By: Sanjit Bardhan, Vice President – Head of Emerging Markets, Physical Access Control Solutions

Employers today face a new challenge: to provide a safe and clean work environment as employees bring with them a new social consciousness centered on public health awareness, social distancing and hygienic spaces. As employes consider a return to the physical workplace, they must adapt to new requirements, implement new procedures, and leverage technology to alleviate their employees’ concerns.

Access control plays a critical role in creating a safe back-to-work strategy. Organizations can leverage contactless physical access technologies — including mobile credentials along with Bluetooth solutions — as well as implement location services and visitor management tools to provide employees with an experience that supports a healthy and safe work environment.

CHANGED EXPECTATIONS

As organizations move toward re-opening their offices, workers bring with them a new awareness of issues around human proximity, environmental and surface cleanliness, and the sharing of publicly accessed resources such as touch screens and keypads. Hygiene isn’t a new concern, but the level of awareness is new, as well as the need to give employees the confidence that their workplace is not only secure, but healthy and safe.

Physical access is a prime area of interest. Crowded entryways, elevators and shared working spaces are a threat to safe social distancing. Credentialing processes that come with high human-to-human contact are also a cause for concern.

Those who manage physical access can play a key role in helping to meet these changed expectations. With health and safety concerns at the forefront, security and facilities personnel have the opportunity to be the heroes of the day. At a time when employee safety is not just an ordinary need, but an extraordinary moral obligation, teams can rise to the fore with proactive solutions that meaningfully impact quality of life. Access control management can help route employees, in tandem with efforts to stagger work times. Physical access control systems (PACS) can also leverage location services to support contact tracing and reduce crowding, and these same systems can be used in support of thoughtful visitor management.

While contactless credentials inherently support a touchless “badging in” experience, employers and building managers should implement these technologies as part of a holistic approach to building management. Clear policies, explicit signage, cleanliness protocols — all are part of this big picture.

Those looking to support a safe return to the workplace can look to technology to help minimize the high-touch human interactions that have characterized PACS in the past. By upgrading from legacy systems to more modernized solutions, it is possible to significantly reduce human contact around access control in a way that directly addresses employee concerns.

TOUCHLESS ACCESS CONTROL

Various forms of touchless access control can help to reduce viral spread
at human-to-object touchpoints. By reducing contact between humans and the objects related to access control, security could help to minimize potential cross-contamination.

Automatic door operators, revolving doors, and sliding doors — all can help to reduce contact at high-volume entry and exit points. These can be coupled with contactless credentials and readers to ensure security while minimizing surface contamination.

Another strategy involves the use of long-range capable readers that leverage Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connections to deliver read performance at a distance. With a read range of up to several meters, BLE can further distance employees who might otherwise crowd up around readers and doors.

Mobile access likewise reduces the need for employees to physically touch cards and communal readers. Organizations that rely on keypads or two-factor authentication may find mobile credentials and mobile capable readers to be a more hygienic alternative. The user is required to unlock their phone using a passcode, fingerprint or facial read in order for the phone to unlock, thus delivering two-factor security without the need to touch a shared keypad.

In the same way, mobile also allows for a biometric layer to be added to the access experience. Businesses can configure the mobile credential to only work when the device is unlocked, thereby requiring the owner to authenticate using their enrolled biometric, whether fingerprint or facial recognition. That mitigates the risk of a lost, stolen, or shared mobile device from being used. And by leveraging the technology on the mobile device instead of at the door, users are only touching their own device, and not a touchpoint that is shared with every other occupant.

Touchless credentials, including mobile-based, shouldn’t be limited to opening doors. Organizations also may find that these credentials support more hygienic protocols for logging in to networks, paying for vending, or activating printing.

In order to reduce contact at shared surfaces, these technologies need to be implemented
in tandem with clear policies and supporting signage.

OVER-THE-AIR CREDENTIALING

Most credentialing processes rely on a high degree of human-to-human interaction: someone in IT or the card office prepares the card, the card may then be passed to HR or the front desk for delivery to the user. And when a card is lost or stolen, the process repeats. Whether it is an employee or a visitor, the credentialing process is typically a high-touch operation.

