CIO ONE by Business Media International

EDITORIAL

PUBLISHED BY Business Media International REGISTERED OFFICE: Office 10, Sharjah Media City www.bmi-digital.com EDITOR IN CHIEF Raman Narayan narayan@bmimea.com Mob: 971-55-7802403 SALES DIRECTOR Ankit Shukla ankit@bmimea.com Tel: 971-4-2618885, Mob: 971-552572807 EDITORS Baraka Jefwa baraka@bmimea.com Tel: 971-4-2618885 Mob: 971 50 237 3005 CIRCULATION MANAGER Bhawana Bhatia bhawana@bmimea.com Tel: 971-4-2618885 SALES R. Subramanyan subu@bmimea.com Tel: 971-4-2618885 FINANCE Akhilesh Pandey akhilesh@bmimea.com Tel: 971-4-2618885 DESIGN Ali Raza ali@qnamarcom.com Tel: 971-4-2618885

CATALYSTS OF CHANGE As the evangelist of new technologies in the organization, the CIO’s role is a strategic one. In recent years as technology moved to the forefront as a Business enabler, the role of the leader who was in charge of IT decisions at the enterprises continued to rise in prominence. Today, the CIO is not just a technology person, as his decisions need to be in conjunction with the Business goals of the organization. The more he understands his evolving role within the organization he serves, the better the success would be. So how does he gauge what is expected from him as the transformation projects or regular IT upgrades he leads get underway and then are completed. Keeping the other senior management in loop on newer initiatives, or the fine-tuning of existing ones is quite a necessary aspect of the role. Being more familiar with the Kenyan market, where I’m from, the title of CIO is still fairly new. It is certainly a sight for sore eyes to view how far the technology leaders in this region have come and the leadership they show in spearheading digital transformation initiatives; it should be a source of inspiration for CIOs in other regions who have ambitions of enhancing their roles within their organisations. At the moment however, I am looking forward to taking part in my first GITEX Technology week where, I understand, technology at its best will be highlighted by leading companies both global and from the region. The event’s theme, ‘Synergising the Mind and Technology Economy’ is timely as many people are in fear of losing their jobs to machines, it will be good to have this demystified by the various speakers who will be participating at the event.

Baraka Jefwa Editor, CIO One

Management Chairman S.N. Tiwari

CEO Saumyadeep Halder

Publisher Raman Narayan

Managing Director Ankit Shukla

sn.tiwari@bmimea.com

narayan@bmimea.com

saumyadeep@bmimea.com

ankit@bmimea.com

A supplement edition from Smart SMB.

Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to validate the accuracy of all information included in the magazine, the publishers wouldn’t be liable for any errors therein Copyright@2019 Business Media International LLC. All rights reserved.

CIO ONE / October 2019

CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS cover story

CASE STUDIES

EMBRACING THE FOCUS 14

KUWAIT FINANCE HOUSE TAPS ARCSIGHT FOR IMPROVED CYBERSECURITY

Bahrain credit drives digital transformation with veeam

Alkhalij enterprises chooses epicor erp for modernized business processes

interview A Peek at Veeam version 2

insight YOUR OPTIMAL ROUTE TO HYBRID IT INFRASTRUCTURE

feature DEEPER INTO THE DIGITAL FUTURE

strategy

Ten tips to secure your financial fortress

Saas - whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in it for customers and vendors?

News

New Tech

Market Scape

Adapting to digital is key 18

Customer service Automation comes To the fore CIO ONE / October 2019

Evolved cybersecurity is synchronized security.

Firewall

Wireless

Web

Encryption

Mobile

Server

Endpoint

Sophos Central

XG Firewall

Intercept X

Synchronized Security is an award-winning cybersecurity system Next-gen endpoint, network, mobile, Wi-Fi, email, and encryption products, all sharing information in real time and responding automatically to incidents. And with everything controlled through the Sophos Central cloud-based security platform, management is a breeze.

NEWS

BIOS MIDDLE EAST PUTS THE SPOTLIGHT ON MULTI-CLOUD DURING GITEX 2019

BIOS Middle East will be participating at the week-long technology trade show with Cisco, highlighting the benefits of Multi-Cloud environments. Successfully advancing customers’ cloud journeys, UAE-headquartered BIOS Middle East together with global technology giant Cisco, will be showcasing how customers can efficiently and securely manage workloads across a multi-cloud environment, at the 39th edition of GITEX Technology Week, taking place from 6th to 10th October 2019 at Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC). BIOS Middle East will advise customers on how they can select the most apt cloud for specific business needs through the Multi-Cloud. Increasing number of organizations are looking to adopt a Multi-Cloud strategy when it comes to revolutionizing their existing IT infrastructure. According to research firm Gartner, by 2021, at least 75% of large and global organizations will implement a multi-cloud-capable hybrid integration platform, up from less than 25% in 20181. Identifying the market opportunities,

BIOS Middle East will be emphasizing on the benefits of BIOS Multi-Cloud and how customers can achieve comprehensive visibility from a single pane of glass through which they can manage, govern and provision workloads on Microsoft Azure, AWS, CloudHPT and others. BIOS Multi-Cloud also integrates into its Cross Cloud Managed Services, BIOS Assured, as well as into Cross Cloud Managed Security Services, BIOS Secured. According to the company, this allows for a fully managed and secure Multi-Cloud strategy. “Multi-Cloud environments are rapidly becoming the norm within enterprises. To further demonstrate its capabilities, we will have one-on-one sessions with our customers on Multi-Cloud. As the only Cisco-powered cloud in the UAE, we will continue to work towards significantly growing the business and educating customers on cloud-based solutions,” commented Rudi Feitsma, General Manager, BIOS Middle East.

Rudi Feitsma

GM, BIOS Middle East BIOS Middle East has recently been awarded the Cloud and Managed Services Partner of the Year for the Gulf East region by Cisco at their Commercial Partner Summit 2019. “GITEX is the ideal platform to reinforce our commitment to the region. MultiCloud strategies are becoming the backbone of enterprises’ transformation journey. BIOS Middle East has consistently driven value for our customer base, and we are excited to capitalize on the market opportunities together,” commented Shukri Eid, Managing Director, Cisco East Region.

F5 NETWORKS APPOINTS MOHAMMED ABUKHATER AS REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT FOR MEA Appointment set to further expand F5’s influence in the region and accelerate a transition to a software-driven business model

Mohammed Abukhater

Regional Vice President of MEA, F5 Networks F5 Networks announced the appointment of Mohammed Abukhater as its new Regional Vice President of Sales for the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. An experienced leader working with high-performing sales and channel teams across the GCC and Africa, Abukhater has over 16 years’ industry knowledge in the technology sector. Based in Dubai, he will report directly to David Helfer, Senior Vice President for EMEA Sales.

CIO ONE / October 2019

Abukhater joins F5 from FireEye, where he stood out for driving impressive results as their VP for MEA. Over the course of his six plus years at the company, he also held several regional and vertical-specific sales director roles. Prior to that, he was making his mark as a territory sales leader and SE manager at Bluecoat Systems.

Abukhater’s first public appearance in his new role will be at GITEX Technology Week, where F5 is championing multicloud application services and DevOps methodologies as major catalysts for digital transformation and growth across the Middle East. F5 is also sharing insight on its latest solution offerings and its recent NGINX acquisition.

“This is a significant time for Mohammed to join F5, and I am confident he will have an immediate impact,” said David Helfer. “F5 is stronger than ever in the MEA region. Not only have we reinforced our strength in core Middle Eastern markets over the past few quarters, but we’ve also seen our profile markedly grow in countries like Turkey and North Africa. We are in a strong position to offer a unified customer experience for management across the entire app spectrum – from code to customer.”

Mohammed Abukhater said: “I am delighted to join F5 Networks at such a pivotal moment in the company’s history. All the elements are in place to take the business to the next level in the Middle East and Africa, including expanding and accelerating our multi-cloud application services, security capabilities and DevOps-related offerings. We already have an exceptional team in place, and the potential of cloud-driven, application-centric innovation is creating huge opportunities for both F5 and our customers.”

NEWS

MINDWARE BECOMES CITRIX SERVICE PROVIDER DISTRIBUTOR

Milan Shetti

SVP and GM, HPE Storage Mindware announced it has been appointed by Citrix as the Authorized Citrix Service Provider (CSP) Distributor in the Middle East region. Under the Citrix Service Provider Distributor program, Mindware would provide product and service fulfilment, technical and business enablement and support to the Citrix Service Providers in the Middle East. “Mindware is delighted to be appointed as an Authorized Citrix Service Provider Distributor for the Middle East. Our Distribution relationship with Citrix has grown over the years. This new program is a natural extension as the technology adoption matures from on-prem to the cloud. With Citrix, our partners/ service providers will have all the elements to

Partner program designed specifically for service providers who provide paid third party hosted software services to end-user customers create scalable, reliable, private or public cloud-based offerings. This will help our partners to be more productive & profitable.” Philippe Jarre, CEO, Mindware said. The Citrix Service Provider Program is a Citrix partner program designed specifically for service providers who provide paid third party hosted software services to end-user customers. In addition to complete Desktops-as-a-Service offerings, many Citrix Service Providers host a single application or applications for an ISV who does not have a SaaS-based offering, provide NetScaler as a service, mobility (mobile device management) as a service and/or managed services to their clients. With Mindware becoming the Authorized CSP Distributor in the Middle East region, integrators that aim to become Ci-

SYNOLOGY TO HIGHLIGHT ITS LATEST INNOVATIONS AT GITEX 2019 Synology will showcase its NAS, multimedia and video solutions for digital workplaces and homes with three end-to-end portfolios Synology Inc. announced its participation at GITEX Technology Week 2019, which will be held from October 6 – 10, 2019 at the Dubai World Trade Center. Synology will be showcasing its latest product innovations and solutions across three stations, which include storage foundation and digital workplace, smart surveillance solutions, and multimedia and networking for home. "Synology is happy to announce our participation in GITEX Technology Week 2019 once again this year. It is a perfect platform for us to showcase our best-in-class innovations in Network Attached Storage (NAS), enterprise data protection, file sharing, and file syncing solutions as well as smart surveillance solutions to a niche audience attending the region’s largest technology exhibition from across the globe,” said Nick Jheng, Regional Manager of Middle East at Synology. At GITEX 2019, Synology plans to show-

case its complete hybrid cloud solutions, along with its first ever dual controller Synology NAS UC3200 at its storage foundation and digital workplace station for medium and large-scale enterprises. The company will also highlight its first ever deep video analytics NAS model DVA3219, powered by NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti graphic card, for the first time in the Middle East at the smart surveillance solution station, and showcase its range of new, entry level Synology NAS products, that are suitable for households, power users, small office and home offices at the multimedia and networking for home station. For users who have been following Synology for quite some time, Synology will present its latest and largest upgrade to its operating system, DiskStation Manager 7.0 (DSM 7.0), that brings increased agility and scalability at mid-range price points. “We see the beginning of large-scale technology transformation taking place in the Middle East region across small

trix Service Provider would benefit from more than 15 years of product, technical and licensing expertise as a Citrix Distributor. They would also get access to skilled consultants and experts as well as to the Citrix Cloud lab environments to demonstrate the value of Citrix SaaS solutions to customers. “As a Citrix Service Partner Program Distributor, Mindware will help manage and support the service providers in the region who want to build and deliver complete hosted service portfolio (hosted desktops and hosted apps, mobile device management and secure file share, infrastructure for self-service provisioning and secure networking). Mindware will also support in the hosted workspace activities of these partners and ensure on-time reporting for their products.” Piotr Faderski, Partner Director, Emerging Markets, Citrix, said.

and medium businesses and enterprises. As a global networking and storage vendor, we are geared up to make our NAS solution, video archiving, data management applications, and home solutions available through our trusted channel partners, to the end customers," Nick explained "With our three-pronged use case approach, leveraging NAS in the area of digital workplace, smart surveillance solutions, and multimedia for home, we believe we have covered the present mid-level market opportunity, end to end. Our solutions meet the pain points of end users in the region with attractive price points, reliability, support and solid relationships from local channel partners," Nick concluded.

