The Genetec Empower 360 roadshow to demonstrate unified approach to biometrics, video analytics, and access control solutions.

Genetec announced the launch of “Powering innovation 2024: A Genetec Empower 360 roadshow”. The Middle East tour will spotlight the company’s product roadmap, featuring the latest innovations and strategic vision for the future.

In partnership with Axis Communications, HID Global, and Ipsotek, the event will commence in Doha on May 2nd, followed by pivotal stops in key markets such as Abu Dhabi on May 13th and Riyadh on May 16th. Delving into crucial topics impacting physical security professionals, this roadshow will feature Genetec’s experts exploring biometrics, video analytics, and access control solutions that go beyond the door. Central to the discussions is the exploration of a unified approach to seamlessly integrate these solutions.

The event will cover important themes around the state of regional physical security and the evolving trends and best practices for safeguarding assets and infrastructure. Attendees will gain exclusive insights into the latest Genetec technologies, upcoming product launches, and strategic initiatives shaping the industry landscape. Additionally, they will have the opportunity to engage in live demonstrations of solutions and connect with both industry experts and partners to explore emerging trends and technologies.

“At Genetec, we’re committed to shaping the future of physical security and public safety through innovation and collaboration,” said Firas Jadalla, Regional Director – Middle East, Turkey & Africa, Genetec Inc. Our goal is to equip our customers with the resources and knowledge they need to effectively navigate the complex world of physical security. The upcoming roadshow is a testament to our dedication to empowering professionals with cutting-edge solutions. In collaboration with our long- standing partners, we hope this event paves the way for a safer, smarter tomorrow.”

The “Powering innovation 2024: A Genetec Empower 360 roadshow” will also showcase Security Center SaaS, a massively scalable, open, and unified software as a service (SaaS) solution. The new offering combines access control, video management, forensic search, intrusion monitoring, automation, and many other advanced security capabilities.

Intel has validated its AI product portfolio for the first Meta Llama 3 8B and 70B models across Intel Gaudi accelerators, Intel Xeon processors, Intel Core Ultra processors and Intel Arc graphics.

As part of its mission to bring AI everywhere, Intel invests in the software and AI ecosystem to ensure that its products are ready for the latest innovations in the dynamic AI space. In the data center, Intel Gaudi and Intel Xeon processors with Intel® Advanced Matrix Extension (Intel® AMX) acceleration give customers options to meet dynamic and wide-ranging requirements.

Intel Core Ultra processors and Intel Arc graphics products provide both a local development vehicle and deployment across millions of devices with support for comprehensive software frameworks and tools, including PyTorch and Intel Extension for PyTorch used for local research and development and OpenVINO toolkit for model development and inference.

Intel’s initial testing and performance results for Llama 3 8B and 70B models use open source software, including PyTorch, DeepSpeed, Intel Optimum Habana library and Intel Extension for PyTorch to provide the latest software optimizations.

Intel Xeon processors address demanding end-to-end AI workloads, and Intel invests in optimizing LLM results to reduce latency. Intel® Xeon® 6 processors with Performance-cores (code-named Granite Rapids) show a 2x improvement on Llama 3 8B inference latency compared with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors and the ability to run larger language models, like Llama 3 70B, under 100ms per generated token.

Intel Core Ultra and Intel Arc Graphics deliver impressive performance for Llama 3. In an initial round of testing, Intel Core Ultra processors already generate faster than typical human reading speeds. Further, the Intel® Arc™ A770 GPU has Xe Matrix eXtensions (XMX) AI acceleration and 16GB of dedicated memory to provide exceptional performance for LLM workloads.  

ASBIS is the official distributor of Intel products and a leading Value-Added Distributor, developer and supplier of IT and IoT products across EMEA.

News Summary:
Cisco powers and secures AI-scale data centers and clouds, safeguarding every application and device regardless of distribution or connectivity.

• In today’s highly distributed landscape, the window from vulnerability to exploitation is shrinking rapidly.
• Defending against this complex threat environment is beyond human scale.
• Cisco Hypershield enables customers to deploy security wherever needed: in the cloud, data center, factory floor, or hospital imaging room.
• With AI-native security, customers can autonomously segment networks, enjoy distributed and instant exploit protection without patches, and experience self-qualifying software upgrades with zero downtime.

News in Detail:
Cisco, the leader in security and networking, today unveiled a radically new approach to securing data centers and clouds in response to the increasing demands the AI revolution has put on IT infrastructure. Cisco is rearchitecting how we harness and protect AI and other modern workloads with industry-first, Cisco Hypershield. With this unprecedented innovation, Cisco is tipping the scales in favor of defenders, building on its recent announcements to accelerate AI infrastructure with Cisco’s ethernet switching, silicon and compute portfolio.

Cisco Hypershield protects applications, devices and data across public and private data centers, clouds and physical locations – anywhere customers need it. Designed and built with AI in mind from the start, Hypershield enables organizations to achieve security outcomes beyond what has been possible with humans alone.

“Cisco Hypershield is one of the most significant security innovations in our history,” said Chuck Robbins, Cisco Chair and CEO. “With our data advantage and strength in security, infrastructure and observability platforms, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers harness the power of AI.”

