Features
THE NEXT PHASE OF VIRTUALISATION
By Editor
The next leg of the journey is to port mission critical workloads to virtualized infrastructure.
Consolidation and automation of their IT infrastructures are what customers are seeking to make their Business processes and services more effective and virtualization has been a means to that. To take the process further, Virtualisation must extend to the domain of the mission crucial Business applications.
Historically, the challenges in moving Mission critical applications to virtual infrastructures have been about high availability, predictable performance and security primarily. There are however solutions available that help customers tide over these challenges by testing and validating infrastructure performance as well as troubleshoot issues that arise in the test phase.
While Virtualization deployments in the region are no longer confined to only the commodity workloads, the instances of virtualizing mission critical workloads are still in the early stages but are showing an increase. Most of the virtualisation deployments continues to be limited to servers and systems.
Feras Abu Aladous, Manager, Systems Engineering, Services & Support at Brocade says, “Many Enterprises in the region are targeting virtualization of up to 90% of their servers and systems, to increase Server’s utilization efficiency, increase mobility, orchestration agility. A reduced number of physical servers require reduced space and cooling inside the datacenter which leads to cost savings as well.”
Companies in the region are definitely starting to virtualise business critical applications at a rapid rate opines Gregg Petersen, Regional Director Middle East & SAARC at Veeam Software. He adds, “In some instances we are seeing banks deploying on a virtual workload, however the Middle East region is in the infancy stages of this compared to USA and Europe. But, there is definitely a huge move towards virtualisation of these core applications.”
Operational agility is a key reason driving Businesses to head into the next phase of virtualization. The next leg of the journey is to port the more difficult workloads to virtualized infrastructure.
“We believe most of the technical barriers to virtualization of these more difficult workloads have already been resolved, and it is already becoming mainstream to virtualize across the board. We are seeing different factors driving the virtualization of these database and “big iron” workloads though. In the first phase of virtualization customers were focused on consolidation of “easy workloads.” For this next phase, they are much more focused on operational agility and speed of time-to-market. So IT departments that virtualize all of their workloads tend to do so because they want to offer a cloud utility experience to their lines of business – this is no longer just about asset cost avoidance,” says Aaron White General Manager, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, Hitachi Data Systems.
Over the past few years, other hypervisors have gained ground while VMware’s Hyper V still dominates by far in terms of x86 server virtualization infrastructure with Microsoft a distance second. Hyper-V has constantly improved and added more features to compete with VMware and gain market share while there are other competitors including Citrix’s XenServer that carries no licensing charge, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) etc that have smaller market share.
The focus has however shifted away from hypervisors to innovations around the Management layers above the hypervisor.
Aaron says, “We have started to see them, but this tends to be within System Integrators and Service Providers’ landscape rather than in the traditional internal enterprise IT. The reason for this is a “leveling-up” of the capabilities of the hypervisor. So whereas in the past there was clear white space between ESX, the leading hypervisor, and Hyper-V / OpenStack, we have now seen that the hypervisor layer is becoming commoditized over time. And customers are starting to focus more on the management layers above it. We tend to see customers introducing at a “second hypervisor,” because they are looking at leveraging the merits of a specific management ecosystem, rather than because the specific hypervisor brings differentiation.
Enterprises mostly stick with one virtualization vendor to reduce cost of operational expenses but that is beginning to change. Customers are looking for best functionalities as some workloads do perform better on some hypervisors vis-à-vis others.
Greg says, “We are witnessing many cases where customers order Veeam Software – both hyper-V and VMware in large quantities. This tells us that customers are utilising the best of both worlds. Generally, we see a lot of production environments on VMware and hyper-V and this is where Veeam plays a crucial role because we have the ability to provide the best of both worlds. In addition we have also seen a large amount of deployment in business critical applications with hyper-V and VMware, once again proving that multi-hypervisor environments are becoming more common.”
Multi-hypervisor environments bring along its own set of challenges and therefore there could be customers sticking with one hypervisor. However, cross platform management will be a reality that needs to be taken in stride for those who are willing to look at the best of the options.
Aaron argues, “The downside of that is that managing two hypervisors increases your operational overhead – you need to have two sets of operational and integration processes. This is why it mainly occurs within the System Integrator space – they have the organizational economies of scale that can make it cost effective. We have also seen this drive an interest in converged platforms such as Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform. This platform takes care of all the workflow required to integrate and manage everything from the hardware elements up to the hypervisor. As it supports both VMware and Hyper-V, it frees customers up to focus on business workflow “above the hypervisor” and is a key enabler for this new trend in Infrastructure as a Service.”
