In a move that strengthens its ability to enable Middle East businesses to protect their data against breaches, insider threats and cyber-attacks, Help AG, the region’s leading cybersecurity solutions, services and consultancy provider, has entered into partnership with global cybersecurity leader, Forcepoint. While the agreement extends across Forcepoint’s entire product portfolio, Help AG will focus particularly on the vendor’s unique dynamic security protection offerings, Dynamic Data Protection, Dynamic Edge Protection and Dynamic User protection, offering these to enterprises in the UAE and KSA.

 

“Data is one of the most valuable assets for businesses and its protection is therefore a top priority. Middle East organisations are looking to safeguard their data, not just for compliance purposes, but also because of the potential impact breaches can have on business continuity and brand reputation,” explained Stephan Berner, CEO at Help AG. Research by the Ponemon Institute has shown that the impact of data breaches has been especially severe for Middle East organisations. The region reports the world’s highest average number of breached records, at 38,000 per incident, with the average cost of each data breach averaging at nearly $6 million. Both these figures are about 50% more than the global average.

 

“Forcepoint’s security solutions perfectly compliment the rest of our portfolio and their model has the benefit of supporting both cloud and on-premise deployment options. Furthermore, their open platform strategy facilitates seamless integration with other industry-leading solutions. We can therefore leverage their products to build comprehensive, multi-vendor solutions that protect the entire data life cycle for our clients, whether in the cloud or in private data centres,” said Berner.

 

Forcepoint offers next generation DLP, which overcomes the rigidity and hurdles of traditional DLP by reducing alert volumes, false positives and alarms to focus on what matters. Forcepoint is a 9-time leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise DLP and their solutions protect organizations from information leaks and data loss at the perimeter, inside the organization and in enterprise cloud apps, including Office 365, Box, and Salesforce.

The vendor’s DLP solution includes an analytics engine that identifies and ranks high-risk incidents, reducing false positives and enabling businesses to isolate problems faster.

 

Dynamic Data Protection employs behavioural analytics and machine learning in its  solution to examine and assess user behaviour. By understanding attributes like typical access patterns of users, this individualised, adaptive security protects enterprises against malicious user actions such as data exfiltration or unauthorized access to critical assets and systems.

 

“As business models evolve to meet the challenges of digital transformation, the way that organisations adapt their data protection strategies will prove critical. By moving to a human-centric approach which places the data, and the understanding of user behaviour at the centre of their design, organizations can proactively protect themselves,” said Gihan Kovacs, Senior Country Manager for UAE and Pakistan at Forcepoint. “Help AG has a proven track record in rapidly assessing and embracing best of breed technologies that solve key cybersecurity challenges. We are confident that with their expertise and support we will be ready to successfully engage with and serve a broader segment of Middle East enterprises.”

 

Help AG is now a Platinum Partner within the vendor’s Partner Program. In addition to offering consultancy and implementation services, the company will also become an Accredited Service Provider on behalf of Forcepoint.

NetApp introduces vision for enterprise-class data services for stateful, cloud-native applications with any Kubernetes distribution on any cloud

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), the leader in cloud data services, today introduced Project Astra, a vision for a software-defined platform that is currently in development with the Kubernetes community. Project Astra will deliver the industry’s most robust, easy-to-consume, enterprise-class storage and data services platform for Kubernetes that enables both application and data portability for stateful applications.

Although companies everywhere are rapidly adopting Kubernetes, many organizations lack reliable data and application services, and have difficulty making application data as portable as the applications themselves are in Kubernetes. Yet to meet the standards that CIOs expect, IT teams and site reliability engineers must find a way to store, govern, protect, and replicate the data for both stateless and stateful cloud-native applications with enterprise-class cloud storage and data services.

Project Astra is being purpose-built for and in collaboration with Kubernetes developers and operations managers to help bridge the fundamental gap that exists between the popularity of containers today, the capabilities and user experience they require, and their ability to deliver true, comprehensive portability. NetApp’s vision for Project Astra is to enable companies to work seamlessly with their choice of Kubernetes distribution, on any cloud.

Project Astra leverages the underlying technology delivered through NetApp’s public cloud partners and enhances it through Kubernetes-native integration of data services with applications.

