How 5,000 cameras and multi petabytes of storage bring prison safety into focus
In prisons, video cameras are vital to keeping an eye on the watched and the watchers. But capturing, storing and retrieving that information isn’t as easy as training a lens on a few dark corners. What does that look like? The Irish Prison Service (IPS) recently upgraded its video surveillance system in 12 prison facilities to 5,000 cameras continuously recording the movement and actions of everyone on the inside. And to respect privacy laws, that footage has to stick around at least four years and a day — that’s two blue moons or a leap year cycle — or until any incidents are resolved. “Video data has a huge impact on the safety and security of our staff and prisoners. People’s lives are at stake in extreme cases,” says George Jackson, the recently retired head of information and communication technology at IPS. “Therefore, it’s hugely important that there are safeguards around how the data is stored and secured.” Despite a historical low incarceration rate close to countries like Norway and Sweden, the upgrade from the 2008 surveillance setup comes as the IPS population grew about 10 percent over the previous year. The old system wasn’t up to the task of ensuring safety. Footage from the traditional storage array had never been deleted. The service lacked the visibility and a technical process for securely and systematically deleting video. Storage capacity was also running short. Additionally, IPS had recently upgraded surveillance infrastructure with new high-definition cameras, generating larger video files and even more storage demands. LOCKING DOWN SECURITY AND STORAGE WITH PRISON CAMERAS Enter data storage solutions from HPE, Scality and CTERA. HPE provides local storage using CTERA running on HPE servers to capture video 24/7 at each prison facility. Long-term offsite storage relies on HPE systems and Scality RING to securely retain video of incidents. HPE servers at each facility provide five terabytes of raw storage to handle all the video captured locally, with room for up to 64 terabytes. Two Scality RING storage clouds provide 300 terabytes of usable, secure storage that scales to multiple petabytes if needed. Scality also manages replication between the two environments, protecting the data by having a complete copy of the archive always available in the event of a disaster. Scality software provides intelligent data management throughout the lifecycle of the stored video, including secure and automated deletion. Moreover, to be certain the deletion process is carried out with full transparency, there are a series of email alerts to advise relevant parties in advance of deletion, beginning at the three-year mark and progressing with more frequent notices up to the day before scheduled deletion. “Prisons can be difficult environments, so any technology we use must work,” says Jackson. “If there is an incident, it’s highly important that the solution works and is reliable

NetApp Powers the Data Fabric Bringing Digital Humans to Life
NetApp, the leader in cloud data services, has been selected by 3Lateral, a global leader in the “digital humans” industry, to help deliver a data-driven approach for the creation of incredibly realistic human characters for video games, movies, and wider industrial and AI applications. 3Lateral, part of Epic Games, has pioneered the concept of digital humans for over a decade with its work featured in award-winning game, and film. “Creating digital humans requires a deep understanding of every aspect of our appearance and motion, both of which portray our inner self and tell stories around us,” said Vladimir Mastilovic, founder and director of 3Lateral. “We read all these visual cues with great precision as instinct to analyze an image of another human being is deeply embedded in our DNA.” Data-driven approach Behind the realistic models that can be controlled in real time is a data-driven approach which requires the studio to collect data with a unique facial scanner, soon to be peaking at 1 PB per scanning session. Multiple teams at 3Lateral using both custom software and cloud environments use this data to generate realistic models and scenes. The data pipeline has to integrate with multiple project requirements for a variety of unique hardware, software and synthesize technologies. 3Lateral and NetApp developed a data fabric based on AFF and FAS platforms that could follow up the immediate challenges, which also meets the needs for further development, storage capacity demands and workflow changes. The data fabric allows seamless access to petabytes of data that spans multiple technology foundations. In preparation for the massive performance requirements of the future, the teams are experimenting with enhancing their data fabric with NetApp Memory Accelerated Data (MAX Data). The integration could then be extended with a NetApp Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and NetApp Kubernetes Services (NKS), enabling the studio to further simplify and accelerate their development environment. Enhancing data collaboration The teams at 3Lateral predict an increase in data density and Mastilovic aims to develop a framework which enables people to create new applications in industries beyond the entertainment sector. A wide range of applications in medicine, biometrics and research are possible. For this purpose, Mastilovic considers scaling up the cloud capacities of 3Lateral to cover further spikes. According to him, a data fabric strategy offers the necessary “gateway to the cloud”. “Working with 3Lateral has been an exciting project that showcases the potential of a data fabric enabled by NetApp solutions,” said Matt Watts, CTO EMEA at NetApp. “Through the adoption of a data-driven approach, 3Lateral has built a foundation, which solved the immediate challenges of inflexible data silos that have hindered innovative collaboration. The new infrastructure design can deal with the issues of increasing data collection speed and capacity. 3Lateral’s data fabric will adapt and evolve with them as they are looking to solve new and future challenges.” To learn more about the digital human concept carried out by 3Lateral, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMQmWW5w_1s

Digital Transformation for a leading Bank from South Africa
The bank needed to transform itself to offer a more enriched experience to its customers. It needed to eliminate the time taken by its staff to fill in forms and other applications manually-leading to less focus on the customer engagement or relationship building which is integral to the banks growth. The bank embarked upon a digital transformational journey to become Africa’s most admired bank by 2020 Zensar exhibited true partnership by helping bank in creating an online On-Boarding application and creating great client experience leading to client growth and satisfaction. The team has delivered features like FICA on Card delivery, Locker Card Delivery for new clients. Zensar implemented ‘Design Thinking’ for right design experience, applicable for banking industry making it a comprehensive and seamless process. As a result of this approach, the Bank was able to achieve increase in overall sales and a visible improvement in customer experience. We strongly feel that the work done impacted its business outcomes and brand image hence it’s something we would like to share with a larger audience. Customer Challenges /Business Pain Point • 6 out of 7 desk staff finds the form filling on behalf of the client, time consuming and extremely complex • 80% of the bank’s staff voiced the user “unfriendly” ness in terms of ease of navigation of the transactional products interface while selling personal loan • Existing personal loan application is quite convoluted, taking average 27 mins complete the form filling while selling personal loan product. Solution overview: 1. JAD (Joint Application Design) with users for exploratory research and content audit 2. Interactive mocks and prototypes based on continuous feedback wireframe were created 3. Forms designed as per wireframes with new complex features in a simplified way 4. Delivery under Agile guidelines for FTM (Faster time to market) Design Thinking Approach: We followed phases of Design thinking to bring the desired user experience 1)Define In order to identify the problem correctly, the team wrote down all the problems on the stickers. After identifying all the problems, we grouped it by a similar symptom (insight), provide a title for each group and figure out the connections between them. 2.Ideation Ideation is at the heart of the UX process in Nedbank. There are several of techniques, for example brainstorming, cuddle, huddle, wireframing and prototyping used. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of Nedbank users 3. Review A major part of a designing was to review & collaborate with people, especially business, copywriters & developers. To create a successful product, the entire team was made to be on the same page and in sync. 4. Testing & QA Testing tool like ‘Invision’ made our much life easier for final testing prototype. We strictly followed User testing and tried to bring real-life scenarios, post that all screens moved to Sprint ready. We also collaborated with Tech-developers to explain every single interaction involved into Sprint ready screens. The design thinking methodology begins at the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation and is human-centered—based on the needs and wants of real people. Design Thinking can be radically human-centered because it continually talks to real users, gets their feedback, and works to empathize with their wants and needs. Benefits and Outcomes for the customer: 1. Resulted in 30% reduction in Client Onboarding time 2. Onboarding conversion increased by 3 times 3. 24/7 Banking that is easy, simple and intuitive 4. Client-centered pricing and offerings

Stagecoach drives towards a ‘cloud-first’ enabled network strategy with Node4
Stagecoach Group is the UK's leading multi-modal UK public transport company, with operations in England, Scotland and Wales. The Group operates bus, coach, rail, and tram services in regulated and deregulated markets. Stagecoach is the UK's biggest bus and coach operator, with 24,000 employees serving three million passengers every day across 100 major UK bus depots. The company needed to be able to support both business growth and its increased adoption of cloud-based technologies. To ensure Stagecoach could progress with its cloud-first strategy, it required a combination of SaaS adoption and preparing core systems for the cloud; both of which need application routing control and extensive access to bandwidth. To drive forward its digital transformation plans, Stagecoach replaced its legacy WAN infrastructure across 240 sites with a new SD-WAN based architecture provided by Node4. Node4 was carefully selected based on bespoke design, extensive networking experience and being an early MSSP adopter of SD-WAN technology. Stagecoach has already begun to replace its current legacy copper network infrastructure and move to a high capacity fibre network across its 240 sites. This will reduce the overall cost of bandwidth. It will also allow Stagecoach to gain more control and capabilities, as the SD-WAN allows deployment across both MPLS and internet-facing access circuits, whilst optimising secure access. “With so many sites to roll the SD-WAN technology out to, Node4 has been a huge help with ensuring the process is more efficient and effective on both sides. Our teams work in unison to come up with designs and configurations and migration strategies so that everyone is fully versed in the process before we implement the tech,” commented Graham. Node4 has also enabled Stagecoach to implement its full suite of Office 365 collaboration technology to ensure that amidst COVID-19 and beyond, remote staff can keep working with a successful line of communication. Quality of Management Implementation of the SD-WAN started before the outbreak of COVID-19, but the pandemic and its restrictions meant that roll-outs had to be halted and rearranged. Given the mammoth task of rolling out this new connectivity across 240 sites in the UK, Node4 and Stagecoach had to meticulously plan together when and how this would work - even amidst a pandemic. Andrew Clark, Group Technology Senior Project Manager at Stagecoach, said: “I myself have worked with Node4 in the past and even though Node4 has grown since then to more than 300 people strong, the team we work with on a day-to-day basis still has the same Node4 feel. Node4 does what it says on the tin and the team has been open and honest from the get-go, which is refreshing from a supplier and partner. This consistency is hugely important to us at Stagecoach for the future of our digital transformation journey. “We have a great working relationship with Node4 that is built on true partnership and ultimately works because both Stagecoach and Node4 are equally invested in delivering a world class solution for our customers. They want success for our business as much as we do.” Graham Moore, Group Chief Information Officer at Stagecoach added: “I have been a Node4 customer previously and they’re the right fit for Stagecoach because, while SLAs and contracts are great, what you need to know is that you have someone who is there when you need them – and the team at Node4 are always there. With Node4 we get to utilise the best of the technology that we need to progress our digital transformation plans, as well as a valued partnership rather than a typical supplier/customer relationship.” Return on Investment There are three key areas where Stagecoach has and will continue to see benefits from working with Node4: collaboration, connectivity and security. Stagecoach now has visibility of the applications and websites that are being accessed over the network and internet, due to the layer seven capabilities of the SD-WAN. This has allowed Stagecoach to prevent access to certain websites and prioritise traffic to ensure bandwidth is utilised for business usage. “The new network will give at least 10x more bandwidth across every Stagecoach site, from <2MB to dual links that are now on average 20MB each. This will improve working life for employees at the depos significantly – before, the network was so slow that employees would have to kill time making a cup of tea while the system tried to boot up,” stated Graham. “Working with Node4 is revolutionising performance, as we now have much more bandwidth to carry out innovative and business-driving projects,” Graham continued. “The bandwidth also plays into cost optimisation, which is a key factor for the business. By enabling us to implement collaboration technologies we were previously lacking, we will see a significant reduction in travel costs.” Security is another key component of the benefits Stagecoach will reap from the partnership, as IT teams will be able to look into network traffic more, understand what apps are using more bandwidth than others, and give security the ability to block certain apps. Firewalls at the edge of every depot will be enabled for security around the perimeter, giving Stagecoach greater confidence and control. There is also increased resiliency due to multi-supplier connectivity and resilient device setup on site. This has proven invaluable already, when Stagecoach was able to identify when a link went offline at a site, meaning the site wasn’t impacted. “In the past this would have caused the site to go down, impacting the business and increasing calls to the desk,” said Graham. “Thanks to Node4, we were able to identify it quickly and bypass any downtime.” “Another huge benefit the security team will see will be the added Layer 7 controls the new solution provides,” Graham said. “It doesn’t just have the ability to filter out unwanted elements, but also provides detailed visibility into traffic on the network that was not available previously. With the installation of Fortigate devices at every site, we are able to monitor and protect East and West traffic, providing additional protection if one site is compromised and preventing it from it spreading.” Customer Benefits Uptime is vital for any digital transformation initiative to work, as customers of Stagecoach expect their bus journey app to be reliable and efficient. As such, staying online is hugely important for Stagecoach, its employees and its customers. But using legacy infrastructure meant there was previously no way of automatically monitoring the entire estate. This resulted in the IT team having no visibility into knowing if or when a site was down or struggling for bandwidth. This, in turn, could cause extended periods of downtime if not addressed, as the on-site teams had to manually check each site minute by minute, and the IT support team would only find out about any downtime once they were told. “If the network goes down we aren’t able to schedule buses or update customers on whether their bus is coming,” said Graham. “It’s of paramount importance in today’s digitally-driven world that our customers using the app which tells them when a bus is due to arrive can expect this to be a reliable and consistent service. Because the app works on a national basis but takes a feed from every machine on every site and every bus, the network going down on one site removes the transitions of ticket data for those buses, which leaves essential functions blind.” Graham continues: “We also needed to adapt quickly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, to be able to remain connected and collaborative from remote locations. We had only just rolled out Office 365 at the end of last year, and not yet used the capabilities of it fully. Implementing the proper processes and technologies for effective remote collaboration was high on the Stagecoach agenda.” Summary of Success As a large operation that serves over three million passengers every day, Stagecoach, with the support of Node4, has completely modernised its entire infrastructure. This means it can now support current and future digital transformation initiatives. It is paramount for Stagecoach that it stays at the cutting edge of the latest technology, in order to serve its customers the way they expect to be served in the modern digital world. Rolling out SD-WAN for improved connectivity, collaboration tools and security across every depot in the UK means that Stagecoach can deliver on these expectations, and enables the business to further its digital transformation as digitally-driven consumer demands continue to evolve and grow. Plus, the IT team at Stagecoach can do this knowing they have the full support of the team at Node4, a partner that feels more like an extension of their own team, rather than a separate vendor.