The datacenter
In the datacenter Server virtualization has seen widespread adoption and continues to be the primary focus of virtualization efforts. With the increasing adoption of virtualized computing infrastructure, enterprises are able to run multiple servers on the same equipment, reducing the demand for additional servers. As a result, data centers are becoming smarter and supporting more users than ever before while requiring less hardware to do all of this.
Feras says, “Virtualization is the major trend inside the data centers; and it’s expected that by the end of 2014 around 70% of Server workload will be virtualized, but Storage and Network virtualization is still very low.”
Virtualization in other domains is still growing at a modest pace and would be the focus in the second phase. Virtualized infrastructure offers the potential for higher productivity, scalability and manageability compared to traditional computing which is what customers are in pursuit of as they allow virtualization to get deeper into their networks.
Aaron says, “We would consider server virtualization to be pretty well advanced – we’re about 90% there, and are just about tying up loose ends with it. People are now looking to technical innovations in network and storage virtualization, as well as the management ecosystem to provide the next level of agility and efficiency.”
Automation would be a key objective going forward in the datacenter. An effective virtualization strategy lays down the framework for more automation of regular tasks and this enables greater efficiency with available computing resources.
Greg says, “There is a lot of buzz around automation in the datacentre at the moment. Over the last three years virtualisation has moved from 30 – 40% to 60 – 70%. Most of our customers are about 60% virtualised. As organisations become mature in virtualisation, automation will continue to become an important aspect for companies.”
There are bottlenecks along the way for a wider adoption of virtualization. For instance, there are some very mature technology offerings in the Storage Virtualization space but significant differences between individual vendor strategies are slowing down adoption, believes Aaron.
He comments, “Most vendors still sell separate storage virtualization appliances, whereas Hitachi has integrated storage virtualization capabilities into every enterprise storage array that we have sold for the last ten years. And our customers have now leveraged this during several transition events to virtualize legacy assets and accelerate transformation. So we believe pretty strongly that Storage Virtualization just needs to be an integrated feature of every storage controller in order to gain broader adoption.”
He also believe that applications are still too tightly coupled to physical storage assets and physical locations.
Aaron adds, “This is the next wave of value-add from Storage Virtualization, and it is why we have invested in Storage Virtualization OS, which will enable us to run a common storage virtualization platform across all of our storage hardware containers. We also believe that customers will move to active/active architectures and have introduced distributed Virtual Storage Machines which can live forever, delivering zero downtime during site disaster recovery and non-disruptive technology refresh.”
On the other hand SDN (software defined networking) has still had very limited adoption and there are a lot of competing standards at the transport virtualization and management control layers. There are also strong requirements for a more integrated approach between the management frameworks for SDN and Network Function Virtualization.
“We believe that the benefits in terms of total cost to provision new services are so substantial that we will see very active investment for these use cases in the short term within the SI and Service Provider space. Once this technology is proven in this arena it will become more common in tradition enterprise IT.
SMB adoption
Virtualistion technologies suit growing SMB Businesses as well as the already large sized customers. In fact Virtualisation helps dynamically scale up capabilities of a Business’s IT infrastructure and this is a trend seen in the case of companies who are looking to add more virtual servers.
Greg says, “SMB clients are definitely adopting virtualisation and we can see this with our customers. We are seeing companies who have up to 10 servers and instead of putting it on physical servers they are recognising the need to virtualise. It’s a trend that is rapidly increasing and more and more customers are realising the value in adopting virtualisation.”
There is better understanding among SMB Businesses that Virtualisation will help them not only manage costs of upgrading IT infrastructure but also improve critical tasks like data backups and high availability.
Feras says, “SMB market is considering virtualization more than ever. SMBs are trying to get more performance and flexibility out of their existing server resources, considering the rising cost of managing physical data centers. Server virtualization improves disaster recovery and high availability allowing administrators to take VM snapshots, and recover from existing snapshots, and reduces the number of required servers to implement solutions.
However, SMBs have limited exposure to Virtualistion benefits within their networks and largely confined to only server consolidation. Enterprises on the other hand are more focused on optimizing the benefits across and therefore adopt innovations faster.
Aaron says, “We’ve seen large enterprises that are much more virtualized than SMBs. In fact, the most virtual organizations are the ones who are process-driven, focused, and committed to achieving efficiencies as a primary goal. Those who lag behind in the virtualization landscape the most are those who have taken some individual areas of the business, and run the IT departments for those sectors almost as pet projects. In addition, the SMB space tends to focus on Server Virtualization whereas SI’s and large enterprises have clear additional use cases that they can enable by deploying network and storage virtualization layers as well.”
