To coincide with the occasion of Mother’s Day, taking place on the 21^st of March, AESG today announced the implementation of its new maternity policy aimed at fostering more equitable and gender-neutral career growth opportunities across its organisation. The policy generously extends on the UAE’s labour laws by offering 90-days paid leave, with an additional 90-days of optional unpaid leave, to its female staff in the UAE.

According to AESG, the policy is in line with its commitment to being an equal-opportunity employer which has organically resulted in its industry-leading gender ratio with women representing 46% of office staff and 42% of senior leadership positions. While the announcement will stand to make employment at AESG a more attractive proposition for aspiring female professionals in the construction industry, the company has cited its desire to empower its female employees to ‘thrive in both work and family life’ as the foremost reason for this decision.

“It’s all too common for women to have to place their careers on hold following their decision to have children. This is a contributing factor to why we see gender disparity, especially in senior management and leadership positions, in our sector,” explained Phillipa Grant, Director of Energy and Sustainable Development at AESG. “We are proud of the fact that women at AESG – by virtue of their merit and our company’s fairness policies – are already well represented in senior positions. With the implementation of these new provisions, we hope to ease the transition into motherhood while giving our female employees the confidence that the hard-work and progress they have made in their careers will be safeguarded.”

While making this announcement, AESG reiterated that it follows world-class project management workflows that incorporate industry best-practices which ensure that the quality of its services and progress of projects will remain unimpacted by the new policy. “We have always implemented a ‘soft-handover’ process with a sufficiently long duration. This has served to ensure that newly assigned team members have an in-depth understanding of the project and their responsibilities much before the actual transition takes place,” said Grant.

Following the global success of its solution, the company has now unveiled the Smart Platform in the region with purpose-built use cases for the energy, oil & gas, utilities, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and hospitality sectors

Dimension Data, a leading global systems integrator and managed services provider, today launched its Smart Platform in the Middle East. Having successfully expanded on its award-winning Smart City and Smart Sport solution – which has enhanced public safety, emergency response, situational awareness, and urban planning in modern cities – the company has now tailored the Platform for application in the energy, oil & gas, utilities, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and hospitality sectors.

At its core, Dimension Data’s Smart Platform is a big data analytics and machine learning engine that collates and analyses vast amounts of data to generate problem solving insights and predictions that enable organizations to meet business objectives such as data monetisation, user experience improvement, safety enhancement, marketing optimization, and client satisfaction and retention.

“To succeed in the data economy, businesses need to unlock the potential of their data. For this, they need enterprise-class tools that break down silos and transform the deluge of data into rich actionable analytics,” explained Redouane Gaouar, Director Go-to-Market Practices and Strategic Partner Alliances at Dimension Data Middle East. “We help clients to develop and execute their innovation agenda by using new and emerging technologies to disrupt existing business models and achieve business outcomes faster. Our Smart Platform is the result of our co-innovation with partners and clients. It has proven its ability to help governments and organisations use their data more effectively to make informed decisions.”

Dimension Data’s Smart Platform has been purpose-built to offer the utmost flexibility, scalability and agility, enabling organisations to integrate advanced technologies like IoT, connectivity, edge computing, security, storage, data processing, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) into the solution at the pace that is right for their business.

The system is based on a model that combines elements which perform recognition and detection at the network edge to analyse and predict trends using AI. It is a smart behaviour analytics platform that leverages machine learning for real-time processing, discovery, understanding, analysis the continuous time-serial data collection from agnostic sources. In this way, it enhances the predictive power of machine learning models, allowing clients to focus on deriving business insights and enhancing business decisions making.

The Smart Platform is interoperable with multiple technologies, facilitating its integration within different environments. It thus allows businesses to protect their existing IT investments, while utilising the Platform’s open architecture to design, implement, integrate and operate at the highest levels of automation and flexibility. As it is built from the ground up as a cloud-native application, with the utilization of micro-services and open APIs, the Smart Platform enables integration with any third party system for data extraction, normalization and application of AI, ML and Analytics functions for any use case. The Platform includes Dimension Data’s in-house developed multi-orchestrator which gives the ability to manage complex infrastructure environments and deploy the Smart Platform anywhere – on-premise in private data centres, on public clouds, or in hybrid cloud environments.

Dimension Data will extend full maintenance and support services for its Smart Platform. For customers that choose to act autonomously post-deployment, the company will offer a comprehensive training regimen that fully prepares in-house IT teams to independently support and maintain the system.