Nick Jheng

Regional Manager - ME, Synology

NEWS

PURE STORAGE PUTS A SPOTLIGHT ON THE MODERN DATA EXPERIENCE AT GITEX 2019 Latest innovations from Pure enable CIOs and strategic decision makers to build a hybrid cloud, transition to fast, consolidated data architectures, and derive business value from AI and analytics Pure Storage, the data solutions leader, today announced its participation in GITEX Technology Week to be held in Dubai, UAE from October 06 – 10. Coinciding with the company’s 10year anniversary, Pure Storage will showcase next-generation evolution in its flagship all-flash array solutions, cloud offering and innovations in AI that enable a modern data experience. With these additions to the portfolio, Pure Storage continues to deliver a modern data experience that is cloud-managed, AI-driven and consumable via a flexible subscription model that can be deployed in a hybrid environment. This will empower regional enterprises to utilize more of their most critical asset, their data, while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. “Over the past decade, we have time and time again challenged the status quo and brought to market several industry-first solutions and services that make us not only the most innovative, but also the safest choice for our customers. By offering unified, automated and multi-cloud solutions that focus on data utility, we are enabling companies to modernize their existing applications and simultaneously accelerate their adoption of hybrid cloud, containers, DevOps, AI, and real-time analytics at scale. This is the cornerstone of a modern data experience and the focus of our participation at GITEX 2019,” said Assaad El Saadi, regional director – Middle East at Pure Storage. At GITEX, a central showcase for Pure’s modern data experience will be the company’s flagship all-NVMe and NVMe-oF flash storage arrays. First unveiled at GITEX 2018, the Pure Storage FlashArray//X product line is an enterprise-grade solution that makes everything faster – databases, virtualized and containerized environments, test/dev initiatives and web-scale applications - enabling companies to drive business intelligence and get the most value out of their data. The company will also unveil FlashArray//C - the latest addition to the FlashArray product line, which provides consistent modern all-flash performance at a cost-competitive price, for lower tier and less mission-critical workloads.

MCDONALD’S UAE DIGITALLY TRANSFORMS TO SERVE UAE’S USD 9.7 BILLION FOOD SERVICES MARKET SAP real-time technology with SEIDOR MENA enables McDonald’s UAE to enhance operations and customer experiences One of the UAE’s largest quick service restaurants, McDonald's UAE, has digitally transformed with global technology company SAP to serve the country’s food services market growing to USD 9.7 billion by 2020, and enhance customer experiences, industry experts announced today. According to a recent report from Al Masah Capital, UAE’s booming food services market will grow by 45 percent to USD 9.7 billion by 2020. This growth, especially in the quick service industry, will be further bolstered by the country’s tourism sector, which is expected to draw over 20 million visitors in 2020. McDonald’s UAE, owned and operated by Emirates Fast Food Co. LLC, manages over 170 restaurants and employs more than 4,000 employees. As its business expands, McDonald’s UAE needed to modernize operations with mobile and scalable cloud solutions and turned to channel partner SEIDOR MENA to adopt SAP S/4 HANA Cloud ERP, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP SuccessFactors for talent management through a unique offering which was built specifically for their needs. “In the UAE’s highly-competitive and rapidly-growing quick service restaurant sector, customers want orders that are fast, consistent, and tailored to their needs,” said Walid Fakih, GM, McDonald’s UAE. “McDonald’s UAE’s digital transformation with SAP is giving all of our staff real-time access to lines of business to transform customer experiences – from optimized layouts, to personalized menus, and fast deliveries.” Being a big proponent of standardization, McDonald’s UAE keeps up its strict control over quality and continues improvement in new areas. In this respect, SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, serves as an excellent and cost-effective solution for their standardize services across the UAE. The implementation of SAP S/4 HANA Public Cloud, an intelligent, integrated ERP system, has virtualized McDonald’s infrastructure, reducing ownership and maintenance costs. By automating finance and sales processes, McDonald’s UAE is using real-time data to organize suppliers, monitor supply sources, and manage inventory. In addition to optimizing IT infrastructure costs, SAP Analytics Cloud enabled McDonald’s UAE to communicate operational data to all restaurants, including kitchen serving times and relationships with third party operators.

NEWS

FOCUS SOFTNET TO SHOWCASE AI SOLUTIONS AT GITEX 2019 $XWRPDWLRQ RI SURFHVVHV IRU Hŕ§˝FLHQF\ YRLFH GULYHQ FRPmands, and reallocation of human capital costs, are key GULYHUV IRU DGRSWLRQ RI DUWLÂżFLDO LQWHOOLJHQFH VROXWLRQV EHLQJ demonstrated at the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading ICT exhibition. Focus Softnet, the leading software development and enterprise applications provider, announced its participation in GITEX Technology Week 2019, which will be held at the Dubai International Convention Center from October 06-10, 2019. The company plans to launch its newly developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated Ali Hyder enterprise software Group CEO, Focus Softnet solutions in addition to showcasing its complete cloud product portfolio, including its flagship product Focus 9 powered by Pronghorn server, which is feature-rich and uses in-memory computing for fast transactions. Adopting AI platforms is a key emphasis across the GCC region, which is looking at switching from a petro-based economy to a smart, efficient, automated, and highly profitable economy. This is one of the reasons why Focus Softnet is placing the spotlight on its latest innovations in artificial intelligence at GITEX 2019. "We are seeing large scale interest by GCC public sector and private organizations, to reduce investment in human capital, and divert spending into automation of processes. It is for this reason that we have built our AI solutions alongside our enterprise software solutions including our ERP and CRM suites. Focus Softnet customers using cloud-based Focus 9 ERP, can move to a highly efficient AI-driven automated environment, and reap the benefits of a rapid return on investment. For other new businesses wanting to automate their business operations, they can get the benefit of both AI and ERP through our end-to-end product portfolio," explained Ali Hyder, Group CEO of Focus Softnet. As part of it GITEX 2019 plans, the Focus Softnet Group will showcase its flagship ERP â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Focus 9 and other solutions such as Focus 8, as well as end-to-end cloud solution portfolio from Centra Hub, including its CRM and HCM suites, and vertical market solutions. Centra's cloud solution portfolio includes Centra CRM, Centra HCM, Centra REMS, Centra Edu, Centra CAFM, Centra Auto, Centra OA and Centra Projects.

Cyril VanAgt

EMEA Channel & OEM Lead, Nutanix

NUTANIX APPOINTS CYRIL VANAGT TO LEAD CHANNEL AND OEM ACTIVITIES IN EMEA

Role will oversee overall partner sales and go-to-market programs for customers and partners with cutting edge portfolio of technologies for the multi-cloud era Role will oversee overall partner sales and go-to-market programs for customers and partners with cutting edge portfolio of technologies for the multi-cloud era Nutanix , a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has appointed Cyril VanAgt to lead its Channel and OEM activities in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Mr. VanAgt will oversee all of Nutanix's go-to-market relationships with resellers, distributors, regional system integrators and technology partners in the EMEA region, providing them with the capabilities needed to apply the company's cutting-edge technologies. In particular, Mr. VanAgt will be responsible for driving the Nutanix Channel Charter, a strategic initiative to strengthen the company's relationships with the reseller community by empowering them to succeed throughout both the sales cycle and their own customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; technology lifecycles, ultimately enabling all participants to compete in the modern era of multicloud needs and capabilities. Mr. VanAgt joined Nutanix in October 2014 and has been responsible for channel sales in the Southern European territories of the EMEA region since then. In four years he structured the Nutanix distribution network and built a strong channel ecosystem in this part of EMEA. The organization established by Mr. VanAgt enabled the readiness and autonomy of Nutanix channel partners in France, Italy, Iberia, Switzerland and French-speaking Africa, turning this region into a model for collaboration between Nutanix and its channel network. Mr. VanAgt's responsibilities were expanded further in 2018 with addition of OEM and alliance partner management. Commenting on Mr. VanAgt's appointment, Sammy Zoghlami, Senior Vice President of Sales for the Europe, Middle East & Africa region, said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am delighted to have Cyril lead our Channel and OEM operations in EMEA. These relationships are critical routes to market for Nutanix and its solutions, and Cyril's vast experience in technology partnering and implementation, will see these partners gain maximum benefit and value from what these innovative products have to offer them.â&#x20AC;? Mr. VanAgt joined Nutanix following a 14-year career at NetApp in France. He was educated at the ISEN Institut SupĂŠrieur d'Electronique et du NumĂŠrique, France, gaining a degree in micro-electronics, computer sciences and telecommunications engineering. He also holds a postgraduate qualification from the TĂŠlĂŠcom Paris institution in Image Processing & Television Systems.

