The Value Plus Magazine - October GITEX Issue

Redington Value is a value added distributor for the following brands in parts of Middle East & Africa:
TECHNOLOGY
DISTRIBUTION
RE-IMAGINED

Splunk® has extraordinary power to
harness massive amounts of machine data and
extract actionable Operational Intelligence.
More than 14,000 customers in 110 countries have used
Get more value from your data free: splunk.com/free-trials
© 2017 Splunk Inc. See website for terms and conditions.

Dear Partners,
A
s the industry expands
with many new players
entering the space,
staying differentiated
is increasingly becoming a
challenge. However, only by
separating yourself from the
crowded marketplace will you be
able to create impactful and lasting
relationships with customers.
The first step to achieving this is
understanding your strengths and then leveraging that to your
benefit. It is vital that channel organizations identify what their
core fortes are and devise a plan to use that effectively. Firms
that manage to create a sense of belonging for their customers
will be able to remain distinguished for years to come. It is also
important that you invest in your workforce and ensure they
reflect the company’s values and ethos. This will only happen
by creating an employee-driven and positive work culture.
Never compromising on quality is another way firms can make
sure they stand out from their competitors.
RedingtonGulfhasbeenabletoleadtheregionaldistribution
space and provide continued differentiated offerings through
similar principles. We believe that in order to stay a market
leader, it is imperative that we continue sharpening our
personnel’s skill sets and stay relevant in a rapidly evolving
business environment.
We encourage our partner organizations to stay
differentiated and relevant as new-age technologies such as
IoT, big data analytics, security, mobility and cloud transform
the way we do business. We are optimistic that our driven and
innovative partners will be able to adopt and flourish amid the
rapidly evolving and competitive IT channel marketplace.
Yours sincerely,
Raj Shankar,
Managing Director, Redington Gulf
04 Interview
10 Dell EMC
14 VMware
16 TCG Digital
20 Cambium Networks
22 Cisco
28 Oracle
CONTENTS
08 Defining path to success
30 Innovative solutions
31 Primed for progress
42 Fortifying the future
41 Collaborate to profit
26 Beyond the horizon
09 Confluence of platforms
32 HPE
36 HPE Aruba
38 Huawei Middle East
44 StorageCraft
46 Red Hat
50 Check Point
52 Fortinet
56 Splunk
58 Malwarebytes
62 Palo Alto Networks
64 Microsoft
68 CyberArk
70 Seclore
Published by
October 2017 The Value Plus 3For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

INTERVIEW | REDINGTON VALUE
REDEFINING
DISTRIBUTIONOver the last decade of operations, Redington Value has strived to be at the frontier
of industry transformations. President Ramkumar Balakrishnan is determined to
steer the firm head-on into the digital era of computing and unleash its next phase.

ow has the regional IT
channel transformed over
the last ten years?
As a value-added distributor,
operating in the region for over a decade,
we have witnessed the evolution of the
market. We have seen the industry
progress from focusing only on products
to offering a more comprehensive
solutions approach with the backing of
services. A solutions’ distributor is
someone who engages in an outcome
based sale. Many believe solutions
distribution is like old wine in a new bottle
but that’s not the case. This transformation
is happening; however, the industry must
have people who can understand, create
and go-to-market with a genuine
proposition.
Redington Value has had several
developments this past year. Can you
share some of the bigger milestones?
Over the last year, we have worked towards
building our portfolio of offerings in the
regional market. We have expanded our
operations in all the territories, especially
in French and North Africa. Gulf and East
Africa have always been high-growth
markets for us. We have also onboarded
new vendors such as Palo Alto Networks in
Egypt, Nokia, Seclore, Nexthink and have
gone mainstream with Huawei. In terms of
technologies, we have intensified our
focus in the security, cloud and
hyperconverged space.
Two key initiatives stand out from a
strategic perspective – one is the setting
up of our consulting arm, which is now a
DIC company – Citrus Consulting. We are
already in the process of obtaining the
first few projects. Citrus will be laser-
focused on cloud and analytics.
The second is that our aggregation and
H auto provisioning platform, Red Cloud, is
going on general availability in the current
quarter, which is a big win for us.
Can you elaborate on any updates to
key initiatives launched last GITEX
such as Red Vault and Red Cloud?
Red Vault has become a serious
proposition, considering it now boasts
around 35 odd solutions and use cases.
With representation for every single
vendor, Red Vault has become mainstream
for us.
Now we are attempting to raise it to a
different level. We are looking to onboard
ISVs and vertical business specific use
cases on analytics. This way we can allow
customers to have hands-on experiences.
We are definitely in the next phase of
developing this solutions center.
To enable cloud services, Red Cloud
will be upgraded to the 2.0 version, which
will have far more capabilities such as
bots, massive amounts of analytics and
auto-provisioning among other features
that will be added. Once the platform is
ready for general availability, we will
transition it from the old platform to the
new one. We now actively have more than
175 partners, compared to 65 last year,
transacting with us through this platform.
Which areas are driving growth for
Redington Value’s business in the
region?
The growth for the company has been
derived largely from the security, analytics
and the software-defined everything
offering, which includes software-defined
data center, networking and storage.
Today we are in the process of
constructing the offering towards an
OPEX model as compared to CAPEX,
which has gained momentum. Also,
regional customers are increasingly
adopting software-defined solutions in
the security, networking and data center
space. These are the areas where
enterprise uptake is growing, including
analytics.
“Only if the reseller takes
the driver’s seat and makes
that investment in personnel
and resources, can he
truly take advantage of the
opportunity.”

INTERVIEW | REDINGTON VALUE
What are the aspects that have
enabled Redington to stand out in a
crowded marketplace?
What has influenced and contributed to
our success is our ability to adopt
emerging technologies. We have moved
away from the traditional box moving
style of business and have more number
of people who understand emerging
technologies and trends. More than 65
percent of our Q1 revenues have come
from software while only 35 percent
constitutes hardware. We are considered
as a competent partner of choice by all
our vendors. Having identified the
prospects that emerging trends will have
and beginning initiatives around it early
on, have helped us to stay one step
ahead of the game.
Challenges will always exist but what is
important is that we identify opportunities
within it. If credit availability in the SMB
channel or waning demand in select
markets is a challenge, then we should
create a contingency plan and address it.
It is necessary to remain driven and
proactive.
Today every single person at Redington
Value is a solutions provider. The approach
is how to bring together different
technologies into one solution to win the
marketplace. This change in mindset has
also helped us to be at the forefront of the
industry.
“Today every single person at
Redington Value is a solutions
provider. The approach is how
to bring together different
technologies into one solution to
win the marketplace. This change in
mindset has also helped us to be at
the forefront of the industry.”
Are you also trying to translate
these ideologies to your partner
community?
Yes, absolutely. Today we have a set of
smaller channel firms who are viewing
Redington Value as a ‘partner’. They
don’t look at us as a supplier. The
conversations are around how to
successfully and jointly win the market
opportunities. It is quite different
from a few years’ ago. If all we can
offer is credit or simply supply the
product, then there isn’t much room
for a partner to engage. However, if
we talk about the opportunity and
how we can cohabitate, it would
become more interesting for the
channel partners. We are looking to
help our partners win in the real sense
and to enable this, we offer extensive
support such as PoCs, hosting
customers in our facility and taking
them through the journey.
65% 35%of Redington Value’s Q1
revenues have come
from software
from hardware
MORETHAN
WHILEONLY
MARKET EVOLUTION
6 The Value Plus October 2017 For more information, please write to sales.value@redingtonmea.com

How important is channel
enablement to the firm’s overall
business?
Channel enablement and education
are as important for us as channel
acquisitions and promotions. We
organize a number of trainings and
enablement initiatives throughout the
year to help partners be in a better
position to seize market opportunities.
How are you helping partners to
make the transition to working in
a cloud-enabled environment?
We assist partners from understanding
the concept of cloud to onboarding
them on platforms such as Azure and
AWS. We conduct regular workshops
and organize cloud cafes and boot
camps. We help them get certified and
proficient in cloud technologies from a
public cloud point of view.
From a private cloud perspective,
our expertise on VMware’s private
cloud and Red Hat’s Open Stack is
extensive. We support them from
virtualizing the compute storage and
the network layer to setting up a private
cloud network in the journey to the
public cloud. We enable partners on
different segments and have full-
fledged training on how to deploy a
private hybrid cloud infrastructure and
move between public and private
environments. With various courses
and training labels, we do this
extensively across the region in
association with key vendors.
How can they prepare their
businesses to thrive in the new
digital era?
Partners need to take risks. They must
put the cart before the horse even in
initiatives or areas where the demand
may not be 100 percent. Traditionally,
resellers will wait for a vendor or a
distributor to pass on the funds for a
particular technology. But only if the
reseller takes the driver’s seat and
makes that investment in personnel and
resources, can he truly take advantage
of the opportunity. The market is fiercely
competitive with many new players
entering regularly. It is critical to stay
differentiated.
This rings true for us as well. We have
made several investments where the
returns are not expected in the first
year. However, we have stayed invested,
created the business opportunity and
now we are going to accelerate the
demand. Partners have to take risk and
invest in emerging technologies.
Can you elaborate on your plans
for 2018?
Over the course of 2018, we will be
massively focused on four areas –
mobility, security, cloud and analytics.
There will be a number of prospects
around cloud, software-defined data
center and hyperconverged
technologies. We believe security will
remain the fastest growing opportunity
for us. We also aim to be the most
differentiated analytics player by 2018.
By ‘differentiated’, I mean we will have
an offering of our own such as
analytics-as-a-service.
After 11 years of operations in the
region, how do you plan to
revolutionize the distribution
space?
The next phase for Redington Value is
transforming from a distributor to an
aggregator. The difference is that as a
distributor you are only tied up with
the authorization you have to resell
particular products and services. An
aggregator is someone who can
aggregate solutions, products and
relationships. We sell to ISVs and
telcos but currently we are not route
to market to both. Tomorrow we
envisage a model where we will be a
route to market to sell their services.
We will become an aggregator of
products, solutions, services – we will
not remain as a distributor. That’s our
vision over the next five years.
partners in 2017
MORETHAN
175
Red Cloud
partners in 2016
65

DEFINING PATH
TO SUCCESS
server virtualization market grew during the
early adoption days of virtualization as a
technology.
There is a huge opportunity for the
channel in this area. Software-defined data
center is basically using software to control
hardware that brings infinite scalability of
resources and services to meet a defined
level of service assurance. This is achieved by
abstracting the hardware layer to provide
compute services as virtual resources to
applications demanding them.
This abstraction is achieved through –
server virtualization, storage virtualization or
software-defined storage, network
virtualization or software-defined networking.
Specialized skills in each of the areas will
be required to achieve this abstraction. This
presents an enormous opportunity for
consulting and professional services for the
channel partners. The key is to invest early
enough to reap the full benefits of this
opportunity.
The biggest challenge in this area is the
availability of skills. The transformation from
a traditional data center to a fully optimized
SDDC requires expertise not only in the area
of virtualization but also requires
understanding of storage, compute and
networking, management and cloud. System
integrators need to invest in building and
acquiring specialized skills to build a future
ready organization.
Redington Value has invested and
developed competencies in-house in each
of these areas. Conducting workshops and
boot camps on SDDC overall and individual
specialties is part of the firm’s regular
calendar. Additionally, Redington has hosted
several VMUGs focusing on individual
specialties. We have also made significant
investments in building a state-of-the-art
Solution Centre with entire stack deployed
in the data center. We encourage our
partners to bring in their customers to
showcase solutions. In specific cases, we
also replicate customer environments to
test applications.
We are optimistic about the market and
look forward to successfully capturing
opportunities together with our partners.
By Sayantan Dev, Vice President, VCG, Redington Value
he modern data center goes
beyond the four walls of the on-
premise establishment to the
public cloud. Today servers have
been consolidated and fully
virtualized with new levels of integration and
scalability achieved through converged and
hyperconverged architectures. Now the on-
premise infrastructure is SDDC-enabled and
public-cloud-ready for seamless movement
of workloads.
Therefore, the new age systems integrator
needs to understand all the tenets of the
modern data center strategy, including the
latest in data center infrastructure,
operations and management.
According to sources, the SDDC market
worldwide is expected to grow from $25
billion in 2016 to $80 billion plus by 2021.
The Middle East and Africa market size is
expected to be over $5 billion. So, there is a
massive opportunity ahead of us in the
region. If we break it down to solutions,
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is
expected to be the highest growth category.
In fact, SDN as a category is expected to
grow even faster than the rate at which the
T
VIEWPOINT | REDINGTON VALUE
“Software-
defined data center
is basically using
software to control
hardware that brings
infinite scalability
of resources and
services to meet
a defined level of
service assurance.”

CONFLUENCE
OF PLATFORMS
go much beyond a transactional one. Channel
partners must gain an understanding of current
environment, ongoing applications and business
challenges by wearing a consultative hat. This
approach helps partners to pick the right
language and open up the possibilities of
reaching higher up the value stack to support
customers by pitching CI / HCI solutions as well
as take part in future digital transformation
processes. Adding virtualization layer helps
channel partners to bring additional value to
their customers such as streamlined IT
operations and optimization, reduced spending,
easier backup, disaster recovery, enhanced
security, better business continuity and more
efficient IT operations.
Redington is coming from a rich
hyperconverged exposure. At one point of time,
we had in-house HCI assembly plant in the
region for one of our strategic vendors. We were
trained to assemble, integrate and sell. We have
designed our own strategies around go-to-
market, channel and business development.
Our homegrown HCI team can play an effective
role in any position in the sales cycle and make
the difference. Over the last year, Redington has
not only doubled the sales figures in the market
we operate in but also developed a focused and
committed channel community. Our aim is to
continue working on new innovations, which our
channel ecosystem will hear about soon.
At Redington Value, we are always taking the
upper hand in enabling our channel community,
especially on emerging technologies. Our skilled
sales and technical teams have committed to
disseminate the message of CI and HCI with the
comprehensive proof of concepts built in RED
Vault - Redington’s state-of-the-art IT experience
center. Our in-house discovery mechanism has
helped channel partners to discover the next
opportunity. We invite all our partners to be a
part of this journey.
By Dharshana K, General Manager VCG, Redington Value
“In the event
of Converged
Infrastructure or
Hyperconverged
Infrastructure;
conversation
between channel
partners and end
consumers go
much beyond a
transactional one.”
yperconverged Infrastructure
(HCI) is a marketing coin, which
has captured the industry’s
attention in the recent past. The
general accepted definition of the
term is a combination of compute, storage,
networking and management; leveraging the
hypervisor to converge these layers on an
industry standard X86 platform. HCI has become
one of the fastest growing technologies in our
region, among the enterprise, midmarket and
SMB markets. Customers who were spending
huge amounts on standalone technologies or
converged platforms are now looking for
hyperconverged platforms because they are
affordable, easy to deploy and less complex.
HCI technology has captivated customers in
this region within a short period of time. Through
HCI, they have hosted at least tier-2 applications
and services on hyperconverged platforms, with
All-Flash capability. Some customers have
deployed tier-1 applications as well. Multiple ROI
calculations by Gartner or Forrester indicate that
the cost of hyperconverged infrastructure is way
less than traditional systems. Some studies
found that it can even cost less than public cloud
expenses. Few researches showcase
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and
Converged Infrastructure (CI) adaptation in
EMEA little above 45% in 2016 compared to 25%
in 2015. HCI is a technology shift where
customers can achieve their objectives in a cost-
effective way without any compromise.
In the event of Converged Infrastructure or
Hyperconverged Infrastructure; conversation
between channel partners and end consumers
H

ACCELERATING
BUSINESS
AGILITY
Learn how Dell EMC DSS 9000 can address an organization’s
workload challenges effectively.
ell EMC is helping carriers and
service providers accelerate the
shift to software-defined data
centers and cloud computing
initiatives with the Dell EMC DSS 9000, an open
and agile rack scale infrastructure. CenturyLink
and Telefonica are among the first customers
using the hyperscale-inspired DSS 9000 to
address workload demands economically and
efficiently.
“Carriers and service providers need
hyperscale-inspired infrastructure to balance
the need to innovate at the speed of business
while spending less,” said James Mouton, Senior
Vice President, Extreme Scale Infrastructure,
DELL EMC
D

Dell EMC. “With the DSS 9000, we are leveraging
our 10 years of experience working with
industry titans to make it easier to purchase,
optimize, deploy, manage and service
infrastructure at scale.”
To increase competitiveness and enable
rapid innovation for modern technologies
including 5th generation wireless (5G) networks,
Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, many
carriers and service providers are moving
toward software-defined infrastructure, similar
to what the largest hyperscale cloud companies
employ. With a flexible design and open
architecture, the DSS 9000 can reduce TCO by
up to 27% over five years.
The DSS 9000 provides compute, storage,
networking, power, cooling and open
management in a pre-integrated rack scalable
up to 96 nodes with Intel Xeon Scalable
processors and built to customers’
requirements. With the DSS 9000, carriers and
service providers can move toward a future of
composable infrastructure and provision and
manage at the rack level – as well as across the
entire infrastructure – with a single interface.
DELL EMC DSS 9000 IN ACTION
CenturyLink, a global communications and IT
services company, offers a portfolio of flexible
cloud solutions to help customers create, run
and scale their applications. The company
selected the DSS 9000 as a building block for its
public and private cloud offerings.
“Our cloud infrastructure offerings are
designed to help customers maintain control,
increase visibility and be more agile so they can
run both cloud-native and traditional
applications more efficiently,” said David
Shacochis, Vice President, Hybrid IT product
management, CenturyLink. “We chose the DSS
9000 to be a key component of our CenturyLink
Private Node offering because of its flexible
design and ability to give our customers a build-
to-order private cloud solution. Our public
cloud offerings are also offered on the DSS
9000, providing a consistent and reliable
experience for customers who have both public
and private cloud needs.”
DSS 9000 BENEFITS
To keep pace with growing digital workloads
and the influx of data, carriers and service
providers need open and agile infrastructure
that can quickly respond to rapid growth, while
providing a consistent and scalable platform
from the edge to the core. The DSS 9000 helps:
• Accelerate delivery of new services by
provisioning, deploying and managing at the
rack level to speed time to value and deliver
better total cost of ownership.
• Simplify large scale operations with
management based on the Distributed
Management Task Force (DMTF) Redfish
specification that ensures interoperability
with heterogeneous systems.
•Providegreaterbusinessagilitybydisaggregating
hardwareresourcesandcreatingcomposable
systems with Redfish and Intel Rack Scale
Design (RSD).
• Future-proof infrastructure with open
principles; for example, DSS 9000 is
recognized by the Open Compute Project as
OCP-INSPIRED and designed with an open
networking approach to support NFV and
SDN initiatives.
• Deploy workload-optimized configurations with
a variety of rack heights that accommodates
full, half and third-width compute and storage
sleds as well as other standard server, storage
and networking options.
“IntelRackScaleDesignenablescomposable,
disaggregated infrastructure solutions, which
enables service providers to cost-effectively
accelerate data center innovations,” said Figen
Ulgen, General Manager, Intel Rack Scale
Design. “We have been working alongside Dell
EMC on Intel RSD since its inception and are
thrilled to see the traction the Intel RSD
architecture and software is driving in digital
transformation.”
“Dell EMC is focused on partnering with
service providers to help architect, design, and
deploy rack scale infrastructure and on
delivering solutions that target the
transformation of the data center, from edge to
core, helping accelerate the pace at which
service providers can adapt,” said Kevin
Shatzkamer, Vice President, Dell EMC Service
Provider Solutions. “With the rapid advances in
network, compute, and storage virtualization, it
is important to have a common underlying
infrastructure platform that spans both
currently-accepted virtualization principles and
incorporates a path toward more advanced
tooling and operations such as containers,
micro-services, automation, and DevOps.”
AVAILABILITY
The DSS 9000 with Intel Xeon Scalable
processors will be available to carriers and
service providers in the Americas in October,
and in other regions worldwide in Dell EMC’s
fiscal fourth quarter.
The DSS 9000 provides compute,
storage, networking, power,
cooling and open management in a
pre-integrated rack scalable up to
96 nodes with Intel Xeon Scalable
processors and built to customers’
requirements.