Over-the-air provisioning minimizes contact for those seeking credentials, and it can have a dramatic impact on the human-to-human contact for the administrator charged with assigning credentials. Fewer visits from those looking to obtain credentials significantly reduces the risk factor for those that normally see a range of personnel on a daily basis.

VISITOR MANAGEMENT

Visitors introduce a new variable to the equation. They must be credentialed upon entry, and their untracked movements can pose a health risk, or at least introduce a dangerous unknown should contact tracing become necessary.

Solid policies and advanced technologies can ensure safe movement of visitors. Visitor management solutions can be used either standalone or in conjunction with an organization’s access control system. Visitors self-register in the lobby and hosts are notified when they arrive. Driver’s license scanners, barcode scanners, cameras, and printers all help support those front desk processes.

While the primary use case is for visitors, these systems can also be used to issue employees temporary badges for single day use, or to issue replacement badges. Visitor management solutions are also ideal for a range of high-volume settings, including healthcare, schools, and logistics — all places where physical access control is critical and visitors are frequent.

Even more, records from the visitor management system can be used for follow-up tracking of potential contacts in case an employee or visitor receives a positive virus test result.

LOCATION SERVICES

Key to keeping people physically distanced is knowing where they are at any
given time. Much how GPS is used in outdoor settings, location services leverage BLE beacons to ping off gateways that in turn can identify the location of individuals in a physical space. An individual’s identity can be based on an ID card which broadcasts continually, creating a virtual map of location relative to the fixed gateways.

Location services give management a means to be proactive rather than reactive in their efforts to promote physical distancing.

The same system could make space utilization more efficient. Connected beacons could broadcast room occupancy, for example, letting people know which spaces are free and which are in use. In the same way, this connectivity could serve as an early-warning system.

There’s also significant forensic value in this capability. Should an individual test positive for COVID, the arduous task of contact tracing — identifying people who have an infectious disease and those they’ve come in contact with — is automated. “Rather than relying on a person’s memory, you can trace a person — or anything tagged with a beacon – and build historical data on where that person had been and who else had been there, with graphics and analysis,” said Blokker. In addition, location services support “mustering” — the ability to call together a select group of employees in an urgent circumstance.

Location services can also support monitoring usage of hand sanitizing stations. By embedding a BLE sensor in the soap or sanitizer dispenser, the user’s beacon authenticates and registers the event. With hand-hygiene being a key way to prevent the spread of infection, enforcing consistent usage is vital to a healthy workplace.

MAKING THE MOST OF PACS TECHNOLOGIES

For those charged with implementing and overseeing physical access control, these are extraordinarily challenging times.

While technology can play a significant role in supporting social distancing and other pandemic- related needs, policies are at the core of any successful return-to-work effort.

It is critical, for example, to have solid audit systems in place. PACS systems generate logs, reports, and archives — invaluable information, if put to good use. Building managers can leverage this key data to see who was in the facility and when, in order to build a fuller picture of the operational risks.

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in private cloud, hybrid and multicloud computing, today announced the healthcare industry findings of its third annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring healthcare organizations’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. The findings point to a growing trend within the sector: with more than two-thirds (70%) of respondents reporting that COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically within their organizations and the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation that is likely to shape the future of healthcare.

As COVID-19 hit, healthcare organizations looked for ways to effectively support the skyrocketing technology demands of the COVID-19 pandemicーfrom enabling remote work, to implementing telehealth practices, to supporting an increasing patient load. As a result, they sought out IT solutions that could support their organizations’ growing needs and support their digital transformation. With digital transformation top of mind, the healthcare industry is more bullish than any other sector about adopting a hybrid IT model, with 95% of respondents agreeing that hybrid is their ideal choice.