NetApp is working with the Kubernetes community to further develop technology that advances the user experience and extends the promise of Kubernetes to data-rich workloads. Together, NetApp and the Kubernetes community are building a platform to help you:

• Discover applications with your Kubernetes of choice, whether on your premises or in any cloud

• Integrate and unify applications and data management

• Deliver NetApp’s expertise in data and Kubernetes both as a service and as built-in capabilities

• Extend the promise of portability for all workloads, including stateful, data-rich apps

“Project Astra represents the next major step in the evolution of storage and data services for Kubernetes,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit. “We are making a decisive and long-term commitment to addressing the data challenges of Kubernetes, together with the communities and platforms that use it. Project Astra will provide a software-defined architecture and set of tools that can plug into any Kubernetes distribution and management environment.”

Project Astra builds on NetApp’s experience in enabling customers to manage petabytes of container data with NetApp® Trident and NetApp Kubernetes Services and adds a specific focus on the developers and operations managers who are innovating with containers today.

“As the first product manager for Kubernetes with Google back in 2014, I’m thrilled to be at NetApp as we continue to lead the effort to tackle the very real challenges that organizations are facing,” said Eric Han, vice president of product management for NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit. “I’ve been inspired by the potential of Kubernetes to transform IT services—and by the passion of the community that has helped to build Kubernetes to its prominence today. In a few short years, Kubernetes has become the de facto choice in orchestrating container environments. Yet there is still potential, and a need, to further evolve. With Project Astra, NetApp is delivering on the true promise of portability that professionals working with Kubernetes require today and is working in parallel with the community and our customers to make all data managed, protected, and portable, wherever it exists.”

Kubernetes developers and operations managers who are interested in participating can sign up here.

All it takes is one major event or natural disaster to disrupt the way businesses operate, which can ultimately negatively impact productivity and the bottom line. These events can often prevent us from working in our corporate offices, conducting business on the road and confining us to our homes. However, many of us are ingrained with the concept of traveling to a location to meet with clients, partners, industry associates or collaborate with fellow employees to “get business done” because, let’s face it, there really is no complete replacement for the face-to-face. But in today’s highly connected business world, staying connected doesn’t always require us to be in the same physical space to be engaged, present and productive.

 

One way organizations can help their workforce stay productive in the midst of travel restrictions is by providing your workforce with the same corporate access and digital experience they would receive while at the corporate offices. This starts with having a seamless and secure onramp into corporate resources. Tools such as remote access points paired with secure network access that follows you – no matter where you are – can keep you connected and help you remain competitive when time is money.

 

Technology really has come a long way and companies have created hardware and software solutions that extend the corporate employee experience to anywhere they choose to be productive. Employees today have a wealth of remote working options that they can employ when the need arises, such as remote access points or RAPs. RAPs come preconfigured, so any employee can simply plug in to any existing Internet connection and they’re ready to work as if they were inside the office. IT departments can securely extend the corporate enterprise network to every remote employee to easily overcome common issues, such as having to repeatedly login and authenticate in order to access applications, that make traditional remote networking painful.

 

Another benefit is that RAPs support centralized management of data, voice and video applications, including wired voice over IP desk phones, printers and other IoT devices. Since most employees don’t have a degree in IT, RAPs are simple for any employee to power up since they’re essentially plug-and-play.

 

No matter the reason behind an organization’s decision to implement a remote working protocol, the fact is that technology advancements are helping to bridge the digital and physical worlds. In other words, experiences that were once only thought possible through in-person interaction can now be had without physically being in the same room.

 

When combined with skyrocketing costs, associated productivity loss from travel, as well as the physical and mental fatigue that comes with navigating airports and juggling time zones, many organizations are re-thinking the possibilities around remote working simply because the technology is now capable of delivering an experience very similar to that of in-person interaction to the point where many of the benefits of the daily commute into the corporate offices and longer haul travel for business may no longer be worth it.

Joint solution to streamline database delivery and management, freeing IT teams to innovate

 

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, and Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced the launch of Wipro’s Digital Database Services (DDS) powered by Nutanix Era and Nutanix HCI software. This offering will enable enterprises to efficiently manage databases optimizing time and effort of IT teams.

 

As the data landscape shifts, businesses face constant pressure for innovation resulting in strain on the company’s IT departments. With legacy infrastructures, databases can be one of the components hindering time to value and linear scalability, preventing rapid scaling of operations such as transaction processing in which business can lose valuable transactions or insights that directly impact their revenue or decision-making capabilities. Wipro’s Digital Database Services (DDS), built on Nutanix solutions for Databases including Nutanix HCI software and Nutanix Era, allows enterprises and users to provision and manage databases just-in-time, without prior knowledge of hardware, database software and associated configurations. The result is accelerated application release time, allowing database administrators to focus on new innovation instead.

