Category: technology

Manual Contract Processing Costs Businesses Nearly $13mn Annually, Finds 4C Research

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Although organisations are successfully undertaking digital transformation initiatives to streamline businesses processes, contract management – a vital function within companies of all sectors and sizes – remains largely manual resulting in a significant impact on revenues and operations. New research by 4C estimates the average resulting loss of business at over $12.9 million per year, with over a third of respondents facing annual loses of $1 million or more.

The EMEA-wide survey also found that the lack of contract process automation is resulting in wasted resources, with companies spending an average of 69 hours per month processing agreements and one in ten (10%) spending over 200 hours per month – equivalent to one working month.

“While Middle East businesses have made exemplary strides in digital innovation, these have often been in the front-end systems that customers directly engage with. However, it is just as important to effectively digitize back-office processes which have just as much impact on customer experience. This is why a centralized system that unifies front and back end functions to deliver visibility through the entire process lifecycle can prove incredibly valuable to any organization,” said Jake Callaway, Managing Director, MENA at 4C.

“When we undertook this research, we were surprised to find that just eight percent of respondents have a fully automated process for managing agreements. Considering that business relationships ultimately hinge on underlying contracts, by failing to optimize their preparation, signing, activation and management, organizations are exposing themselves to risks that could easily be mitigated,” he added.

4C’s research supports Callaway’s advice as it found that the vast majority of companies have experienced issues as a result of non-automation. These include:

  • Unintentionally allowing agreements or contracts to expire (42%)
  • Human error, such as incorrect document disposal (58%) and time delays to projects (59%)
  • Agreement crossover, with for example people signing different versions of the same document (43%)

Shedding light on the challenges that companies face in the automation of contract management, the survey found that 36% cite concerns around data security. Internal issues are also a key barrier, with competing business priorities (37%), company culture (34%), a company preference for hard copy agreements (33%) and a lack of stakeholder buy-in (30%) emerging as the main internal challenges.

Despite these hurdles, an encouraging majority (59%) of organizations see full digitisation and moving towards automation of their manual agreement processes as very important to their business. These organizations outlined their key perceived benefits to be regulatory compliance (41%) and data safety (36%). A further third stated cost reduction (33%), while just under a third expect higher employee productivity (32%) and an improved customer experience (31%) to be outcomes of their investment.

“In the era of Industry 4.0, the very pace of business has transformed. Where once, it was accepted that finalising a contract could take days or weeks, today, speedy, convenient and accurate completion is expected in hours or even minutes. With automated systems, companies can build a culture of accuracy and efficiency, where innovative technology lightens the load of contract management. It is imperative that organizations embrace sophisticated digital tools that enable a more sustainable future,” said Callaway.

Cyber Adversaries Reincorporate Old-School Tactics to Catch Organizations Off-Guard Ahead of Busy Holiday Season

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Fortinet Threat Landscape Report Highlights Cybercriminals Bypassing Popular Phishing Tactics to Inject or Execute Code Onto a Range of Publicly Facing Services

“Cybercriminals continue to attempt to be a step ahead of cybersecurity professionals. While they develop new malware and zero-day attacks, they also redeploy previously successful tactics to maximize opportunity across the entire attack surface,”said Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances, Fortinet. “In addition to essential strategies like patching, segmenting, and training, organizations also need to embrace automation and AI to enhance their ability to correlate threat intelligence and respond to threats in real time. This approach will only be successful, however, when organizations integrate all of their security resources into a security fabric that can see across, and adapt to their rapidly expanding network.”

Highlights of the report follow.

Shifting Tactics to Catch Organizations By Surprise: The majority of malware is delivered via email, therefore many organizations have been aggressively addressing phishing attacks with end user training and advanced email security tools. As a result, cybercriminals are expanding their ability to deliver malicious malware through other means. These include targeting publicly facing edge services such as web infrastructure, network communications protocols, as well as bypassing ad blocker tools to open attack vectors that don’t rely on traditional phishing tactics. For example, this quarter FortiGuard Labs saw attacks against vulnerabilities that would allow the execution of code remotely targeting edge services, at the top in terms of prevalence amongst all regions. Although this tactic is not new, changing tactics where defenders may not be as closely watching can be a successful way to catch organizations off guard and increase chances for success. This can be especially problematic ahead of a busy online shopping season when online services will experience increased activity.