The Value Plus Magazine - October GITEX Issue

To learn more about micro-segmentation enabled by VMware NSX, please visit
vmware.com/products/nsx
BUILDING AND
STRENGTHENING YOUR
DATA CENTER SECURITY
Traditional approaches to securing data centers have focused
on strong perimeter defenses to keep threats outside the
network. Once attackers are inside, it's difficult to stop them.
Divide the data center into distinct security segments, and
integrate with leading third-party security solutions to:
Define security
controls and network
services for each
unique segment
Restrict an attacker’s
lateral movements,
even after a
perimeter breach
BUILD A STRONGER DEFENSE with
MICRO-SEGMENTATION
Isolate
communication
across unrelated
networks
Segment
communication
within a network
The Software-Defined Data Center extends core
virtualization technologies to the entire data center.
Through network virtualization, organizations can
deploy micro-segmentation for the following use cases:
Network security
inside the data center
DMZ anywhere Secure user
environments
TRANSFORM YOUR DATA CENTER with
NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION
W ith network virtualization, micro-segmentation has
become a practical and powerful reality where:
STRENGTHEN YOUR DATA CENTER with
MICRO-SEGMENTATION ENABLED BY VMWARE NSX®
Security is
everywhere
Core virtualization
technologies
transform data-
center economics
Automation and
non-disruptive
deployment provide
business agility

OPENING DOORSVMware’s vCloud NFV-OpenStack offers communications service providers the fastest path to
OpenStack for Network Functions Virtualization.
Mware has recently announced
VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack,
delivering the fastest path to
deploying production NFV services
on OpenStack.
The new vCloud NFV-OpenStack platform
includes VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier
Edition, VMware’s new OpenStack Ocata-based
distribution that is fully integrated, tested, and
certified with VMware’s NFV infrastructure
platform. Using VMware Integrated OpenStack
as an NFV Virtualized Infrastructure Manager
(VIM), network architects can easily deploy,
upgrade, and operate an OpenStack cloud on
top of VMware’s carrier-grade NFVI platform.
Facing unprecedented traffic growth along
with rapidly evolving customer expectations,
communications service providers (CSPs) are
accelerating adoption of Network Functions
Virtualization (NFV). Industry momentum for
OpenStack in NFV deployments has continued
gaining traction, with telcos seeing the potential
for benefits that include use of open
architectures, improved flexibility and pace of
innovation for cloud-based networks, access to
a global community of OpenStack developers
and standardized northbound interfaces (NFV
Orchestration, VNF-Manager). With the vCloud
NFV-OpenStack Edition, VMware supports an
open architecture for seamless integration and
interoperability.
“The release of vCloud NFV-OpenStack
Edition and announcement of VMware
Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition is a major
VMWARE
V step forward in our NFV strategy, given the
feedback we received from our customers,”
said Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice President,
Solutions, Telco NFV Group, VMware. “We are
able to offer the fastest path to production
OpenStack by providing what nobody else has
in the market: the most reliable and rich NFV
infrastructure based on VMware’s industry-
leading virtualization software combined with
the openness of standard OpenStack to be
optimized with carrier extensions.”
OPENSTACK THAT’S PURPOSE-BUILT AND
TUNED FOR CARRIER REQUIREMENTS
VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition
has been developed specifically to address the
requirements of CSPs deploying NFV-based
network services on OpenStack. VMware
vCloud NFV-OpenStack brings native support
for container-based Virtualized Network
Functions (VNF) through integrated container
management, enabling VM and container-
based VNFs to run on a single VIM. The solution
leverages Ocata’s specific functionality to give
CSPs tools to deploy NFV networks including:
Multi-Tenancy and VNF Resource
Reservation: provides resource-level tenant
isolation and guaranteed resource availability
for each tenant, enabling CSPs to deliver on
infrastructure SLAs while securing tenants
within the network and improved capacity
planning.
Dynamic and Elastic Scaling of Network
Resources: allows CSPs to create elastic
service constructs that can scale network
functions up or down, in and out based on
usage patterns in order to respond to real-
time network traffic conditions. This enables
optimal resource management and lowering
of capital and operational costs.
Enhanced Networking Support and
Platform Awareness (EPA): delivers carrier-
grade, low latency data-plane performance,
enabling CSPs to maintain network
performance to deliver a high subscriber
Quality of Experience while optimizing
resource utilization through supported
methodologies such as CPU Pinning, fine-
grained NUMA placement settings, support
for multiple NIC types and Single Root I/O
Virtualization (SR-IOV).
VMWARE VCLOUD NFV OPENSTACK
ACCELERATES AND SIMPLIFIES PATH TO
PRODUCTION NFV
Leveraging VMware’s rich feature set for NFVI
and VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier
Edition, VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack
offers CSPs:
Simplified OpenStack Installation and
Deployment: VMware Integrated OpenStack-
CE allows templated install and deployment
of a complete OpenStack Infrastructure
within the VMware vSphere Web Client,
leveraging advanced management
capabilities through vCenter.
Seamless OpenStack Upgrade Experience:
Control Plane and Data Plane separation

allows for zero network services downtime
and service continuity during the OpenStack
upgrade process. CSPs can keep up with the
pace of innovation through fast upgrades
and patching.
Integrated Operations Management:
through unique NFVI operational automation
and Ceilometer integration, along with
proactive and predictive analytics, issue
isolation, root cause analysis and fast
remediation capabilities. VMware vRealize
Operations Manager, Log Insight, Network
Insight integrated within vCloud NFV-
OpenStack, provide operations monitoring,
analytics, and a remediation platform via a
single pane of glass that reduces operational
costs through fast Mean-Time-To-Understand
and Repair (MTTU/MTTR).
VMWARE VCLOUD NFV AND THE VMWARE
READY PROGRAM
With more than 90 NFV deployments by more
than 50 CSPs worldwide, VMware vCloud NFV
accelerates service innovation and delivery,
reduces costs, and simplifies network operations.
The vCloud NFV platform enables organizations to
deploy a multi-vendor and multi-function NFV
platform today that delivers service automation,
secure multi-tenancy, operations management,
and carrier grade reliability with 5G readiness. The
VMware Ready for NFV certification provides CSPs
with the confidence that VMware partner VNF
solutions will seamlessly and effectively deploy,
run, and interoperate with VMware vCloud NFV.
To date, more than 20 VNF partners have been
certified on previous versions of VMware
Integrated OpenStack, and have committed to
certification on VMware Integrated OpenStack-
Carrier Edition upon GA of the software.
“VMwareismakingaboldplayfortheOpenStack
market with a new implementation that combines
a big tent standard Ocata distro with superior
usability and additional carrier-grade extensions,”
said Caroline Chappell, Principal Analyst, Analysys
Mason.“Carriersthathavestruggledtomakeopen
source work reliably in the NFV environment will
wanttoconsiderthisproductcarefully,asitmarries
a slew of VMware-engineered capabilities that are
critical to NFV operations with the advantages of
OpenStack.”
AVAILABILITY
VMware vCloud NFV-Carrier Edition will be
generally available in Q3 FY 2018 (ending
November 3, 2017).

BUILDING
MODERN
ENTERPRISESArunava Mitra, Director and Leader, Middle East, Turkey and
Africa, TCG Digital, details how the firm can assist businesses
to go digital.
T CG Digital, part of a US$ 4B
conglomerate - The Chatterjee
Group (TCG), is a leading global IT
Consulting, Products and
Solutions company headquartered in NJ, US
with clients across North America, META,
India, Central America and Asia-Pacific. It can
be considered as a new-age startup, which
has its roots and foundation in providing
technology services for almost two decades
and brings the desired flexibility, agility and
modern technologies that define new-age
startups today and helps in building the
modern enterprise.
We are one of the few companies that has
managed to successfully transform itself from
being a traditional application development
and support services provider to a digital
transformation enablement partner thus
ensuring a strong sustainable foundation
leveraging our investments in building
products and focusing on growth drivers like
analytics, mobility and cyber security.
TCG DIGITAL
The last six months have been of critical
importance as we have got validation of our
focus and strategy from the marketplace and
witnessed continuous growth in an otherwise
challenging business environment digitally
disrupted with game changers including
automation, AI, analytics and machine learning.
A 30% plus profitable growth in this period,
industry recognitions including “Excellence in
Business Analytics” from NASSCOM and
“Dream Company To Work For” at 6th Asian
HR Leadership Awards held in Dubai and
multiple client acquisitions lay testimony to
the success achieved.
Our investments during this period have
been heavily focused on building the
foundation to the Middle East and Turkey
(META) business with a local team and a
channel partner ecosystem, which will be the
fulcrum of our business in the region. Our
channel business is of strategic importance to
TCG Digital, leading its growth in the non-US
market (focus markets being UAE, Saudi
Arabia, Oman and Qatar). Our growth strategy
is pillared around our award winning end-to-
end analytics platform (tcg mcube), which is
seeing significant traction in the marketplace.
The Middle East technology market is in a
transformational phase focused on data driven
investments led with big data analytics and
enterprise analytics initiatives. Businesses are
driving efficiencies, optimizing costs and
increasingly becoming customer centric to
differentiate in the market place. We see it as a
huge big opportunity for TCG Digital to deliver
significant value to clients in the region with
rapid implementation at an optimal cost with
our core focus in BI and Advanced analytics, a
modern analytics platform (tcg mcube) and
high performing talent in data science.
We are banking on a channel driven
approach to the market. Our channel strategy
is extremely focused on ensuring more for less
for our partners and customers. We would
invest in ensuring partner enablement,
training, pre-sales support and most
Arunava Mitra
TCG Digital

importantly devise a win-win strategy
committed to their success, which will drive
our growth. We believe that the unique
positioning of tcg mcube addresses the
biggest challenges faced by enterprises with
respect to analytics investments – (i) Stretched
time to value (ii) Complex choices in multiple
analytics investments will enable them to sell
more with lesser effort.
tcg mcube has a future proof architecture
built on modern technologies that caters to
the entire spectrum of the analytics value
chain – descriptive, predictive and prescriptive
analytics with a single investment. tcg mcube
can work with structured and unstructured
data sources and accelerate time to value with
pre-built industry specific algorithms and use
cases that deliver tangible business outcomes
for data analytics initiatives across aviation,
retail, insurance, manufacturing, consumers
and petrochemicals industries.
We are looking at creating a position for tcg
mcube as the enterprise analytics platform of
choice in the region. In 2018, we are confident
that tcg mcube will have a significant imprint
into clients of various sizes due to its ability to
deliver business outcomes in quick time.
The biggest challenge currently in the
market is that the BI and Analytics space has
become quite crowded with various tools
catering to specific aspects of analytics like
ingestion, processing, reports, dashboards
and advanced analytics. However millions of
dollars of investments have failed to deliver
the promised value in terms of measurable
business impact.
The ability of tcg mcube to cater to the
entire spectrum of the analytics value chain
and helping business users to solve complex
business problems specific to their industry
will make it a platform of choice optimizing
time to value for analytics initiatives and
simplifying complexities attached to procuring
multiple products and the challenges towards
consolidation and integrations as part of the
enterprise analytics landscape. Moreover, tcg
mcube lays the foundation to an analytics
journey and adapts to the “as-is” analytics
maturity of an enterprise and helps in the
evolution overtime with incremental business
value at short intervals as business evolves.
Our key message for our channel partners
is our success in the region relies on your
success and we are committed to your
success! Our analytics platform has proven its
ability to solve complex business problems
across industries and will help your customer’s
achieve end-to- end analytics with a single
investment. It not only simplifies their buying
process but delivers results in quick time for
internal justifications with tangible benefits. In
addition, with 100+ industry specific pre-built
business use cases, it helps clients relate to
their real-world problems and see solutions
that can democratize analytics adoption
across their business and technical
communities. Thus, it makes selling a lot more
seamless and value-driven and is perceived as
a business analytics solution rather than just a
technology or a tool.
“The Middle East technology
market is in a transformational
phase focused on data driven
investments led with big data
analytics and enterprise analytics
initiatives.”

THE STRONGEST LINKRon Ryan, SVP Global Channels, Cambium Networks, describes how the company aims to
“connect the unconnected” through compelling channel allies.
Can you share recent
milestones from the
company?
Technology is the fuel that drives
the continued growth of Cambium Networks.
We just recently shipped the one millionth PMP
450 device that has been the flagship of our
multipoint technology. That milestone was
shortly preceded by the announcement of the
industry’s first Massive MIMO, 14x14, outdoor
access point that is part of that same family.
Add this to our recent expansion in the
enterprise Wi-Fi market with a new line up of
our indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi products that are
all managed with a cloud-based, single pane of
glass. Additionally, we’ve recently surpassed
the five millionth network design, using our
industry standard ‘LINKPlanner’. Cambium
continues to be a leader in wireless innovation.
CAMBIUM NETWORKS
What is the firm’s business objective?
What role do partners play in meeting it?
Cambium’s primary business objective is
Connecting the Unconnected—People,
Places and Things, with a wireless fabric
of products that range from two meters
to 250 kilometers. The wireless fabric
consists of indoor and outdoor products
that are engineered to be high quality,
yet affordable.
Since Cambium sells 95% of its
products through the channel, our
partners are a big part of our company
strategy and extremely important to our
success. Our partners serve thousands of
customers in hundreds of vertical
applications that give us reach and a
strategic advantage for our large portfolio
of wireless products.
What are some growth drivers powering
your business?
Affordable internet access, including
residential, commercial, and industrial, is still
underserved in many markets. Those that
have it are looking for higher bandwidth, and
those that don’t are looking for adequate
bandwidth. This application, in its many forms,
continues to fuel growth for Cambium’s
products.
Where people have been the primary target
for internet access, the Industrial Internet of
Things (IIoT) will significantly exceed this over
the next five to ten years. There will be an
unprecedented number of things connected
to the Internet, most of them still undefined.
Connecting these devices will require networks
that are close in proximity and that backhaul
product over long distances.

The commercial enterprise world is focused
on office mobility in place of the historical ‘blue
wires’ that weave through ceiling structures
terminating to a single Ethernet plug under
your desk. The new office is focused on Wi-Fi
access with roaming capability and high
security.
Cambium’s wireless fabric includes
products that serve all of these vertical
applications with affordable quality and a
single cloud-management system to operate
the network efficiently. Whether it’s wireless
access or transport, Cambium is relevant to
the discussion.
Can you elaborate on your channel
strategy for the region?
Cambium works through a two-tier channel
strategy. The first part is the selection and
onboarding of our distributors. The MEA
region is no exception; Cambium chooses
distributors based on their geographical and
vertical market reach. We look for well-
capitalized distributors who can provide
adequate sales terms, lead times, and credit
facilities to support a growing customer base.
The second part is the recruitment and
onboarding of the value-added reseller
(VAR) base. Distributors can provide
significant value in this process, particularly
in identifying and communicating to the VAR
base. Good distributors have a standing
with VARs in multiple vertical markets and
usually have effective ways of bifurcating
and communicating based on their
individual strengths and capabilities.
The VARs are the customer-facing
solution providers to our end customers. It
is critical to the success of any region to
ensure we have the right partners and to
ensure they are adequately trained and
enabled to represent Cambium.
How do your distributor partners
enable your channel within the
region?
Enabling partners is an ongoing multistep
process. Training is the obvious first step,
but ongoing communication about new
products, services, and opportunities is
equally important. Some of our best trainers
are qualified Cambium Certified Instructors
who are employed by our distributors. They
are able to set up local, in-market training
opportunities that are more difficult for a
manufacturer to do on a global scale.
Another critical enabler is providing
marketing support and leads. VARs are
often smaller organizations that have limited
resources for business development and
good distributors offer ways to provide
that value.
Can you share some channel initiatives
that the firm has undertaken?
With the introduction of our new enterprise
grade Wi-Fi and IIoT products, Cambium has
been on an aggressive partner recruiting
effort, signing more than 500 partners
globally in the last six months. It has been a
collaborative effort with our distributors and
one that will likely continue for the rest of this
year.
How can your partners successfully
sell your solutions? Which are the
areas they have to be proficient in?
We encourage all our partners to take the
certification courses for the products that fit
their vertical markets. Each vertical market
has its own context for the application of our
products, and VARs are the ones to make
that connection. A clear understanding of
networks and how to deploy them in a
wireless context is a must.
Can you share your plans for the region
in 2018?
Cambium will continue to introduce new
products in 2018. We have a need to continue
recruiting and enabling partners, specifically
in the commercial enterprise business
segment. Our primary focus will be to support
those efforts.
“Cambium’s wireless fabric
includes products that serve all
of these vertical applications with
affordable quality and a single
cloud-management system to
operate the network efficiently.”
Ron Ryan
Cambium Networks