CIO ONE / October 2019

NEWS

HELP AG, PROOFPOINT PARTNER TO DELIVER PEOPLE-CENTRIC CYBERSECURITY FOR MIDDLE EAST ENTERPRISES Solutions covering key user-focused threat vectors including email, social media and mobile devices While cybersecurity awareness and spending in the Middle East continue to increase, human behaviour remains the weakest link in enterprise security strategies. Recognizing this, Help AG and Proofpoint have entered into partnership to deliver people-centric cybersecurity solutions covering key user-focused threat vectors including email, social media and mobile devices. The new agreement with Proofpoint advances Help AG's strategy of broadening its cybersecurity managed services offering to include the protection of people, however and wherever they work. In its recent Human Factor Report, Proofpoint identified that more than 99% of cyberattacks rely on human interaction to work — making individual users a critical line of defence. “Attacks have pivoted from the network to endpoints because social engineering attacks are not only easier to execute, but also more successful, making them highly profitable. The rapidly changing dynamics of

INFOR PARTNERS WITH QAD PRECISION Infor Nexus Network Transportation Management further expands multi-modal capabilities with parcel execution Infor, a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry, has announced a partnership with QAD Precision, an industry-leading provider of global trade management and transportation execution software, to deliver multi-carrier parcel execution capabilities within the Infor Nexus global Network Transportation Management solution. Infor Nexus is the world’s largest single-instance, multi-enterprise supply chain cloud network business platform. Infor Nexus, rebranded earlier this year from GT Nexus, combines the power of the world-leading supply chain management network, with IoT and Infor Coleman AI to advance global enterprises on their path toward more intelligent, more autonomous supply chains. The Infor Nexus Network Transportation Manage-

CIO ONE / October 2019

the Middle East workforce – with more employees working remotely and onthe-go than ever before – introduces a new set of security complexities and risks. However, this mobility is key to the modern workforce’s ability to excel. That’s why at Help AG, we’re partnering with Proofpoint to adapt cybersecurity to new business requirements, giving organizations the ability to empower their employees without sacrificing protection,” explained Stephan Berner, CEO at Help AG. This emphasis on securing businesses without imposing restrictions is reflected in the flexibility of Proofpoint’s deployment models. The vendor’s solutions offer the same industry-leading level of protection in both cloud and on-premise environments. As a result, Middle East businesses currently in the critical transition phase can realize their cloud ambitions without introducing risks in the interim. The vendor’s global intelligence platform spans email, social and mobile ment solution offers multi-modal, multileg and multi-enterprise global logistics orchestration — beyond the capability of conventional TMS (transportation management system) software — to improve operational performance, supply chain visibility and total freight spend control. The addition of parcel shipping capability, through the partnership with QAD Precision, further extends the comprehensive multi-mode rating, planning, optimization and execution across ocean, air and truck modes already available

Jonathan Wood GM (MEA), Infor

Stephan Berner CEO, Help AG

and collects and analyses more than 100 billion data points a day from more than 100 million email boxes, 200 million social-media accounts, and 7 million mobile apps. Furthermore, to help its customers protect their people, data and brand, Proofpoint has established technology alliances with leading security vendors which are also long-standing Help AG partners. This gives Help AG the ability to build on its customer relationships by extending on and enhancing their existing investments to deliver truly integrated end-to-end protection. with Infor Nexus. Steve Gardner, president of QAD Precision, said, “QAD Precision and Infor Nexus both believe in the power of digital transformation to help our customers manage critical business processes. This partnership offers Infor Nexus customers a seamless integration from their global transportation management system to QAD Precision’s global multi-carrier network for parcel shipping and tracking.” Jonathan Wood, General Manager, Middle East & Africa, Infor, said: “Infor Nexus continues to enable significant performance improvement through digital transformation in the most complex supply chain operations at leading enterprises around the world. For companies in pursuit of a next-generation supply chain network that is real time, intelligent and self-orchestrating, the global logistics capabilities of our Network Transportation Management solution contribute to power better freight spend control, optimized carrier service levels, and the multi-party synchronization necessary to fulfill on customer promise. "

GITEX SPOTLIGHT

DEEPER INTO THE DIGITAL FUTURE Technology companies at GITEX 2019 are eager to assist regional customers in establishing a successful digital business built upon a robust digital foundation

isations dealing with disruptive technologies that are emerging faster than many can contend with. Tackling the issue of complex technology environments that are both difficult to maintain and secure, VMware is aiding customers in unlocking the full potential of today’s technologies, whether it be public cloud services, maximisation of data centre resources and integration to the public cloud, or the utilisation of mobile and smart devices.

Ahmed Auda

Managing Director – Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, VMware

VMware who are returning to GITEX Technology Week with their biggest ever booth, from which they will showcase their latest advances in cloud infrastructure, intrinsic security and digital workspace technology. Aligning with GITEX’s theme of ‘Synergizing the Mind and Technology Economy’, VMware will assist regional customers in establishing a successful digital business built upon a robust digital foundation. As part of its efforts, the company aims to address the pressing challenges faced by organ-

From its stand, VMware will exhibit its latest innovations in the cloud and explore the opportunities presented by the evolution of 5G. The company will showcase its latest software solutions in computing, cloud, networking, security, and digital workspace and will host several demonstrations throughout the event. The company will offer demonstrations of its integrated digital workspace platform, Workspace One – which is one of the many products VMware offers as part of its end-user computing solutions – as well as its vSAN Assessment module. Ahmed Auda, Managing Director – Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, VMware, said: “The advent of technology-driven innovation is disrupting every market and industry, which creates new opportunities but also brings new challenges. For the last decade, VMware has been a driving force in the successful digital transformation of many public sector and private organisations across a range of industries in the Middle East. Our focus now is to help our customers to unlock the

full potential of their digital foundation, capitalising on their operational improvements, while remaining secure in the face of new threats. GITEX gives us the opportunity to not only showcase our solutions but to also show customers first-hand how they can transform their organisation into a digital force to be reckoned with.” Secureworks, a leading global cybersecurity company, will also be at the event, where they will be highlighting a range of its cybersecurity solutions with its parent company Dell. The company is keen to draw attention to the need for organisations to significantly improve their ability to detect and respond to cyberthreats. Indeed, according to Secureworks’ latest Incident Response Insights Report, adversaries remained undetected for 111 days on average in 2018. To help organisations rapidly scale their security expertise and defeat cyber adversaries, Secureworks recently made its SaaS product – Red Cloak Threat Detection and Response (TDR) – available with a 24x7 service option. The new service, called Man-

Dr. Moataz Bin Ali

Vice President, Trend Micro, Middle East and North Africa

GITEX SPOTLIGHT

can enable enterprise protection on the cloud. Cybersecurity will be a major topic of discussion at GITEX, especially as cyber-attacks caused USD 12.5 billion in losses from 2016 to 2018. In 2018, Trend Micro blocked 48 billion threats and discovered 200 new ransomware families.

Miroslav Kafedzhiev Vice President & GM, MERTA, Honeywel

aged Detection and Response (MDR), powered by Red Cloak, is the latest enhancement to the company’s software-enabled security offering using its cloud-based security analytics platform to deliver threat detection and response with unprecedented speed and accuracy. “The actionable insights generated by Red Cloak TDR are available to organisations who want software-enabled hunting, detection and response capabilities, but also prefer the turnkey support of an experienced provider,” said Mahmoud Mounir, Regional Director, Secureworks MEA. TDR is differentiated by world class threat intelligence, expanded through ongoing incident response experience, enabled via relevant telemetry from a variety of network, endpoint, cloud and business systems across Secureworks’ entire global customer base.

To bring these cyber-threats to life, Trend Micro has commissioned six artists to process and interpret cybersecurity data. Rather than at a standalone stand, Trend Micro will showcase these artistic interpretations specialized pods at six different partners’ stands, as well as on screens between demos. “As the cybersecurity landscape becomes more complex, cyber-threats can be abstract to understand and ugly to confront when they strike,” said Dr. Moataz Bin Ali, Vice President, Trend Micro, Middle East and North Africa. “However, with our GITEX theme of ‘The Art of Cybersecurity,’ we aim to show how cybersecurity can be beautiful when organizations literally see how siloed threats can be put together to show a big picture, helping organizations stay one step ahead of cyber-threats.” Supporting cybersecurity, Trend Micro will highlight its Deep Security solution for cloud and data security with AWS, Microsoft, and VMware, along with its new XDR detection and response

“Our vision for a software-driven SOC of the future is one that pairs machine intelligence with human insight to take the guesswork out of incident response and give the adversary nowhere to hide,” said Mounir. During the event, Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, will showcase “The Art of Cybersecurity”, including how 400 million pieces of global security data

Mahmoud Mounir Regional Director, Secureworks MEA

solution for email, endpoint, server, and network with its channel partners Mindware, Redington, and StarLink. Trend Micro will also highlight security innovations across DevOps, collaboration, and cloud apps. Honeywell will demonstrate cutting-edge IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) technologies designed to optimize e-commerce operations and advance digital transformation across the region’s retail, transportation, logistics and warehousing sectors at GITEX 2019. With the Middle East’s e-commerce market expected to grow in value to $48.6 billion in 2022, up from an estimated $26.9 billion, retailers are increasingly leveraging advanced technologies to meet growing consumer expectations around delivery options, shorter delivery timelines and lower costs for shipping goods. “Over the past decade, the Middle East’s retail and supply chain industries have undergone a significant transformation due to the growing requirement for the more rapid and seamless delivery of goods,” said Miroslav Kafedzhiev, vice president and general manager for Honeywell Safety and Productivity Solutions, Middle East, Russia, Turkey and Africa. “At Honeywell, we deploy a range of smart solutions that facilitate digital warehouses and more connected supply chains, where operators can receive, store and ship goods quickly and accurately using advanced software, artificial intelligence and mobile computer technologies.”

COVER FEATURE

EMBRACING THE After 30 years of operations in the Middle East as a HPE software; Micro Focus, has for the past three years, been staking a claim for the position of the leading software company in the region The story of Micro Focus starts in 1976, when the company was formed in the UK, and half a decade later, in 1981, when the company developed a software product that would help revolutionise modern day information technology as we know it. The product was CIS COBOL, a standard-compliant COBOL implementation for microcomputers. Fast forward to present day and the company was recently celebrating the 60th anniversary of COBOL, which was created in 1959 as a U.S Department of Defense project to assist data processing, the revolutionary language was built to last through the expert design work of Grace Hopper, Jean Sammet, and others. Since starting with the development of a COBOL compiler in 1976, Micro Focus has spearheaded the evolution and innovation of the language and the contemporary technology that supports it. During an interview with CIO ONE, Mr. Gonzalo Usandizaga, VP & GM Emerging markets, Micro Focus, pointed out that it’s this continued innovation on COBOL that has enabled Micro Focus to be a leading software company that helps their customers in the digital transformation journey by helping them transform, operate and secure their IT infrastructure. “As Micro Focus we have been in this business for 40 plus years and when CIO ONE / October 2019

you work with companies for that long you get to know a lot about their legacy systems. These customers are the ones that are now embracing the digital transformation concept; which is not something as simple as switching the lights off and on, it’s a journey and customers need help. There are not many vendors in our industry today that can help with this application modernisation from mainframe to mobile phone.” explained Mr. Usandizaga. “We are COBOL founders, and we deliver solutions from COBOL down to cell phones; because the applications that you have in your phones are monitored and managed by our solutions as well. We like to call ourselves the glue between the old and the new and that’s how we drive our customers in digital transformation,” he added. For 43 years, Micro Focus has grown its footprint considerably; whereby they currently have around 15,000 employees and have more than 43,000 customers globally. The company has a broad portfolio of 300 plus products thanks to its many acquisitions over the years. However, they categorise their solutions in four main areas which include: • Enterprise DevOps- where they have leading testing solutions in the market; • Hybrid IT Management- where they

help customers to manage their own IT environments; • Security, Governance and Riskwhere they have multiple solution in this practice, from identity management to helping companies secure their applications, networks and data; • Predictive Analytics- where we have leading solutions like Vertica and IDOL, for sentiment analysis. “In this region we focus on all our solution areas, but where we see more traction is in Hybrid IT and Security, Governance and Risk. Within Security, Governance and Risk we see a lot of traction on identity management solutions, application firewall solutions and monitoring solutions as well,” said Mr. Usandizaga. He further explained, “we rely in our partners and system integrators; whereby 100 percent of our business is somehow touched by our strategic partners. So, apart from working extremely close with a significant number of partners in the region, we made the decision as a company to invest heavily in this region,” True to form, the company was in the middle of hosting their Experience Tour 2019 MEA event, which Mr. Usandizaga described as a top 3 customer and partner event Micro Focus has for the whole EMEA.