Maximizing Earning Potential: Following in the footsteps of the lucrative GandCrab ransomware, which was made available on the dark web as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) solution, cybercriminal organizations are launching new services to expand their earning potential. By establishing a network of affiliate partners, criminals are able to spread their ransomware widely and scale earnings dramatically in the process. FortiGuard Labs observed at least two significant ransomware families—Sodinokibi and Nemty—being deployed as RaaS solutions. These are potentially just the beginning of what could be a flood of similar services in the future.

Refining Malware for Success: Expanding on these approaches, cybercriminals are also refining malware to evade detection and deliver increasingly sophisticated and malicious attacks, such as the evolution of the Emotet malware. This is a troubling development for organizations as cybercriminals increasingly use malware to drop other payloads on infected systems to maximize their opportunities for financial gain. Recently, attackers have begun using Emotet as a payload delivery mechanism for ransomware, information stealers, and banking trojans including TrickBot, IcedID, and Zeus Panda. In addition, by hijacking email threads from trusted sources and inserting malicious malware into those email threads, attackers are significantly increasing the likelihood that those malicious attachments will be opened.

Maximizing Opportunity with Older Vulnerabilities and Botnets: Targeting older, vulnerable systems that have not been properly secured is still an effective attack strategy. FortiGuard Labs discovered that cybercriminals target vulnerabilities twelve or more years old more often than they target new attacks. And in fact, they target vulnerabilities from every subsequent year since then at the same rate as they do current vulnerabilities.

Similarly, this trend of maximizing existing opportunity also extends to botnets. More so than any other type of threat, the top botnets also tend to carry over from quarter to quarter and region to region globally with little change. This suggests the control infrastructure is more permanent than particular tools or capabilities, and that cybercriminals not only follow new opportunities, but like legitimate businesses, also leverage existing infrastructure whenever possible to increase efficiency and reduce overhead.

Protecting for the Unexpected: Broad, Integrated, and Automated Security

The expanding attack surface and shifting attack strategies of cybercriminals means organizations cannot afford to over-focus on a narrow set of threat trends. It is essential that organizations adopt a holistic approach to securing their distributed and networked environments. This requires the deployment of a security fabric that is broad, integrated, and automated. This approach will enable organizations to reduce and manage the expanding attack surface through broad visibility across integrated devices, stop advanced threats through AI-driven breach prevention, and reduce complexity through automated operations and orchestration. In addition, threat intelligence that is dynamic, proactive, and available in real-time plays a crucial role in identifying trends by following the evolution of attack methods targeting the digital attack surface and then pinpointing cyber hygiene priorities.

Report and Index Overview
The latest Fortinet Threat Landscape Report is a quarterly view that represents the collective intelligence of FortiGuard Labs, drawn from Fortinet’s vast array of global sensors during Q3 of 2019. Research covers global and regional perspectives. Also included in the report is the Fortinet Threat Landscape Index (TLI), comprised of individual indices for three central and complementary aspects of that landscape, which are exploits, malware, and botnets, broken down by prevalence and volume in a given quarter.

Nutanix to Host .NEXT on Tour – The Enterprise Cloud Conference in Saudi Arabia

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Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today that it will host its annual .NEXT on Tour with the theme ‘Invisible Clouds, Visible IT’ at the Fairmont Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on November 18, 2019. The conference will focus on helping enterprises in the Kingdom free themselves from the complexity and cost of legacy IT and embrace the power of cloud. 

 

Executives from Nutanix will deliver a number of informative sessions including latest insights into data center modernization, multi-cloud and automation and application workloads. The event will feature keynotes and talks, hands-on learning with experts, and a first-hand look at the latest Nutanix products. The solutions-oriented event will educate attendees on how they can build virtual apps and desktops on Nutanix. Topics include:

• Best practices for running high performance and low latency workloads on Nutanix databases 
• The ABCs of enterprise end user computing 
• Real-life demo experience 
• Customer panel discussing their Nutanix experience 
• Importance of a high performance and scalable IT infrastructure in creating a great user experience 

 

The illustrious speaker lineup includes Dheeraj Pandey Co-Founder & CEO Nutanix, who has been identified as being one of the top 30 most influential IT leaders in the world and Stephen Hadley, principal of RiceHadleyGates LLC, an international strategic consulting firm founded with Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and Anja Manuel. AvinashShetty, Sr. Director, Strategy at Nutanix will conduct technical sessions, giving deeper insights into specific product features, workloads and latest technology announcements. One of the attractions at the event will be the presence of Sophia the robot, the world’s first robot citizen who is a Saudi national.