Today, more than half of healthcare respondents have increased their public cloud (56%) and hybrid cloud (51%) use and nearly half (46%) have invested more in private cloud environments in an effort to quickly provide new work-from-home employees with access to IT resources. While 77% of healthcare respondents previously had some employees working remotely one year ago, that percentage has increased to 93% this year since the onset of the pandemic.

Other key findings of this year’s report include:

• The future of healthcare is dependent on decommissioning of legacy architecture: Currently, more healthcare companies run exclusively traditional, non-cloud-enabled datacenters (27%) than any other industry, compared to 18% globally. Over the next five years, however, healthcare organizations plan to shrink that gap with an expected 21-percentage-point drop in legacy datacenter installations and a corresponding 32-point increase in hybrid cloud deployments.
• Healthcare organizations look to hyperconverged infrastructure to support IT modernization and pave the way to hybrid cloud: Hyperconverged infrastructure is often seen as the basis for a hybrid cloud infrastructure, the HCI of the next decade, as it helps accelerate cloud adoption by sharply reducing the time it takes to build the software-defined infrastructure necessary to support private cloud, while also providing the scalability of cloud technology. About 64% of healthcare respondents say they’ve either fully deployed HCI or are in the process of doing so, significantly outpacing the approximately 50% of global respondents who are using or deploying hyperconverged infrastructure.
• Security, privacy and compliance pose a significant challenge to the industry’s digital transformation: 58% of healthcare respondents described security as a significant challenge, compared to 51% of global respondents. Healthcare respondents also ranked cost control (45%) and business continuity (45%) more often as significant challenges than any other industry.
• As the healthcare industry evolves, cost advantages will be the main gating factor for IT infrastructure deployments: All industries, including healthcare, indicated that security, privacy, and compliance solution strengths were highly important to infrastructure decision-making.

“The healthcare sector has clearly charted a path toward technology transformation, specifically a hybrid cloud consumption model that will enable HIT teams to provide security, ensure regulatory compliance, and enable healthcare providers to deliver care. The future of healthcare requires embracing technology—including cloud technologies—to secure, organize, and protect patient data,” concludes Aaron White, Sr. Sales Director, METI at Nutanix.

The 2020 respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific (APJ) region.

To learn more about the healthcare findings, please download the report here.

By: Dave Russell, Vice President, Enterprise Strategy at Veeam Software

Gartner estimates that by 2022, 75% of enterprise customers using cloud infrastructure as a service will adopt a deliberate multi-cloud strategy. Up from 49% in 2017, this is a fast-growing trend, which shows little sign of abating as businesses continue to ‘mix and match’ the services provided by the big four hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba. With that said, Gartner’s used of the term ‘deliberate’ multi-cloud strategy is a telling one, as it implies that there is such a thing as an accidental or even haphazard counterpart.

The truth is that there is, and in the IT world this is a tale as old as time. Infrastructure evolves and expands organically, based on the need for short term fixes and challenges posed by managing increasing data volumes. The pandemic underlined this fact in a big way. According to Veeam’s Data Protection Report 2021, 50% of CXOs in Saudi and 52% in UAE said that the need to maintain operations during the pandemic had held back their strategic digital transformation initiatives. It is only now that we will see a shift as businesses move beyond the crisis stage of their Covid-19 response and start to look at how the digital infrastructure and skills they acquired through short-term necessity can be evolved into a coherent, longer-term vision.

There is no reason why the same is not true when it comes to multi-cloud. Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report found that 92% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. The question I would post, is how many have a deliberate multi-cloud strategy? Yes, many enterprises will have weighed up the pros and cons of working with each cloud provider and implemented a Cloud Data Management strategy to ensure they can manage and protect data across multiple public cloud platforms. But we must not pretend that a significant number are likely to have found themselves working with multiple cloud provides, based on factors such as what platforms their partners use, through mergers and acquisitions, or in an attempt to contain spiralling costs. This is where the risk of multi-cloud can begin to offset the benefits.