COVER FEATURE

we have almost doubled the number of employees to support our customers in the region. There is a very strong commitment from our corporation with the Middle East, and especially in the UAE,” The company’s customer base in the region is mixed, as they have key customers in almost every single vertical. Mr. Usandizaga said, “When you look at the different Telecom operators, we have in the region, they are both important customers for Micro Focus, in the financial services we probably power nine out of the ten important banks in the region. We also have customers in transportation and within Government and public sector we have very strong partnership agreements with many entities in this country,” Recently, the company’s CEO made an announcement stating that he would revisit the guidance on the top line for the financial analyst; where they were expecting to deliver a lower number in the second half of their fiscal year because of a number of reasons with the main one, according to Mr. Usandizaga, being that the macro economic situation in Western Europe. “However, if we look at this region; emerging market has so far been very successful region in fiscal year 19 as it was in fiscal year 18 where we have been growing the business double digit which is beyond our original expectation. It’s true that some external factors can impact the business on the existing outlook for the second half, but this is not something we have seen in the Middle East,” he continued.

Gonzalo Usandizaga

VP & GM Emerging markets, Micro Focus

“This event is becoming extremely relevant for our company for this region, it’s starting to become the flagship event for Micro Focus; the investment we put in teamwork with our partner community is significant otherwise we would not have an event like this one. This is the fourth year in a row we are running the partner event and every year it is becoming more popular and more successful. We get to update

our customers on some of our latest innovations and we also run sessions where it is all about customer testimonials; where customers share their experiences with Micro Focus,” he said.

REGIONAL PRESENCE Mr. Usandizaga further explained, “if I look at where we were in terms of resources in the region three to four years ago and where we are at today;

M&A STRATEGY Micro Focus has in recent times been taking deliberate steps to round out its digital transformation capabilities. In order to deliver on the wide-ranging and complex requirements, the company pursued a two-pronged strategy. One step has been to strengthen the company's overall portfolio through M&A.

CIO ONE / October 2019

COVER FEATURE

The acquisition of HPE software was an important first step to strengthen the company's overall bench, and subsequent acquisitions have added further depth while at the same time previously announced divestitures have allowed the company to stay focused on its core strategy without negatively impacting customers. At the same time, the company has been executing on an aggressive product development strategy – such as launching a modernization approach for core business systems and announcing new data protection solutions for virtualized and Hybrid IT environments – to evolve its offerings and align to this overall strategy. Speaking on Micro Focus’ merger with HPE, Mr. Usandizaga said, “HP made a decision to simplify their business and they went through a journey; where their first decision was to spin off the services business, then they made the decision to do the same with software; that is when Micro Focus, in 2017 September, acquired the HPE software assets,” “Since then we’ve been working close with HPE, they are one of the platinum partners we have in the region. I manage around 63 countries in the region I cover, I can tell you that in most of the countries, if not all, the most important

“We rely in our partners and system integrators; whereby 100 percent of our business is somehow touched by our strategic partners. So, apart from working extremely close with a significant number of partners in the region, we made the decision as a company to invest heavily in this region,” partner that we have is HP Software. We are a platinum partner for HP for a local initiative they have called the Data Garage that they are in the process of launching in UAE,” he added. On 15 September 2014, Micro Focus announced that it would acquire The Attachmate Group for US$1.2 billion in shares, which would give it ownership of the Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell, and SUSE product lines. The compa-

ny recently announced it had completed the sale of open–source software provider, SUSE to private equity firm EQT Partners for an enterprise value of USD 2.535 billion. “When we acquired Attachment, SUSE was part of the acquisition. Since day one it was part of the strategic plan to spin off the SUSE business at some point in time. That is why we made the decision to keep SUSE completely independent and we never integrated SUSE into Micro Focus, they were playing as an independent vendor,” explained Mr. Usandizaga. “Going through this transaction that we did about a year ago, we let SUSE operate as a company so that they can have their own journey and it was also a good financial transaction for us. We continue to partner with SUSE on their Open source solutions,”

Emerging technologies Mr. Usandizaga explained that, when it comes to embracing emerging technologies, “the company has specific solutions to deliver analytics; what we are doing now, as part of the evolution of our portfolio, is looking at ways to include these existing analytic solutions that we have, into the broader portfolio in Micro Focus. We started about nine months ago with our security solutions where we released a solution called ArcSight investigate; and what it does is to put analytics as part of the security solution. So, when we talk about the short-term future, this is where we are making the most relevant investment as a company,” “At the same time, we keep active with mergers and acquisitions, we just announced the acquisition of Interset, to replace an OEM agreement we had with another company, to help us to get insights from analytics to make it worthwhile for our customers. At the end of the day we listen to our customers whether it’s about AI or Big Data they are saying that they need to get more value for all their data and that is what we are doing now by embedding the analytics functionality in our existing product range.” Mr. Usandizaga concluded.

CIO ONE / October 2019

Synergising the Mind & Technology Economy The biggest tech show in the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia

#GITEX2019

gitex.com

#gitexfuturestars

futurestarsSales@dwtc.com

CIO FEATURE

ADAPTING TO DIGITAL IS KEY Organizations need to embrace new technologies in order to remain competitive and relevant otherwise there is risk of being left behind A recent report by Honeywell, which analyzed the views of approximately 250 C-level executives at medium-to-large companies across key industries, reveals that there is a strong and growing appetite among businesses to embrace digitalization to meet market demands. Mohammad Shahzad, Chief Information Officer, Rashed Darwish Al Ketbi (RDK) notes that in order to prevent losses through disruption, regional companies must enhance innovation and digital transformation capabilities.

Competitors across all industries that have learned to innovate has been converting economic opportunities into realities. “We all know that the organizations need to embrace new technologies in order to remain competitive and relevant otherwise there is risk that in few years they would be left behind. Transformation is not happening always from within the organization, but consumers/ customers push business to innovate and transform as they have been adapting digitally enhanced life faster,” added Mr. Shahzad. “In this region especially UAE and Saudi Arabia, there is a growing across several business vertical that digital transformation is both critical and essential recognition as we have already entered an era of Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0),”

Jayakumar Mohanachandran Head of IT, Precision Group

Jayakumar Mohanachandran - Head of IT - Precision Group, added to this point by saying, “Digital transformation is now becoming a common thing like other things that we consume in our daily life. The world is changing so fast

and so is Technology. With the magnitude of technology revolution that is happening within the region or globally, those who don’t transform digitally will be soon out of the game because they won’t be able to sustain in the market anymore,” Precision Group is a 35-year-old organization and as a company they were having huge legacy issues of processes and systems of 25+ years. To remain competitive in the market they have had to understand the need of digital transformation across their organization and have decided to have Cloud as our Strategy and the biggest enabler in their journey. “We are the first company globally, within manufacturing industry to adopt a full-fledged Cloud Suite from Oracle. Being an early adopter within the industry we have got opportunities to work with the product development and other different teams of Oracle to define the roadmap and functionalities for the manufacturing industry,” explained Mr. Mohanachandran. “By having our new platform on Oracle, overall mobility has increased, and our employees can access their entire information from any part of the world. Similarly, the real-time dashboards have increased overall visibility and hence faster decision making. We have also gone paperless in many areas eliminating a lot of manual rather administrative work.” Mr. Shahzad explains that RDK is embracing technology as they continue to drive digital transformation initiatives across the group, Formulating and implementing strategic plans to enable digital transformation by establishing overall roadmap and vision. Some of their transformation initiatives include:

CIO FEATURE

• Consolidating & optimizing hospitality business vertical applications and infrastructure footprint across group to achieve operational excellence & continuous process improvement; • Adopting Cloud Strategy & facilitating collaboration within Business; • Deploying an ERP system on Cloud computing for real estate and Facilities management vertical which integrated processes end to end; • Deploying industry best hospitality systems in record time to enhance their Guest Happiness & experience; • Deploying ERP Mobile App for internal & external customer to improve overall customer happiness and loyalty. He further explained, “We have done partnership recently with Dubai based Crypto company – Darico to tokenize some of our premium real estate properties. Through the collaboration, we want to explore together the prospect of offering crypto mortgages, where monthly payments can be made using virtual currencies, it will enable the public to own fractions of an apartment,”

Planning for digital

gency, examine market and competitive realities for potential crises and untapped opportunities; educate the rest of the organization about the implications of disruptive scenarios. Create an awareness strategy to pick up disruption’s earliest signals. Get everyone in the business listening for those warning signals,” he added. In their case, Precision group were forced to disrupt as they have many demanding global customers, explains Mr. Mohanachandran, he goes on to say, “It is always important to have a lean manufacturing setup that ensure our competitiveness within the industry and that is where the need comes in for having a digital transformation. With continuous changes in the world of technology, there will always be impulses in the business models, and this highlights the need to remain highly dynamic to perform a continuous innovation across the business lines,” To the question of which technology is going to be the most disruptive in the coming year, Mr. Shahzad opined that in 2020-2021 5G will be the game changer for 4th Industrial Revolution(4IR). Using 5G, enterprises will be able to rapidly transmit data to and from multiple clouds and billions of edge devices with increased reliability and security, reduced latency and dramatic improvements in bandwidth

— this will eventually help businesses transform the user experience for their customers and optimize processes across industries from retail to financial services, smart cities transportation to manufacturing, to healthcare and beyond. “Industry 4.0 – IoT, AI, Blockchain, Cloud computing merges operational, information and communication technologies enabled by advanced wireless communication. This digital and wireless transformation will be powered by 5G networks, which have the potential to drive economic growth in the region,” he added. “AI is going to have a huge impact in the coming years. The whole world is moving towards autonomous and RPA enabled processes will help to eliminate routine jobs. Because of artificial intelligence and its ability to automate certain tasks that in the past were impossible to automate, not only will we have a much wealthier civilization, but the quality of work will go up very significantly. Many jobs nowadays are quite routine and AI can do them for us, so being creative, innovative and good at design thinking are crucial skills once it comes to future jobs. Also, if we look at this way, all this could lead to a happier work environment and more fulfilling professional lives.” Concluded Mr. Mohanachandran.