 

Mohammad Abulhouf, Country Manager – Saudi & Bahrain at Nutanix says, “.NEXT on has become a premier event for the latest in cloud technologies. With our company’s well-earned reputation as a global leader in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), we aim to help regional organizations embrace the power of hybrid clouds by eliminating pain points, and enabling them to manage, govern and optimize applications across public and private cloud architectures. I’m confident that this event in Riyadh will give attendees a clear roadmap so that they can help drive digital transformation initiatives within their organizations.”

Fortinet Expands Integration of Cloud Security Offerings with Microsoft Azure to Provide Advanced Protection

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Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions,today announced the expansion of the Fortinet Security Fabric’s dynamic-cloud security offerings with Microsoft Azure, providing customers with an easier way to connect, manage and protect their cloud workloads on Microsoft Azure.    

Organizations turning to Azure want to take advantage of the public cloud benefits without compromising security. While Microsoft secures the Azure infrastructure and isolates the tenants, customers are responsible making sure their cloud configuration is secure. Fortinet provides customers that utilize Azure with the confidence to deploy any application in the cloud while maintaining a consistent operational model and managing risks. The Fortinet Security Fabric’s dynamic cloud solutions help Azure users connect and protect their cloud workloads and offers security capabilities that are delivered from the cloud.

“Fortinet is helping our customers protect, consume and deliver cloud through our dynamic cloud security offerings. Using Microsoft Azure allows our customers to implement broad protection across their cloud deployments as well as on-premises infrastructure,”said John Maddison, EVP of product and CMO at Fortinet. “Today’s announcement strengthens our collaboration as we work together to provide end-to-end security across the expanding digital attack surface.”

Delivering dynamic-cloud security solutions

Fortinet is working with Microsoft to enable joint customers to reap the benefits provided by cloud environments without compromising security. Today’s announcement includes: 

  • FortiGate Secure SD-WAN now integrates with Azure Virtual WANto accelerate their cloud on-ramp by improving customer QoE and security. This is done through product integration and automation that simplifies connectivity to Azure Virtual WAN using Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN offering. This integration automates the creation and tear down of branches connected to Azure Virtual WAN and provides centralized management of connected clouds across offices and regions. FortiGate Secure SD-WAN’s integration with Azure Virtual WAN also ensures optimal performance and security at the branch for customers accessing applications on Azure. 
  • Fortinet FortiCWP’s integration with Azure provides customers with increased visibility into their cloud workloads activity and configurations, as well as the ability to conduct deep analysis of data stored in Microsoft Azure blobs. By leveraging deep integration with Azure as well as utilizing FortiGuard-based threat intelligence, customers get comprehensive and most up-to-date threat information pertaining to their cloud workloads. FortiCWP works across clouds and leverages cloud providers’ APIs to gain a comprehensive view across workloads in any cloud region, enabling customers to detect threats and subsequently deploy necessary protection to mitigate these risks.
  • Fortinet is also deliveringFortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service from Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Organizations protecting their web applications are struggling to find a working balance between operational overhead and security effectiveness. Fortiweb WAF-as-a-Service offers the ideal combination by exposing pertinent configuration parameters, while automating provisioning of protection resources and fine-tuning security policies. Customers can now activate Fortinet’s WAF solution instantaneously and have the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution automatically provision resources through the Azure marketplace. Fortinet’s WAF SaaS solution does not require administrators to possess specific web application security skills, enabling rapid application deployment. Other products already available on the marketplace include FortiGate VM Next-Generation Firewall, FortiWeb VM, FortiMailVM, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer& FortiSandbox for Azure.

As organizations increase their adoption of Azure to build or migrate applications their technology footprint diversifies and expands. As a result, organizations are increasing their attack surface and risk. To mitigate these risks and properly secure workloads and applications, organizations need to securely connect their organization to the cloud. This can be done with the implementation of cloud security for their web applications and cloud platforms that is managed easily and seamlessly.  