Cloud Desktop Solution
Some projects demonstrate that outstanding collaboration can play just as important a role as innovative technology in achieving results. Pulsant’s Cloud/MSP undertaking for London law firm Teacher Stern is the epitome of this. The project highlights the latest high-performance cloud solutions, but its ‘people-focused’ facet is what makes it shine brighter than others. In 2019 Teacher Stern engaged Pulsant to overhaul its aging and inflexible IT infrastructure to boost staff productivity and effectiveness. The firm’s vision was to create a lasting partnership that would enable it to achieve its business goals and growth plans and continue to deliver a reliable and excellent service to clients. Pulsant worked hand-in-hand with Teacher Stern to create a bespoke IT architecture, including a fully-managed Cloud Desktop solution delivered on Pulsant Enterprise Cloud (PEC), as well as hosting for email, practice management and back office systems within two Pulsant data centres. Pulsant’s solution provides private resilient telecommunications from Teacher Stern’s head office into Pulsant data centres in Milton Keynes and Edinburgh and a virtual desktop delivery system using Citrix, secured for remote access with two-step authentication. This solution was a step change from the traditional multi-tenant shared session desktops of the past. Pulsant tailored their project delivery using Prince 2 / Prince 2 Agile methodologies, adapted for the engagement with Teacher Stern. The Pulsant PM SaaS tool was a key enabler of the level of collaboration required to deliver in the timescale and provide the necessary transparency between the organisations. The initiation phase included the creation of a PID, with both organisations signing off on deliverables, roles and responsibilities. Pulsant’s substantial customer migrations experience enabled early identification of risks and issues within the PID. Early-stage deliverables included a due diligence exercise by Pulsant which enabled the creation of key artefacts such as Low-Level Designs and Migration approach documents. Controlling the various stages with tracking and updates of the RAID logs provided valuable input into the directing stage and Pulsant presented jointly with the Teacher Stern programme management team in regular steering meetings to the senior business stakeholders. MSP projects are often technology led – conventionally delivering a technological solution to an inflexible playbook. The Pulsant/Teacher Stern project breaks convention with the outstanding level of collaboration involved and uncommon amount of time both companies devoted, which delivered the kind of results that would usually be associated with an enterprise project. A process of comprehensive user testing saw a level of teamwork unique in Pulsant’s history, driven by dedicated transition managers who became an integral part of Teacher Stern’s IT team. This included enhanced post go-live support from Pulsant to ensure a seamless transition into BAU support. This people-focused approach proved vital in ensuring the project got the right result first time. In the face of an unmovable tight four-month deadline - with no scope for error or delay - the project was completed seamlessly a month ahead of schedule. This enabled Teacher Stern to achieve a high level of mobility and to transition smoothly to home working at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a situation the previous system could not have coped with. Teacher Stern now benefits from reliable IT with better connectivity and more robust security, providing its fee earners with quick and uninterrupted access to systems and applications from any location or device. Improved reliability also means that Teacher Stern can install legal application features that were not previously possible, while the close working relationship with Pulsant means the company has the flexibility to implement additional services quickly if and when required. Teacher Stern IT Programme Manager Andy Cecil said: “The project provided a big leap forward in terms of our capability and now IT has become an enabler, rather than a constraint. This meant we could quickly adapt and pivot our IT services away from constant firefighting, instead delivering to the business something more akin to the textbook proactive IT service management approach that we aspire to. “Pulsant delivered a systemic solution, transforming the fundamental way our system worked. By changing the structure of its key elements, we have released efficiencies which were previously being strangled by issues inherent in the overall system. Even if we were counting modestly, we’ve seen a five-fold reduction in Priority 1 incidents in the eight months the system has been live.”

Six Degrees delivers cloud services that enable Whistlebrook to deliver software in a regulatory compliant ‘as a service’ model
Six Degrees, have announced that leading financial services software provider Whistlebrook has elected to host a number of its software services on Six Degrees’ secure cloud platforms. Whistlebrook has chosen to partner with Six Degrees to deliver its integrated suite of products in an ‘as a service’ model, enabling financial services firms to consume Whistlebrook’s innovative back office software systems in the most appropriate manner to meet their commercial and operational needs. Whistlebrook has chosen to partner with Six Degrees as a result of Six Degrees’ impressive cloud pedigree and security capabilities, its mature management wrap-around services, and its track record in working with other software providers. Six Degrees’ secure cloud services meet the financial, operational and regulatory compliance requirements of UK financial services firms. As a Microsoft Azure expert and Gold Partner with multiple security accreditations including ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus, along with a UK-based cyber security operations centre (CSOC), Whistlebrook trusts Six Degrees to deliver cloud platform services that maintain the uptime, performance and security of its software systems at all times. Together, Six Degrees and Whistlebrook have developed a shared responsibility service model that will provide a streamlined, comprehensive service to Whistlebrook’s clients, enabling them gain intelligent insights whilst guaranteeing reliability, performance and support levels for the software systems that facilitate mission-critical back office functions. James Henigan, General Manager, Cloud Services, Six Degrees, said: “Six Degrees is trusted by a number of leading software systems providers to provide the secure cloud foundations that support the delivery of their software in a secure, high-performance and highly available manner. We are proud to partner with Whistlebrook, an innovative and trusted provider to the financial services sector, and the shared responsibility model we have developed collaboratively will enable firms to receive a seamless, hassle-free service delivered through the most appropriate ‘as a service’ model to meet their needs.” Andy Hudders, Company Director, Whistlebrook, said: “We are committed to supporting our customers by offering them choice and flexibility as to how they can deploy our products. Our understanding of the strict regulatory compliance requirements that Whistlebrook’s clients must adhere to, our in-house expertise, and now our strong relationship with Six Degrees, will continue to enhance the operational efficiencies that our clients can achieve.”

Remote Support Desk
What, exactly, is novel about the process/product or innovation? Hyve operated a remote support desk for the first time, offering the same level of service as a traditional support department even though staff were working from home. How does the product or process break with conventional ideas or processes in its field? Hyve offers 24/7/365 support from its headquarters in Brighton. But it had to quickly shift to home-working whilst maintaining the same level of service. How does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists? Engineers proved to be more effective when working from home, with productivity unexpectedly increasing. How do customers benefit from the product/process or innovation? Customers were facing uncertainty during the lockdown, with home-working disrupting their usual working practices. By implementing a remote service desk, Hyve was able to offer reassurance and support during the pandemic. Introduction to Hyve Hyve Managed Hosting is a UK-based cloud-hosting provider which prides itself on offering its customers bespoke 24/7/365 support and management. In the past year, Hyve has seen demand from new customers grow by 17%, with clients now including the NHS, Caffe Nero and Anglia Ruskin University. With this growth in its customer base, Hyve has also seen increased demand for support services. So when the coronavirus lockdown forced its staff to work from home, Hyve was faced with a challenge: how could it maintain its support system when employees were no longer based in the office? To make sure its customers stayed online and fully operational during the pandemic, Hyve had to quickly implement a support desk which could operate entirely remotely. This is the first time it has ever operated a remote support system and forced a dramatic rethink in working processes. Hyve’s engineers rose to the occasion admirably, improving their productivity during the pandemic and laying the groundwork for a radically different way of working. A commitment to remote working Hyve offers several products which allow its customers to work remotely. In the past 12 months, the Brighton-based firm launched its pioneering Desktop as a Service (DaaS) product which offers customers the ability to access their systems from home, giving them the ability to read emails or use business desktops without being in the office. The product makes it easier to run a company remotely, easing the pressures of running an in-house IT infrastructure. Hyve was also the first UK-based cloud hosting provider to set up a fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud as well as offering a network capacity of more than a terabit to meet the demands of customers. But it did not expect to have to roll out its own remote-working infrastructure at speed and under pressure, as the country retreated into its homes during lockdown and demand for online services skyrocketed. Home-Based Support Desk All of Hyve’s customers are able to draw on the expertise of a personal Account Manager as well as a team of technical engineers who work to ensure the solutions are operating effectively and at full capacity. Hyve’s support system means that customers don’t have to deal with automated call centres and are able to interact with human staff at any hour of the day or night. When lockdown was imposed on the UK, Hyve had to quickly adapt to the new normal and operate a remote support service which maintained high standards whilst obeying the government rules forbidding staff from working in an office. Lockdown began on March 23, prompting a flurry of support requests, with the number of tickets doubling in the last week of March. This was a major test for Hyve’s home-based support desk, which is closely monitored to ensure it deals with requests as quickly as possible. As well as tracking the number of support requests coming in, Hyve also tracks “queue length” which refers to how long it takes to resolve and close an open support request. Statistics relating to the queue length of support tickets showed a slight increase in the time it took to deal with issues during the first week of lockdown (see supporting graphs attached). But then something surprising happened. As the number of support tickets slipped back to normal levels during April, May and June, engineers had to deal with a workload that was roughly similar to pre-pandemic levels. However, Hyve’s statistics showed a sustained reduction in queue length that follows the end of March spike. In other words, the support system appeared to be working more effectively than it did before the pandemic. This has prompted Hyve’s engineers to consider whether home-working could actually boost their productivity, rather than reducing it. The success in driving down queue times whilst maintaining the same level of support showed that Hyve can not only survive an emergency, but thrive during it. Hyve’s customers can be assured that the hosting provider can cope with unprecedented changes in circumstances whilst maintaining the support they need during troubled times.