“We’re excited to offer businesses across a myriad of industry verticals a convenient and cost-effective path to realising the full value of their data. The tailored use cases we have designed for the urban planning and administration and the different industries greatly simplify roll-out of the platform while accelerating ROI and driving tangible business outcomes. The clients and partners that we have engaged with so far in the Middle East are acknowledging a lot of uniqueness in our Smart Platform value proposition. We put our society at the forefront of our consideration, and we are excited with the idea to bring value to our citizens, public and private organisations by leveraging such outcome-oriented proven solutions,” concluded Gaouar.

Aruba Air Pass roaming service, combined with Aruba Air Slice radio resource management, delivers seamless, secure mobility between cellular and enterprise networks with carrier-grade Quality of Service

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today announced the introduction of its new roaming service designed to enablecellular subscribers to securely and automatically roam onto participating Aruba enterprise Wi-Fi networks. The new service, called Aruba Air Pass, allows for a seamless hand-off between cellular and Wi-Fi networks, without sacrificing security or quality of service. When used in conjunction with Aruba Air Slice, an Aruba technology that improves radio performance, telcos can extend their 5G footprint into the enterpriseand enable seamless Wi-Fi calling and gigabit-class guaranteed performance.

Due to evolving building codes, energy efficient construction materials and low-emission glass, cellular signals are challenged when penetrating buildings, resulting in dramatically diminished performance. To solve this problem, Aruba customers can easily leverage their existing enterprise Wi-Fi infrastructure as a cost-effective alternative to deploying indoor small cells or distributed antenna systems (DAS). Because 5G standards support aggregation of both 3GPP and Wi-Fi radio access networks (RANs), global telcos can leverage Wi-Fi as an indoor onramp to 5G services to deliver new classes of enterprise services, such as network slicing. This helps enterprise IT teams accelerate their adoption of 5G with an economical and seamless solution that greatly improves performance and user experience inside the enterprise. 

One of the fundamental enabling technologies behind Aruba Air Pass is Passpoint, a standard created by the Wi-Fi Alliance to enable mobile devices to automatically authenticate on enterprise Wi-Fi networks using their cellular credentials. Passpoint is a broadly accepted standard, and is supported on nearly all mobile devices. By leveraging Aruba Air Pass, global telcos have the ability to vastly expand their footprint to potentially include the nearly 20 billion square feet served by Aruba Air Pass-ready infrastructure worldwide.  

Delivering Carrier-grade QoS and Optimized User Experiences with Wi-Fi 6

Based on the same OFDMA radio technology that powers the 4G LTE and 5G NR radios, Aruba Air Slice is a unique Wi-Fi 6 technology designed to optimize user and application experience by providing carrier-grade quality assurance. By dynamically allocating radio resources, such as time, frequency and spatial streams, Aruba Air Slice guarantees performance for latency-sensitive applications such as AR/VR, Zoom and Slack, mobile gaming and real-time IoT applications.

Using Aruba Air Pass and Aruba Air Slice, mobile network operators can benefit from a globally scalable coverage solution, maintain continuous visibility and contact with subscribers, and deliver future 5G services across the depth and breadth of Aruba’s global installed base of enterprise Wi-Fi customers.

“The combination of Aruba Air Pass with Aruba Air Slice gives telcos the ability to extend the reach of their 5G networks into the enterprise while economically improving the overall end user experience,” said Jeff Lipton, vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “Devices that associate with an enterprise network using Aruba Air Pass may then use their Wi-Fi connections to access applications and services, such as making and receiving calls and text messages, based on their roles and permissions.” 

Gift practical gadgets that eases your mum’s life

This year, show gratitude to your mum with a range of products from Anker Innovations that would make her life easier and more fun.

Gifting gadgets from Anker for special occasions satisfies different personalities with different tastes as products range from Bluetooth speakers, headphones, security cameras, smartscales to power banks.

We suggest three products on this special day that would make your mum’s life more musical, ease her household chores and let her put her feet up with the latest state of the art cinema experience in the comfort of her home.

Soundcore Liberty Air 2

Download your mum’s favourite songs and let her listen to them using Soundcore Liberty Air 2. 

The true wireless in-ear headphones come with four built-in microphones with noise cancellation and filters out ambient noises.

Environmental noises are reduced by 60% to 95% to ensure crystal-clear diamond enhanced sound with twice the amount of bass. The HearID technology maps hearing sensitivity at multiple frequencies and intelligently analyzes results for a truly personalized listening experience. 

For convenience, the one-Step Pairing ensures automatic connection to your device. The earbuds allow for 7 hours of playtime but the charging case provides a longer battery life of 28 hours on the go. Liberty Air 2 can also recharge its power through wireless chargers. 

