Co-authors: Dave Russell, Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam and Rick Vanover, Senior Director of product Strategy at Veeam

When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, enterprises’ first priority was to patch together a communications and information-sharing infrastructure that could sustain operations until work could return to normal. More than a year later, returns are on hold, and enterprises are rethinking their visions of “normal.” They’re reimagining their workplaces and their business practices – embracing more flexible models that take advantage of the benefits of edge technologies.

Edge computing is defined loosely as a model that brings computational, data storage and connectivity resources closer to the locations where they’re needed, saving bandwidth and accelerating response times. Edge technologies power millions of IoT applications in industrial, retail, healthcare and smart cities environments, and, prior to 2020, analysts expected an additional bump from virtual reality and 5G in the coming years.

Then the pandemic hit, and the need for edge technologies suddenly accelerated. As millions of workers shifted out of enterprise hubs into more remote locations, they put a strain on networks, creating increased latency and a greater need for computer power, capacity, and storage closer to the new network edge.

It’s not just workers connecting on Zoom occupying this new edge. Video editors working from home are transmitting huge files, schools are engaging thousands of students in online classes, and physicians are conducting remote health visits where high-res images are posted and circulated. Investing in edge solutions that process data locally and enable more seamless connections avoids having to slog through increasingly overburdened public networks.

The result: a boom in edge-related hardware, software and applications. Analysts are predicting a major growth spurt at the edge, rocketing up 30 percent a year to $44.0 billion by 2030.

As enterprises accelerate investments in digital transformation projects, edge technologies will open up new opportunities to succeed in the marketplace. Here are a few areas where they’ll play prominent roles.

Customer service

Customers, of course, can be demanding. They want choices, information, intuitive purchasing options, respect for their privacy and, at times, a little coddling. Businesses can respond better in transactional situations if they can have information and insights available in the moment. This plays right to the strengths of edge applications.

Retailers, for instance, can use edge devices with web caching functions to replicate online customer experiences in the physical world. They can capture customer information, apply insights from shopping patterns, process connections in real time and be ready to serve the customer better at key points of the buying journey.

Outside the store, changeable digital displays can broadcast pop-up sales to attract customers inside. As customers enter, the network connects to their personal devices and access their purchase history. Customers then can request customized coupons or connect to personalized shopper assistance. Inside the store, strategically positioned kiosks and screens display customized promotional offers based on each shopper’s buying patterns.

Sales associates can use digital assistant devices to check updated inventory levels or gather insider product information. Easy-to-use product finder displays can steer customers to the right products based on individual, self-selected preferences.

Security

The proliferation of edge computing applications has significant – and seemingly contradictory – ramifications for security.

On one hand, adding more nodes opens up more places vulnerable to attack. This will force IT security leaders to bolster their defenses to ensure that information and applications stored at the edge match the strength their applying inside the data center itself.

At the same time, edge computing’s decentralized nature brings some security benefits. If an edge device is breached, security teams can easily wall off the endpoint so the attack doesn’t spread to the whole network. They can also configure their edge models to keep more data at the endpoints and limit the amount of information that gets sent back to home office. That adds an extra layer of security, keeping threats away from the data center, where more mission-critical resources are stored.

To optimize the security of an edge-enabled system, organizations will need to establish strong governance programs to control the data that’s being generated, processed and transferred from individual sites.

Plus, since IoT devices are tough to secure, it’s important that the edge computing deployment emphasizes proper management of the devices themselves. They’ll need to establish policy-driven configuration enforcement and security for computing and storage, paying special attention to encryption of data at rest and in flight.

While edge security isn’t a new concept, the scale of the challenge has grown with the expansion of remote work and on-site IoT-related applications. Solving these edge security issues will be a top priority in 2021 and beyond.

Democratizing technology

Gartner identified democratization as one of its top ten strategic technology trends for the enterprise in 2020. While the projection focuses mainly on a broader sharing of technical and business domain expertise, it can be extended to include an increase in democratization of commerce itself – enabled by the growth of edge technologies.

The edge’s ability to aggregate, process and analyze data locally opens up new opportunities for entrepreneurial ventures outside major hubs of commerce. Data will be cheaper to manage, and it will be available to larger pools of talent. Startup and operational costs will be lower, creating a budding market for new ventures in new and existing industries.