Delivering a Secure Connected Digital Experience During a Crisis
In only four weeks, Tata Communications transformed its standalone products into a cohesive digital solution that enables customers to pivot their businesses and rapidly make the move to remote working. Tata Communications launched its Secure Connected Digital Experience (SCDx) platform to give EMEA enterprises a holistic and secure way to adopt new digital working models while providing optimised application experience for end users. Its mission was to enable enterprise customers to compete in the post-COVID world and focus on business success, instead of just business continuity. Lockdowns and quarantines associated with COVID-19 have created a new business landscape that requires new applications, services and tools to ensure the entire value chain can stay up and running and serve changing demands. A recent report from McKinsey estimates that the pandemic ushered in the equivalent of a five-year leap in digital adoption, in just eight weeks. At Tata Communications, we recognised that our enterprise customers needed to urgently rethink their digital strategies and transform themselves to prosper in this digital-first ecosystem. The SCDx platform harnesses the power of collaboration tools, virtual desktop interfaces, omni-channel eCommerce, contact centre solutions, agile networking and zero-trust security. It has helped our customers to re-prioritise how they serve their end users and support their business in a challenging time. With two focus areas, our SCDx platform helps to support enterprise customers and enable them to continue to serve customers and grow during the pandemic. This helps them to accelerate their digital transformation, minimise disruption and maximise security. Digital Customer Experience Platform The pandemic brought about new norms of social distancing, no-touch interactions and rich virtual experiences. Enterprises needed to offer end users low or no touch omni-channel experiences and roll out a suite of communications solutions to engage customers across mobile apps, voice calls, social media and the web. Our platform offers all this in a single secure platform and enables enterprises to gain intelligence and automated customer support services for agile issue resolution and enhanced customer experience (CX). • WFO - Enables contact centre agents to be optimally trained, monitored, evaluated and rewarded, thus increasing the overall efficiency of the agent. • Intelligent Routing - Enables customer calls to be routed to the most preferred agent, by gauging the preferences of the customer and the skill set of your agents. • WebRTC - Enables communication within the website and mobile application, integrating click to call feature, engagement in video calls and screen sharing. • Agent Assist - This helps with intent detection and call resolution support through automated chatbots, screen pop-ups during a live call. • Speech Recognition - Enabling specific actions on identifying spoken words or phrases in a conversation which can be customised according to business needs. • Mobile App - Provides mobile application integration via third-party APIs, enabling omni-channel experience. • Smart Dialer and SMS - Enables smart dialer that leads to a quicker turn-around by the agents thus leading to enhanced productivity. We enabled our customers to provide secure omni-channel experiences all while working remotely. SCDx removed the barriers to delivering exceptional CX during the pandemic. “Tata Communications offered the extreme agility and speed of execution we needed, working on-the-fly to deliver projects within 24 hours in some cases. The solution is supported from the Tata Communications service centre 24/7.” Spokesperson, global IT and business consultancy company Secure Connected Digital Workplace The pandemic disrupted businesses and corporate ICT was fragmented with inconsistent access to networking solutions and hardware. An immediate solution was required for user experience and collaboration. The project was led by our leadership team, who are directly involved in service delivery, customer service, operations and marketing. They took a consultative approach when designing, deploying and managing the right mix of solutions for connectivity, security and collaboration. It was with the full support of our leadership team that within a matter of weeks, we were able to develop and deliver our Secure Connected Digital Experience (SCDx) platform, so our customers could digitally transform their business operations with agility, flexibility and ease. Through combining ultra-secure networking, secure internet gateway solutions, global VPNs and cloud applications, it gives enterprises a Secure Connected Digital Workplace that can focus on business success and not just continuity. We seamlessly combined these services and capabilities into a single seamless platform: • NetFoundry – High-performance access to remote users connecting to public/private cloud applications over the internet with military-grade security on any broadband connectivity • Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) – Remote access to cloud applications on Microsoft Azure and AWS, with rapid provisioning of VDI Services with few deployment and management complexities • Cisco and Microsoft UCaaS solutions – Fully managed collaboration services based on Cisco WebEx or Microsoft Teams. With Tata Communications global connectivity, voice network and lifecycle management, remote users can seamlessly collaborate with employees and partners • Global VPN – Ensuring employees gain seamless access to the enterprise network. Flexibility to upgrade internet and MPLS bandwidth at the data centre and VPN gateways for accessing private applications that are only available to a business unit. This was critical as customer were struggling to identify their b/w need and needed an agile and flexible solution to scale up with their evolving need. • Secure Internet Gateway Solutions (SIGS) – Provides employees with secure access to applications and data residing in the enterprise data centre. The SIGS solution will help inject internet traffic into the MPLS network and reduce the load from the user firewall/concentrator, ensuring security and compliance for users working remotely. Compliance and security are vulnerable components during a pandemic it needed to be addressed as soon as possible. We delivered a unified approach to securing and optimising applications and services so that our customers could not just survive but thrive during the pandemic. We gave them the tools they need to be successful in a single platform. “The outbreak of COVID and subsequent work from home imperatives have led to the requirement of a strong and reliable network. Tata Communications played a pivotal role in setting up a proactive business continuity plan to ensure we scaled our network connectivity in an agile manner without any bandwidth constraints. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge that the network availability during the crisis has been commendable. In one of a recent incident, the Tata Communications team proactively highlighted temperature issues with one of our MUX devices for two locations. Despite lockdown, they immediately sent a field engineer to ensure services are restored within no time. They leave no stone unturned to delight us. They have helped us set up a solid foundation upon which we run our network.” Pramod Maharana, IT Manager, Atos Syntel "Thank you so much to everyone on the team for getting our latest project completed, I know how much time and effort you all invested to not only get the project done prior to the deadline, but to ensure the client was satisfied with every step of the process, despite the challenging atmosphere in the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I appreciate the cooperative spirit and the attention to detail that enabled us to streamline the entire process in order to achieve success and to meet our goals." Spokesperson, Tier 1 Global Telecoms Operator We allocated an investment of $3 million to commercialise our project. We’ve reshaped our suite of solutions, enabled 98% of our workforce to work from home within two weeks, and upgraded the capacity of our network to cope with demand caused by the pandemic. The return on investment can be seen through the 650+ orders we’ve received and delivered to customers, corresponding to 1.35 Tbps of additional bandwidth, 30% increase in internet traffic, and a 23% quarter on quarter increase in IP traffic on our network. Our digital transformation project has allowed us to gain 100+ new enrolments in our customer reference program, with a total of 500+ strong advocates and 40+ reviews added post-pandemic on analyst platforms like Gartner Peer Insights. As a result, 70% of customers being willing to refer us to other businesses. This is also evident of our year on year double digit increase in our NPS®**, which consistently puts us in the top quartile for customer service within the telecommunication industry. We have enabled customers to change how they operate almost overnight, with an ultra-secure environment and a reliable global platform. How does the product or process break with conventional ideas or processes in its field? Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Tata Communications has been supporting enterprises to deploy relevant solutions in record time; in many cases, delivering changes and upgrades in less than six hours. Tata Communications has enabled tens of thousands of employees globally for remote working across more than 150 organisations. Tata Communications has been evolving how it serves its enterprise customers for more than 30 years. Our belief in continual transformation enabled us to pivot to serve changing enterprise demands in only weeks after the pandemic hit. We have consistently invested in agile solutions that can be shaped to meet the needs of a changing channel environment. We accelerated our planned network expansion and transformation of our internal systems to give enterprises new levels of support. Enterprises benefited from our network upgrades that enabled them to manage surging bandwidth usage, and we reshaped our solutions set to support rapid digital transformation and SCDx. SDCx was not designed to just solve the challenges facing customers in 2020. It has been designed to be a long-term solution that enables businesses to embrace fluid and distributed working environments beyond the pandemic. At the same time, it prepares businesses for the next unexpected event and ensures that they have the security and infrastructure in place to rapidly adapt and pivot their operations seamlessly and overnight. COVID-19 has acted like a Proof of Concept (PoC) for remote working and now we expect many businesses in EMEA to support remote working and go agile even when the pandemic is over. We’re ready to support that. Customer Benefits of SDCx include: • A single seamless platform with security, networking, communications services and applications available with one user experience • Re-opening for a safe and contactless workforce • Secure application access & performance • Remote collaboration and CX command centre • Digital-first, secure collaboration experiences • Safe, seamless and connected applications • Digital retail experiences augmented with audio and video • On-demand scalable private networks over public internet • Zero-trust access to enterprise cloud applications over the internet • Safe and secure contactless workforce • Secure video-enabled collaboration and commerce • Omni-channel digital experience across all touch-points ** Net Promoter Score (NPS®) Disclaimer: Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc

Simplicity is underrated
At Digital Cloud UK, we believe that customer service is everything. Our customer testimonials speak for themselves and our clients tell us that they choose us, because they haven’t found other providers investing in service like we do. For us – simplicity is underrated. We know that technology can be perceived as complex, often coupled with technical jargon and unbounded functionality. And trust us when we say, we know running a business can be all-consuming. But we believe that technology can and should, simplify things. That’s why we do everything possible to take the pain out of tech for our SME clients. In a market that’s crowded and confusing – we maximise the value that they get out of their systems and streamline their business sales & management processes by building simple automation to their everyday tasks. But most importantly, we underpin all this with our service-led innovations, leading with the customer experience every step of the way. Our unique customer service model ensures that service is built into every phase of our process, whether we’re delivering our Microsoft 365 or our CRM (Customer Relationship Management packages, providing stand-out service is what drives us. Phase 1 - Discovery Phase 2 - Development Phase 3 - Delivery Phase 4 - Evolution We go above and beyond to ensure our clients get the most out of digital innovation: • Free 30 minute digital innovation call for all of our prospects and clients • Free 7 day product trial, with daily check-ins from their technical manager to field product questions, confusions or adaptations • 2 hour discovery consultation for all of our clients • 6 hours of free go-live support with their dedicated technical manager • Post go live training onsite/online • Daily on-call Whatsapp or Microsoft Teams support That means that for every client - in total - we offer 12 hours of free service add-ons, that they can’t get with any other CRM provider. But more than that, it’s the reason we believe, our customers have become loyal connections and advocates of Digital Cloud UK and our team. During the uncertain times we’re seeing clients facing in 2020, we’ve reacted by pivoting our costing model, as we know that reliable access to IT and rapid shifts in technology have been fundamental to business continuity and success. We now offer; • A range of low-cost packages • 6 and 12 month payment plans to help them spread the cost during these challenging times • Quick turnaround times (for those that need it) with our quick-start packages At Digital Cloud UK, we are clear that our values are driven by providing exceptional customer service. We never use technical jargon, and we pride ourselves on investing upfront in understanding our customers. This allows us to deliver technology that is tailored to their goals, in a language they’ll truly understand. See our client testimonials which underpins our excellent service. The outcomes are proof that our unique service approach is the tipping point of digital transformation in our clients’ businesses, allowing them to fulfil their potential… And that couldn’t make us happier.