Tightened integration through the Fabric-Ready program 

The Fortinet Security Fabric’s dynamiccloud security solution set provides Azure customers with an extensive portfolio of integrated security solutions to address this need. By implementing the Fortinet Security Fabric on Azure, customers can deploy a fully integrated security solution that seamlessly spans dynamic clouds, which consist of on-premises and hybrid cloud environments.

Fortinet has a broad range of Security Fabric integrations with Microsoft products, including the extensive solutions with Azure referenced above, as well as FortiNAC integration with Microsoft InTune and SCCM, and FortiMail integration with Microsoft 365. By integrating its solutions, Fortinet and Fabric-Ready Partner Microsoft provide customers with end-to-end security that is pre-validated, saving time, costs and resources in systems integration, deployment, operations and support.

How CIOs and IT Teams can Prepare for Life on the Edge

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Author: Jacob Chacko, Regional Business Head – Middle East at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

IT teams have been under pressure to introduce a range of new technologies into businesses, across multiple departments and functions. These range from IoT, to AI and machine learning, data processing alongside traditional functional technologies like CRM systems. The network edge represents the culmination of these technologies coming together. According to Gartner, edge computing will be a necessary requirement for all digital businesses by 2022. With potentially trillions of dollars being invested in the hope of generating huge economic returns, the argument for paying attention to the Edge opportunity is clear and the window for learning and action is narrowing.

The challenge for IT teams is to lead the pursuit of these edge-based strategies across the business, and manage the edge environments, from user devices to operational technology all with data security as a priority. 

In the findings of the e-book commissioned by Aruba entitled ‘Opportunity at the Edge: Change, Challenge, and Transformation on the Path to 2025’, many interviewees and survey respondents highlight the sheer scale of the technology ecosystem that IT must manage in an edge environment. For example, in a university environment, IT now must accommodate and support the range of student devices being used across campus – from laptops to smart speakers – plus IoT-enabled environments such as temperature sensors and security cameras. At the same time, all the university functions from catering to the athletics department are deploying an ever-wider array of technologies at the edge that need to be bound into the network and supported in a secure manner. 

Innovation, Change and Transformation Advisor Philippe Choné reinforces this point: “Products used to be physical things. Now products come with a layer of software and data and that points to an ecosystem. Product management and strategy, then, needs to involve not only IT partners but also legal compliance.”

Part of the challenge for the C-suite is ensuring leaders have enough understanding and digital literacy to drive and support the IT function to fulfil its crucial emerging role in a business pursuing edge strategy. 

Building an Edge-Capable IT Function

Across the expert interviews, survey, and secondary research, the issue of upgrading IT capabilities was raised consistently. Emphasis was placed on the need for the C-suite to reassure itself that the IT function fully understands the requirements and challenges of delivering seamless and secure service across tens of thousands of digital touchpoints, with focus on four key issues. 

First, the management, integration, and security of a highly distributed IT infrastructure spanning from the core of the business via the cloud to the new network edge. Typically, this ecosystem includes users, fixed and mobile edge devices, applications, data, distributed data centres, networks, gateways, on-premises infrastructure, cloud services, infrastructure management processes, security management, and reporting. Key here is flexibility, as most organizations cannot say with certainty just how many digital touch-points they might create over the next three to five years in an edge environment. Hence the infrastructure strategy needs to allow for the potential for the number of edge-connected devices to increase by 10X, 100X, or 1000X – placing the spotlight on the scalability and interoperability of the technology choices being made.  

Second, the collection, storage, management, security, privacy protection, and governance of data becomes a heightened priority as the organization increasingly reinvents itself around this core asset.

Third, the sheer complexity of such environments will drive organizations to make far greater use of smart software applications operating at every level from device monitoring to management of the entire ecosystem. While AI will have a clear role to play, it is critical that every component in the software architecture can be monitored with full traceability of how it made its decisions. This may be a major challenge with many of the current AI applications that cannot explain their reasoning. 

Fourth, as highlighted earlier, the edge represents a massive increase in potential security risks as every device and network touchpoint becomes a potential point of vulnerability and source of threat. The InfoSec Institute highlights a number of critical risks that need to be managed, including weak device access passwords; insecure communications; data collected and transmitted by devices being largely unencrypted and unauthenticated; physical security risks for individual devices; and poor service visibility, with security teams unaware of the services running on certain devices.

