March Issue 2020

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FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs. MARCH 2020

IS THE

MULTICLOUD

MODEL TOO MUCH TOO SOON FOR THE INDUSTRY? According to IBM, 85% of enterprises are in a multi-cloud environment, but only 41% have a multi-cloud strategy. The challenges that the organizations are facing, outweigh the benefits they are accruing from the model. Is multi-cloud coming into an industry that is not yet ready to optimally utilize it? P/18

HOW ARE DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES ENABLING THE MANUFACTURING SECTOR?

FEATURE P-28 STORY

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FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs. MARCH 2020

EDITOR’S LETTER

HOME: THE NEW ADDRESS OF YOUR WORKPLACE Hello Friends.

While I am writing this piece of content, the whole world is trapped by the pandemic of the decade called COVID 19.

This is paralyzing the systems one after another - affecting the businesses like wildfire does to the jungle. All the industries are falling like a pack of cards .

First: the aviation industry got hit. People from international destinations were barred from entering countries. Then flights to and from international destinations got cancelled.

Then domestic flights got restrictions on flying. This took the tourism industry along with this. People cannot travel to destinations cannot contribute to tourism economy. By the way, outbound tourism from China is the largest to the world and by curtailing the international flights and direct impact of COVID in China, the tourism industry got affected.

Along with the tourism, the hospitality industry is now badly hit. Hotels are empty and restaurants do not have diners anymore. Much before we can understand anything, we are locked into our residences and there is complete lockdown outside. Nothing is working – No industry for time being. There is no mobility unless you have the

COVER STORY

NEXT MONTH SPECIAL

SECURITY IN THE TIME OF A PANDEMIC The next issue is dedicated to combating the cyber threats arising as the world fights the COVID 19 pandemic. We would like to stake feedback from the CIOs, CISOs and Vendors on what are the security challenges they are facing in these times and how are they overcoming them.

compelling reason. So, you are face to face with a new way of working – “Work from Home”. I myself had to go through this new experience – trust me – it is not at all enjoyable. Like me, 95% businesspeople must have faced the situation but with guarantee I say that their situation and experience would have been as that of mine. It is not that we do not love to stay at home and work, but it is the remote access and remote work.

They must have faced with multiple challenges from video not working to audio not working or freezing, so and so forth.

But the fact of the matter is that you must accept the situation and start learning quickly. Always laggard in technology implementation, Education sector have already started using e-learning technologies for allowing students to continuing taking lectures from their distance teacher. To me it is a mindset. If you change your mindset, works can be uninterrupted from your homes. Imagine the benefits. First: expenses of the company will be reduced drastically, your own expenses would be reduced drastically, productivity can be high – as the work hours would not be restricted to 10:00 – 06:00. Plus, biggest benefits to the environment. Suddenly, we will be inhaling clean air and our medical expenses would be minimized. Cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Gurgaon, etc., which ar e on the pollution radar would become clean cities.

Secondly, If you ask me how long the situation will prevail. The honest answer is: No Idea. So, embrace technologies, change the mindset and start working from home: that is the precise answer.

S A N J AY M O H A PAT R A S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N F O M E D I A . C O M

SUPPLEMENT

BUSINESS CONTINUITY AMID THE PANDEMIC The supplement story of the magazine would focus on how to keep your business running remotely during the pandemic. The story would have relevant quotes from the top CIOs in India.

PLUS

Interviews and Case Studies

Catch interviews, guest articles and case studies of recent applications from the Industry stakeholders, IT/ITES Vendors and IT leaders and CIOs from the Enterprise IT World CIO Community.

Send in your inputs to sanjay@accentinfomedia.com 4

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

CONTENTS V O L U M E 0 5 | I S S U E 0 1 | MARCH 2020 | W W W . E N T E R P R I S E I T W O R L D . C O M

FOR THE CIOs. BY THE CIOs.

Publisher: Sanjib Mohapatra Chief Editor: Sanjay Mohapatra Managing Editor: Anisha Nayar Dhawan Sub Editor: Pooja Jain, Nidhi Shail Designer: Ajay Arya Assistant Designer: Shadab Khan, Rahul Arya Web Designer: Vijay Bakshi, Sangeet Technical Writer: Manas Ranjan Lead Visualizer: DPR Choudhary MARKETING Marketing Manager: Vaishali Shukla SALES CONTACTS Delhi 6/102, Kaushalya Park, Hauz Khas New Delhi-110016 Phone: 91-11-41055458

COVER STORY

18

E-mail: info@accentinfomedia.com EDITORIAL OFFICE

IS THE MULTI CLOUD MODEL TOO MUCH TOO SOON FOR THE INDUSTRY?

According to IBM, 85% of enterprises are in a multi-cloud environment, but only 41% have a multi-cloud strategy. The challenges that the organizations are facing, outweigh the benefits they are accruing from the model. Is multicloud coming into an industry that is not yet ready to optimally utilize it?

GUEST ARTICLE : /24 Cloud Applications

26 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DDOS WEAPONS TODAY AHMAD NASSIRI

“Security Solutions Architect, A10 Networks.”

Delhi: 6/103, (GF) Kaushalya Park, New Delhi-110016, Phone: 91-11-41657670 / 46151993 info@ accentinfomedia.com

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ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY IN TIMES OF CRISIS, REMOTE WORKING THE NEW NORM

E-COMMERCE: THE NEXT BIG OVERHAUL THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

DEBPROTIM ROY

SUROOR WIJDAN

“CEO and Founder, Canvs.”

“Founder, Xencov Software.”

34 THE WAY WE APPROACH SECURITY NEEDS TO EVOLVE: MURALI URS MURALI URS

“Country Manager-India, Barracuda Networks.”

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

5

ITWORLD

ROUND UP

India Migrates Apps Back On-Prem from Public Cloud B Y S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N FO M E D I A . C O M

According to a new global study by Nutanix, Indian enterprises are leading the charge when it comes to repatriating public cloud workloads. The report found that 91% percent of India’s enterprises reported having moved, or plan to move, public apps back on-prem. This compared to 73% globally, and 76% in the APJ region.

The report highlights that Indian enterprises are going through a period of adjustment as their understanding and experience with public cloud matures.

Many enterprises now realise that public cloud is not the single solution to their cloud strategy.

This reflects India’s enthusiasm for hybrid cloud adoption, which offers enterprises cloud mobility 6

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

and agility as well as the ability to integrate multiple clouds, both public and private. For the second year running, Enterprise Cloud Index respondents have selected hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model going forward.

“Cloud mobility is a critical factor, as India’s enterprises embrace digitization and decide where to place their workloads. In this fast-changing digital environment, flexibility and security are essential, and Indian enterprises need the ability to match workloads to the best environment at the time.” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, VP and MD-Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix.

D ATA BRIEFING

54% of the companies in India do not have enough technology and resources for employees to work from home.

Source: Gartner

ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

VMware Expands Portfolio to Help Customers Modernize Applications and Infrastructure

VMware has introduced a comprehensive portfolio of products and services to help customers modernize their applications and infrastructure—marking a new chapter for the company.

VMware is introducing the newly expanded VMware Tanzu portfolio for modern applications, and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu, the automated, turnkey hybrid cloud platform that now supports both traditional VM-based and container-based applications featuring the new VMware Cloud Foundation Services using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and the new VMware vSphere 7 to drive developer productivity. With the most comprehensive

CIO

Microsoft and partners across 35 countries took coordinated legal and technical steps to disrupt one of the world’s most prolific botnets, called Necurs, which had infected more than 9 million computers worldwide. This disruption is the result of eight years of tracking and planning and will help ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyberattacks.

The Necurs botnet is one of the largest networks in the spam email threat ecosystem, with victims in nearly every country in the world.

The breakdown by countries for the first seven days of March 2020 showed 13.59% of the distinct infected IP addresses coming only from India.

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, BitSight and others in the security community first observed the Necurs botnet in 2012, and Microsoft has since collaborated with law enforcement agencies, the government and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to rid computers of malware associated with the Necurs botnet. In India, the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit partnered with the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) and National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) to disrupt cyberattacks led by the botnet. This effort prevented the criminals behind Necurs from registering new domains to execute attacks in the future in India.

EVENTS

25TH MAR 2020

23-24 SEP 2020

Impact and opportunity of SaaS on Channel Business

This expo would be organized at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC).

WEBINAR

8

software stack for modern applications—spanning application to infrastructure—VMware is uniquely positioned to enable and guide customers to develop new modern applications as well as modernize existing applications and infrastructure.

“Today, we bring to market a comprehensive portfolio for modern apps to help customers accelerate their pace of innovation,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “VMware gives developers the freedom to deliver apps to any cloud, remove barriers to Kubernetes adoption, and help IT administrators transform their skills in support of a new wave of modern apps.”

Microsoft and Others to Disrupt Necurs

ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

CLOUD EXPO ASIA, HONG KONG

272020 FEB 2020 2ND APR

Bengaluru A Hyper platform for Key benefits of discourses on IT Converged Infrastructure Disaster Recovery, - including reduced TCO, Emergency Response & operational simplicity, Crisis Management and unmatched performance, Information agility and scalability fromSecurity. a cloud operating model with an integrated one-stop support experience.

WEBINAR

BUSINESS & IT RESILIENCE SUMMIT

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

One Third of Mobile Operators will Deploy 5G Standalone within Two Years: Enea Survey

S/HE SAID IT

VIJENDER YADAV

CEO AT ACCOPS SYSTEMS

“For enterprises solving the work from home challenge in the face of CoronaVirus threat, workspace virtualization seems to be the exact technology that fills the missing piece in the puzzle.”

37 percent of mobile operators say they will begin deploying 5G standalone (SA) within the next two years, according to a new worldwide survey of 41 mobile operators released by Enea. The report reveals how operators are addressing 5G architecture, edge deployment, and a network data layer.

The survey shows that 27 percent of operators will deploy 5G SA within 12-18 months with a further 10 percent within 24 months. With the maturity of 3GPP standards, such as the Release 16 freeze in March 2020, operators now see a clear path to 5G SA infrastructure. The overall timeline is supported by a total of 49 percent of operators who plan to deploy 5G SA within the next four years.

Analysis shows that operators choose different strategies when it comes to the edge. 85 percent of operators are planning QUICK BYTE ON

edge deployments at some point, but more than half of the operators in the survey have no strategy for doing so. 32 percent are going only with limited, specific use cases such as smart factories, smart cities, or retail, while others are holding off until the business case for edge deployment becomes more viable.

“Operators are beginning to firm up plans for how they will implement flexible, multi-vendor service architectures that enable them to deploy and monetize their 5G networks and differentiate their services” said Sue Rudd, Director, Networks and Service Platforms, Strategy Analytics.

“The survey indicates that several operators have figured out how to deploy SA in the next couple of years. This could be as ‘islands’ of 5G radio access with a 5G SA core for special services, starting late 2021.”

“Today technology has become integral to the way India operates and this development has opened up diverse avenues for young Indians to develop new age skill sets and explore differentiated career opportunities.”

NIKHIL ARORA V I C E P R E S I D E N T A N D M A N A G I N G D I R E CTO R , GODADDY INDIA

SECURITY

Trend Micro Blocked 12.7 Million High-Risk Email Threats in 2019 In 2019, Trend Micro blocked 12.7 million high-risk email threats for customers leveraging cloud-based email services from Microsoft and Google. 89% of the blocked emails were phishing related. Of these, 35% more credential phishing attempts were detected than in 2018. Additionally, the number of unknown phishing links jumped from 9% to more than 44% in 2019.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

Ozonetel Facilitates WFH Transition for Call Center Agents for Acko General

ACI Worldwide Launches Advanced ML Capability to Reduce Payment Fraud for Banks and Their Customers ACI Worldwide has introduced an innovative approach to ML that will enhance fraud protection for financial institutions and their customers. The company has filed a patent application for its ‘Incremental Learning’ technology, which is being implemented in ML models within ACI’s fraud prevention solutions, including Proactive Risk Manager, which delivers enterprise fraud management capabilities for financial institutions and intermediaries.

ACI’s ‘Incremental Learning’ technology represents a significant advancement over current machine learning models that need to be retrained as fraud patterns change.