Curvature's Remote Hands, NetSure Hardware Maintenance, and Auditing solutions provided in global settings exemplify Curvature's Excellence in Service capabilities:
3 Examples of Curvature Delivering World-Class IT Service: Curvature is the world leader in independent IT support, products and services, transforming how companies deal with multi-vendor, multinational networks and data centres, to promote efficiencies. As a strategic partner with more than 15,000 organisations globally, Curvature is trusted to deliver premium services that cut reduce costs and enhances the user experience of IT. Three recent examples of excellent IT service delivery are detailed below. Curvature has helped a rapidly growing, major global bio-pharmaceutical, to reroute network asset budget into digital innovation that in the year of COVID, has kept essential research flowing. The biopharma being detailed started the relationship with Curvature with a complete networking infrastructure assessment, the output of which allowed them to quickly seize upon the opportunity to boost performance across devices; identifying cost savings and EOL equipment that would be better served with support from Curvature’s NetSure, their network hardware maintenance solution. Now fully equipped with a customised network blueprint, the biopharma was able to deploy a hybrid maintenance and support strategy, blending Curvature support with manufacturer support. On a daily basis, the biopharma streamlined operations through Curvature’s maintenance concierge, giving a single point of contact, regardless of service provider. Six vendors platforms were consolidated, lowering admin costs. The biopharma also used Curvature’s Remote Hands service to dispatch highly trained Curvature engineers to locations around the world, providing critical assistance as further M&A have occurred and a ‘transparent extension’ to the pharma’s internal IT team. Overall, through the service partnership with Curvature, the biopharma has supported growth and saved 50% in network hardware maintenance and support costs. Elsewhere, Curvature has continued to provide Excellence in IT Service through helping a global IT Security services organisation reach its goal of moving thousands of users and 25 data centres into an outsourced cloud supported model in 2020. In short, the company - with major centres in the Netherlands, UK and the US - wanted to simplify operations, leveraging local engineers from Curvature who were already familiar with the IT Security company’sies’ hardware platforms across data centres and provide a single central itemised invoice each month. For an improved user experience, the company used Curvature’s Remote Hands service to achieve accurate support ticket logging; highlighting where break fix maintenance was required vs professional services. Lastly, the largest finance technology provider in the world used Curvature to achieve complete asset auditing, our final example of Excellence in Service. The company, who employees over 50,000 people in 130 countries, requested help from Curvature to deliver detailed Assessment Services for over 34,000 IT assets globally and within a week. That’s a logistically challenged objective to deliver under any circumstance! Add to that, the organisations’ requirement to keep the audit under a total a veil of complete secrecy for independence to satisfy external government auditors. Speed, accuracy and internal co-operation were essential, with audits occurring inside working hours, alongside IT, and actually completed within 5 days. Reliability and the usage of proven methodologies were key factors of success.

ExaGrid Reseller Partner Program
The ExaGrid Reseller Partner Program offers a strong deal registration program for a product with a highly competitive win rate. The program is designed to be easy for partners, with support from the ExaGrid sales team and without milestone commitments. ExaGrid is known for having a Tiered Backup Storage system that ‘just works’ and provides its customers with stellar customer support from an assigned level 2 engineer, ensuring that partners’ customers are well taken care of. ExaGrid provides generous Meeting Maker and SPIFF incentives to its partners in the ExaGrid Reseller Partner Program. ExaGrid Reseller Partner Program at a Glance: • No certification training required • No inventory requirements • No sales milestones • Marketing events programs to generate leads • Strong deal registration program – high margins • Meeting maker incentives • New customer SPIFFs • ExaGrid does the heavy lifting for sales and support • High competitive win rate • Product that just works • Strong customer support with happy customers • Strong customer repeat business as data grows • Maintenance and support renewals through the reseller

SolarWinds Doubles Down on Customer Success Initiative to Help Empower IT Service Providers to Outperform Their Goals and Thrive
SolarWinds is a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software. Our products give organizations worldwide—regardless of type, size, or complexity—the power to monitor and manage their IT services, infrastructures, and applications; whether on-premises, in the cloud, or via hybrid models. We continuously engage with technology professionals—IT service and operations professionals, DevOps professionals, and managed services providers (MSPs)—to understand the challenges they face in maintaining high-performing and highly available IT infrastructures and applications. The insights we gain from them, in places like our THWACK® community, allow us to solve well-understood IT management challenges in the ways technology professionals want them solved. Our focus on the user and commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT management has established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in solutions for network and IT service management, application performance, and managed services. Targeted for MSPs, the SolarWinds MSP product portfolio delivers broad, scalable IT service management solutions that integrate layered security, collective intelligence, and smart automation. Our products are designed to enable MSPs to provide highly-effective outsourced IT services for their SMB end-customers and more efficiently manage their own businesses.

Altaro EndPoint Backup for MSPs
* What is novel? Released this year, Altaro EndPoint Backup for MSPs is purpose-built for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). It enables them to back up files on thousands of on-premise and roaming endpoints, such as Windows desktops and laptops, across multiple customers. MSPs can centrally manage backups and restore files through a multi-tenant online console, on a monthly subscription. No binding contracts apply: MSPs pay per endpoint per month, with the flexibility of adding and removing endpoints, and can set their own pricing. Award-winning, 24/7 support – with an average call response of 22 seconds – is included. MSPs can also provide backup storage services from their own Azure account as another revenue stream. * How does it break with conventional ideas or processes? Three key reasons: 1) This is a new product that allows MSPs to help their customers and save their bacon by backing up files on their on-premises and roaming network desktops and laptops, an area that is often overlooked, resulting in a data protection gap. The reasoning behind this: Much of the work within a business or organization is conducted on these network PCs and laptops. Yet, despite companies' best efforts to ensure that their information is stored on their network servers or in the cloud, end users often only save files on their desktops and laptops instead. Should any of these be lost, stolen or damaged, or should their user delete any data, businesses and organizations need a way to access and restore that data. MSPs therefore must be able to back up their customers' on-premise and roaming endpoints as a managed service, to provide them with increased data protection across their entire network. 2) Additionally, Altaro has chosen to provide MSPs with the ability to back up 10 of their own endpoints for free, forever - no strings attached. This not-for-resale Free Edition will enable them to take advantage of its benefits in their own organization at no cost. 3) But the innovation goes beyond that: With Altaro EndPint Backup for MSPs, Altaro now provides AMSPs with a one-stop-shop for their backup needs, giving them various backup solutions on a monthly subscription. But there’s more to it than that Altaro is the only vendor that enables MSPs to manage and monitor different kinds of backups – like VMs, Office 365, physical servers and endpoints – across all their customers from a single pane of glass, simplifying their life. This is possible through Altaro’s ground-breaking, multi-tenant online management console, a powerhouse for MSPs, which also provides centralized billing, with one convenient monthly invoice for the various backup services used by different customers. MSPs can pick and choose which backup services to provide to provide per customer, benefiting from flexibility and cost savings, and can scale as needed. There are no binding contracts. MSPs pay per usage and set their own pricing. Award-winning 24/7 support, with an average call response of 22 seconds, is included. * How does it go beyond marginal improvements? This is a brand-new product offering, launched this year – it is another product in Altaro’s suite of robust backup solutions for MSPs; but it is a standalone offering. An MSP can subscribe to any or all of the solutions in Altaro’s MSP program and can choose which to apply to which customer of theirs. * How do customers benefit? Altaro’s customer here is the MSP. Managed Service Providers can enjoy these benefits with the Altaro EndPoint Backup for MSPs subscription program: • Multi-tenancy – Manage and monitor all customer endpoint backups through a single pane of glass, through our ground-breaking multi-tenant online management console. • Pay as you go – Pay per endpoint. No biding contracts: minimum starter pack of up to 10 endpoints per month across all your customers. Scale to thousands of endpoints. • Data storage – Set up your own MS Azure storage account to save customer backups to. Bill each customer for storage used. • Recurring revenue – Charge your customers a monthly recurring fee for backups, your services and storage used. What’s in it for the MSP: • Unbeatable value: Starting at a low entry point per endpoint per month, with the ability to set your own pricing; scale up and down as needed. • Low monthly requirements: Minimum monthly starting subscription of up to 10 endpoints. • No annual commitment: You may stop at any time: Others require single or multi-year contracts. • 24/7 support - 'Best in the IT industry': 22-second average call pickup, instant live chat. Speak directly with an expert; no tier 1 agents or gatekeepers. • Free for your own internal use – Back up 10 of your own endpoints per month for free. • One-stop backup shop with central management – Choose which backup services to provide per customer and manage their different kinds of backups – VMs, Office 365, physical servers, endpoints – from a single pane of glass. An industry first!

homeConnect by Mobliciti
During the COVID-19 lockdown, businesses resorted to home working en mass, whilst most were able to connect and work from home over their existing home broadband connections. The substantial rise in traffic has exposed the limitations of using domestic broadband for sustained business communication. Sharing a domestic broadband connection often results in slow and glitchy performance as households compete with family members and neighbours for bandwidth. Corporate IT teams have no visibility of the connection and are powerless to help with technical problems, causing additional concerns over security & compliance. Mobliciti homeConnect was established within a month of lockdown and combines our expertise in mobile, wireless and managed services to provide home workers with a high-performance business-grade service, utilising the optimum signal from the best 4G or 5G network available within the user's area. Legal firms often have partners who live in remote parts of the country and so by utlising homeConnect we have been able to increase download speed from 3Mbps to 40Mbps and uploads from 1Mbps to 30Mbps. homeConnect has been specifically designed for this new working world where staff will be based at home more often than in the office. We have seen massive uptake on this new service as it provides businesses with full visibility over home connections including security patches and troubleshooting abilities.

Why we're the number one choice for Managed IT Support
INFINITY IT Solutions was formed in 2009 by 3 Directors who had a shared belief that they could change the way that Professional IT Managed Services and Support could be delivered. Their initial philosophy has never wavered, and they continue to push the barriers in terms of service delivery, customer satisfaction and performance. This has seen INFINITY become one of the fastest-growing service providers in the UK, supporting thousands of devices worldwide across a range of markets. As the business has grown, the owners have introduced a middle-management layer to allow them to push on with accelerating growth. The Directors style has always been to enable their staff, giving each employee an opportunity to progress, learn new techniques and forge a career – resulting in high employee retention; each team member understands the business journey and has an appreciation towards the investments made into their careers. We target businesses wishing to work on an entirely outsourced basis, delivering an all-encompassing IT offering to our clients; we are the IT Director, Strategist, Project Manager and Support deliverer. Ultimately it’s our job as a Professional Service Provider to offer sound advice to our clients - to do this we must stay abreast of the ever-changing nature of our industry and be able to adapt to changes quickly and efficiently. Differentiating a business can be difficult in the services sector, that said we differentiate ourselves in two key ways; The time we take to respond to an incident, and our proactive care. Industry standard response times for an IT service desk are an hour, INFINITY offer a guaranteed 30-minute response which is industry-leading. The average response time is 20 minutes for out-of-hours support, and during office hours is near-instant. Our excellence as a business isn’t reserved solely for dealing with problems when they occur, but being able to pre-empt an issue and resolve it before it takes causes downtime. We don’t like surprises, “prevention is better than cure”. Monitoring & Management has improved our clients experience by allowing us to monitor the health of our client’s devices remotely. Raising proactive alerts for a huge range of hardware, software and system errors. Through its workflow and automation features it allows us to routinely run administrative tasks and risk assessments, which ultimately avoids problems before they have an impact. Our focus is to become a £10m turnover business, which we aim to succeed within 3 to 5 years. The demand for professional, award-winning Managed IT services businesses has never been so high. IT will play a much more strategic role in companies, driving business results and creating business value through technology-based business innovation and digital initiatives. With such substantial plans, both space and personnel are going to be a challenge and plans are already afoot to relocate to a new purpose-built premises in the next 12months at the same time as growing departments. We actually took the pandemic as a perfect opportunity to refurbish our office and make way for new recruits when it is safe to return. This is our main short-term objective, which should support and enable us to reach our longer-term goal of becoming a £10m turnover business. Despite challenging times for all businesses at present, we exceeded our annual sales target during Q3 and still see an extremely bright future for the business. Since April we have experienced 22x the usual amount of service desk tickets and have subsequently recruited a new team member, with another two recruits in the pipeline over the next month. We’ve also played our part in the local community, offering free advice, knowledge and cloud readiness assessments free of charge. In addition we gave away Android tablets to children that needed them for home schooling during lockdown and raised over £1000 for The Childrens Society. To be named Managed Services Provider of the Year at the SDC Awards would be phenomenal recognition for our business and stand testament to our core business values and culture that have been engrained and demonstrated across our whole team. Not only that, it would contribute towards our goals and further bolster our brand and reputation. We provide consistent industry-leading service levels, we transform businesses, we have a fantastic company ethos and we truly believe we are the number one managed service provider, with the best team in the UK. Website: https://www.infinityit-solutions.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infinity-it-solutions/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/infinityitsol Twitter: https://twitter.com/iitl YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/INFINITYITSOL