NEXT-GENERATION
OF NETWORKING
Frida Kleimert, Channel Lead, Cisco Middle East and Africa, elucidates how to
accelerate digital transformation with the firm’s ‘The Network. Intuitive.’
T here are an estimated 8.4 billion
connected devices today and this
number is racing ahead to reach
hundreds of billions. According to
Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts,
over 500 billion devices and objects will be
connected by 2030. The present and ongoing
phase of digital transformation is more powerful
and challenging than previous technological
transformational phases. Digital disruption is
radically changing economies, cities,
communities and the landscape of business.
The connected world has become too big
and too complex for us humans to effectively
administer by our own skills. The networks of
tomorrow, with their dense array of devices,
sensors, systems, appliances, applications, will
not be manually administered. They will be too
complex, too cumbersome, too complicated,
and fast changing, that much more than manual
administration will be required. Traditional
networking models simply do not scale and
perform to meet the expectations of this digital
era.
With this spate of challenges, businesses
need a new networking framework, that is
simplified and more secure to use. IDC indicates
that businesses that have invested in modern
networks, have improved their rate of growth in
revenue, customer retention and profit, by a
factor of two to three times. For digital
organizations, the network is the foundation of
their business and success.
In the connected world of today, every
company is becoming a technology company.
While connected devices present useful
business opportunities, the complexity of
managing the devices and the network itself, in
an efficient and secure manner, is a challenge for
present day technologies. This means every
company needs to have security, on the top of its
boardroom agenda. Organizations that make
cybersecurity a critical foundation for their digital
growth strategies will accelerate their innovation
and reduce their time to market. Security is the
most sensitive and critical component of digital
transformation.
Increasingly industry analysts now agree that
the way forward to tackle security challenges in
digital organizations is through the network. It is
within the network that people, processes and
data collide, and technology itself presents
solutions to move forward.
From the field of analytics, machine learning
can be used to build complex models and
algorithms within networks that are capable of
generating forward looking trends. Analytical
CISCO

models inbuilt inside networks can produce
reliable and repeatable decisions and can
uncover hidden insights through learning from
historical relationships embedded in data.
Machine learning can give networks the ability to
learn without being programmed. This approach
has evolved from pattern recognition and
learning theory in artificial intelligence.
Networks with such inbuilt algorithms can
learn and make predictions from data. With the
help of these algorithms, networks can
overcome the limitation of static programming
and can make data-driven predictions and
decisions, through building a model from data
inputs. In the past data mining has been used
to discover new trends in wide arrays of
collected data. However, in the case of such
intuitive networks built on machine learning,
algorithms discover known trends that are
prevalent in data as it is aggregated.
Networks with in-built machine learning and
complex algorithms can establish a pattern of
baseline behavior and can successfully flag
deviations without supervision. One of the
immediate benefits is the ability to successfully
build models of optimal network behavior and
proactively react without intervention to
anomalies and intrusions within.
Such new intuitive networks shift from the
traditional manual, time-intensive, static mode of
operation, towards one that is capable of
continuously learning from the data that it
manages for an organization. The more volume
of data it manages, the more it is capable of
learning through analytics and adapting for
automatic and efficient response. The intuitive
network automates the edge of the network and
embeds machine learning and analytics at a
foundational level.
Three fundamentals characterize these
innovative solutions. By enabling the ability to
move from manual operations to automation,
this network can scale to manage millions of
devices, establishing its Intent. By assessing data
continuously in Context with the rest of the
organization, the network can provide better
insights leading to proactive security actions and
efficiency. By virtue of the actions it takes and
assessment of the results, the network can
improve the results of its future insights and
also its future action, hence Intuition.
Where does all this lead? The first is, an
intuitive network will gain the trust of business
and IT executives wanting to select a platform to
build their digital business models of tomorrow.
This will be on the basis of its machine learning
capabilities, that it is constantly learning and
evolving to become highly secure and provide
insights. And the second is, the intuitive network
is just the stepping stone to a much bigger vision
of creating intuitive technology infrastructure.
Butfornow,thenetworkremainstheaccelerator
and enabler towards this exciting end game.
‘The Network. Intuitive.’ – Cisco’s Next
Generation of Networking
Marking one of the significant breakthroughs in
the history of enterprise networking, Cisco
recently launched ‘The Network. Intuitive.’, which
is the result of years of research and
development by the company to reinvent
networking for an age where network engineers
managing hundreds of devices today will be
expected to manage 1 million by 2020. Designed
to be intuitive, the new network can recognize
intent, mitigate threats through encryption, and
learn over time, thus unlocking opportunities
and enhancing business agility.
Our partners are excited about our new
intuitive networking platform, which is an end-to-
end solution - unmatched in today’s market
place. It brings analytics, automation, machine
learning and AI together, so customers really do
get an intuitive network. Cisco’s Encrypted Traffic
Analytics solves a network security challenge
previously thought to be unsolvable, where
malware can be found in encrypted traffic. By
utilizing Cisco’s Talos cyber intelligence and
machine learning to analyze metadata traffic
patterns, the network can identify the fingerprints
of known threats even in encrypted traffic,
without decrypting it and impacting data privacy.
As the new Cisco network is secure, simple,
and based on software, with always-on analytics,
partners will be able to help customers to make
better business decisions faster, with lower
costs and lesser risks. To embrace this
technology, our channel partners are evolving
their networking practices and developing new
skills to pursue new business opportunities.
Cisco is helping partners in their efforts by
introducing new programs, incentives and tools
to help them build networking practices that
incorporate software, security, automation and
analytics for their customers.
Cisco has created a new portfolio of services
that leverage best practices and innovative tools.
Whether customers are looking to transform
their entire network or integrate new security
and automation capabilities into their existing
network, Cisco partners have a life cycle of
advisory, implementation, optimization and
technical services to help.
The network has never been more critical to
business success. Our partners will lead the
digital transformation market by selling the most
advanced and intuitive digital network available
and enabling customers to respond quickly to
changing demands. We are excited to be part of
this next era and we look forward to making
history together.
Frida Kleimert
Cisco Middle East and Africa

Constantly learning.
Constantly adapting.
Constantly protecting.
Only from Cisco.
#networkintuitive

BEYOND THE
HORIZON
security for your cloud infrastructure, ease of
moving workloads between on-premise to
public cloud at the same time reducing the
complexity of operations with the help of
solutions such as Ravello.
As the industry’s broadest and most
integrated public cloud, Oracle cloud offers best-
in-class services across Software as-a-Service
(SaaS), Platform as-a-Service (PaaS), and
Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS). More than
that, it also lets customers put Oracle Cloud in
their own data centers.
Oracle offers a complete cloud solution for
every layer of the cloud technology stack, and the
flexibility and ability to move applications and
workloads between the cloud and on-premises
environments. From PaaS, which includes the
Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server; to
IaaS, wherein the firm delivers a set of
infrastructure services—including elastic
compute and storage; and lastly, to Oracle SaaS,
which covers everything from customer
experience to ERP, human capital management,
and many more.
For partners who want to help drive their
customers’ innovation and business
transformation through Oracle’s cloud solutions,
the company offers the OPN Cloud Program.
The initiative is designed to help partners
accelerate innovation, lead business
transformation and fully realize the competitive
advantages offered through Oracle Cloud. The
Cloud Program also aims to enable partners to
get trained, differentiate their cloud offerings,
develop new solutions or move their existing on-
premise applications on to Oracle PaaS, integrate
these applications with Oracle SaaS and then
marketandresellthesesolutionsusingtheOracle
Cloud Marketplace.
As an Oracle partner, Redington Value is
focused on the journey towards cloud success,
we aim to build internal skill sets and expertise to
handle the new trends from a sales and technical
perspective. In line with this, we have recently
launched our Red Cloud platform, which enabled
us to digitize and transform our channel
distribution practices. It has allowed us to
streamline our channel engagement activities
such as recruitment and enablement, presales,
consulting and sales, credit, supply chain and
logistics, partner and vendor management.
Furthermore, we are also setting up Cloud
Centres of Excellence (COEs) across the region to
showcase and demonstrate Oracle Cloud
Solutions, facilitate trainings and workshops and
build use case scenarios among others.
By Cherian John, Vice President, Converged
Infrastructure Systems, Redington Value
“We are also
setting up
Cloud Centres of
Excellence (COEs)
across the region
to showcase and
demonstrate Oracle
Cloud Solutions,
facilitate trainings
and workshops.”
s cloud technologies continue to
gain traction in the region,
organizations are under enormous
pressure to optimize and fine-tune
the infrastructure to best take advantage of the
new technology.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
region’s public cloud services market is projected
to grow 22.2 percent in 2017 to total $1.2 billion,
up from $956 million in 2016, and will most
probably end up at $2 billion by 2020, according
to recent figures from Gartner.
The major forces driving the Middle East
cloud infrastructure services market are easy
access to disaster recovery, faster deployment
of infrastructure services and scalability
features, and enhanced efficiency and
business productivity.
The growth in PaaS and SaaS are indicators
that migration of application and workloads
from on-premises data centers to the cloud, as
well as development of cloud ready and cloud
native applications, are fuelling growth in the
cloud space.
Oracle is perfectly positioned to take
advantage of these trends since they have a
comprehensive and complete portfolio of cloud
offerings supported by more than 19 worldwide
data centers, a large team of cloud security
experts, and around-the-clock monitoring and
support. Oracle provides the best availability and
A

NOKIA EASES IOT MARKET
ENTRY FOR MOBILE OPERATORS
DIGICERT TO ACQUIRE
SYMANTEC’S WEBSITE SECURITY
SOLUTIONS IN $950M DEAL
PIVOT3 FLAUNTS ACUITY
CAPABILITIES IN MARKET STUDY
VERITAS ELEVATES SOFTWARE-
DEFINED STORAGE TO MAKE
STORAGE SMART
okia is expanding its Internet of Things (IoT) services, offering
to help mobile operators enter new IoT market segments or
expand their footprint geographically. In addition, the
company has complemented its end-to-end validation and
testing services with Nokia TestHub, designed to accelerate
new technology launches, such as IoT and the cloud.
Nokia’s WING market entry services is a consultative offering for
operators, that determines opportunities in nine IoT market
segments, including connected cars, healthcare, and smart cities, as
well as connected industry. Once a service is up and running, the
Nokia WING managed service model can provide provisioning,
device management, operations, security, customer care and billing
for all connected applications.
ymantec and DigiCert have recently announced an
agreement under which DigiCert will acquire Symantec’s
website security and related PKI solutions. Under the
terms of the agreement, Symantec will receive
approximately $950 million in upfront cash proceeds and
approximately a 30 percent stake in the common stock equity of the
DigiCert business at the closing of the transaction.
The addition of Symantec’s website security solutions to DigiCert’s
offerings will bring together the industry’s top talent and provide
customers with an enhanced technology platform, unparalleled
customer support and market-leading innovations. DigiCert will gain
capabilities to take advantage of growth opportunities in IoT and bring
new approaches to the SSL market.
ollowing its launch in April 2017, Pivot3’s HCI solution
Acuity has been compared against conventional
solutions in the market throughout a three-month
period, using industry-standard test tools and similar
workloads on similarly-configured HCI systems, while also
referencing public data for comparison.
The results of the first phase of comparison testing showed
that the platform demonstrated 62 percent faster response
times and nine times faster processing of IOs at sub-
millisecond latencies. It also showcased faster application
response time, even under heavy workloads, resulting in
more satisfied end-users, increased revenue and greater
employee productivity.
eritas Technologies has unveiled a new software-defined
storage solution designed for massive amounts of
unstructured data, known as Veritas Cloud Storage. This
storage solution enables customers to apply analytics,
machine learning and classification technologies to stored data, which can
help customers extract much greater value from their data, delivering
better business outcomes and exceptional customer experiences. Veritas
Cloud Storage can also help organizations accelerate their data center
transformations with flexibility, agility, lower costs and no vendor lock-in.
To complement this launch, Veritas also announced the Veritas Access
Appliance, an integrated software-defined storage appliance that offers
long-term data retention with multi-cloud capability. These solutions are
available in the coming quarters.
N
S
F
V
VENDOR NEWS

UNLOCKING
POSSIBILITIES
Oracle’s expanded IoT cloud portfolio now features built-in
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that powers
Digital Twin and Digital Thread capabilities.
Oracle has announced significant
enhancements to the Oracle
Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud. The
offering now features built-in
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning
that powers Digital Twin and Digital Thread
capabilities. As such, customers and partners
can quickly gain operation-wide visibility and
leverage predictive insights from connected
assets. These insights can decrease deployment
times, reduce costs, improve business
outcomes, and accelerate new market
opportunities. Combining the power of Oracle
IoT Cloud and enterprise applications, Oracle
ORACLE

also introduced new industry solutions for digital
field service, smart connected factories, and
digital fleet management.
“IoT holds the potential to transform today’s
siloedoperationsintoamodern,interconnected,
digital set of workflows with real-time visibility
and responsiveness,” said Bhagat Nainani,
Group Vice President, IoT Applications, Oracle.
“Oracle continues to push the boundaries of IoT
to help our customers significantly simplify their
IoT deployments. By receiving real-time data
streams enhanced with predictive insights, they
can reach new levels of intelligence and a much
quicker realization of ROI.”
Theexpansionfollowstherecentintroduction
of new Oracle IoT Cloud Applications for asset
monitoring, connected workforce, fleet
monitoring, and production monitoring. Also, in
the past six months alone, Oracle has more than
tripled its IoT application ecosystem of device
and systems integration partners. Oracle IoT
Cloud is offered both as software-as-a-service
(SaaS) applications, as well as platform-as-a-
service (PaaS) offerings, enabling a high degree
of adaptability for even the most demanding
implementations.
NEW CAPABILITIES INCLUDE:
•DigitalTwinforSupplyChainManagement
Digital Twin is a digital representation of a
physical asset or equipment that enhances
traditional analytics approaches. The object
model includes multi-faceted views into
current, historical, and predictive data, as well
as operational and behavioral dimensions of
that asset. This enables remote users to not
only monitor the health of that asset to prevent
failures before they occur, but also to run
simulations of ‘what-if’ scenarios in the context
of the business processes. With Digital Twin,
organizationshaveanewoperationalparadigm
to interact with the physical world, allowing
lower operational and capital expenditures,
minimizing downtime, and optimizing asset
performance.
• Digital Thread for Supply Chain
Management
Supply Chain practitioners have spent millions
of dollars in implementing SCM and ERP
systems, but most often, data is manually fed
into these systems. Digital Thread is a
connected business process framework that
leverages IoT and creates a ‘system of
systems’ by connecting traditionally siloed
elements in real-time throughout the digital
supply chain. By providing an end-to-end
view of an asset throughout the entire
manufacturing lifecycle, Digital Thread
seamlessly bridges the entire supply chain
process—from product design and order
fulfillment, to manufacturing and product life
cycle management, to warehousing and
transportation, to logistics and procurement.
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine
Learning
Built-in AI and machine learning features are
now fully integrated across Oracle’s IoT
solutions portfolio. These technologies
leverage machine data in the context of
business data from applications, such as
manufacturing, maintenance, service, and
logistics. The built-in operational analytics
help detect anomalies, predict equipment
failures, and recommend the best course of
action. They also provide the intelligence
needed to evolve capabilities to increase
effectiveness and experiences of
applications.
• Industry Solutions Built on IoT Cloud
Applications
Oracle IoT industry solutions help customers
reimagine and innovate business solutions for
the connected, intelligent, context-aware,
digital enterprise. New solutions introduced
include:
Digital Field Service: Showcases intelligent
remote monitoring, failure prediction, over-
the-airrepair,anddynamictechniciandispatch.
The solution features IoT Asset Monitoring
Cloud, CX Service Cloud, CX Engagement Cloud,
and CX Field Service Cloud, plus the use of
augmented reality (AR) for guided equipment
repair.
Smart Connected Factory: Demonstrates
how incident detection, root cause analysis,
and smart resolution are performed within
minutes in a connected factory. The solution
features IoT Production Monitoring Cloud,
SCM Cloud and ERP Cloud, and the use of
virtualreality(VR)tonavigatethemanufacturing
floor. It can also be used for remote worker
training.
Digital Fleet Management: Showcases real-
time shipment tracking, risk management, and
logistics synchronization. The solution features
IoT Fleet Management Cloud and Oracle
Logistics Cloud.
“Oracle continues to push the
boundaries of IoT to help our
customers significantly simplify their
IoT deployments. By receiving real-
time data streams enhanced with
predictive insights, they can reach
new levels of intelligence and a much
quicker realization of ROI.”

