited for enterprises large and small. n

Microsoft see a strong adoption of datacenter migration to Azure from many of Microsoft customers, along with backup disaster recovery security and management. Data workloads such as moving data platforms, data warehouses, AI and IoT projects are common, providing people and organisations access to cloud services to develop innovative solutions to address pressing challenges.

Microsoft Teams, part of Microsoft 365, is a hub for remote and secure team collaboration in Microsoft 365 that integrates the people, content, and tools across the organisation.

Microsoft Teams has received renewed impetus, combining meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration into a single tool that preserves context and keeps everyone up to speed. Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, and two-thirds of them have shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams as well.

Microsoft see a strong adoption of datacenter migration to Azure from many of Microsoft customers, along with backup disaster recovery

security and management. Data workloads such as moving data platforms, data warehouses, AI and IoT projects are common, providing people and organisations access to cloud services to develop innovative solutions to address pressing challenges.

Microsoft 365 is being adopted by businesses in the Middle East, delivering productivity apps integrated through cloud services and delivered as part of an open platform for business processes.

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are being used by forward-looking businesses as the next generation of intelligent business applications that enable organisations to grow, evolve and transform to meet the needs of customers and capture new opportunities.

This widespread adoption is delivering upon Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more, accelerating digital transformation of business and improve productivity and collaboration.

One of the advantages of Microsoft cloud

platforms is precisely this –scalability, suited for enterprises large and small.

The characteristics of an easily scalable platform are the flexibility and the choice to fit the current needs and requirements, with the adaptive ability to expand with needs at a short notice.

Microsoft’s Middle East cloud regions provide an option for organisations to navigate their digital transformation journeys, while availing enterprise-grade performance, data residency combined with security and the broadest compliance.

Microsoft is continuously investing in local infrastructure to tailor its services to the evolving needs of the customers. Much of this is underpinned by Microsoft’s cloud services as more industry leaders choose this platform to further their digital transformations.

SaaS offerings are available to UAE customers to bring value to local organisations in order to enhance their customer experience, utilise low-code Apps for remote work scenarios, while ensuring seamless operations including critical finance and supply chain capabilities.

Azure extends both its platform capabilities by adding all open source and partner solutions as well as providing innovations for its individual services. It integrates enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics, human parity in AI cognitive services. Microsoft are also testing undersea datacenters to provide more environmental sustainability.

All of this is moving the digital transformation of the region at great scale – customers are migrating to the cloud.

Microsoft is supporting local skilling to drive forward knowledge and expertise through initiatives such as the Cloud Society, a global initiative that is designed enhance technical skills amongst individuals in emerging technologies - trainings harness technologies such as AI and IoT, as well as upskill in cloud, networking, Big Data, Data Science and Mobile technologies.

Microsoft works closely in tandem with its partners in every step of the process from deployment and integration services right across to onboarding partner solutions on Azure. Global partnerships with industry vendors, from SAP to Sitecore, Citrix to many others, deliver the easily accessible services, box ready in the cloud in a safe and secure way. ë

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COVER FEATURE

ALIBABA CLOUD

EXTREME SCALABILITY, PERFORMANCE, MACHINE LANGUAGE, AI Alibaba Cloud powers 11.11 the most extreme and scalable shopping festival, offering immersive experiences and ML translation into multiple languages.

E PHILLIP LIU,

General Manager, Middle East and Africa, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

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stablished in 2009, Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is among the world’s top three IaaS providers, according to Gartner. It is also the largest provider of public cloud services in China, according to IDC. Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and public services. Alibaba Cloud is the official Cloud Services Partner of the International Olympic Committee.

PolarDB and Hybrid Backup Recovery are some of the more popular products for the Middle East and Africa market. PolarBD is a cloud-native database that is designed for business-critical database applications, especially those that require fast performance, high concurrency and automatic scaling. It is compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, supporting up to 100 TB of data.

Hybrid Backup Recovery is an enterpriselevel data backup and migration service that is secure, efficient, cost-effective, and scalable.

It provides full protection for data stored on Alibaba Cloud and in on-premises data centres. By using Hybrid Backup Recovery, customers can reduce their cloud storage costs significantly while ensuring data security in a feasible way.

Elastic Compute Service ECS is the product most subscribed to in the Middle East and Africa region. ECS provides fast memory and the latest Intel CPUs to help customers power their cloud applications and achieve faster results with low latency.

Alibaba Cloud is currently supporting the world’s largest e-commerce platforms – Taobao and Tmall – in addition to working closely with scientists from DAMO Academy a global research initiative by Alibaba to accurately predict, prevent, and mitigate infrastructure

issues without impacting customers.

In the UAE, Khalifa University utilises Alibaba Cloud’s high-performance computing with Graphics Processing Unit to carry out clean energy research.

In addition to an extensive portfolio of products and services, Alibaba Cloud has 63 zones, strategically located across 21 regions of the world, and over 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide. As of 3 July 2020, two in five Fortune 500 companies choose Alibaba Cloud for their cloud services.

Alibaba Cloud’s mature AI-powered and digital intelligence technology supports an end-to-end platform that provides various machine-learning algorithms to meet customers’ analysis requirements.

Alibaba DAMO Academy provides enhanced machine translation technology for the cross-border e-commerce platform AliExpress. The technology can help small and medium-sized merchants globally to automatically translate their store and product pages into 21 languages, including Russian, Spanish, Turkish, French, and Arabic, for buyers across Europe, Asia, America, and the Middle East.

During the 11.11 shopping festival, the machine translation service was used 1.66 billion times, with over 200 billion words translated into different languages.

Last year, together with partners such as Al Jammaz and Interdist Alliances, Alibaba Cloud trained and certified more than 100 cloud professionals across the Middle East and Africa.

ALIBABA CLOUD AND 11.11.19 Alibaba Cloud handled extreme scalability processing $1 billion of Gross Merchandise Volume in the first 68 seconds of the event; volume hit $10 billion of Gross Merchandise Volume in under 30 minutes. Overall, Alibaba

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Cloud’s infrastructure handled $38.4 billion of Gross Merchandise Volume in 24 hours with zero downtime.

The third generation of X-Dragon architecture fully supported the shopping event. The Elastic Bare Metal Servers improved cost efficiency by 20%.

X-Dragon servers seamlessly integrated computing platforms, including the Elastic Compute Service, ECS bare metal server and virtual machines, in a single architecture.

Apsara Operating System processed around 970PB of data to support the peak performance of 544,000 orders per second, setting a record during 11.11.

POLARDB, a database developed by Alibaba Cloud, supported sales activity with a peak of 87 million requests processed per second.

Through self-developed green technologies, including liquid immersion and deep-water cooling, power consumption for every 10,000 e-Commerce transactions can be reduced to 2kWh. Overall data center energy consumption dropped 70% from last year, saving over 200,000 kWh on 11.11.

During the shopping festival, the machine translation service was used 1.66 billion times, with over 200 billion words translated in different languages.

More than half of the live streaming Tmall merchants selling products such as cosmetics, clothing, food, cars and electronics experienced robust growth, with home décor products seeing 400% sales growth.

Taobao developed a new, real-time communications framework for audio and video on Alibaba Cloud. Network latency was reduced to 1.5 seconds from five to seven seconds, improving real-time interaction experience between broadcasters and users. Video AI identified products mentioned by broadcasters during live streaming, and audiences could view product links simultaneously displayed onscreen.

During 11.11, over one million orders were placed and processed through voice command via Tmall Genie, Alibaba AI Labs’ smart speaker.

Alibaba Cloud’s AI-enabled technology empowered sellers from international brands and SMBs through features such as unique 3D user interfaces, customer services chatbots and automatic translation services.

Thousands of Tmall merchants were upgraded to Tmall Flagship Store 2.0 storefronts before 11.11.

Version 2.0 offers a unique user interface with a 3D Taobao avatar for customers to try on clothes and jewelry, further engaging customers via rich, interactive content and an omni-channel experience.

Alime Shop Assistant, a customer-service chatbot supported by Alibaba DAMO Academy’s machine learning technologies, handled 97% of online customer inquiries on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall during 11.11. ë

Alibaba Cloud is the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. n

Alibaba Cloud is among the world’s top three IaaS providers. n

Alibaba Cloud is the largest provider of public cloud services in China. n

PolarBD is a cloud-native database that is designed for business-critical database applications. n

PolarBD is meant for applications that require fast performance, supporting up to 100 TB of data. n

Elastic Compute Service is the product most subscribed to in the Middle East and Africa region. n

Alibaba Cloud is currently supporting the world’s largest e-commerce platforms – Taobao and Tmall. n

Khalifa University utilises Alibaba Cloud’s highperformance computing with Graphics Processing Unit to carry out clean energy research. n

Alibaba Cloud has 63 zones, located across 21 regions of the world, and over 70 security accreditations. n

Alibaba DAMO Academy provides enhanced machine translation technology for the cross-border e-commerce platform AliExpress. n

During 11.11, the machine translation service was used 1.66 billion times, with over 200 billion words translated. n

With Al Jammaz and Interdist Alliances, Alibaba Cloud trained and certified more than 100 cloud professionals. n

Alibaba Cloud handled extreme scalability in 11.11.19 processing $1 billion Gross Merchandise Volume in first 68 seconds. n

POLARDB supported sales activity with a peak of 87 million requests processed per second. n

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COVER FEATURE

VINOD KRISHNAN

, Head of Middle East and North Africa, AWS.