A Tech Pro Research survey found that 70 percent of companies either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one. For large enterprises, that number is probably higher. To complement this initiative, IT digital transformation budget increased year over year for half of the survey respondents. To this point Mr. Shahzad says that, “leaders Preparing for digital-led disruption requires an extensive review of data and the ability to spot trends within the data and understanding consumer behavior which will allow for a better understanding of the market and what adaptations can be made to prepare for the future,” “We need to establish a sense of ur-

Mohammad Shahzad

Chief Information Officer, Rashed Darwish Al Ketbi (RDK)

CIO ONE / October 2019

FEATURE

Customer service automation comes to the fore in UAE Zendesk notes that 82 percent of customers will move to a competitor because of bad customer service Gartner recently predicted that by 2019 more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations, highlighting the fact that automated customer service is currently on the rise. Zendesk, a customer service software company, in a bid to promote customer service automation in the UAE held a ‘Zendesk Presents’ event, dubbed: 'leveraging customer service as competitive advantage’, at the Conrad Hotel. The event provided Zendesk with the opportunity to bring together business leaders to learn more about improving customer service and happiness. One of the key objectives of the event was to present some of the findings from their annual customer experience benchmark report and share some key recommendations for companies which included: think omnichannel, provide self-service options for customers, optimise the first response time, know your customer and use the data and offer live support channels (Chat, Talk, WhatsApp). “Customer's expectations have never been higher and satisfaction scores have never been lower. customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores have fallen by 2.2% over the past year. which is worrying considering our recent benchmark survey tells us that customers will detract to a competitor if they have a bad customer experience,” said Aoife Byrne, Regional Marketing Manager, Zendesk CIO ONE / October 2019

Andy Heather

Territory Sales Manager ME, Zendesk

Group, Namshi and Mumzworld. As the importance of improved customer service continues to rise, Zendesk’s footprint continues to increase with more companies, from both SMBs and enterprise sector, utilising their services. Some of the Enterprise clients utilising Zendesk include: OSN, Careem, Noon, Sun Sand Sports, Kamal Osman Jamjoom

“We are increasing our footprint and our focus on the region and want to create a community around customer experience. We see events such as this as a key part of that strategy. Events are a great way to create a shared learning environment where like-minded business leaders can

FEATURE

have robust conversations about where their challenges and opportunities are and seek out solutions and best practices from other attendees,” added Ms. Byrne. She further explained that organisations in the region are looking to leverage AI and Machine Learning tools to solve many of the high volume, repetitive inquiries, avoiding the requirement for any human interaction. Using tools like this to help customers self-resolve issues, enables customer service teams to double down and focus on the high priority cases, that may require more attention. These tools can be deployed on live channels like Live Chat & WhatsApp, or across traditional channels like email. “We see our customers leveraging our out of the box Natural Language Processing (NLP) product AnswerBot, to surface knowledge articles directly from their help centre into an email or chat, but some customers go one step further and engage our Chatbot partners to build more customised & advanced bots, via our open API framework,” explained Eoin O’ Cuilleanain, Territory Sales Manager Middle East, Zendesk. “Customer expectations are increasing and as a result we're seeing strong growth in the region as businesses look to offer a truly omnichannel experience to their customer base. Now more than ever before, GCC companies seem to be putting their customer at the centre of everything, and they realise they can't do this if they have different versions of the same customer across siloed technologies. We pull it all together for them, giving a 360-degree view of the customer,” he added. Mr. O’ Cuilleanain further explained that, one of the reasons Zedesk experienced such strong growth over recent years is because they have continued to innovate faster than any of their competitors, launching more products to help their customers deliver exceptional customer experiences. Additionally, as an agile, open and extensible platform, they've been in

the fortunate position where businesses can implement & deploy their technology in weeks, not months. Speaking to Ms. Faten El Azhary, Head of customer support department Beam Wallet, one of Zendesk’s customers; who has been using their services for two years. She noted that Zendesk has empowered the company’s customer support team over the years by allowing them to improve, customer satisfaction, efficiency and customer engagement. Ms. El Azhary added that the thing she loved most about Zendesk was the fact that it enables its customers to follow market and competition requirements. “In one year, Zendesk has come up with a new analytics tool which covered all the concerns that we had on their old version. The tool has flexibility in using all data that exists in the system to create all required reports using certain formulas and queries,” explained Ms. El Azhary.

Faten El Azhary

Head of customer support department, Beam Wallet

She further explained that digital transformation is extremely important for customer service because, “customers are now relying on anything online to save their time, and the winning businesses are the ones that are capitalising on this. All organisations which collect customer’s data from: purchases, location details, clicked ads, searches on google and much more can change their business focus 360 degrees and accordingly present products and solutions that can exceed customer’s expectations,”

“Customer's expectations have never been higher and satisfaction scores have never been lower. customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores have fallen by 2.2% over the past year. which is worrying considering our recent benchmark survey tells us that customers will detract to a competitor if they have a bad customer experience,”

CIO ONE / October 2019

CASE STUDY

KUWAIT FINANCE HOUSE TAPS ARCSIGHT FOR IMPROVED CYBERSECURITY Security solution supports advanced breach defense and full regulation compliance in evolving threat landscape with powerful real-time data correlation Kuwait Finance House (KFH) is considered a pioneer in the banking phenomenon known as Islamic Finance or Shari’a Compliant Banking. KFH is the first Islamic bank established in 1977 in the State of Kuwait and today it’s one of the foremost Islamic financial institutions in the world. KFH has steadily expanded its business and achievements to lead the Islamic banking industry and become a pioneer financial establishment. KFH’s group banking network spans across several regions worldwide, with 504 branches, 1,263 ATMs, and approxi-

CIO ONE / October 2019

mately 15,000 employees.

Challenge KFH, as all other leading financial institutions, was facing a growing cyber threat landscape and Mr Majeed Behzadi, Executive Manager, Group Information Security Management and IT Infrastructure Design for KFH, explains why the organization felt compelled to look for a comprehensive security solution: “We had a basic security monitoring

solution but it didn’t give us the correlation capabilities we felt we needed in a much more sophisticated threat landscape. There was also limited development and support on the solution, and we wanted to look for an alternative before ending up with an obsolete solution. We needed to comply with very strict financial services industry regulations, including PCI-DSS, and we have a requirement to manage a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) environment with 24/7 monitoring. We are also audited regularly and need to provide comprehensive reporting in support of this.”

Solution After a thorough market evaluation, the team concluded that ArcSight Enter-

CASE STUDY

prise Security Manager (ESM) in combination with ArcSight Logger was the best fit for their breach defence and compliance needs. ArcSight ESM provides powerful insight into real-time correlation of Kuwait Finance House ArcSight supports advanced breach defense and full regulation compliance in evolving threat landscape with powerful real-time data correlation of security events, while ArcSight Logger delivers a cost-effective universal log management solution that unifies searching, reporting, alerting, and analysis across any type of enterprise machine data. It has built-in content for regulatory and security compliance requirements to ease the burden on KFH’s security teams. KFH engaged with a local implementation partner and within two months the ArcSightdriven SIEM environment was live. Set up in a datacenter-based cluster environment, disaster recovery is guaranteed through a separate site set up. Mr Behzadi on how ArcSight supports the day-to-day operations within the KFH Security Operation Centre (SOC): “The ESM correlation engine is one of the best in the industry. For our threat investigations it’s really helpful to collect data and correlate events in real-time to prioritize and escalate threats that violate the internal platform rules. We were able to optimize the events received from the different sources using ADP filtering and aggregation capabilities, resulting in us only managing around 3,000 events per second. Thus, directing our resources in the right way is a key benefit for us.” Mr Behzadi also found the community-driven ArcSight content to be of help: “Through the ArcSight Marketplace and Activate framework, we benefit from security rule-sets, dashboards, and reports developed by Micro Focus® SOC experts and the ArcSight Community. ArcSight Activate includes hundreds of use case solutions and ESM packages that we can simply download and integrate into our own ESM environment. It has hugely enriched and enhanced our security operations and response times.”

The reporting modules within ArcSight ESM and Logger have also been very useful. The KFH security team have been able to introduce comprehensive dashboard reporting which is used in many parts of the organization, as well as in audits. Standard and custom, as well as automated and ad-hoc reporting are all part of the security service. KFH have leveraged ArcSight to integrate with many financial applications. This makes adding digital payment capabilities seamless and simple by removing data silos and using customer data for real-time payments. It has helped minimize online fraud and ensures data confidentiality. KFH have created an integrated enterprise software platform that brings together proven, real-time core processing with channel solutions from Finastra, a unique cloud platform built specifically for the financial market. This ensures that consistent information is available throughout the entire enterprise and that adding and maintaining customer records is simplified and streamlined. It improves compliance, as reporting and analysis is also made easier with drag and drop report-building capabilities from within the same database. ArcSight Flex connectors for these use cases were developed through Micro Focus Professional Services and are available through ArcSight Marketplace. KFH leverages these concepts in advanced use cases to correlate the IT/security logs with financial data to cross verify attacks and identify vulnerabilities.

Results KFH’s main objectives were to be fully compliant and have complete visibility of their infrastructure, improving their ability to respond in a timely manner to any threat events. Mr Behzadi is confident this has been achieved: “It’s hard to measure success in this area for us, but our entire infrastructure with all its elements is now 100% covered by our ArcSight-driven SIEM. Any future devices or systems can easily be integrated as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more relevant in our in-

dustry. We are fully compliant with any industry regulations and feel confident we can respond quickly and accurately to any security threats.” The KFH security team is also looking into adding ArcSight Data Platform (ADP) to its SIEM. This will enable KFH to easily collect, normalize, enrich and distribute their event data to any other data consumers they may have, including their analytics tools. Mr Behzadi concludes: “We want to expand our SIEM to provide a group level security service, centralized in Kuwait, to encompass our banking and non-banking subsidiaries. With our ArcSight implementation we feel ready to tackle this new challenge in an evolving threat landscape. ArcSight has helped us meet all compliance mandates in order to mitigate the risk of fines and potentially negative legal ramifications. We look forward to our continued partnership with Micro Focus.”

“Through the ArcSight Marketplace and Activate framework, we benefit from security rule-sets, dashboards, and reports developed by Micro Focus® SOC experts and the ArcSight Community. ArcSight Activate includes hundreds of use case solutions and ESM packages that we can simply download and integrate into our own ESM environment. It has hugely enriched and enhanced our security operations and response times.”

CIO ONE / October 2019

CASE STUDY

BAHRAIN CREDIT DRIVES DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITH VEEAM The solution has yielded added benefits for company’s IT department, in the form of noteworthy time savings. This time has now been reclaimed to focus on actively driving the company's ongoing Digital Transformation through the introduction of innovative new services Bahrain Commercial Facilities Company (BCFC) was founded in 1983 and is based in Tubli in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The group operates in many sectors, including property, through Tasheelat Real Estate Company; insurance, through Tasheelat Insurance Services; and the automotive industry, served by Tasheelat Automotive Company, Tasheelat Car Leasing Company and National Motor Company. Bahrain Credit, the group’s personal and corporate finance division, leads the Kingdom in the services it provides, from credit cards to commercial investment offerings.