INNOVATIVE
SOLUTIONS
cloud and IoT offerings will be the way forward
for partners in the coming years.
With the advent of cloud and virtualization
technologies, legacy systems integrators are
now attempting to construct their business
models around these opportunities. In the
meantime, we are seeing an increasing
number of ‘born-in-the-cloud’ partners and
ISVs who are making an impact in the cloud
segment. Majority of these companies are
able to offer vertical solutions aimed at specific
industries. As the cloud opportunity in the
Middle East is expected to grow exponentially
in the coming years, it’s critical for the channel
to develop the required model and in-house
expertise to present cloud offerings to their
customers. We believe that the channel
partners’ ability to identify their model of
value-add in the cloud era must be at the
center of their roadmap and vision.
They also need to invest significantly in
improving the skills of their internal talents to
ensure they can provide end-to-end solutions
to their customers. There is a growing trend of
solution companies opting for a more direct
model by eliminating the value chain in
between. However, partners will still have a
significant role to play as they own customer
relationships and have a say in the decision-
making process.
As the IT industry undergoes this
transformation, at Redington Value, we are
ensuring we are leading the space with
innovation. For example, our state-of-the-art
solutions center Red Vault showcases
technologies addressing different business
outcomes across verticals. Our consulting arm,
Citrus Consulting is supporting partners on
building the cloud roadmap for end-users. We
aim to continue collaborating with vendors on
comprehensive solutions around IoT and
Smart City solutions.
By Kunal Singh, Server, Storage and Networking Head,
Redington Value
“As the cloud
opportunity in
the Middle East is
expected to grow
exponentially in
the coming years,
it’s critical for the
channel to develop
the required model
and in-house
expertise to present
cloud offerings to
their customers.”
he enterprise storage and
servers segment has evolved
greatly over the last few years.
We have seen a massive shift in
the market with respect to the
traditional hardware segment as customers’
demands are now more focused on addressing
business outcomes.
The IT department is no longer the sole
decision-maker for technology related matters.
Business and functional teams are proactively
contributing to these decisions today.
The demand for enterprise hardware is
being driven by customers’ requirements for
comprehensive solution sets to address their
specific business needs.
Partners need to change their approach
when it comes to selling these products and
attempt to view it as part of an overall solution.
They have to go beyond the traditional product-
based approach to offer a comprehensive
solution to meet the customer’s requirements.
There is also a large influx of small to medium
IoT firms that can help address the challenges
faced by organizations across different
functions and industries. We believe
collaborating and building a model around
T

PRIMED FOR
PROGRESS
attaching services to all these technologies,
which will help them improve their margins
greatly. This will also enable them to retain
customers for a long-term. Partners
should invest in developing lasting
relationships with their customers by
ensuring they are consultative in their approach. They must think beyond just
selling and become an advisor for their
customers’ businesses.
Over the course of 2018, our partners
will see us reiterating our position in the
market. Following the immense success
of the Red Vault in the UAE, we are
aiming to launch the solutions center in
Saudi Arabia next year – Red Vault Saudi.
The solutions center will be fully
integrated with more than 40 different
solutions from numerous vendors,
thereby making it the only such facility in
the Saudi market with a multi-vendor
environment. The innovative new
solutions center will create a platform
for existing as well as new partners and
customers to get trained on vendor-
authorized training centers.
We are bullish of our growth strategies
in place and urge our partners to take
the lead and transform their businesses
to the requirements of the digital era.
We will continue to offer in-depth
support and back our partners to keep
up with market evolutions. We are
excited for a prosperous 2018 ahead.
By Rashad Baradie, General Manager, KSA,
Redington Value
“We are bullish
of our growth
strategies in
place and urge
our partners to
take the lead and
transform their
businesses to the
requirements of
the digital era.”
he economy of Saudi Arabia
is characterized by a number
of special features, the most
important of which is that it is
the biggest economy in the Middle East.
Redington Value has had an
exceptional growth year in the Saudi
market. The main factors for our growth
have been the government’s Vision 2030
announcement along with the uptake of
technology game changers such as
cloud, mobility, Internet of Things,
converged infrastructure, Big Data and
analytics, in the Saudi market.
One of the noteworthy milestones for
Redington Saudi Arabia Distribution has
been the fact that we have evolved from
being a product-centric to a solution-
centric firm over the last few years. We
boast the largest portfolio of IT products
and solutions, which span across the
traditional technology domains such as
networking, voice, servers, storage,
software, security and infrastructure.
We aim to grow even more aggressively
over the next year.
We believe partners have several
areas where they can invest to sustain a
profitable business in 2018. We
encourage our partners to focus on
solutions around Internet of Things,
mobility, cloud and hyperconvergence.
They can maximize the opportunity by
T

CHANGING
THE GAMENigel Upton, General Manager, IoT and Global Connectivity
Platform, HPE, explains why Industrial IoT must move from
optimization to transformation.
Industrial IoT (IIoT) can be seen as a way
to optimize existing processes and
business models, for instance by
achieving higher degrees of
automation, or by avoiding outages with help
of predictive maintenance.
However, IIoT can and must be more than
that. We have seen how new digital business
models have disrupted industries like media,
retail or travel – and the same will happen
over time to industries like manufacturing,
chemicals or energy. Thus, at its core, the IIoT
is not about achieving some percentage
points of efficiency. It’s about which companies
will capture which portion of this trillion-dollar
opportunity – and which companies will
become an extended workbench of a
predominantly digital value creation.
This means that adopting the IIoT must go
beyond optimization – it has to be a
transformation. It means introducing new
data-enabled processes in R&D, production,
marketing and sales, new forms of
HPE
cooperation in the supply chain, new ways of
creating and commercializing products and
services – all backed by a technology
architecture that enables interoperability
between “things” and provides data insights
with the required speed.
Together with Industry of Things World, one
of the leading IIoT conference series globally,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) conducted a
survey to find out to which degree company
leaders approach IIoT as optimization or as a
transformation, how successful they have
been, and what the biggest obstacles are. We
also wanted to know which technology
architectures they implement – how important
will the public cloud be for IIoT, and which role
will Edge Computing play?
OPTIMIZATION GOALS PREVAIL, MIXED
SUCCESS RATE OF IIOT PROJECTS
Asked about the business goals they want to
achieve with their IIoT initiatives, by far most
respondents (64%) named “increase efficiency”.
Similarly, other high-ranked IIoT goals like
increase flexibility (48%) and reduce time to
market (35%) rather aim to optimize the existing
business, not create the new. In comparison,
transformative goals like establishing new
business models (34%), improving marketing
(27%) and product development (26%) with
help of IoT data, or the transformation from
product sales to an as-a-services model (25%)
ranked relatively low.
To be clear, increasing efficiency or time to
market are important business goals –
however, the dominance of optimization goals
in the context of IIoT can be seen as an
indicator that many companies have not yet
fully embraced the transformational nature of
this concept.
Can we as a consequence expect that the
IIoT projects of our respondents have not
been entirely successful? Yes, we can. 53%
said their IIoT projects in the past 12 months
either met or exceeded their goals, while
47% did not reach their goals – a small
portion of which even say their projects were
a complete failure.
So, for which reasons did companies
struggle with their IIoT projects? Respondents
named the lack of skills and the culture within
their own company as the biggest obstacles
(both 38%). This clearly underlines the fact that
being successful with IIoT requires a company
transformation, a central aspect of which is
that you need new skills and mindsets. This is
a challenge to many companies, as well as
transformational issues like missing
organizational structures (27%) and wrong
governance and management (21%).
The survey makes clear that transformation
also applies to the technology that underpins
IIoTinitiatives.Youcan’tjustbuyIIoTtechnology
– IIoT requires a fundamental redesign of the
information technology (IT) and operational
technology (OT) architecture.
Nigel Upton
HPE

YOU CAN’T JUST BUY IIOT TECHNOLOGY –
YOU HAVE TO TRANSFORM YOUR
TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURE
Closely after skills and culture, missing
standards (36%) is named as one of the biggest
IIoT roadblocks. This refers to the difficulty of
making the “things” in the IIoT speak with each
other – be it a Kuka robot speaking with an ABB
robot, a production machine speaking with an
IT systems, or a manufacturing plant speaking
with an energy supplier. This requires common
standards as well as new technology
architectures which create convergence of
information technology (IT) and operational
technology (OT).
Accordingly, the number one skill
companies are looking for is the ability to
design new common architectures for IT and
OT (45%), and number three is the ability to
create a unified approach to the operations
and support of IT and OT (32%). The fact that
software development is also one of the
most desired skills (42%) shows that we
need new types of IT/OT software which in
many cases are not available on the market
as a packaged application.
EDGE AND CLOUD COMPUTING WILL
GROW EQUALLY STRONG
We also asked which role edge and cloud
computing will play for IT/OT architectures in
the coming years. Many market observers
have emphasized the crucial role of the cloud
for the IIoT. However, as our survey shows,
edge computing is as important and will grow
equally strong.
Edge computing means that compute and
analytics resources are not running in a
central datacenter or a cloud, but near to the
things or in the things themselves – think of
the IT embedded in a car, IT systems
embedded in a machine, running on the
factory floor or on an oil rig.
First, if we look at how much of the sensor
data is today analyzed on IT systems close to
the data source (i.e. the edge) and in the
cloud, the percentages are quite low on both
ends, with more than half of companies
analyzing less than 30% of sensor data at the
edge and in the cloud. The rest of the sensor
data is processed in a traditional company
datacenter.
But if we look five years ahead, these
numbers will change significantly, the ratios will
be turned on their heads, with the majority of
companies planning to analyze 30% to 70%, or
even more than 70% of the sensor data at the
edge and in the cloud.
This might seem to be a contradictory result,
but it is not. In order to realize the promise of the
IIoT, we have to deeply transform our traditional
IT architectures, and we need both the edge and
the cloud capabilities to make that happen.
TOP-THREE REASONS FOR EDGE
COMPUTING: SECURITY, LATENCY,
BANDWIDTH
Why is this the case? We also asked that question.
First, the three most important reasons for using
edge computing in the IIoT are security (52%),
latency (41%) and bandwidth (35%). Let’s look at
latency and bandwidth first. Imagine a self-driving
car driving with 100 kilometers per hour towards
an obstacle on the road – the IT systems in the car
have to analyze mega- and gigabytes of sensor
data within milliseconds to avoid a crash. There is
simply no time to send that sensor data to a
remote cloud and wait for an answer. This equally
applies to production machines and other things.
And security: sending all that data via the network
opens a big attack vector for hackers, so it’s better
to analyze the data on site and only send selected
and encrypted data to the cloud.
Similarly, there are important reasons to use
the cloud, the top three being correlation analysis
(66%), deep learning (51%) and horizontal
integration (36%). It’s not enough to have
intelligence in one machine, car or plant – you can
create more value if you bring the data of these
machines, cars or plants to one central place to be
able to compare and correlate their behavior.
Then you are able to derive deep insights from the
data – i.e. do deep learning – which you can play
back to the things and enable them to perform
better, adapt to new and unknown situations
better, and avoid outages. This also allows us to
better coordinate cars, machines and plants,
enabling things like swarm intelligence in traffic or
highly automated supply chains.
This means the IIoT will be a hybrid world. And
one of the key tasks will be to create integrated
architecturesthatbridgefromtheedgetothecore
datacenters to the cloud and all the way back.
ENCOURAGING RESULTS, BUT STILL A LOT
OF WORK TO DO
Again, the journey towards the IIoT goes
beyond optimization – it is a transformation
which requires change on all company levels:
technology, architecture, processes, people,
and business models. Overall, our survey
results show that the industry is still in the
learning curve in that regard. However, we
have to consider that IIoT is an emerging
concept, and therefore it’s encouraging to see
that transformational approaches already play
a significant role in the way companies plan
and execute IIoT. Similarly, I’d suggest to talk
about a 53% success rate, not a 47% failure
rate. The glass is half-full, not half-empty. This
also means there’s still a lot of work to do. My
appeal to the industry is: embrace and master
transformation – and accelerate your journey,
because there’s not much time.
“To realize the
promise of the
IIoT, we have to
deeply transform
our traditional
IT architectures,
and we need both
the edge and the
cloud capabilities
to make that
happen.”

Brought to you by HPE & Intel®
. Intel Inside®
. Powerful Productivity Outside.
*HPE internal testing on StoreVirtual VSA software-defined storage, February 16, 2016. Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. © 2016 HPED LP.
IT resiliency and security for everyone.
Keep your business moving forward with secure, right-sized networking, servers, and storage
from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. If disaster strikes, minimize disruption with powerful backup
and recovery that delivers 99.999%* continuous data availability. See how easy it is to make
uptime a key advantage.
HPE Just Right IT for any size business.
Stu & Mitch
IT Team of Two
Retailer
198 Employees
Technology:
HPE Aruba Access Points and Switches HPE
StoreVirtual
HPE ProLiant Servers

Make the Connection:
BRINGING ORDER TO DIGITAL DISRUPTION
Digital disruption is driving innovation in business models, optimizing internal
processes, unleashing new products and services, and radically changing how
organizations engage with customers. Organizations must adapt to this multi-device,
multi-mode world where quality is measured not by schedules, budgets, and
defects, but by user experience. A “one size ﬁts all” strategy is no longer an option.
A new approach to your network is critical so you can access:
• Real-time comprehensive network visibility
• Automation and speeding of network tasks
• Insights to optimize structured workﬂow
The time is now for a modern campus architecture from the edge to the core.
Learn more at www.arubanetworks.com/digitalworkplace

ENABLING THE
MOBILE ERAAruba to demonstrate its Intelligent Mobility Solutions at GITEX 2017.
At GITEX 2017, Aruba, a Hewlett
Packard Enterprise company, will
be demonstrating its mobility
and IoT solutions that empower
organizations to serve GenMobile – mobile-
savvy users who rely on cloud-based business
apps for every aspect of their work and
personal lives – and to harness the power of
insights to transform business processes.
HPE ARUBA
Jose Vasco, Managing Director MEMA
and CCEI, Aruba, said, “We are in the midst
of a huge transition away from networking
technologies that were designed for the
20th century before mobile, IoT and cloud
existed. The surge in mobile and IoT means
that the network must deliver more than
just connectivity. It is expected to provide
actionable insights about the use of mobile
and IoT to justify future investments, so
that businesses can adopt new
technologies and serve the needs of
GenMobile – while keeping the network
secure and taking into account cost
efficiencies.”
On display at GITEX will be the latest
innovation from the company – the Aruba
asset tracking solution that is fully
integrated into the Aruba Wi-Fi
infrastructure and helps organizations
easily track valued assets and automate
inventory management, resulting in
improved organizational efficiency and
lower capital and operational costs
associated with misplaced assets.
The company will also be demonstrating
the latest Aruba 8400 Core Switch Series,
purpose-built for emerging mobile-cloud
business applications and changing traffic
patterns that are being driven by the
massive flood of data sources and growth
in IoT. The switches deliver a breakthrough
in campus core and aggregation, extending
intelligence from the edge to the core and
allowing CIOs to derive better business
outcomes from their networks. While the
Aruba 8400 provides the carrier-class
availability and performance that
New Aruba 8400 core switch

organizations need in a core switch, the
innovation goes beyond table stakes to
address the need for immediate visibility,
greater security, better insights into
troubleshooting, and easier automation,
giving enterprises true business agility as
they move to mobile-first, cloud, and IoT-
enabled businesses.
Aruba will also be demonstrating its
entire range of mobility and IoT solutions
under the umbrella of the company’s
‘Mobile First Platform’ including:
• ArubaOS, the operating system for all
controller-managed wireless LANs
• Industry leading 802.11ac wireless access
points; mobility controllers that offer
centralized network engineering, IP
services, security and policy controls, and
app-aware platforms
• Access switches that bring performance
and reliability to the mobile-first campus
• Aruba AirWave for network management
giving granular visibility into wired and
wireless networks
• Aruba ClearPass that offers policy
management for mobile and IoT
• Aruba Central that manages, monitors
and secures wired, Wi-Fi and wide area
networks from the public cloud and
• Aruba Meridian mobile apps that enables
location-based services powered by
Aruba Beacons, where business leaders
can get also get access to beacon
powered presence analytics and success
rate of pre-defined goals.
“Aruba was born in the mobile, cloud,
and IoT era of networking and Aruba
Mobile First Networks are optimized for
the ‘Digital Workplace’. We focus on
designing secure, intelligent edge
networks - not fixed, monolithic, and
proprietary networking, with a view to
support modern digital experiences of
GenMobile, from the edge-in rather than
taking a ‘network out’ approach. With
Aruba’s acquisition by Hewlett Packard in
2015, we bring our industry-leading
wireless LAN infrastructure to the access
layer, complementing HPE’s strong
position in wired LAN,” said Vasco.
Aruba has had a close association over
the years with GITEX and the Dubai World
Trade Centre (DWTC), where the event is
held. Over the past seven years the
company has partnered with DWTC to
provide ‘always-on’, secure and high speed
wireless internet access across the venue
during GITEX Technology Week. This is a
major demonstration of Aruba’s superior
wireless technology in a venue requiring
world-class wireless connectivity – WLAN
that is secure, reliable, capable of handling
client diversity and density, can support
spikes in connections at peak hours and
have the backing of world class support.
Vasco said, “We have been participating
at GITEX for many years due to the
importance of this regional event where
many of our customers and partners
attend. HPE Aruba’s senior leadership
from the US and Europe will attend the
show together with the company’s regional
leadership in order to drive key discussions
with customers and partners. Our objective
is also to reach out to new potential clients
and grow our regional business across key
verticals such as education, hospitality,
healthcare, government and retail.”
Aruba will be exhibiting from the HP
stand number CLD-6 in Hall 7.
“Aruba was born in the mobile, cloud,
and IoT era of networking and Aruba Mobile
First Networks are optimized for the ‘Digital
Workplace’. We focus on designing secure,
intelligent edge networks - not fixed,
monolithic, and proprietary networking, with
a view to support modern digital experiences
of GenMobile, from the edge-in rather than
taking a ‘network out’ approach.”
Jose Vasco
HPE Aruba

POWERING DIGITAL
COMMUNITIESHazem Bazan, Vice President, Channels and
Commercial Sales, Huawei Middle East on building
an ecosystem for a better connected world.
HUAWEI MIDDLE EAST
s we advance into the Digital Age,
enterprises and governments are
re-inventing themselves to cope
with the new demands from a
digitally empowered community. But having
adequate ICT infrastructure is not sufficient
for a nation to achieve digitalization. Without a
digitally fluent population that is comfortable
adopting new technology, innovative solutions
will be left to languish in conferences and labs,
useless to the wider population. A
technologically advanced workforce is a key
factor in advancing the agendas set for
national development.
A Organizations need to recognize that
investing in human capital is as important as
investing in innovation and technology. For
this reason, Huawei’s Transforming Together
2.0 strategy aims to create an ecosystem of
trusted partners, vendors, and resellers who
can lay down the foundations for a Better
Connected World. Huawei has taken the lead
in creating training and educational initiatives
across the Middle East. Through partnerships
with universities, internship programs, and
the ICT Skill Competition, Huawei is ensuring
the youth of today is ready to meet the
challenges of tomorrow. But digitalization is
happening today, not tomorrow. Nations of
the world cannot afford to wait for the young
to mature, nor do they need to—there is
already a large pool of talent in the workforce
ready to take on the mantle of digitalization.
Huawei has been targeting this
demographic with a two-pronged approach:
firstly through the creation of training
programs and certifications for professionals,
and secondly by familiarizing businesses with
its portfolio of solutions through OpenLabs
and industry alliances. Both of these methods
empower partners by enabling them to
better serve their customers’ needs.