Server virtualization will be the key driver of virtualisation market but for customers who have already gone through a first phase of virtualization, they will have the opportunity to look at tapping into other innovations from the virtualisation industry.
Aaron says, “Servers and to a certain extent storage virtualization too have seen growth. For networking it’s a bit of a different story – they’re not necessarily about consolidation they’re about programmability. Networking efficiency comes from bringing complex systems into a virtual, manageable space, and alleviating IT departments dependency on hardware segmentation and re-config.”
With virtualization, the utilization rates of the installed hardware has a huge jump. The ROI benefits are seen in a short time.
Greg says, “With server virtualisation the benefits are seen instantly. Storage and network virtualisation are yet to gain traction in this region compared to other regions. But, it’s just a matter of time before network and storage virtualisation takes off, because it’s cost effective and far more efficient.”
While most virtualized workloads are either server or desktop workloads, there is an increased interest in virtualizing network and application delivery etc.
Feras says, “Sever virtualization is the major trend in Data center virtualization and very mature, on the other hand network and storage virtualization is still under evaluation by enterprises, and not widely implemented.”
In summary, there are applications that are still ring-fenced from virtualization and while that percentage may begin to come down each year, even outside of that the scope for virtualization remains high. So while there is a huge variance among customers, the number of those that have virtualized the entire stack – server, storage and network is increasing rapidly. Further, while virtualization may not be seen as essential before adopting cloud computing, cloud deployments in virtual environments deliver optimized results and hence a key consideration factor for Businesses looking to adopt cloud services.
Features
Paving the Way for AI Success in Business
By Karim Azar, Regional Vice President – Middle East & Turkey, Cloudera
The digital landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and at the heart of this evolution lies the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Across industries, AI is not merely a buzzword but a revolutionary force driving innovation, efficiency, and growth. Its impact extends beyond automation, touching every side of business operations and decision-making. It can revolutionize multiple sectors and fundamentally reshape the corporate industry.
Nonetheless, challenges arise with technological evolution, particularly in accessing and overseeing varied datasets across diverse environments. These challenges frequently act as obstacles to achieving successful AI implementation. In response to these challenges, the technology landscape is witnessing significant advancements in open data lakehouse technologies, providing a robust foundation for AI and analytics. Let’s delve into key technological developments and their advantages, focusing on the broader implications rather than specific products.
Unlocking Business Potential
AI has the potential to unleash new opportunities for businesses. McKinsey’s findings reveal that more than 62% of companies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region currently utilize Generative AI in some operational aspect. The research underscores the substantial potential of AI to create tangible value in the GCC, with an estimated value of up to $150 billion.
This adoption trend is not without merit; statistics show that 83% of businesses adopting AI report substantial (30%) or moderate (53%) benefits. AI can address various challenges by providing predictive analytics and personalized customer experiences, enabling organizations to make faster and more accurate data-driven decisions.
Despite the obstacles in adopting AI, such as data management complexities and security concerns, offering air-gapped deployment for large language models (LLMs) is still a viable option. This feature boosts security, data privacy, and performance while also lowering customer operational expenses. However, overcoming these challenges requires more than just technological solutions. It demands a comprehensive approach that includes robust data governance frameworks, continuous employee training programs, and collaboration with regulatory bodies to ensure compliance with data protection laws.
AI Across Industries
AI is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is applied differently across industries and business functions, including healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and retail. The potential uses of AI are vast, from boosting supply chain efficiency to transforming healthcare outcomes and customer service.
For example, in the healthcare industry, AI-powered predictive analytics can help doctors identify patients at high risk of developing certain diseases, allowing for early intervention and personalized treatment plans. AI algorithms can analyze market trends and financial customer behavior to recommend customized investment strategies. In manufacturing, AI-driven predictive maintenance can proactively anticipate equipment failures and schedule maintenance activities, minimizing downtime and reducing costs.
As businesses increasingly adopt AI, they invest in their organization’s future. By promoting innovation and agility, companies can leverage AI to maintain competitiveness in a digital era. Prioritizing data privacy and security helps build trust with customers and stakeholders, ensuring AI technologies’ responsible and ethical use.
AI is a significant transformation in how businesses function and innovate. Embracing AI opens up vast opportunities for organizations to reshape their operations, stimulate growth, and influence the future of business. While the journey may present challenges, the potential benefits are boundless for those willing to embrace the power of AI.