The challenge Bahrain Credit's mission is to be the first choice for customers by providing excellent products, services and solutions. In recent years, this has meant having to prioritize the digitization of its services to extend greater conveniences to its customers, while catering to Bahrain's growing demographic of young, tech-savvy digital natives. As a financial institution, the company knew that to succeed in this initiative, it would have to guarantee the availability and integrity of its digital data and services.

The business solution Bahrain Credit was facing a challenge common to thousands of companies worldwide, in industries from retail to CIO ONE / October 2019

entertainment: how to please a new generation of customers born into a world of digital conveniences and instantaneous service.

“As a finance organization, data has always been critical to us, but the escalation in market expectations means every entry now plays a vital role, be it simple customer details or a new lead.” Ali Al Marzooq, Head of Innovation and Business Technology, Bahrain Credit said. In pursuit of unprecedented brand loyalty, Bahrain Credit needed to align with the digital native expectation of multi-channel engagement.

CASE STUDY

“This new generation of customers doesn’t want to visit a branch with physical documents,” Al Marzooq explained. “With digital on-boarding, we wanted to simplify our processes and save our customers time and effort. We’re building omni-channel engagement for our customers through web portals, mobile apps and self-service kiosks, so their entire customer journey can be managed online.”

The Veeam solution Bahrain Credit turned to Veeam® after realizing that its legacy backup solution was incompatible with its ambitions of catering to the demands of digital natives. Bahrain Credit was determined for its replacement backup solution to address its Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), both for external and internal compliance. Veeam Backup & Replication™ now takes care of backup and recovery of several mission-critical virtual machines (VM), including the VM running Bahrain Credit’s core database. Al Marzooq also cited the ease of use and set up as a major reason for selecting Veeam. By facilitating the group’s Digital Transformation, Veeam has radically enhanced efficiencies across multiple areas of Bahrain Credit’s business. Where previously, physical files would be moved from branch to branch, digital records are now instantly available from anywhere in the organization, speeding up workflows. As of last year, the group has digitized most of its customer records through its document management system (DMS) and today, over 90% of its data now exists in digital formats alone. As a result, this has all but eliminated physical copies of documents resulting in significant reductions in the company’s paper usage. Bahrain Credit will next turn its attention to replicating this success for its credit card debt collections department

CIO ONE / October 2019

Veeam’s solution has also yielded benefits for Bahrain Credit’s IT department, in the form of noteworthy time savings. This time has now been reclaimed to focus on actively driving the company's ongoing Digital Transformation through the introduction of innovative new services.

“Veeam is a fundamental enabler of our ongoing Digital Transformation, because by guaranteeing the Availability of our mission-critical data and services, they give us the ability to roll out new digital innovations for our customers with complete peace of mind," concluded Al Marzooq.

“Backup today can play a major role in saving the environment by reducing the amount of paper waste in our daily work,” Al Marzooq said. “”

The results

In pursuit of the further enhancement of its High Availability capabilities, Bahrain Credit is now set to partner with Veeam in a cloud migration project designed to be the first step in an ongoing Digital Transformation journey for the company. The program will also integrate Veeam’s replication solution for disaster recovery and a system for the archiving of emails for off-boarded employees to promote greater service continuity for customers.

Bahrain Credit attributes the ability to smoothly run its business and serve its customers to the Availability and integrity of its digital data and services — which is made possible by Veeam. Thanks to Veeam, Bahrain Credit's IT team now spends less hours per month on backups and running data restoration. Reclaiming this time has allowed them to focus on delivering exceptional omni-channel engagement for customers through web portals, mobile apps and self-service kiosks, so the entire customer journey can be managed online.

“Our initiative to go to the cloud has been, at least in part, spurred by the confidence we’ve gained from our successful Veeam implementation,” said Al Marzooq. “Cloud will give us High Availability at a lower total cost of ownership for all our systems. Our goal is to not have any physical servers by 2020 and we see Veeam as being a key partner in achieving this objective.”

Veeam has given Bahrain Credit the confidence to digitize its mission-critical records, allowing customer records to now be instantly available across all branches, speeding up workflows. This has cut the processing time for new service applications by 75% and has eliminated the need for paper forms between the loan processing and customer relationship departments.

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CASE STUDY

ALKHALIJ ENTERPRISES CHOOSES EPICOR ERP FOR MODERNIZED BUSINESS PROCESSES ERP solution is built on latest technology and is in line with industry best practices and processes. In business since 1971, alkhalij enterprises LLC is a leading distributor of industrial spare parts and maintenance products for globally recognized brands including Alemite, Cummins Filtration, ESAB, NTN Corporation, Rexnord Corporation, ROCOL, SNR Roulements, Honeywell, JSP and Timken. Operating out of 11 offices across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman Qatar and Tanzania, alkhalij caters to businesses in the oil & gas, marine & shipyard, construction, metals & mining, cement & aggregates, food & beverage, manufacturing, and transportation sectors.

Legacy ERP risk Since the early 2000s, alkhalij was relying on a custom-built enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution from a local UAE vendor. Like most homegrown solutions it was inflexible and couldn’t easily be scaled in line with business growth. Most importantly, the solution was not built on any standard IT platform nor was it compliant with commonly used business and IT practices, which posed a significant business risk. Highlighting some of his frustrations and concerns with the legacy ERP solution, Kapil Bhatia, Director for Operations and Business Development at alkhalij enterprises LLC, said, “Unlike most modern ERP solutions that offer broad functionality right out of the box and allow for easy in-house customization, our previous solution offered none of these capabilities. Particularly since the solution was not built on any CIO ONE / October 2019

standard platform, each time we required a new module, report, or some added functionality, we had to rely on the developer to build this for us from scratch.” Bhatia continued, “This posed three major challenges. Firstly, we were quite literally at the mercy of the vendor and if they went out of business, we were essentially out of business too! Secondly, we would regularly lose 2-3 weeks between a request for a new module or report from a user and the time it took the vendor to develop it and make it accessible to us. As you can imagine, this severely hampered our ability to make good, real-time decisions and adversely impacted our business growth. Finally, because of the lack of best practices, very little thought was given to the impact the addition of a new module or report might have on the business, particularly data integrity and security. As such users had access to information they necessarily shouldn’t be privy to and could make changes to system data without proper authorization. This again had a knock-on effect on our business planning and bottom line.”

Flexible and user-friendly Realizing that continuing to rely on an inflexible and archaic ERP solution was not only hampering business growth but, more importantly, could undermine the business altogether, Bhatia and the rest of the alkhalij management team took the decision to replace the legacy system.

On the list of priorities for the new ERP solution was the need for it to be built on latest technology and be in line with industry best practices and processes. This was particularly important when it came to out of the box functionality, reporting capabilities, security, and ease of customization and scalability. An industry veteran, with over 15 years of ERP solution experience, both in the US and in the Middle East, Bhatia vetted out several ERP vendors over a period of six months before finally deciding to select Epicor. Explaining some of the key factors that set Epicor apart from the competition, Bhatia said, “Epicor ERP met 75 % of our business needs right out of the box. Importantly, having essentially come from a ‘closed-box’ environment, where we had to rely on the vendor for even the smallest customizations, the fact that Epicor ERP allows us to easily customize the solution for last-mile functionality, was key. Another big advantage of Epicor ERP, over some of the other solutions we evaluated, is the look and feel of the user-interface. The solution is very intuitive and easy to navigate which is an important criterion given that everyone in the company—from the warehouse to the back office—needs to be comfortable with using the solution. Finally, as with most IT investments, cost is a major factor and Epicor provided the best value for money for our business.” Over a period of six months, Bhatia and his team deployed Epicor ERP across the company’s 13 locations in the Middle East and East Africa.

CASE STUDY

Today, 70 users rely on Epicor ERP and its core modules—sales management, supply chain management (SCM) and financial management—for the majority of their day to day activities and decision making.

Modernizing business processes One of the biggest benefits since the implementation of Epicor ERP has been the ability for alkhalij to implement standard operating procedures and automate business processes across departments. Bhatia explained, “With our old ERP solution there were no checks and balances, which fostered poor business practices. This was most evident in Procurement and Dispatch, arguably the two most critical functions for a distribution business like ours. For example, our procurement team would receive goods in from a supplier and if they were in a rush to turn them around and get them out to a customer, would do that first, before taking the time to log the transaction in the system. Sometimes they would forget to go back and log the transaction which in turn adversely affected our inventory count, financial reporting and bottom line. It also caused the inventory to be inaccurate.” “Now, with Epicor, when parts come in from a supplier, the team must first receive the goods into the system, add in costs, and follow proper inventory control... Only then are these parts available to be shipped out to a customer. With Epicor ERP, we can even

automate the management of expiry dates of several products like safety, welding and lubricants, something we previously managed manually in excel. This again has helped us improve our inventory control and reduce waste and costs.” “Similarly, in Dispatch there were no standard procedures for picking, packing, allocating, scheduling, or tracking. This, coupled with the lack of visibility and transparency across departments, meant that we had several instances where we missed shipments or couldn’t meet our promised delivery dates. Now with Epicor ERP, we can better control a customer order lifecycle, from the point of sales where we accept an order and promise a delivery date, to ensuring that the product is available in stock and delivering it on time, every time,” continued Bhatia. Implementing the Epicor ERP system has also allowed alkhalij to automate most approvals. This was previously a manual task that required employees to walk pieces of paper from one department to the next. Now, all requisitions and approvals—everything from a requisition for purchasing more office supplies to a request for new equipment—are managed directly through Epicor ERP. “With its robust workflows, the Epicor ERP system has actually forced us to change the way we work and has driven us to adopt best-in-class business processes. This has allowed us to improve efficiency and accountability and reduce human error, waste and costs. Also, auditors like to see

well documented processes and workflows, so thanks in large part to having implemented the Epicor ERP system, we recently received our ISO 9001:2015 certification,” said Bhatia.

Better, faster, making

decision

In addition to being able to improve and automate their business processes, alkhalij users are leveraging the system’s strong suite of reporting capabilities and the availability of real-time, accurate data, to take better, faster, day-to-day decisions. Elaborating on this, Bhatia said, “Our legacy ERP system didn’t have any in-built reporting functions. So, each time we needed a report we would either have the developers build it from scratch, or manually run a report in Excel. Now, with Epicor ERP, I can essentially create a stream of data and set user controls to ensure that users only see the data they need to see. Any user can then use this stream of data to easily create their own customized reports and dashboards based on their requirements with just a few clicks.” “Epicor ERP allows us to implement industry best practices, automate processes, take better, quicker business decisions, and ultimately better serve our customers. With the Epicor ERP system serving as the backbone of our business, I am confident that it gives us a significant competitive advantage. It’s the right platform for our business growth,” concluded Bhatia.