Incremental Learning models are able ‘to think for themselves’ and make small adjustments on an

EXECUTIVE

ongoing basis to ensure they remain relevant, even as fraudsters and genuine consumers change their behaviors.

“Traditional machine learning models in many cases are not sufficient to stop fraudsters in their tracks. As fraudsters become more sophisticated, we need to continuously advance our models to beat them at their own game,” said Jimmy Hennessy, director of Data Science, ACI Worldwide. “Our global data science team has created a gamechanging piece of machine learning technology that can be seamlessly integrated and future-proofs the precision and operational efficiency for over 5,000 institutions protected by our solutions today.”

Coronavirus (COVID- 19) has triggered the world’s largest workfrom-home experiment. Employers look forward to opt for this option to stave off a crisis while keeping employees safe. However, not all jobs/roles are aligned to work-from-home. Especially it seems difficult for jobs like call centres to switch to work-fromhome model.

Keeping this in mind, Ozonetel is offering cloud - based solutions for their clients to easily switch to Work-from-home. With the help of offline mode, the companies can temporarily switch their call centers to a work-from-home model. This entire practice can be executed without compromising on the security and privacy concerns of the businesses. For example, Acko General Insurance, took a prompt decision to move their call centers to work-fromhome and Ozonetel helped them do this within a quick span of time seamlessly.

“We believe the remote working model can be as efficient as working from office if we use the right tools. And since we can offer this option for our employees, we should. Now all calls landing on Acko’s toll-free number are smoothly transferred to employees who receive the calls on their mobiles. Sales representatives can click to call customers or prospects from their systems. The call automatically dials out to the employee’s mobile phone on one end and to the customer/prospect on the other,” says Yugansh Goyal, Associate Director, Acko General Insurance.

MOVEMENT

Ness Digital Engineering Appoints Ranjit Tinaikar as the Global CEO.

Pine Labs ropes in Amrish Rau as the CEO.

10 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

Dassault Systèmes Promotes Deepak NG to MD, India.

DXC Technology names Nachiket Sukhtankar as the MD of India Business Operations

Salesforce ropes in Arundhati Bhattachary as the Chairperson & CEO India

Kamal Goel appointed as the EVP-IT & Chief Evangelist of Yotta Infrastructure

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

BOOK

SHELF

Smart Intelligent Computing and Applications

GLOBAL UPDATE

HPE Container Platform Empowers Customers with Choice in Deployment Models

BY

SURESH CHANDRA SATAPATHY, VIKRANT BHATEJA, J. R. MOHANTY, SIBA K. UDGATA

PRICE

RS. 29,815.00

WHERE:

AMAZON.IN

About The Book

HPE Container Platform is an enterprisegrade container platform designed to support both cloud-native and noncloud-native applications using 100 percent open source Kubernetes – running on bare-metal or virtual machines (VMs), in the data center, on any public cloud, or at the edge. In addition, HPE is introducing new professional services to ensure faster time-to-value and several new reference configurations for data-intensive application workloads such as AI, machine learning, deep learning (DL), data analytics, edge computing, and Internet of Things (IoT).

The HPE Container Platform dramatically reduces cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal, while providing the flexibility to deploy in VMs or cloud instances. This allows businesses to embrace a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud approach to deploying Kubernetes with enterprise-class security, performance, and reliability. Organizations seeking greater cost savings, efficiency, utilization, and application performance can eliminate the need for virtualization and expensive hypervisor licenses, by running containers directly on bare-metal infrastructure.

This book gathers high-quality papers presented at the Third International Conference on Smart Computing and Informatics (SCI 2018–19), organized in Bhubaneswar, India.

Key Feature The book includes advanced and multi-disciplinary research on the design of smart computing and informatics. It broadly focuses on several innovation paradigms in system knowledge, intelligence and sustainability that can help to provide realistic solutions to various problems confronting society, the environment, and industry.

3i Infotech Brings in AI-powered Anti-Money Laundering Solution 3i Infotech has launched AMLOCK Analytics, its advanced anti-money laundering (AML) solution powered by AI and ML, which enables banks and financial institutions to identify complex and hidden AML patterns. It helps organizations to meet their most critical challenge of managing high false positives and provides a holistic view of investigating an alert. AMLOCK Analytics uses various statistical methods and machine learning algorithms to derive analyses and predictions based on institution specific historical data.

One of the important features of 3i Infotech’s

AMLOCK Analytics is the reduction of false positives using risk profiling, through predictive analytics that identifies potential risk and thereby enhances decision making. The solution also provides an insight on the trends followed by customers, based on seasonality and identifies the anomalies based on deviation from these trends, where machine learning helps in customer segmentation. This enables users to investigate effectively by working closely on those groups which are risky or deemed outliers.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

IBM Advances Watson’s Ability to Understand the Language of Business

DIGEST

IBM is bringing in several new IBM Watson technologies designed to help organizations begin identifying, understanding and analyzing some of the most challenging aspects of the English language with greater clarity, for greater insights.

The new technologies represent the first commercialization of key Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to come from IBM Research’s Project Debater, the only AI system capable of debating humans on complex topics. For example, a new advanced sentiment analysis feature is defined to identify and analyze idioms and colloquialisms for the first time. Phrases, like ‘hardly helpful,’ or ‘hot under the collar,’ have been challenging for AI systems because they are difficult for algorithms to spot. With advanced sentiment analysis, businesses can begin analyzing such language data with Watson APIs for a more holistic understanding of their operation. Further, IBM is bringing technology from IBM Research for understanding business documents, such as PDF’s and contracts, to also add to their AI models.

WIPRO AND HFS RESEARCH STUDY FINDS 75% EXECUTIVES LOOK AT BLOCKCHAIN AS AN ENTERPRISEWIDE STRATEGIC PRIORITY IN 2020 AND BEYOND

PRAMAN CMS100- Centralized Management Server Matrix’s PRAMAN Centralized Management Server is a Windows based software application for centralized management of all the telecom devices, located across several offices. It increases the operational efficiency of the organization with its enhanced Device Monitoring and Fault Management functions. The Centralized Management Server enhances enterprise communications, ensures uninterrupted connectivity, and centralizes enterprise communication management. Improve staff productivity and pave the way for your business towards success with Matrix PRAMAN Centralized Management Server.

The key features of Matrix’s Praman are - 24x7 Performance Monitoring, Alarms and Alerts, Automatic Device Discovery, Centralized Reports, Customized User Roles, Network Topology View, Custom Dashboards, Intuitive and Web-based GUI & Integrated Solution with Matrix VoIP Devices.

According to a report by Wipro and HFS Research, nearly 75% of executives look at blockchain as a strategic priority while only 1% dismiss it as not relevant. Their survey found that nearly 75% executives are leveraging blockchain for near term business impact (process excellence and efficiency, data and identity management, and better business outcomes) or to drive competitive differentiation (reimagined IT infrastructure, additional trust in multi-party collaboration, transparent and immutable transactions).

The report has also found that more than 95% of enterprise blockchain initiatives focus on six broad areas: identity, crypto, trade, payments, supply chain, and finance.

Enterprise adoption of blockchain is nascent and challenging, yet ambitious as 75% of all blockchain initiatives are less than two years old and only 14% has reached a production stage.

The report titled, ‘Ignore Blockchain at Your Peril, But Don’t Drive Blindly’ is an outcome of a global survey conducted with 300 senior executives, including more than 100 C-level executives who are closely associated with their organizations’ blockchain initiatives and analysis of 940 blockchain initiatives across industries.

AI HELPS ORGANIZATIONS GROW PROFITS 80 PERCENT FASTER: ORACLE

IBS Software has got into a contract with the Japan Airlines (JAL) for the implementation of iCargo, a comprehensive cargo sales, inventory and reservations system that manages air cargo operations and movement globally and powered with business capabilities that are tailored for the unique Japanese Air Cargo market.

JAL will replace multiple legacy systems with IBS’s iCargo Terminal Operations solution for Japan, the workhorse that will manage the entire operations process covering the import, export, transfers, warehouse 12 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

operations and airports operations across the network. Along with significant savings in legacy system maintenance costs, JAL will also benefit from major efficiency improvements through the iCargo solution. The real time availability of operational information through iCargo also helps generate actionable intelligence to understand the overall utilization of assets and thereby improve operational efficiencies. iCargo is an integrated solution that supports the end-to-end business functions such as cargo reservations, rating, manifesting, import & export operations, warehouse management, revenue accounting, air mail handling and revenue management of cargo carrying airlines and ground handlers.

According to a study from Enterprise Strategy Group and Oracle, organizations that are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies in finance and operations are growing their annual profits 80 percent faster. The global study, Emerging Technologies: The Competitive Edge for Finance and Operations, surveyed 700 finance and operations leaders across 13 countries and found that emerging technologies—AI, Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, digital assistants—have passed the adoption tipping point, exceed expectations, and create significant competitive advantage for organizations.

AI, IoT, blockchain and digital assistants are helping organizations improve accuracy, speed and insight in operations and the supply chain, and respondents expect additional business value as blockchain applications become mainstream.

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

MANAGEMENT

MANTRA

“True leadership is about enabling voice of the youngest team member.”

Suchi Mukherjee, CEO, Limeroad

Pine Labs and ZestMoney partner to offer instant credit at POS

Cloud Snooper Allows Malware to Communicate Across Firewalls: Sophos

Sophos has released a report on Cloud Snooper, a sophisticated attack that uses a unique combination of techniques to allow malware on servers to communicate freely with its command and control servers through firewalls. The report deconstructs the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used in the attack. SophosLabs believes the attack was the work of a nation state motivated by espionage.

As detailed in the report, the TTPs used together include: a rootkit circumventing firewalls, a rare technique to gain access to servers disguised as normal traffic, and a backdoor payload that shares malicious

code between both Windows and Linux operating systems, a known, but uncommon approach.

“This is the first time we have seen an attack formula that combines a bypassing technique with a multi-platform payload targeting both Windows and Linux systems. IT security teams and network administrators need to be diligent about patching all external-facing services to prevent attackers from evading cloud and firewall security policies,” said Sergei Shevchenko, Threat Research Manager, SophosLabs. “IT security teams also need to protect against multi-platform attacks.

Pine Labs has partnered with ZestMoney to provide in-store digital EMI options to customers through Pine Labs’ Plutus and Plutus Smart point of sale (PoS) devices. This offering is targeted at the new-to-credit customers. ZestMoney EMI on Pine Labs devices will be available across 20,000 outlets in 100 cities in the next 12 months.

Venkat Paruchuri, Chief Product Officer, Pine Labs said, “We hope to extend instant credit facility to additional categories such as apparels and fashion, education, wellness and healthcare, and travel and tourism over time.”

As an inaugural time-bound offer, ZestMoney will provide 0% interest EMIs on the purchase of any product for a three-month tenure. Apart from the inaugural offer, Pine Labs and ZestMoney are also working with manufacturers across mobile, consumer durables and laptop categories to bring EMIs with 3, 6, 9, and 12 months tenure.

This partnership will allow first-time credit seekers who do not have a credit or debit card to make purchases at offline stores and avail of EMI. Pine Labs’ cloud-based software platform can enable instant credit disbursal using ZestMoney’s credit risk and disbursement criteria.

Increased Focus on Data Privacy boosts jobs in Cybersecurity in India: Indeed

Data from Indeed reveals that postings for cybersecurity-related jobs have increased by 98% in the last three years (December 2016 to December 2019). During the same period, searches for these roles grew by 73%. Postings

show the largest jump between December 2017 and December 2018 (47%), followed by the spike between December 2016 and December 2017 (31%). Searches on the other hand, saw the greatest increase between December 2018 and December 2019, with a 44% rise.

Job seekers in the age group of 25-29 rank the highest in terms of searches for cybersecurityrelated jobs, followed by the age group of 20-24, and 30-34. The field sees the most interest from millennials, followed by Gen Z, who are now entering the workforce. Interest from the youth in working in these roles has been consistent,

as evidenced by Indeed’s earlier report that also indicated high levels of interest in cybersecurityrelated jobs among 26 to 30-year-olds.

