By: Morten Illum, EMEA Vice President at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

Introduction

As businesses everywhere struggled to get a true sense of COVID-19 during the first month of lockdown, data analytics company Global Data predicted that “The impact of COVID-19 on the IT services sector will be deep, immediate, and long-lasting.”

One month on and thoughts are indeed beginning to turn from the immediate business continuity challenge of keeping companies running remotely, to the far more insidious financial fallout of the pandemic – as the long-term economic impact leaves businesses facing significant cashflow and liquidity challenges.

According to IDC, worldwide IT spending is now projected to decline by 2.7% in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. Meanwhile a recent CFO survey from Gartner found that 70% of CFOs are making changes to their long-term investment plans.

Digital transformation

And yet against this backdrop, the continued digital transformation of businesses will be more vital than ever – not just to help them get through lockdown but also to set themselves up for a successful rebound.

In fact, many industry commentators are telling businesses to accelerate their projects if they want to give themselves a fighting chance. To bring in Gartner again, Sandy Shen, Senior Director Analyst, has said of COVID-19: “Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”

So whether you’ve gone through the hard work of getting a digital transformation project up and running only to find it put on ice, or find yourself facing an uphill battle to get new projects moving in response to the pandemic, how can you unlock them from limbo?

Flexible financing

Even in today’s uncertain business climate, there are options available for companies seeking to continue their tech investments despite a squeeze on funds.  

Indeed, this is something vendors like Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, have been giving serious thought to in recent weeks – evaluating our finance portfolios to find a way to support both customers and partners.

In general, there are two main avenues to explore when it comes to flexible financing:

• Defer or reduce expenses – vendors may let you delay payments for a set period of time (typically a number of months) or start your payments on a reduced rate and offset the balance at an agreed date in the future (i.e. one year from now)  
• Generate cash from assets – vendors will offer to buy back your existing IT assets or other infrastructure and lease it to you as a service

Determining which option suits your business will largely depend on your current IT real estate and preferred future consumption model. What is the scope of your existing tech infrastructure? Do you want to continue to own it or are you happy to pay to use it instead? Are you comfortable outsourcing its management or would you like to keep it in-house?

Your sector may also be a deciding factor, as certain sectors will be more risk adverse when it comes to moving their IT solutions off-premise and handing over their management. Good examples of this include financial services and healthcare, both of whom have serious data protection issues to navigate when it comes to changes to their IT infrastructures.

What to do next

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has been a wake-up call for companies in terms of how ready they are for a truly digital age – with many finding that their current infrastructures and systems are simply not able to cope with the demands this brings.

In the coming months it will be important not to lose sight of the fact that the digital age will not end when lockdown does. The need to transform existed before the pandemic and it will continue long after – particularly as consumer behaviours and habits become permanently changed by the experience of living remotely.

In light of this, you cannot afford to let your digital transformation journey stagnate. So, continue to pressure your C-Suite on its digital transformation promises, assess what consumption models your business will be comfortable with coming out of the crisis, and challenge your vendor on their financial portfolio. If they are anything like Aruba, they’ll want to help.

Families & Front Liners Stay In Touch With Loved Ones During Covid-19

As we practice social distancing and follow guidelines to flatten the curve and reduce the spread of Coronavirus, a reliable home security system like eufy Security can help us keep an eye on what is happening outdoors, at home, at the office, watch elderly relatives living remotely while essential front liners can keep an eye of their family while at work.

COVID-19 has caused significant “Anxiety” for families, making it difficult to keep an eye on children around the clock or monitor elderly parents who live remotely. Eufy Security Smart Wireless Cameras and Video doorbells hence have become essential at this current moment using “Motion activity alerts” that shows who is entering or leaving your home or any room, who is at your door step and users can define the designated zone to get alerts on unusual activity.

While some parents are allowed to work from home during isolation, essential workers do not have that privilege and need to monitor home schooling or child sitting at a distance. For these parents, knowing what is going on at home while they are away is vital. Are the kids staying in the house and attending their classes and is their lunch or dinner arriving on time are questions that can cause anxiety.

The motion detection alerts in Eufy security cameras, which can be wirelessly installed near the front door and are triggered by movement can answer the above questions. Users receive a smartphone alert when a motion is detected & recorded and the video is viewable at the same time.  