 

The DDS offering from Wipro, powered by Nutanix, empowers customers to consolidate their database workloads onto a shared infrastructure to manage database sprawl. It drives efficiency, agility, cost-effectiveness, and scalability across the enterprise by automating and simplifying database administration. Additional benefits delivered by the joint solution include:

 

● Cost reduction: Reduction of acquisition and operating costs of database, consolidation and effective utilization of resources (control sprawl, better lifecycle management), better utilization of database administrators’ time by allowing them to focus on innovations and optimizations

● Rapid provisioning: Delivering of services in minutes as compared to days; business lines, database administrators, or non-IT users can consume services through a self-service portal, reducing overall time

● Innovative pricing: The as-a-service model makes cost predictable and easily dispersed to business units, ensuring service quality and customer satisfaction

● Reusability: The solution integrates with other third-party cloud management platform and orchestration tools to help reuse existing investment

● Supportability: Support for multiple database technologies and versions

● Automation: Enabling of greater efficiency and faster change delivery with better quality and predictability

 

Satish Yadavalli, Vice President, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Wipro Limited said, “Wipro’s joint offering with Nutanix brings agility, speed and flexibility for core and digital applications delivered as a service. Wipro’s Digital Database Services (DDS) powered by Nutanix HCI platform and Era delivers end-to-end services from transition, modernization, continuous deployment and automated lifecycle management operations of enterprise, open source and NoSql databases. Integrations are simplified as developers and application owners have access to a repository of customized services APIs. With this joint solution, we are confident of helping our joint customers optimize the Database resources and license cost.”

 

Bala Kuchibhotla, Vice President and General Manager, Nutanix Era and Business Critical Apps, Nutanix said, “Legacy database management is traditionally complex and requires massive amounts of resources from database administrators, taking away time they could be spending on more critical initiatives. With data volumes growing exponentially year-over-year, provisioning, protection, patching, performance and copy data management operations are becoming even more tedious and expensive. Our partnership with Wipro, will help develop the efficient and elegant Database-as-a-Service solutions for our customers to further our mission of enabling any organization to embrace the power of the cloud.”

 

Wipro DDS powered by Nutanix is available now. For more information, visit https://www.nutanix.com/partners/system-integrators/wipro

 

Online, Self-paced Training Courses Previously Open to Partners for Free Now Also Available for Anyone to Expand Technical Security Skills and Broad Cyber Awareness At No Cost

“In the wake of the global health crisis, organizations in the region had to make a rapid shift to accommodate their remote working models. As a result, businesses face several challenges but key among them is dealing with new security risks targeting remote workers,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East, Fortinet. “IT teams are under pressure to secure not only the organization’s network, but also a remote workforce, and this requires a broad and varied skill set. To help our partners and customers in the Middle East region update and gain new skillsets in this time of crisis, we are making our entire online, self-paced catalogue of advanced training courses available for free so that any IT professional can expand timely knowledge and skills on-demand as needed to effectively protect their organizations.”

Increased Risk With Distributed Workforces

Globally, organizations have had to quickly adapt their network to support their workforce transitioning from their traditional on-premises work environment to remote telework. To maintain business continuity, IT teams are strained with ensuring everyone in their organization is securely set up to remotely access critical resources and applications on the corporate network. In parallel, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the unprecedented increase in remote access of sensitive information and data by searching for security gaps and shifting attack strategies to target teleworker environments.

 According to a recent study from ISC2, nearly two-thirds of companies lacked the skilled staff they needed to maintain effective security operations. With the rapidly expanding attack surface that a distributed workforce at scale has introduced, IT teams need broad security skillsets more than ever, to protect their organizations.

Free Training to Help Develop Timely Security Skills

Fortinet is leveraging curriculum from its NSE Institute’s training and certification program to offer 24 advanced security courses for free to help IT professionals expand their cybersecurity knowledge and address new risks.

By learning about Fortinet technologies, such as FortiGate firewalls, FortiNAC and FortiManager, training participants will acquire an array of skills to defend any network against threats. Recorded lab demos for these courses will be available for on-demand viewing and supplemented with regularly scheduled live sessions with Fortinet Certified Trainers. During these live sessions, trainers will be available to demo labs and conduct Q&A sessions. Anyone interested in getting started with Fortinet’s free training courses can visit here.  

 For anyone interested in training options beyond self-paced, Fortinet has a worldwide network of Authorized Training Centers (ATCs) providing Fortinet training in a variety of formats.