In terms of location, cities that see the maximum job opportunities for these roles include Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad, leading with 40%, 12% and 10% of all cybersecurity-related job postings nationally. As prominent tech hubs, these cities have a keen focus on securing information and maintaining data privacy. These cities previously held 36%, 9% and 8% of all cybersecurityrelated jobs in the country respectively.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

Mimecast’s Email Security Advances the Way Organizations Combat Email Based Cyber Attacks

With the Looming Coronavirus Threat Array Networks Offers WFH Solutions to Enterprises In a step towards enabling corporate workforce to work from home (WFH) amid the coronavirus threats, Array Networks is offering complimentary Virtual Secure Access Gateway (vxAG) and Direct Desktop Business Continuity Planning license for 30 days to all enterprises who securely wish to plan work from home for their employees.

With stock markets reeling and growth forecasts slashed, companies have been scaling up efforts to keep workers virus-free. The move comes amid industry-wide concerns on how badly the coronavirus might affect the financial industry. In offices across Asia, enterprises have asked their employees to WFH as a precaution against deadly coronavirus.

“We are cognizant of the fact that the virus is becoming a more

immediate threat to all types of businesses exploding remote work across Asian countries. While we hope that the disruption would be minimal, we know there would be some difficulty in people continuing their roles efficiently without compromising security at the same time. Array’s vxAG virtual secure access gateways extend remote and mobile access capabilities to virtualized data centers and public/private clouds. DesktopDirect ensures operational readiness and ensure our ability to perform at full capacity in case of an extended period and also allows non-mobile workers to immediately get to work during disruptive events, without forcing compromises on IT or the corporation as a whole,” said Shibu Paul, Vice President - International Sales at Array Networks.

Mimecast has added new capabilities to its cloud-based platform comprised of integrated service components that organizations need to combat the latest cybersecurity challenges. These capabilities further enable customers to embrace a new approach to defending email. Mimecast’s Email Security 3.0 strategy helps organizations address threats at three distinct zones: the email perimeter, inside the organization or network and beyond the perimeter. Mimecast has incorporated new major platform innovations helping to increase efficacy with technology integrations and product capabilities, including web browser isolation, security awareness training integrations and brand exploitation protection solutions.

“The email threat landscape has changed and requires organizations to evolve from a perimeter-based discipline to a more pervasive one. For instance, tactics, like impersonation attempts, are becoming increasingly more difficult to identify as they’re happening both in email and ‘in the wild’, but organizations still need to cover off on their basic protection needs at the same time. This requires organizations to consider a new strategy when it comes to defending email,” said Peter Bauer, chief executive officer at Mimecast. “As our customers’ needs evolve, Mimecast is committed to continuing to developnew innovations into our platform to help them build a stronger cybersecurity and resilience posture.”

Forcepoint Offers Security Solutions Through AWS Security Hub Forcepoint today announced that three of its products are fully integrated and available through AWS Security Hub, providing up to 40,000 enterprises worldwide with a comprehensive, aggregated view of security alerts generated

by Forcepoint’s risk-adaptive cybersecurity solutions.

Forcepoint DLP is one of the first data loss protection products to integrate with AWS Security Hub, while Forcepoint CASB is the second cloud access security broker product offered by Forcepoint in co-operation with the

14 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

service. Integration with Forcepoint’s NGFW is now also available through AWS Security Hub, offering customers visibility across both their on-premises and Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments. All three Forcepoint services went live on February 20.

Part of Forcepoint’s robust and open technology partner ecosystem, the AWS Security Hub integrations are designed to help enterprises extract more value from their existing security investments while keeping users and data at the center of their cybersecurity architecture.

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

Nutanix Expands COVID-19 Response to APJ Binance and WazirX Supports Startups with a USD 50M ‘Blockchain for India’ Fund

Nutanix has expanded the availability of its Xi Frame virtual desktop service in Asia Pacific and Japan, as the region’s businesses struggle with the fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.

Xi Frame is a cloud-based service providing companies with virtual desktops via a web browser providing flexibility, safety, security and access without software or plugins. Xi Frame has now been made available in five new “cloud regions”: two on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with locations in Osaka, Japan and Seoul, S. Korea, and 3 on Microsoft Azure, with locations in S. Korea Central and South and Australia Central.

The increased capacity will provide easier access to cloud-based “work from home” services for many more businesses across the region and comes amid the

rising impact of the outbreak on regional and global economies.

With this announcement, the service is now available in 25 Azure, AWS, and GCP datacentres across the region making it easier for businesses to access the service and remain efficient, productive and operating during these turbulent times.

The total number supported globally is 63.

“As Asia’s workforce struggles to get to the office, we are bringing the office to the workforce,” said Matt Young, SVP Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan, at Nutanix. “We are making it as easy as possible for Asia’s businesses to access the solutions needed to keep their employees and business associates safe and secure, and their businesses productive and profitable, especially in these unpredictable and fluid times.”

Binance and WazirX have launched a joint initiative “Blockchain for India” to support the development and growth of blockchain startups in India.

They have set up a USD 50 million Blockchain for India fund to incubate and invest in blockchain projects and startups focused on solving industrial and social problems through the use of blockchain technology.

This fund will help fuel the growth of many Indian blockchain startups and entrepreneurs and encourage the sustainable growth of the blockchain startup ecosystem in India. The investments will include, but not limited to, fiat-to-digital assets gateway solutions, trading platforms, payment and remittance solutions, digital asset wallets, stablecoins, DeFi platforms, decentralized applications (dApps) and more.

Nischal Shetty, Founder & CEO of WazirX, said “With this fund, we want to encourage and enable more and more founders and teams to come in and BUILD. This initiative also shows the incredible potential that the Indian blockchain ecosystem has to offer. Apart from funding transformative blockchain projects in India, we look forward to collaborating with other investment funds to grow the ecosystem even further.”

Rise in Cyberattacks in Italy Prove Coronavirus is Impacting Cybersecurity: Cynet After analysing the company’s aggregate customer data in Italy, Cynet is connecting the spread of the Corona Virus to a growing volume of cyber-attacks in the region. The findings reveal that companies with higher instances of the virus and that have quarantined or instructed employees to wfh, are now experiencing a sharp rise in both phishing attacks that target remote user credentials and include weaponized email attacks. This shows the propensity for hackers to shift their focus to remote work environments in order to capitalize on the virus while thwarting corporate security measures. This data illustrates

the future cyber implications for any territory in which the Corona virus would spread to the level that justifies a similar quarantine policy.

This analysis focuses on multiple organizations in Italy and shows a distinct spike in remote worker phishing attacks, compared to countries with fewer attacks. This indicates that remote workers have become a weak link that threat actors are targeting and that user credentials in offsite computing (home) environments are increasingly at risk -- especially in regions with escalating cases of COVID-19.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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ITWORLD // NEWS BRIEF

iValue and Actifio Join Hands to Offer Multi-Cloud Data Management Software Platform

CyberArk Alero Extends Zero Trust Access to Remote Workers CyberArk has expanded capabilities of CyberArk Alero to support emerging business continuity priorities. Building on its core use case of enabling privileged access for remote vendors, Alero, a SaaS-based solution combining Zero Trust access and biometric multi-factor authentication, now allows remote employees simple and secure access to critical systems managed by CyberArk. Securing access for remote workers is a critical element of business continuity strategies. According to Forrester, 88 percent of organizations cite provisioning employees with remote access technologies so they can work remotely from a location with internet access as a key work-

force continuity/recovery strategy.

“As organizations continue to embrace the benefits of remote work – be it out of necessity or simply offering employees flexibility – it’s critical they adopt an integrated and standardized method for workers and vendors to securely access the critical internal systems necessary to keep business up and running,” said Gil Rapaport, Vice President, CyberArk Alero. “By extending the capabilities of CyberArk Alero to now include remote employees, organizations can take advantage of the benefits of continued productivity while simultaneously mitigating security risks and reducing operational complexity.”

iValue InfoSolutions and Actifio have partnered to help customers deliver their data just as they deliver their applications and infrastructure - as a service available instantly, anywhere. Actifio’s enterprise-class software platform powered by its patented Virtual Data Pipeline technology frees data from traditional infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of hybrid clouds, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.

Actifio is the latest entrant into iValue’s offerings in the Data, Network and Application Management and Protection space.

Slow restoration of large databases ends up in violating enterprises’ SLAs. Enter Actifio, a pioneer in Data Virtualization, whose platform protects, provisions and recovers databases instantly, automatically from a Database-as-a-Service Cloud.

“Actifio’s unique platform helps customers instantly access or recover data that has been backed up or archived, all enabled on a single license. Actifio’s uniqueness on Test Data Management helps customers to seamlessly integrate and rapidly access enterprise data to drive insights and innovation.” said Calvin Samuel, Business Manager, iValue InfoSolutions.

Wipro to Enable PLEXIS Healthcare’s Digital Transformation Wipro Limited has partnered with PLEXIS Healthcare Systems to enable a streamlined, efficient, accurate and integrated plan administration solution to support healthcare payers and plan sponsors worldwide. The aim is to offer secure, compliant, high-value, end-to-end “digital first” plan administration solutions at a cost-effective price point along with enhanced customer experience. The partnership will initially focus on supporting Medicare and Managed Medicaid programs, but will expand to support Accountable Care Act and commercial lines of business.

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At its core, Wipro’s Medicare platforms will combine with PLEXIS’ healthcare payer claims and care management platforms, to deliver a state-of-the art technology backbone. This will enable Wipro to deliver world class Business Process as-a-Service (BPaaS) for efficient and effective management of the entire value chain including enrollment processing with Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) member billing, fulfillment, care management, claims processing and Encounter Data Processing to CMS.

NEWS BRIEF // IT WORLD

Wipro Launches Microsoft Business Unit for Digital Transformation Solutions

L&T Technology Services and IITKanpur Sign MoU for Research in Cybersecurity Programs L&T Technology Services has signed a multi-year MoU with the IIT Kanpur to collaborate on research in industrial and infrastructure cybersecurity. The MoU was signed by CEO and MD of LTTS, Dr. Keshab Panda and Deputy Director at IIT-Kanpur and Padmashri Awardee, Professor Manindra Agarwal in the premises of IIT-Kanpur.

According to the MoU, LTTS and IIT-Kanpur will together set-up a Center of Excellence (CoE) in the IIT-Kanpur campus and conduct research in the areas of Honeypot (network-attached system set up to entrap cyberattacks and study

hacking attempts), intrusion detection systems, malware analysis, blockchain, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing and provide cybersecurity awareness and training programs. The MoU will also give LTTS access to IIT-Kanpur’s cutting-edge testbed for critical infrastructure.

The CoE will be a part of IITKanpur’s C3i Center, a Government of India-funded one-of-a-kind cybersecurity research center, which was developed to work on solutions and technologies to protect India’s Strategic and Critical Utility Infrastructure.

Wipro has launched its Microsoft Business Unit that will focus on the development and evangelization of solutions leveraging Microsoft’s enterprise cloud services. This initiative is an outcome of Wipro’s expanded global alliance with Microsoft to accelerate cloud adoption and digital transformation for its customers across sectors.

Wipro’s Microsoft Business Unit consists of a team of trained and certified Azure consultants and specialists. The new unit will offer domain-based solutions and solution accelerators, including Wipro’s Cloud Studio, Wipro’s LiVE Workspace solution and Wipro’s Data Discovery Platform (DDP).

Bhanumurthy B.M, President and Chief Operating Officer, Wipro Limited said, “Our newly formed Microsoft Business Unit will aid organizations in accelerating their innovation and modernization journey by leveraging Wipro’s deep domain expertise along with Microsoft’s futuristic enterprise-class offerings. With this partnership, we will co-innovate in industry domain services focused on data, analytics, security and customer/employee experiences.”

Fortinet Introduces Self-Learning AI Appliance for Sub-Second Threat Detection

Fortinet brings FortiAI, a first-of-its-kind on-premises appliance that leverages self-learning Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to speed threat remediation and handle time consuming,

manual security analyst tasks. FortiAI’s Virtual Security AnalystÔ embeds one of the industry’s most mature cybersecurity artificial intelligence – developed by Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs – directly into an organization’s network to deliver sub-second detection of advanced threats.

To address the challenges faced by security professionals today, Fortinet is unveiling FortiAI Virtual Security AnalystÔ to accelerate threat remediation. FortiAI handles many of the time consuming, manual tasks currently expected of security professionals, preserving their time for

higher value security functions. FortiAI’s selflearning capabilities continue to get smarter once deployed in an organization’s network.