The real time response feature on the camera allows you to speak directly to anyone who approaches your front door via two-way audio as well as keep the kids disciplined during study time. It is a great way to be plugged into your kids’ activity while working on the front lines and ensure intruders stay away.

Eufy Video Doorbell has proven to be another great accessory during isolation. If you use online food and groceries delivery services like Talabat, Uber Eats, Amazon, noon, you may know that they practice “no-contact delivery” by placing your food or grocery in a way that minimizes in-person contact. Eufy Video Doorbell alerts you when your food or grocery has arrived and you can see and speak to the delivery team using the Eufy Security app.

If you are worried about unfamiliar faces or strangers in the neighbourhood, you can check suspicious activity from your smartphone. Eufy doorbell (2k Resolution) is equipped with a two-way audio system to scare off intruders and allows you to save footage with no monthly charges.

If you are in quarantine or at the hospital, you can also stay in touch with people at home and office and feel as though you are in the same room.

Eufy Security Doorbell is more important now than ever during these challenging times as COVID-19 keeps us away from our office, our elderly relatives and in some instances, away from family if our jobs require us to be out in the field helping to battle the Coronavirus. It has made isolation from our loved ones more bearable and relieves anxiety with the real time interaction.

Fueled by the Fortinet NP7 Processor, the FortiGate 4200F Delivers an Average of 10x the Performance of Competitors; Enables Ultra-fast Network Firewalling, Accelerated Internal Segmentation, and Massively Scalable Teleworker Solutions

Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced another milestone in its ability to deliver the industry’s highest performance. Powered by NP7, the seventh generation of Fortinet’s custom-built network processor, FortiGate 4200F is specifically engineered to deliver the scalability and performance required for the networks of today and tomorrow.

 

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO at Fortinet

“In recent weeks, the lack of performance and scalability of integrated firewall and VPN solutions has challenged organizations when scaling their secure remote access initiatives. Organizations deploying traditional firewalls cannot scale across multiple applications and have been forced to upgrade or even install completely separate appliances. With 10 times the performance at the same price, the FortiGate 4200F powered by our 7th generation Network Processor (NP7) sets a new paradigm in network security performance. Our ability to deliver the highest performing firewalls on the market means customers can either scale far beyond their expectations at the same price point of competitors or spend less to get the performance they need. Either way, our customers win.”

 

Organizations need to be able to expand and adapt their network security to changing business conditions at a moment’s notice. Whether an organization is retooling their network to suddenly support a remote workforce, or embracing digital innovation, performance and scalability are key. Unfortunately, most security solutions are simply unable to provide speed and scale at a price that most companies can afford. That’s because security vendors simply have not invested in the technology required to cost-effectively meet the demands of today’s digital workplace. This has forced organizations to purchase security solutions with minimal performance and scalability headroom. As a result, when a critical event occurs, or the market requires digital innovation, firewalls become a bottleneck rather than an enabler.

 

To deliver security that keeps pace with the scale and performance demands of the new realities of today’s data centers, Fortinet is introducing the FortiGate 4200F, the newest addition to its portfolio of high-end network firewalls. As an integral part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiGate 4200F has been specifically engineered to enable an innovative, security-driven networking approach that seamlessly integrates networking with security. The hardware acceleration of FortiGate 4200F via Fortinet’s seventh generation network processor, NP7, delivers Security Compute Ratings* 5 to 15 times better than comparable competitor solutions. Below is a comparison of the top firewalls on the market against FortiGate 4200F:

 

• Security Compute Rating is the benchmark (performance multiplier) that compares Fortinet’s purpose-built ASIC-based FortiGate NGFW performance vs the industry average of competing products across various categories that fall within a close price band that utilize generic CPUs for networking and security capabilities.

1 Enabled with an optional Feature License

2 SRX5400E-B1-AC, non-power mode

With these performance numbers, FortiGate 4200F enables ultra-fast network firewalling, accelerated internal segmentation, and massively scalable teleworker solutions to secure the data center edge and core across a variety of use cases.