AWS

SCALE, BREADTH, DEPTH, COMMUNITY OF CLOUD SERVICES AWS has more services, more features, more regions, than any other cloud provider - from infrastructure technologies to emerging technologies.

F

or 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for various solutions. These include compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and

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artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality, media, and application development, deployment.

AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure with 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the

world. The AWS Region Availability Zone model has been recognised by Gartner as the recommended approach for running enterprise applications that require high availability. AWS announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world, including tens of thousands of customers in the Middle East and North Africa MENA. AWS launches its first AWS Middle East Region in Bahrain in 2019, bringing advanced and secure cloud technologies closer to customers in the region.

AWS has significantly more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider- from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage, and databases- to emerging technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and Internet of Things.

AWS also has deep functionality within those services. AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today.

The core infrastructure is built to satisfy the security requirements for the military, global banks, and other high-sensitivity organisations. This backed by a deep set of cloud security tools, with 230 security, compliance, and governance services and features. AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications, and all 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to encrypt that data.

For the tenth year in a row, AWS is evaluated as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, placed highest in both axes of measurement — Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision— among the top 7 vendors named in the report.

The AWS Partner Network, APN is the global partner programme for technology and consulting businesses who leverage Amazon Web Services to build solutions and services for customers. The APN helps companies build, market, and sell their AWS offerings by providing valuable business, technical, and marketing support.

AWS has a vibrant and growing partner network in the Middle East, offering customers cloud expertise, and business and technical

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support. AWS systems integrator partners include global companies such as Accenture, Crayon, Deloitte, Rackspace, Tech Mahindra and Wipro, as well as regional partners such as Integra Technologies, MIDIS group, Bespin Global MEA, Citrus consulting, Zero & One, Thinglogix, Computer world, Al Moayad, and many more.

The AWS Marketplace is an online software store that helps customers find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services that run on AWS. AWS Marketplace is designed for Independent Software Vendors, Value-Added Resellers, and Systems Integrators who have software products they want to offer to customers in the cloud. Partners use AWS Marketplace to be up and running in days and offer their software products to customers around the world.

Some of the emerging technologies that we are focused on that customers are fast adopting:

ML AND AI Tens of thousands of customers are running machine learning on AWS, spurred by the broad adoption of Amazon SageMaker by a broad set of customers that include companies like Aramex, Slack, Intuit, Pinterest, Capital One, Yelp, and NBC.

IOT EDGE With the combination of AWS, AWS IoT, and AWS Greengrass, developers have a single pane of glass that lets them decide what processing and analytics they want to do in the cloud, and what they want to do on the device itself, eliminating the latency of a round trip to the cloud.

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for various solutions. n

AWS has built 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions. n

AWS has announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. n

AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. n

AWS Infrastructure satisfies security requirements for military, global banks, high-sensitivity organisations. n

AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications. n

The basic unit of compute is becoming smaller, and compute is an area where we continue to invest.

All 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to encrypt data.

DATABASES

n

COMPUTE

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora continues to be the fastest growing service in the history of AWS, with tens of thousands of customers.

DATA LAKES, ANALYTICS AWS hosts tens of thousands of data lakes running on S3 today. Customers can process vast amounts of data with Amazon EMR, and run analytics on real-time streaming data with Amazon Kinesis. Customers are also actively using Amazon Elasticsearch Service for real-time operational dashboards, Amazon QuickSight for business intelligence with great visualisations and embedded machine learning, and Amazon Athena to instantly analyse data stored in S3 using standard SQL. With Amazon Redshift, customers can perform complex queries on massive collections of structured data with superfast performance. ĂŤ

n

AWS is evaluated as Leader in 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, among top 7 vendors. • AWS regional partners include Integra Technologies, MIDIS group, Bespin Global, Citrus Consulting, Zero & One, Thinglogix, Computer World, Al Moayad, and others.

AWS Marketplace is designed for ISVs, VARs, SIs, who have software products they want to offer to customers in the cloud. n

Partners use AWS Marketplace to be up and running in days. n

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NUTANIX

COMPUTE, NETWORKING, STORAGE IN A CLOUD CLUSTER Nutanix is building solutions that help customers achieve a seamless experience across multi-clouds by breaking silos and eliminating complexity.

PAULO PEREIRA,

Director Systems Engineering, Emerging Markets and Eastern Europe, Nutanix

Nutanix was designed from day one with hyper scale in mind. n

Nutanix natively provides ability to add compute, memory, networking, and storage resources to a given node. n

Nutanix delivers a hybrid and multi-cloud platform with natively integrated networking. n

Nutanix enables customers to run full software stack anywhere – on-premises or public clouds. n

Leap offers disaster recovery-to-cloud solution that protects applications and data without a separate infrastructure stack. n

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T

he use of 5G with the edge cloud to operate capability, remotely from workers whilst allowing them to still remain in control, will offer new opportunities for business and innovation. The IoT applications can run on the edge cloud, providing remote sensing and other capabilities to enterprises who need access to their working environment.

Security across those networks from open IoT devices will be another area that will receive increasing attention.

TNutanix was designed from day one with hyper scale in mind, providing natively the ability to seamlessly provision and add compute, memory, networking, and storage resources to a given node or set of nodes that make up a larger cluster.

Nutanix delivers a hybrid and multi-cloud platform with natively integrated networking between private and public clouds that allows seamless application migration and license portability across all environments.

Nutanix enables customers to run the full Nutanix software stack anywhere – onpremises or public clouds such as AWS or Azure- it is the same management.

IT operators can seamlessly migrate existing applications, software licenses and operational practices between clouds without any rearchitecting or rework.

Organisations benefit from agility, resilience and flexibility to choose the infrastructure platform that meets their business needs without any cloud lock-in.

The Leap Service offers a fully integrated disaster recovery-to-cloud solution that rapidly and intelligently protects the applications and data in your Nutanix environment without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack. By utilising

the same platform on-premises and in the recovery site, Leap fully eliminates the need for complex translation of constructs, policies and data models across environments.

Leap is natively built-in to the Nutanix Platform, eliminating the need to painstakingly fuse multiple products to protect your environment. disaster recovery planning, set up and monitoring are managed within Prism, so there is no learning curve.

As a native extension of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, Leap ports workload profiles, including VM, networking and security configuration to the recovery site, reducing setup time and streamlining failover processes.

During this month, Nutanix announced a new partnership with Microsoft that will enable both companies to deliver a hybrid solution with seamless application, data, and license mobility as well as unified management across on-premises and Azure environments, using Nutanix Clusters on Azure.

Nutanix also announced general availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS, extending the flexibility and ease of use of the company’s hyperconverged infrastructure HCI software, along with all Nutanix products and services, to bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services AWS. With this announcement, Nutanix delivers a hybrid cloud infrastructure - one that allows businesses to accelerate their digital initiatives and optimise spending, priorities further amplified in the age of COVID. Nutanix will continue to build solutions that help customers achieve a seamless experience across multi-clouds by breaking silos and eliminating complexity. ë

INNOVATION

Scareware pop-ups have been used for years to prompt people into downloading malware

WHEN THE BARK OF A SCAMMER IS WORSE THAN THE BITE Threat actors have reengineered scareware pop-ups in browsers and multiple languages to generate fear-based responses to download malware onto devices.

I

nternet scammers are always looking for a better way to separate unwitting device users from their money. And as with all other endeavors, they have learned that it pays to advertise.

A recent scam exploits web advertising networks to pop up fake system alerts on both computers and mobile devices. The goal: to frighten people into paying for a solution—to a problem they do not even have.

It is not exactly a new trick. Scareware pop-ups have been used for years to prompt people into downloading fake virus protection and other malicious software, including ransomware.

Browser developers have done a lot to limit the damage that can be done by malicious pop-up sites, including recent fixes by Mozilla that attempt to limit the ability of malicious web pages to slow down and lock up the

Firefox web browser.

But even if the scammers do not lock up your web browser, they can make it appear that something has gone terribly wrong—and that you need to do something immediately about it.

That is where the potential damage begins, with victims allowing the fraudsters to gain access to their device, and to install and extract payment for potentially harmful software.

These scams reap tens of millions of dollars from their victims each year.

That industry is diversifying its customer base as well. Fake alert campaigns are targeting Japanese, German, and French-speaking Windows and macOS users. There are efforts by tech support scammers to find people who speak those languages to participate in their scams.

Scammers create a sense of urgency with wording and countdowns And some technical support scams will play computer-generated voice messages urging you to take action. But all of these scams have one very specific thing in common—they go away when you close your browser.

While mobile fake alerts and similar pages on desktop browsers can be easily closed, browser lock support scam pages often use scripts that make it difficult or impossible to close the web browser normally or navigate away from the page.