FortiAI leverages Deep Learning known as Deep Neural Networks, which mimic neurons in the human brain, to make complex decisions based on its scientific analysis of threats specific to the organization where it is deployed. As FortiAI’s artificial intelligence continues to mature, organizations benefit from having FortiAI’s Virtual Security AnalystÔ effectively transform and adapt threat protection.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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COVER STORY // MULTI CLOUD MODEL

A

multi-cloud environment is a type of digital infrastructure where an enterprise distributes its cloud assets, software, applications and more across several cloud providers. Every cloud provider has unique things to offer, each has their different architectures, because of which they all offer different levels of security, adherence to compliances, managed services along with varying billing models and support for different technology platforms. It is on the part of the organizations to select the best suited cloud type for their business needs at a cost that fits their budget.

Commenting on different perspectives that led to the adoption of the multi-cloud model, Subramanian Gopalaratnam, CTO, Resulticks says, “One school of thought holds that key factors in the market are resilience and, disaster recovery capabilities to ensure business continuity across the cloud. The second school of thought is to provide or consume specific enablers from each of it. For example, Amazon Pegasus provides

18 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH FEBRUARY 2020 2020

a great stream processing ability for a company whereas they might want to use Azure’s database capabilities as they are a Microsoft house. This provides certain point of views on why one is using the multi-cloud model. But at the same time, there is also another school of thought which maintains that different clouds provide the same solution, which means, one is not utilizing the specific cloud’s native or proprietary offerings.”

Multi-cloud environment does accrue cost and efficiency benefits, but it also complicates cloud management in the same process. Given that each individual cloud provider has its own siloed systems and configurations, the overall management of the cloud requires more resources and time.

Visibility across clouds might be complicated.

“Multicloud is playing out in one of two ways: Organizations committing to a platform but still using differentiating services from any source; and Building core application development and deployment strategies utilizing Kubernetes and Serverless to stay vendor neutral,” adds Subramanian.

With adoption of containers and open programming languages by cloud providers there is an opportunity to leverage multi-cloud for capabilities and features. “Multi cloud comes with the promise of agility and freedom. Shifts to modular application design, microservices, containers, cloud-native applications along with AI/ML, IOT, Blockchain and edge initiatives are enabling multi cloud adoption.” said Biswajit Mohapatra, Executive Director, IBM Cloud Migration Factory, Cloud Application Services.

“With IP Lock-in and portability issues abating, customers like having best of breed options for choosing clouds for their unique differentiating advantages or workloads e.g. Azure for DevOps automation or GCP for AI/ML, AWS for number of services and availability zones etc. Today we have customers who are developing cloud native apps on their On-Prem PaaS, AWS for bursting scenarios and plan to get their insights from their data lake on GCP. Customers are often picking one dominant partner as default or go-to option and use others to augment the first option,” says

MULTI CLOUD MODEL // COVER STORY

IS THE MULTI CLOUD MODEL TOO MUCH TOO SOON FOR THE INDUSTRY? According to IBM, 85% of enterprises are in a multi-cloud environment, but only 41% have a multi-cloud strategy. The challenges that the organizations are facing, outweigh the benefits they are accruing from the model. Is multicloud coming into an industry that is not yet ready to optimally utilize it?

BY POOJA JAIN POOJA@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Yesh Subramanian, SVP Digital, Mphasis.

Advantages of Multi Cloud Migration of application and workloads from on-site data centers to the cloud, as well as the development of cloud-ready and cloud-native applications are fuelling growth in cloud space.

When they find their organizations so heavily dependent on cloud, CIOs are becoming cognizant of the fact that they shouldn’t be leaning on a single cloud service provider for the entirety of their workload.

“Challenges around single cloud reliability, cloud service provider lock-in, regulatory compliance, price-sensitive deployments, data sovereignty, reality of shadow IT, latency/proximity concerns and resiliency are some of the driving factors leading to hybrid multi cloud model,” said Biswajit Mohapatra, Executive Director, IBM Cloud Migration Factory, Cloud Application Services.

What was the urge to avoid the nightmare of vendor lock-in, has paved way to the adoption of

the multi cloud model that at the face of it offers better disaster management. As the industry started dividing up its workload to different CSPs, it realized that breaking free of the vendor lock-in is merely the tip of the iceberg.

As the organizations gain a deeper understanding of the cloud services they use to run their workloads, they have started realizing that they don’t necessarily have to associate themselves to a single cloud provider. Organizations are becoming cognizant that a multi-cloud strategy allows them to select solutions from different providers for different needs, based on the provider’s merits.

By using multiple clouds, organizations can avoid vendor lock-in. This essentially means that they are benefitting from the strengths of every provider without limiting themselves to a single provider’s portfolio.

Using multiple clouds allow organizations to carry out Flexible Architecture Design, which enables them to customize their deployment to best suit their existing setup. This makes it easier for organizations to integrate legacy

infrastructure.

In a public cloud model, organizations have the ability to spend on what they need at the time they need it. A multi cloud model considerably enhances an organization’s On-demand Scalability. Managed correctly, public clouds cost lesser compared to private cloud, especially when the low capital outlay is factored in.

“A multi cloud enables the user to own the foundational infrastructure while leasing more resources to deal with spikes in traffic, ensuring they only pay for actual consumption. This way organizations can meet financial targets with the help of pay-as-you-go billing,” says Alex Li, GM, Alibaba Cloud South Asia.

Multi-cloud provides more options and gives us the ability to balance certain regional obligations from a compliance angle.

“Increased agility enabling workload mobility between heterogeneous cloud platforms, improved resiliency, robust security, competitive pricing model with cost-performance optimization , reduced risk of service disruption, driving

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

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COVER STORY // MULTI CLOUD MODEL

SURAJIT SEN CHIEF OF STAFF, MODERN DATA CENTRE, APJ, DELL TECHNOLOGIES.

“Organizations all around the globe are moving towards the adoption of multi-cloud BISWAJIT MOHAPATRA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, IBM CLOUD MIGRATION FACTORY, CLOUD APPLICATION SERVICES.

“Vendors have to buy-in to support interoperability to the highest degree possible, and co-exist & operate like a well-oiled machine to provide a seamless cloud experience to the client, thereby having organizations to really benefit from their multi cloud strategy.”

innovation through multi cloud management and monitoring process and freedom form cloud service provider lock-in are the advantages experienced in the adoption of multi cloud model. I strongly believe faster time to market, monetized data for new revenue streams, optimized supply chain, enhanced market reach, superior customer experience and cross organization collaboration can be achieved through hybrid multi cloud adoption. Fit-for-purpose cloud architecture, compatibility with emerging partner ecosystem, competitive pricing model, avoiding cloud service provider lock-in, ability to transition seamlessly for better alternatives, security and privacy are at the top of my list” said Biswajit Mohapatra, Executive Director, IBM Cloud Migration Factory, Cloud Application Services.

Changing Dynamics Between the Cloud Service Providers For a service model to not just sustain, but to thrive, it has to drive growth for both parties involved. Popularity of multi cloud is an opportunity and a driving force for the vendors to deliver a more robust and wonderful customer experience. Commenting on how a multi cloud model leads to vendor growth, Subramanian Gopalaratnam, CTO, Resulticks says, “It forces the vendors

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to provide solutions capable of scaling across continents and countries without violating any of the regionalized compliance requirements. This is where a multi-cloud option opens up greater opportunities for vendors to provide an enhanced solution.”

True to its nature, competition is one of the drivers of innovation for cloud service providers.

The advent of multi cloud is forcing cloud service providers to partner with each other for providing a seamless client experience. Competition is resolving itself in favour of collaboration. From pitting the vendors against each other for a larger share of the market, organizations now require them to work in coalition so that they can reap the benefits of the unique strengths of different cloud providers. While some cloud provider would be strong in providing IaaS, others would have great business solutions, vendors collaborating to enhance the multi cloud model is how the customers can meet the entire gamut of their business cloud requirements.

In many ways, the multi cloud revolution re-constituting the relationship between the organizations and their Cloud service providers. Dr. Rajeev Papneja, Chief Growth Officer, ESDS Software Solution Pvt. Ltd, elaborates on this. “A key component of multi cloud model is

approach to take better control of their cloud ecosystem. A multicloud strategy should be designed to simplify workload migrations, eliminating silos and cutting operational costs, thereby achieving a consistent cloud management experience.”

the Multi cloud management platform. Every Cloud Service Provider had Cloud management platform to manage their own platform and with the advent of multi cloud models, the first thing every vendor had had to do is redesign their CMP to make it MCM platform. This move has made the cloud service providers as competitors to software vendors who only developed multi cloud platforms. These third party vendors will now be forced to come up with some greater value additions to be in business. Secondly, organizations are expecting the CSP’s to be their one stop solution provider for all their transitions and management thereafter, which is a blessing in disguise. On one hand it is an added opportunity, while on the other hand this means ramping up the IT skillset and manpower along with various technology tools to assist the businesses embrace multi cloud models and get the best of all clouds.

As glittery as it looks, CSP’s are under pressure to bundle different solutions from different cloud providers and offer it tailormade on customer demand. In doing so it is becoming difficult more than ever to maintain its own unique proposition as highlight for the customer,” he says.

Challenges in Multi Cloud The Multi Cloud model is still in its initial stages of evolution. As with every other technology adoption, the nascent stages have its own challenges in terms of adoption, implementation and sometimes even arriving at a nuanced under-

MULTI CLOUD MODEL // COVER STORY

SUBRAMANIAN GOPALARATNAM CTO, RESULTICKS.

“Cloud computing has reached a new stage of maturity characterized, ALEX LI GM, ALIBABA CLOUD SOUTH ASIA.

“As companies get more comfortable with the idea of utilizing a multiple public cloud strategy, they are able to make choices based on

by movement away from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to the next level of platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

This trend will evolve over the next five years, as PaaS becomes an entry point to the Cloud..”

cost, performance and application capability – potentially moving between clouds as these dynamics change.”

standing of the technology.

According to IBM, 85% of enterprises are in a multicloud environment, but only 41% have a multicloud strategy. Further, according to a study by the IBM Institute of Business Value, more than 60 percent of customers lack the tools and procedures to manage and operate in a complex multicloud environment. Hence, it is to be expected that organizations will face challenges early on in their multi cloud journey.

Each cloud service provider has its own way of doing things, and so expertise in one cloud environment does not necessarily translate to expertise with another. When embarking on their multi cloud journey, some enterprises resort to employing a single-cloud specific workforce that is gradually trained to garner multiple cloud skills.

This inadvertently results in sub-optimal utilization of not just the talent in the organization, but also of the multi cloud environment.

That can only be rectified either with experience or guided training. Therefore, ensuring efficient and optimum use of cloud resources becomes a key challenge in adoption of multi cloud environment, as the justification of adopting this, or any other model for that matter is incumbent upon optimum utilization of resources.

To tackle this challenge, Alex Li, GM, Alibaba Cloud South Asia suggests, “The members of an organization’s IT staff will need to have a good

DR. RAJEEV PAPNEJA CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER, ESDS SOFTWARE SOLUTION PVT. LTD

“Taking the multi cloud approach help in achieve increased resiliency, agility, working knowledge of the cloud platforms that are being used. Not every IT staff member needs an intricate knowledge of every cloud platform, but the IT department should collectively have the knowledge required to support each cloud that is being used.” The organizations should have an in-depth understanding of different cloud providers, especially at the level of architecture.

When working with multiple cloud providers, it becomes necessary to understand the similarities and differences of their design architectures, deployment and management models. Only then can an organization make an informed decision when it comes to choosing different cloud providers.

performance, cost savings, resource optimization, and adherence to compliances as compared to being tied up with a single vendor.”

“Multiplying cloud environments typically means multiplying what’s required to effectively run those environments over the long haul. That’s true both for the internal teams and external resources. The higher the number of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions leveraged, the higher the number of [in-house] technology skills that must be developed and maintained,” says Prabhakar Jayakumar – Country Director, India

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

21

COVER STORY // MULTI CLOUD MODEL

SAIGHIRIDHAR V V SENIOR DIRECTOR OF ENGG, TECHCHEFS.

