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RACE Model: Building Cyber Resiliency and Mitigating Network Risks by Going Back to Basics

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1 month ago

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HUAWEI CYBERSECURITY

By H.E. Dr. Mohamad Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cybersecurity, UAE Government, and Dr. Aloysius Cheang, Chief Security Officer, Huawei Middle East & Central Asia

Jim Rohn once famously said, “Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.” Resilience is key to surviving in today’s world full of emerging technologies and hot-button buzzwords. It is a race towards all that is good, towards cyber survivability, a race of the utmost urgency and importance. As such, cybersecurity and, in particular, cyber resiliency is more than just having an incident response plan or a computer security policy. It is about ensuring that your entire security posture can withstand a wide range of threats, which includes hybrid, blended attack vectors that can transcend time and space through the interplay of physical, cyber, and virtual planes that take apart traditional brick-and-mortar aspects of any organizations and cross-borders jurisdiction.

Hence, we need to design a more holistic security framework by integrating cyber and physical security measures, hardening critical systems, and creating cross-functional teams and multi-disciplinary teams that will involve team members not only from our own organization but also from other stakeholders in our ecosystem that can address risks from multiple angles. Indeed, designing an auto-adaptable, self-evolving security framework that will evolve alongside the volatile and rapidly evolving threat landscape will be crucial to maintaining cyber resiliency and, therefore, safeguarding the business in the new intelligent era. But, without a doubt, there’s an urgent need to prioritize building cyber resiliency above all other matters.

Leonardo Da Vinci said, “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough. We must apply. Being willing is not enough. We must do.”  To build resilience, having a lofty mission statement with an ambitious plan is definitely not enough; the efforts must be grounded in the practicality of getting our hands dirty and being able to paddle in and out of the mudflats regardless of how much the mud will engulf you.

Figure 1 shows our proposed RACE model as a simple four-part process to look at how organizations can build cyber-resiliency with a feasible and actionable plan to achieve our objective of securing any organization by going back to basics. By going back to basics and doing them well, it will at least address 90% of the problems that most organizations are facing today. The solution needs not to be complex nor flamboyant; it just needs to be practical, and if one can cut through the levels of complexity and zero in on the crux of the problem and put in place basic security controls that are effective and efficient, it will lay the groundwork for success.

Borrowing the analogy of racing, would you be driving a race car that has a manual gearbox for full control and is tuned for the race track, or would you just take any car straight from the garage untuned for the conditions of the race track and relying on the car’s automatic gearbox to take care of the driving? Thus, it is clear that returning to basics and tuning your security measures for accuracy and precision is a much better bet than pouring huge investments into advanced systems and mechanics, building layers and layers of security indiscriminately.

Being accurate and precise will enable us to build quantifiability into our cybersecurity program. Accuracy and precision are both ways to measure results. Accuracy measures how close results are to the true or known value, while precision, on the other hand, measures how close results are to one another or, in other words, how well our defenses are designed and executed. This is our motivation behind the development of the RACE model. The subsequent paragraph will describe each key component of the model in greater detail.

Figure 1: The RACE model, a simple 4-part plan for building cyber resilience

Firstly, resiliency in modern cybersecurity speaks to the capability to provide value for the customer. In simplistic terms, it is to provide robustness and survivability of the organization’s cyber footprint in the face of adversaries and threats, meet compliance needs for business governance while excelling and providing a competitive advantage, using whatever security capabilities are based on established best practices, processes, and frameworks that achieve repeatable results. Figure 2 below summarizes what it takes to build cyber resilience and the value it brings to the table, taking into consideration the interplay between being compliance and building capabilities to support the resiliency of the entire information infrastructure that supports the business of an organization.

Figure 2: Building trust, enhancing cyber resilience, and mitigating risks in action

Next, awareness refers not only to imbuing a culture of cybersecurity among all the staff in an organization to the extent that basic cyber hygiene can be practiced but also to targeting the team focusing on delivery and maintaining ICT and security services within the organization so that they pay attention to cementing their core competencies and fundamentals. Hereby, it is recommended that harnessing risks and hedging your bet against the barrage of threats based on a risk-based approach is the best way, given that resources on hand are always scarce, limited, and, to some extent, expensive. Given that is the case, we have identified five basic core fundamentals that every cybersecurity team in any organization needs to build up on their basics (and manage them well) based on common cybersecurity issues faced, as depicted in Figure 3. While it may seem simple, the devil is always in the details to ensure a job is done well.