With a comfortable fit and the IPX5 (Splash Proof, Liberty Air 2 gives freedom from messy wired headphones and offers the convenience of listening to music by the pool, during morning walks or while cooking and relaxing. 

Nebula Apollo Pocket Projector

Mum can now watch her favourite Netflix shows with friends, news and music videos wherever she is comfortable, including projecting her favourite cooking shows on the kitchen wall while cooking with Nebula Apollo Smart Pocket Projector. 

Nebula Apollo Smart Pocket Projector is a new generation pocket cinema in a compact, mobile and soda-can size design. Hosting capabilities such as Google Assistant, remarkable clarity with Sharp 200 ANSI lumen image and improved audio, it is the perfect entertainment partner for your mum while she is having a down time or when she has a girl’s night in with her friends.

Nebula Apollo is perfect for consumers who want to enjoy their favorite video apps and movie streaming apps on the go on a bigger screen powered by Android 7.1 which brings great content to you, so you spend less time browsing and more time watching movies with loved ones. 

Nebula Apollo provides 4-hours of video playtime with single full charge and offers big 360^o sound with a 6W speaker. Nebula Apollo offers an advanced entertainment experience, anytime, anywhere with your loved ones.

RoboVac 30C 

Instead of cleaning the house, we like to see our ladies relax with a cup of tea watching their favorite programmes or out for a walk to enjoy some fresh air. 

Stronger, slimmer, and the most convenient RoboVac to use, the RoboVac 30C makes a perfect gift for your mother as it comes with Wi-Fi, Amazon Alexa, and the Google Assistant-compatibility, meaning it is 100% hands-free cleaning.

The slim 2.85in profile glides under sofas and beds with super-strong 1500Pa suction power and three brushes that effectively cleans up dust and furs for up to 100 minutes, leaving the house spotless.

RoboVac uses drop-sensing technology to avoid falling down stairs and specialized dual-hall sensors detect Boundary Strips that ensures RoboVac only cleans the areas you want. Nine anti-collision infrared sensors helps RoboVac avoid bumping into obstacles and clean non-stop.

EufyCam 2C

Keep an eye on your mum abroad or let her watch her grandkids grow as well as keep the family secure with the neweufyCam2. Working mums will appreciate the EufyCam 2C to keep an eye on intruders and be able to communicate with the nanny and the kids in real time.

The neweufyCam2C is a wireless Home Security Camera System with 180 -Day Battery Life and comes with features that include HD 1080p for clear crystal footage, IP67 Weatherproof that withstands cold, heat, dust and rains, state of the art Advanced Night Vision and is compatible with Amazon Alexa and Homekit. 

It has a 2-Cam Kit and does not bind users to a monthly fee which means a one-time purchase that combines security with convenience. Eufy Security products store, process, and calculate user data locally using military grade encryption.

The Smart Image Enhancement feature gives a clearer, brighter view of the people in-shot while the built-in AI technology identifies and focuses on the human in the image. The Instant Mobile Alerts notifies users in seconds when suspicious motions are detected while Real-Time Response allows being able to speak directly to anyone who approaches your home via a two-way audio giving you complete control over your surveillance.

FortiAI Leverages Deep Neural Networks to Automate Threat Detection and Remediation, Expanding Fortinet’s AI-driven Security Offerings

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO at Fortinet

“Fortinet has invested heavily in FortiGuard Labs cloud-based AI-driven threat intelligence, allowing us to detect more threats, more quickly and more accurately. FortiAI takes the artificial intelligence knowledge from FortiGuard Labs and packages it specifically for on-premises deployments. This gives customers the power of FortiGuard Labs directly in their environment, with self-learning AI to identify, classify and investigate sophisticated threats in sub-seconds.”

Organizations Face an Uphill Battle

Security architects confront many challenges when it comes to discovering and remediating threats, including:

• Cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated. While traditional cyber threats continue, sophistication of advanced attacks – often enabled by artificial intelligence, machine learning and open source communities – are increasing. As a result, organizations and their defenses are challenged to keep pace with threat evolution.

• The attack surface is expanding. Millions of new applications, growing cloud adoption and the increase in connected devices are creating billions of edges that security teams need to properly protect and manage. Organizations are challenged to keep pace with the threat volume resulting from many potential entry points.

• Security teams are constrained due to the cyber skills shortage. The cybersecurity industry faces a skills gap that has become a top emerging risk for organizations. Thereare not enough skilled professionals available to properly triage, investigate and respond to the growing number of threats – potential and actual – making it easier for cybercriminals to outpace legacy security processes and tools.