The edge clearly represents a massive business opportunity and delivering on it will inevitably mean the C-suite spending progressively greater amounts of time truly understanding the IT capabilities being delivered. Leaders will need to be immersed enough to know if their IT function, its infrastructure, and its key partners are fit for purpose and can provide a robust platform to enable a range of future options. 

Retail Revolution with Capillary Technologies

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Nitin Kaushal

Vice President Sales META of Capillary Technologies

As Vice President Sales META of Capillary Technologies, Nithin Kaushal has a deep understanding of the technology sector with expertise in Enterprise Sales Strategy especially Value Based selling & Channel Development.

Currently there are over 800 Capillary associates across 14 global offices continually innovating to find new ways for brands to make their consumers’ lives easier, and experiences memorable.

Nithin talks to us about the outlook on the current retail landscape in Middle East (UAE and KSA) in an interview.

  1. Countries in the GCC are on the cusp of retail revolution. What is driving their growth at the moment?

In a trend that is growing all over the world, consumers in GCC are also increasingly expecting personalised engagement with the brands that they interact with. This has persuaded brands to deepen their involvement through the customer’s journey, and not just at the time of transaction.

The greatest driver of this growth in the retail industry has been consumers moving to online shopping. The ecommerce market is predicted to expand threefold by 2022 as compared to 2018, making the penetration rate 7% of total retail sales.

  • How is technology going to drive growth for brands? How is Loyalty, CRM, Ecommerce, AI and personalization enhancing this growth?

Technology has been at the core of helping brands stay Consumer Ready through an evolving consumer environment. 

It starts with helping brands collect data related to customer behaviour and transactions across all channels (offline, online and social). This allows for a single view of the customer; the Customer Data Platform is an exemplary way for brands to do this with ease.

Following this is enhancing communication with customers. Mass campaigns and discount-based loyalty is a thing of the past. AI-powered tech is helping brands bring personalised communication to life. We have seen brands gain five times their usual engagement (like hit rates, redemption) when they personalise engagement. Additionally, technology like behavioural data capture and gamification is helping brands create experiential loyalty programs for their customers. We’ve also seen that brands resonate with Loyalty Programs and apps especially when purchase cycles are longer.

A critical aspect of e-commerce is the experience customers receive. Technology can be broadly divided into 2 categories: Front-end (or consumer-facing), and Back-end. At the front-end, the key is to create sector-specific consumer journeys using tech-enabled customisations that are both easy and quick. At the back-end, it is crucial to have a strong Order Management System (OMS), powered by open APIs for easy integration. The region is also witnessing the rising trend of Online-to-Offline customer journeys.

A brand provides a consistent customer experience across all their channels when the various segments of technology are robustly integrated with each other to work in sync.

  • How tech-ready are retailers in the GCC, and what trends should brands be embracing right now?

Getting tech-ready for the next generation of consumers boils down to two parts: System Readiness and People Readiness.

System Readiness – The majority of retailers still operate on legacy systems that are not integrated with each other, and prevent retailers from providing a consistent experience across channels. Legacy systems hinder retailers from moving fast with evolving customers because a lot of data isn’t available while recreating a single view of the customer. With new channels emerging (such as online and social), brands can leverage the data generated to understand their customers better. Hence, it is important for retailers to move to cloud-based technologies which are easy to integrate and allow brands to keep up with the changing consumer due to its very nature. 

People Readiness – This is a positive trend in the region. There is an increased focus on investing in consistent customer experiences across platforms. We see retailers creating roles like CRM Head, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Customer Officer among others. This definitely pushes retailers in the region to have System Readiness.

  • If retailers embrace new technology, how can Capillary Technologies help them protect their data, and how do firewalls, security programmes and anti-virus software help?

Not really relevant. We are a SaaS-based product company for CRM, Loyalty, e-commerce and in-store technology. We do help retailers capture data, but we have a strict data security policy. We use the world’s highest security standards–the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) certification–to ensure that customer data is secure at all times, no matter where they shop. In addition to this, we are also ISO 27001:2013 certified.

  • Consumers now have a number of touchpoints to interact with their favourite brands, and data is generated in the form of their transactional history, personal data and buying preferences. How much can retailers know about buyers using technology?

I will divide this into 3 broad buckets – Online, Offline and Social

Online – Online platforms help retailers collect massive amounts of data. Here, the complete online customer journey is available to retailers. 

