Alaris, a Kodak Alaris business, has announced its participation at GITEX Technology Week taking place between 06 -10 October 2019 at the Dubai World Trade Centre. This year the company will focus on educating trade show attendees about the importance of intelligently re-engineering and automating business processes in order to increase agility and efficiency. 

Naji Kazak, General Manager – Middle East, Africa, Turkey & Russia at Alaris, a Kodak Alaris business says, “Digital transformation is high on every CIOs agenda today. However, we find that a gap still exists between digitisation and automation. There are plenty of business process workflows out there that are digitised but not yet fully automated. We still see lots of steps, lots of hands on a process from start to finish, and every one of those interactions costs money, opens up compliance risks and introduces errors.”

“We are eager to work with regional organizations in identifying the various inefficiencies in their workflows and then providing an end-to-end solution, using our market leading and award winning hardware, software and professional services. In this context, GITEX is a very important platform as it helps us to expose our brand and capabilities to potential customers and the channel community. We have several exciting announcements including new document scanners, service offerings and a new partner programme.”

True digital transformation demands dramatic change—new ways of thinking for a new era. Alaris embraces change and discovers innovative ways to think about what’s possible. The company’s custom solutions uniquely combine imaging science, artificial intelligence and advanced process automation to turn clutter into clarity and data into a powerful competitive advantage. The Alaris IN2 Ecosystem brings together document scanners, software and services, delivered by a network of trusted partners, to capture information that integrates with an organization’s business applications. 

Businesses of all kinds want to make their processes more efficient, and Alaris offers the right technology to optimize workflows that involves paper. At GITEX, the company will showcase its range of award winning desktop, departmental and production scannerswith intelligent automated features. 

A big focus at GITEX will be on the company’s software portfolio. Efficient operations are all about getting it right – delivering the right information to the right person at the right time. That single-mindedness on doing it right lets an organization get information from documents into its systems to make fast decisions, at a lower cost and with improved customer outcomes. In line with this, the Alaris software portfolioaccurately extracts data from paper documents and routs it to the desired location – no matter if it’s a local folder, cloud service, ECM system or integrated line of business application. Alaris Info Input Solutiongives companies the freedom to capture documents through a web browser or mobile device, and scaling across departments and enterprises is fast and secure. For high volume operations like service bureaus and mailrooms, Alaris Capture Pro Softwaregives the greatest ability to effectively manage scanning workflows  and take the manual steps out of the image capture process.

Furthering its commitment to help organizations in their digital transformation journey, Alaris recently announced a global strategic alliance with TAIGER, a visionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, to integrate its AI-based software with Alaris’ award-winning document scanners to simplify information intensive business processes. The collaboration will help end-users intelligently automate complex business tasks and drive greater efficiency in the workplace. Alaris will be exhibiting at GITEX as part of its distributor Mindware’s stand No. E1 in Hall 3 at the Dubai World Trade Centre. 

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company has announced the appointment of Jacob Chacko as its Regional Lead for Middle East (UAE, Qatar, Saudi, Egypt, Gulf & Levant). Jacob will assume responsibility of the regional sales organization and will strive to grow market share and revenues with partners, alliances and associates, strengthening Aruba’s position in the region. Based out of Dubai, he will report directly to Jose Vasco, the company’s Regional Director, Central Europe Middle East and Africa.

“Jacob has been with HPE for the last 9 years and he has worked across the spectrum of the business. I am confident that his knowledge about the business and his techno commercial acumen will surely be of great value and help us grow the regional business. Jacob has close to 21 years of experience in the networking industry and his experience across sales, channel, distribution and category will give an impetus to our efforts in the region and take our business to the next level,” said Jose Vasco. 

Commenting on his appointment, Jacob explained, “I am excited to be a part of this team. 2019 will be an important year of change in the networking industry as innovations from recent years begin to reach the crest of their impact, and a variety of new technologies just hitting the market now will pave the way for future innovation in the coming years. Our focus is to enhance our regional structure, continue to develop our partner network and increase our product and services portfolio to further build on our market leadership.”