Managed Services Provider
At SCC, our managed services offering stands out from the competition – we don’t just win business, we build lasting partnerships that we continue to nourish. We help revolutionise our customers’ IT In the past 12 months we have moved our clients’ hosted-workloads to the public cloud where we have seen performance or commercial benefit. Such instances include scalable commercial booking systems and website applications. One of our biggest achievements was working in a collaboration with AWS to design, build and launch a public website to support the NHS through the pandemic. The hospitals had a need for training staff on how to put on and remove PPE correctly to make sure they did not contract or spread coronavirus. SCC stepped in to help architect and deploy the infrastructure to run the website in AWS, free-of-charge, in just 48 hours. For our long-standing partner, WHSmith, we’ve demonstrated our commitment to the relationship, resulting in a 5-year contract renewal late last year. After successfully completing a service transformation in 2015, where we moved their IT in our data centres, we saw they were ready for the next step. We wanted to keep nourishing this partnership and saw the potential of moving them to a fully migrated private cloud solution. By doing so, we have removed equipment obsolescence, removed issues with technical debt and reduced risk related to legacy estate. We’ve also reduced the risks of outages and downtime, so they can carry on delivering their services without costly interruption. COVID-19 In fact, we have been there more than ever through the recent pandemic, performing outstanding services, such as: • Setting up a service desk in 48 hours for ESL • A dedicated team working two full weekends and long weekdays to get 3,500 global Atradius staff working from home • For Gist, within 48hrs of the request, we were able to double the Internet bandwidth from 100Mb to 200Mb into the DC • Providing our customers with 14,000 headsets, 40,000 laptop devices and 30,000 keyboard and mice, to enable homeworking Investment We have invested heavily in our Managed Service offering this past 12 months, including launching version 2 of TrinITy, our AI chatbot, expanding our Romanian HQ, which provides UK and European customers with 24/7 access to over 1,200 skilled staff, dedicated to flexible support solutions to meet their needs; and finally our new dedicated public cloud offering, Oworx. This new business function focuses uniquely on solutions that help customers scale and thrive in the Public Cloud. Oworx blends innovative technology and tooling with some of the country’s leading technical experts to help transition customers to the Public Cloud more quickly and more securely. Once there, we then help customers to thrive through our innovative managed services and support. SCC’s Managed Services in Numbers Over the past 12 months, our managed services offering has grown exponentially: 9% services growth in UK 11% services growth across EMEA 17% UK data centre operations growth Our Service Desk also has impressive stats: 13s Average answer time <1.5% abandonment rate 78% First time fix 99% incidents fixed at the desk withing customer SLA >98% customer satisfaction rate 2.4m+ Tickets per year Helping our customers and vendor partners SCC’s dedicated team worked two full weekends and long weekdays to get 3,500 global Atradius staff working from home, standing up specific environments for. Atradius business units to work effectively. “SCC has done a really greatjob for us, working day and night. The great achievement is that we now have the whole company remotely working without any restrictions. A major success and just reward for our colleagues in SDI and SCC who have worked so hard and so well together over the past three weeks to get to this point.” Dr Jörg Müller, Group IT Director Atradius “A huge thank you for assisting NHSBT today in such a critical situation. As explained, we were struggling to provide some key services to the country and with the COVID-19 issues, nobody needs such outages at the moment. So thanks for picking up the phone early this morning, responding with deploying an engineer directly to the cabinet before calls were raised in Croatia, saving us precious time in getting us 100% Operational again.” NHS Blood and Transplant logo “SCC is a long standing Microsoft partner that has worked with our mutual clients to drive great customer business outcomes and customer satisfaction across the Cloud and on premise Microsoft Solutions. SCC’s ability to offer managed services as well as hybrid compute and consulting services enables them to provide a wide range of solutions to meet the needs of our customers.” Alex Smith Cloud Scale Partner Lead Microsoft

Asigra Deep MFA
With evolving infiltration and ransomware tactics threatening backup data, protection against cyberattacks has become critical. Asigra’s advanced security posture incorporating features such as AI-powered bidirectional malware prevention, backup immutability to name a few, now also includes Deep Multi-Factor Authentication, making it the most secure backup platform on the market. This form of app-centric MFA-enabled passwordless sign-in and process authentication is unique in the industry. Once logged in, administrators can configure an adaptive authentication scheme to control user sign in and task level assignment throughout the Asigra software stack to protect sensitive data at multiple levels and other mission critical areas without the use of a password. Combined with immutable retention, it prevents malware from deleting, modifying, or encrypting backup data from object storage during the immutable retention period.

IPification
IPification – Mobile Authentication Remastered. No credentials, No Tokens. Farewell to unsafe SMS OTPs, header enrichment, or biometric solutions such as face and fingerprint scans. With IPification, unparalleled level of security is created with a single tap. IPification is building the backbone of mobile authentication of today and tomorrow. By verifying mobile devices, SIM cards & phone numbers via IP addresses, the patented technology developed by IPification is enabling safer mobile user authentication, phone verification, and fraud prevention solutions, whilst maintain the highest level of user experience. Readily available across numerous countries and regions, IPification is trusted by the leading technology, payment, and OTT companies worldwide. In the mobile first digital age, mobile users demand a FAST and SEAMLESS mobile authentication solution. Mobile network operators and digital service providers also need a secure solution to authenticate their customers whilst maintaining a seamless user experience. Sadly, online privacy is often compromised through existing authentication services such as SMS one time password and biometrics verification. Everyone in the ecosystem seek an authentication factor which will not require sensitive data to be shared to the third parties. IPification revolutionises mobile authentication and enhances users experience without compromising security and privacy. IPification can verify phone number, SIM and device via IP addresses. It is the first, and the one of a kind seamless authentication technology based on secure protocol. In terms of security, user experience and privacy, IPification offers a massive advantage over the commonly used SMS one-time PIN and header enrichment. With IPification, online service providers ranging from banking apps, streaming apps, email service providers, social networks, online gaming platforms and so forth will have the capability to uplift their user experience through a hassle-free user flow, whilst enhancing the security of their service with our top-notch security protocol and standards. For instance, they can offer use zero-tap, passwordless mobile authentication for smooth user registration and login process, and varieties of fraud prevention products, including SIM swap protection. IPification seamlessly authenticates the mobile users based on their Public IP address while the users are “on-net”. Though changes of Public IP (and port values) on the user’s side could be frequent, IPification is still always able to identify and resolve all those different IP addresses changes. IPification aims to respond to the ever-growing challenges of mobile security that arise from SIM Swapping, the change of mobile numbers and detection of accurate changes to Devices. We are introducing a unique method for creating a Mobile ID that would not require any subsequent, additional examination and/or verification, in any of the above-mentioned examples. Our bullet-proof security and privacy protection are created with a unique Mobile ID. IPification is using proprietary technology to create a unique Mobile ID by hashing several key telecom network-related information embedded on every SIM card such as MSISDN, IMSI and IMEI. These values can detect any sensitive changes related to the SIM card or device. The Service URI is another crucial element of the Mobile ID. Combining with the above-mentioned SIM card based values, it ensures the Mobile ID created will be unique on the service level. By doing so, it will be virtually impossible to track the user across digital touch-points (most often for, but not limited to, marketing and advertising purposes). Therefore, users’ privacy can be completely safeguarded. As an operation system “OS” and device-agnostic solution, IPification can instantly authenticate users based on the public IP address without taking any unreliable data and parameters from the app and device that can be spoofed by the hackers. HTTPS is the new standard of the internet, and so the existing and insecure authentication methods including header enrichment and plain HTTP protocol will soon become obsolete. Furthermore, both Apple and Google are going to ban all HTTP requests coming from Android and iOS apps. Therefore, the patented IPification technology can address all these challenges and trends. Moreover, it offers a powerful tool for mobile network operators to stand against the competition such as biometrics, social networks, AI, and so forth. HOW IS IPIFICATION UNIQUE Market Competition: who are our competitors? Companies providing Biometric solutions, SMS 2-factor authentication, third party authenticator apps, header enrichment and so forth. THE BARRIERS TO ENTRY FOR A COMPETITOR TO REPLICATE IPification is currently the ONLY vendor for Telecom based solution (GMID box) which enables them with the seamless and secure authentication capabilities. IPification needed more than three years of building a robust platform and collecting the necessary know-how (learning by doing). Therefore it is tough for the new entrants to try to replicate this, regardless of the challenger size. Sales cycles with Telecom operators are very long, so once any agreement is in place, it is an arduous and lengthy process for similar vendors to acquire/offer the same service directly. And most importantly, the IPification solution is protected by patent: HK (1248463) US (15928348) UK (1803719.2) MARKET OPPORTUNITY IPification is putting in place TWO commercial models with every MNO based on the responsibilities of each party in the ecosystem: Business Model #1: Serve as the full solution provider for both Telecoms and Merchants / Service Providers (IPification AAS). IPification provides the fully managed service (responsible for both GMID™ Box deployment and maintenance & service providers signing). In this case, IPification is signing the agreement and receiving the revenue per transaction from the Service Provider and forwards MNO’s revenue part. Two pricing model available for Merchants: - per authentication request - per Mobile ID / daily & monthly Business Model #2 IPification as a technical enabler for GMID™ BOX. In this case, MNO is signing the agreements directly with the Service Providers (or Authentication providers) and collects the full revenue per successful authentication. In this case, IPification receives just the standard fee per each transaction going through GMID™ BOX. With IPification integrated, mobile operators will be able to address the existing challenges of today’s ever-growing digital user identity and authentication market. They can become a major authentication player in a new digital ecosystem by offering a highly secure and seamless user authentication service. We aim to empower mobile operators to re-establish themselves in the digital value chain and help them to bring back their power through new revenue streams, strong partnerships with top technology companies and innovative services offered to their subscribers. IPification authentication method is suitable to be used by many different customer segments in the given country for: - App / Mobile Web developers - to increase conversion rates thanks to seamless user journey during registration and login, increased number of transactions and a higher level of user experience - Banks and Fintech companies - to enhance security measures, transaction confirmations and robust authentication - Corporations - to match employees’ mobility and data security, making workforce mobile, trusted remote access to working tools - Government - to reduce administration cost and time frames, enabling digital IDs (both eID and mID) with smooth and secure user authentication Besides, mobile network service subscriber (users) are also benefiting from IPification by: - Peace of mind, having their Privacy fully protected - Being provided with the highest level of online security (trust with the mobile network operators and service provider can also be enhanced) - Drive new service adoption, upsell, conversion by providing them with the most convenient login/registration method Strong collaboration is needed among all the stakeholders in today’s digital economy to drive higher user acceptance and more significant adoption of operator-based services and APIs among app and website developers. IPification is establishing prospective partnerships with mobile network operators (MNOs), assisting them in bringing this authentication service to all their subscribers and above-mentioned service providers on the markets where the MNO operates. IPification brings the following benefits to different market players: 1. A new revenue stream. IPification is a new and secure technology leveraging mobile-network technical capabilities that have never been commercialised. With IPification, operators can gain a brand-new revenue stream as they will receive a fee for each successful IPification API call (authentication) payable by the service providers. Moreover, with the zero-rating IPification auth URL for mobile data access (for zero-rated services and campaigns such as WhatsApp, Viber, LinkedIn etc.), network operators can also expand their service reach and open new ways to monetise pre-paid subscribers with no credit or airtime left via the seamless authentication fee service providers are paying for. 2. The central role in the digital ecosystem and mobile identity market. For 2FA and MFA providers, it has always been challenging to strike a balance between security and the user experience (UX). IPification has a perfect blend of high-security and UX, making it a unique solution that will offer operators a central role in the mobile identity arena. 3. Enhancing security and brand image. By offering a fully secure and seamless authentication to service providers, network operators can display their commitment to keeping subscribers safe, thus increasing the brand image and the lifetime user value. 4. A solution for 5G and IoT With the advance of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the arrival of 5G, users will be more dependent on their mobile devices and app. Therefore, IPification can forge a seamless and secure mobile internet experience with operators and contribute to the smart city transformation as well. More details about IPification and our solution can be found here: https://www.ipification.com/media/for-awards-organisers.pdf