Using Task Manager or Force Quit may be the only way to escape some of these pages, short of a reboot—that and not allowing the browser to restore pages from the last session when re-launching. ë Source: Sean Gallagher, Senior Threat Researcher, SophosLabs.

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CHANNEL STREET INNOVATION

Global CIO Forum is offering its community of technology decision makers an opportunity to become part of the UKIndia innovation axis NAYAN GALA,

Co-founder and Managing Partner, JPIN VCATS

JPIN VCATS PARTNERS WITH GLOBAL CIO FORUM TO INTEGRATE CIOs INTO STARTUPS

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PIN Venture Catalysts Ltd (JPIN VCATS), the UK extension of Venture Catalysts, rated by Crunchbase as seventh most active angel and seed investor globally in 2019, has tied up with Global CIO Forum, to invite and accept CIOs and CXOs, to become part of its global investment community. JPIN VCATS is looking at building an active global community to support its strategic investment into top of the class early startups across India & the UK. Global CIO Forum offers an active participating community of 1,500+ global CIOs and CXOs across the Africa, India, Asia Pacific, Europe, Americas and the Middle East, as potential investors and mentors into JPIN VCATS. Global CIO Forum is the organiser of the Global CIO 200 roadshow, the largest global

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virtual event for CIOs and IT decision makers with a net audience base of 10,000+. Global CIO Forum is also the supporting partner for technology publications, Business Transformation, Enterprise Channels, The Titans, Cyber Sentinels, with a combined monthly viewership of 500,000+.

JPIN VCATS is active in raising capital from the UK and globally for its portfolio of UK and India Startups. Venture Catalysts has an existing network of 4,500+ investors and the UK Chapter has a vision to grow this global community to 10,000+ Angels, CIOs, CTOs, CXOs, HNW, UHW+, Family offices and Micro VCs to make it the largest active networks globally for startup investments.

“A diversified investor network enables faster fundraising, which we are seeing already and offers early stage startups a global perspec-

tive and a choice of more strategic investors, increasing their speed and chances of success,” explains Nayan Gala, Co-founder and Managing Partner, JPIN VCATS. “The overall vision is to create the first of its kind, UK-India investment and growth corridor, for startups to scale and grow. The UK and India are amongst the top three entrepreneur friendly, capital-rich ecosystems. Startups here, have global ambitions and Americas, Africa and Europe and Middle East are attractive growth markets,” explains Gaurav Singh, CoFounder and Managing Partner, JPIN VCATS. “By partnering with JPIN VCATS, Global CIO Forum is offering its active community of technology decision makers an opportunity to become part of the UK-India innovation pipeline axis. They can integrate their mentorship and guidance through mentoring and direct

INNOVATION

A diversified investor network enables faster fundraising and offers early stage startups a global perspective GAURAV SINGH,

Co-Founder and Managing Partner, JPIN VCATS.

investment, and achieve a monetary return through the diligence of JPIN VCATS,” added Tushar Sahoo, Managing Director of Global CIO Forum and GEC Media Group.

JPIN VCATS is the extension of Venture Catalysts in the UK, which is India’s leading integrated incubator supported by an angel network. Venture Catalysts has a target to reach 100 cities in India.

JPIN VCATS is its largest international chapter with a target to reach most major cities in the UK by end of 2021. The UK is a trusted and highly regulated jurisdiction and plays a dominant role globally to fill in Series A-B funding gap, where India also struggles.

JPIN VCATS invests and syndicates capital ranging from £0.2 to 20 Million, mentoring and network, contributing to the growth and the success of investee companies. JPIN VCATS is sector-agnostic in its approach of investment with focus from seed to growth stage.

“Startups fail when they are exposed to partners, who do not perform, leading to failure. Venture Catalysts’ investor and mentor base has been the basis for its success. This base has helped Venture Catalysts to reach the global top 7 position within 4+ years,” added Nayan Gala.

JPIN VCATS leverages market research done by Venture Catalysts through its offices in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India and JPIN VCATS’s network in the UK and globally of family offices, HNIs and Angels who wish to co-invest into its supported startups.

Venture Catalysts bring together best of breed startups and provides them the top-class mentors from existing unicorns, industry stalwarts and globally renowned investors and

corporations to nurture and transform them into successful businesses. This typically leads to better returns for early stage investors taking a bet into fast growing startups.

HOW TO GET STARTED? Attend the free regular monthly events and hear 20-30 startups pitching annually l Post this become a member of JPIN VCATS network to invest l Attend exclusive members-only weekly events to evaluate startups, 60-100 annually

Portfolio development incubation programme ensures higher chances of success.

Lead investor Leverage knowledge, network, support for startups in return for sweat equity.

l

WHY BECOME A MEMBER?

Curated deal flow Evaluate and invest in 60-100 curated startups every year, shortlisted from 5,000+ applications.

Affordable entry size A subscription can start from a low £5,000 into multi-millions based on stage and round size.

Peer to peer networking Meet, greet, network with the member community across geographies through various events.

Event participation Join the team at top national and global startup events.

Knowledge sessions Be a part of learning and industry sessions for personal development.

HIGHLIGHTS FOR VENTURE CATALYSTS Crunchbase ranked Venture Catalysts as seventh Most Active Angel and Seed Investor globally in 2019 l There has been a number of successful exit opportunities, the most recent being in June 2020 when Marico acquired Beardo ë l

Portfolio construction Diversify and build a portfolio under guidance of JPIN VCATS team.

Post investment support

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CHANNEL STREET

KHALED CHATILA,

Regional Sales Director, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Anomali.

ANOMALI

BUILDING CONTEXTUAL SECURITY AWARENESS OUTSIDE AND INSIDE OF BUSINESS Threat intelligence brings awareness about real time incidents outside an organization relating them to unknown incidents inside the organization.

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he Middle East represents one of the most vibrant economies in the world while promising to be a cradle of innovation for decades to come. This is not lost on cybercriminals, who continue to hammer the region’s businesses with ongoing attacks. With the emergence of bold initiatives such as NEOM in Saudi Arabia and other expansive plans, comes the threat of even more adversaries. To combat threats, organisations are rapidly adopting advanced technologies such as threat intelligence to help stay ahead of

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the assaults.

The threats in the Middle East are not unlike those that are active in other regions and countries. They are topped by nation state actors, rounded out by more common incidents such as financial cybercrimes, that take advantage of the transient nature of regional populations in most of these countries. The political climate in the Middle East also generates its own threat landscape as various countries compete with each other for an economic advantage.

The current pandemic situation is also an

opportunity for attackers to take advantage of, leading to an unprecedented number of cyber campaigns globally. In this region for example, lures in Arabic will get more attention than something in English.

WHAT IS THREAT INTELLIGENCE? “Threat intelligence is not just about detecting external threats. A key requirement is also situational awareness, by taking external data and marrying it with internal telemetry to

CHANNEL STREET

STRENGTHS OF ANOMALI’S THREAT INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION Anomali’s core strength is ability to combine global threat intelligence with a customer’s network telemetry. n

An ESG report describes how Anomali can provide as much as 233% return. n

Using Anomali an organisation’s ability to analyse massive amounts of data gets enhanced. n

Anomali Match can process the metadata of full event logs and compare it to many millions of indicators to detect matches. n

Anomali Lens+ gives business direct access on how a threat may impact it. n

Anomali Integrator provides integrations with third party security solutions at a granular level. n

find correlations between the two data sets,” explains Khaled Chatila, Regional Sales Director, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Anomali.

Top level executives like to see a return on any of their investments and a threat intelligence programme is no different. In the early stages, the value of a threat intelligence programme is not clearly visible as it takes time to ramp up. With the lack of available and experienced threat intelligence analysts, it may be quick to pass judgement on the programme not providing value back to the business.

On the other hand, security operation teams understand and appreciate the value a threat intelligence programme provides.

Organisations with mature IT and security policies have started seeing returns from threat intelligence. A recently published ESG report describes how Anomali can provide as much as 233% return in certain circumstances. One organisation reported 70% drop in analyst’s time spent on collecting, managing and curating intelligence indicators, giving back valuable time for more critical tasks. A good threat intelligence programme could provide

feedback to business on which intelligence data products should be purchased.

“With Anomali’s technology being an enabler, the organisation’s ability to analyse massive amounts of data and contextualise it for the business, gets enhanced,” says Chatila.

The organization can run retrospective searches, detecting unknown threats, and reduce the dwell times of attackers within networks. The average time to discover a threat can range from 120 to 200+ days before being discovered.

To help C-level executives understand the possible return on investment, Anomali has created tools such as Anomali Lens+, giving direct access to business leaders on how a threat may impact the business. This enables threat intelligence analysts to build reports for an organisation’s stakeholders.

CORE PRODUCT STRENGTH Anomali’s core strength is its ability to combine global threat intelligence data with a customer’s unique internal network telemetry to produce

a threat match. The internal SIEM is not entirely capable of matching threats, since the SIEM has to deal with an impediment to its operation, the number of IOCs that it can reliably process against the potential Terabytes of data stored within.