Anker Innovations is geared up to make the back to school shopping more rewarding for students and teachers with a selection of gadgets that gives everyone in the education sector a head start into the new school year with confidence.

Stride into the classroom equipped with gadgets below that would satisfy the most tech-savvy students and teachers looking for productivity during studies and entertainment during recess and free time.

PowerCore II 10000 – White A1230H21 

It can get frustrating when one runs out of charge in school but the sleek and ultra-compact 10000mAh portable charger from Anker provides high-speed charging with PowerIQ 2.0.

Providing three phone charges with Anker’s new generation advanced smart-charging technology, the Powercore IIadapts to your device’s unique charging protocol to deliver a tailored, blazing-fast charge. Mum’s can get fully charged up in between school runs in as little as 4 hours using a Quick Charge charger and stay in contact with the family all day long.

PowerLine II 3ft Lightning –red color A8453H91

Having frayed wires wrapped up in the school or computer bag can be a drag but with PowerLine II 3ft Lightning, the world’s most durable cable, worry about wires becomes alien as it is not only safe to use and walk around with but comes in a red colour that is easy to spot in the handbag and not easily mixed with other cables.

PowerLine’s cable tolerates being bent over 12000 times along with any knocks, drops, twists or yanks thrown at it. The MFi certification means total peace of mind because it is designed to work flawlessly with devices having a Lightning port. Lasting for an entire lifetime, it really will be a cable that helps keep you and your mum in touch at all times.

Liberty Air

Liberty Air wireless earbuds deliver enhanced audio experience, long lasting battery life and unbreakable connections for the most active students and teachers listening to classes.

The wireless, comfortable and fuss free earphones are relatively small size, provides pure freedom,are automatically connected to a user’s phone via Bluetooth and features a tap based voice assistant that works with Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby and Alexa. 

The charging case takes the total playtime up to 20 hours and has the added feature of LED lights, which will show battery life. The swappable silicone tips allow for more flexibility in terms of fit and available in black or white.

Nebula Capsule II 

Perfect for class presentations is the Nebula Capsule II, a next generation compact pocket cinema that hosts new capabilities including Android TV, Google Assistant, HD picture quality and improved audio.

Nebula Capsule is perfect for students which brings great content to you via Google Play, YouTube, Hulu Plus or apps that appear automatically in your home screen.

Nebula Capsule’s sleek, black cylindrical body measures in at 5.9 inches high and can be easily transported in the included carrying sleeve. Capsule II is now able to project a 720p image at 200 ANSI lumens and provides 3-hours of video playtime or 30 hours of Bluetooth speaker on a single charge.

Leveraging Anker’s Power Delivery technology, Capsule II can charge to full power in 2.5 hours via USB-C. Capsule II offers owners an advanced audio-visual experience, anytime, anywhere.

NetApp expands the EF-Series to help customers access their data faster and speed time to actionable decisions

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), the data authority for hybrid cloud, today announced the NetApp^®EF600 storage array.The EF600 is an end-to-end NVMe midrange array that accelerates access to data and empowers companies to rapidly develop new insights for performance-sensitive workloads.

Organizations are looking for ways to improve the speed and responsiveness of the applications that control their critical business operations. Because application performance is a key driver of time to market, revenue, and customer satisfaction, it’s crucial that companies operate at the highest levels with maximum efficiency. The end-to-end NVMe EF600 array doubles the performance of currently available all-flash arrays that use the serial-attached SCSI (SAS) protocol. NetApp is leading in thisoffering as companies continue to make the move to flash. This technology allows organizationsto accelerate write IOPS and read/write throughput with an end-to-end NVMe storage system that’s purpose-built for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

“The storage industry is currently transitioning from the SAS to the NVMe protocol, which significantly increases the speed of access to data,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Research. “But conventional storage systems do not fully exploit NVMe performance, because of latencies imposed by their main controllers. NetApp’s E-Series systems were designed to address this architectural issue and are already used widely in performance-sensitive applications. The EF600 sets a new level of performance for the E-Series by introducing end-to-end support for NVMe, and should be considered by IT organizations looking for high-speed storage to serve analytics and other data-intensive applications.”