A key element of the first approach is the
Huawei Certified Sales Professional (HCSP)
certification. The HCSP familiarizes VAR
account managers with Huawei’s products,
services, and solutions in order for them to
better understand how Huawei’s portfolio
can be adapted to and enhance their clients’
businesses.
Huawei also offers technical ICT skills
certifications in the form of the Authorized
Learning Partner (HALP). To successfully
complete the course, professionals must
demonstrate a working knowledge of how to
use Huawei routing and switching devices to
assist in the design of individualized small-
and medium-sized networks. Over 60,000
engineers worldwide have earned Huawei ICT
certifications, demonstrating their ability to
use Huawei technology to deliver better
solutions to customers.
Those who have demonstrated
exceptional ICT skill level can tackle the
Huawei Certified Internetwork Expert (HCIE)
technical certification, the most specialized
certification Huawei offers. The HCIE
curriculum provides professionals with a
comprehensive understanding of how to
operate both large and medium-sized
networks. Those who receive the certification
will have proved themselves able to use
Huawei routing and switching devices to
create individualized enterprise networks.
The HCIE is a highly technical certificate, and
so far, 2,500 engineers have successfully
completed the course.
Huawei also seeks to familiarize a broad
network of enterprises with its solutions
offerings through the creation of OpenLabs,
which act as a bridge between talent and
technology. These labs are a space where
local partners can collaborate with Huawei to
co-innovate solutions, and also give
enterprises an opportunity to become more
comfortable using Huawei solutions. As of
July 2017, there are seven OpenLabs in
operation around the globe, with the Middle
East’s first launching in Dubai earlier in the
year. Huawei plans to invest $200 million
over the next three years, to have twenty
OpenLabs operating by 2020.
The final element of Huawei’s strategy to
create a strong end-to-end value chain in
the Middle East is the establishment of
regional industry collaborations. One
illustration is Huawei’s partnership with the
GSM Association (GSMA) to create a Narrow-
Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) Forum.
Internet of Things is gaining traction
worldwide, and Huawei is one of its most
vocal evangelists. The Forum aims to
continue to convert industries to the
advantages of NB-IoT, thus driving forward
economic growth and digitalization.
Huawei’s firm belief in the importance of
developing human capital is demonstrated
by the amount it spends in training and
educational initiatives. We invest over $5
million annually to develop and deliver our
educational programs. Our drive to create
recruit, enable, and activate an ecosystem of
trusted partners was rewarded in 2016 with
one of the most prestigious regional awards
for ICT vendors—Reseller Middle East’s Best
Partner Excellence Program. Janees Reghelini,
Editor of Reseller Middle East, commended
Huawei’s channel partner program for its
“excellence in empowering partners to
identify new avenues and growth and
enhancing their business.”
More rewarding than any award, however,
is the knowledge that Huawei is contributing
to the development of its regional partners
and helping to build an ecosystem of trusted
professionals ready to pave the way to the
Digital Age. Developing a global pool of talent
is paramount to creating a Better Connected
World, and Huawei will continue to invest to
turn vision into reality.
Hazem Bazan
Huawei Middle East

COLLABORATE
TO PROFIT
The channel partners need to
acknowledge and accept these changes as
the new reality. The need to innovate and
transform has never been so urgent before.
For partners, reskilling is the need of the
hour. Those partners who stay invested and
have enough working capital to manage
this transition and enhance credibility in
the books of vendors and suppliers will
stand to emerge as winners in this
competitive market. Ultimately, partners
who have transformed their businesses
into these new models will also receive
more support. The others will tend to lose
out and be forced out of the game.
The challenge for channel is to transform
their organization into the new models
while maintaining the current business
profitability and ensuring consistent
growth. All this can come from the channel
recognizing the need to reskill their team
and identifying opportunities to contribute
towards the new models of business.
We believe that collaboration presents a
massive opportunity for channel partners
to flourish and remain competitive. Many
partners have key accounts that offer
relevant and significant prospects for other
partners, and together they can introduce
innovative solutions for end customer
organizations. Going forward, we will
execute business in a collaborative eco
system. Channel partners who can move
towards this sooner rather than later will
see great benefits in the long run. It’s not
possible to acquire all new skills and make
it feasible. Therefore, collaboration is the
way forward.
By Rajesh Mathrani, General Manager Sales, Middle East
and North Africa and Director Operations, Redington Value
“Those partners
who stay invested
and have enough
working capital
to manage this
transition and enhance
credibility in the
books of vendors and
suppliers will stand
to emerge as winners
in this competitive
market.”
t the macro level, the IT industry
is undergoing tectonic (tech-
tonic) changes. This includes
the emergence of new trends in
IT budget utilizations along with
customers becoming more demanding
because of pressures on costs and the
need to enhance productivity. Models are
evolving from bulk capital purchasing to
OPEX, IT-as-a-service, IT-in-the-cloud and
pay-as-you-grow. Market advancements
have also compelled OEMs to gradually
transform into these newer models.
Emerging technologies such as IoT, Big
Data Analytics and blockchain computing,
with security as the core component for all,
are further accelerating the transformation
in the industry. Reliance India’s Mukesh
Ambani terms this shift as the Industrial
Revolution 4.
Considering these developments, we
are seeing that the pie for the channel,
between the OEM and end customers, is
reducing in terms of product delivery and
sale. There is also a wide gap between the
skill set available within the channel today
and the skill set requirement for the
future, which needs huge investments
and a longer ROI. Therefore, the regional
channel market is affected and is currently
under these immense pressures. This has
led to competition becoming fiercer than
before with the risks of smaller channel
members collapsing. Survival of the fittest
will once again come into play over the
next two years.
A
REDINGTON VALUE | VIEWPOINT

FORTIFYING
THE FUTURE
area. This can be directly proportional to the
securityincidents,notnecessarilyjustwithintheIT
space but from other dimensions too. It is critical
thattheorganizationcanmeasureorhavevisibility
on the incidents as they happen. One of the
approaches could be to run an Operational Risk
assessmentthatencompassesalldigitalaspectsof
the firm and then introduce people-process-
technology parameters to address.
The first step to devising security strategies
is accepting that the space is highly dynamic.
There has been a paradigm shift in the IT
decision-making. It used to be the IT managers
but now it is the business users who drive the
changes. So, it is now no longer an IT project
or a use case discussion. Instead, it is a
‘business outcome’ dialogue. The resellers
have to realize this change and align their
business operations accordingly. As the cloud
adoption increasingly gains momentum, there
is a plethora of opportunities for security
businesses from DevOps security, IAM, Data
protection and CASB. The region will soon
witness introduction of stringent compliance
and regulation requirements that will be a
shot in the arm for security businesses.
As a focused IT security, value-added
distributor, it has been our constant
endeavor to bring in advanced and
innovative security technologies and
products early on into the market. We will
continue to equip and enable our reseller
partners in addressing the full life cycle of
customers’ Information Security demands in
the region. We provide end-to-end support
to our partners in sales, pre-sales,
consultancy and professional services
engagement in multiple areas of security
technologies and solutions.
Whilewewillcontinuetofocusonempowering
our channel community and end customers in
combating legacy security challenges, moving
into FY18 there will be a lot more focus in
addressing the cloud security, IoT security and
SOC services by bringing in the best-of-the-breed
solution portfolio in this space. We will be
launching a comprehensive enablement
program for our channel designed around cloud
and IoT integration challenges focusing on
security compliance, governance and shared
security responsibility model for the future
enterprises. We look forward to a prosperous
2018 with our partner ecosystem.
By Hishamul Hasheel, Vice President, Software and
Security, Redington Value
“We will continue
to equip and enable
our reseller partners
in addressing
the full life cycle
of customers’
Information
Security demands in
the region.”
iddle East firms have suffered
bigger losses than the other
regions last year because of
cyber incidents that have
ranged from the actual theft
of data to coordinated spam emails and
phishing attempts.
Often victims find it difficult to identify when
an attack has taken place. Most only discover it
when third parties or clients report suspicious
messages or requests for funds. Many
organizationsstillbelievethattheITdepartments
have the silver bullet. However, cybersecurity
has outgrown the traditional realms of
technology and is now multi-dimensional.
Awareness is equally important and companies
must begin investing in employee education.
The region has seen heavy investments going in
procuring products and solutions. It is now time
to focus on other dimensions as well, namely
process and people. Simultaneously, the boards
of organizations have to get involved. Currently,
the strategies and policies laid out by most
organizations are too IT specific and do not
address the business IT mix.
One of the challenges companies face is how
to measure the success of an investment in this
M

DATA ANALYTICS
SCALE OUT STORAGE
BACKUP & RECOVERY
Simple. Powerful. Protected.
Business Continuity Starts Here

EMBRACING
BUSINESS
ENDURANCEHow enterprises can leverage All-Flash Storage and
Business Continuity solutions from StorageCraft.
STORAGECRAFT
aving a back-up and Disaster
Recovery plan is crucial for
enterprises of all sizes as there is
no discrimination when it comes
to data breaches. Companies need to protect
themselves against data loss and downtime,
which can happen as a result of human error,
hardware failure, software corruption, natural
disasters, ransomware, and many more. In IT
circles, we often say, “It’s not a case of if disaster
happens, but when disaster will happen”.
Based on findings in the US last year,
downtime that lasts for one hour can cost small
companies as much as $8000, mid-size
companies $74,000 and $700,000 for large
enterprises. According to the National Archives
and Records Administration, more than 90% of
companies that experience at least seven days
of data centre downtime go out of business
within a year. Yet some 65% of all businesses
currently have no backup or recovery solution in
H place! Analysts Forrester and Gartner have
reported that 60% of businesses see data
backup and recovery as a critical priority, but
that only 35% of businesses actually have any
form of disaster recovery plan in place. As data
volume continues to increase with big data,
cloud computing, BYOD and IoT, it remains a
huge challenge for businesses to protect their
own data.
Recovery and backup operations more
critical and more challenging than ever
before
Business Continuity has become more critical
than ever before for the following reasons:
• Digital transformation, big data analytics and
24/7 business operations make rapid
recovery and the elimination of downtime an
essential business differentiator.
• Highly virtualized environments and
exponential data growth are making it harder
to meet today’s ambitious recovery objectives
using traditional hard disk or tape solutions.
A logical solution to address backup and
recovery challenges would be to use all-flash
storage in conjunction with a solid Disaster
Recovery software solution. If companies could
use all-flash, they could conceivably eliminate
performance issues across business-critical
applications when backup images are needed
for fast recovery. The challenge, of course, has
been cost. All-flash arrays can cost 10 or even 20
timesmorethanharddiskarraysforcomparable
capacities, depending on the configurations.
With that, the idea of paying so much extra for
the equivalent of an insurance policy has been
impossible for many companies.
Introducing a new category of all-flash
storage
Companies of all sizes can now choose from a
unique scale-out all-flash array for backup and

recovery without paying a premium for the
additional performance capabilities they can
achieve. The availability of this new approach
representsasignificantbreakthroughforbackup
and recovery applications—particularly in highly
virtualized environments.
The architecture of this new breed of array
brings enterprise-grade all-flash storage to a
price point that was previously impossible. At
less than 50 cent per effective gigabyte, it is
comparable to hard-disk drive (HDD) or hybrid
arrays for backup and recovery scenarios. The
solution uses several innovative design
techniques to achieve this breakthrough,
including:
• Giving customers the ability to purchase
standard enterprise-grade solid-state drives
(SSDs) at retail prices without the traditional
mark-up charged by the leading array
vendors. This results in significant costsavings
without impacting performance, reliability or
functionality.
• An architectural design that combines a
distributedfilesystemthatistightlyintegrated
with a fine-grained object store. It delivers a
scale-out architecture with seamless capacity
for backup and recovery options.
• Industry-leading data reduction technologies,
including inline, variable length deduplication
and compression. The combination of these
technologies delivers a storage reduction
ratio of 10:1 in backup environments.
This new all-flash array was developed by
the leading backup and recovery provider
StorageCraft. It is called Exablox OneBlox and is
designed for a wide range of use cases, not only
backup and recovery. OneBlox is also aimed at
organizations looking for cost-efficient scale-
out all-flash storage solutions for all their tier-
one production environments.
Traditional HDD storage arrays tend to
crumble under the pressure of the I/O blender,
which is one of the key reasons why all-flash
arrays have become the go-to solution for
many tier one business critical applications.
But what happens in a Disaster Recovery or
other downtime scenario? If dozens or
hundreds of VMs are recovering at the same
time from an HDD— or, worse, a tape backup—
it is going to take an extremely long time for the
business to get back up and running.
In this environment, business continuity is an
essential competitive differentiator. However,
the challenge to improve business continuity
comesatatimewhendatagrowthisaccelerating
and IT teams are under pressure to improve
recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Using all-flash storage to dramatically
improve business continuity
Because every minute of downtime has a huge
impact on the business, IT leaders are seeking
solutions that improve RTOs and ensure that
they can complete backups within the required
backup windows.
In virtual environments, backup applications
aim to deliver near instant recovery of virtual
machines. They do so by booting directly off
backups without waiting for restores to
complete. (available with StorageCraft ®
VirtualBoot™). Booting is just one piece of the
puzzle. The recovery process still needs to be
done with data recovered from backup images.
During recovery operations, the virtual
machines that are booted off the backup
images need to be production-worthy and
performance needs to be similar to what they
would get from their primary storage.
With Exablox, organizations can recover the
entire virtual infrastructure literally in seconds
or minutes and keep it production-worthy.
Additionally, Exablox lets organizations expand
storage dynamically over time by incrementally
adding SSDs or additional appliances: “Pay-as-
you-grow” with no forklift upgrades involved.
This is even possible without having to make
application configuration changes. No other
solution on the market offers a comparable
level of affordable performance for backup
and recovery.
StorageCraft: The ideal Storage and
Business Continuity partner
The StorageCraft Recovery Solution, known
for its outstanding reliability, provides the
tools to back up systems, applications, and
data, replicate them locally or in the cloud,
and restore everything from a single file to
complete systems throughout a network.
Physical or virtual, Linux or Windows, desktop
or server, Office 365 or G Suite, all are
protected by fast, reliable, file and folder or
complete system and data recovery.
The availability of a new class of all-flash
array, represented by the development of
Exablox OneBlox by StorageCraft, represents
a breakthrough in backup and recovery for
virtualized (and other) environments. With it,
organizations have access to much higher
levels of performance than legacy disk
solutions, at a comparable price point. IT can
achieve RTOs that deliver dramatic
improvements in business continuity at a
time when organizations of all sizes in all
industries strive to reduce downtime and
support new initiatives such as digital
transformation.
A logical
solution to
address backup and
recovery challenges
would be to use
all-flash storage
in conjunction
with a solid
Disaster Recovery
software solution.
If companies could
use all-flash, they
could conceivably
eliminate
performance issues
across business-
critical applications
when backup
images are needed
for fast recovery.

CLOSING
THE GAPOliver Horn, Senior Solutions Architect
Alliances, Red Hat, explains how IoT
has the potential to bring operational
and IT infrastructures together.
RED HAT
oT represents the beginning of a
new era of networked systems in
which highly developed applications
intelligently monitor and control
sensors, mobile devices, and machines in
production environments and elsewhere.
As a result, the IoT will eliminate the division
between the traditional operational control
systems of Operational Technology and
business-oriented Information Technology.
The Internet of Things (IoT) will make
Operational Technology (OT) – and hence
the hardware and embedded software
for monitoring and controlling physical
devices, processes, and events – fit for
the future. It has the potential to
fundamentally transform almost every
industry, whether production, energy
supply and distribution, transport and
haulage, or healthcare. The networked
sensors, measuring devices, and
actuators monitor and control the status
of resources and machines.
I For historical reasons, IT and OT still
remain separate
Most IT companies still treat IT (Information
Technology) and OT as separate areas and
develop, maintain, and use the two for different
purposes:
• The CIO is responsible for general company
applications, such as ERP, CRM, and BI
solutions.
• The operations or production manager is in
charge of production control and other
special applications, such as Manufacturing
Execution Systems (MES), Energy
Management Systems (EMS), and
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition
Systems (SCADA).
IT and OT solutions emerge independently
of each other over time. They solve different
problems and use different system
architectures and communication protocols.
For example, IT systems were developed to
connect applications and enable data sharing,
and they generally use an open, standards-
based architecture. Operational control
systems, on the other hand, are devised as
standalone systems and were not originally
designed for connection to the outside world
or for external access; OT systems are
frequently self-contained and proprietary.
Interlinking OT and IT systems
Department managers and IT architects see
the IoT as a catalyst for change. They want to
deploy standards-based operational control
systems as an important component of IoT
projects, thereby replacing standalone
measuring devices, sensors, and actuators with
intelligent, IP-based devices. By interlinking OT
and IT solutions on the basis of established
protocols and modules, companies can link
heterogeneous systems and processes,
thereby eliminating redundancies.
When attempting to link OT and IT systems,
system architects are faced with a number of
functional requirements:

• Scalability: Intelligent systems record and
analyze large quantities of data from a
variety of endpoints and require high-
performance computing, storage, and
networking capacities to do so.
• Availability: Many intelligent systems are
designed to be deployed in environments
where system failure might lead to reduced
productivity, unsatisfied customers, or even
loss of revenue. In the case of critical
applications such as medical applications,
monitoring solutions, and smart grid
implementations, system failure may even
result in severe damage to health or the
environment.
• Security: Intelligent systems frequently
depend on the publicly accessible Internet
or use cloud-based computing and memory
resources. To protect against loss or theft of
data or a denial of service attack, the new
solutions have to be optimally secured and
easy to maintain. This means, among other
things, that it must be possible to apply
security patches quickly. OT is not
traditionally configured to support this.
Ensuring high scalability and reliability
To achieve optimal scalability and reliability, Red
Hatrecommendsusingahierarchical,intelligent
system architecture consisting of a device tier, a
gateway tier, and a data center or cloud tier.
The device tier includes endpoints such as IP-
capable measuring devices, sensors, displays,
actuators,medicaldevices,antennas,machines,
and vehicles, where data is collected and then
transmitted. The data center or cloud tier
consists of computing or memory capacities,
for example, for industrial process monitoring
and control. But it also includes integration into
the existing IT infrastructure, the deployed ERP
systems, and other business-oriented company
applications. The connection to the company’s
value chain is made here.
IoT gateways build a bridge between OT
and IT systems
The gateway tier serves as an intermediary
between the devices and the data center or the
cloud. It aggregates device data and can buffer
it before relaying it to the data center. In
addition, it transfers controlling information to
the device on the basis of open messaging
standards. It also serves as a buffer for data
that is required for tactical analysis or regulatory
requirements. Furthermore, gateways can
facilitate a direct, local reaction, as required –
without going through the data center.
Therefore, the gateways can be situated in the
factory hall, a train station, or a hospital wing.
IoT gateways optimize the performance of a
solution by collecting real-time data from
operating procedures at the place of origin and
performing initial processing. In this way, they
disburden the applications in the data centers
and the cloud and facilitate efficient
development by introducing an abstraction tier
between the devices and the application.
Furthermore, by separating the devices from
the applications, they enable new endpoints to
be added more quickly and easily to a
configuration.
The IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) area
provides a good example in this context: here,
gateways are used due to different
communication technologies and can deliver
value-added services at the intersection of IT
and OT. In this use case, data often needs to be
converted between fieldbus systems - for
example the Modbus - and TCP. In doing so,
data can also be aggregated and machine
conditions for example are only reported when
there is a change.
There are use cases in the transportation
sector. It might be necessary to amalgamate
data from the tractor, the trailer and the cargo
directly at the vehicle - again either to react
locally, when having an unstable data
connection to the data center or because there
are heterogeneous technologies for vehicle,
trailer and cargo that cannot be controlled by
one tool. The hierarchical architecture
addresses the strict requirements regarding
IoT scalability, availability, and security. The
number of gateways can be increased
incrementally, thereby enabling cost-efficient
growth. To avoid single points of failure,
companies can implement redundant
architecture components at every tier. This
ensures service availability, for example, in
cases where an individual component
malfunctions.
Specific security measures that cover a
comprehensive spectrum of threats and
vulnerabilities should be implemented at every tier.
Through a convergence of OT and IT
environments, companies can improve their
performance and reduce the total cost of
ownership. However, detailed preliminary
analysis and planning is required to reconcile
various departments, disciplines, and business
processes optimally with each other. In most
companies, different organizational units have
previously been responsible for OT and IT
functions – with different targets, budgets, and
strategies.
The OT department implements and
supports highly specialized process control
systems that ensure continuous availability of
applications. Yet, the IT department implements
and supports comprehensive, complex, open
systems that depend on standards-based
networks and servers running virtualized
applications that partly rely on cloud services.
The two organizational units have to coordinate
their activities in order to benefit from a
convergent OT/IT environment with a uniform
IoT architecture.
Unlike traditional, manufacturer-specific
control systems, modern OT solutions use
standards-based IT infrastructures and
communication protocols; as a result, they can
achieve greater flexibility and scalability while
remaining cost-efficient. Thanks to the
convergence of previously separated OT and IT
environments, companies might now be in a
position to increase performance while
reducing complexity and infrastructure costs.
Oliver Horn
Red Hat