Send in the digital health inspectors

Multi-cloud brings a number of challenges in terms of cloud security, skills, and cost optimization which businesses must be aware of before investing heavily in this as a strategy. Focusing on security first, so often cybersecurity vulnerabilities can be traced back to low levels of digital hygiene – a problem that is exasperated by using multiple cloud providers. In an ideal world, businesses would all have the required digital hygiene to successfully manage a multi-cloud environment, reaping the benefits of scalability and diverse capabilities this can brings. But in the real world rather than the ideal world, many businesses are still challenged by shadow IT and employees who require more extensive training when it comes to handling data compliantly, being more savvy when it comes to spotting phishing links, and using strong, varied passwords that they change regularly.

This takes us onto skills because as well as employees requiring training to improve their digital hygiene and savviness, multi-cloud also creates a skills void at a more technical level – within the IT team itself. Finding talented and experience system administrators and IT personnel is challenging enough as it is. Now you have to find ones who are well versed in not one, but two or three different cloud platforms. Compatibility and interoperability between these platforms are almost non-existent. They are written using different code, programming language and standards. Simply put, they’re made using different bricks. So, it is important that organizations looking to leverage a multi-cloud strategy are furnished with technical skills in all of the platforms they plan to use. This is essential for not only managing and protecting data across multiple public clouds, but also optimizing the costs of this strategy.

The public cloud opens up an array of exciting opportunities for organizations looking to consume Software as a Service (SaaS) and manage the exploding data volumes which have challenged IT departments globally. However, there is a feeling among IT teams that the public cloud has not completely fulfilled the promise of being cost-effective. In fact, for many cloud costs are spiralling out of control. So, it stands to reason, that if it’s difficult to contain the costs of using one public cloud, it certainly isn’t any easier to contain the costs of using multiple clouds. This is where having a cohesive Cloud Data Management strategy comes into play. Businesses need to be honest with themselves and ask whether they have adopted an intentional multi-cloud strategy, or did it just happen? If it’s the latter, that is fine, but it’s time to conduct a full review of your cloud provision, and ensure you have the required skills on board to maximise your use of each cloud, contain your storage costs, and to ensure data is fully protected across all infrastructure.

Businesses looking to deliberately form a multi-cloud strategy must first ensure that their standards of digital hygiene – including cybersecurity protocols, tracking, clear roles and responsibilities – are fit for purpose. This is fundamental to the success of reaping the very real benefits of, while managing the potential risks in terms of cloud security and cost containment.

By: Amr Alashaal, Regional Vice President – Middle East at A10 Networks

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, connectivity played an important role in university life. In recent years, it has become a routine practice for students to attend lectures virtually. A wealth of online learning resources is available both within university networks and on the internet. Meanwhile, online retail, banking, health services, gaming, media, and more are mainstays of student life.

Now a global pandemic has radically accelerated this trend. Universities everywhere have been forced to create and expand online remote access for their students, including many of which had not yet begun the evolution. More than just a convenience, connectivity has become a lifeline for students—and network admins to meet their needs. For university IT, this means making a fundamental shift from on-campus networking to supporting a distributed network across the globe.

Empowering the New University

The pandemic has been a wakeup call for university IT: Improvisation and patchwork of legacy infrastructure and security will no longer suffice. Institutions of higher education need a well-thought-out plan for moving to a more resilient, on-demand model. With current on campus traffic relatively light at many universities, the best time to upgrade is now.

Continued Needs of the On-campus Model

For their on-campus learning population, universities need to leverage their existing on-campus networks to support growing devices and traffic. Even if the on-campus population is not growing, the number of devices and connections continues to rise. Rather than purchasing costly new IPv4 addresses on the market, a carrier-grade network (CGN) solution makes it possible to extend their current pool through carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), which uses address and port translation in large scale to extend the life of an IPv4 network infrastructure.

Meanwhile, it’s important to have a plan in place for IPv6 migration. Specialized resources such as student ERP, registration, billing, online classes, and collaboration will be accessed on devices that will increasingly run IPv6, while network infrastructures may still be running IPv4 for the foreseeable future. Since IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, universities will have to accommodate the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks to ensure business continuity and prepare for future growth.