“One key factor executives decided migrating to cloud was to reduce the

SEEMA KUMAR TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, CLOUD AND COGNITIVE SOFTWARE, IBM INDIA/SA

“The early adoption of cloud was led by organizations lifting and shifting workloads onto the public cloud driven by the need to cut costs and increase availability. The next phase of the cloud is where we see serious enterprise workloads also getting ready to move to the cloud by investing in cloud-native development approaches and architecture.

A hybrid multi-cloud approach offers them the flexibility to quickly move or migrate workloads across clouds.”

at DigitalOcean.

So, another challenge faced by the CIOs in operating on a multi cloud model is the added complexity in managing IT infrastructure. To tackle the complexity of having to redesigning the network for multiple clouds, Biswajit Mohapatra, Executive Director, IBM Cloud Migration Factory, Cloud Application Services suggests CIOs to have “a unified IT infrastructure strategy and execution across the clouds from security and cost optimization perspective in a multi cloud environment.”

With multiple clouds coming into the picture, effectively managing security and privacy across cloud environments is another crucial aspect of the movement to the multi cloud model.

“Organizations that have stringent network compliance requirements and are tied up to specific networking devices, cannot impose the needs to all different cloud providers. How is the same level of security maintained across different cloud providers at each layer as each cloud provider will have its own framework in place, remains a big scar to be patched in the overall multi-cloud

22 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

strategy,” says Dr. Rajeev Papneja, Chief Growth Officer, ESDS Software Solution Pvt. Ltd. A key problem that can come out of a multi-cloud environment is Data Synchronization ability or Interoperability. This includes the ability to manage the connectivity between the cloud environments, application portability and migration challenges across different cloud environments, among other complexities.

“With containers being mainstream, developing containerised applications to a great extent assist with lift and shift of environment from one cloud provider to another. If proprietary platform are being used from any cloud service provider, then in any case the organization is tied up to the vendor. Developing cloudagnostic applications to work on all different platforms using their technologies is not a very viable option either. There is still lot of work that needs to be done before true interoperability can be achieved,” comments Dr. Rajeev Papneja, Chief Growth Officer, ESDS Software Solution Pvt. Ltd. “Strategic coherence, Enhanced agility, Radical interoperability, Boundless application and data

cost of managing licenses, and periodic upgrades. Post migration, companies realize that the Cloud Service Providers have incorporated lock-in periods; resulting in additional cost due to inability to address the challenges of Flexibility and Complexity. Migrating to multi cloud solutions addresses this challenge.”

portability, Expanded ecosystem, Enterprise grade security, Compliance certifications, Established governance model and Improved cloud management are the factors to be taken into account while selecting a multi cloud service provider. Compliance and regulatory requirements, reliability, security and privacy are the most prioritized factors to be considered in a multi cloud adoption journey.” said Biswajit Mohapatra, Executive Director, IBM Cloud Migration Factory, Cloud Application Services.

USE CASE Biswajit Mohapatra, Executive Director, IBM Cloud Migration Factory, Cloud Application Services shares a recent example of a client who is a mid-sized Bank.

The bank is facing multiple business challenges attributed to emergence of Fintech economy. The bank is lagging behind competition, customer retention and revenue is declining.

Creating a cognitive banking roadmap powered by multi cloud adoption strategy is the need of the hour for the bank. Three key use cases identified for quick wins are: 1. The loan origination process at the bank took weeks from initiation to disbursement. This was too long especially with respect to competition 2. Bank’s Anti money laundering systems had a huge scope for improvement.

3. The customer retention rate was a low 76%

MULTI CLOUD MODEL // COVER STORY

A 4-pronged hybrid multi cloud transformation approach was used to provide accelerated and effective value delivery to the Bank on its cloud journey. During the Advisory phase, multi cloud strategy and roadmap was created for the bank performing business, technology and cost value assessments. The roadmap drives one of the migrate, modernize or cloud native application development paths in a hybrid multi cloud environment with a default containerization platform.

Finally, approach to manage the workloads in cloud leveraged advanced monitoring, using intelligent solutions to keep the systems healthy, and identify issues early.

A SaaS product from a public cloud provider was leveraged to have a seamless user experience and gather 360-degree view of customer, another SaaS product from second public cloud provider was leveraged to enable voice first banking and cognitive analytics product from third public cloud provider was leveraged to drive the insights and actionable patterns for corrective and preventive models for customer retention. Anti-money laundering product was deployed in Bank’s private dedicated cloud for proactive detection of fraud in commercial transactions.

All the structured and unstructured data generated was analysed, mined and processed with

insightful, pattern-based business models to provide augmented on-demand service to customers.

Bank’s on-premise monolith was broken into microservices and seamless integration between on-premise applications, private dedicated cloud and public cloud from 3 cloud service providers was established.

We are beginning to see the results and they

look encouraging. The most important part is Bank had to make much lesser capital expenditure compared to traditional or single-cloud models. Without a multi cloud model, it is extremely difficult to implement such complex solutions in a matter of weeks and start seeing the business benefits.

Subramanian Gopalaratnam, CTO, Resulticks shares his multi cloud strategy with an example.

“At Resulticks, we look at different clouds for the capability each provides. For instance, we use Azure because it can provide in-country or localized data protection. We use IBM SoftLayer because it provides us with more options for cost-effective, team-based solutions for hosting certain types of technology that are still not realisable. This way we benefit from the best of both worlds.”

Alex Li, GM, Alibaba Cloud South Asia.

Saighiridhar V V, Senior Director of Engg, TechChefs.

“We at Alibaba Cloud work closely with our customers and partners by offering the proven products and solutions used by Alibaba Group for Indian companies. Alibaba Cloud as a vendor in this case not only provide our customers with technical support, we also advise them on the business aspects of cloud computing, given our success experience with Alibaba Group and the global ecosystem we have been building, ranging from e-commerce, Fin-tech, logistics, media and entertainment and digital marketing.”

“Given that there are multiple Cloud vendors showcasing services in different domains, Organizations are eager to tap into different cloud services to address their specific requirements. For example: Sys Admins may prefer to manage data on AWS, while engineers may prefer to utilize the Analytics engine in GCP and the CIO may observe the Windows licensing is reasonable on Azure. A mix & match of such an architecture is possible within the multi cloud paradigm.”

Finally...

With the Multi Cloud model coming to the forefront of organizations’ cloud approach, it is not just enhancing the way organizations operate

on the cloud, but is also paving the way for the service providers to expand their portfolio. Another aspect of the multi cloud makeover is the changing relationship dynamics between the different service providers and their role in the market. But the

challenge for the organizations is to devise strategies to optimally and efficiently use the model, instead of merely jumping on the multi cloud bandwagon for the sake of it.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 23

GUEST COLUMN // CLOUD APPLICATIONS

SANDIP KUMAR PANDA

Co-Founder and CEO, Instasafe Technologies “Cloud based solutions are today proving to be a silver lining that are a key driver in maintaining business continuity in the midst of an impending pandemic. While the future of the outbreak and its impending ramifications remain vague, it is apparent that there is a need to revamp corporate capabilities in line with increased adoption of cloud technologies”

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

As the panic around the rapid outbreak and spread of the novel coronavirus strain COVID-19 becomes more and more pronounced, there has been a metaphorical mad scramble on every front. With markets tumbling like dominos, and the general populace emptying shelves of supermarkets in anticipation of a pandemic, life in general, coupled with business operations all across the globe have been disrupted.

On the economic front, businesses have been facing the brunt of the outbreak, with investors descending on a selling frenzy, one which forced the NYSE to deploy their proverbial ‘circuit breaker’, and halt trading for 15 minutes to cut losses, for the first time since 1997. Coupled with the crash in the oil prices due to the Saudi-Russia oil war, the outbreak has caused stunning declines in the global markets, with Nikkei, Sensex, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index having shed around 5% at the peak of the coronavirus panic this month.

That said, the impact of the outbreak hasn’t been limited to financial losses and hygiene concerns alone. Global panic has forced organisations to alter the way they work, and clamour for deploying defensive measures to ensure seamless operations, while ensuring the safety of its employees. In what has been termed as the ‘world’s largest work from home experiment’ by Bloomberg, and ‘the end of the office’ by editors at LinkedIn, organisations have witnessed an unprecedented rise in work from home requests.

In addition, multiple giants, like Twitter have will-

24 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

CLOUD APPLICATIONS // GUEST COLUMN

THE CLOUD WITH THE SILVER LINING: HOW CLOUD APPLICATIONS ARE HELPING ORGANISATIONS DURING THE CORONA VIRUS OUTBREAK As the world fights the Corona Virus outbreak, organizations turn to the Cloud for business continuity. Sandip Panda writes about the silver lining amid the pandemic. ingly issued directives to their entire workforce to work from home.

In this scenario, multiple organisations have been forced to have a re-look at their remote access capabilities, and look for solutions that augment their ability to cater to an increasingly distributed workforce. Given the multiple technical considerations to be kept in mind, employers have to take tough decisions ahead, what with determining how to keep their off premise employees connected, while keeping their access secure, in addition to assessing ways to function efficiently without considerably disrupting team dynamics.

This is not just a technological shift, but may well be designed to be a cultural revamp. Tools that act as remote connectivity enablers may well have been around for more than 2 decades, but the fact remains that allowing a majority of its employees an option to work remotely, is an eventuality that not many organisations would have considered to implement anytime in the foreseeable future.

Of course, extending access to organisational resources carries with it obvious security risks.

The primary risks happen when technology is removed from places wherein they can be controlled. That said, the cloud has the potential to act as a saviour in this scenario. Apart from web-based apps, and virtual desktops, security measures which include end-to-end encryption, VPNs, and the more recent Zero Trust Network Access solutions have been a prime driver in

ensuring thatorganisations extend access to their resources to off-premise locations with minimal concerns about security.

That said, although large organisations may have the resources to deal with large incoming WFH requests, by increasing the number of licenses for their VPNs, it is the smaller organisations that will struggle to put up with this unprecedented change in their workflow process, and will have to adopt novel measures to rapidly provision for the resources that are required to support their remote workforce.

Tech providers are well aware that such outbreaks call for extraordinary measures, and some tech giants have taken steps to accord free access to their remote access augmenting tools to organisations across the globe. These include Microsoft, which has extended the premium trial version of its Teams Chats app, and Google, which has allowed free access to its Hangouts Meet app to all G Suite users. Zoom, which already offers free versions of its videoconferencing tool, has gone back to the drawing table to test its network in order to cope with increased capacity and ensure maximum functionality without any lapses.

Given the complexities associated with the extension of traditional security setups like VPNs, and issues related to their scalability, speed of deployment, and compatibility with cloud environs, organisations are looking for better cloud based alternatives that can cater to the immediate need of extending remote access capabilities on

demand, rapidly, and in the most secure way possible. Cloud based security solutions like those of Software Defined Perimeters (SDP) serve as a viable answer to the aforementioned challenges.

Given their hardware free, cloud agnostic, scalable on demand, and easy deployment features, the software defined perimeter market has been drawing eyeballs from tech organisations round the globe. And SDP providers are well aware of this impending need for scalable solutions in the market, especially in the light of the outbreak.

Organisations like Cisco have been trying to leverage this market to garner a larger customer base.

Closer home, Zero Trust solutions provider InstaSafe has been preparing to scale operations in order to cater to the needs of multiple organisations which have been contacting the team to extend their remote access capabilities.

In order to help smaller organisations cope with the outbreak, InstaSafe has extended free usage of its SDP Solutions to these companies. Says Mr. Sandip Panda, CEO of InstaSafe, “The coronavirus outbreak is an unprecedented situation wherein organisations must simultaneously ensure business continuity, as well as the safety of their employees. We understand that such dire times call for unconditional support from viable solution providers, which is why we have extended our services for free to smaller and mid size organisations. We feel that while the implications of the coronavirus outbreak may be harsh on both companies and the general population, organisations should see this as an opportunity to future-proof their workplaces, and adopt scalable technologies that can ensure seamless business operations even in the eventuality of such unforeseen circumstances.”