This is a gap that Anomali’s Match was built to address from the ground up, as it collects only metadata from the SIEM. Anomali Match can rapidly process the metadata of full event logs in a fraction of the time, and compare it to many millions of indicators to detect matches.

The metadata occupies roughly 8% of the full event storage requirements boosting the speed and search capabilities of Anomali’s Match.

With every subscription, Anomali provides a middleware component named Anomali Integrator. This component provides the capabilities to perform integrations with third party security solutions at a granular level. Should a customer have a technology not supported, they can use an integration option such as by CSV or JSON, or similar technologies, along with an SDK for which customers may code their own custom integrations.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR CHANNEL Anomali has a wide channel network leveraging its distribution partner in the Middle East.

This gives access to a range of channel partners for many of whom, threat intelligence may not be an in-house skillset. However, for those channel partners with good cyber security skills, they can be enabled to qualify and approach threat intelligence opportunities. The professional services for such opportunities will be delivered by Anomali including deployment and enablement of end users.

Most cyber security channel partners are a good fit for Anomali’s partner programme. Not many channel partners have cyber threat intelligence analysts, since it is highly specialized role. Anomali has a team that assists channel partners in guiding the end user towards a suitable combination of product plus services to achieve desired results.

Channel partners experienced in threat intelligence can ask the right questions and collect the required information from an end user. This information includes size of operations, specific needs, active markets, brand exposure, geographical regions, industry verticals, amongst others. Using Anomali’s software and services, channel partners can fill the gaps in existing programmes or build an effective programme. ë

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PRODUCT NEWS

ORACLE REVAMPS CLOUD SUITE PORTFOLIO FOR POST PANDEMIC WORKPLACE

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racle announced new integrations between Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience and Zoom that will help sales, marketing, and customer service teams incorporate video into existing processes and workflows in order to make every customer interaction better.

To support the rapid growth in digital selling, marketing, and customer service, Oracle and Zoom are introducing a series of integrations between Zoom’s communications platform and Oracle Cloud CX applications.

A new integration with Oracle Eloqua, part of Oracle CX Marketing, helps marketers improve the performance of multi-channel demand generation and nurture programs.

With the integration, marketers will be able to deliver richer digital events and improve the performance of webinars by quickly and easily collecting and analysing data surrounding engagement and registration. The integration will also help marketers deliver a consistent experience and improve customer engagement by leveraging branded assets.

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A new integration with Oracle CX Service will help service teams improve customer satisfaction by solving incidents faster and delivering a more contextual and personalised customer experience. In addition, service agents will be able to better build relationships and get answers from colleagues faster by using video to improve collaboration between teams while working remotely.

A new integration with Oracle CX Sales will help sales teams use video to engage with customers and prospects. Sales teams will be able to schedule or start a Zoom meeting in the context of a sale against an account, contact, lead, opportunity, or proposal. In addition, sales teams will be able to view the Zoom interaction as part of a feed, record and save a meeting for later, and even run a transcription to capture insights from the meeting.

ORACLE FUSION CLOUD CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND SPRINKLR Oracle announced new integrations between

Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience CX and Sprinklr, a Customer Experience Management CXM platform for modern enterprises, that will help organisations deliver personalised and connected experiences for customers.

The new integrations help marketers reach audiences on social media and other messaging channels at any point in the customer journey and help customer service professionals resolve service requests more efficiently.

The two new integrations enable joint customers to provide an omnichannel experience that builds customer loyalty by supporting marketers and customer service professionals.

Marketers A new integration with Oracle Eloqua helps joint customers increase conversions by connecting Eloqua campaigns and social media marketing campaigns in real time. For example, as soon as a potential customer clicks on a promotional email, it is synced to Sprinklr and that potential customer can be immediately

PRODUCT NEWS

targeted across social channels.

The new Sprinklr and Oracle Eloqua integration builds on existing integrations, which help marketers unite social media, messaging, and digital marketing campaign management.

Customer Service Professionals A new integration with Oracle B2C Service helps organisations proactively serve customers by automatically creating incidents based on social conversations and bringing those incidents into the service center. Customer service professionals will have a complete view of customer interactions – across 23 social channels, 11 messaging channels, and SMS – enabling them to drive faster resolution and higher customer satisfaction.

ORACLE ENHANCES HUMAN EMPATHY INSIDE ORACLE CLOUD HCM To help organisations continue to deliver a positive employee experience while meeting the evolving demands of today’s workplace, Oracle announced updates to Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management. The new products and features deliver personalised journeys and growth opportunities for employees, while improving data accuracy for HR teams. As a result, the latest updates improve both the employee and HR experience.

Journeys Provides a seamless, step-by-step experience

for employees as they move through personal and professional situations that require complex tasks and interactions. Journeys gathers various components necessary for these multipart processes to take the confusion out of activities like re-boarding employees as they return to the office, or helping employees manage their physical and mental wellness by providing access to health resources provided by the organisation.

Profile Video Helps teams feel more connected when working remotely by allowing employees to add a customised 10-second video introduction to their profile page in Oracle Connections.

Opportunity Marketplace Helps employees discover opportunities to grow within their organisation, learn new skills, and expand beyond their traditional role to find long-term success and satisfaction.

By making it quick and easy for employees to discover short-term projects and internal job postings, Opportunity Marketplace helps organisations tap into existing talent and fill short-term needs in new ways.

Open Jobs for My Career Flags new and relevant roles to make it easy for employees to apply for new roles internally.

The new Open Jobs for My Career tool gives employees the support and resources needed

to continue growing their careers within the organisation, instead of looking elsewhere for new opportunities.

Oracle Payroll Connect Streamlines processes with payroll partners by making data accessible in real time directly through Oracle Cloud HCM. With access to all necessary payroll information on one platform, HR leaders do not need to go back-and-forth between software to pull necessary employee payroll information, improving both efficiency and data accuracy.

Oracle Anytime Pay Provides employees with the opportunity to get paid for time worked in advance of their pay cycle. This employee loyalty offering enables HR to meet new workforce demands, especially with the rise in contract workers and gig projects that have more on-demand payment requirements.

Diversity Dashboard Expands the possibilities of data by providing personalised business analytics for HR decision makers. The rich set of more than 50 HR KPIs, dashboards, and reports in Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM includes a Diversity dashboard.

The pre-built dashboard highlights key statistics and trends to help HR teams better analyse employee data and improve initiatives around diversity and inclusion in their workforce. ë

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PRODUCT NEWS

Synology launches new high performance micro-server Synology has launched DiskStation DS1621xs+, redefining performance expectations in a compact tower form-factor. Pairing a quad-core Xeon processor together with ECC memory and onboard 10GbE, the DS1621xs+ raises the bar for high-performance data storage and management. The DS1621xs+ shares a powerful Xeon processor found in some of our datacentre bound devices, but now in an 11.5L chassis. Over 3.1 GB/s seq. read and 1.8 GB/s seq. write performance means you can tackle larger data sets and handle more users, even quicker than before. We also paired it with ECC memory for maximum dependability. Together with Btrfs and our comprehensive data backup options, your data is in safe hands.

SMALL, BUT PLENTY BIG

Six internal 3.5” bays enable up to 96 TB of raw storage capacity. When that’s not enough, bump that up to 256 TB, on-demand, by adding on two additional DX517 expansion units for a total of 16 drives. The DS1621xs+ also includes two M.2 2280 slots for blazing-fast NVMe cache so that you can make your storage go over 20X faster without sacrificing any bays.

10X FASTER NETWORKING FOR SERIOUS WORK

Finish content creation projects, big backup tasks, and anything that needs fast file transfers quicker with 10GbE, built-in. Slot in an additional 10 or 25GbE card to speed up and tackle high-resolution network rendering projects or provide even faster transfer performance for multiple virtual machines.

POWERED BY SYNOLOGY DSM

Data management shouldn’t be difficult. Synology DSM simplifies difficult and cumbersome processes while still giving you ample control over decisions that matter.

Create your own on-premises cloud with Synology Drive and protect data located on PCs, virtual machines, SaaS, and more with Synology Active Backup suite.

Synology Inc. also announced the availability of the 5-bay DS1520+ storage system, built to excel in home and small office environments. Ideal for data backup and organising multimedia libraries, DS1520+ is a versatile and scalable option to create your own private cloud.

DS1520+ AT A GLANCE

126% faster in website responsiveness 19.8% faster in compute-tasks Five internal drive bays with support up to 15 Up to 240 TB raw capacity Dual M.2 2280 NVMe SSD cache slots

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PRODUCT NEWS

Sennheiser facilitates social distancing with touchless audio Sennheiser’s TeamConnect Ceiling 2 enables touchless audio in meeting rooms, enabling employees to more easily maintain social distancing best practices while ensuring all participants experience clear and discernible communications.

As it is ceiling mounted, the system does not require constant cleaning as table microphones would, and the fact that it reliably covers the entire room without the need for any re-adjustment allows for participants to sit at the recommended distance from each other.