Ensuring High Availability

Higher education faces one of the most challenging environments in IT. From proliferating unmanaged devices, to spiky traffic patterns driven by class schedules, to highly latency-sensitive applications such as online classes, research, video, music, and gaming, university IT faces requirements more similar to a commercial service provider than an enterprise. In meeting these demands, IT must have a fully developed strategy to ensure high availability, disaster recovery, multi-cloud security, and load balancing.

Secure On-demand Education

As the university environment expands beyond campus, institutions need a security model based on the recognition that a threat can come from anywhere. The Zero Trust model responds to these challenges by adopting the approach of “trust nobody”—inside or outside the network. Cybersecurity strategies are redesigned accordingly along the following key principles:

• Create network micro-segments and micro-perimeters to restrict east-west traffic flow and limit excessive user privileges and access as much as possible.
• Strengthen incident detection and response using comprehensive analytics and automation.
• Provide comprehensive and centralized visibility into users, devices, data, the network, and workflows.

With learning platforms and resources accessible via the web, it’s essential to protect them against HTTP and web application-based security flaws. Web application firewall (WAF) systems use specific knowledge of HTTP and web-application vulnerabilities to filter or block these attacks without ever exposing the web servers or applications. This helps protect the environment against attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).

Automated DDoS protection is critical to protect against widespread and easily launched DDoS attacks. Universities should leverage DDoS threat intelligence, combined with real-time threat detection, to defend against DDoS attacks no matter where they originate. Methods such as automated signature extraction and blacklists of the IP addresses of DDoS botnets and available vulnerable servers can help organizations proactively defend themselves even before the attacks starts.

Integrated Security Approach
Over the years, most organizations have collected a number of security point solutions, addressing specific threats and typically from many different vendors, added incrementally as new threats were identified or a new approach provided. These legacy systems increase the complexity of operations, add latency into applications and reduce security efficacy. An integrated approach that consolidates security functions as much as possible will allow these functions to work together seamlessly, enabling compliance and unified security.

In conclusion, while the shift to remote and on-demand learning has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the transformation of higher education had already been well underway. Driven by trends in finances and enrollment, universities have needed to expand the opportunities and options available to students not only on campus, but around the world as well. The evolution in business models is now clear; what remains is to ensure that the university’s technology infrastructure can support the new direction. The network is front-and-center in this effort. By upgrading their capability to support growing numbers of connections and rising traffic, ensure cybersecurity and compliance, and maintain availability wherever and however students connect, universities can provide a solid foundation for success for their institutions and students alike.

Kodak Alaris hosted more than 200 partners from 43 countries at its 2021 virtual Partner Summit for the Europe, Africa, India and Middle East (EMEIA) region. The overarching theme for the 2021 edition, which was opened by Kodak Alaris President & General Manager, Don Lofstrom, was ‘Growth Starts Here’.

The annual Partner Summit is a clear demonstration of Kodak Alaris’ commitment to its channel partners as the primary vehicle for delivering information management solutions that simplify and improve the way its customers work. During the 2021 event, Lofstrom provided a recap of the business’ strong performance in a year that presented unprecedented challenges, and reinforced the company’s commitment to continue to invest for growth. Plans to further expand the company’s market reach include bringing to market new versions of its award-winning production capture and distributed capture scanners and software solutions; continued innovation within the cloud-based connected solutions software and solutions space; forming and building new partnerships; and enhancing the company’s skills in software solutions and professional services to support these initiatives.

The event also shone a light on the excellence, growth and engagement of its top partners, with the company recognizing ten partners from the EMEIA region in its annual Partner of the Year awards. An important event on the annual calendar, the awards celebrate partners who have demonstrated excellent growth, engagement, innovation and implementation of customer-centric solutions based on Kodak Alaris’ technology and services portfolio. The winners were chosen based on their commitment to customers, investment in solutions from Kodak Alaris, year on year revenue and growth trajectory, as well as successful joint wins over the past year.