Cloud based solutions are today proving to be a silver lining that are a key driver in maintaining business continuity in the midst of an impending pandemic. While the future of the outbreak and its impending ramifications remain vague, it is apparent that there is a need to revamp corporate capabilities in line with increased adoption of cloud technologies. Companies may have to go back to the boardroom to discuss, re-evaluate, and re-assess the impact of such disasters on their functional capabilities, and may have to accept the utility of remote work, and the adoption of its associated technologies as the norm.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 25

GUEST COLUMN // SECURITY

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DDOS WEAPONS TODAY To help organizations take a proactive approach to DDoS defense, A10 Networks recently published a report on the current DDoS landscape, including the weapons being used, the locations where attacks are being launched, the services being exploited, and the methods hackers are using to maximize the damage they inflict.

AHMAD NASSIRI, Security Solutions Architect, A10 Networks.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

“With IoT devices coming online at a rate of 127 per second and accelerating, hackers are poised to enter a golden age of possibilities.

In fact, new strains of DDoS malware in the Mirai family are already targeting Linux-powered IoT devices—and they’ll only increase as 5G brings massive increases in network speed and coverage.”

A DDoS attack can bring down almost any website or online service. The premise is simple: using an infected botnet to target and overwhelm vulnerable servers with massive traffic. Twenty years after its introduction, DDoS remains as effective as ever—and continues to grow in frequency, intensity, and sophistication. That makes DDoS defense a top cybersecurity priority for every organization. The first step: understanding the threat you face.

To help organizations take a proactive approach to DDoS defense, A10 Networks recently published a report on the current DDoS landscape, including the weapons being used, the locations where attacks are being launched, the services being exploited, and the methods hackers are using to maximize the damage they inflict. Based on nearly six million weapons tracked by A10 Networks in Q4 2019, the study provides timely, in-depth threat intelligence to inform your defense strategy.

Here are a few of our key findings.

Reflected Amplification Takes DDoS to the Next Level The SNMP and SSDP protocols have long been top sources for DDoS attacks, and this trend continued in Q4 2019, with nearly 1.4 million SNMP weapons 26 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

and nearly 1.2 million SSDP weapons tracked. But in an alarming development, WSDiscovery attacks have risen sharply, to nearly 800,000, to become the third most common source of DDoS. The shift is due in part to the growing popularity of attacks using misconfigured IoT devices to amplify an attack.

In this key innovation, known as reflected amplification, hackers are turning their attention to the exploding number of internet-exposed IoT devices running the WS-Discovery protocol. Designed to support a broad variety of IoT use cases, WS-Discovery is a multicast, UDP-based communications protocol used to automatically discover web-connected services.

Critically, WS-Discovery does not perform IP source validation, making it a simple matter for attackers to spoof the victim’s IP address, at which point the victim will be deluged with data from nearby IoT devices.

With over 800,000 WS-Directory hosts available for exploitation, reflected amplification has proven highly effective—with observed amplification of up to 95x. Reflected amplification attacks have reached record-setting scale, such as the 1.3 Tbps Memcached-based GitHub attack, and account for the majority of DDoS attacks.

They’re also highly challenging to defend; only 46 percent of attacks respond on port 3702 as expected, while 54 percent respond over high ports. Most of the discovered inventory to date has been found in Vietnam, Brazil, United States, the Republic of Korea, and China.

DDoS is Going Mobile Unlike more stealthy exploits, DDoS attacks are loud and overt, allowing defenders to detect their launch point. While these weapons are globally distributed, the greatest number of attacks originate in countries with the greatest density in internet connectivity, including China, the

United States, and the Republic of Korea.

A10 Networks has also tracked the hosting of DDoS weapons by autonomous number systems (ASNs), or collections of IP address ranges under the control of a single company or government. With the exception of the United States, the top ASNs hosting DDoS weapons track closely with the countries hosting the majority of attacks, including Chinanet, Guangdong Mobile Communication Co. Ltd., and Korea Telecom.

In another key trend, the prevalence of DDoS weapons hosted by mobile carriers skyrocketed near the end of 2019.

In fact, the top reflected amplified source detected was Guangdong Mobile Communication Co. Ltd., with Brazilian mobile company Claro S.A. the top source of malware-infected drones.

The Worst is Yet to Come With IoT devices coming online at a rate of 127 per second and accelerating, hackers are poised to enter a golden age of possibilities. In fact, new strains of DDoS malware in the Mirai family are already targeting Linux-powered IoT devices—and they’ll only increase as 5G brings massive increases in network speed and coverage. Meanwhile, DDoSfor-hire services and bot herders continue to make it easier than ever for any bad actor to launch a lethal targeted attack.

The A10 Networks report makes clear the importance of a complete DDoS defense strategy.

Businesses and carriers must leverage sophisticated DDoS threat intelligence, combined with real-time threat detection, to defend against DDoS attacks no matter where they originate.

Methods such as automated signature extraction and blacklists of the IP addresses of DDoS botnets and available vulnerable servers can help organizations proactively defend themselves even before the attacks starts.

MATRIX // CASE STUDY

NATIONAL BANK OF UMM AL QAIWAIN ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY OF EMPLOYEES WITH MATRIX TIME-ATTENDANCE SOLUTION

Industry BFSI Customer Name National Bank of Umm Al Qaiwain Locations 14+ Location across UAE Devices VEGA FAX Users 500+ Applications Matrix Time-Attendance Solution for Quick Salary Processing by Eliminating Manual Calculations

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

Company Profile National Bank of Umm Al Qaiwain (the Bank) is a Public Shareholding Company incorporated in Umm Al Qaiwain by Amiri Decree Number (1) on January 5, 1982, issued by His Highness, the Ruler of Umm Al Qaiwain and commenced its operations with effect from August 1, 1982.

The Local government of Umm Al Qaiwain is the largest shareholder and promoter of the bank. The bank is engaged in providing retail and corporate banking services through a network of 14 branches in U.A.E. The Bank carries out Islamic banking operations through Islamic Banking window established in 2005 across its branch network.

Challenges They were searching for a fool-proof solution that would help them in managing the TimeAttendance and overtime calculation. With offices spread over 14 locations in UAE, management of attendance data was a daunting task. Thus, centralized attendance data management and maintaining a complete record of their employees were a part of their key requirements. Moreover,

their payroll processing deployed a software - RAMCO, wherein the attendance data was manually entered.

Solution After a comprehensive discussion with the customer, Matrix offered a centralized platform - COSEC CENTRA, to manage all the data centrally. Door controllers - COSEC VEGA FAX installed in all the office entrances. These door controllers are integrated with the central platform that pushes the event data to the server.

Furthermore, the Matrix platform is integrated with the payroll system - Ramco. All manual work for report generation was eliminated outrightly, simplifying the salary procedure.

Results fAfter implementing Matrix solutions, NBQ witnessed drastic changes while following their processes. Effortless attendance management of multiple locations from the Head Office was prominently one of them. The shift allocation and shift correction processes were streamlined.

Their solution included some advanced features

like customized attendance policy formation and real item alert on attendance related event & auto-scheduled reporting.

This, in turn, ensured efficient employee database management improving productivity.

Products and Solutions Offered COSEC VEGA FAX A complete Time-Attendance and Access Control solution with a blend of aesthetics, size, connectivity, reliability and ease-of-use.

Designed for large enterprises with multi-location organizations.

COSEC CENTRA PLT A web-enabled application server that controls the entire system from anywhere in the world. It is the heart of the entire solution and acts as a bridge between applications and the devices.

COSEC CENTRA TAM An enterprise-grade solution, designed for organizations the Time-Attendance and Leave Management processes like recording entries and exits, salary processing, etc.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 27

FEATURE STORY // MANUFACTURING SECTOR

How are Disruptive Technologies Enabling the Manufacturing Sector?

As Industry 4.0 takes over the marketspace, Manufacturing sector in India is not far behind in leveraging the new age technologies. They are exploring these technologies and devising use cases to enhance their productivity and efficiency. And yet what we see today is only the beginning.

BY POOJA JAIN POOJA@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

D

isruptive technologies like IoT, AI, 3D Prinitng and Advanced Robotics are the forefront of the transformation of manufacturing processes around the world. While the supply chain and logistics industry stand to benefit greatly from Blockchain, VR and AR will go a long way in creating partnerships between man and machine. As IoT connects machines, Industry 4.0 enables AI assisted analytics and predictive maintenance.

Not only does Digitization driven by these technologies helps companies achieve increased efficiency and productivity, but it also drives quality improvements and customizations. The Digitization of Manufacturing Sector in India is still in its initial stages as manufacturers have started leveraging these technological advancements recently.

According to the World Bank, India’s manufacturing sector only accounts for 18.3% of the country’s GDP as compared to 29% in China, 21% in Germany, 28% in South Korea and 20% in Indonesia. The Government of India has set an ambitious target of increasing contribution of the manufacturing sector from the current level of

28 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

16% to 25% of GDP by 2022.

A recent report titled ‘Will the Next Transformation in Manufacturing be led by Digital?’

by EY, notes, ‘Within India, many medium and large companies have initiated proofs of concept (PoCs) across multiple domains including, energy, maintenance, dash-boarding, optimization, and analytics. However, these developments are still in their nascent stages and there is a lot to achieve. The Indian manufacturing sector continues to remain apprehensive about the benefits of embarking on an end-to-end digital journey.’

Namrata Khanna, Senior Manager, Technology & Projects, Concentrix, elaboratess, “Providing manufacturers with the opportunity to utilise advanced manufacturing capabilities and IT throughout the product lifecycle. As a result, manufacturers are benefitting from increased efficiency in operations, substantial cost savings, faster production times and the ability to provide excellent customer support. Manufacturers are increasingly leveraging the IoT, which entails the interconnection of unique devices within an existing Internet infrastructure, to achieve a variety of goals including cost reduction, increased efficiency, improved safety, meeting compliance requirements, and product innovation. IOT,

AI, BOTs, RPAs, Machine Learning are some of the key IT technologies which are making great impact on Manufacturing sector in India.”

Given that the Indian manufacturing sector is levitating towards steadily leveraging the new-age technologies in favour of a streamlined and digitized manufacturing process, the only way individual manufacturers keep up with the race is by embracing the change of technology trends.

Sharing their digitization journey Diwakar Belavadi, Director – Operations & Strategic Projects, Citadel Intelligent Systems says, “In CIS, we have laid out a ‘Digital Factory’ roadmap which encompasses concepts of Industry 4.0, Connected Machines, Selective automation of few of our critical manufacturing processes, Digital Work Instructions, use of RFID technology for Production Tracking, Logistics & Warehousing. This is the key to enhance the overall efficiency and effectiveness of our organization. We have also used digital technology effectively for our data storage and data retention processes. We have automated data storage and retention processes using cloud technology in our organization. In addition to the above, we are also implementing ‘Digital Command Center’ in our organization to assist our Business Intelligence and HR

MANUFACTURING SECTOR // FEATURE STORY

NAMRATA KHANNA SENIOR MANAGER, TECHNOLOGY & PROJECTS, CONCENTRIX.

Industry 4.0 takes the emphasis on digital technology from recent decades

to a whole new level with the help of interconnectivity through IoT, access to real-time data, and the introduction of cyber-physical systems. Industry 4.0 offers a more comprehensive, interlinked, and holistic approach to manufacturing. It connects physical with digital, and allows for better collaboration and access across departments, partners, vendors, product, and people.

KM SHARMA SALES HEAD, BEST POWER EQUIPMENTS (BPE).

On the one hand, we are witnessing a lot of competition from the global industry.

Industrialization is going to have a major impact on the lives of people working in the manufacturing sector, especially those who employ people on a large workforce. For example the Automobile & Textile sector.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 29

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

The upcoming technological trends are going to act as a coin with two sides.

FEATURE STORY // MANUFACTURING SECTOR

processes.”

Use Cases Namrata Khanna, Senior Manager, Technology & Projects, Concentrix elaborates on how her

30 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

organization is using SaaS based dealer management system. The key features of this system are: • A flexible system that can evolve with a rapidly changing market needs • Features that help you design and run market-

ing campaigns • Facility to monitor and record customer satisfaction trends • Functionality that helps in running and managing after-sales activities

MANUFACTURING SECTOR // FEATURE STORY

• Increase customer satisfaction index • Functions that enhance revenue and utilization Diwakar Belavadi, Director, Operations & Strategic Projects, Citadel Intelligent Systems shares use cases of disruptive technologies in his organization.