Features
Smart Cities and the Rise of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Exploring the Benefits and Risks of Vehicle Surveillance
By: Dr Ryad Soobhany, Associate Professor, School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University Dubai
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have emerged as a transformative solution in urban areas, tackling challenges such as high traffic and pollution. These systems, incorporating a network of static and mobile sensors, including cameras on buildings or vehicles/drones, embedded in the smart city infrastructure, are revolutionizing traffic management. By harnessing data from cameras, in-vehicle GPS systems, in-vehicle Near Field Communication (NFC), IoT devices, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), ITS enable the monitoring and tracking of vehicles for Intelligent Traffic Management Systems (ITMS) or Public Transportation Management Systems (PTMS).
While intelligent transportation systems offer significant benefits, it’s crucial to acknowledge the challenges and risks they pose. ITMS provides real-time monitoring of traffic on roads and at junctions, while PTMS focus on managing transportation fleet and passenger information services. Emergency Response Management Systems (ERMS) primarily monitor the emergency responders of the smart city. The use of intelligent vehicle surveillance systems improves traffic management, public safety, and urban planning, but it also raises concerns about the data privacy and security of users and infrastructure, a risk that must be carefully managed.
Benefits
There are several benefits from the implementation of vehicle surveillance systems in urban areas and the most obvious one is a better vehicle traffic flow by using ITMS. Cameras placed strategically across the city monitor traffic to identify congested areas and road traffic incidents (e.g. accidents). Implementing dynamic traffic lights systems at junctions and temporary speed limits can improve traffic flow. Using AI, predictive traffic routing forecasts traffic bottlenecks and suggests alternative routing. The use of PTMS leads to enhanced scheduling of public transportation; for example, the arrival/departure of trains/metro at the station is synchronized to feeder buses or taxis being stationed outside the station. There is an improvement in customer satisfaction and journey planning with real-time updates for public transport. Traffic flow is also improved by monitoring of cycle and pedestrian lanes, where safer cycle lanes will encourage road users to adopt cycling in certain urban areas adapted for cycling.
There is an overall improvement in public safety by better traffic management, with better response time to emergency situations by the ERMS, such as ambulances. LPR/ANPR (Licence Plate Recognition/Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems and GPS tracking systems in cars allow the monitoring of vehicles while they are located withing the bounds of the smart city. Stolen or wanted vehicles can be detected and followed through the city. The use of surveillance cameras, LPR/ANPR systems and GPS tracking can improve identification of criminal activities, which should enhance the response of law enforcement. Under-Vehicle Surveillance Systems (UVSS), which are cameras placed at strategic places on roads in the city take pictures or videos of the underside of vehicles to check the chassis for stolen cars. UVSS can also be used to detect contraband at ports or entry/exit points in smart cities.
The use of LPR/ANPR systems ease the management of Low Emission zones, which are areas where low emission vehicles (e.g. electric or hybrid vehicles) can circulate without charges and vehicles with higher emission rates have to pay an hourly or daily charge. The implementation of Low Emission zones can bring environmental benefits. The improved traffic flow in the urban areas can also lead to environmental benefits with less emissions in traffic jams and long traffic queues at junctions. Apart from environmental benefits, there are economic benefits linked to better health and overall happiness of citizens and visitors.
Risks
Several risks are associated with the amount of data collected from the vehicle surveillance systems. The main concern is the privacy of the smart city’s car drivers and car owners. Vehicles and their drivers are tracked everywhere they travel around the city and the speed they travel. This can lead to tracking drivers and without proper legal frameworks, the data collected can be used to encroach on the users’ privacy. The large amount of collected and stored data can be quite attractive to cyber criminals and might lead to cyber-attacks. Any data breach from these attacks might expose the personal information of drivers and their vehicles. Cyber-criminals can target the surveillance systems, for example hacking the intelligent dynamic traffic speed system and changing the traffic speed around the city.
Having video surveillance around the urban areas recording the public can lead to ethical issues. Most of the time, drivers might not have provided informed consent to participate in the vehicle surveillance systems. The lack of consent from users can lead to non-compliance with regulatory bodies and can result in legal challenges from user groups. Users need to be made aware that they are entering a vehicle surveillance zone and their data might be recorded. Vehicle surveillance systems can be used to discriminate against certain sections of the community, for example, young drivers might be unfairly targeted by the vehicle surveillance systems because they allegedly drive fast and dangerously, which allegedly cause accidents. Any cyber security attack or data intrusion can lead to users losing trust in the vehicle surveillance system.
The use of vehicle surveillance systems can benefit smart cities and enhance the quality of life of residents and visitors, but the authorities must respect the personal privacy of the public by ensuring that data are collected and processed ethically and guarded against any cyber-attack. Security policies and mitigation plans are primordial for vehicle surveillance systems.