Hypershield is a revolutionary new security architecture. It’s built with technology originally developed for hyperscale public clouds and is now available for enterprise IT teams of all sizes. More a fabric than a fence, Hypershield enables security enforcement to be placed everywhere it needs to be. Every application service in the datacenter. Every Kubernetes cluster in the public cloud. Every container and virtual machine (VM). It can even turn every network port into a high-performance security enforcement point, bringing completely new security capabilities not just to clouds, but to the data center, on a factory floor, or a hospital imaging room. This new technology blocks application exploits in minutes and stops lateral movement in its tracks.

“AI has the potential to empower the world’s 8 billion people to have the same impact as 80 billion. With this abundance, we must reimagine the role of the data center – how data centers are connected, secured, operated and scaled,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security and Collaboration at Cisco.

“The power of Cisco Hypershield is that it can put security anywhere you need it – in software, in a server, or in the future even in a network switch. When you have a distributed system that could include hundreds of thousands of enforcement points, simplified management is mission critical. And we need to be orders-of-magnitude more autonomous, at an orders-of-magnitude lower cost.”

Security enforcement with Hypershield happens at three different layers: in software, in virtual machines, and in network and compute servers and appliances, leveraging the same powerful hardware accelerators that are used extensively in high-performance computing and hyperscale public clouds.

Hypershield was built on three key pillars:

• AI-Native: Built and designed from the start to be autonomous and predictive, Hypershield manages itself once it earns trust, making a hyper-distributed approach at scale possible.
• Cloud-Native: Hypershield is built on open source eBPF, the default mechanism for connecting and protecting cloud-native workloads in the hyperscale cloud. Cisco acquired the leading provider of eBPF for enterprises, Isovalent, earlier this month.
• Hyper-Distributed: Cisco is completely reimagining how traditional network security works by embedding advanced security controls into servers and the network fabric itself. Hypershield spans all clouds and leverages hardware acceleration like Data Processing Units (DPU) to analyze and respond to anomalies in application and network behavior. It shifts security closer to the workloads that need protection.

Cisco, with its industry-leading expertise in networking, security and extensive partner ecosystem, together with NVIDIA, is committed to building and optimizing AI-native security solutions to protect and scale the data centers of tomorrow. This collaboration includes leveraging the NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework for accelerated network anomaly detection, as well as NVIDIA NIM microservices for powering custom security AI assistants for the enterprise. NVIDIA’s class of converged accelerators combine the power of GPU and DPU computing, to augment Cisco Hypershield with robust security from cloud to edge.

“Enterprises across all industries are seeking the security that can protect them against ever expanding cyber threats,” said Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA. “Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are leveraging the power of AI to deliver powerful, incredibly secure data center infrastructure that will enable enterprises to transform their businesses and benefit customers everywhere.”

As a revolutionary new security architecture, Hypershield is solving three key customer challenges in defending against today’s sophisticated threat landscape:

• Distributed Exploit Protection: Attackers are adept at weaponizing newly published vulnerabilities faster than defenders can patch. With defenders seeing nearly 100 new vulnerabilities every day, according to Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence, this can lead to catastrophic results. Hypershield delivers protection in minutes by automatically testing and deploying compensating controls into the distributed fabric of enforcement points.
• Autonomous Segmentation: Once an attacker is in the network, segmentation is key to stopping their lateral movement. Hypershield perpetually observes, auto-reasons and re-evaluates existing policies to autonomously segment the network, solving this in large and complex environments.
• Self-qualifying Upgrades: Hypershield automates the incredibly laborious and time-consuming process of testing and deploying upgrades once they are ready, leveraging a dual data plane. This completely new software architecture allows software upgrades and policy changes to be placed in a digital twin that tests updates using the customer’s unique combination of traffic, policies and features, then applying those updates with zero downtime.

Built into the Security Cloud, Cisco’s unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform, Cisco Hypershield is expected to be Generally Available in August 2024. With Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk, customers will gain unparalleled visibility and insights across their entire digital footprint for unprecedented security protection.

“AI is not just a force for good but also a tool used for nefarious purposes, allowing hackers to reverse engineer patches and create exploits in record time. Cisco looks to address an AI enabled problem with an AI solution as Cisco Hypershield aims to tip the scales back in favor of the defender by shielding new vulnerabilities against exploit in minutes – rather than the days, weeks or even months as we wait for patches to actually get deployed,” said Frank Dickson, Group Vice President, Security & Trust at IDC. “With the number of vulnerabilities ever increasing and the time for attackers to exploit them at scale ever decreasing, it’s clear that patching alone can’t keep up. Tools like Hypershield are necessary to combat an increasingly clever malicious cyber adversary.”

“Cisco Hypershield takes aim at the complex security challenges of modern, AI-scale data centers. Cisco’s vision of a self-managing fabric that seamlessly integrates from the network to the endpoint will help redefine what’s possible for security at scale,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst of ZK Research. “For instance, this level of visibility and control across a hyper-distributed environment prevents lateral movement of attackers, enabled through a unique approach to segmentation that’s autonomous and highly effective. While this may seem fantastical, the time is right given recent AI advances combined with the maturity of cloud-native technologies like eBPF.”

“At AHEAD we believe cybersecurity should be integrated into everything we do. Bolted-on security is more expensive and less effective,” said Steven Aiello, Field Chief Information Security Officer at AHEAD. “Cisco Hypershield ensures that cyber protections are included into the fabric of the enterprise. Distributed Exploit Protection will be a massive win for blue teams – legacy synthetic patching was primarily limited to edge devices, allowing lateral movement once an attacker breached the perimeter. It’s a great day for cyber-defenders!”