FlashBlade
Data is a business’s most valuable asset. Today more than ever, having consistent, real-time access to data is critical to success. According to an ESG survey, 71% of respondents identified the strategic role of data and effective storage strategies in delivering a competitive advantage1. This means that when systems go down, whether the result of user error, malicious cyber-attack or other causes, data needs to be recovered as quickly and safely as possible. However, most data protection architectures are optimised for backup, not recovery. The same design that optimises for data ingestion and space-efficiency creates significant drag on recovery speed, because data needs to be reconstructed after being widely dispersed through deduplication. Poor recovery performance exposes organisations to undue risk and can cost millions in unplanned downtime. FlashBlade(R), Pure's unified fast file and object solution delivers simple, scalable and performant data protection, enabling organisations to modernise their backup and restore data at high speed and with scale. FlashBlade possesses unparalleled recovery performance of up to 270 TB/hour, with a peak backup speed of 90 TB/hour, which is simply unmatched. FlashBlade also sustains performance, even as data volumes increase. Evidence of this is that competitors share backup and storage efficiency metrics publicly, but never share restore performance. This is because the average competitor cannot restore at over 20 TB/hour, let alone the 270 TB/hour offered by FlashBlade. Consider that a single database restore can easily take 10 hours, with many taking 24 hours, and this puts FlashBlade’s speed into context. Additionally, ransomware attackers now target backup data as an organisation’s last line of defence, meaning that backups themselves now need to be protected. According to an ESG Report, 47% of organizations reported an increase in attempted cyber-attack since the COVID-19 quarantine when people started working from home.2 FlashBlade mitigates against ransomware attacks with an industry-unique combination of security, simplicity, and high speed restore, enabled by all-flash file and object storage and standout software features, such as SafeMode Snapshots. This feature means that snapshots are read-only, immutable, and prevent backups from being deleted even if IT credentials are compromised. These snapshots are automated and cannot be deleted or altered by customers or anyone with admin access, and can only be deleted after a pre-agreed ‘cool down’ time. What’s more, this feature is included at no charge. These unique features combined make for the ultimate disaster recovery tool, which can sustain performance as data volumes increase, and integrates easily with backup software from Cohesity, Commvault, Veeam, and Veritas NetBackup and more for additional simplicity. What’s more, Pure works tirelessly with partners to deliver the most innovative business continuity solutions possible to the market. Most recently in August 2020, releasing Pure FlashRecover™, Powered by Cohesity. FlashRecover is the industry’s first modern, jointly-engineered solution designed to meet the most demanding business continuity requirements. The solution will be GA in the coming months, empowering organisations to future-proof data center investments and realize new levels of performance to meet growing petabyte-level recovery requirements by combining Cohesity DataProtect software with Pure’s unified fast file and object FlashBlade platform. One customer who is using FlashBlade to successfully manage its disaster recovery is eMoney Advisor, a financial planning software application based in North America. As an organisation operating within financial services, it’s crucial that eMoney is able to provide a guaranteed level of uptime in order to honour its SLAs to its clients. In 2017, the organisation noticed the trend of its backup and restore tests increasing due to expected data growth. However, the restore tests were proving not to be up to standard, and ensure rapid recovery in the event of a significant issue. eMoney Advisor brought in FlashBlade to handle mission critical SQL backups in combination with Cohesity software and SafeMode snapshots, which would provide for multiple options for rapid restore / recovery. With FlashBlade now in place, database restore times are now well within the window needed to meet SLAs, and provide rapid recovery of critical systems and databases. To combat the threat of downtime, maintain smooth business operations and recover in the event of an outage, businesses need a successful data backup and recovery strategy comprised of two critical elements that FlashBlade provides: Firstly immutable, viable backups not affected by a cyber attack or outage, which can be used to safely restore systems and services. Second, the ability to restore petabytes of data rapidly and at scale, in hours not days. Without this capability there is no limit to the reputational and financial damage a business could face due to downtime. Sources: 1ESG 2019 Data Storage Trends Survey 2ESG Research Report: Impact of COVID-19. June 2020

Open-E JovianDSS
Open-E JovianDSS is a unified data storage software based on Linux and ZFS (Zettabyte File System). The software is designed especially for Enterprise Software-Defined Storage environments. There are three main areas covered by Open-E JovianDSS: 1. Data Storage 2. Backup & Disaster Recovery 3. Business Continuity The first area is Data Storage, where the centralized data storage is accessible over protocols such as iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), NFS and SMB/CIFS. Open-E JovianDSS, based on the Linux architecture, provides better hardware compatibility compared to other products. It also supports VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft Hyper-V making it a perfect fit for any virtualized storage environment. Open-E JovianDSS can be easily set up as a virtual storage appliance in a virtual environment or can be installed on a physical server. Thanks to the implementation of the most advanced file system - ZFS, it provides multiple layers of data protection mechanisms including: Self-healing, Data and metadata check-summing, Atomic Transaction Writes and more. Backup & Disaster Recovery is supported in Open-E JovianDSS by On- and Off-site Data Protection feature. It allows you to perform data backup and data restore in case of a disaster. The backup is independent of underlying data - everything can be backed up. This functionality is based on snapshots which can be restored on local as well as on remote destinations. The data can also be instantly accessed from the backup destination. You are also able to define retention plans that will help you to set up even very complex backup schemes, according to your needs. This solution is especially useful when working with Open-E JovianDSS in a data center. The third area, Business Continuity is related to the continuous availability of all company’s data that is essential when maintaining critical business operations in case of unexpected harmful events. Business Continuity in Open-E JovianDSS is achieved by a High Availability failover clustering which minimizes server downtime periods, eliminates single points of failure and provides the highest performance, reliability, and data availability. The built-in solution supports a huge number of topologies ranging from small cluster-in-a-box setups to big rack servers with multiple JBODs, local clusters up to stretched metro clusters, handling both: shared and non-shared data storage environments.

ExaGrid Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery
ExaGrid recently released software Version 6.0, which began shipping on September 18, 2020, and launched ExaGrid’s new Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery feature, which is built upon ExaGrid’s unique Tiered Backup Storage architecture. ExaGrid is the only company offering a ransomware recovery strategy in the backup storage market. Retention Time-Lock is a revolutionary approach to protecting backup retention data to enable fast and easy recovery from ransomware. • ExaGrid’s two-tier architecture includes a network-facing tier and a non-network-facing tier. ExaGrid alone controls the non-network-facing tier, creating a true air gap. • A policy-driven approach allows for any delete requests issued to the network-facing tier to be delayed in the non-network-facing tier for a specified number of days, so that backup data will not be deleted when a hacker takes control of the backup application or backup storage. • If encrypted data is sent to the network-facing tier, or if any of its data is encrypted, ExaGrid’s repository is protected as all the deduplication objects are immutable because they are never modified. ExaGrid assumes the hackers will take control of the backup application or the backup storage and will issue delete commands for all backups. ExaGrid has the only non-network-facing tiered backup storage solution with delayed deletes and immutable deduplication objects. This unique approach ensures when a ransomware attack occurs, data can be easily recovered or VMs booted from the ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage system. Not only can the primary storage be restored, but all retained backups remain intact.

iXsystems Unveils Industry’s Fastest OpenZFS Storage System with Launch of TrueNAS M60
For this award program, iXsystems is submitting the TrueNAS M60. The M60 is a unified storage system powered by the significantly faster TrueNAS 12.0 operating system (OS) that delivers on today's demands for affordable capacity, security, and performance. The TrueNAS M60 represents a leap forward in OpenZFS storage performance to meet demanding virtualization, multimedia, and backup applications. Through decades of expertise in system design and development of Open Source software (FreeNAS, FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and TrueNAS), iXsystems has become an innovation leader in high availability storage and servers powered by Open Source solutions. With over one million deployments and backed by the legendary ZFS file system, TrueNAS offers the stability and reliability required for Backup, Multimedia, Cloud Hosting, Virtualization, Hyper-converged Infrastructure, and more. Since the founding of iXsystems in 2002, thousands of companies, universities, and government organizations have come to rely on the company’s enterprise servers, TrueNAS Open Storage, and consultative approach to building IT infrastructure and Private Clouds with Open Source economics. The TrueNAS M60 unified storage system is built for enterprises requiring maximum storage performance. The system is available with single or dual-controllers and hybrid, fusion, or all-flash drive configuration. The M60 achieves over 20GB/s and 1 Million IOPS, making it the fastest open storage system in the industry. The system also includes the all-new high-performance TrueNAS Open Storage 12.0 operating system featuring multi-layer enterprise security. The TrueNAS M60 Powered by TrueNAS Open Storage 12.0 is the industry's fastest OpenZFS Storage System on the market. The system is designed for midsize and enterprise organizations that require high performance, affordability, flexibility, functionality, and the reliability to keep pace with data growth. With the M60 and TrueNAS 12.0, iXsystems is leading the trend in Open Storage as the company improves Open Source economics for partners and enterprise customers. 1. The M60 is powered by TrueNAS 12.0 OS, making it the fastest OpenZFS-based storage system available with all of the economic benefits of an open source storage platform. 2. TrueNAS M60 delivers multi-layer enterprise security with dataset encryption for ultra-secure remote replication; Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) for drives and datasets; two-factor authentication; API keys for TrueCommand, vSphere, and other REST API systems, and Open VPN Client and Server Integration. 3. The TrueNAS M60 achieves over 20GB/s and 1 Million IOPS through its improved software and the latest hardware technology. 4. The system scales to 20 Petabytes of hybrid HDD/NVMe raw capacity or 4 PB affordable all-flash capacity per rack and provides 64 Cores with up to 1.5TB of RAM, 12.8 TB of NVMe Flash and 4 x 32GB NVDIMMs 5. TrueNAS M60 is unified storage that deliver block, file and object storage to support the widest array of workloads.

Visual Storage Intelligence
Delivered as a Storage Resource Management-as-a-Service (SRMaaS), Visual Storage Intelligence® (VSI) provides data-driven insights into performance, capacity, utilization and governance challenges. These insights allow you to save time, reduce costs and improve efficiency. VSI simplifies your storage management process by organizing independent data elements into a unified, visual analysis across your multi-vendor storage environment. With an automated data collection process, VSI offers actionable intelligence through consistent reporting on existing arrays at 7 levels, from the Host/LUN to the Business Unit; providing a single pane of glass across the enterprise. VSI provides you with the insight you need to plan ahead, so that you can forecast precise outcomes, improve budgeting accuracy, track your growth trends, negotiate new storage purchases while avoiding any unnecessary, reactive purchases, and much more. This year we added a whole new level of capacity planning tools and modeling capabilities. These features use your past growth rate to compute future projections and allow you to model both capacity adjustments (increase or decrease) and workload changes to the historical growth rate projections – then shows your data against 70-80 – and 100% utilization thresholds so customers can see when those thresholds will be crossed. This allows customers to purchase what they need and make sure it will last for the desired period of time. One of the major features added is not only can you do this planning and the device level, but you can also build capacity plans at the: a. Data center level b. Device classification level c. Device type level d. Application level These additional capabilities allow customers to “cluster” a set of resources as an entity and not just treat each device individually, so they can now maximize their expense dollars and manage overall resources more effectively. We have also included AI-based weekly data mining of customers storage data and trends – which produces a weekly email to the customer with: a. Changes in the customer environment in the past week b. Performance changes and comparisons across all storage arrays but also across all hosts and luns mapped to each array c. Specific alerts and error conditions found and those requiring remediation d. Pattern changes in workload and the array, pool and host level are noted and changes recommended if needed e. And single point of failures alerts or exposures which could cause an outage if left unchanged.