WELCOME
TO THE FUTURE OF
CYBER SECURITY
Wherever you are. Wherever you go. Whatever the future brings.
Check Point keeps you one step ahead.
C L O U D M O B I L E T H R E AT P R E V E N T I O N
Learn More: checkpoint.com

APPROACHING
SECURITY
PROACTIVELYCheck Point launches new research online platform and
releases mid-year cyber-attack trends report.
CHECK POINT
heck Point Software Technologies
has launched a new online
platform, Check Point Research,
providing cyber threat intelligence
insights to the greater community. Check
Point Research is a platform to inform the
threat intelligence community on original
Check Point research, top trends in the cyber
security space, and details on the current
threat landscape.
Coinciding with the launch of this new
online research platform, Check Point also
released its Cyber Attack Trends: Mid-Year
Report. The report provides a comprehensive
overview of the malware landscape in the top
categories of ransomware, banking and
C mobile threats - based on threat intelligence
data drawn from Check Point’s ThreatCloud
World Cyber Threat Map between January and
June 2017.
Astonishingly, the research finds that in the
first half of 2017, 23.5% of organizations were
impacted by the RoughTed malvertising
campaign, and that 19.7% of organizations
were impacted by the Fireball malware. In
addition, ransomware attacks in the Americas,
Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) were
nearly double that detected in the same
timeframe last year.
The report highlights a number of key
trends during the period:
• Mutation of adware: The Fireball malware
has led to a major change in the approach
to stop adware, especially adware owned
by massive, seemingly-legitimate
organizations. In parallel, mobile adware
botnets also continue to expand and
dominate the mobile malware arena.
• Nation-state cyber weapons: The leak and
consequent availability of key nation-state
hacking tools, zero-day vulnerabilities,
exploits and attack methods now enables
any potential hacker to carry out
sophisticated attacks.
• Evolution of macro-based downloaders:
During the past six months, new methods
for exploiting Microsoft Office files have
been detected. Those methods no longer

require victims to open the door for the
attackers by enabling macros.
• A new wave of mobile bankers: The
perpetrators combined open-sourced
banking malware code with complex
obfuscation techniques to successfully and
repeatedly bypass protections, making it
difficult to detect.
• Ransomware Surge: The percentage of
ransomware attacks in all three regions,
Americas, EMEA and APAC, almost doubled
in the first half of 2017 compared to the first
half of 2016—from an average of 26% to an
average of 48% of the three main attack
categories worldwide.
“Organizations are struggling to effectively
counteract the abundance of threats now in
play. Hackers are making malware more
sophisticated, and so the ability for unskilled
hackerstoinflictdamagehasrisendramatically,”
said Maya Horowitz, Threat Intelligence Group
Manager, Check Point. “With all the cyber
threats in circulation, many organizations still
do not have the right security defenses in place,
and are focusing on a detection approach
rather than implementing a proactive
prevention solution that would block the
attacks in the first place.”
The Check Point research team collects and
Major cyber breaches
in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
January 7, 2017
E-Sports Entertainment Association League, a popular video gaming community owned
by the Germany-based eSports company Turtle Entertainment GmbH, suffered a breach,
revealing gaming servers’ data and users’ personal details. According to researchers, the
number of users affected by the breach may have reached 1.5 million.
January 12, 2017
Cellebrite, an Israeli company known for developing mobile forensics and hacking
tools, was breached, leading to the theft of 900 GB of customer data. According to its
announcement, the breached web server contained basic information of customers
registered for alerts and notifications for Cellebrite products, as well as hashed
passwords of customers that had not yet migrated to Cellebrite’s new end-user license
management system.
April 9, 2017
Wonga, a UK-based loan firm, suffered a breach affecting up to 270,000 customers, most of
them in the UK. According to Wonga, the leaked data may include e-mail addresses, home
addresses, phone numbers, partial credit card numbers and bank account numbers.
GLOBAL MALWARE STATISTICS | 8
Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
0
5
10
15
20
25
0
5
10
15
20
25
23.4%
RoughTed
19.3%
Fireball
7.0%
Hacker
Defender
10.9%
Kelihos
8.4%
CryptoWall
7.8%
RIGExploitKit
6.1%
Nivdort
5.8%
WannaCry
5.5%
Conficker
5.4%
Zeus
0
20
40
60
80
100
0
20
40
60
80
100
iSpy Kometaur Cryptoload naKocTb Cerber
4%
2%
94%
12%
11%
24%
4%
14%
18%
19%
16%
Americas APAC EMEA
78% 72% 69% 66%
Asia-Pacific
25
Americas APAC EMEA
Figure 4: Most Prevalent Malware in EMEA Figure 5: Top Targeted Malware in EMEA
analyzes global cyber-attack data stored on
Check Point’s Threat Cloud to keep hackers at
bay. Check Point Research publications, such as
the Cyber Attack Trends Report, fuel a
conversation around new cyber threats, trends
and additional threat security insights. Check
Point Research is designed to be a resource
for organizations to better understand the
threat landscape and protect themselves
against cyber threats.
MOST PREVALENT MALWARE IN EMEA
Most prevalent malware in EMEA Top targeted malware in EMEA

SECURITY
FIRST
STRATEGIESAlain Penel, Regional Vice President, Middle East, Fortinet,
elaborates on how partners can prime customers for the
digital transformation era by proactively including security
in their business approaches.
FORTINET
here are countless examples
of companies and industries
that failed to adapt to
technological disruptions at
their outset, and as a result
have become obsolete. Consumers now
expect a dynamic experience in which they
can access and change information and
services at a moment’s notice, from any
location. Consumer and employee
expectations are driving what is being
called the digital transformation. Digital
transformation refers to the dramatic
change in business products, services,
workflows, and operations required to
leverage available – and future –
technology to its fullest extent in order to
meet the demands of customers,
streamline business operations, and
respond immediately to shifting market
demands. These changes aren’t optional.
T

of new digital tools like effective data analytics
algorithms will make your customers more
appealing targets for cyberattacks.
3. Transitioning into the cloud
Cloud adoption across industries will likewise
continue to accelerate digital transformation.
With such large amounts of data being
generated and requested, the cloud’s elasticity
is quickly gaining traction as the best way to
meet expanding data processing needs and
deliver essential services in a more cost
effective way than building out internal
infrastructure. The cloud is simply more
efficient at processing data, responding to
queries, and expanding digital resources in
real time to meet spikes in demand.
In addition, storing and processing data
and applications in the cloud can also hinder
visibility into network activity.
SECURING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Securing the distributed network brought on
by digital transformation requires end-to-end
protection that spans from endpoints, such
as IoT devices, through the physical network,
and out to the cloud – be it private, public, or
hybrid. This not only means perimeter
defenses, but also internal segmentation,
endpoint protection, and web application
firewalls.
Customers must have a flexible security
infrastructure in place that can dynamically
expand and contract as the cloud responds to
demands. Fortinet’s Cloud Security Solution
offers scalable, segmented protection for
every cloud environment. An integrated
combination of physical and virtualized
solutions means that as your elastic cloud
infrastructure expands or shifts, your security
moves with it. Segmentation allows you to
logically break up your network, allowing
greater visibility into lateral data movement,
and driving visibility and control deep into the
network to ensure that if a breach occurs, it
will not affect the data stored in your
customer’s cloud environment.
Fortinet’s Application Security Solution
secures customers from highly targeted
application vulnerabilities using web
application firewalls (WAFs). These WAFs
harness both local and global threat
intelligence to stop malicious code from
exploiting the latest application vulnerabilities,
detect bots, and stop DDoS attacks. This is a
critical feature, as hacked IoT devices can be
used to form botnets to carry out such things
as distributed denial of service or distributed
ransomware attacks.
Each of these features can also be woven
into Fortinet’s integrated Security Fabric to
deliver a comprehensive security framework
which make it the ideal security solution to
facilitate your customers’ digital
transformation.
As customers come to rely on digital assets
to remain competitive, security cannot be an
afterthought. The inherent infrastructural
changes that come with digital transformation
will alter and increase the attack surface of
their networks. It is important that as your
customers undergo these changes, such as
cloud adoption, increased data collection, and
IoT adoption that they assess how these
developments will impact their cybersecurity
strategy, and make adjustments to ensure
consistent, end-to-end protection.
Alain Penel
Fortinet
They are necessary to ensure that companies
remain competitive. This is affecting every
business, including those served by our
channel partners.
As organizations map out their digital
transformation strategies, it’s important that
they understand how these changes affect
their overall technical infrastructure –
especially as it pertains to security.
To assist our channel partners in guiding
their customers through their digital
transformation efforts, we’ve outlined three of
the major objectives companies need to focus
on, how these efforts can impact their network
security, and how Fortinet can help mitigate
these risks.
1. Internet of Things (IoT) adoption
The advantages that the Internet of Things
provides to consumers and organizations
through such things real-time information,
customized transactions, device-to-device
communications, and intelligent automation
is continuing to drive its adoption at an
unprecedented rate. Incorporating IoT
devices, or connected web applications
through smart devices is necessary for
businesses to stay competitive in today’s
market. Additionally, organizations will have
to provide regular updates and new features
to these connected devices – making
continuous deployment processes integral to
successful digital transformation. Unsecured
devices, vulnerabilities in off-the-shelf IoT
devices and software, and an increasing
number of endpoints attempting to access
your customers’ networks can overwhelm
existing network and security infrastructure
and create gaps in security that can lead
directly to data breaches.
2. Big Data Analytics
Given the trajectory of the expected growth in
connected devices, it’s clear the aggregate
amount of data collected and communicated
from IoT devices will be enormous. Successfully
digital transformation depends on making this
data actionable, using those data driven
insights to customize user offerings and
services and optimize business operations. At
the same time, storing large quantities of
personal and device data, or the development

VENDOR NEWS
VEEAM TO SHOWCASE
AVAILABILITY SUITE V10
AT GITEX 2017
TREND MICRO
STRENGTHENS
SECURITY OFFERINGS
company defines as the gap between users
demand for uninterrupted access to IT
services and what businesses and IT can
deliver.
According to the latest Veeam Availability
Report, 82 percent of enterprises in the Middle
East admit to suffering from this ‘availability
gap,’ which is impacting the bottom line to the
tune of $21.8 million per year. In addition,
almost two thirds of respondents admit that
this is holding back innovation.
ransomware and malicious threats by
providing reliable protection that blocks 250
million threats a day.
XGen security, which powers all of Trend
Micro’s solutions, is a new class of security
software that addresses the full range of
ever-evolving threats – now and in the future.
It offers a unique blend of multi-layered
protection including proven and advanced
threat defense techniques and intelligently
applies the right technique at the right time,
delivering maximum protection and
efficiency.
eeam Software has reiterated its
commitment to helping Middle
East enterprises meet the
requirements for 24.7.365
availability, by announcing its participation for
the seventh consecutive year at GITEX
Technology Week.
The company will demonstrate the new
Veeam Availability Suite v10, which drives
business continuity and agility to new levels,
and bridges the ‘availability gap,’ which the
n an age where safety is key, whether
it be in a car, airplane or on a
computer, consumers are continuing
to push for enhanced safety and
functionality. In line with this, Trend Micro is
strengthening its portfolio with the release of
Trend Micro Security for 2018. The latest
version of software integrates Trend Micro’s
XGen security with machine learning, to
better protect consumers against the latest
evolving threats by providing multi-layered
protection. This new offering has expanded
capabilities that safeguard users from
Veeam has experienced a great deal of
success and accelerated growth in the region, as
evidenced by the company’s Q2 results, where it
achieved a 41 percent year-on-year total
bookings revenue growth. Looking to build on
this, Veeam hopes to use GITEX as a platform to
educate CIOs and IT managers about the need
to re-think their IT strategies and service models,
andmoveawayfromlegacybackupandrecovery
solutions as they virtualize their infrastructures
and move to the cloud.
What’s more, in a recent industry test, ‘AV
Comparatives Real-World Protection Test
February – June 2017,’ Trend Micro was the
only vendor to achieve 100 percent effective
protection rate on a test based on sample
size of nearly 2,000 cases.
With more than 5,000 employees in over
50 countries and more than 25 years of
security expertise, Trend Micro is now
recognized for delivering top-ranked data
protection across physical, virtual and cloud
environments, ultimately enabling users to
enjoy their digital lives safely.
V
I

FUJITSU TECHNOLOGY SMOOTHS
CO-CREATION ACROSS MULTIPLE
LOCATIONS
IVANTI LAUNCHES
SESSION PERSISTENCE
SERVER
HITACHI ENTERPRISE CLOUD
PROVIDES NEW CHOICES IN
MANAGED SERVICES
NEXTHINK LISTED IN FORRESTER
RESEARCH’S REPORT ON
COGNITIVE OPERATIONS
ujitsu has recently expanded its Creative Digital Space User-
Interface (UI) technology, which turns entire rooms into
digital space. In the field of manufacturing, for example, the
concept of a virtualized project room offers a way to quickly
and efficiently share issues on the ground and find solutions by
connecting different places, including design facilities, manufacturing
facilities, and quality assurance departments.
Fujitsu has also developed technology that smooths co-creation
activities across multiple locations.
Its distributed data sharing technology stores data locally at multiple
locations, not in the cloud. Depending on network latency between
each location, this technology only synchronizes necessary differences
in data, while eliminating unnecessary data, such as trajectory data
when content is moved, providing smooth data usage across multiple
locations.
DC Research reported a significant increase in Android
devices purchased in 2016 from the year prior, bringing
the Android market share up to 37 percent of rugged
mobile computers. In line with this, Ivanti’s Session
Persistence Server, a server that ensures telnet task workflows are
protected against data loss from network connectivity issues, offers
secure, persistent connections for Ivanti’s Velocity applications. This
free add-on, previously named ConnectPro, is now available for any
Android deployment.
Session Persistence Server allows organizations to avoid dropped
connections and automatically reconnects their Android apps and
legacy systems by acting as an intermediary connection server
between the client device and the host application server.
itachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, has
announced the expansion of its Hitachi Enterprise Cloud
portfolio to address DevOps and container use cases. The
Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize Automation
now provides expanded services offering for DevOps and Container
Support for hybrid cloud deployments inclusive of cloud-native
architectures. In addition, a new Hitachi Enterprise Cloud Container
Platform provides hybrid cloud resources for DevOps that utilize
microservices architecture with a turnkey, end-to-end container as a
service environment.
With expanded support for DevOps and Containers, Hitachi
Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize 7.3 automates the creation,
deployment and management of container hosts and cloud-native
applications as a service, across a multi-vendor, multi-cloud
infrastructure.
exthink has announced that it was included in Forrester
Research’s newly published ‘Vendor Landscape:
Cognitive Operations.’ The report, which examines the
role of artificial intelligence (AI) in IT operations and
application performance management, listed Nexthink as claiming
the four benefits of cognitive operations. These benefits include:
reduced discovery effort, faster reaction and resolution of problems,
proactive prevention of problems, and providing meaning to
business impact.
According to the report, “Technology has grown too much and
too quickly for humans to monitor and operate it effectively. While
computer-assisted analytics helps firms react to and resolve
problems faster, predicting and preventing them is the Holy Grail.”
F
V
H
N