NSE Institute’s History of Addressing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap

Today’s introduction of additional free cybersecurity courses further builds on Fortinet’s existing efforts to address the cyber skills gap through training and education. With over 300,000 NSE certifications issued, Fortinet established the NSE Institute in 2015, comprised of the NSE training and certification program, the Fortinet Network Security Academy, and the Fortinet Veterans program. In addition, Fortinet was named “Professional Certification Program of the Year” by the 2019 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards.

As part of the program’s free training catalogue, Fortinet provides foundational cyber awareness courses for anyone through levels NSE 1 and NSE 2. In addition, the FortiGate Essentials training was recently added as an additional course for anyone interested in learning how to use firewall policies, user authentication, routing and SSL VPN.

Securing the Expanding Attack Surface Beyond Free Training

Fortinet is committed to customers and partners not just through free trainings but also through existing functionalities embedded in Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. For example, existing Fortinet customers already have remote worker solutions embedded in their FortiGate firewalls that can be used at no additional charge. Powered by custom security processors (SPUs), FortiGates are capable of scaling to a significantly higher capacity. Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution is included in every FortiGate appliance, providing customers reliable and cost-effective connectivity for their branch workers, improving their application performance. And Fortinet’s free FortiClient software can be quickly installed on both business and personal devices to create encrypted VPN connections to the enterprise network.

 

Huawei Consumer Business Group (BG) announced that the Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) has given the HUAWEI P40 Series the highly coveted TIPA World Awards 2020, crowning the three flagship smartphones – HUAWEI P40, HUAWEI P40 Pro and HUAWEI P40 Pro+ – the Best Photo Smartphones of 2020. This marks the fourth consecutive year that the HUAWEI P Series has been recognised by TIPA, standing alongside a range of exceptional gear and solutions that professional photographers have come to love and rely on.

Founded in 1991, TIPA is a highly respected industry association with member publications hailing from photo and imaging fields across the globe both print and online. The association bestows TIPA World Awards annually to companies and new products that TIPA editors deem to deliver the best quality, performance and value to consumers. In the TIPA World Awards 2020 Official Product Citation, TIPA writes: “Smartphone photographic capability takes another great leap forward with the latest generation of Huawei’s P-Series. All three smartphones – the P40, P40 Pro and the P40 Pro+ – have the Kirin 990 5G chipset, a large 1/1.28-inch sensor, and were developed in conjunction with Leica. Noteworthy features of the models include AI-powered white balance algorithms, including those dedicated to optimise skin-tone and texture, greatly enhanced dynamic range and low light performance, colour temperature sensors, focus capability on all pixels, and an XD Fusion Engine for smooth zoom and optimisation of image quality.”

 

The TIPA World Awards 2020 adds to HUAWEI P40 Series’ expanding list of accolades. The HUAWEI P40 Pro was recently given a DXOMARK rating of 128, the highest overall score ever seen on the recognised leader board. In the same review, the flagship smartphone also earned the highest scores for photo and selfie performances, at 140 and 103 respectively

A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN) today announced its participation in IDC’s regional webinar entitled ‘Envisioning a Resilient, Cloud-Based Digital Infrastructure’ taking place on April 21, 2020 at 11:00am (UAE time). The event is tailored for IT leaders and executives looking to enact resilient, long-term, cloud-based digital infrastructures that drive their future-of-work, data management, customer experience, and digital innovation strategies.

 

Mohammed Al-Moneer, Regional Vice President of Sales, MENA at A10 Networks will be part of the panel discussion (Track B) with the theme ‘Security and Digital Trust Model for the Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Era.’ Panelists will discuss software-defined security and automation, digital trust-based models for security services, new architectures for cloud workloads, and novel approaches to ensuring governance, risk, and compliances.

 

“Organizations in the Middle East are increasingly adopting hybrid IT and embracing multi-cloud strategies as part of their digital transformation initiatives. To an unprecedented extent, all organizations are digitizing aggressively, and all enterprises are becoming more like technology companies. Although the benefits that can accrue from multi-cloud environments are compelling, the networking and security implications are profound,” said Mohammed Al-Moneer.

 

“The vision of A10 Networks is to enable a secure and available digital world and deliver better business outcomes that support investment protection, new business models and help future-proof infrastructures. Our solutions provide always available application delivery and security – on-premises and in the cloud and protect networks from cyber security attacks that threaten network availability. As cloud computing brings in additional complexities, our technology simplifies IT operations with connected intelligence, automation, machine learning and DevOps/SecOps tools. We are excited to share all these insights during the panel discussion.”