FortiGate 4200F: Delivering Business Outcomes 

FortiGate 4200F, powered by Fortinet’s 7th generation processor (NP7), radically increases the speed, scale, and performance for large enterprise data centers. The 4200F delivers the highest performance and scale to securely drive digital innovation and meet the huge capacity and performance demands of critical business operations across a wide variety of verticals and large enterprises including financial services, healthcare, education, advanced research, and high-velocity e-commerce. The following are a few examples of FortiGate 4200F use cases: 

• Financial services organizations building massively scalable remote access: In this ever-changing world, customers across industries are increasingly enabling a remote workforce to come online expeditiously – speed translates to productivity. The FortiGate 4200F offers the industry’s highest Security Compute Rating of 10x for IPsec encrypted performance and allows organizations to implement business continuity while sustaining ongoing operations.  

• Large manufacturing and energy companies managing internal security risks: Reducing the attack surface, especially in today’s dynamic environment, is essential for protecting critical applications and infrastructure. Providing trusted application access and achieving compliance requires enterprises to segment at scale. With a Security Compute Rating of 5x for SSL inspection (including TLS 1.3), FortiGate 4200F delivers the industry’s best price/performance. 

• High-velocity e-retail and e-commerce providers handling event-based connection bursts: Managing previously unseen levels of capacity and support for up to tens of millions of user connections per second is mandatory for virtual business. With a Security Compute Rating of 15x for connections per second, the FortiGate 4200F provides high performance security to handle escalating business needs without compromising user experience. With a further Security Compute Rating of 8x, FortiGate 4200F delivers essential firewall security for a wide variety of online businesses. 

• Advanced pharmaceutical research, oil and gas, and government organizations that require support for elephant flows: Today’s data centers struggle to securely transfer huge datasets (e.g. 1 TB files) for activities such as AI/ML simulations used within cutting-edge research. The FortiGate 4200F allows the rapid transfer of large datasets by supporting multiple 100Gbps elephant flows.

• Cloud providers and large enterprises that must segment massively scalable virtual networks: Typical security products that use software-based Virtual Extension LAN (VXLAN) solutions have low performance and high latency, which increases time to service. FortiGate 4200F offers hardware accelerated VXLAN to enable secure, and super-fast communication without impacting performance.

 Report highlights that secure access for remote and branch workers and high costs are the main connectivity challenges that regional organizations currently face

Riverbed® announced today the results of its ‘Middle East Network Transformation Survey’, which assessed the state of cloud and network technology advancement for enterprises in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The Report, which was commissioned by Riverbed and conducted by IDC earlier this year, provides excellent insights into just how prepared enterprises have been to roll out their remote work strategies.

With government measures to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus still in effect in both countries, organizations have had to prioritize the IT investments that enable their employees to work from home. Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Zoom are all seeing a significant spike in adoption rates, given their ability to be rapidly deployed at scale. It is no surprise then that three quarters (75%) of respondents agree that cloud is ‘important’ to their organization’s network strategy. Riverbed’s survey reveals that 29% of organizations in the UAE and Saudi Arabia have already completed migration of workloads to the cloud. This process is currently ongoing for a further 31% while an additional 20% of organizations will execute such migrations within the next two years.

The transition of employees to remote working arrangements has also meant that organizations must now ensure seamless and secure access to applications and data across the Internet and home networks. With business-critical services now being delivered to employees working from home via the cloud, it is no surprise that 77% of respondents stated that it is ‘very important’ for them to optimize connections to SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 to ensure consistently good performance at all times.

Highlighting that 71% of organizations believe cloud is crucial for their digital transformation, Mena Migally, Senior Director, MENA, at Riverbed said, “Current events are hugely impacting all of us on a global scale and organizations are under immense pressure to maintain business continuity while safeguarding the health and safety of their employees. For many, this has translated to the rapid roll-out of work-from-home policies whereby cloud has been instrumental. However, slow SaaS applications can reduce workforce productivity and significantly impact organizations’ ability to execute in highly demanding times.”

When queried on the key connectivity challenges they face, respondents identified secure access for remote and branch workers and high costs as their top two concerns. With large segments of the workforce now requiring access to corporate data and applications from personal devices and home networks, and the challenging economic environment, the impact of issues is likely to be aggravated.

Organizations in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are therefore investing in upgrading their networks and currently over half (52%) are undergoing network transformation. Riverbed’s commission survey reveals the top three factors driving these transformation initiatives to be the need for greater security and compliance (54%), improved application performance (50%) and improved network monitoring and optimization (44%). In conducting these network upgrades, these businesses hope to improve operational efficiency (62%) and business productivity (52%).