Self-Learning AI Adapts Organizations’ Threat Protection 

To address these challenges faced by security professionals today, Fortinet is unveiling FortiAI Virtual Security AnalystÔto accelerate threat remediation. FortiAI handles many of the time consuming, manual tasks currently expected of security professionals, preserving their time for higher value security functions. FortiAI’s self-learning capabilities continue to get smarter once deployed in an organization’s network. 

FortiAI leverages Deep Learning known as Deep Neural Networks, which mimic neurons in the human brain, to make complex decisions based on its scientific analysis of threats specific to the organization where it is deployed. As FortiAI’s artificial intelligence continues to mature, organizations benefit from having FortiAI’sVirtual Security AnalystÔeffectively transform and adapt threat protection.

FortiAI Levels the Playing Field 

Fortinet’s Deep Neural Networks (DNN) approach enables FortiAIto revolutionize threat protection by:

• Automating time-consuming manual investigations to identify and classify threats in real time: Organizations using legacy security processes combined with limited security staff find it difficult to perform manual investigations for each threat alert. This creates additional risks including a data breach or security incident due to slow response time. To solve this, FortiAI automates investigations using DNN to identify the entire threat movement and uncover patient zero and all subsequent infections in a sub-second.

• Transforming security processes for instant detection and remediation of attacks:FortiAI’sVirtual Security AnalystÔsignificantly reduces the time organizations are exposed to threats by scientificallyanalyzing characteristics of threats and generating an accurate verdict to accelerate threat response. 

• Delivering tailored threat intelligence to significantly reduce false positives: False positives are a burden for security analysts to investigate and it is time consuming to determine threats versus non-threats. Through tailored threat intelligence, FortiAI learns new malware features as it adapts to new attacks instantaneously and reduces false positives.  

On-premises Protection for Air Gapped Networks

Another key distinction of FortiAI is that it offers on-premises AI suitable for organizations that have air gapped networks. Operational technology environments, government agencies and some large enterprises must adhere to strict compliance regulations and/or security policies that limit their network’s connection to the internet. FortiAI with its self-learning AI model does not require internet connectivity to learn and mature, enabling organizations with closed environments or stringent security policies to stay ahead of threats. 

Fortinet’s AI-driven Technologies Automate Threat Protection

Fortinet has a longstanding history of helping customers strengthen their security posture by leveraging artificial intelligence. Some of the existing Fortinet offerings and services, complemented by the new FortiAI, that leverage various forms of AI, such as least squares optimization and Bayesian probability metrics, include: 

• FortiGuard Labs Threat Intelligence: FortiGuard Labsuses proven advanced AI and machine learning to gather and analyze over 100 billion security events every day. This threat intelligence produced by FortiGuard Labs is delivered to customers through its subscription services available for a range of Fortinet’s products, including the flagship FortiGate NGFWs. As a result, customers benefit from artificial intelligence deployed in global labs for faster threat prevention.

• FortiSandbox:Fortinet is the first security vendor to introduce AI to sandboxing to automate breach protection. FortiSandboxincludes two machine learning models to its static and dynamic analysis of zero-day threats, improving the detection of constantly evolving malware, such as ransomware and cryptojacking. Through the use of a universal security language to categorize malware, FortiSandbox also connects discussions between network and security teams, leading to more integrated and improved security operations.

• FortiEDR:Fortinet’sFortiEDRuses machine learning to automate the endpoint protection against advanced threats with real time orchestrated incident response functionalities. Customers also benefit from more control of network, user and host activity within their environments. 

• FortiInsight:FortiInsightuses machine learning analytics to effectively monitor endpoints, data movements and user activities to detect unusual, malicious behavior and policy violations attributed to insider risk.

• FortiWeb:To better protect web applications and APIs, FortiWebapplies machine learning to tailor a unique defense for each application. As a result, FortiWeb can quickly block threats while minimizing the false positives that may interfere with end user experience.

• FortiSIEM: FortiSIEMleverages machine learning to recognize patterns in typical user behavior like location, time of day, devices used and specific servers accessed. FortiSIEM can then automatically notify security operations teams when anomalous activities occur, like concurrent logins from separate locations.

As cyber criminals look to exploit the expanding digital attack surface with sophisticated attacks, the breadth and depth of the Fortinet Security Fabric’s AI-driven technology provides customers with unparalleled threat prevention, detection and response that can be instant and automated.