SAP We have a full fledged implementation of SAP B1 version which runs our Supply chain operations in our organization. SAP B1 is fully integrated with the Sales Planning, Manufacturing & Mate-

rial Planning, Quality Assurance, Plant Maintenance, Procurement, Finance & Accounting, Logistics & Warehousing and Sub-contracting processes in our organization.

automated with the help of cloud service providers who back up data at multiple intervals during the day. Our emails also run on Google cloud platforms with structured backup mechanisms.

Cloud Computing CIS as an organization operates without a “Physical Server” concept. CIS has designed its Data storage and retention mechanism built on a Cloud Server concept. Our SAP B1 server is hosted on NTT Cloud servers backed up by Tier 3 cloud retention architecture. Our Data is hosted on MS Azure server. The data backups are

Finally...

Digitizing the manufacturing sector will be a long journey for the Indian marketplace. Challenges are bound to come up but the multiple advantages that such a system accrues will continue to drive the manufacturers to test their limits.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD

31

GUEST COLUMN // REMOTE WORKING

ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY IN TIMES OF CRISIS, REMOTE WORKING THE NEW NORM Many Organizations across India seem to be working remotely.

But do they really know how to extract maximum efficiency and productivity from their employees?

DEBPROTIM ROY, CEO and Founder, Canvs.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

“Organizations have had to very quickly adapt to remote work, and too from home, without the liberty of movement. Remote work has certainly novelties that seem pleasant when you get started but the challenges become more obvious when you have to do that sustainably.”

A Bangalore company was recently in the news for giving its employees work from home, but only if they work in front of the camera for 9 hours. While some of us may feel ok with it and some of us may not, the key question is why would the company include such a clause for its own employees? The answer is, to keep the productivity up. Crisis or no crisis, corporate giants such as Google, Facebook, Accenture,

32 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

etc. are all accustomed to remote working and have standard protocols set for the same. While on the other hand, majority of the companies might find it extremely challenging to align the remote working process.

Hard as it is to ignore the current challenges organizations are facing due to COVID- 19, we all can agree that it has allowed us to move to a new mode of work: the challenges of physical presence confine to the office or traveling through mass transportation means, has made Remote working popular.

“Productive remote work is heavily dependent on the willingness to work, ability to manage tasks virtually, organizational skills, proactive communication chops, interpersonal skills, among a few other factors. If you don’t check most of these boxes, remote work is going to be tough for you. Today most individuals are being forced to work remotely from home and are facing challenges that crop up due to a lack of a super formal construct around work. There are quite some people around the world who have perfected the nuances of remote work, and there’s much to learn from them. Although everyone feels thrown into a situation of social distancing, it’s not too hard to forget how much we have pined for healthy personal time and space just a couple of months ago. Remote work allows you to work from anywhere which is a great middle ground.

These trying times shall make us understand the importance of upholding the spirit of humanity, helping each other during need and perhaps make a paradigm shift in the way we work and allocate our precious time on earth towards work and personal time and space,” Debprotim Roy, CEO and Founder, Canvs.

Remote working has worked impeccably for a large number of organizations. On the one hand they have successfully benefitted

from the remote working model but on the other hand, there are still some firms that are struggling to avail its benefits. Some of the key steps that should be taken to achieve efficiency in this model are • First and foremost, asystem in place with set protocols for the all individuals • Easy and free-flowing modes of communication with your team via messaging tools • Siloed collaboration by allocating individual responsibilities within teams.

• Mitigate challenges and provide execution support through proactive communication • Regular updates and work summary to monitor efficiency.

Your tests for remote recruitment should hence be partially objective and subjective. As conscious beings, we tend to conflate physical separation with mental separation quite naturally.

Hence the, “Out of sight, out of mind” adage. Physical separation and mental detachment meet midway in a compromise through constant communication. To sustain relationships at a distance we consciously make an effort to talk more to each other.

When we work remotely we do exactly that. Communication is the viscera of remote relationships. In that, the frequency of communication is a very important aspect. Tying your workspace with products leads to an inundation of notification streams. Staying in sync with people at work leads to perpetual and continuous communications since to compensate for the lack of face time.

In order to succeed, organisations must make all efforts must be made to smoothen communication, automate repetitive stuff, accommodate with peers and adapt to changing circumstances.

This trend in work that has been picking recently, Remote working is definitely a massive part of the near future.

E-COMMERCE // GUEST COLUMN

E-COMMERCE: THE NEXT BIG OVERHAUL THROUGH TECHNOLOGY Suroor Wijdan discusses some of the technological advancements and their implications for driving forward e-commerce success.

SUROOR WIJDAN, Founder, Xencov Software.

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

“For their strategic plans and competitive marketing e-commerce organizations need to remain up to date with the latest technologies.

These technological advancements have taken the e-commerce industry to the next level and will continue to mark a new territory of innovation in the coming years.”

In the e-commerce world, things like the selection of products, pricing, shipping and customer service all play an important role in the customer experience. The products that have the best user experience and create the greatest amount of joy end up getting the customers’ attention and pocketbook. And to create such user experiences, businesses need to stay observant and responsive to change. They need to be one step ahead of the curve like Amazon is trying to stay ahead by its unique features and services such as consistently low prices, giving customers’ Sunday delivery and use of drones to deliver small packages, etc.

Technological advancements have had a huge impact on the e-commerce world, changing the way consumers connect with brands. Technology is always evolving and shaping up the future of e-commerce businesses. For their strategic plans and competitive marketing e-commerce organizations need to remain up to date with the latest technologies. These technological advancements have taken the e-commerce industry to the next level and will continue to mark a new territory of innovation in the coming years.

Let’s discuss some of these advancements and their implications for driving forward e-commerce success: s AI has raised the marketing standards with smart solutions in various sectors especially in e-commerce over the past few years. AI is helpful in effective personalization which comes from understanding customers’ preferences and behavior.

Through AI, nearly every user action online is captured and stored, creating a huge pool of information known as big data. AI and machine learning analytics drive customer behavior patterns, whilst simultaneously translating this data, that means businesses are provided with a cycle of desires and expectations, creating endless possibilities. s Digital/ Internet GrowthWith the arrival of smartphones, the internet is within the reach of millions which has also changed the ways people live and work.

Customers have found their way to online services. They demand easy access, the immediate response around the clock for online shopping, electronic payments and delivery of their products. Equipping yourself with the ongoing digital growth is important for the companies to create a better customer experience and to be competitive in the market. s AR and VR- AR and VR are completely changing the traditional dynamic of customers going to physical stores to try and experience the products.

With AR and VR, retailers can build awareness of their brands’ features and offer customers a chance to virtually experience the same. Several e-commerce giants and startups are in fact engaging customers through virtual experiences by creating virtual showrooms and allowing customers to explore their products from the comfort of their homes. Integrated AR and VR technologies provide an immersive shopping experience

to the customers, connecting them with the brand in a more deeper and meaningful way. s IoT- The IoT has revolutionized e-commerce in many ways. The IoT provides digital communication through specialized hardware and embedded systems. Inventory can be easily tracked through the use of IoT sensors. Customers can view and shop available inventory in real-time which creates a sense of transparency between retailers and customers. The IoT can track and monitor the entire e-commerce experience from the time a customer first engages with a site to the shipment of products creating an enhanced shopping experience for customers and help achieve great ROI for retailers. s Emerging Web StandardsThe focus of technological innovation in e-commerce is towards enhancing the user experience, improving conversion rates and reducing cart abandonment. To achieve all, entrepreneurs should adapt to emerging web standards.

Their web store design should be attractive and easy-to-navigate that prompts customers from visiting the webpage to finally purchase products. Convenient and quick payment methods such as PayPal, Google Pay are replacing tedious billing forms, and have shown to remarkably increase conversion rates.

E-commerce merchants should adopt these technological developments to enhance customer loyalty that will lead to increased conversions.

Technology is the backbone of e-commerce. Not only does it help connect sellers and customers on mobile and web platforms, but it also enables the effective management of customer orders, deliveries, returns and payments of purchased goods. It allows enhanced search, customization, and personalization, which are fast becoming “must-have” capabilities for e-commerce success.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 33

INTERVIEW // SECURITY

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

With massive digitization happening in the industry, what is the state of security and vulnerability expanding?

The massive digitisation and advent of newer technologies has also brought in some big challenges in the cybersecurity space. Email threats evolve quickly as attackers find new ways to evade traditional email security solutions. In the months to come, highly targeted attacks and conversation high jacking will proliferate as mechanisms for Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks – making these threats even more convincing, and ultimately more costly. Web application security is often overlooked because most organizations don’t have the resources or skills needed to manage the solutions properly. In addition, many customers presume their hosting service supplies this protection when they may cover some but not all their requirements.

Another threat that is growing rapidly are “Deepfakes” - AI-based spoof images, videos and audios created using computers and machine learning software to make them seem real, even though they are not. Such as that video of Mark Zuckerberg bragging about having “total control of billions of people’s stolen data”, which had gone viral in 2019. Deepfakes will be used to propagate disinformation and even trick employees into making wire transfers. With ransomware, hackers will go extra lengths to make sure their attacks are successful. As more and more customers leverage public cloud infrastructure and solutions, human error will continue to be the primary source of breaches, leading to misconfigurations and overlooked vulnerabilities. The new age social engineering attacks such as spear phishing, vishing and smishing will tend to manipulate users in more convincing ways. All this makes cybersecurity infrastructure and solutions even more crucial.

With so many of solution providers with millions of spend on R&D, why is there no abatement of vulnerability?

The cyber security industry is developing new technologies to mitigate the emerging threats targeting segments such as email security, data protection & cloud security. Unfortunately, many organizations still have inadequate protections in place. And many of the current application security solutions are too complicated for most organizations to deploy and manage. Even when a business has a solution in place, it usually isn’t properly configured – leading to vulnerabilities.

Security teams are stretched thin. Attacks keep getting more advanced, and there is less talent available to manage it. That is why, the way we approach security needs to evolve too. Lack of 34 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

THE WAY WE APPROACH SECURITY NEEDS TO EVOLVE: MURALI URS Enterprise IT World in conversation with Murali Urs, Country ManagerIndia, Barracuda Networks about the security question. awareness could lead to human errors, adding to vulnerabilities. Hence, employees need to be informed about the threats they are facing, and how to recognize suspicious activities. CISOs will need to understand the proliferation of privacy and compliance laws that are being proposed and implemented globally. They also need to

continue to make sure they are effective at driving support for key security initiatives with the CEO and board members, capitalizing on the attention raised by increasing security concerns to get the resources they need to address new challenges. It will be increasingly important for security executives to focus on how to integrate security into

SECURITY // INTERVIEW

M U R A L I

U R S

Country Manager-India, Barracuda Networks

Cybercriminals now operate in a highly sophisticated manner, with a variety of hacking

tools available in new technologies.

While email and internet-facing applications continue to be the top threat vectors, email threats evolve quickly as attackers find new ways to evade traditional email security solutions.

company culture so everyone in the organization understands the roles they play in keeping the company secure. Business leaders need to be aggressive about data security now more than ever. The masses need to be made aware of threats and how to not fall victim to cyber frauds. With a strong sense of cyber security and response plan, attacks can be prevented and mitigated better.

You have solutions for on prem to cloud, what is the competition landscape? What are your competitive advantages?

The growing use of private cloud services fuels need for cloud protection, and the deployment of vulnerable cloud communication technologies makes cloud safety crucial. In its latest report titled ‘Future shock: the cloud is the new network’, Barracuda Networks mentioned that 44 per cent of Indian and APAC organisations said their cybersecurity staff spends four to eight hours preventing and managing cyber-attacks every week. And 84 per cent of Indian respondents said concerns such as security of public cloud infrastructure, the impact of cyberattacks, and security of applications in public cloud, restrict their organisation’s adoption of the public cloud.

Today, attackers move fast by automating the exploitation of misconfigured resources. To defend your network, you mustact fast. Barracuda Cloud Security Guardian polices and automatically remediates your management and data planes by instrumenting and configuring native controls. In addition, it can instantly configure and deploy Barracuda CloudGen

WAFs and CloudGen Firewalls as needed to ensure seamless, comprehensive security across your entire cloud infrastructure. Only Barracuda Networks integrates cloud security management with perimeter and network security solutions i.e., control, data, and management plane security together in a single solution.