“Given that our technology has the ability to greatly aid the success of these initiatives, we are keen to play our part in supporting regional customers,” said Migally. “Riverbed empowers IT teams with purpose-built solutions that facilitate fast, agile, secure delivery of SaaS applications to any user, anywhere, ensuring even the most remote and mobile employees stay productive as well as monitoring their organization’s network performance.”

Manish Ranjan, Program Manager for Software and Cloud, IDC Middle East, Turkey and Africa, adds, “IDC is seeing increasing appetite for cloud adoption these days and Work From Home is expected to be a new normal across various organizations in the Middle East region. As organizations increasingly deploy and use mobility and productivity solutions on cloud (including IaaS/SaaS, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud solutions), greater bandwidth with lower latencies will be needed to access these applications. Business leaders need to focus on optimizing their network infrastructure, make it agile to improve application performance and network security. Organizations that optimize their network performance and provide stable network infrastructure to its users will be able to improve operational efficiency and enhance business productivity.”

Riverbed Network and Application Performance Platform

The Riverbed Network and Application Performance Platform enables organizations to maximize the visibility and performance of any network for any application. Riverbed’s Platform includes a powerful combination of four key solutions to ensure our customers reach the full potential of their technology investments. These include:

• WAN Optimization: Maximize network efficiency and expand network capacity with market-leading WAN optimization technology.

• Network Performance Monitoring: A unified performance monitoring solution that provides deep and broad visibility and analytics.

• Application Acceleration: Ensure the fastest, most reliable delivery of SaaS, cloud and on-premises applications to any user, regardless of location, including for remote and work from home employees.

• Software-Defined WAN: Modernize your network with a software-defined architecture that delivers cloud-ready agility and cost savings.

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), today announced that it has successfully hosted a ‘Virtual Partner Xchange 2020’ conference in mid-April. The webinar with the theme ‘Scale up with Nutanix’ exclusively catered to Nutanix partners across the Middle East and Turkey and was attended by over 330 channel executives from across the region. The two hour programme included partner awards being announced at the end.

Bassam Al Masri, Director of Channel, METI at Nutanix said, “As a result of the COVID-19 virus impact on businesses, we have had to come up with a novel way of connecting with our partners and reinvent our annual partner summit as a virtual event. By sharing our company’s vision and roadmap and providing insights into the latest innovations in our products and partner program, we believe we have set our channel partners up for success this year and beyond. We take this opportunity to congratulate all the partners that won awards, and thank them for their continued commitment to driving growth for our company.”

During the virtual event, executives from Nutanix delivered a number of sessions enlightening partners about how they could benefit from the technical and business advantages of the cloud offered by Nutanix, such as infrastructure-independent and automated app mobility, scalability, flexibility and elasticity. Insights were also provided on how partners can maximise their organisations’ profitability with the ‘enhanced’ Nutanix Channel Charter.

GBM, a Nutanix strategic Master Partner, presented a video case study involving a prestigious government agency that implemented a Nutanix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution for 2000+ users. This was based on Nutanix’s latest offer called FastTrack for VDI that supports companies anywhere in the world to quickly deploy a VDI solution and onboard thousands of remote employees in record time.

In order to keep the session fun and interactive, Nutanix organized a quiz with participants having a chance to be one of the three winners of exciting prizes. There was also a raffle draw.

The programme concluded with the partner awards. Below is the list of partners that were recognized for their excellence:

Innovation Partner of the Year – Fujisoft

Partner of the Year – PRO TECHnology

Partner Project of the Year – GBM

Top Nutanix Sales Professional of the Year – Berkan Kılıç (KoçSistem)

Top Nutanix Sales Engineer of the Year – Farhan Parkar (GBM)

Top Nutanix Champion of the Year – Khalid Mashayekh (Versos)

TOP MET Distributor of the Year – Redington

OEM Partner of the Year – Solutions by STC

Best Marketing Campaign Award – Rana Mustafa (GulfNet Solutions Company limited)

Top Nutanix Sales Professional of the Year – Serdar Ünsal (KoçSistem)

“We have ambitious plans. We will be introducing new initiatives that will enhance our partners’ capabilities and drive business for them. Despite the less than ideal market conditions, we are confident that we shall close out this year on a positive note,” concluded Bassam.