Figure 3: Managing five common risks (end-to-end) comprehensively as a basis for building cyber resilience

One man, organization, or country cannot resolve cybersecurity issues alone. It takes an entire village to address cybersecurity issues as they affect everyone if anything goes awry. Cybersecurity is a team sport, and all the stakeholders within the ecosystem must contribute towards addressing the elephant in the room, as shown in Figure 4. We always find strength in numbers because “united we stand, divided we fall.” We see the Blackhat community is doing that exactly, and that is why they are always a step ahead of the good guys every time, thereby summarizing the urgency to Collaborate as a key differentiating measure.

 Figure 4: Cybersecurity is a team sport. So, who is on the team?

Last but not least, we need to bring everything together to build or Engineer the process, putting the cogwheels into their rightful places to drive the engine forward. We have identified five key fundamental security measures that, if done diligently, will be key to building an end-to-end resilient system and reducing network risks. 

As shown in Figure 3, the five key fundamental security measures are 1) software integrity protection, 2) security configuration, 3) digital certification management, 4) vulnerability remediation, and 5) product lifecycle management. Take “Security configuration” as an example. To engineer and address the risk brought about by system misconfiguration, we need to break it down into its elements or identify its Work Breakdown Structure or WBS, which is a key step for planning project tasks and allocating resources.

Figure 5: Security Configuration Example: Optimize the Security Configuration Baseline based on Service Scenarios

Figure 5 summarizes typical work done to break down “security configuration” into its WBS. While this figure does not depict the complete picture, it does show a deep dive into each piece of work. One should keep working on breaking it down until the project scope and all the tasks required to complete the project can be visualized in one snapshot.

In conclusion, we have distilled the entire RACE model in detail in this paper. Achieving RACE is key to building resiliency for any organization. The important thing to note is to keep it simple and go back to basics. Build an auto-evolving, adaptable security framework based on the strategy that is designed to shape-shift alongside emerging blended, hybrid threats by leveraging on actionable intelligence, building resilience, and fostering collaboration so that individuals, organizations, and nations. Establishing public-private partnerships (PPP) with governmental entities and authorities enables public sector players, such as the UAE Cyber Security Council, to act as the fulcrum for coordinating and pooling resources and intelligence. This will enable our modern society to defend against today’s threat and safeguard one’s digital journey by addressing the challenges of tomorrow’s Age of Intelligence.

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Qlik Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Augmented Data Quality Solutions

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2 days ago

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March 20, 2025

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Qlik

Qlik recently announced its recognition as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Augmented Data Quality Solutions, marking its sixth time receiving this recognition. Qlik sees this recognition as a validation of its commitment to helping businesses ensure the data quality and governance needed to drive AI confidently at scale.

“With AI models increasingly commoditized, the true differentiator is data quality,” said Mike Capone, CEO, Qlik. “Companies that invest in governance and integrity will extract the most value. This recognition from Gartner validates what we see—AI success depends on trusted data.”

AI models require consistent, complete, and trusted data to generate accurate insights, yet many organizations struggle with gaps, inconsistencies, and unstructured inputs that undermine AI’s effectiveness. Poor data results in unreliable models, biased predictions, and heightened operational risk.

“Organizations need more than standalone data quality tools—they need a complete data strategy that ensures integrity at every stage,” said Drew Clarke, GM & EVP, Data Business Unit, Qlik. “Qlik Talend Cloud enables enterprises to embed trust into their data, analytics, and AI workflows, turning fragmented data into a reliable asset.”

By enabling proactive, governed data pipelines, Qlik ensures AI systems operate with high-trust data from the start, allowing businesses to scale AI with confidence.

AI is driving demand for next-generation data quality solutions that go beyond basic cleansing. With innovations like the Qlik Trust Score for AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) support, and automated data remediation, businesses can move from reactive fixes to continuous, AI-powered data optimization.

Key Capabilities of Qlik:

  • Qlik Trust Score for AI: Assesses data readiness for AI applications, ensuring reliable and explainable outputs.
  • Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Deployment: Ensures consistent quality across diverse environments.
  • Unstructured Data Processing: Converts raw, unstructured content into actionable insights, ensuring seamless connectivity.
  • Automated Remediation: Machine learning refines quality rules over time, reducing manual effort.
  • Data Products: Ensuring that curated data assets are easily accessible to data consumers to accelerate their use-cases, including AI projects.