Two partners in the UK scooped awards this year. Midwich was named Top Value Added Distributor, in recognition of its strong performance across all four quarters, excellence in terms of stock holding and product range, and initiatives such as work from home bundles and NHS pricing. Restore received the Top Performing Partner accolade. The company recorded strong overall performance and celebrated a number of key wins including an NHS hospital trust and large government agency.

In Germany, Datapool won the Top Solutions Partner Award, recognizing service excellence and outstanding performance in sales of Kodak Capture Pro Software. The Top Strategic Partner honor went to ALOS, who successfully won a number of significant multi-site tenders within the financial services sector.  e-das (now part of Ibykus) received the Service Partner Growth Award. e-das recorded significant year on year growth and continued to add value to Kodak Alaris’ software portfolio, providing customers with complex and challenging requirements with customized solutions. Vision Business Service GmbH earned a Special Award in recognition of a custom solution developed for a customer operating in a high-security arena. 

High Performance for Information Technology (HP IT) was the winner of the Service Partner Loyalty

Award. With travel restrictions in place limiting Kodak Alaris’ ability to support customers in Saudi Arabia onsite, HP IT stepped up, working collaboratively with the region’s service team to keep customers up and running. Also based in the UAE, Rookie Ninja scooped the award for Top Value Added Distributor Emerging Markets. In perhaps the toughest year of trading, the company achieved the highest revenue across the emerging market.

Other award winners included Viveris (France) who scooped the New Software Assurance Solutions Partner Award and Belgium-based Procedo who received the Top Performing System Integrator Award.

“These awards recognize the considerable contribution that our partners make to our business and applaud their success in helping our customers leverage Kodak Alaris technology solutions to solve the complex challenges they face,” said Gerry Kelliher, EMEIA Managing Director, Kodak Alaris. “The 2021 award winners have gone above and beyond, continuing to deliver outstanding levels of customer service and solve problems for their customers during these unprecedented times.”

For more information on the Kodak Alaris Partner Program, please visit the website.

By: Guido Kragten, Category Lead for Cloud Platforms at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard company

Finally, there is a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. As we get closer to the easing of lockdowns and social restrictions, many organizations are starting to look forward to welcoming employees and clients back to the office.

But if you think that this is the end of working from home, think again. While working from home was initially a reactionary solution to COVID-19, now that it has demonstrated its value, it is here to stay. In fact, I believe we will see a renewed focus on the home office as it becomes an integral part of organizations’ long-term hybrid workplace strategies, and not just a stopgap solution.

This new approach will require a further change in mindset and network infrastructure. If organizations wish to enable their employees to successfully work from home in the long-term without impact or risk, their remote foundations need to be as strong as possible – before they even start thinking about the physical office. Here are three things they must consider.

1. Connectivity and access at the Edge is critical.

With the home office set to become a permanent place of work, organizations can no longer afford to ignore the limitations of home network solutions and consumer-grade network equipment, which can cause user experience problems that pose a very real threat to workforce productivity and business continuity.

Indeed, as expectation levels rise and patience levels fall in the wake of the pandemic, employees at home must be able to connect and collaborate at the same level and access the same network functionality and applications as they do when in the office.

To achieve this, organizations need to find ways to extend their infrastructure to the Edge of the network (where employees are now connecting). This will include looking for remote access solutions that can provide home workers with fast, reliable enterprise-level network performance. These solutions must be able prioritize network tasks to eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks and have built-in policy enforcement to ensure that employees can connect securely to the network and key applications.

Plug-and-play options should also be considered, as they make installation effortless for employees – and in turn, IT teams.

• Network security will be more complex than ever.

The rapid transition to working from home throughout the pandemic brought with it significant complexities for network security – complexities that must now be addressed if employees are to be allowed to move freely between the office and home.

IT teams no longer have complete control over which devices employees are using and the risks they are taking. This new explosion of unmanaged devices connecting regularly to the network at its Edge means that organizations are faced with a much larger attack surface, but lack a good view of it.