CIO ONE / October 2019

INTERVIEW

A PEEK AT VEEAM VERSION 2 Veeam Software is a leading developer of backup, disaster recovery and intelligent data management software for virtual, physical and multi-cloud infrastructures. Claude Schuck, Regional Manager, Middle East at Veeam, speaks about the company’s next steps in their evolution.

Claude Schuck

What is the current uptake of Veeam in the Middle East? We’ve been very lucky in terms of the uptake of Veeam, we’ve been in country (UAE) for eight and a half years; where we’ve had a physical presence in terms of an operating office. We have an excess of 4500 customers across the Middle East, specifically; when you look at IDC numbers, in Saudi Arabia we are number one in terms of vendor and across all the other countries we are either number one or two. Veeam spreads across from small businesses to enterprises and Telco. For the first four or five years here, we were focused on small, medium and mid-sized businesses, but for the las three to four years we’ve penetrated Government, Telcos and large enterprises.

What products/ solutions is Veeam concentrating on for the Middle East region? Veeam has been around for 11 years as a company, when the founders first developed the product; they developed a product that had backup and recover virtualisation, specifically VMware only. So, they took a big gamble because at the time virtualisation, specifically VMware, was only in test and no one had it in production. Thankfully virtualisation VMware and then hyper-v became mainstream and the product has grown from there.

CIO ONE / October 2019

Regional Manager, ME, Veeam So, if we call that Veeam version one, with Veeam version two, the big bet we are placing is on cloud workload. The next thing we will be doing is embedding all our development, all our products, the way customers procure, the way you buy from us will be all around host and subscription-based services; workloads sitting in cloud type environments is what we are doing. So, Veeam version 2 is all about cloud and host revenue.

Kindly elaborate on how data management has changed in the multi cloud era? With the advent of all public clouds, specifically in the Middle East; when we look at Bahrain, AWS has put a data centers down, in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Azure has put data centers down. So, with that customers will start to scale about moving workloads to have them available for access across the region. So, data management of the past, in terms of ownership of having data on site all the time and moving some offsite using tape will be less; tape will still be important for matters of compliance. Veeam is all about when everyone dose backup and recovery, but we are saying let’s utilise the data as it has value. Currently data management is not just about using data and backing it up but having access to it and this cloud infrastructure gives you quick access to data and helps you make informed decisions and it will

help grow your business ultimately.

Who are some of the major public cloud service providers that you are working with in this region? and how has the collaboration been so far? We collaborate with Azure and AWS, where we have specific products for this kind of partnership. Every single customer that buys Veeam has access to Cloud Connect, a piece of software that enables our customers to connect to any public or private cloud provider. In the region we have a lot of hosting cloud provider.

Briefly discuss your go to market Channel strategy We are a 100 percent channel organisation. So, we have distribution in country, but we have partners of many levels; all our partners can sell our services and we offer them skills in terms of training. The good thing about the Veeam certified training is that we touch on many things, not just back up and recovery, and it is a good overall certification that gives you a good understanding of data center applications and how it works. It’s quite a sought-after certification and the pass rate for first timers is about 25 percent, because there is nothing you can research on the web.

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INSIGHT

YOUR OPTIMAL ROUTE TO HYBRID IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Assaad El Saadi, Regional Director, Pure Storage opines that those who ask the right questions as they design their hybrid IT infrastructures, are more likely to recount a happily-ever-after story than those that jump in with both feet. Today’s most evolved enterprises know the potential of their data as a competitive lever and for insights into their customers. They also know that not all data is created equal. To build the most modern IT environments and derive the maximum value, there is a growing acknowledgment that data types have different needs for access, storage, and management.

several cautionary tales. If these uncomfortable anecdotes were to be compiled into a single volume, its title would read: “Plan Ahead”. Jumping the gun in IT projects has never

yielded a happy ending, and yet we still do it. But those who ask the right questions as they design their hybrid IT infrastructures, are more likely to recount a happily-ever-after story than

In the Middle East, there has been a growing movement towards the adoption of hybrid IT environments, where workloads and services are split across cloud and non-cloud environments such as on-premises hardware, private cloud, co-located cloud and public cloud. According to IDC, public cloud spend in the UAE alone is set to soar from around US$ 119.6m in 2017 to US$ 411.4m in 2022. When a market more than triples in value in a five-year period, we should take notice. But challenges persist, especially in the Storage-as-a-Service domain. Many third-party providers of this increasingly popular hybrid cloud offering have not managed to catch up with more stringent requirements when it comes to enterprise class-deployments. Many have shied away from moving critical client workloads offsite, choosing instead to maintain them in their own data centres. And travelling workloads are also beset by licensing restrictions that shrink the number of options for IT organisations. And so, the relatively short history of hybrid cloud has furnished us with CIO ONE / October 2019

Assaad El Saadi

Regional Director, Middle East, Pure Storage

INSIGHT

those that jump in with both feet.

What are your targets? Identify your goals, zero in on your biggest pain points and plan your attack. Maybe you want to find better ways to run traditional applications in a public-cloud setting. You might want to explore ways to unlock the limitless computing power inherent in cloud-native applications and cloud-native development in your data centres. Or perhaps you just crave the cyber-safety of the public cloud for the protection of your data and the options for business continuity.

Supporting on-prem cloud-native apps

and

When planning better support for enterprise applications in the public cloud, make sure that the data services you select not only meet the feature requirements of your operations, but that the performance of those services can scale appropriately to the needs of your apps. When you are careful to select services that are compatible with your data centre storage, you are taking the step of ensuring that APIs and management are consistent across all your environments. Now your architecture looks more like a hybrid infrastructure is supposed to look-with apps free to move more between your data centres and the cloud. They can even span environments, delivering that all-important agility that you seek.

models, across on-premises, hosted, and public cloudâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;aligning application workloads with the most effective infrastructure. Most importantly, the modern IT environment should work harmoniously with a common management interface, 100% non-disruptive architecture and proactive/predictive support services.

Securing the digital estate Meanwhile, the digital threat landscape has become a bugbear for us all. In recent yearsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;especially in the Arab Gulf region, amid a surge in cloud migration-the cybersecurity worry-lines have undergone their own migration, from the IT office to the boardroom. Depending on the business model, organisations could be fretting over perimeter protection, PCI compliance, cross-jurisdictional data-privacy regulations or disaster recovery. Building your ideal hybrid IT infrastructure will require a long, hard look at your current security policies and the formulation of new ones that allow a secure environment without hampering your operational ambitions. Do not be afraid to re-evaluate your entire

data-protection and disaster-recovery processes, to ensure all your digital bases are covered. Your recovery objectives may have changed, before or during the design of hybrid cloud. As a result, you may find that the recovery options available to you are no longer fast enough for your new ambitions, necessitating the switch to flash storage. And if you find yourself needing to repurpose your backup data under your new paradigm, then consider using object storage for the long term, to ensure greater accessibility than you would receive with tape solutions. As with any endeavour where you adopt something new, it is prudent to let others fail first. But hybrid cloud is now mature enough that the major lessons have all been learned. Others have both failed and succeeded, and digital transformation is working its magic on those that have been duly cautious with their planning. I urge you to be one of them. Modern IT infrastructure roadmaps, diligently navigated, can take you where you want to be, with your data working for you, delivering the actionable insights that will keep you relevant in the global digital economy.

If your big win is to prepare your data centres for the support of cloud-native apps, then you will need to add container support and object storage capabilities. This code portability allows cloud-native applications to run on your premises. In addition, associated automation tools and self-service facilities can lead to an appreciable surge in your organisation's agility and allow you to deliver on cloud-native application development. The bottom line is that modern IT environments should facilitate data strategies based on flexible consumption

CIO ONE / October 2019

INSIGHT

TEN TIPS TO SECURE YOUR

FINANCIAL FORTRESS

Harish Chib, Vice President â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Middle East & Africa of Sophos describes how banks and financial institutions are particularly targeted by phishing attacks and how to build a suitable fortress of protection.

Banks and financial institutions continue to be the prime target for global threat actors. The most prolific type of intrusive activity is through phishing emails or SMS targeted at bankâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s customers. In this form of attack, malicious links are overlaid with well-written bait text, appealing to a certain type of response from the recipients. The degree of sophistication in phishing attacks and the number of such attacks varies considerably. Over time, the nature of the phishing emails has become more sophisticated and their degree of success in motivating users to action has also increased. Once the recipient reads the text, they are motivated and interested to proceed with the call to action. Clicking on the embedded link, can launch a malicious application that takes control of the user's device through a number of intermediate steps. Usually, by clicking on the link, the recipient will be directed to a compromised web site, whose landing pages looks similar to the bank or financial institution's web site. Through the web siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s landing pages, threat actors will attempt to capture as much information as possible about the recipient. This includes user name and password, verification answers, registered address, credit card and account details. At this stage, the information collected by threat actors may be used to target the recipient directly. The information may also be consolidated and sold along with information from other recipients to third party cyber criminals. Another consequence of being a victim of a phishing attack is that the stolen credentials can be used to open impersonated accounts. On one hand, personal information can be used to complete financial transactions, before there is realization of the theft of identity. On the other hand, stolen identity details can be assumed to build fraudulent accounts and complete additional illegal transactions. CIO ONE / October 2019

Banking and financial customers need to realize that their banks will never ask them to disclose specific information about their banking practices and routines. Neither is there any reason for them to cooperate and disclose this information to anyone claiming to be part of the institution or its operations. Recipients of phishing emails and SMS need to resist the urge to respond since this will always be a

INSIGHT

well-engineered and deceptive approach to solicit information. While phishing emails and SMS are targeted at individual recipients, more sophisticated and high value activities target the internal SWIFT transaction banking system. Since the SWIFT transaction system is a closed group of users, built with the highest levels of technology encryption and safety, the breach of the system usually involves an insider element. Such a threat actor, has a high level of internal security clearance and usually sits dormant, waiting for the right time to move forward with outside accomplishes.

Building the fortress The move to new digital technology platforms by banks and financial institutions allows them to gain greater traction with the unbanked and underbanked. However, it vastly expands the attack surface for threat actors

looking at all possible vulnerabilities. Online banking portals with account and credit card information and other value-added services like life, medical, accident, home insurance is particularly targeted because of the high net worth information that they contain and offer in case of a successful compromise. With the large number of customer touch point channels, and the possibility of huge financial losses, the cybersecurity systems used by banks and financial institutions need to operate in real time and be intuitively proactive in nature. Some of the key technology requirements include: 1. Protect end points, mobile devices, servers, networks, amongst other areas. 2. Multifactor authentication and next generation firewalls need to be used extensively. 3. Security systems should cover ATMs, branches, micro-branches, data centers.

Harish Chib,

VP (MEA), Sophos

4. Virtual private networks are required for secure site-to-site and remote access. 5. Invest in email protection with a range of protection technologies.