“Trusted data is critical to our operations, from regulatory reporting to daily decision-making,” said Tomohisa Nakajima, Senior Manager, ICT Strategy Department, at NEC Personal Computer Corporation. “As we explore AI, ensuring data quality and governance allows us to do so responsibly and with confidence. Qlik Talend Cloud will help us automate data quality, reduce inconsistencies, and build a foundation of trust that supports both our current needs and future AI initiatives.”

“We’re seeing an increasing demand from businesses that recognize AI’s potential but struggle with data reliability,” added Clarke. “Qlik’s ability to deliver converged data management—from ingestion to AI-powered insights—sets us apart and ensures organizations can scale AI initiatives with confidence.”

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With NVIDIA Cosmos Curator, Milestone announces a platform to enable access to data and train AI Models

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2 days ago

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March 20, 2025

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Milestone NVIDIA

Leveraging the NVIDIA platform, Milestone Systems’ Project Hafnia is aiming to be a leading service for data generators, to share and utilize their data, and for developers, to access traceable and regulatory-compliant annotated video data.

Milestone’s goal is to put the latest advances in Vision Language Models (VLM) and supporting data curation capabilities in the hands of as many developers as possible.  One of the first service offerings is a VLM, fine-tuned using NVIDIA fine-tuning microservices on a large volume of compliant transportation data, curated using NVIDIA Cosmos Curator.

The VLM’s accuracy and performance optimizations are tuned for running on NVIDIA GPUs and in NVIDIA’s video search and summarization (VSS) AI blueprint. 

“By leveraging the NVIDIA platform, Milestone Systems is helping accelerate this next wave of powerful visual services,” says Deepu Talla NVIDIA Vice President and General Manager — Embedded and Edge Computing. “The next phase in development and adoption of visually perceptive Agentic AI services will be unlocked by recipes like NVIDIA VSS blueprint combined with widely available and accessible fine-tuned VLM models,” he says.

Access to data
Milestone Systems is aggregating compliant data through its global network of partners and customers in video data management. These organizations seek to leverage their own data to develop smarter analytics and will be able to benefit from the platform, which can be utilized to train AI models on sufficient, compliant data.

“Artificial intelligence is our generation’s biggest game-changer. A major challenge for the ongoing development is having access to enough high-quality data for training AI models. The Project Hafnia platform will collect and curate data with the aspiration to be the world’s smartest, fastest and responsible platform for video data and training of AI models,” says Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone Systems.

Additionally, Project Hafnia will remove major friction points and provide smooth and seamless access to data. Driven by NVIDIA Cosmos Curator data curation, the service will speed up developing AI and analytics – up to 30 times faster than today’s standards.

Accuracy and speed
Milestone Systems will offer two services:

  •  A cutting-edge service for AI model training with high-quality video data through Training as a Service, where software developers can access quality data to train AI-models
  • A new Visual Language Model as a Service for smart city transportation and Intelligent Traffic Service use-cases that will be industry leading in performance.  


With new high-quality data and improved annotation, future analytic software for applications such as traffic management, manufacturing, airports, law enforcement, and business could achieve accuracy high enough to enable large-scale automation of operations and surveillance like never before.

Traffic Management VLM
By leveraging the NVIDIA platform, Milestone Systems has taken the first step in developing a market leading traffic and transportation Visual Language Model (VLM). The model supports a range of use cases, including general traffic assessments, driving condition evaluations, alert validation, and incident reporting.  

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UiPath to Unveil Latest Agentic Automation Solutions at Agentic AI Summit

Published

2 days ago

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March 20, 2025

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AI Summit

UiPath recently announced its annual UiPath Agentic AI Summit will take place online on March 25, offering attendees deeper insight into the latest UiPath agentic automation innovations and strategies for implementing agentic AI and automation to deliver consistent, reliable, and transformative business outcomes.

Agentic automation integrates AI agents, robots, and people to streamline operations, automate complex end-to-end business processes with multiple workflows and contextual decision-making, improve scalability, and unlock new levels of productivity. It enables AI software agents powered by machine learning, advanced AI, natural language processing, and computer vision to take autonomous action and deliver consistent, reliable, and transformative outcomes.