COMPATIBILITY WITH LEADING VIDEO COLLABORATION PLATFORMS

TeamConnect Ceiling 2 microphone is compatible with Zoom Meetings and is also certified for Microsoft Teams Rooms when deployed with Microsoft-certified DSPs. Both platforms have become market leaders in the video collaboration space and with cutting-edge features, Sennheiser’s solution greatly enhances the performance of these solutions. For example, dynamic beamforming automatically focuses on the active speaker and follows their voice no matter where they move in the room. This enables presenters to move about freely and utilise whiteboards without being restricted to a fixed position in the meeting space.

R&M launches PRIME Ribbon, enables 40% more fibres R&M, the global Swiss developer and provider of connectivity systems for high-quality, highperformance network infrastructures, has launched its new PRIME Ribbon distribution module in the Middle East. The slide-in module for the fibre optic distributor rack PRIME connects ribbon fibre cables with the flexible and proven PRIME programme. With this type of cable, the number of optical fibres in a rack can be increased by 30% to 40%.

In comparison to single fibre cables, ribbon fibre cables offer several advantages. They enable a higher number of fibres with the same cable diameter as well as the splicing of 8 or 12 fibres in one working step. With this technology, three to four times more fibres can be laid in a conduit or rack than usual.

The PRIME ribbon distribution modules from R&M occupy a 3/4 height unit in a 19 rack. Their capacity is 96 fibres. In addition to the splice patch variant with LC duplex or SC couplings, R&M offers a pure splice variant for 288 splices.

The PRIME ribbon distribution modules are suitable for fibre to the home projects in combination with the PRIME racks. They are used for network expansion in central offices, POPs and street cabinets. Data centres use them to consolidate the fibre optic cabling of meet-me rooms and zone distributors. Campus networks and backbones in large buildings are also among the areas of application.

WILL TOWNSEND, SENIOR ANALYST, MOOR INSIGHTS AND STRATEGY.

Aruba ESP unifies IoT, IT and OT networks

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has announced significant enhancements to Aruba ESP, Edge Services Platform, that unifies IoT, IT, and Operational Technology, OT, networks to enable customers to quickly adapt to changing environments and user requirements. Aruba ESP is the first fully programmable platform to generate contextual information about identity, location, security posture, and applications in use to power efficient decision making and AIOps. Built to integrate with devices and applications from Aruba’s technology partners, customers can now become hyper-aware of their operating environment so

they can quickly adapt to evolving business, visitor, and employee demands.

Today, connected facilities only provide device connectivity for subsets of control services, whereas hyper-aware facilities can leverage Aruba ESP-generated contextual data to dynamically adapt a facility to its occupants and operating environment. Unifying these IoT, IT, and OT networks under the Aruba ESP platform, and capturing rich context, enables hyper-aware facilities that are safer, more adaptive, and enhance productivity. That represents a quantum leap forward over what can be achieved by basic connectivity and machine learning-based monitoring.

These enhancements to the Aruba ESP cloud-native, AI-powered platform are integral to sensing, analysing, and reacting to device data and contextual information. Aruba access points and switches now serve as multiprotocol IoT/OT platforms that interface with Aruba’s expanded technology partner ecosystem. Virtually every subsystem spanning machine inputs and outputs on a manufacturing floor through multimedia devices in the CEO suite can be accommodated, from social distance monitors to gunshot detectors,

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PRODUCT NEWS

Synology launches centralised data management solutions Synology launched a new generation of two and four bay Plus Series NAS, designed as a centralised data management solution for both home and business environments. Up to 133% faster in website responsiveness and over 15% improvement in compute-tasks, the new Plus series enables you to get things done faster and more efficiently. Two M.2 NVMe slot enable accelerated I/O performance, especially in multi-user environments.

DATA PROTECTION FOR EVERYTHING

Synology storage solutions are not only designed to fulfil data management requirements, but centralise backups for Microsoft Windows PCs and Servers, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V VMs, and Microsoft 365 and G Suite accounts using our Active Backup suite.

BUILD YOUR OWN PRIVATE CLOUD

Access your data without boundaries, but only if you allow it. Granular access rights and customisable password and expiration policies for file sharing puts you in control of your data. Easily synchronise with remote sites for distributed work and set up data encryption for your most sensitive files.

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PRODUCT NEWS

Edenred UAE enhances app to better manage financial health Payroll solutions provider Edenred has announced the launch of its revamped mobile banking application, C3Pay, with the aim to offer its cardholders a seamless and streamlined digital banking experience. The new features enhance security in order for its users to take full control of their financial health during this unprecedented time.

According to a statement from the FBI, the use of mobile banking has increased by 50% so far this year, and we are continuing to seeing an increase as the pandemic expands. Another survey by Ondo cited an increase in contactless payments with 30% of consumers trialling this feature for the first time since the pandemic. Moreover, 70% of these same consumers shared their preference to continue to use contactless solutions even after the pandemic.

The penetration of smartphone has grown from 73.8% in 2016 to 96% in 2019, even in the unbanked segment. During the stay-at-home public health emergency, millions of customers flocked to digital banking to transact from the comfort of their homes and C3Pay app offered a smooth digital payment experience to its cardholders to remit money home or for mobile recharge. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, it is becoming critical for the UAE businesses to ensure financial inclusion and digital onboarding for both the banked and unbanked population, ironically more than 60% of the UAE’s current working population, especially in manufacturing, trading, F&B and construction, sits outside the traditional banking system.

Edenred’s latest C3Pay mobile app is available for download on Google Play and App Storefor all the current C3Pay cardholders. It features a clean look, robust mobile banking services, improvements to SMS alerts and notifications, the ability to report lost or stolen card, replacement of the current card and instant money transfers to other C3Pay accounts. These timely features can make it easier and more secure for cardholders to bank, providing them with detailed information to make smart choices in managing finances.

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REAL LIFE

Infosys adds Qualys tools to Cyber Next Platform Qualys has announced that Infosys, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, will integrate Qualys VMDR and Multi-Vector EDR into its Cyber Next Platform, a managed security service offering.

Powered by the Qualys Cloud Platform, Qualys VMDR, Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response, and Multi-Vector EDR, Endpoint Detection and Response, will collect vast amounts of telemetry from the Qualys Cloud Agent and multiple sensors, to combine with network information, for a broad view of the environment, going beyond just the endpoint.

This will help eliminate false positives and significantly reduce lateral movements of security breaches to spread further from the initial point of compromise. The result will be a next-generation, 24 by 7 managed detection and response offering that can

enable Infosys to detect and respond to security incidents quickly across an entirely hybrid environment. Infosys customers can also extend their use of the Qualys Cloud Agent to Patch Management, File Integrity Monitoring and other functionalities.

Qualys VMDR provides an all-in-one cloud-based app that automates the entire vulnerability management cycle across on-premises, endpoints, cloud, mobile, containers, OT, and IoT environments, significantly accelerating the ability for organisations to respond to threats and prevent breaches. For clients looking to recognise suspicious patterns and uncover hidden incidents, Qualys offers an endpoint detection and response solution. Qualys Multi-Vector EDR provides vital context and comprehensive visibility to the entire attack chain, from prevention to detection to response, all from a single solution.

Schneider Electric designs sustainable data centre

Schneider Electric has contributed technology and engineering solutions and expertise to design DataXion’s data centre, now the most energy efficient and sustainable data centre in the North Africa region. The Tunisia-based data centre is the largest colocation facility in North Africa and caters to the financial, retail, internet service providers, and technology

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firms. The data centre, first opened in 2016, has reduced its energy needs by 35%, increased its asset availability by 20%, and lowered operational costs by 20% over the past four years.

Created by Unipack in 2013, a subsidiary of Tunisia’s Poulina Groupe Holding, DataXion was inaugurated in 2016 to meet the needs of companies throughout North Africa. The

PHILIPPE COURTOT, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, QUALYS.

facility was designed in accordance with tier 3+ international standards, and includes redundant and dual-powered servers, storage and connectivity. DataXion uses multiple, active and independent sources of power and cooling resources for the site.

Given the region’s climate, in which temperatures often reach 34 degrees Celsius in summer, the site’s greatest challenge was how to reduce energy consumption whilst maintaining the highest levels of availability and security. Schneider Electric’s team designed and implemented an end-to-end data centre that would fully automate and digitise the facility’s equipment, ensuring 99.9% availability for customers, whilst monitoring and optimising the centre’s energy usage and cooling.

The site was designed and commissioned

by Schneider Electric, and the equipment was supplied and installed by Schneider Electric’s team in the region. The site uses EcoStruxure IT Expert, which allows the operations team to monitor, manage and optimise energy use across the site’s servers, cooling and electrical equipment. All preventive, curative and predictive maintenance operations are carried out by Schneider Electric’s service and digital teams.

REAL LIFE

Chalhoub Group leverages Salesforce Customer 360 platform Luxury retailer Chalhoub Group has announced a digital transformation agreement with Salesforce to enhance customer e-commerce experiences amid the Covid-19 pandemic. GCC and Egypt’s beauty and personal care e-commerce market is valued at $1 billion, according to Bain & Company.