The democratization will be driven, in part, by society’s move to remote work. Home-based businesses will create their own individual edge outlets, and organizations will establish regional edge hubs to serve growing numbers of remote employees and contractors. And, telecommunications providers will shore up edge hubs and leverage faster 5G to lighten the traffic loads that are bogging down today’s suddenly overburdened networks.

Gartner’s trend prediction projects four key elements of democratization to accelerate through 2023. These include the democratization of data and analytics (tools targeting data scientists expanding to target the professional developer community), development (AI tools to leverage in custom-developed applications), design (expanding on the low-code, no-code phenomena with automation of additional application development functions to empower the citizen-developer) and knowledge (non-IT professionals gaining access to tools and expert systems that empower them to exploit and apply specialized skills beyond their own expertise and training).

We will see edge technologies pushing commerce into the mix starting this year.

#GlobalTrendMonitor  #Veeam #Technology #Security #AI #IT #magazineUAE #magazine #mediaUAE #UAEbusiness #myDubai 

Interview with Ahmed Nasser Co-Founder of Odiggo

Shereen Shabnam

We recently had coffee at the Shangri La Dubai with Ahmed Nasser, Co-Founder and President of Odiggo, a one-stop-shop for everything you need for your vehicle. He tells us how the business started and how e-commerce is empowering the younger generation to come up with new ways to do business.

Odiggo is an app that connects all car owners with the best quality car parts at the lowest prices possible. It is perfect for those who wouldn’t know where to start when it comes to buying parts for their cars and need to know who has the capability to do the job and at what price.

The global market for the auto parts and accessories manufacturing industry is currently valued at US$2 Trillion and is one of the top 10 industries in the world. It is a $61 billion (AED224 billion) industry in the Middle East and Africa alone which is a brilliant opportunity for Odiggo to use its E-commerce expertise to transcend the market and become the leading company in the industry.

How did Odiggo start?

It started with Ahmed Omar who was keen on e-commerce after he sold his dad’s bike online and received part of the sales. His career and journey to Germany and the USA exposed him to the potential of e-commerce and on return to Cairo, he started  new ventures with friends. In 2017, Omar launched an online with friends for used and new cars and called it Kasr-Zero with a supporting online marketplace that offers car spare parts.

It was in 2019 that we set up Odiggo which means ‘drive’ and now has revenues that have increased from 6 million to 100 million.

How big are you?

We operate in Egypt and have just launched in the UAE. Our team and investors are all over the world but the core team is about 35 people strong.

What do you offer via the App and how does the back-end technology work?

We offer a one-stop-shop for everything you need for your vehicle and the app connects all car owners with the best quality car parts at the lowest prices possible with best service provider at your doorstep including offering customers free car washes.

Describe your target audience?

There are two apps – one for customer and one for supplier. We target individual car owners and look after any type of car. We are also getting requests for our services from businesses now as well.

Are there any expansion plans?

We intend to expand to Saudi and then to other parts of the world but we also intend to expand our services and look after not just cars but also bikes and trucks in the future.

How do you select suppliers?

There is a criteria as we initially focus on the top 20 who hold the highest market share because of their track record reputation and size. Once they get a taste of the reach we have, they stay and this encourages the rest of the market to come on board. Currently we are a market leader in Egypt because of the due diligence done on our suppliers.

What’s next for Odiggo?

We will be connecting the car directly with the app using our deep-tech dashboard. By doing this we will know the accurate diagnosis of the car at the right time. This offers the best customer experience as we hope to use AI technology for OBD (On-Board Diagnostics), and enhance vehicle’s self- diagnostic and reporting capability allowing us to get data to identify between 2-3K errors in a car. This is a gamechanger for us and will see us grow tenfold in the future.

#GlobalTrendMonitor #technology #App #Software #Odiggo #Business #interview #magazineUAE #magazine #mediaUAE #UAEbusiness #myDubai 

Virsec, the industry leader in application-aware workload protection, announced that regional companies emerging out of the pandemic are accelerating their investments into digital transformation. They are increasingly concerned about the everyday announcements of cybersecurity compromises at large and medium enterprises, global and regional.