Offline – This is where the real challenge lies. Apart from transactional history, retailers really don’t know the details about the customer journey (such as visit history, browsing history, demographics and other data). For the same reason, we recently launched an AI-powered solution which, on the one hand, helps brands track people as they walk into a store; on the other hand, brands can track the demographics of walk-in customers. With this information at the brands’ disposal, they can know the power hours of every store and staff their stores accordingly.

Social – This is the newest channel to evolve, and plays a very important role in pre- and post-purchase journeys. Brands do have limited information about their consumers here, but the bigger challenge is tying that information back to the complete customer journey to obtain a single view of the customer. 

Finally, all this data is integrated into one single platform to create a single view of the customer. This is utilised to develop personalised campaigns and strategies, which in turn accelerates growth.

Nutanix Partners with Hardis Group to Deliver Innovative IoT Solution for Supply Chain Operations

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Powered by Nutanix’s Xi IoT Platform, Solution to Improve Supply Chain and Logistics Operations in Real-time by Leveraging AI, IoT, and Edge Computing

Nutanix, Inc.(NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today a partnership with Hardis Group, a consulting, digital services and software publishing company, to deliver Vision Insights powered by Xi IoT, an innovative solution to manage supply chain operations efficiency. Available now, Vision Insights powered by Xi IoT is a supply chain optimisation solution comprised of Hardis Group Vision Insights software running as a container on the Nutanix Xi IoT platform. This solution will help companiesharness the potential of cognitive services (image and voice recognition), IoT, edge computing, and machine learning technologies to dramatically improve efficiency, traceability, and safety of logistics and supply chain operations in warehouses, factories and distribution centres.

In a new survey of 2,650 IT decision-makers around the world by Vanson Bourne, commissioned by Nutanix, IoT and edge computing ranked highest among other high-impact technologies and trends as having a “significant impact” overall on respondents’ businesses. In addition, AI and IoT will have a strong impact on supply chain management operations and according to Gartner “by 2023, at least 50 percent of large global companies will be using AI, advanced analytics and IoT in supply chain operations.”[1]

Vision Insights powered by Xi IoT allows Hardis Group’s Vision Insight customers to get easy traceability of assets through real-time image monitoring and recognition. For example, sensor data from cameras, fixed or embedded on systems such as an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) or cart, will be ingested into the Xi IoT platform through data pipelines and passed to Vision Insights for AI inferencing at the edge. This enables the creation of a digital twin of the warehouse and real-time analysis of a situation, which can include comprehensive visibility of a specific logistics process flow, number of pallets incorrectly positioned, wet or damaged package detection, or an operator not equipped with proper safety equipment. Any anomalies in the image recognition are sent to the Hardis Group cloud for deep learning purposes and the entire edge platform is managed by the Xi IoT SaaS management.

By bringing this new solution to market with Hardis Group as part of their new Vision Insights and IoT Insights programs, Nutanix helps its customers address common supply chain operations challenges such as efficiency, traceability and safety. Key benefits of this solution include:

  • Ability to centrally deploy, secure, monitor and manage the lifecycle of supply chain applications and AI models across thousands of edge locations
  • Capability to seamlessly work with existing remote camera deployments for a quick path to ROI
  • Support for a large variety of edge hardware devices to accommodate nearly any logistics facility 

By partnering with Nutanix’s Xi IoT platform, Hardis Group was able to focus on the business logic behind their Vision Insights program, and dramatically decrease the time to develop the application, go-to-market, onboard and prove ROI to its customers, as well as drastically improve IoT security, app debuggability and manageability.

“Historically, warehouse and supply chain managers have had to rely on manual processes to track warehouse logistics. With our joint solution, we’re helping customers improve the logistics performance in their factories, including upstream and downstream of their production lines, from the moment their components and raw materials arrive on-site, to storage and shipment of finished products. Customers can now seamlessly track and control routine processes through automation and IoT to improve efficiency, traceability and safety,” said Satyam Vaghani, Senior Vice President and General Manager of AI and IoT at Nutanix. “This partnership will bring better management of customer’s logistics flows by leveraging AI, advanced analytics and IoT to improve supply chain operations.”

“When we started developing this solution in the cloud, we quickly realised we needed a partner who was able to operationalise this at industrial scale at the edge. Nutanix and its Xi IoT platform was the right partner to assist us in doing so,” said Nicolas Odet, CEO of Hardis Group. “By working with Nutanix, we were able to drastically reduce the time this innovative solution was brought to market for our customers and help them accelerate their supply chain and digital transformation. We’re excited to continue working with Nutanix to scale and deploy these solutions worldwide.” 