In anticipation of its growth, and to meet customers’ shift to e-commerce amid the Covid-19 coronavirus, Chalhoub Group has accelerated its digital transformation to meet customer needs and to deliver on e-commerce expectations. Chalhoub Group has more than 125 companies, partners, and affiliates, and 600 retail stores across 14 countries.

In 2020, Chalhoub Group has already launched digital commerce experiences for 3 brands, Make Up For Ever, Yves Saint Lauren, and Swarovski. Working with the channel

KRISTOF LUKOVICH, HEAD OF DIGITAL, BEAUTY VERTICAL, CHALHOUB GROUP.

partners Changi Consulting and Emakina, Chalhoub Group continued its digital transformation by adopting the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud to drive e-commerce, and personalise customer journeys across chat, email, social media, and WhatsApp.

In response to customer demands, Chalhoub Group worked with Molton Brown to create a luxury handwash and hand care set, and also launched a digital concierge service to virtually connect customers with makeup artists, and perfume and skincare experts from the comfort and safety of their homes.

Chalhoub Group has also doubled down on customer engagement via WhatsApp, with rapid responses and personalised recommendations on one of the region’s most popular social communication platforms.

Chalhoub Group is also leveraging AI from Salesforce’s with Einstein, built-in intelligent solutions to personalise customer journeys, offer product recommendations, and implement Einstein Bots to ease the load on customer service agents by automating routine requests, which enables agents to handle more complex issues. Chalhoub Group is leveraging MuleSoft to unlock and unify data throughout the customer journey, creating connected customer experiences in e-commerce, services, and retail stores with an API-led approach.

With MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, Chalhoub Group is able to accelerate speed of delivery and time-to-market, while reducing complexity and maintenance, and dependencies on legacy integration tools.

BIOS Middle East completes cloud migration for Delma Exchange BIOS Middle East has announced that Delma Exchange, a UAE-based global currency exchange, has successfully completed its large-scale cloud migration and business continuity project. Delma Exchange is embracing the latest IT technologies to add more value to internal productivity and customer offerings.

Delma Exchange operated in a Local to Local and Decentralised IT infrastructure environment.

With the Financial industry going through significant digital transformation, these legacy systems left the business exposed to inefficiencies, security risk and scalability issues. To stay ahead in the business, Delma Exchange started a multiyear IT strategy programme, and all-out cloud migration is one the major milestones in this journey.

After extensive survey and research, Delma Exchange partnered with BIOS Middle East for transforming its IT Infrastructure. This migration has put in place a robust, scalable and manageable IT Infrastructure and IT governance in place.

Working with some of the leading global vendors, BIOS Middle East is focused on providing a range of Public and Private Cloud as well as Managed Services in the region. The company has customers from several business streams including financial services, healthcare, insurance, oil and gas and more.

TDOMINIC DOCHERTY, MANAGING DIRECTOR, BIOS MIDDLE EAST.

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It’s also likely that co-creation and co-curation will become more important, so we need tools that are conducive to getting creative juices flowing.

ANDREW BRINDED,

Vice President and Sales Chief Operating Officer, EMEA, Nutanix.

WHAT THE KNOWLEDGE WORKER OF 2030 WILL DO Immersive screens, virtual desktops and AI assistants will boost the next wave of end-users, predicts Andrew Brinded of Nutanix.

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o understand what end-user computing may look like in 10 years, first think about how you work today and consider how you worked 10, 20, 30 years ago. And if you’re lucky enough to be too young, ask a colleague.

The Seventies. The knowledge worker of the 1970s had a fixed-line telephone, sheaves of paper documents, possibly a typewriter,

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memos for written communications, a legion of clerks, a typing pool and precious little other information infrastructure.

The Eighties. As hairstyles got shorter, the office expanded to include early personal computers. IT began to talk more to end-users and business analysts’ requests for data to be hauled off mainframes and mid-range servers became more frequent.

The Nineties. Cheaper PCs, laptops, the web, local-area networks, email, mobile phones and client/server IT made this the decade where personal productivity soared.

The Noughties to now. Smartphones abounded, WiFi became ubiquitous, tablets soared, and office workers were released from the shackles of their desks to be effective from anywhere, often selecting their own devices

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too. Architects design spaces for workers to bump into each other, brainstorm and cocreate with far-flung colleagues and partners.

But what of the knowledge worker in 2030?

Where will this person work from and what tools will s/he use to become optimally effective? It’s a fair bet that this person will need to be creative because nobody wants to compete with China or Indonesia or any low-cost economy on price, so innovation will be key.

It’s also likely that co-creation and co-curation will become more important, so we need tools and spaces that are fun, funky and conducive to getting creative juices flowing. Here are some ideas of what we might see.

Everything is virtual. Desktop PCs will disappear almost entirely except for poweruser workstations. Virtual desktop infrastructure will prevail because users will want to see their working environment from any device, whether that’s a laptop, tablet, phone, smart watch, smart speaker or something else. We can expect ubiquitous compute capacity everywhere: in domestic appliances, in-car infotainment systems, perhaps baton or cylinder computers with roll up flexible screens, smartphones that can double as PCs, Star Trek-style smart microphones that we pin to clothing.

Streaming is everywhere. Once, a lack of support for advanced graphics was the criticism of VDI but that argument is becoming obsolete. Google’s cloud-based Stadia games platform will even support 8k streaming at 150 frames per second. That could mean the computer of the future effectively returning to be a dumb terminal and with hardware costing perhaps tens of pounds rather than hundreds.

Massive immersive screens. With such great

With such great streaming quality, screens may be one of the hottest areas of end-user computing change. streaming quality, screens may be one of the hottest areas of end-user computing change.

It’s possible that we will go from today’s curved OLED screens to immersive pod units where we are transported into another world of crystal-clear audio and life-like visuals. Your colleague in the US takes a virtual seat in a simulacrum of a meeting room alongside you and calls are finally perfect, thanks to faster broadband and clusters of routers.

Alexa and her friends are coming to you.

Voice assistants will become critical to the business user interface, meaning we can control everything from anywhere, hands-free.

Bolstered by AI, search will be simplified. Can’t find that file? Just say: ‘Computer find me that document I wrote about end-user computing in 2030’… and there it is.

Instant computing. Faster boot sequences helped by advanced memory will make computing faster than ever with fewer irritating wait states. Storage becomes less important if streaming dominates but NAND Flash and similar technologies will help with lightningfast caching and buffering.

Autonomic self-correction. Security and

By tapping into the innate human capacity to innovate, companies that offer the best environments will excel and win over the best people.

error detection will advance to the point that helpdesk calls are reduced to a minimum as AI and Machine Learning detect and anticipate signs of imminent failures or vulnerabilities and take action without user action.

Long-lasting power. Advanced battery chemistries will let computers run for days on end while solar and wireless charging become ubiquitous.

Faster input. Tools such as Otter provide the ability to transcribe meeting notes with high degrees of accuracy, while Zoom offers a transcription service for conferencing sessions. Expect more automation of clerical tasks such as automatically storing files in a logical place or anticipating next actions based on previous behaviour.

Homes that look like offices, offices that look like homes. For 20 years, designers have created office spaces that bring out the kidult in all of us. Games rooms, comfy sofas, work-out rooms and running tracks abound, but now the tide is turning the other way as the design experts figure out how to bring work capabilities into domestic spaces. So, look out for pull-out pods and desks, beds that turn into workspaces, TVs that morph into computers screens and more.

Some of this may sound fanciful and the truth is that it’s hard to predict progress with any great degree of accuracy, but think of how working life has changed over the decades and these ideas are far from absurd. In order to win the battle for talent, companies need to provide attractive working environments and great tools for the incoming generation of workers. By tapping into the innate human capacity to innovate, companies that offer the best environments will excel and win over the best people. ë

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Educate your IT teams and employees to minimise risk and maximise prevention.

RICK VANOVER,

Senior Director of Product Strategy, Veeam.

THINK 3,2,1 TO PROTECT YOUR BIZ FROM RANSOMWARE While education is a critical step, organisations must prepare for the worst-case scenario, says Veeam’s Rick Vanover.

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he war on ransomware is real. In the past few years, this form of attack has become a valid threat to businesses.

We have seen huge attacks that have rendered multinational organisations, even governments, vulnerable and unable to continue mission-critical operations. In 2017, WannaCry brought hospital IT departments across Europe to a standstill, with over 200,000 computers across affected, demonstrating the destructive potential of ransomware.

Organisations need to acknowledge this threat and take steps to prepare, defend and be ready to remediate. This is a critical step

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to avoid an unplanned and likely ineffective response later during a ransomware incident.

A strong, multi-layered defence and strategy to address ransomware is composed of three key elements: education, implementation and remediation. Furthermore, having an ultraresilient approach to backing up, recovering and restoring data is vital to protect business continuity in the event of an event.

EDUCATING THE BUSINESS There are two major audiences that should be targeted from an education perspective: IT staff

and organisational users. It’s important to target both groups as threats can be introduced from both personas.

The main points of entry into a business for ransomware is through Remote Desktop Protocol or other remote access mechanisms, phishing and software updates. Put simply, in most cases cyber-attackers are not made to work as hard as they should to fetch big prizes. Knowing that these are the three main mechanisms is a huge help in focusing the scope of where to invest the most effort to be resilient from an attack vector perspective.