Pure1
Data is a core asset to any business; but not when it takes more time to manage and store than harness for innovation and business growth. This is where advanced, intelligent software management like Pure1 can help customers to get maximum value out of their data. What makes Pure1 novel Built on the mantra “simple is smart”, Pure1 is a truly AI-powered cloud-based data-storage management and support platform, which manages, automates, orchestrates and optimises data infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. Pure1 enables easy troubleshooting and effortless management, even for large-scale environments. Additionally, Pure1 enables automated infrastructure management, capacity planning, and troubleshooting. This means that organisations can now spend less time managing their IT infrastructure and more time innovating. By making capacity and performance forecasting a reality, Pure1 eliminates guesswork. This means the IT team can accurately predict capacity and performance needs over time; even model workload consolidation and hardware upgrades. Forecasting from Pure1 is also more than simple linear regression, as it’s powered by the Pure1 Meta AI engine which is fed with genuine workload data, which enables modeling of upgrades, capacity scaling, and delivers the insights that can eliminate risk and drive efficiency in enterprises. How Pure1 breaks with conventional ideas in the field Pure1 breaks the datacenter norm by our “mobile first” approach, in line with facilitating an end-user consumer-led experience. This provides a centralised dashboard that gives businesses a holistic view of their data, no matter where it’s stored. It provides an overview of all snapshots and provides detailed status on all data protection including snapshots, periodic replication, continuous replication, and ActiveCluster. As Purity CloudSnap maximises the cloud’s potential for backup storage with intelligent and efficient data transfer to and from the cloud, Pure1 works in tandem to keep track of data across the hybrid cloud. Pure1 serves as a single pane of glass across the infrastructure granting the ability to simplify, automate, and optimise virtual infrastructure across the stack. As Pure1 is designed with mobile in mind, customers get alerts and notifications on their mobile device about issues that need attention. They can then create a quick support ticket or allow remote access for Pure Storage to take care of the issues - no need to make a special trip into the datacenter. By focusing on making sure that customers have access to their alerts and cases on their phones, Pure1 provides peace of mind in knowing that the latest health and updates are available right in their pocket, allowing them to be a little less tied down. How Pure1 goes beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists What sets Pure1 apart from other storage management solutions is how it helps Virtual Machine Admins to quickly identify and solve problems across the entire infrastructure stack. With Pure1 VM Analytics, customers enjoy a dynamic, topological view of their infrastructure, from VM to Storage Array. Performance issues are instantly visible thanks to the rich interface overlaid with detailed performance metrics. As a result, it is easier to focus on direct solutions to problems as opposed to blind troubleshooting. This feature delivers full stack analytics capabilities, offering a complete view of disks, VMs, data stores, volumes and arrays in the cloud and on-premises. Through this system, organisations can monitor latency, bandwidth and IOPS. How customers benefit from Pure1 Pure1 makes storage management effortless, intelligent, and frustration-free. The platform was designed with customers front of mind, and the expanded capabilities of AI-driven global predictive intelligence gives customers storage that is completely self-driving that proactively identifies issues and solves problems before they occur. As Pure1 is a cloud-based SaaS platform, no additional Pure hardware or software installation is required by the customer to get started. Other benefits include: - Customers get visibility of their file-system snapshots and replications (block, file and object) to assess their data protection environment across the fleet. This capability provides a global view of snapshot and replication policies, where they reside, and whether they are in compliance. Pure1 makes it extremely simple to monitor and access information for all Pure Storage arrays. - The Pure1 cloud is continuously scanned for leading indicators for every known issue in an array, detecting and addressing problems with Pure arrays, often before our users even know, automatically generating and creating a support ticket, notifying the customer. Currently, more than 70% of Pure’s tickets are Purity and Pure1 generated, and a majority are addressed remotely before users even know of an issue. - The self-driving functionality provides insights on how performance and capacity will grow, predict upgrade movements, and optimises resource utilisation. This support and customer-centric focus is a key contributor to Pure’s NPS score of 82, extremely high for a technology company. Pure opens the majority of support cases, and so far Pure has resolved more than 500 Sev1 cases before they affected our customers. Customer examples: Metito ● About the company: A global provider of water management solutions based out of the United Arab Emirates. The company is dedicated to improving public health and enabling economic growth, from simple clean-water projects from desalination to industrial solutions that include hyper-pure water. ● With Pure1, Metito has been able to move to a more proactive management mode, ensuring there is no downtime due to capacity constraints or drop in availability of business-critical applications. The time saved on management is also allowing the team to focus on more innovative projects that can add tangible business value. ● Commenting on Pure1, Prashant Menon, Manager of IT Infrastructure and Support Services, Metito, said: “All the other vendors we considered offered legacy-storage technologies with flash add-on and did not have the required software component to manage it. With Pure1 we have access to a more advanced solution, the latest technology and we can view all performance metrics from a single dashboard. All at a predictable cost of ownership” NTT DATA ● About the company: The company provides a variety of professional services such as consulting, system development and business IT outsourcing. With business operations in more than 50 countries and regions, NTT has “benefited tremendously” from the Pure1 platform. ● “Pure1 is able to proactively identify issues based on our past activity, alert our team if a problem is detected, and resolve it before it occurs,” said Yuji Chigita, Senior Manager, Digital Business Solution Division, NTT DATA. “Self-driving storage puts us at ease knowing that any issues will be proactively resolved. Pure1’s AI-driven management also allows us to run simulations so that we can gauge when and if our arrays are low on capacity.”

Supermicro vSAN Solutions
Supermicro vSAN ReadyNode(TM) solutions are designed to deploy VMware vSAN as quickly as possible; the hyper-converged architecture provides the ability to provision and manage compute, network and storage resources from a single pane of management. The solution is targeted at a variety of use cases in tier 1 or 2 workloads and virtualized desktop infrastructure environments; it introduces a new, high performance storage tier optimized for enterprise-class virtual environments which makes it the ideal solution for enterprise, ROBO or SMBs to grow and manage virtualized infrastructure in a way that not only increases ROI but also reduces the total cost of ownership by up to 50%, allowing customers to granularly scale-out storage environments to allow for growth with no overprovisioning. The vSAN ReadyNode solution is a preconfigured, single or multi-node server hardware configuration for use with vSAN. It includes specific CPUs, memory, flash, HDD and IO controller devices within each server. Customers deploying this solution recieve a single bundle for procurement, with licenses for vSAN and vSphere included as well as Supermicro production and services working alongside customers to ensure a simplified set up.

Edge Computing Analytics on Computational Storage with Resiliance and Fault Tolerance using VMware VSAN, Bitfusion and Tanzu
Emerging edge use cases need to process vast amounts of data and yield AI-driven insights faster than ever. These systems are increasingly in the critical path and need to handle host failures without a hiccup for mission-critical environments. This Innovation explores a new solution that combines leading computational storage technology from NGD Systems, a VMware Tanzu Greenplum database and VMware vSphere 7 for a high-performance, zero-downtime edge analytics solution. It enables computational storage with GPUs by using vSphere Bitfusion technology, allowing efficient machine learning inference and even training new models at the edge. VMware vSAN and vSphere Fault Tolerance work together to offer zero-downtime edge analytics for a small form factor deployment. The net result of this innovation is a platform that can replace a rack level (42U) GreenplumDB solution with a Edge-Friendly, Fault Tolerant, 6U platform. Overall results of the analytics are faster than the traditional architecture and provides a better overall TCO and use of the system components. This platform requires only 3 single socket servers, 3 GPUs, and full array of Computational Storage Drives to accomplish like task that would normally require dual socket servers with 16 GPUs and empty storage slots (as it requires more servers for CPU/GPU) not data.

WAN Data Acceleration Powers Database Synchronicity, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Bridgeworks industry defining Data Acceleration technology is re-defining Wide Area Networks enabling organisations to reach transfer speeds up to 200x faster, whether large volumes, encrypted or media files. Using Automated, AI technology Bridgeworks dramatically alleviates the effects of latency and packet loss, meaning that data can get to where it needs to be quicker and maximising business performance with dramatic ROI. Solutions such as Bridgeworks PORTrockIT go beyond the traditional choices and capabilities of WAN Optimisation and SD-WAN, allowing organisations to improve the efficiency of their WAN links. Francois Steyl, CTO at StratIT says: “Bridgeworks is unique in what it does, and addresses the latency, packet loss and ingress and egress rates which is the culprit for poor throughput rates across the WAN. The ease of the Virtual appliance deployment and the adjusting of routing rules makes Bridgeworks the clear solution to accelerate data across a customer’s WAN. The implementation of Bridgeworks’ solutions at Investec Private Bank, has realised a 424% increase in total traffic sent across the WAN, which provides an almost instantaneous Return on Investment”. Alternatives such as Aryaka were considered, but solutions such as PORTrockIT were found to meet all of Investec’s requirements after a proof of concept (POC) of 6 months duration. This POC was carried out after StratIT introduced Investec to Bridgeworks.

CyberSense: Detect, Diagnose and Recover from a Cyberattack
CyberSense is the only product on the market that directly scans backup images and utilizes full-content analytics with a single pass to detect signs of a cyberattack. CyberSense assumes that endpoint security solutions are not 100% effective and checks the integrity of backup data. This allows CyberSense to detect all common attack vectors including encryption, data corruption, mass deletion, with 99.5% accuracy. CyberSense checks the integrity of backup data using an automated process that is based on machine learning that will send an alert if data corruption is detected. If an attack does occur CyberSense provides forensic tools to diagnose and recover. This includes reports on files that were impacted so they can be replaced with the last known good version. CyberSense empowers organizations to recover quickly without paying ransoms or spending months in a clean room to find and restore the last good backups. CyberSense integrates into organization’s existing data protection software including Dell EMC’s Networker and Avamar, IBM Spectrum Protect, Commvault and Veritas NetBackup. CyberSense is bundled with offerings including the Dell EMC Cyber Recovery product and IBM's Cyber Resiliency offering.

Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT utlises AI and Machine Learning to offer greater management and automated data centre servicing
Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT is a vendor-agnostic, Cloud-based Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software platform that enables data centre operators and channel partners, including Value Added Resellers (VARs) and Managed Service Provders (MSPs) to proactively monitor, manage and maintain data centre business continuity from remote locations. It makes use of Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and intelligent benchmarking techniques to analyse aggregated data from infrastructure components and deliver detailed insight into the operation of a data centre. The software leverages Internet of Things (IoT) technology, now commonplace in data centre components and subsystems including racks, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and cooling equipment to enable both end-users and partners to proactively anticipate capacity and efficiency problems before they arise’ delivering more secure, resilient and efficient operations. Using Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and intelligent benchmarking techniques, EcoStruxure IT can analyse aggregated data from a wide variety of sources to provide analytical insight into every aspect of a data centre, or edge computing environments operation. Recent enhancements to EcoStruxure IT include the addition of Monitoring & Dispatch Services and the availability of a public Application Programming Interface (API). Monitoring & Dispatch Services, powered by analytics from the EcoStruxure IT data lake, allow customers to glean insightful, data-driven recommendations to maintain system uptime and shift from being reactive to proactive in maintaining distributed IT infrastructure. The approach combines 24/7 expert remote monitoring and troubleshooting by Schneider Electric’s engineers with next-business-day, on-site support, including replacement parts, when necessary. This ensures timely address of maintenance and service issues and simplifies the management of widely distributed IT assets, particularly in Edge data centres with no permanent onsite technical personnel. The EcoStruxure IT Public API allows partners and third-party software developers to integrate EcoStruxure into their preferred systems, extending the reach of the DCIM platform seamlessly into existing environments. This increases the overall visibility of data centres and edge compute to maintain uptime, detect faults or capacity issues before they become critical. The system offers more insightful, data-driven reporting and makes smarter decisions for more efficient and resilient operations. As a cloud-based software platform EcoStruxure IT is quick and easy to install, and scalable across distributed data centres. Its standards-based vendor-agnostic approach means that it can be used with equipment from any vendor that is compliant with common industry standards. Real-time updates and status reports can be delivered 24/7 to anywhere via the EcoStruxure IT Expert mobile application, allowing maintenance personnel to monitor the systems remotely and proactively maximise uptime and maintain mission critical continuity, from any location.