They must find ways to increase visibility and control – without increasing workload. After all, securing and monitoring end users, devices and things, on a scale that a hybrid workplace model requires, takes time that IT teams do not have.

Automation and Zero Trust Security models are the only way to effectively streamline security operations. With real-time monitoring, IT teams will be able to detect, prevent, isolate and stop network breaches, ideally before they happen. Solutions like automatic device categorization based on network fingerprint and dynamic segmentation will provide the reliable, effortless control needed. 

But they should also be aware that any failures in connectivity and access will have implications for security and can compound threats. If employers fail to provide adequate remote working solutions, employees may search for digital workarounds, potentially downloading and installing tools and apps from questionable sources. Security must get back on the front foot.

• Organizations need to take full responsibility for the at-home employee experience.

The only way a hybrid workplace model can truly succeed is if the work-from-home experience is on par with the in-office experience.

We have already spoken about the need to provide the same levels of connectivity and access. The quality of network experience directly impacts workforce productivity, collaboration and working relationships and as such, employee experience is fast becoming a performance metric for IT.

But network performance cannot be the only consideration, and satisfied employees require more than just digital capabilities. If the home office is to truly be a permanent extension of the workplace, employers must take a more holistic approach to equipping the employee experience.

This means that factors such as physical workspaces, comfort and ergonomics, and additional equipment like headsets and monitors – which have largely been left to employees to date – may now also be considered the employer’s responsibility under a hybrid workplace model.

What other benefits are employees missing out on when they work from home? What tools and equipment do they not have access to? What aspects of the employee experience would discourage them from seeing the home office as a viable alternative – and can we address them?

These are all questions that organizations must ask if they want to successfully integrate the home office into their long-term strategy.  

What does the future hold?

The truth is that no one knows. As we saw in 2020, circumstances can change at any moment and organizations must be ready to respond accordingly. What happens if your employees grow tired of working from home? If the trend for third-party collaboration spaces picks up where it left off pre-pandemic?

With this in mind, flexible network technology such Remote Access Points offer a low-risk solution to support home workers at the Edge as needed. They offer easy provisioning and can be easily turned off and mailed back – providing control and visibility while ensuring a consistent, safe experience.

Longer-term, organizations will need to focus on building an agile network that can scale when and as required. This will be the most resourceful way of ensuring that you only pay for the connectivity you need at any given time.

After a successful debut in 2020, Software AG (Frankfurt MDAX: SOW) has launched the second edition of Future Disruptors Award; a program for undergraduate students from UAE Universities. This year students will create and celebrate prototypes under the theme ‘Enriching lives, improving experiences’. The program is intended to spark creativity that delivers cutting-edge and innovative real-world solutions and play an active role in today’s digital world. Recognized projects will give students the opportunity to showcase their solutions at the 41st GITEX Technology Week.

The program aims to nurture innovation by bridging the gap between the current developments in the corporate world with increasing expectations of the ‘digitally-native’ workforce and citizens of tomorrow. Participants are encouraged to address real-world challenges through IoT, AI and machine learning based innovative models. Anchored by Software AG, the program empanels advocates of leading organisations in the region as members of the jury; the 2020 edition the program empanelled officials from DEWA, Smart Dubai and Du Telecom to name a few. This year as well, this stellar panel of experts will put entries through a rigorous process and reinforce the awards’ innovation agenda.

The program that spans a six-month schedule featuring extensive resources and indepth training on Software AG’s industry leading Cumulocity IoT platform led by the firm’s technical team.  In addition, mentoring sessions through the period from industry experts will further nurture students to unlock their potential. The highlight is its culmination at the 41st GITEX Technology Week in October this year.  Three finalists, chosen by a combination of jury and public voting get an exceptional opportunity provided by Software AG to present their prototype at this coveted event which attracts over 100,000+ visitors from 140+ countries.  shortlisted finalist teams will receive IoT training from the industry’s best, funding to build the prototype, presence at GITEX Technology Week and an enriching internship at Software AG with hands-on experience and projects and career opportunities to eligible interns.