Urban Resilience Critical to Combatting Climate Change Impact on Cities, says AESG Report

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New research article by AESG outlines key Urban Resilience design principles and best-practices and provides insight to enable cities to better mitigate the impact of climate change

With 68% of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, and a proven correlation between increases in urbanization and climate change, it is imperative for governments, city planners and developers to future-proof their cities by investing in urban resilience programs. AESG, a world leading Specialist Consulting, Engineering and Advisory firm, has released a new research article which presents clear guidance on urban resilience concepts and best practices. The company intends for this report, titled ‘Urban resilience: A look into global climate change impacts and possible design mitigation’, to aid governments, city planners, engineers, architects and developers in building resilient cities that can better tackle the urban challenges resulting from climate change.

Saeed Al Abbar, Managing Director at AESG advocates the need for a concerted effort by these stakeholders to mitigate the climate change impact on cities through better urban planning. “While the effects of climate change can be detrimental, a large majority of these can be alleviated by strengthening interdependent infrastructure systems and ensuring resilience on an infrastructure, policy and economic basis,” he said.

“Building resilience in cities is essential to not only make populations and infrastructure less susceptible to damage and loss, but to also make them more agile to the unpredictable nature of climate change impacts. We are at a pivotal moment in human history, and the actions we take today will bear profound impact on the security and quality of life, of us, and our future generations,” he added. 

The report, developed by AESG’s qualified team of sustainability, environmental and planning experts, stresses that achieving urban resilience necessitates planning a city at a macro-level, understanding interdependencies of its systems and implementing solutions to mitigate the anticipated risks. In addition to reporting the key climate related threats that cities today face, the article expertly analyses the innovative locational, structural and regulatory approaches being implemented globally to address a myriad of urban challenges.

Briefly summarizing the insight and guidance detailed in these best practices, Al Abbar said. “For city and municipal governments, resilience implies planning development, providing safe and affordable infrastructure and services, regulating building design and construction, regulating hazardous activities, influencing land availability and construction requirements, encouraging and supporting household and community actions to reduce risk, and finally, putting in place effective disaster early warning, preparedness, and response systems.”

A first in a planned series of urban resilience themed reports by AESG, the article focuses on showcasing the extent of the problem on a global level while recommending mitigation measures that could be incorporated from planning all the way through operation and maintenance. ‘Urban resilience: A look into global climate change impacts and possible design mitigation’is available as a free download from: https://aesg-me.com/urban-resilience-a-look-into-global-climate-change-impacts-and-possible-design-mitigation/

Visibility and Anomaly Detection in the Age of IoT

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By: Craig Sanderson, Senior Director of Security Products at Infoblox

Historically, organizations have struggled to gain visibility of what users, devices and applications are accessing their network infrastructure. If the maxim “you can’t protect what you can’t see” holds true, then the prospect of the Internet of Things (IoT) business transition which will result in billions of devices connecting to IP networks is a nightmare in waiting. Identification and classification of IoT devices is particularly problematic because the range of new device types leveraging the IP network is going to explode making it harder for IT security teams to manage and control policies that protect these new devices from themselves and the existing IP connected services.

Beyond controlling accessing and setting policy, IoT also presents a sizable headache when it comes to detecting breaches and enabling effective response. The plethora of protocols that IoT devices will leverage, spanning a broad range of vertical industries from Healthcare to Retail will make it hard for traditional security platforms to detect breaches. Malware sandboxes whose expertise is identifying abuse of well-known operating systems such as Windows servers will have a steep learning curve to apply the same detection for the bespoke applications running on proprietary software platforms. Instead organizations will have to rely heavily on secure IoT endpoint platforms to try and reduce the potential attack surface area. Surely there must be a simpler way to approach these problems. A common denominator that can cope with the breadth of platforms and devices that IoT will present.

That common denominator could well be an infrastructure that is already prevalent across all IP networks, whether they be corporate network, public clouds, next generation data centers and even the Internet. That infrastructure would be the DHCP, DNS and IP address management (DDI) infrastructure which for the past 30 years has provided internet scale to all IP connected devices. How could this ubiquitous infrastructure be applied to the address the challenges of IoT?