“NetApp has been a leader in supporting Mellanox NVMe-oF network controllers on their EF-Series and E-Series arrays, including both NVMe/IB and NVMe/RoCE available now with the latest EF600 platform,” said Rob Davis, vice president of storage technology at Mellanox. “We look forward to continuing our partnership of innovation with NetApp to accelerate the industry’s transition to NVMe-oF.” 

“Organizations demand high performance and fast access to their datain order to makedecisions that positively impact business operations,” said Fadi Kanafani, Middle East Managing Director & General Manager, NetApp. “The EF600 offers customers the ability to unlock the value of their data and rapidly develop insights that were previously unrealistic for performance-sensitive workloads such as Oracle databases, real-time analytics, and high-performance computing applications on top of a BeeGFS high-performance parallel file system.”

The EF600 all-flash array delivers 2 million sustained IOPS, response times under 100 microseconds, and 44GBps of throughput and offers a leading price/performance ratio for enterprise workloads. With the array’s trusted simplicity, the modular design and simple management tools make it easy to scale the EF600 without adding management complexity. 

Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced that the Gulf Stevedoring Contracting Company (GSCCO), a port operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is leveraging Nutanix software to increase IT capacity to support growing operations across Saudi port facilities while also reducing IT management overhead. This includes successfully accommodating a 50% spike in container volumes with no impact on operational efficiency.

As the organisation responsible for the management of three major port container and bulk terminals in Saudi Arabia, GSCCO is fully committed to supporting the government’s Saudi Vision 2030 agenda for economic diversification. Scalable, reliable and easy to manage IT systems are recognised as key to delivering this agenda. This has meant the company both virtualizing existing workloads and replacing its end-of-life physical infrastructure with a more flexible and scalable hyperconverged software solution to cope with predicted increases in customer demand.

“We wanted a solution that would deliver linear scalability to handle rapid growth in container traffic,” explains Hossam El-Masry, Information Technology Manager at GSCCO. “We were also looking for greater resiliency and the ability to upgrade and manage the infrastructure without any downtime or impact in any way on the level of service provided to staff and customers at the ports we manage.”

Following a comprehensive evaluation of hyperconverged solutions from a number of vendors, the team at GSCCO decided on Nutanix, whose solution enables the company to reach a milestone of 50 percent growth in container traffic well ahead of schedule while significantly lowering operational overhead.

“The Nutanix software delivered fully on its promise of cloud-like scalability, enabling us to add additional nodes in hours rather than days or even weeks with the old hardware and software, and with no downtime. We now also have a much more resilient infrastructure allowing us to keep the ports running at all times with no disruption in service during maintenance and rapid failover to our recovery site to enable us to keep the ports working should we suffer a power outage or other problem,” said El-Masry.

Migration to Nutanix HCI software has led to a significant increase in performance and greater capacity, saving in rack space and a significant reduction in associated datacenter power and cooling overhead. The implementation success has freed up time for the support team to manage all physical and virtual resources across two sites with just one Nutanix management console, thus enabling them to spend more time supporting users and planning for further developments.

“Not only have we saved on capital IT spending, we have also achieved a saving of around 15 percent in terms of OpEx,” commented El-Masry.

Looking to the future, the company is evaluating the possible use of public cloud services, process automation and support for the Internet of Things (IoT), doing so confident in the knowledge that the Nutanix solution is uniquely equipped to enable them to take advantage of these and other new technologies and do so at minimal risk and expense.

“With zero downtime even during major capacity upgrades, migration to Nutanix has revolutionised our IT infrastructure, making it quicker, more reliable and much easier to both scale and manage. We simply couldn’t have handled the recent massive growth in container traffic without Nutanix software,” concluded El-Masry.

Aaron White, Regional Director, Middle East at Nutanix commented: “GCSSO has proved that it is a forward-thinking organization by embracing the latest data center and cloud technologies in order to streamline its operations and prepare for future expansion. We are very happy that through GCSSO’s deployment of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Solution, Nutanix is able to clearly demonstrate the benefits of an efficient, reliable and modern cloud infrastructure.” 