 

IT executives interested in attending the webinar can register at the following link – https://www.idc.com/mea/events/67332-idc-regional-webinar-middle-east/registration#category_0

 

Only 9% of organisations say customers rate brand experiences as fully satisfactory, with satisfaction around AI and robotics experiences faring

Customer experience continues to be one of the greatest challenges to businesses across Middle East and Africa, at a time where customer expecations are the highest they have ever been. This disconnect is exposed as Dimension Data reveals its findings in NTT Ltd.’s annual Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report titled “The Connected Customer: Delivering an effortless experience”. According to the research, only 6% of organisations are delivering a fully functioning experience, yet more than half (63%) consider CX to be their primary differentiator.  

The report revealed that organisations struggle to align their CX strategies to voice of customer (VoC) feedback, with 68% having no formal process for considering this data and 28% capturing no feedback at all. Only 31% fully define and track the value contribution of CX and just over a third (38%) are able to connect data relationships across customer service channels – leaving the rest operating ‘blind’ with no full view of the customer ecosystem.

Paul Potgieter, Managing Director at Dimension Data Middle East explained, “This research comes at a time when current global challenges and driving more digital engagements than ever before. This is consequently exposed gaps in the service strategies of many organisations.”

“Modern customers expect seamless, personalised service via the channel of their choice and organisations that can deliver this will be market leaders. To achieve this on an enterprise scale, while balancing resources, businesses will need to automate and integrate artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and data analytics into their day to day customer interactions to enable intelligent self-service, augment agents’ response rates and thus enable a fluid customer journey,” he added.

Listening starts with strategy

A successful CX strategy is proven to improve customer and brand engagement, and drive commercial performance, yet many organisations are still stuck in the developmental stage due to siloed technology systems, inconsistencies in experience, and a lack of clear processes. Specifically, challenges include:

 

• Faltering technology systems: Nearly one in three (30%) say their technology systems are failing to meet current needs and many teams still struggle with legacy systems (52%) and the integration of multiple technology systems (43%). Additionally, the inability to secure budgets (57%) remains a concern and skills shortages is seen as a growing concern (38%)

• Siloed channels and internal business organisations: Almost two thirds (63%) of organisations agree there is only partial collaboration between functions when it comes to designing CX, and 11% don’t collaborate at all. More than two thirds (69%) still have no cross-channel contact management strategy and only one third (33%) claim to have good or complete consistency across contact channels.

• Inconsistent priorities: Personalisation capabilities have surged from 49% to 73% in one year, but just 12% of organisations place “customer delight” as the top driving force behind their customer journey design strategy. This may account for why over one third (36%) of assisted-services enquires fail to be resolved during first contact, while automated channels fare worse with a 45% fail rate.

 

Creating a smarter CX with data analytics

While just over three quarters (78%) of organisations indicate that they are satisfied with their customer satisfaction capability, only 9% of their customers rate customer experience at ‘advocacy’ level. Worryingly, just 5% of AI and robotics users say customers rate their experience at advocacy level, exposing the gap between emerging technologies and satisfaction levels.

 

This demonstrates that businesses need to create a smart strategy which bases AI on optimum data, organisations must learn to fill the gap between data management and integration, and prioritise an efficient data management platform. As it stands, more than half (62%) of data capture needs are defined and aligned to desired business outcomes, and just 19% have a dedicated team managing the company’s entire data lake. In fact, 18% have no data management strategy at all. Because of this, data is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. More than half (54%) of all teams are evaluating and learning how to use available data and over a third (35%) do not have the required data management skills or resources to do so.

 

An increasing number of organisations are moving towards the use of smart data to inform CX decisions but are often overwhelmed by this transformation. Half of businesses confirmed data analytics and data management will be one of the top three tech initiatives prioritised by the CX team. Analytics (61%) is expected to be the top factor in reshaping the CX industry within the next five years. This is closely followed by artificial intelligence (57%), service personalisation (48%) and technology integration (45%).

 

Overcoming business organisational structure challenges

Many organisations believe AI and automation is the future for creating operational efficiency, hyper personalisation and providing an effortless customer experience. Rules-based robotic solutions “are the preferred option both now and in the short term with AI being the top five year priority.”

 

The vast majority (81%) of organisations also believe customer operations will be positively impacted by AI and CX robotics in the future, followed by business insight and customer intelligence (66%) and workplace management/operational productivity (53%). However, the implementation of AI remains difficult. Looking forward, businesses must find a solution for the current lack of skills across the business, which is currently considered a challenge for more than half (58%) of organisations today.