Most IT administrators use RDP for their

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In disasters of any type, communication becomes one of the first challenges to overcome.

There are two major audiences that should be targeted from an education perspective: IT staff and organisational users.

self-assessment tools can be an effective mode of first-line defence.

The third area that comes into play is the risk of exploiting vulnerabilities. Keeping systems up to date is an age-old IT responsibility that is more important than ever. While this is not a glamorous task, it can quickly seem a good investment should a ransomware incident exploit a known and patched vulnerability. Be mindful to keep current with updates to critical categories of IT assets: operating systems, applications, databases and device firmware.

A number of ransomware strains, including WannaCry and Petya have been based on previously discovered vulnerabilities that have since been corrected.

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daily work, with many RDP servers directly connected on the Internet. The reality is that Internet-connected RDP needs to stop. IT administrators can get creative on special IP addresses, redirecting RDP ports, complex passwords and more; but the data doesn’t lie that over half of ransomware comes in via RDP. This tells us that exposing RDP servers to the Internet does not align with a forwardthinking ransomware resiliency strategy.

The other frequent mode of entry is via phish mail. We’ve all seen email that doesn’t look right. The right thing to do is delete that item. Not every user handles these situations the same way, however. There are popular tools to assess the threat risk of phish success for an organisation such as Gophish and KnowBe4. Combined with training to help employees identify phishing emails or link,

Even organisations that follow best practice to prevent exposure to ransomware are at risk.

While education is a critical step, organisations must prepare for the worst-case scenario.

If there’s one takeaway for IT and business leaders, it is to have a form of ultra-resilient backup storage.

At Veeam, we advocate the 3-2-1 rule as a general data management strategy. The 3-2-1 rule recommends that there should be at least three copies of important data, on at least two different types of media, with at least one of these copies being off-site. The best part is that this rule does not demand any particular type of hardware and is versatile enough to address nearly any failure scenario.

The one copy in the 3-2-1 strategy has to be ultra-resilient. By this, we mean air-gapped, offline or immutable. There are different forms of media which this copy of data can be stored in an ultra-resilient manner. These include tape media, immutable backups in S3

or S3-compatible object storage, air-gapped and offline media, or software as a service for backup and Disaster Recovery.

In disasters of any type, communication becomes one of the first challenges to overcome. Have a plan for how to communicate to the right individuals out-of-band.

This would include group text lists, phone numbers or other mechanisms that are commonly used to align communications across an extended team. In this contact book you also need security, incident response and identity management experts.

There are also conversations to have around decision authority. Businesses must decide who makes the call to restore or to fail over before an incident takes place. Once a decision to restore has been made, organisations need to implement additional safety checks before putting systems back online.

A decision also has to be made as to whether an entire virtual machine recovery is the best course of action, or if a file-level recovery makes more sense. Finally, the restoration process itself must be secure, running full anti-virus and anti-malware scans across all systems as well as forcing users to change their passwords post-recovery.

While the threat of ransomware is real, with the right preparation organisations can increase resiliency against an incident to minimise the risk of data loss, financial loss, and reputational damage. A multilayered approach is key. Educate your IT teams and employees to minimise risk and maximise prevention. However, implement solutions to ensure data is secure and backed up. Finally, be prepared to remediate data systems through full backup and DR capabilities should your previous lines of defence fail. ë

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MARCO ROTTIGNI,

Chief Technical Security Officer, EMEA, Qualys.

5 KEY ELEMENTS FOR SUCCESSFUL VULNERABILITY REMEDIATION Vulnerabilities are inevitabie. But security teams can take control of evolving threats by knowing which ones to remediate first, says Qualys’ Marco Rottigni.

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T departments are overwhelmed by the abundance of vulnerabilities that continue to grow at a rapid pace every day. They struggle to identify the most critical threats they must address right away at any given point to protect their organisations from a compromise. Attempting to eradicate 100% of vulnerabilities sequentially, by treating them all as equally important, is impractical, myopic and dangerous.

Some vulnerabilities represent a minor risk, while others must be addressed immediately.

Ignoring serious vulnerabilities for extended

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periods of time while you tend to trivial ones is like deciding to paint a house whose roof you know is in danger of collapsing. Moreover, the damage potential of vulnerabilities fluctuates constantly. For example, a vulnerability considered unimportant for months can suddenly become critical if an exploit kit for it becomes widely available. Consequently, organisations that fail to properly prioritise vulnerability remediation open themselves up to devastating cyber-attacks. They risk sustaining extensive damage to their operations, financial standing, brand image, corporate reputation and

customer and partner relationships.

To that end, here are the 5 requirements for prioritising vulnerability remediation.

A comprehensive and continuously updated view of all your IT asset When attempting to prioritise vulnerability remediation, it’s what you don’t know that derails your efforts. At the most basic level, this means being aware of all the hardware and software in your organisation, from high-end systems to mobile apps. There can be no phantom servers, PCs, smartphones, tablets, printers, applications, middleware and the like

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You also need to plug into the firehouse of external vulnerability disclosures so that you are aware of the latest threats in the wild.

Treating all vulnerabilities as equally important is impractical, myopic and dangerous.

lurking in your network without your knowledge. You must have a complete, unobstructed view of your IT environment at all times, and be instantly aware of its changes.

In addition to having a complete list of your IT assets, you need granular, detailed access to the components of each one. You must also understand how extensively each asset is interconnected with and dependent of other systems. Finally, it’s critical to know the role of each asset in your overall IT environment and how valuable and important it is to your organisation. This contextual knowledge and detailed data form the foundation upon which you can then begin the process of prioritising vulnerability remediation. Absent this underlying information structure, your attempts to assess vulnerability risks will be ill-informed and ultimately erratic and ineffective.

Knowledge of the constant stream of vulnerability disclosures Just like you must have a clear and deep knowledge of your organisation’s IT assets, you also need to plug into the firehouse of external vulnerability disclosures so that you are aware of the latest threats in the wild. This disclosure information flows uninterruptedly from multiple sources, including industry groups, government agencies, academic researchers, technology analysts and security vendors.

For example, you must be aware of zero day

vulnerabilities being actively exploited, publicly available exploit code, actively attacked vulnerabilities, lateral movement vulnerabilities that let hackers use a compromised system to attack other machines on the same network, vulnerabilities with high data loss potential, DDoS attacks and malware outbreaks.

The ability to correlate external threat information with the vulnerability gaps that exist in your IT environment Lets say you have a comprehensive, detailed view of your IT asset landscape. And you’re also up to date on the universe of thousands upon thousands of disclosed vulnerabilities.

That is a great start, but you’re far from done.

Now you must connect the dots. And to do so manually is an arduous task.

You need to mesh both sets of internal and external data, your IT asset information and disclosed vulnerabilities, and correlate them. And you need to be doing this continuously, so you’re alerted whenever there is a match. You also must be able to proactively conduct specific searches, combining multiple variables, to find assets that may be potentially at risk. This will give you a dynamic snapshot of all the vulnerabilities that exist in your IT environment at any given moment.

Dashboards and reporting tools to visualise your threat landscape Once you have correlated your internal and external threat data and identified impacted IT assets, you must be able to drill down on the data, mine it for patterns, slice and dice it, aggregate it in custom reports and represent it graphically. This multidimensional and iterative analysis of the data will allow you to extract insight and gain an awareness of your security posture that you otherwise wouldn’t have had access to.

You should be able to measure your progress and remediation efforts with real-time trend analysis and generate scan and patch reports for your stakeholders. After all, the goal is not just to identify vulnerabilities and assets, but rather to prioritise which ones you are going to remediate first.

In addition to having a complete list of your IT assets, you need granular, detailed access to the components.

Precise assessments of your organisation’s threat scenarios Finally, you’re now ready to factor in various criteria for assessing how critical certain threat scenarios are in your organisation’s specific context using actionable intelligence. The goal is to be able to prioritise your vulnerability remediation tasks in a continual, contextual, automated and precise process.

Consider these two opposing scenarios. Let’s say there’s a vulnerable database software that is being savagely exploited in the wild, causing chaos in many companies. And you happen to have one instance of it. However, in your environment this database is only present in a system of marginal importance that is isolated from the rest of your infrastructure. You determine that if that asset were compromised, the risk to your organisation would be trivia.

Likewise, you may encounter the opposite scenario, in which a vulnerability that isn’t attracting much attention in the industry may be a critical one for your organisation.

Vulnerabilities are an inevitability. And if staying ahead of the vulnerability curve wasn’t challenging enough, the acceleration of remote working means IT security teams are now under more pressure than ever before. The good news is that following these five steps will allow organisations to take full control of evolving threats, so security teams know which vulnerabilities to remediate first. ë

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AMMAR ENAYA,

Regional Director, METNA, Vectra

THE CASE FOR BEHAVIOUR-BASED THREAT DETECTION t’s time to jump off the signature hamster wheel, gain visibility and an understanding of what’s inside your networks, insists Vectra’s Ammar Enaya.