Further augmenting its capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for cybersecurity, Help AGtoday announced a new partnership with Exabeam, the Smarter SIEM™ company. As the Middle East focus partner for Exabeam, Help AG will bring to market Exabeam’s industry-leading security information and event management (SIEM) and user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) solutions. This will empower regional enterprises to detect, investigate and respond to cyberattacks more efficiently and effectively.

This new partnership is in line with Help AG’s AI strategy. Over the last year, the security services and solutions provider has worked closely with several industry-leading technology vendors to develop and deliver practical and impactful use-cases for AI in the context of cybersecurity. 

Explaining how Exabeam furthers this strategy, Stephan Berner, CEO at Help AG said, “Through the application of AI to critical labour-intensive tasks, Exabeam expertly enables cybersecurity teams to refocus their efforts on risk rather than events. This is especially beneficial in the region, as these solutions can alleviate the workload on understaffed IT teams, while delivering an elevated ability to detect and mitigate the impact of complex cyberattacks.”

Exabeam is a recognised leader in the SIEM and UEBA marketplace. It offers the comprehensive  Exabeam Security Management Platform (SMP) that enables organizations to take advantage of big data, advanced analytics, and automation capabilities toreduce time to investigate and contain threats by 51 percent. Exabeam’s solutions integrate seamlessly with key technologies in Help AG’s portfolio – such as security solutions from Splunk and Vectra – as well as with cloud environments such as Microsoft Office 365, AWS, Google, and Salesforce. These integrations allow Help AG to unlock the full potential of our customers’ existing cybersecurity investments.

“Exabeam’s solutions perfectly complement the security technologies that form the core of Help AG’s product portfolio, thereby enabling us to create highly effective turn-key solutions for our customers. Furthermore, we have deployed these solutions within our own Cybersecurity Operations Centre (CSOC), thereby enhancing our 24×7 Managed Security Services (MSS) offering,” Berner said.

“As a truly advanced provider of cybersecurity services in the Middle East, Help AG is an ideal partner for Exabeam,” said Brett Candon, VP, EMEA Channels, Exabeam. “Together, we can help more enterprises investigate and respond to security events in minutes, not days, and enable security operations center analysts to work smarter. They are a welcome addition to our Exabeam Partner Program.”

By Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East, Fortinet

Does the arrival of summertime remind you of warm sunny days, the sizzle of the grill, trips to the beach, or the electricity of the crowd at the ballpark at the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, as the home team’s star hitter steps up to bat?

Summertime living might be easy, but if relaxation brings a lack of vigilance, it can have devastating consequences for potential cybercrime victims. And the warmer months do come with some unique security risks, especially for IT teams working at stadiums and major event venues.

Summer is prime season for outdoor concerts, music festivals, and sporting events, when people tend to gather, both physically and online. And as a recent Fortinet Threat Landscape Report shows, attacks are increasing, cybercriminals are wily and shrewd, and are willing to take advantage of opportunities—both technical and human—wherever they can find them.

During the season when people gather, it’s essential for IT teams to be on guard against cyber attackers targeting crowds – especially on stadium and venue networks. If an event has brought thousands or even tens of thousands, of people together, it’s all too likely that most of those people are also using a mobile device connected to your wireless access points, and as a result, someone there will also be looking for ways to exploit your wireless network to target attendees.

Olympic Destroyer Sets the Precedent

Cyberattacks targeting stadiums, arenas, or event sites are nothing new. Cybercriminals are willing to target any element of a venue’s potential attack surface in order to compromise internal systems as well as the devices of paying customers. As we noted in last year’s Q1 Threat Landscape Report, an attack made headlines around the world when it disrupted the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Though the majority of cybercriminals are motivated by the desire for financial gain, high-profile events like the Olympic Games also make attractive targets for politically motivated threat actors, or for those seeking to alter the competition’s outcome by tampering with scoring equipment or monitoring systems. If they manage to cause damage, millions of eyes will be watching them do it.

With this in mind, IT and security teams at venues need to be aware of what poses the greatest risk to their own and customer security, and how to minimize that risk while meeting user demands and increased traffic.