TAKING
THE WHEELMatthias Maier, EMEA Director of Product Marketing,
Splunk, highlights that organisations need to actively
manage cybersecurity to ensure limited damage and
fast recovery.
SPLUNK
O ver the course of 2017 we
have seen a massive increase
in public hacks and threats
hitting the news. Organisations
around the world were impacted by
WannaCry ransomware which encrypted
files, resulting in UK hospitals being
immobilised, causing outages of Deutsche
Bahn display panels, forcing Honda to take
production plants offline and resulting in
hundreds of speeding fines have become
invalid caused by infected speed cameras.
Shortly after this, cyber threats were again
in the news as when the UK’ s Parliament

was hit by an attack in which malicious
actors tried to gain access to e-mails. This
was followed by yet another hack, named
Petya, which had a massive impact in the
Ukraine, bringing down monitoring
systems around the former nuclear power
plant in Chernobyl, as well as many cash
machines.
These examples demonstrate that IT or
digital security can no longer be just an IT-
Security System Admin problem, focused
on installing and configuring new network
firewalls, deploying endpoint protection
solutions and next generation spam filters.
For example, the organisations effected by
WannaCry that “simply” kept their systems
up to date with the latest patches were
resilient against it. In the case of the UK
parliament, a business decision had to be
made to disconnect a critical digital
communication service for security
reasons, heavily interrupting parliamentary
operations. This is beyond the usual remit
of an IT Security System Admin, and shows
that security has to be approached from a
business perspective.
What should organisations be doing?
• Maintain basic security hygiene
• Proactively monitor access to critical services
• Define an incident response process and team
Establishing a data driven security
strategy underpinned by machine data is
the foundation required to support all of
the above initiatives. To monitor whether
basic security hygiene is being maintained
and to identify weak areas that no one is
looking after, a security information and
event management (SIEM) solution is a
good choice. It will aggregate information
and let businesses run regular reports
such as which systems are patched,
provide information from vulnerability
scanners, update them on the status of
endpoint protection solutions as well as
alert to any notable security anomaly
happening, such as a virus event or a new
service being installed on a system.
If we look at user authentication, it’s no
longer enough to simply rely on the in-
built security of Microsoft Active Directory
and its lockout policies. Organisations
need to dive into each digital service,
figure out how that service is exposed
externally, understand how people log on,
how they reset their passwords, how new
users are created and then identify the
machine generated data required to get
those insights. They can then learn the
specifics of that data and set up monitoring
to proactively detect any outliers. By
maintaining basic security hygiene and
proactive monitoring companies can
reduce risks to a minimum and during the
process identify white spaces in their
environment.
However, nothing in life is 100 per cent
secure – so businesses need to think
ahead to a potential breach/hack. What’s
the organisational process? Which people
need to take immediate action? Who can
help answer questions about what
happened? What do we need to do to stop
it? Who was impacted, and who takes the
important decisions such as taking services
offline, notifying the authorities or
communicating to the media?
This exercise goes beyond the IT-
Security System Admin role with more
mature organisations already having crisis
and risk planning for “cyber-risks” included
within operational planning. The people
involved in this are required to find
answers to the above questions regarding
the breach and must think about which
systems they can find their answers in and
how long it would take. This information
can mostly be found in machine generated
data/log data, which should be stored in a
centralised platform where they can ask
any question in a flexible way. This makes
the process scalable and efficient as
technical security investigations can often
become a bottleneck during a crisis. Even
in the British Parliament example the
ability to collaborate and work with others
to answer questions was a core
requirement. In an instance such as this,
a centralised platform with all your
machine data is a real strength. SIEM
solutions like Splunk Enterprise Security
(ES) provide organisations with this ability
and enable them to find the answers they
need to quickly detect and respond to
internal and external attacks. This is
completed as Splunk ES provides one
centralized platform for machine data
generated by security technologies such
as network, endpoint, access, malware,
vulnerability and identity information to
feed into.
With more focus from authorities
being place on cyber-security in light of
recent threats, organisations of all types
have to sit up and take a more active
approach to the the way they secure their
digital assets.
Matthias Maier
Splunk

TURNING
POINTAgthia Group gains sustainable protection against
ransomware through Malwarebytes Endpoint Security.
MALWAREBYTES

gthia Group is a leading Abu
Dhabi-based food and beverage
company, committed to the
highest standards of sustainability
and quality at every stage of the food chain—
from field to fork.
With ransomware becoming a billion-dollar
concern for businesses worldwide, Agthia
Group chose Malwarebytes to increase
endpoint protection across its organization.
Business challenge
Fighting multiple flavors of malware
Agthia Group operates in the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), Oman, Egypt, and Turkey.
More than 3,000 employees are engaged in
manufacturing, distributing, and marketing
water, flour, animal feed, juices, dairy, and
assorted frozen food products. Recently,
however, the flood of ransomware, Advanced
Persistent Threats (APTs), and multi-stage
malware began targeting Agthia Group. In
several incidents, ransomware attacked
various users and servers. The conventional,
signature-based antivirus solution wasn’t able
to timely and effectively stop these aggressive
new forms of malware.
“We urgently needed a more effective way
to stop ransomware and other advanced
threats,” said Zeeshan Khalid, Group IT and
Information Security Manager, Agthia Group.
“With operations spread across multiple
locations, we began looking for a cost-effective,
centrally managed way to deploy additional
protection and monitor threats trying to gain
entry.”
The solution
Malwarebytes Endpoint Security
The Agthia Group’s primary requirement was
to identify, block, and quarantine malware and
ransomware while complementing its existing
security infrastructure. Beginning with
solutions recognized by Gartner in the anti-
malware market, Khalid and the Agthia Group
team conducted an extensive evaluation and
deep technical analysis of several potential
solutions. After a proof of concept, Agthia
Group chose Malwarebytes Endpoint Security.
“We found Malwarebytes to be the right
solution for countering malware threats and
also to be cost effective,” said Khalid.
“Malwarebytes gave us the additional protection
we were seeking with remediation capabilities
that save time and increase effectiveness.”
Khalid also said that Malwarebytes
integrated smoothly with Agthia Group’s
existing security infrastructure. The
Malwarebytes team worked closely with
Khalid’s team during the proof of concept and
implementation. As a result, Malwarebytes
immediately began detecting, blocking, and
quarantining malware and exploits.
Achieving daily benefits
Khalid said that Malwarebytes actively blocks
exploits every day. The Malwarebytes
Management Console provides the team with
instant visibility into endpoints to make sure
that they are protected, regardless of where
the endpoint is located. The team can monitor
status at a glance and easily push updates.
Malwarebytes also notifies them of any issues
that require further investigation, but
otherwise automatically remediates malware
trying to enter their environment.
Real return on investment
Ease of use, effectiveness in stopping malware
and ransomware, budget friendliness, and
time savings add up to a solid return on
investment for Agthia Group. Combined with
Malwarebytes support, Agthia Group can
respond instantly to address malware-
related threats.
“The Malwarebytes team is very responsive,
and issues are typically resolved well before
the agreed SLAs,” said Khalid. “We plan to
continue using Malwarebytes and look forward
to adding new capabilities as they become
available.”
“We found
Malwarebytes to
be the right solution
for countering
malware threats
and also to be
cost effective.
Malwarebytes gave
us the additional
protection we
were seeking
with remediation
capabilities
that save time
and increase
effectiveness.”
A INDUSTRY
Food and beverage
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Identify, block, and quarantine
malware and ransomware while
complementing the existing security
infrastructure
IT ENVIRONMENT
Traditional antivirus product,
standard corporate protection
measures from endpoints to network
perimeter
SOLUTION
Malwarebytes product suite
RESULTS
• Gained visibility into endpoints for
monitoring malware and other
threats
• Saved time with built-in remediation
and notification
• Reduced threat of ransomware and
malware

Malwarebytes.com/business
750,000,000
IT hours saved
10,000+
Business Protected
605,000
Threats blocked every hour

PALO ALTO NETWORKS
POWER
OF TENPalo Alto Networks outlines top 10 considerations
for securing public cloud workloads.
ey considerations to effectively
protect data and applications in the
public cloud from a multitude of
ever-evolving security threats that
often mirror those faced in a
traditional, on-premise data center are:
1EMBRACE THE SHARED SECURITY
MODEL
Public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web
Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, make it
clear security is a shared responsibility. In this
model, the provider is responsible for ensuring
the platform is always on, available, up to date
and so on.
In fact, most believe the cloud provider’s
global data center infrastructure is more secure
than their own. What gets lost is the fact that
you,thecustomer,areresponsibleforprotecting
your own applications and data running within
the public cloud.
2ENGAGE WITH BUSINESS GROUPS AND
DEVOPS EARLY
Many public cloud projects are driven by
business groups, such as DevOps, that quickly
spin up new products or functional prototypes.
Challenges arise based on two things: general
availability of new application approaches, and
the security team, which is often brought in to
assist with deployment. Both identify possible
architecture-based security holes.
K Ideally, security and DevOps should work
in tandem to understand the scope of public
cloud projects and ensure the architecture
of the application deployments meets
business development needs while
mitigating security risks.
3KNOW YOUR POTENTIAL EXPOSURE
Public cloud usage is often referred to as
“shadow IT,” given how easily an account can be
established. Employees doing what is “right for
the business” may create security holes if the
environment is not configured properly. It is
imperative to know who in your organization is
using the public cloud and to ensure the
environment is configured correctly.
• Monitor Public Cloud Usage: Perhaps the
quickest and most accurate way to determine
usage is to call the local public cloud provider
sales representative and ask how much your
organization is using AWS or Azure.
• Ensure Proper Configuration: Configure the
environment with security best practices in
mind.
• Enforce Two-Factor Authentication: To
minimize the risk of an attacker gaining
access using stolen credentials, two-factor
authentication should be applied.
• Lock Down SSH: Secure Shell is a preferred
method to securely control cloud services,
yet this is often left exposed in AWS and
Azure environments. A cybercriminal with
SSH access can easily use an organization’s
cloud infrastructure to launch his or her own
botnet-based attacks.
4UNDERSTAND THE ATTACKER
Attackers leverage automation to find
potential targets within minutes. Once identified,
they look for weaknesses, checking default
passwords, probing for SSH misconfigurations
and so on. This is why security is critical in the
public cloud.
5EVALUATE YOUR SECURITY OPTIONS
There are several security options to choose
from when moving to the public cloud, most of
which are similar to the options for physical
networks.
• Native Public Cloud Security: Cloud service
providers offer native security services
including security groups and web application
firewalls (WAFs). While these tools help reduce
the attack surface, there are security gaps.
o Security groups are essentially port-based
access control lists, providing filtering
capabilities. However, you will not be able to
identify or effectively control the specific
applications being allowed, nor will you be
able to prevent threats or control file
movement.
o WAFs only protect HTTP and HTTPS
applications, and ignore all other traffic. They
are also not always required, whereas a

firewall is always critical. WAFs cannot protect
applications, such as Microsoft Lync,
SharePoint or Active Directory, that use a
wide range of contiguous ports to function
properly. Further, they are not an effective
means of identifying and controlling remote
management or access tools, such as SSH or
Microsoft RDP.
• Point Products: One of the more common
approaches to securing the public cloud uses a
host-based point product to detect and
preventthreats.Thepopularityofthisapproach
is driven by the notion that native security,
combined with an IDS or an IPS, is sufficient to
protect your deployment. In reality, an IDS is
counterintuitive to the speed and agility of the
cloud as it requires manual intervention and
remediation. An IPS only looks at known
threats, and may miss zero-day or unknown
threats. Neither provides a holistic view of your
public cloud environment.
• Do-It-Yourself Security: Some organizations
choose a DIY approach to securing public
cloud workloads, using scripting and visibility
tools to protect deployments. Potential
disadvantages to this strategy include
inadequate resources, lack of expertise to
manage the security implementation and
operations, and nonexistent support in the
event of a security breach. Organizations that
rely on internal personnel to manage public
cloud and security deployments must be
prepared for attrition. Typically, only a few
engineers know the environment well, but they
don’t necessarily have time to keep proper
documentation or manage knowledge-sharing
requirements. If even one of those engineers
leaves the company, the organization may not
be well-positioned to effectively manage
security needs moving forward.
• In-Line Virtualized Appliances: An in-line virtualized
appliance, such as a virtualized next-generation
firewall, provides a foundation to gain visibility
into all traffic in your cloud deployment. By
employing integrated next-generation security,
organizations can elevate protection for
applications and data in the public cloud, using
application-, user- and content-based
identification technologies to understand
exactly what is being accessed, by whom and
for what purposes. With this understanding,
dynamic security policy can be enforced to
safely enable applications, content and users
regardless of location, as well as protect data
and applications in public cloud deployments
from targeted and inadvertent threats.
6KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
Personal branding consultant John
Antonios once said, “knowledge plus action is
power.” In public cloud security, knowledge
begins with safely enabling all traffic traversing
your environment, spanning mobile, network
and cloud.
The magnitude of digital data traversing
these environments is immense. By utilizing a
virtualized next generation firewall as part of a
natively integrated, comprehensive security
platform, organizations gain necessary insight
into traffic identity and characteristics so they
can make more informed policy decisions to
protect applications and data from threats.
Native public cloud tools provide little visibility at
the application layer. Further, in some cases, in-
depth networking knowledge is required to
interpret the data accurately.
7BELIEVE IN PREVENTION
There are those who believe the attackers
have already “won,” and thus choose to
implement a detection and remediation
approach. However, with complete awareness
of your environment, a prevention philosophy is
indeed possible. Enabling the prevention of
successful cyberattacks in the public cloud
requires four key capabilities – complete
visibility, reduce the attack surface, prevent
known threats and prevent unknown threats.
8TAKE A CLOUD-CENTRIC APPROACH
The public cloud enables your
organization to address business challenges
with an agile, more scalable approach. To take
full advantage of the cloud, recommended
best practices include “applying the concepts
of the data center to your deployment, while
leaving the traditional constructs behind.” This
way, organizations can achieve high availability
and scalability.
The cloud centric approach utilizes the cloud
provider fabric and its inherent resiliency
features, such as load balancing, to quickly and
seamlessly accomplish the end goal of HA.
9USE AUTOMATION TO ELIMINATE
BOTTLENECKS
Automation is a central tenet of the public
cloud, where rapid change is common. When
security best practice change control is
followed, the delay may induce friction, slowing
deployments or, worse, weakening security if
the deployment does not “wait” for change
control to work. By automating security in the
public cloud, organizations can eliminate
security-induced “friction” and take advantage
of the flexibility and agility benefits offered in
the public cloud. automation tools that
organizations should look for in their public
cloud security include touchless deployments,
bidirectional integration with third-party
resources and “commitless” policy updates.
Automation features like XML API and Dynamic
Address Groups allow you to drive dynamic
security policy updates as workloads change.
10ENFORCE POLICY CONSISTENCY
THROUGH CENTRALIZED
MANAGEMENT
To maintain effective security for data and
applicationsinthepubliccloud,policyconsistency
is essential. Controlling your distributed network
of firewalls, physical and virtualized, from one
central location and applying a single, consistent
security rule base from the network to the public
cloudiscriticaltomaintainingsecurityfunctionality
and efficiency. Centralized management provides
insight into traffic and threats network-wide,
simplifying management and helping you
minimize security policy lag as workloads in the
public cloud change.
Organizations are boarding the public cloud
train to achieve more efficient time to market,
improve overall business and continue carving
a competitive edge. However, as business-
centric groups continue to drive adoption,
security teams are not always involved in the
process. Based on common experiences, these
security considerations are designed to be
educational and informative. Ideally, the goal is
to encourage dialogue between the security
and business groups to achieve a public cloud
architecture and deployment that accounts for
both groups’ demands.

GUIDING THE
NEW ERAMicrosoft helps customers digitally transform their businesses with cloud, AI and
mixed reality — while also advancing the next frontier of computing.
Microsoft Corp. welcomed over
25,000 business customers
to its annual IT event,
Microsoft Ignite in Orlando,
Fla., last month, where the company
showcased how it is infusing cloud, AI and
mixed reality across it products to help
customers visualize and create the future
of business. Microsoft also shared how
quantum computers could help solve some
of our planet’s biggest challenges. News
spanned Microsoft’s commercial
businesses — Office 365, Windows 10,
Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and
Microsoft AI — with a focus on how the
company is empowering people and
organizations to succeed in a rapidly
evolving workplace, and enabling customers
to harness data, AI, hybrid and cloud
technologies to evolve business process
and innovate for the future.
“Digital technology is impacting all
aspects of our society and economies,
creating unprecedented opportunity for
organizations of all sizes,” said Satya
Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “I’m optimistic and
inspired by the ingenuity of customers,
partners and developers everywhere that
are pushing the frontiers of what’s possible
with mixed reality and artificial intelligence
infused across Microsoft 365, Dynamics
365 and Azure, to transform and have
impact in the world.”
THE NEXT FRONTIER OF COMPUTING
Following 12 years of investment in its
vision to create a scalable computer based
on quantum physics, Microsoft has
announced the creation of a new
programming language optimized for
exploiting scalable quantum computers
and deep integration of the programming
language into Visual Studio, providing
developers debugging and other support
and state-of-the-art simulators that can run
locally or on Microsoft Azure. The tools will
be available for free by year’s end.
EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES AND
FOSTERING A NEW CULTURE OF WORK
Microsoft announced the expansion of
Microsoft 365 with two new solutions to
empower firstline workers and education
customers. The company also introduced
Microsoft 365 F1 and Microsoft 365
Education giving users what they need to
create and collaborate security. New
intelligent search capabilities, a vision for
intelligent communications centering on
Microsoft Teams, and security and IT
management enhancements to help
customers stay secure and compliant,
including meeting the General Data
Protection Regulation.
Also introduced was New LinkedIn in
Microsoft profile cards that now provides
the ability to see information from LinkedIn
profiles in Microsoft apps and services. This
new experience, rolling out now for first
release customers enhances the way you
collaborate and build relationships by
providing insights about the people you’re
working with, inside and outside your
organization, right from within Office 365.
MODERNIZING BUSINESS PROCESSES
WITH CLOUD AND AI
Microsoft expanded Dynamics 365 with
new AI solutions that transform critical
enterprise scenarios and apps and services
to help business users reinvent the
processes they use every day. Microsoft
Dynamics 365 AI solutions are designed to
tackle high-value, complex enterprise
scenarios and tailored to existing processes,
systems and data. The first solution includes
an intelligent virtual agent for customer
care, an intelligent assistant for customer
service staff and conversation management
tools, all powered by Microsoft AI.
Modular apps for Dynamics 365 to help
customers quickly transform high-impact
processes by integrating with existing
systems and augmenting them with
workflow and insights from Dynamics 365,
LinkedIn and Office 365. The first two
modular apps, Attract and Onboard, will
help companies recruit the most qualified
candidates and ensure their success with
personalized onboarding. Both will be
MICROSOFT

available as part of Dynamics 365 for Talent
later this year.
Deeper integration between PowerApps,
Microsoft Flow and Office 365 and Dynamics
365. Now, any business user familiar with
InfoPath forms, Access databases or
SharePoint can build apps that extend and
automate their business processes with
PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.
ADVANCING THE ENTERPRISE CLOUD
Microsoft Azure is driving new levels of
organizational productivity, intelligent data-
driven experiences powered by Azure
Machine Learning and deepened business
trust—all via a consistent, unique hybrid
cloud approach across data, apps and
infrastructure, whether on-premises or in
the cloud.
The announcement includes shipping of
Azure Stack through OEM partners
including Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo. Also,
made available was SQL Server on Linux,
Windows and Docker availability with SQL
Server 2017 GA.
SQL Data Warehouse delivers a new
optimized-for-compute performance tier,
significantly improving performance of
analytics in the cloud. This new compute-
optimized performance tier also scales further
than before, up to 30,000 compute Data
Warehouse Units. The preview will be available
in the fall. Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server
will let customers maximize existing license
investments with discounted rates, further
extending the promise of hybrid across our
customers’ data investments. Azure Cost
Management services by Cloudyn will help
manage and optimize cloud spend via a single,
unified view across multicloud environments.
Customers and partners will be able to use the
service to manage their Azure spend for free.
Microsoft also made Updates to Microsoft
Cognitive Services, a collection of intelligent
APIs that allows developers to easily add AI
capabilities to their applications. New updates
include the general availability of text analytics,
a cloud-based service for language processing,
such as sentiment analysis, key phrase
extraction and language detection of text.
Next month, we will also make generally
available Bing Custom Search, a customized
search experience for a section of the Web,
and Bing Search v7, which will provide more
relevant results using Bing Web, news,
video, image search, as well as a new
version of autosuggest and spellcheck.