Device Identification and Classification

Starting with device identification and classification. IP connected IoT devices are going to require an IP address. If the addresses are statically provisioned organizations will need an IP address management platform to manage the IP address space, even more so given the dramatic increase in consumption of addresses. Even if the devices are going to use IPv6 where address space is not constrained, managing and tracking those addresses is an important operational need. Similarly, if the devices obtain their addresses dynamically, they will still need a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server to provide those addresses. In either case the centralized platforms that manage the IP address space will have a comprehensive view of what devices are on the network. More so, through the static address management process there is the opportunity to classify the device at the moment of provisioning. In the case of DHCP, the DHCP request from the IoT device provides a fingerprint that would enable the DHCP server to classify what devices is requesting an address. There does not seem to be any better common way to identify and classify the broad range of IoT devices than with an IP address management and DHCP platform.

Threat Detection

In the case of threat detection there is an advantage to protecting devices over users. Anomaly detection for users is difficult because it’s hard to predict what a user’s normal behaviour is. Machines on the other hand tend to be far more predictable which means anomaly detection could be a fruitful way of identifying compromised machines. One common means of applying anomaly detection across the breadth of IoT devices would be to leverage their DNS activity. Since statically configuring applications and services is impractical and not scalable, most IoT devices will leverage DNS to dynamically locate the services and platforms it needs to interact with. DNS provides that flexibility enabling services to be re-located between networks whilst maintaining a common point of reference: the fully qualified domain. 

On this premise, it’s possible to monitor and model the services the IoT device seeks to communicate with. If for example there is an IoT thermostat made by a manufacturer in Germany, it may communicate back to the manufacturer for software updates, leveraging DNS to resolve the address of the update server in Germany. DNS servers could model that behaviour and if the device began to deviate from its typical pattern of behaviour, perhaps by attempting to resolve services in a previously unknown location, that would provide an indication of compromise. The common need for IoT devices to use DNS to locate services provides a simple, scalable and consistent model for detecting potential breaches.

Given the looming challenges of IoT, it’s worth considering how the DNS and DHCP platforms that serve IT infrastructure today could be repurposed as a scalable tool for device classification and breach detection.

Aruba Named a Leader in IDC MarketScape Worldwide Enterprise Wireless LAN 2019 Vendor Assessment

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Marks Third Leading Global Research Firm to Recognize Aruba’s Leadership This Year

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today announced that it has been named a leader once again in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Enterprise Wireless LAN 2019 Vendor Assessment (Doc #US45066719, October 2019). This marks the fourth time that the IDC MarketScape has positioned HPE-Aruba as a leader.

Read a complimentary excerpt copy of the report here: https://connect.arubanetworks.com/2019IDCMarketscapeWLAN

Since the 2013-2014 inaugural version of this IDC MarketScape, HPE-Aruba has been recognized as a leader and, according to the IDC MarketScape, “has solidified itself as the number two vendor in terms of market share in the enterprise WLAN industry.”

The IDC MarketScape report is a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that explain a vendor’s chances for present and future success worldwide. The study assesses the capabilities and strategies of 11 enterprise WLAN vendors and evaluates each vendor based on its strengths and weaknesses. 

Of HPE-Aruba’s approach, the IDC MarketScape noted: “The flexibility of the company’s WLAN portfolio to span both on-premises and cloud-based management, along with a tightly-integrated switching platform, and robust management, security and analytics software tools combine to appeal to a broad spectrum of the market, from large enterprises to mid-size businesses.”

The IDC MarketScape specifically noted the strength of HPE-Aruba’s SD-Branch offering, the multiple management options available to customers with the cloud-based Aruba Central and on premises AirWave management platforms, and its “strong line of Ethernet switches, which creates a cohesive, single-vendor wired and wireless campus with advanced management, visibility and intelligence.” The IDC MarketScape also said that Aruba “receives among the highest marks for its breadth and depth of its customer support offerings, including the scope of its 24-hour support availability worldwide.”

“With the IDC MarketScape for Enterprise WLAN, Aruba has now been recognized as a leader by all of the leading research firms in the networking industry,” said Chris Kozup, chief marketing officer for Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “We’re gratified to see this recognition for our continued innovation, validated solutions and, of course, our long-time ‘customer first, customer last’ approach.”