As organizations face growing sophistication of cyberattacks, the demand for effective solutions is skyrocketing. Advanced attack techniques, that execute at runtime in the memory layer, have become mainstream and companies are struggling to combat them.

Virsec Security Platform delivers a powerful solution for container workload protection with runtime visibility and zero-dwell-time defense throughout running container images, including binaries, libraries, interpreted code, and memory.

“It is imperative we change the way we think about the protection of our assets and infrastructure. Conventional security tools, like blacklisting models, were designed to address yesterday’s challenges, and we can’t continue to accept these offerings as the ideal option to mitigate advanced threat scenarios,” said Bobby Gupta, Senior Vice President and Managing Director International, Virsec.

With more than 50 patents, Virsec provides the first and only application-aware workload protection platform that incorporates System Integrity Assurance, Application Control and Memory Protection into a single solution. Virsec delivers in-depth visibility across the entire workload and detects and blocks known and unknown threats that remain concealed by heuristic and endpoint security solutions.

“Security has entered a third wave, driven by the skyrocketing success of more damaging and sophisticated attacks across cloud workloads and virtual server infrastructure,” says Jim Routh, Chief Security Advisor and Board Participant at Virsec. “It is time for security to be re-evaluated at its deepest levels and approached holistically by integrating security into IT and application infrastructure in runtime across a broad range of IT environments and application languages. Virsec has pioneered this approach with its breakthrough platform.”

The Virsec solution maps the expected performance of each application on a workload and protects the memory those applications use to execute. Virsec ensures that the components of those applications are correct and unmodified before they are allowed to execute, and any deviation from the norm is treated as a threat.

Virsec also reported significant momentum in the first half of 2021 with strong revenue growth, strategic customer validation and testing, and industry acceptance of its non-traditional approach to reducing cyber threats.

Virsec’s growth correlates with increasing board-level concerns about the financial, safety, and intellectual property impacts of evolving threat scenarios and the subsequent need to have deeper visibility into application workloads at runtime.

By: PG Menon, Director of Marketing at Infoblox

Cloud-native technologies transform businesses at a global scale

Companies like Amazon and Netflix leveraged cloud technologies to go from being mail order companies to some of the world’s largest consumer on-demand businesses. Cloud-native technologies empowered them to make this transition by providing increased agility and productivity, improved scalability and reliability, and lower costs.

In a borderless enterprise identity is the new perimeter

DNS, DHCP and IP address management collectively automates network connectivity and provides visibility into network connected devices. They enable a foundational layer of visibility and security for your network. Network identity has long been used as a means for authentication and authorization because it ensures you are who you say you are, and, only allows you to do what you are permitted to do no matter where you are located and or your access method.

Identity now includes human users, devices and applications

In transitioning to cloud, the different types of cloud-native applications developed and deployed by organizations such as microservices, web applications or bots are inherently different than human identities and require additional oversight. For example, in operation, Kubernetes requires access to registries on the internet to download various containerized micro-services. There may be hundreds or even thousands of identities accessing resources across an enterprise network on a regular basis, each with its own unique set of circumstances.

Volume and variety of corporate identities are plaguing enterprise IT

Per IDC, it is not uncommon for applications to use their own LDAP directories. Managing those directories and controlling risk is a problem. Enterprise IT simply doesn’t have the level of visibility required to truly understand which identities are performing what actions on their critical resources across multiple and vastly different cloud operating models. Moreover, the identity teams don’t have the time or expertise to keep up with the proliferation of privileges, roles, resources and services across multiple cloud platforms.

ML and AI has transformed identity management

Identity lies in the core of security. Traditional identity mechanisms don’t apply to modern and often hybrid workloads. Runtime authorization decisions are now made within, applications. One integrated platform instead of several discrete Identity and Access Management solutions consumed in a SaaS-delivered manner is the answer. In addition, an ML/AI-driven approach that automates the identity management processes can improve operational efficiencies. AI and ML technologies continuously monitor access relationships and patterns for every cloud resource and aligns with zero trust network access (ZTNA) model for the enterprise.