Copyright © 2017 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved.
We Are The Cloud Generation. The
Cloud Generation is everyone who
lives and works in this unique era—
as computing breaks the boundaries
of desktops and data centers to
embrace the mobile, social, global,
crowd-sourced, always-on realities
of modern life. It’s a time when critical
data, applications and infrastructure
are shifting from “behind the firewall”
to “running on the cloud.” Some of us
are “all in.” Some are only 20% there.
Yes, it’s liberating. And yes, it’s chaotic.
Symantec is here to help.
Securing the
Cloud Generation

Unsecured privileged accounts add risk to your business anywhere they exist—100% of
advanced cyber attacks involve them. Seamlessly protect privileged accounts across the
enterprise— on premises, in the cloud and on your endpoints with CyberArk. Visit Redington
Value in Hall 4 to learn why the world’s leading organizations prioritize privileged account
security with CyberArk to detect and mitigate threats.
CyberArk.com
SECURE
PRIVILEGE.
STOP
ATTACKS.
ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE • IN THE CLOUD • ON ENDPOINTS
©2017 CyberArk Software Ltd. All rights reserved.

LEAVE NO
LOOPHOLESWilliam Udovich, Head of Strategic Accounts, EMEA, CyberArk,
emphasizes the significance of having technology solutions that can
detect behavioural deviations from both, humans and non-humans.
CYBERARK

very large organisation should
assume that they have been
breached. If there is a lesson from
recent high profile attacks, it is this;
in every case, from retail giants like Target to
financial institutions like the Bangladesh
Central Bank, the attacker had been present in
the network long before the breach was
discovered, looking for ways to move around,
using higher and higher access credentials to
get to the end goal.
If companies do not buy into this way of
thinking, they stand little chance of being able
to prevent a targeted attack. It is by luck alone
that they are not admitting, on live TV or in a
national paper, the extent of the breach that
their focus on the ‘wrong’ type of IT security
has wrought.
Credentials themselves are often thought
of in a warped way.
When credentials are discussed, they are
often understood as user credentials; a
standard, locked-down user or a privileged
user, with higher data access and network
operation privileges. In other words – humans.
What is important to remember, though, is
that the goal of attackers is not to impersonate
people. The goal is to get to something. Data
of some kind that can be used to make money
(mostly) or to obtain some kind of information
advantage, or even operation privileges,
simply to cause havoc in the network.
In order to get to the goal, attackers will use
any type of account credentials. And accounts
are not just used by humans, they are used by
automated process also – the machines and
devices inside the network that control
backup, scans scripts and many others.
When we connect a new machine to a
domain, an account is created and certain
services are automatically defined for that
machine. This is to enable network connections
from the machine to other resources in the
network, such as to retrieve configurations
from a domain controller, and to enable
access to file shares on the machine itself.
Any function that is automated is also
associated with an account. It is important to
note that while many services are configured
using machine accounts, services and
applications can also be configured using
user-defined accounts. For example, a
human-created account can be used for a
SharePoint or Exchange service.
And herein lies the problem.
These types of accounts are often not
subject to good security practices like regular
password replacement. Another problem is
that the permission levels of these accounts
are defined by humans. These levels – what
privileges the service account has in the
network - are often too high. A common
scenario is that the service experiences a
problem, doesn’t work properly, the
administrator seeks a solution online and
stumbles on “you probably have a
permissions problem, just join the service to
the admins group” – then elevated
permissions are granted and never revoked.
Your CEO might have elevated
permission levels to a specific resource,
because he or she has kicked up a fuss
about something and it’s easier for IT to
acquiesce. But the CEO would never be
given domain level access. With applications
though, especially those on which the
business relies for proper operation, it is
really important that they work. If they
don’t, and elevated permissions is what is
takes to fix the issue, then elevated
permissions are going to be granted.
Other bad practices include using the
same account for multiple services on
multiple servers, storing privileged
credentials in scripts on endpoints, using
privileged domain-level credentials for local
system services and many others.
This is very lucrative for attackers. They
can scan the network, find script-embedded
domain admin credentials, and then the
game is up.
Several companies have been breached
using this exact method, with the attackers
getting into the network and scanning all
shared drives and finding multiple VB scripts
with domain-admin level usernames and
passwords. This enabled them to completely
control the network and - for example - steal
credit card details from Points-of-Sale.
So, it is key to understand that
everything has an account and that there
are two types of account; machine and
user. Human accounts should be
separated from service accounts. Accounts
should only be used by a single automated
process, with granular permissions.
Instead of granting them privilege levels
that are too high, manage them.
Introduce a way to regularly change
passwords. Make these complex and specific,
not global in nature. Protect and monitor all
accounts. Step beyond those technology
solutions that just detect malicious human
behaviour but are challenged in detecting
deviations in behaviour from non-humans.
And then your CEO might not have to
stand up in public to tell the world why your
company didn’t protect your data better.
E
William Udovich
CyberArk

THE
PERFECT
STORMSeclore discusses why traditional information security
solutions are not meeting the needs for secure
collaboration.
SECLORE
I n a world where information is
regularly shared beyond the
organization’s perimeter with
advisors, vendors, prospects,
outsourcers and partners, the exposure to a
security breach has never been higher.
Couple that with growing regulatory
compliance demands, and the need to
leverage the latest technology trends (cloud,
file-sharing, mobile devices), and you have
the perfect security storm.
Why aren’t traditional security
solutions stopping data breaches?
Current security solutions focus on protecting
the perimeter, network, devices and
applications. In spite of the huge spend on
these traditional security solutions,
organizations are still experiencing costly
data breaches and leaks. So, what’s the
problem with the existing security
technologies?

• First, none of these solutions solve the
problem of persistently protecting
information that needs to be shared with
third parties beyond the perimeter.
• Second, none of them address the situation
where a trusted employee leaves with
sensitive intellectual property in that they
cannot revoke access once given.
• Third, none of these solutions can control
the use of a file at a granular level: what a
user can do with a file (view, but not edit,
where they can access the document from
(only within the corporate network e.g..)
and when (revoke or set expiration).
• Fourth, none of the traditional solutions
can control a file even while it is being
worked upon within the native application.
• Fifth, the traditional solutions lack the ability
to track every action against a file, even
when it is outside of the corporate network.
The new way forward: Enterprise
Digital Rights Management (EDRM)
One of the primary solutions organizations
are beginning to implement to address the
need to protect and audit information
wherever it travels is Enterprise Digital Rights
Management (EDRM). EDRM enables
organizations to persistently protect and
track information wherever it travels. The
usage policies enforce exactly what a
recipient can do with the file (view, edit, cut/
paste, screen share, print and more), when
(set expirations or revoke access), and from
where to support geo-fencing (by IP address,
device). All usage actions including
unauthorized attempts are recorded for
audit and regulatory reporting.
So why aren’t all organizations using
EDRM?
While EDRM has been around for years, it
wasn’t until recently that some of the primary
barriers to widespread adoption were solved.
Here are some of the key capabilities in the
latest generation of EDRM systems that are
making the promise of EDRM a reality:
1. Agentless Data-Centric Security: One of the
barriers to adoption of EDRM has been the
need to download agents. The need for an
agent was especially problematic when an
employee wanted to share a sensitive
document with a third-party outside of the
corporate boundaries. Seclore Rights
Management features a fully browser-based
solution for the person protecting a file, the
person receiving the protected file and for
those administering the solution. Enterprises
can now easily leverage the full power of
data-centric security without the need for
downloads or agent installs, ensuring wide-
spread adoption.
2. The Anyness Factor: Next generation EDRM
solutions enable organizations to protect
any type of file, use any type of application
natively (Word, Adobe, AutoCAD, etc.), on any
device. Expanding the coverage of files that
can be protected and utilized in the native
application on any device is essential to
closing the security gaps inherent in external
collaboration.
3. Automation: If you are relying on employees
to manually protect files as they are shared
via email or file sharing services, you will end
up with minimal adoption. The latest EDRM
solutions feature connectors to DLP, ECM,
File Sharing, email, CASB and ERP systems.
Through these connectors, files are
automatically protected with granular usage
controls as they are downloaded, shared,
and discovered.
4. Simplified Policy Administration: Policy
Federation, or the ability to leverage and map
access policies maintained in other core
solutions with the granular usage controls
offered by EDRM makes it easy to seamlessly
add data-centric security to an existing
infrastructure with less overhead.
Whether it’s between employees, partners,
contractors or customers, collaboration has
never been more important. It’s a necessary
part of business, and one that should not be
hindered or restricted because of security
concerns. Seclore Rights Management is
leading the way to making data-centric
security easy to adopt and administer,
ensuring that collaboration is secure and
compliance is attainable.
Rights management that works
In a world where collaboration with third parties
is essential to doing business, your data and
files are increasing at risk of getting into the
wrong hands. Seclore Rights Management, the
first fully browser-based solution, makes it easy
for employees and third-party recipients to
collaborate freely and securely. Protect your
information to the last mile with Seclore.
One of the primary solutions
organizations are beginning to
implement to address the need to
protect and audit information wherever
it travels is Enterprise Digital Rights
Management (EDRM).

ALGOSEC ALIGNS SECURITY
MANAGEMENT WITH BUSINESS
PROCESSES
BARRACUDA AMPLIFIES
REBRANDED MSP
FOCUS
AMAZON WEB SERVICES MAKES
AWS GLUE AVAILABLE TO ALL
CUSTOMERS
ENTRUST DATACARD JOINS THE
VMWARE MOBILE SECURITY
ALLIANCE
lgoSec has recently released the AlgoSec Security
Management Solution version 2017.2, which intensifies its
focus on delivering new capabilities that align security with
business processes. The solution seeks to enable business
continuity and digital transformation by enhancing and extending
support across the hybrid cloud and on-premise enterprise network.
This latest version uniquely maps and correlates security
vulnerability data to their respective applications and processes,
providing users with the information they need to prioritize any
necessary remediation efforts based on business priorities and
audit requirements.
Enhanced security device support in version 2017.2 includes both
Cisco Firepower and Microsoft Azure Network Security Groups.
ince Barracuda’s acquisition of Intronis, it has expanded
its commitment to the managed services marketplace
through international growth, new offerings, and
partner support models. The company has recently
renamed its MSP business unit, which was formerly known as
Intronis and now rebranded as Barracuda MSP.
Over the past two years, Barracuda’s MSP business has increased
billings, expanded the partner base by 25 percent, and entered the
European market. In addition, the business has added data
protection solutions; e-mail security, archiving, and backup for
Office 365 environments; and next-generation firewalls to its MSP
solution-set.
WS Glue, a fully managed extract, transform, and load
(ETL) service that has recently been made available to
customers by AWS, makes it easy for customers to prepare
and load their data onto various Amazon services and
databases. Customers simply point AWS Glue at their data stored on
AWS, and it discovers the associated metadata (e.g. table definitions)
and classifies it, generates ETL scripts for data transformation, and
loads the transformed data into a destination data store, provisioning
the infrastructure needed to complete the job.
With AWS Glue, data can be available for analysis in minutes.
What’s more, as the service is serverless, customers only pay for the
compute resources they consume while executing data preparation
and loading jobs.
ntrust Datacard has recently joined the VMware Mobile
Security Alliance, which integrates the industry’s leading
mobile security solutions with the VMware Workspace
ONE digital workspace platform powered by VMware
AirWatch technology — creating a powerful alliance that unifies
threat security for business mobility against cyber-attacks.
The technology collaboration enables both companies to
leverage the new Entrust Datacard mobile derived credential
offering which embeds a virtual smartcard, derived from the user’s
certificated based identity, into native apps and services such as
mail, WiFi and secured applications — all via the technology in
VMware Workspace ONE.
A
S
A
E
VENDOR NEWS

MICRO FOCUS FLAUNTS
EXPANDED SECURITY
PORTFOLIO
MOBILEIRON’S APPLE
RELEASE TO BRING
ENHANCED SECURITY TO
MAC OS
New innovations include ArcSight Data
Platform (ADP) 2.2, which brings native, real-
time log parsing, security data enrichment and
normalization into security operations that
scales to any data volumes.
In addition, Micro Focus has begun
delivering ArcSight Investigate 2.0 with
built-in security analytics displayed in pre-
defined dashboards that are powered by
Vertica to provide actionable intelligence
for front-line analysts.
has just been made available to Apple
users, and its impact on the enterprise
highlights Apple’s continued commitment
to businesses by providing more options
for organizations that are in the process of
replacing older PCs.
As desktop and mobile operating
system architectures are converging, IT
teams should be looking to reduce the
number of technologies they use to
manage their endpoints. MobileIron’s
icro Focus has recently
announced new innovations
across its expanded security
portfolio at Protect 2017,
following the successful spin-merge with HPE
Software. Micro Focus’s comprehensive security
solutions spanning security operations, application
security, identity and access management (IAM),
anddatasecurityhelporganizationsstriketheright
balance between easy access to critical business
data and mitigating risk.
obileIron has recently
announced its Apple Release
which addresses the growing
need for enterprises to
provide employees with the option of using
a Mac. The release is designed to bring
MobileIron’s security and access model to
macOS to increase Mac security and
reduce the complexity of IT operations.
The release also features day zero
compatibility support for iOS 11, which
Launching SecureData Cloud for AWS allows
organizations to accelerate the deployment of
hybrid cloud workloads with sensitive data at
DevOps speed, while maintaining compliance
to regulations such as PCI and GDPR.
MicroFocushasalsoannouncedautomation
advancements to the Fortify application security
portfolio that empower developers, testers and
operations teams to implement security testing
and remediation faster. The updated portfolio
is fully integrated into any DevOps tool chain.
Apple Release hopes to make it possible to
secure and manage all modern endpoints
with the same, easy-to-use console.
The MobileIron Tunnel will protect data
as it leaves a Mac, which provides per-app
VPN and eliminates the need for a separate
third-party VPN. The Release will also
protect data in the cloud by enforcing
trusted access through MobileIron Access,
blocking unauthorized Macs from reaching
services like Office 365 and Salesforce.
M
M

As you transform your enterprise application portfolio from waterfall
development to Agile and DevOps based delivery, a tool that supports Project
Agile will not deliver to enterprise scale. This is why an integrated application lifecycle
management toolchain matters. Manage complexity across the portfolio, to continuously
deliver quality applications at scale. Discover the New.
Start your free trial today.
microfocus.com/alm-octane
Support choice in the enterprise
application portfolio with Micro Focus
Application Delivery Management.
Doyouneedtobridgeforhybrid
applicationdevelopmenttoday?
ALM
Octane
Application
Dev/Test
A

WHAT’S
YOUR
?
Solve it with XGen™
security.
Go beyond Next-Gen
with XGen™
security.
www.trendmicro.ae
THE SILOED X.
THE UNSEEN X.
THE EVER-CHANGINGX.

NCOMPUTING LAUNCHES
VERDE VDI 8.1 SOLUTION FOR
ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS
TRIPP LITE RACK ENCLOSURES
NOW AVAILABLE ON BIM
ONLINE PLATFORM
FIDELIS CYBERSECURITY TO
SHOWCASE AUTOMATED
DETECTION AND RESPONSE
SOLUTION
SONICWALL REGISTERS STRONG
FINANCIAL GROWTH, REPORTS
INCREASED PARTNER PROGRAM
SIGN-UPS
Computing has launched VERDE VDI 8.1, a purpose-built
desktop virtualization solution for enterprise and SMB.
The launch of the new VDI, follows NComputing’s
acquisition of VERDE Workspaces during Q1 2017.
The VERDE VDI, according to the firm, incorporates a dynamic
provisioning model that protects users by making unsanctioned
changes non-persistent. It also prevents malware, virus attacks, data
leakage and unauthorized access to the internal network.
NComputing also highlighted that the VDI solution has been
designed with ease of use and efficiency in mind. It leverages a stateless
server architecture for easy infrastructure management and a gold
master image management model that dramatically streamlines the
process of provisioning and managing users. VERDE VDI 8.1 is available
in multiple deployment modes - on-premise, cloud and hybrid.
ripp Lite, a manufacturer of power protection and
connectivity solutions, has made 10 of its rack
enclosures available on bimobject.com.
The BIMobject platform is a digital content
management system for building information modeling
objects. The cloud-based platform provides architects,
builders, engineers, designers and students with robust and
accurate 3D representations of components used in building
and interior design.
With Tripp Lite’s enclosure available as BIM objects, racks
and data center designers will be able to incorporate
photoreal drawings of the racks with confidence that the
geometry and appearance of the racks is represented
accurately within their plans.
idelis Cybersecurity has announced its
participation in GITEX Technology Week 2017 to
be held at Dubai World Trade Center.
The company will demonstrate how its latest
platform, Fidelis Elevate, can empower security teams and
raise an organizations’ security posture by providing
automated detection and response across both networks
and endpoints.
Fidelis Elevate, according to the firm, offers content rich
network and endpoint visibility to detect both known and
unknown threats. Enterprises can utilize its automated
detection and response capability to ensure protection from
security incidents happens immediately, and historical data
is delivered to security analysts for subsequent action.
Through the platform, security teams can triage,
investigate, remediate and forensically analyze security
incidents to fully protect their enterprise.
onicWall, the private network security company owned by
Francisco Partners and Elliott Management, has
surpassed its financial and operational metrics across
sales, partner engagement and support, including
shipping its three millionth firewall.
The company introduced innovations to the partner community to
strengthen those relationships, such as the SecureFirst Partner
Program for channel partners of all types, including resellers,
integrators, managed security service providers and security
consultants. Since the program’s launch in November 2016, it has
experienced a surge in partner growth and sales. Currently, more than
15,000 channel partners across 90 countries have registered for
SecureFirst, 4,000 of which are new to SonicWall.
In addition, SonicWall highlighted that active engagement with its
SecureFirst partners and SonicWall University have achieved 50
percent growth in partner deal registration, which reflects $330
million in the firm’s new pipeline.
N T
F S
VENDOR NEWS

The Value Plus Magazine - October GITEX Issue

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to The Value Plus Magazine - October GITEX Issue (20)

More from Redington Value Distribution (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

The Value Plus Magazine - October GITEX Issue