Fans are the Biggest Target

At any major event, the fans connecting to your network are the cybercriminal’s most likely prey. In the excitement leading up to the big day, people attending a game or concert may be more likely to click on fraudulent websites or phishing emails related to the event. Attackers are also using a number of ticket generation sites to sell fake tickets before events even start. Once there, attendees may also fall victim to credit card skimmers or keyloggers at stadium ATMs. IT staff should be coordinating with the ATM providers to ensure these devices are secure and have not been tampered with.

It is also possible that attackers could target critical stadium infrastructure, like lighting systems or power supplies. However, a cybercriminal’s most probable target—because it can allow them access to the treasure trove of financial data stored on users’ mobile phones—is the event site’s Wi-Fi network. Nearly every large-capacity stadium, major league ballpark, or noteworthy concert venue today offers free Wi-Fi connectivity to the public. Younger fans, in particular, have come to expect faster and more reliable access to data than 3G/4G cellular networks can provide.

Unfortunately, many wireless networks, especially if improperly segmented and secured, are vulnerable to malware injection or man-in-the-middle attacks. Given the sheer size of many crowds, man-in-the-middle attacks can be especially difficult to detect. To reduce risk, venue IT teams must be up on the latest threat intelligence concerning Wi-Fi and router attacks, as well as the tools that are able to identify and pinpoint rogue access points so steps can be taken to remove them.

Wireless Networks Are Common Cyber Targets

Wireless routers are common targets for exploit. With this is mind, the challenge in securing these large events comes down to venue IT teams enforcing appropriate logical segmentation and segregation in its wireless network architecture.

Monitoring the huge spike in traffic that sporting events or concert attendees generate for a relatively brief period of time is a major challenge. It’s critical that IT teams maintain strong network segmentation during the event’s traffic spike, as well as ensure the physical security of the wireless access points and the ports they’re connected to. They also need to continually monitor for the presence of “evil twin” wireless networks set up in or near their facility to ensure attendees connect to the actual stadium network, and not a spoofed imitation set up by criminals to harvest their data or credentials.

Take a Look at the Security of Your Streaming Services

Even though the focus of this article is on protecting your physical venue, today’s marketplace, driven by digital transformation, requires that security be extended to online services. Many organizations are supplementing their revenue by offering streaming services. As a result, a number of cybercriminals are offering free lifetime passes to popular streaming services. These hacked accounts are available on the dark web, often for around $10 USD, and can take a serious bite out of not only streaming services revenue, but ticket sales, as individuals may be less willing to pay for tickets to an event that they can stream for virtually free.

You should also regularly check application stores and search for online sites to ensure that hacked or unauthorized versions of your application aren’t being offered, and coordinate with law enforcement to shut down free services being offered on illegal commerce sites on the Dark Web.

Taking an Integrated Approach to Event Cybersecurity

An integrated, end-to-end approach can help protect event sites and fans against cyber threats.

The key element in securing large-scale network architectures and infrastructures that need to handle tens of thousands of data connections on a temporary basis is appropriate logical segmentation. Traffic containing payment information (used for food orders, merchandise kiosks, or ticketing) should be isolated from internal traffic (facility maintenance IT systems, for instance), which should, in turn, be isolated from team and player communication traffic. Likewise, the wireless Internet access provided to fans should restrict them from communicating directly with each other, and should include filters and firewall policies to prevent user-on-user attacks.

Ultimately, the most successful approaches to this significant security challenge are those that rely on a comprehensive Security Fabric approach. Combining internal segmentation firewalls (ISFWs) with integrated security tools and sensors deployed across the environment, a proactively designed security fabric can detect and filter out attack traffic and prevent criminals from exploiting mobile application vulnerabilities. Additionally, secure wireless equipment can recognize spoofed wireless networks, and automatically alert the SOC to take action.

Securing major event venues as thousands of mobile devices attempt to connect to the network is a daunting task. By staying up to date on common WI-FI attack vectors and threat intelligence, event IT teams can implement the necessary controls and strategies to thwart cyberattacks, allowing everyone to just go back to enjoying their summer.