“Agentic automation is transforming businesses by integrating advanced process automation, business data and real-time intelligence to support scalable decision-making, and we’re seeing strong interest from customers eager to pilot this technology,” said Graham Sheldon, Chief Product Officer at UiPath. “UiPath agentic automation delivers value by driving efficiency, consistency, and scalability while empowering teams, enhancing user experiences, and ensuring strong governance. Simply put, the UiPath Platform is one of the best places to build, test, and deploy enterprise-grade agents.”

At the Summit, viewers will learn how to unlock and accelerate agentic automation initiatives with AI agents that are equipped with enterprise-grade tools and capabilities, orchestrated in complex, end-to-end workflows with robots and human-in-the-loop.

The Summit features experts from UiPath and customers such as WEX, State Street, and Adobe discussing a range of in-demand topics that can help automation professionals, business leaders, and knowledge workers understand the benefits of agentic automation. WEX, a provider of payment processing and information management services, will discuss how it is using the UiPath Platform to build, test, and deploy enterprise-grade agents to transform business processes, in part to enhance sales team preparation and document processing.

“Agentic automation enables us to make informed decisions and quickly adapt to business changes for rapid scaling. Its integration in call centers consolidates automations, streamlines processes, and empowers agents to use natural language,” said Emily Krohne, Enterprise Automation Principal at WEX. “This solution recognizes requests, triggers appropriate automations, and lightens the load on our workforce.”

Ashraf El Zarka, Vice President and Managing Director, Middle East and Africa at UiPath, said: “Businesses in the Middle East are moving beyond basic automation and actively investing in AI-driven solutions that solve real challenges. With AI expected to contribute $320 billion to the region’s economy by 2030, we see strong demand for technologies that simplify operations and deliver real value. Agentic Automation makes this possible by combining AI agents, robots, and people to improve decision-making and efficiency at scale. The Agentic AI Summit is a chance for businesses to see how they can use AI agents to work smarter, reduce complexity, and drive meaningful results.”

The summit will describe building trustworthy, governed enterprise agents within the UiPath Platform with specific sessions on Agentic Orchestration, Agentic Testing, and Agent Builder. The Agentic AI Summit will close with the session, “From inception to execution: The path to an orchestrated enterprise,” that will discuss the future of the orchestrated enterprise and will explore the latest AI research and agentic innovations that will profoundly transform organizations, empower the people who work in them, and change the nature of work itself.

Use case sessions will include:

  • Industry deep-dive: putting agentic automation to work in banking, financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing
  • Department deep-dive: how agentic automation is transforming finance, legal, and human resources
  • Application testing deep-dive: transforming SAP and SAP S/4HANA migration testing with AI
  • Process intelligence: leverage AI-powered insights for data-driven decisions on impactful transformation opportunities

UiPath Agentic Automation offerings

UiPath offers customers a single platform to understand and construct agentic solutions with a thorough understanding of key foundational components and the interplay between them. Its agentic offerings include:

  • Agentic Orchestration: now in public preview, UiPath Agentic Orchestration serves as the nerve center to meticulously coordinate processes involving UiPath-built or third-party agents, robots, people and harmonizes all elements within an automation ecosystem. It functions as the conductor in the grand symphony of business processes, orchestrating the roles of robots, agents, and people in end-to-end implementations. The average large company operates over 175 enterprise applications, each with its own data, processes, and decision-making frameworks. Without a structured, orchestrated approach, AI agents become just another layer of complexity that leads to more inefficiency, siloed decisions, and operational risk. Agentic Orchestration makes it possible for enterprises to take control of their agentic processes by assigning tasks, managing interactions across systems, and maintaining governance over AI-powered decisions.
  • Agent Builder: The company also recently announced UiPath Agent Builder, which offers a guided experience for building, testing, and launching ecosystem-agnostic, data-grounded AI agents. These agents handle complex workflows, provide autonomous decision-making, and integrate various enterprise tools and applications at scale. Agent Builder features include from-scratch agent creation, pre-built templates, testing tools, API deployment, and seamless workflow integration.

At the summit, UiPath will also announce the launch of UiPath Test Cloud, a revolutionary new approach to software testing that uses advanced AI to amplify tester productivity across the entire testing lifecycle to help customers achieve greater efficiency and cost savings. Through Test Cloud, agentic testing for software testing teams becomes a reality, equipping professionals with agents such as UiPath Autopilot and testing agents built with Agent Builder to act as collaborative partners throughout the entire testing lifecycle. By augmenting testers with AI, businesses can test more software, reduce costs, and improve accuracy to accelerate time-to-value and deliver high-quality software to customers.

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