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here’s an alarming cybersecurity gap between the time an attacker evades prevention security at the network perimeter and the time when an organisation discovers that key assets have been stolen or destroyed. This is the attacker dwell time gap, and is measured in weeks or months for most organisations who are breached.

Attackers have a big advantage in this gap.

Traditional, widely embraced approaches to detecting threats, including signatures, reputation lists and blacklists, are inherently reactive, ceding the first-mover advantage to cybercriminals.

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THE INHERENT LIMITATIONS Signatures have had a good run, especially at detecting large-scale commodity threats like command-and-control communications of botnets, automated crawlers and vulnerability scanners that scour the Internet.

But the signature model is limited and leaves multiple blind spots for a barrage of perilous attacks. Attackers who value stealth, over the number of systems they control, are finding ways around signatures. And unfortunately, these sophisticated attackers tend to think more strategically and pose a significant risk to organisations.

Understanding the blind spots caused by signatures requires understanding the weaknesses. For one, signatures, reputation lists and blacklists only recognise threats that have been previously seen. This means someone needs to be the first victim, and everyone hopes it’s not them. Detecting threats usually depends on key security applications installed at endpoints and gateways. New threats are caught in virtual sandboxes and new signatures are generated on-the-fly. The process takes time, and malware can gain a foothold as endpoints and networks are left vulnerable.

Secondly, signatures have no response to attackers that have already penetrated your

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The signature model is limited and leaves multiple blind spots for a barrage of perilous attacks.

There’s an alarming cybersecurity gap between the time of the attack and the time when an organisation discovers that key assets have been stolen. network, as they live off of the land using common protocols and services, and not the malware they used to find a way in. Signatures and other Indicators of Compromise won’t help you identify and stop a malicious insider with legitimate access and legitimate tools.

Attack behaviours and deviations from normal activity can’t be detected with signatures.

Custom malware also makes its way around signatures. Most malware is unique to the organisation under attack, which means it won’t be caught by signatures. According to the 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, 70-90% of malware samples have traits that are exclusive to the targeted organisation, and this approach of customisation and bespoke tooling has only grown since then. Attackers don’t handcraft malware; they modify existing malware just enough to throw off signature-based defences.

Malware signatures work by creating hashes of known bad files, so the smallest modification prevents a match. Attackers simply add a few bits to a malware file so the hash won’t recognise it as malware. These changes occur

automatically with no human interaction.

Vast volumes of seemingly custom malware are generated daily in this way. The key is that while the malware’s bit pattern may differ, its behaviour is the same. The changes, which are designed to avoid signature-based detection, are superficial.

Signatures also miss zero-day attacks that target vulnerabilities in software or operating systems, such as Heartbleed or Duqu 2.0.

These vulnerabilities are virtually impossible to detect via signatures because they only stop known threats.

Creating new signatures is a tried and tested solution. It’s the bedrock of everything from antivirus software to next-generation firewalls, intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems. However, they are always several steps behind attackers and can create a false sense of security.

FOCUS ON ATTACKER BEHAVIOUR Attackers can change malware, search for unknown vulnerabilities and steal data from systems they have permission to access. But they can’t change their attack behaviours as they spy, spread and steal from a victim’s network.

These behaviours can be observed, giving organisations real-time visibility into active threats inside their networks. Today, the savviest organisations complement their signature-based defences with automated threat management. They stay up-to-date on prevalent attacker Tactics, Techniques and Procedures from evidence-based sources like the Mitre ATT&CK framework, to hypothesise possible attacks, and put appropriate controls in place.

Spotting the weak signals of an attack, hidden in the cacophony of communications, isn’t easy, and requires smart, adaptive software. By combining data science, machine learning and behavioural analysis, automated threat management detects malicious behaviours inside the network, regardless of

the attacker’s attempt to evade signatures and whether it’s an insider or outsider threat.

By focusing on attack behaviours and actions, automated threat management can identify every phase of an active attack, command and control, botnet monetisation, internal reconnaissance, lateral movement and data exfiltration, without signatures or reputation lists.

Behaviour-based threat detections also identify internal reconnaissance scans and port scans, Kerberos client activity, and the spread of malware inside a network. Data science models are effective at neutralising an attacker’s use of domain-generation algorithms to create an endless supply of URLs for their threats.

Cybercriminals always look for new ways to conceal their attack communications, and one of the most effective, and fastest-growing, ways to do this is by hiding within another allowed protocol. For example, an attacker can use benign HTTP communication but embed coded messages in text fields, headers or other parameters in the session. By riding shotgun on an allowed protocol, the attacker can communicate without detection.

However, the detection models inherent in automated threat management can reveal these hidden tunnels by learning and analysing the timing, volume and sequencing of traffic.

STAYING AHEAD OF NETWORK THREATS Nimble attackers can easily create and hide their exploits in an infinite number of ways.

Consequently, the limitations of signatures should be complemented with automated threat management models that continuously learn new attack behaviours and adapt to network changes.

It’s time to jump off the signature hamster wheel, gain visibility and an understanding of the previously unknown inside your networks and cloud, and get ahead of attackers by automatically detecting and analysing the behaviours and actions that belie an attack and mitigate the threat before damage is done. ë

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EXECUTIVE MOVEMENTS ServiceNow hires Vanessa Smith as Senior Vice President, Global Go-to-Market

Exclusive Networks appoints Jesper Trolle as CEO

Exclusive Networks has announced the appointment of Jesper Trolle as CEO with immediate effect. Trolle joins Exclusive from ECS Arrow Electronics, where he was President of the Americas, and will be responsible for driving the next phase of growth at the company and upscaling the business. Trolle takes over from Olivier Breittmayer who becomes a non-executive Board member of Exclusive. The move is part of a planned succession strategy and Trolle will work alongside Breittmayer for the next three months to ensure a smooth transition.

Vastly experienced and recognised as an entrepreneurial business leader within the IT industry, Trolle has spent over 28 years working in the sector, initially within the reseller community, before moving into distribution. In 2001 he founded Next Denmark A/S which was acquired

by DNS Denmark, which in turn was acquired by Arrow in 2005.

Since then, Jesper has held a number of diverse positions in multiple locations within Arrow, seeing rapid success and progression, including stints in Germany running central and eastern Europe, and Paris, running north-west Europe. He took up the role as Arrow’s President Americas in 2017, based out of Denver, Colorado, where he has successfully grown a double-digit $bn business.

ServiceNow has announced it has hired industry veteran Vanessa Smith to serve as Senior Vice President, Global Go to Market. In this newly created position, Smith will oversee the company’s global go to market strategy, with a focus on maximising success and accelerating time to value for ServiceNow’s customers. She will report to Kevin Haverty, Chief Revenue Officer. Smith’s appointment expands on ServiceNow’s July announcement of the evolution of its go to market functions to drive deeper customer success and continue to build an exceptional partner ecosystem as ServiceNow scales growth to $10 billion in revenue and beyond.

As head of ServiceNow’s global go to market function, Smith will lead the company’s unified approach to customer engagement across the relationship lifecycle. Her scope includes the top accounts programme, focusing on ServiceNow’s largest customers, as well as the Inspire Programme, which provides digital transformation strategies and resources for ServiceNow’s customers. Smith also will oversee ServiceNow’s value management programme, “Now Value,” and industry solution teams which bring together sales, marketing, and product to unlock innovation and deliver exceptional customer outcomes.

Li Shi appointed as President of Huawei Cloud and AI Business Group, Middle East

With demand in the region increasing for cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, Huawei has appointed a new regional President for its Cloud and AI Business Group as the company restructures its offerings in these fields.

Li Shi assumes the role of President of the Huawei Cloud and AI Business Group in the Middle East region effective immediately. Under his leadership, the group seeks to help governments and local industries to tap into the power of digitalisation while creating more intelligent and safer societies.

Based in Dubai, UAE, Shi will oversee the expansion of the group’s regional product and solution portfolio along with partner ecosystems that will create ultimate service experiences by utilising Huawei’s global capabilities. The executive will further seek to deliver comprehensive terminal-edgecloud solutions and services to more of Huawei’s customers and strategic partners, all with respect to data sovereignty that can support the digital economy and smart society of countries across the Middle East.

Shi has nearly 15 years of international experience with Huawei. He was most recently the CEO of Huawei UAE and had also previously held executive positions for Huawei in other Gulf and Levant countries.

YPO announces Xavier Mufraggi as Chief Executive Officer

YPO, a global leadership community of more than 28,000 chief executives in 142 countries, today announced that Xavier Mufraggi, a member of its YPO Paris Chapter, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, effective 1 December 2020. Mufraggi, the first non-US born CEO of the organisation of young leaders, joins YPO from Club Med, the global leader in luxury all-inclusive vacations.

Mufraggi was most recently the President and CEO of Club Med EMEA, a region delivering more than $1B revenue per year. He previously held the position of CEO for North America and the Caribbean. Under his leadership, this division emerged as a sustainable and profitable business unit, and he succeeded in digitally transforming and repositioning the brand into an upscale family vacation destination.

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