Announcing the program, Rami Kichli – Vice President, Gulf and Levant, Software AG stated, “After the overwhelming response in its first year, we are thrilled to open the Award to all Universities in the country this year under the pre-requisite guidelines. We strongly feel that students are catalysts of a paradigm shift in any industry. This belief has led us at Software AG to create a sustained bridge platform for these students to distinguish them in today’s competitive workforce and rub shoulders with the corporate world. They inspire and dare us to think outside the norm which is the only way to break the corporate glass ceiling for all of us. I look forward to exciting knowledge sharing times ahead with all of them.”

Dimension Data today announced that it has joined the SAP PartnerEdge® programme, through which it will resell SAP solutions to organisations across the Middle East region. Through this engagement, Dimension Data can provide complete solutions that encompasses all facets required for successful implementations, including software licensing, implementation services, training and documentation, staffing and optimisation and support.

“Today, companies are seeking flexibility, and the SAP PartnerEdge Programme offers engagement models that fit the way we work and engage with our clients. The standardised fees, consistent benefits, harmonized discounts, and simplified contracts reduce administration and ensures the programme grows along with our business and ambitions,” says Mohammed Hejazi, Managing Director, Dimension Data Middle East

“Our focus for the next couple of months will be centered around SAP S/4 HANA and helping our clients migrate to the Cloud, SAP Customer Experience and eCommerce, Ariba, Integrated Business Planning (IBP), Human Capital Management (HCM), SuccessFactors (SF) and SAP S/4 HANA transformation,” says Hejazi.

“This is the right time to be investing in this partnership as our clients are revisiting their core business strategies and looking at how to use intelligent technologies and solutions to gain a competitive advantage in the market,” continues Hejazi.

As an SAP partner reselling of an array of SAP solutions to clients across the Middle East region, Dimension Data is well positioned to help organisations achieve their objectives of improved growth, lower costs and a better understanding of business processes.

“Our aim is to drive enterprise-wide digital transformation for our clients, and the SAP PartnerEdge Programme will enable us to help our clients optimise their SAP investments, by reducing costs, improving agility, flexibility and speed and ensuring complete compliance and governance,” concludes Hejazi.

CRN^®, a brand of The Channel Company, has acknowledged Kodak Alaris in its 2021 Partner Program Guide. The annual guide provides a conclusive list of the most distinguished partner programs from leading technology companies that provide products and services through the IT Channel. The 5-Star rating is awarded to an exclusive group of companies that offer solution providers the best of the best, going above and beyond in their partner programs.

Given the importance of IT vendor channel programs, each year CRN develops its Partner Program Guide to provide the channel community with a detailed look at the partner programs offered by IT manufacturers, software developers, service companies, and distributors. Vendors are scored based on investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support, and communication.

“Our customers face numerous challenges associated with inefficient, disconnected, manual document workflows,” said Don Lofstrom, President & General Manager of Kodak Alaris. “Partnering with Kodak Alaris helps our channel vendors find new ways to deliver solutions that accelerate digital transformation, while expanding their offerings and tapping into new sources of profitable revenue.”

With the widespread adoption of IoT and cloud-based solutions, Kodak Alaris has been increasingly focused on partner expansion. “Our goal is to continue to be a premier technology vendor for existing partners while establishing new relationships with the ISVs, SIs and developers who can help us deliver INfuse – our next generation, smart, connected scanning solution,” added Lofstrom.

Another reason partners are attracted to Kodak Alaris is the firm’s top-rated service and support organization, which has a 95% customer satisfaction rating and a 92% first-call completion rate. Their partner program has earned CRN’s 5-Star rating four times in recent years.

“As innovation continues to fuel the speed and intricacy of technology, solution providers need partners that can keep up and support their developing business.” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “CRN’s 2021 Partner Program Guide gives insight into the strengths of each organization’s program to recognize those that continually support and push positive change inside the IT channel.”

The 2021 Partner Program Guide will be featured in the April 2021 issue of CRN and online at www.CRN.com/PPG.