Features
Enabling MEA eGovernment Entities to Enhance Experiences while Cutting Costs
By Uday Shankar Kizhepat, Vice President and General Manager- Middle East and Africa Region, WSO2
We live digitally. Much of our professional work is digital, as is much of our leisure time. Our commercial activity – shopping, service subscription, banking, and more – is digital. And our government is digital. No doubt governance itself requires the wisdom of individuals. But the transactional part – filing, requesting, registering, licensing, and so on – is digital. Governments in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) know they have an opportunity, with today’s technologies, to streamline transactional government functions while cutting costs.
One way to do this is to introduce digital identities. By allowing each citizen to be recognized by their “bytes essence,” public authorities open the door to transformative programs that use these trusted online personas to get things done reliably and rapidly. Many regional nations are acknowledging the potential of digital ID systems and have cultivated track records for themselves in areas such as boosted citizen engagement and enhanced accuracy of outcomes.
Digital IDs offer a practical means to ensure useability when new e-government services come online. Identity verification, service accessibility, and data protection are three major, long-standing challenges encountered by regional governments on their digital transformation journeys. The digital ID solves all of them. It offers an elegant solution to the verification issue, obviously, but its simplicity enhances accessibility, and its security features protect data.
The ’guarantee’
The digital identity may look straightforward, but its elegance is built on a toolbox of advanced technologies such as biometrics, encryption, and blockchain. These building blocks come together to give a guarantee of authenticity when an individual presents their credentials to an online gatekeeper. And we should not use the word “guarantee” lightly. It lies at the core of the viability of any authentication system offered by a government. When waved through the door, verified users can access tax history and health records. They can pay bills or register with a government agency. If verification is erroneous, a host of problems can arise.
The digital ID is a holistic, citizen-centric approach that strikes a balance between security and performance and yet does not compromise either. It eliminates bureaucratic bottlenecks and elevates the citizen experience without the public-sector agency ever relinquishing control of any part of the process. But how? How do digital IDs allow government services to operate at peak efficiency and grant seamless access to every citizen while not faltering when it comes to risk management? How do responsive, always-on services guarantee privacy and security? Well, the answer comes full circle, back to digital transformation.
Governments in the Arab Gulf region mention digital transformation frequently in published guidelines that map the way to economic diversification. These same guidelines apply to the government itself, which must set about transforming systems, processes, and functions to prepare for digital IDs and the world they promise – one in which a digital service provider can offer both seamless access and security. Complexities come from the scale and interconnectedness of operations, and the need for every shred of data, every machine-to-machine process, and every user session to be secure. Regulatory obligations must be juggled with budgetary constraints while technology leaders play intermediary to vying stakeholder factions within the organisation. It is easy to see how challenging it might be to maintain interoperability and data-sharing in such a fraught environment.
Of course, none of this will deter government organisations in the MEA region. They know what the hurdles are, but they also know what is to be gained – smoother services that cost less to provide while engendering greater citizen trust and in fact are leading the way in some of these digital initiatives. Remember, regional governments also know that the expectations of their citizens have, in a very real sense, undergone a digital transformation of their own.
Success stories
If we cast our eyes around the region, we can see digital ID-centric transformation in action already. Some government organisations in the Middle East have introduced biometric facial recognition as part of digital identity phase-ins and are using the system for secure digital document storage. Also in current use are systems that allow single, mobile-based logins. In these countries, the government’s identity access management (IAM) system undergoes a sweeping overhaul that allows the unification of credentials data to provide secure digital identity.
In the Asian subcontinent, we find a government that directed its telecoms ministry to build a national information exchange layer using an API. Strict identity management was rolled out as part of this ambitious project. With digital identity in place, the government can enable slicker collaboration between its departments and enhanced efficiency in outputs. It can do all this while optimising data access and consumption, which empowers analysts to deliver more actionable insights to stakeholders across agencies and ministries.
In Africa, one country showed its peers how an integrated identity and access management solution can be used for risk-based authentication, single sign-on, multi factor authentication, and user self-service. The solution was designed to minimise the risk of identity theft, but it was also (through single sign-on) able to reduce complexity when onboarding and offboarding users.
Conflict resolved
If digital solutions are the future of government, then digital identity is the future of public-sector cybersecurity and risk management. Governments in the region have been trying for years now to transform service delivery and engender citizen trust and engagement, but security has always been in conflict with agility. Having leveraged digital identity, authorities rid themselves of the downsides and reap rewards such as those described here. These regional successes underscore not only the profound impact digital transformation can have on society, but the indispensable role digital identity will play in delivering those efficiencies in a way that promotes trust.
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