6. Include file type blocking, Time-ofClick protection to block malicious URLs. 7. Add next-gen cloud-sandbox technology to stop evasive threats. 8. Advanced DLP and policy-driven SPX encryption prevent data leakage making compliance easier. 9. Develop a security awareness program against phishing. 10. Processes need to be put in place, to allow information gathered by the tools and analyzed by teams, to be shared with stakeholders. For banks and financial institutions, the damage from any type of compromise can be of two types. They can be damaged by the extent of financial transactions lost and diverted to unknown sources. They can be further impacted by the loss of confidence from their customers, shareholders, stakeholders and supporting institutions. The net impact of the two factors depends on the institution, and the country and regions of operation. Suitable investment in cybersecurity and an effort to build internal awareness can help reduce the likelihood of such catastrophes.

CIO ONE / October 2019

INSIGHT

SaaS – What’s in It for Customers and Vendors? Krupa Srivatsan Director, Product Marketing at Infoblox discusses the benefits of SaaS SaaS (software-as-a-service) is here to stay. This is evident from the widespread adoption of business applications hosted in the cloud such as CRM, payroll processing, collaboration and human resource management software over the last decade. And it is not just business applications these days. Increasingly, networking and security has also moved to the cloud. SaaS is a delivery model where the software is centrally hosted by a vendor and buyers consume the service from the cloud. Whether you are an organization using applications to run your business or a vendor providing critical software as a service to your customers, there is something for everyone in a SaaS model. What’s in it for consumers of SaaS: • Reduced IT overhead – Organizations consuming services from the cloud do not need to install or maintain expensive hardware or infrastructure on-premises. If consuming security from the cloud, this is a big advantage because now security can be deployed even in locations where no IT expertise is available. • Immediate Access to Functionality – Customers get access to the SaaS service immediately upon signup without having to wait for shipment and installation of hardware or software. For example, organizations can immediately improve their security posture by signing up for a cloud based security offering. • Flexible licensing/payment options – SaaS model provides companies an alternative to the traditional capex model where they pay upfront for any hardware needed and a perpetual software license. By shifting to an opex model, they can take advantage of lower upfront costs and more predictable recurring costs thereafter. CIO ONE / October 2019

• Seamless upgrades – Customers don’t need to worry about updates for latest features or patching their software for vulnerabilities. The SaaS provider always has the latest secure code in the cloud. This enables customers to get immediate access to new innovations and features. • Scale as you grow – Organizations don’t have to plan for peak capacity like they do when purchasing infrastructure. They can scale by purchasing higher tiers of the service as they grow. • Extend reach – Since SaaS services are delivered from the cloud, it is possible to extend the usage of the services to beyond the traditional on-premises network. For example, security delivered from the cloud can easily be applied to devices on or off premises which greatly expands the use cases that can be addressed.

cause of more frequent involvement with users of their service. This means they can provide features that the customers actually need based on the feedback loop. Many businesses are in the process of making a shift to consuming services from the cloud because they see greater business value through SaaS.

What’s in it for vendors: • Latest code for all customers – Vendors can Krupa Srivatsan allocate resources to proDirector, Product Marketing, Infoblox vide the latest and greatest to all their customers About Infoblox at the same time, without having to worry about a legacy of old software Infoblox is leading the way to next-levthey may need to support. el DDI with its Secure Cloud-Managed • Speed of innovation – The speed Network Services. Infoblox brings of innovation is also much greater as next-level security, reliability and autovendors can make available new feamation to cloud and hybrid systems, tures and functionality to their customsetting customers on a path to a siners much faster than with a traditional gle pane of glass for network manage6-month release cycle for on-premisment. Infoblox is a recognized leader es software. with 50 percent market share com• Better Customer Insight– Compaprised of 8,000 customers, including nies with SaaS offerings are much 350 of the Fortune 500. Learn more at closer to the customer than compawww.Infoblox.com nies with only a traditional model be-

NEW TECH

FLASHARRAY//C

Pure Storage, the fastest growing data storage company, has announced an expansion of the Pure Storage FlashArray product line built to deliver a modern data management experience for customers. Pure is the first and only vendor to enable faster access to data wherever customers need it by delivering flash at disk prices. FlashArray//C, the industry’s first capacity-optimized all-flash array, is built to bring consistent all-flash performance with tier one reliability at disk economics. DirectMemory Cache, a combination of Purity and Intel Optane storage class memory, provides FlashArray//X customers with a software-based accelerant that delivers dramatic performance improvement for applications that require the ultimate in high-performance storage. Today, the majority of organizations need to access their data at any given moment to drive better business results and decision making. Due to economic constraints, tier two applications have long been anchored down by disk technologies, which results in inconsistent latency, management complexity, and forklift replacements every three-to-five years. For organizations that require data availability across all workload tiers, FlashArray//C provides a cost-competitive, modern flash alternative to hybrid disk or cold storage options.

Highlights: • With FlashArray//C, customers can rely on storage solutions for historically less mission-critical workloads at a

cost competitive with archaic hybrid and disk-based solutions. This provides customers with faster access to consistently latent data and helps them make better, more informed business decisions. • Like all products in the FlashArray family line, FlashArray//C provides a no-compromise enterprise experience built for >99.9999 percent availability, Pure1 cloud data management, API automation, AI-driven predictive support, and is built from the ground up to be Evergreen with non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades and no data migrations. • The FlashArray//C60 delivers up to 4.2 petabytes of effective capacity in a sleek and compact design, with full-enterprise software services, Pure1 cloud management and data portability, and 100 percent NVMe flash. • Customers will benefit from 99.9999 percent availability, 5:1 average data reduction and 10:1 total efficiency, reducing the amount of storage customers need to purchase and manage. FlashArray//C is generally available now and optimized for next generation QLC media. • Modern database and analytics requirements have increased customer requirements for storage performance.

ATLAS 800 DEEP LEARNING SYSTEM Tailored toward AI developers and data researchers, Huawei Atlas 800 provides end-to-end capabilities for data labeling, model generation, model training, and model inference services. With integrated software and hardware, this appliance reduces the technical entry requirements for AI applications and enables quick development and rollout of AI services for customers. Huawei Atlas 800 AI appliance provides a Deep Learning Service (DLS) component as a one-stop deep learning platform. It integrates a large number of optimized network model algorithms to help users easily use deep learning technologies in a convenient and efficient manner, and provides users with model training, evaluation, and inference services through flexible scheduling and on-demand services.

Highlights • Ready to work in 2 hours with a pre-installed AI development environment, underlying software library, and development framework. Automatic model generation with AutoDL, automatic hyperparameter tuning, and one-click model deployment. • Optimized AI environment based on a standard framework and programming environment. High-performance scheduling algorithms, improving resource utilization by over 15%. • Comprehensive management of resource utilization, health monitoring, and job scheduling. Easy-to-use WebUI, more intuitive and efficient than the Command Line Interface (CLI).

• Pure Storage DirectMemory Modules plug directly into FlashArray// X70 and //X90 to speed up OLTP and OLAP results instantly, allowing customers to continue innovating without downtime or configuration required. CIO ONE / October 2019

MARKETSCAPE

CLOUD IT INFRASTRUCTURE REVENUES DECLINE IN Q2 2019 According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, declined 10.2% year over year in the second quarter of 2019 (2Q19), reaching $14.1 billion. IDC also lowered its forecast for total spending on cloud IT infrastructure in 2019 to $63.6 billion, down 4.9% from last quarter's forecast and changing from expected growth to a year-overyear decline of 2.1%.

Overall, the IT infrastructure industry is at crossing point in terms of product sales to cloud vs. traditional IT environments. In 3Q18, vendor revenues from cloud IT environments climbed over the 50% mark for the first time but fell below this important tipping point since then. In 2Q19, cloud IT environments accounted for 48.4% of vendor revenues. For the full year 2019, spending on cloud IT infrastructure will remain just below the 50% mark at 49.0%. Longer-term, however, IDC expects that spending on cloud IT infrastructure will grow steadily and will sustainably exceed the level of spending on traditional IT infrastructure in 2020 and beyond.

into traditional (non-cloud) IT environments declined 6.6% from a year ago in Q219. For the full year 2019, worldwide spending on traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure is expected to decline by 5.8%, as the technology refresh cycle driving market growth in 2018 is winding down this year. By 2023, IDC expects that traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure will only represent 41.8% of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending (down from 52.0% in 2018). This share loss and the growing share of cloud environments in overall spending on IT infrastructure is common across all regions.

Vendor revenue from hardware infrastructure sales to public cloud enviMost regions grew their cloud IT Inronments in 2Q19 was down 0.9% Spending on the three technology frastructure revenues in 2Q19. Midcompared to the previous quarter segments in cloud IT environments is dle East & Africa was fastest growing (1Q19) and down 15.1% year over forecast to deliver growth for Ethernet at 29.3% year over year, followed year to $9.4 billion. This segment of switches while compute platforms by Canada at 15.6% year-over-year the market continues to be highly imand storage platforms are expected growth. Other growing regions in pacted by demand from a handful of to decline in 2019. Ethernet switches 2Q19 included Central & Eastern Euhyperscale service providers, whose are expected to grow at 13.1%, while rope (6.5%), Japan (5.9%), and Westspending on IT infrastructure tends to spending on storage platforms will deern Europe (3.1%). Cloud IT Infrastruchave visible up and down swings. Afcline at 6.8% and compute platforms ture revenues were down slightly year ter a strong performance in 2018, IDC will decline by 2.4%. Compute will over year in Asia/Pacific (excluding Jaexpects the public cloud IT infrastrucremain the largest category of spendpan) (APeJ) by 7.7%, Latin America by ture segment to cool down in 2019 ing on cloud IT infrastructure at $33.8 14.2%, China by 6.9%, and the USA with spend dropping to $42.0 billion, billion. by 16.3%. a 6.7% decrease from 2018. Although it will continue to account for most of Sales of IT infrastructure products the spending on cloud IT environments, its share will de2Q19 2Q19 2Q18 2Q18 2Q19/2Q18 crease from 69.4% in 2018 to Company Revenue Market Revenue Market Revenue 66.1% in 2019. In contrast, (US$M) Share (US$M) Share Growth spending on private cloud IT infrastructure has showed 1. Dell Technologies $2,355 16.70% $2,565 16.40% -8.20% more stable growth since 2. HPE/New H3C Group** $1,749 12.40% $1,748 11.20% 0.10% IDC started tracking sales of IT infrastructure products 3. Cisco $1,101 7.80% $1,029 6.60% 7.00% in various deployment en4. Inspur/Inspur Power Systems*** $820 5.80% $690 4.40% 18.90% vironments. In the second quarter of 2019, vendor rev4. Lenovo* $670 4.80% $813 5.20% -17.50% enues from private cloud environments increased 1.5% ODM Direct $4,059 28.90% $5,349 34.10% -24.10% year over year reaching $4.6 Others $3,307 23.50% $3,473 22.20% -4.80% billion. IDC expects spending in this segment to grow 8.4% $14,061 100.00% $15,655 100.00% -10.20% Total year over year in 2019.

IDC's Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, Q2 2019

CIO ONE / October 2019

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