Whether applications are deployed onpremises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid scenario, Barracuda Cloud Application Protection (CAP) makes it easy to keep them secure and available. It is an integrated platform that brings a comprehensive set of interoperable solutions and capabilities together to ensure complete application security.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are available both as appliances (hardware or virtual) that can be implemented on premises or hosted in the cloud, and through an innovative SaaS solution that combines advanced functionality with ease of deployment and management.

How are you alleviating the CISO challenges?

Sophisticated and targeted attacks like spear phishing and business email compromise are fast-growing threats, getting costlier by the day. Thus, organisations remain vulnerable and hackers remain a significant threat. We continue to educate the market on the evolving cyberattacks’ landscape and the importance of readiness to respond to cyber-attacks. Such as on how organizations can protect themselves from cyber-attacks, mitigate business impact, and act appropriately with security solutions to recover operations if they happen to face an attack.

We understand that human errors within an organization continue to be the primary source of breaches, making user education crucial. Security awareness training programs keep employees informed about the threats they’re facing, how to recognize suspicious messages, and how to respond appropriately. Through our solution PhishLine – which guards against every facet of social-engineering threats with continuous simulation and training for employees – as well as regular workshops and webinar series available to partners, we embed learning into business processes with customized simulations that test and reinforce good behavior.

What are the real concerns of CISOs? The top concern for CISOs is undoubtedly the threat of cyber-attacks, especially when organizations embark on their digital transformation - increasing the complexity of cloud

and network application infrastructure. And unfortunately, many organizations still have inadequate protections in place. Cybercriminals now operate in a highly sophisticated manner, with a variety of hacking tools available in new technologies. While email and internet-facing applications continue to be the top threat vectors, email threats evolve quickly as attackers find new ways to evade traditional email security solutions.

Cybercriminals are also succeeding in making attacks seem more convincing, and eventually more costly. They do this using and manipulating newer technologies, for instance using Artificial Intelligence to power deep fakes.

With the launch of The Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 in India and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in EU, data loss and privacy issues are also on the top of CISOs’ minds. Executives need to be prepared to adapt quickly. The implications of these types of rules can be far-reaching, and they’re bound to get more complex.

Facing the increasing threat of cyber-attacks and compliance, security spending is expected to increase at the same time. Gartner forecasted worldwide information security spending to exceed US$124 billion in 2019, suggesting cybersecurity spending is outpacing general IT spending that would jump 8.7% YoY. CISOs would have to justify the rising security spending and its business contribution and it would be a difficult task.

Although board room discussion mentions security, to what extent CISOs are able to convince the CFOs/CEOs about spent on security?

Cost control and return on security investment (ROSI) are significant challenges for CISOs, as it is hard to demonstrate the positive business impact of security strategies.Barracuda’s latest global cloud research report Future Shock: The Cloud Is the New Network finds that key IT decision making tends to lie within IT directors and CIOs more than CISOs. Yet, compliance and security concerns remain on the top of the board members’ mindsfor companies are required to follow privacy regulations like GDPR - which made regulation the main driver for security spending in 2019 behind security concerns. Whilethere is growing focus on digital transformation by IT Leaders, security is and needs to be among the top considerations for CIOs or board members in order to enable a safe cloud and cyber infrastructure that could potentially transform organizations into a larger business. These factors help CISOs to convince board memberfor security budget.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 35

BY SANJAY@ACCENTINFOMEDIA.COM

INTERVIEW // SECURITY

With massive digitization happening in the industry, what is the state of security and vulnerability expanding?

We find ourselves in the midst of the fifth generation of cyber- attacks known as Gen V which are attacks that are large-scale and fast-moving and can easily bypass conventional, static detectionbased defences. It is not uncommon to find enterprises trying to protect their IT environments with older, detection-only technologies that only protect against viruses, application attacks, and payload delivery. This often leaves networks, virtualized data centers, cloud environments, and mobile exposed.

The following are some key trends we have observed in the industry: • Mobile: According to industry data, India was the top country for mobile malware in 2018 (23.6 per cent), with over 3,000 Android malware being reported each day. Mobile threats are increasing in quantity and sophistication, and we are seeing a higher infection rate. Using smartphones and tablets to access critical business information on the go has many benefits, but can also expose sensitive data to risk. Enterprises today need to manage and mitigate the risks of BYOD, in order to protect employees and corporate assets from mobile cyber threats. To be effective, organizations must secure mobile devices with immediate threat removal and real-time intelligence that extends the existing security and mobility infrastructures. Mobile security must include several building blocks that address all the different aspects of the security challenge: Mobile Device Management or, Secure Containers, and Mobile Threat Prevention, protecting against unknown and zero-day threats.

• Cloud: The growing popularity of public cloud environments has led to an increase in cyber-attacks targeting enormous resources and sensitive data residing within these platforms. The lack of security practices such as misconfiguration and poor management of the cloud resources, remains the most prominent threat to the cloud ecosystem in 2019, subjecting cloud assets to a wide array of attacks. In addition, the dynamic nature of cloud-based infrastructure breaks traditional network boundaries and introduces a variety of new challenges, making traditional security approaches ineffective.

• IoT: Many IoT devices still suffer from a lack of security and contain security vulnerabilities.

Default usernames and passwords, lack of software updates and lack of security awareness by the manufacturers are just some of the reasons that make IoT devices so vulnerable to attacks. Since IoT is spreading to more and more

36 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

CHECK POINT OFFERS PREVENTIONFOCUSED AND UNIFIED SECURITY ARCHITECTURE APPROACH Enterprise IT World in conversation with Sundar N Balasubramanian, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies. consumer products, businesses will need to think about how to protect their smart devices and prepare for the wider adoption of IoT. Wearables, for example, can be hacked to capture video or record audio. From an enterprise perspective this is another challenge to be addressed in the coming years, since attackers are aware of the fact that IoT devices are a weak spot in organizational networks, and try penetrating through them.

With so many of solution providers with millions of spend on R&D, why there is no abatement of vulnerability?

Even if an organization is leveraging the most comprehensive, state-of-the-art security products, the risk of being breached cannot be eliminated because of the ever-evolving threat landscape.

In fact, Check Point’s 2020 Security Report establishes that no organization, big or small, is immune from a devastating cyber-attack. We are working with organizations and governments around the world and are sharing recommendations on cyber protection strategies, and using advanced technology with the focus on prevention, not detection or remediation.

You have solutions for end point to perimeter, what is the competition landscape? What are your competitive advantage?

TCheck Point leaves the patchwork, best-of-breed deployments of the past behind through Infinity, its security architecture that unifies all networks, cloud, and mobile. Check Point offers automatic and immediate threat intelligence through new techniques that analyze behavior at the OS and CPU levels to prevent malware at the exploit phase before it has an opportunity to deploy.

Also, proactive file sanitation offers true, powerful prevention without processing delays.

How are you alleviating the CISO challenges? What are the real concerns of CISOs? Since the birth of cyber security, arguably about 30 years ago, the role of cyber security within corporations has evolved. Thirty years ago, we simply needed a great technologist to install anti-virus software and a firewall. Today CISOs need to understand the entirety of what’s going on within a corporation, from how their team’s decisions will impact business, to how the decisions of other departments will impact revenue streams. The ability to articulate business risks to the organization and to the board is also imperative.

Check Point helps CISO address the challenges of today by taking away the piecemeal, detectionled approach to security strategy, replacing it instead with a prevention-focused and unified security architecture that unifies networks, cloud

SECURITY // INTERVIEW

S U N DA R N BALASUBRAMANIAN Managing Director, India and SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies.

Check Point helps CISO address the challenges of today

by taking away the piecemeal, detection-led approach to security strategy, replacing it instead with a prevention-focused and unified security architecture that unifies networks, cloud and mobile.

management team or even the board. The CISO’s ability to articulate business risks to the senior management team to get their buy-in is a huge factor in ensuring that the organisation’s security strategy –and the investments required – are greenlighted.

and mobile. Our key defining security principles are (1) real time prevention that protects assets rather than notify after the fact, (2) agility to secure new assets in seconds and (3) consolidated security for cloud, IoT, networks, workloads, mobile and endpoint.

Although board room discussion mentions security to what extent

CISOs are able to convince the CFOs/CEOs about spent on security?

Increasingly, CEOs / CFOs are recognising that cybersecurity is not just an IT issue but an organisational issue. The risks of cyberattacks span functions and business units, and given the stakes, making the decisions necessary can only be achieved with active engagement from the CEO and other members of the senior-

What is your product road map?

Check Point innovation begins by understanding customers and their evolving security needs. Today, our leading-edge technologies secure networks, enterprise multi-cloud environments, and endpoint and mobile devices.Check Point remains committed to providing customers with uncompromised, innovative protection against all types of threats.

How many cities are you present in India and what is your plan for expansion?

Check Point is present in India’s 8 top cities Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chennai & Hyderabad. We are working with our distributors and partners to cover the next 8 cities by July 2020.

MARCH 2020 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD 37

THE STUFF // PRODUCTS & SERVICES

CIO TOYS POLY STUDIO X30 AND POLY STUDIO X50 Plantronics’ Studio X family which dramatically simplifies the video conferencing experience is now available in India.

Poly announced two new purpose-built all-in-one video bars, the Poly Studio X30 and Poly Studio X50. The Poly Studio X family does not require an external PC or Mac to drive the meeting room experience and is simple to use with support for leading cloud video services such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams built right in. The Studio X family also features new Poly MeetingAI capabilities for breakthrough audio and video experiences built on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

With Poly Studio X30 and Poly Studio X50, Poly is bringing greater choice and flexibility to address the needs of all meeting spaces for its customers. Poly’s line of video devices is designed to work seamlessly with modern collaboration applications to streamline the experience, completely reinvented with support for 4K Ultra high definition (UHD).

Poly also introduced Poly MeetingAI features that improve all aspects of the meeting experience. Advanced noise suppression makes it easy to hear the human voices while simultaneously blocking the typing, pen clicking, or candy unwrapping that may be happening at the same time. New unmatched video production rules automatically allow remote employees to truly see the faces and the context of what is happening, without requiring anyone in the room to touch a remote or reconfigure a setting.

B Y S A N J AY @ A C C E N T I N FO M E D I A . C O M

Powerful and Simple Poly Studio X30 and Poly Studio X50 The Poly Studio X30, ideal for small offices or huddle rooms, supports 4K UHD video and built-in wireless content sharing capabilities, all in a compact design. The Poly Studio X30 supports the full range of Poly MeetingAI capabilities, so it packs a boardroom experience into a small box. Seamless content collaboration is enabled wirelessly. The video bar’s premium audio engineering offers plenty of pickup power.

The Poly Studio X50, the larger of the two new solutions, boasts even greater pickup range and high-quality speakers to suit the needs of midsize conference rooms. In addition to the new Poly MeetingAI features it also supports 4K UHD video, 5x zoom, wireless content sharing, audio input/output and a room-thundering stereo speaker system.

Flexible installation means both Poly Studio X models can sit, stand or be mounted wherever desired, with downward facing connection ports making this flexibility possible. To make it even easier to install and use, Poly also announced the new Poly TC8 touch controller that offers a native Zoom Rooms interface, high-performance, and a single power-overethernet cable so there is no need to stretch cables or cords across tables to connect to the video bar.

Native support for Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) platforms Poly Studio X series enable organizations to setup and convert any room into a meeting room within just a few minutes. It supports leading cloud vendors including• Microsoft Teams – The Studio X Series which include mics, speakers, and camera, and come pre-loaded with the Microsoft Teams application. Studio X will be available for Teams in March 2020.

• Studio X Series for Zoom rooms - With the Poly Studio X Series, Zoom Rooms can be easily deployed in meeting rooms of all sizes, from huddle rooms to board rooms, with the enterprise-grade quality for which Poly is known.

• Poly Studio X Series is also compatible with Blue Jeans and GoTo Meeting.

Studio X Series Pricing and Availability The Poly Studio X30 and X50 Series is now available in India and is priced at US$2,199 and US$3,499 respectively with Poly TC8. For more information, please visit: www.poly.com/video-conferencing 38 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD MARCH 2020

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