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

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

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

CHANGED EXPECTATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

TOUCHLESS ACCESS CONTROL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OVER-THE-AIR CREDENTIALING

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

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

VISITOR MANAGEMENT

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

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

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

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

LOCATION SERVICES

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

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

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

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

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

MAKING THE MOST OF PACS TECHNOLOGIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other key findings of this year’s report include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Send in the digital health inspectors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empowering the New University

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

Continued Needs of the On-campus Model

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

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

Ensuring High Availability

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

Secure On-demand Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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