Netacea introduces TrafficDefender to help businesses cope with shoppers’ lockdown demand
Netacea, a leading provider of bot management solutions, is scaling up its virtual waiting room offering to meet the growing demand for online queuing services amid the coronavirus pandemic. TrafficDefende, powered by Netacea, gives businesses the power to control online traffic with enterprise-grade, secure DNS-based queue technology, that protects against queue jumpers who bypass other JavaScript-based solutions. Implementing fair, non-bypassable virtual waiting room technology ensures that essential amenities are available to the public 24/7, no matter how busy the website becomes. Netacea has separated its scalable and cloud-based virtual waiting room solution from its bot management offering, to ensure organisations can quickly and easily access queuing technology when they need it most. TrafficDefender’s unique approach to virtual waiting room gives businesses complete control of their website traffic, during unprecedented surges of traffic. The technology enables businesses to determine their own limit to the number of concurrent visitors on the site, guaranteeing website availability no matter how long customers remain on the site. The solution, which has already been rolled out by organisations throughout the UK, US, EMEA and Asia, sits in front of a website to protect the entire technology stack with a secure, fair and non-bypassable first-in-first-out queue that guarantees the flow of traffic even if the volume exceeds capacity. By using TrafficDefender, a European government providing financial aid to hospitality organisations was able to remain available for the 20,000 businesses queuing for the service, on a website that typically has capacity for 200 companies registering at once. A retail organisation also used Traffic Defender’s “VIP” queuing functionality to both provide dedicated access to its customers with previous orders in place and allow key workers to access its website ahead of the queues or within specific timespans. Andy Still, co-founder and CTO at Netacea stated: “As demand for our virtual waiting room technology continues to grow, it became increasingly clear that it deserves a dedicated home in TrafficDefender. For many organisations, this technology has never been more critical as they seek to accommodate unprecedented levels of traffic throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and ensure customers can access critical services.” Jeremy Gidlow, co-founder and CEO at Netacea also said: “Over the last six weeks, we have been working hard to ensure that retailers, grocers, governments and public services are available. TrafficDefender provides an essential solution to businesses that need to stay online during surges of traffic.”

Anuta ATOM - Closed-Loop Automation for Multi-Domain, Multi-Vendor Networks at Massive-Scale
Synopsis: Anuta ATOM software helps Telco’s and Enterprises to deliver network services faster, eliminate human errors, avoid security violations, reduce OpEx, and transform today’s networks into future smarter, self-healing ones. Anuta ATOM is a modular, extensible, and cloud-native software platform that enables operators to rapidly design and provision network services, collect real-time telemetry, develop deep network analytics, ensure compliance and provide closed-loop automation for multi-vendor physical and virtual infrastructure. In short, Anuta Networks brings to you – the network automation software that has helped grow the networks of web-scale companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon AWS. ATOM Value Proposition: Enterprises and Service Providers continuously see the need to automate their network services, and there are many solutions to help them build the network from scratch. However, they made an enormous investment in best of breed networking infrastructure from multiple vendors that they can’t afford to replace again and again. And, they can’t rely on niche players who automate network services for a specific use-case or vendor. Anuta ATOM is the only solution that delivers network analytics, automation, compliance and assurance for existing multi-vendor (45+ vendors) physical and virtual infrastructure and automates all the use-cases including Data Center Automation, InterCloud, Micro-Segmentation, Security as a Service, LBaaS, Campus/Access, Branch/WAN, Service Provider IP/MPLS Edge, Virtual CPE, and NFV. Anuta ATOM combines the best of model-driven architecture with the latest technologies in microservices and analytics to deliver one of the industry’s most scalable platforms that automates 1 Million+ devices. Anuta ATOM includes an SDK for ease of developing applications using a sophisticated description language, query interface, and other productivity tools. Anuta ATOM is containerized and can be deployed to manage Small, Medium or Very large-scale networks in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Anuta ATOM Advantages: • One of the broadest industry coverage. • Investment protection for the future demands of IoT, 5G, Multi-Cloud • Aligned with open standards • BPMN Compliant Low-Code Automation with Workflow • Horizontally scalable to automate 1 Million+ devices. • Ensures a higher and more consistent QoS. • Flexible to run on any cloud including AWS, Azure, GCP. • High Resiliency and Auto-Scale • A powerful interface to define KPIs and corrective actions. • Collaboration infrastructure for Device, Service Model and Custom App. development Feature Highlights: Anuta ATOM is a highly scalable cloud-ready platform for network automation & telemetry. The closed-loop automation in ATOM opens exciting new opportunities to transform today’s networks into future smarter, self-healing ones. Multi-Vendor Support: Anuta ATOM supports 150+ platforms from 45+ vendors. Anuta ATOM automates brownfield and greenfield deployments of Physical, Virtual, SDN and NFV infrastructure across multiple network domains. Low-Code Automation: Anuta ATOM leverages BPMN 2.0 for low code automation and simplifies the design of self-service workflows. Creating a workflow is as easy as drawing a Network Diagram in Visio by defining new tasks or picking from a library of available tasks. Config. Compliance: Anuta ATOM delivers secure configuration backup, simplified change management, scalable configuration push, detailed compliance report, and automated remediation. The solution enables network administrators to improve configuration consistency, minimize policy violations, follow best practices, and accelerate reporting activities. Telemetry and Analytics: ATOM collects device data through Telemetry, SNMP, SNMP Trap, and Syslog in the order of microseconds. The data from various sources are normalized into a standard yang format, stored in a time-series database and presented in a single unified view. ATOM’s correlation engine will continuously monitor and compare collected data with the baseline data. On any deviation, ATOM can raise alarms on the dashboard, notify on slack, email and other utilities or create tickets. Closed-Loop Automation: Anuta ATOM applies machine learning algorithms to develop deep analytics and reports. The solution simplifies troubleshooting by providing the context of the entire network. Customers can define KPI metrics and corrective actions to automate SLA compliance. Cloud-Ready: Anuta ATOM is containerized and can be deployed in public clouds including AWS, Azure, and GCP. ATOM can manage Small, Medium, or Very large-scale networks in private, public and hybrid cloud environments.  Solution Benefits: REVENUE: Service providers can use Anuta ATOM to offer highly differentiated network as a service, thus generating new streams of revenue. Enterprises can use the ATOM to accelerate application deployment, thus increasing business agility. EFFICIENCY: By virtualizing network resources into logical functions, organizations can benefit from lower Capex and Opex. ON DEMAND: Anuta ATOM offers superior business agility with its on-demand model of network service creation. SERVICE ASSURANCE: Anuta ATOM monitors, collects, and analyzes telemetry, performance, health, capacity, and availability information from disparate devices. This service level information is compared with baseline behavior to automate the remediation steps to ensure SLA. MULTI-VENDOR: One of the key benefits of ATOM is device abstraction. Anuta ATOM allows customers to leverage best-of-breed vendor devices for their network and avoid vendor lock-in. MAXIMIZE ROI / ROA: As Anuta Networks solution works for existing physical network infrastructures, customers can continue to use the devices they have already purchased and still get complete network agility resulting in higher ROI and ROA. FLEXIBLE DEPLOYMENTS: Anuta ATOM is containerized and can be deployed to manage Small, Medium, or Very large-scale networks in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. SCALE & RELIABILITY: Anuta ATOM has a micro-services-based architecture that delivers efficient scalability and reliability. Ease of Integration: Northbound, Anuta ATOM includes a comprehensive REST API and is integrated with cloud portals (OpenStack, VMware vRealize, ScienceLogic) and customers’ home-grown portals, billing, documentation, and ticketing systems. Southbound, Anuta Networks routinely publishes vendor, platform, and technology-specific models adapted from IETF, Open Config or customer developed. Further, Anuta ATOM SDK allows all device models to be developed by customer or partners. For instance, minor extensions can be implemented within hours while adding new vendor device models can take days to a maximum of 2 weeks.   Interoperability with Ecosystem Partners: Anuta ATOM has been validated with PNF & VNFs from 45+ industry-leading vendors including Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Checkpoint, F5, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, Radware, VMware, etc. supporting hundreds of L2-L7 network functions using CLI, NETCONF, YANG, REST and SNMP. For a complete list, check out http://www.anutanetworks.com/managed-devices/. Anuta ATOM supports multiple NFVI, including VMware, KVM, and OpenStack. Anuta ATOM is integrated with leading SDN controllers such as Cisco ACI, Juniper Contrail, HPE DCN, Nuage VSP, Open Daylight, Cumulus Networks as well as northbound portals such as OpenStack, VMware vRealize and OSS/BSS using REST API. Rapid Customer Adoption: Anuta ATOM received significant traction from Tier-1 SPs and large enterprises. Our publicly referenceable customers include Tata Communications, Telstra, Japan Post, F5 Networks, Neustar, etc. https://www.anutanetworks.com/customers/ Telstra in Australia has multiple ATOM deployments, including 120,000 managed CPE devices roll-out, Multi-vendor data center automation for hundreds of internal departments and cloud interconnect for four global sites. Tata Communications has deployed Anuta ATOM in their SD-WAN project for 15,000 hybrid CPE devices so far and has the plan to support up to 125,000 CPEs in next two years. Neustar, a leader in identity and authentication services, has deployed Anuta ATOM to automate their 26 DCs that scrub DDoS attack traffic at 175Gbps for 11K clients. Japan Post, the Fortune-13 Global Financial Institution, has deployed Anuta ATOM for data center automation in Private Cloud for hundreds of individual departments. Customer Use-Cases: Our Top-3 customer use cases are: Managed Branch Services: Multiple Tier-1 SPs and large enterprises have used Anuta ATOM to offer packaged Virtual CPE to their remote branches. The vCPE included vRouter such as Cisco CSR1000v, Brocade Vyatta and HPE VSR, vFW such as Juniper vSRX, Fortinet and Palo Alto Virtual firewalls, vWanOp such as Riverbed virtual steelhead, Open vSwitch or VMware vSwitch and OpenStack. Many customers also deployed Hybrid CPE, including a combination of legacy Cisco ISRs, Cisco IWAN, and SD-WAN controllers. Anuta ATOM automates multiple network functions such as QoS, Segmentation, Firewall policies, ACLs, IPsec or DMVPN, Policy-Based Routing, Performance Routing, Deep Packet Inspection, WAN Op, Web Security and Zero Touch Deployment for these CPE devices. Managed Data Center Automation – Anuta ATOM is deployed to offer Infrastructure as a Service in large data centers for use-cases such as Firewall as a Service, Load-Balancer as a Service, On-demand provisioning of L4-L7 ADC controllers and Firewalls, Data Center Interconnect, Provisioning Virtual Data Centers for each tenant as well as integration with SDN controllers including Cisco ACI, Juniper Contrail, HPE DCN, Nuage VSP and F5 BIG-IQ. Carrier Core Networks Automation – Anuta ATOM automates Virtual PE, Virtual CE, MPLS L2 VPN, L3 VPN and Cloud Interconnects using VNFs from Brocade, Cisco, Ericsson, HPE, Juniper etc.

LOGICMONITOR INTRODUCES ENHANCEMENTS TO LOGICMONITOR EXCHANGE
LogicMonitor, the leading provider of IT infrastructure monitoring and intelligence software across both cloud and on-premises, has launched version 2.0 of its LogicMonitor Exchange (LM Exchange), the company’s central repository for its growing collection of LogicModule technology integrations. LogicMonitor has over 2,000 pre-built core LogicModules that instantly integrate with the devices, technologies and services that enterprises rely on to keep their businesses running. LM Exchange houses all of these integrations, along with community-submitted LogicModules thoroughly vetted by LogicMonitor. The volume of integrations included in v2 represents the most extensive collection available within the monitoring industry. “Enterprises need a cloud-based monitoring and intelligence platform that can seamlessly adapt and integrate with a broad range of technologies,” said Tej Redkar, chief product officer at LogicMonitor. “The latest version of LM Exchange offers our customers an even better collaborative space from which they can access LogicMonitor’s integrations, source solutions to specific challenges, and share their own LogicModules.” LM Exchange makes it easier than ever for customers to capitalise on LogicMonitor’s extensibility by helping customers to find, customise, update and share out-of-the-box templates. Newly released features of LM Exchange include: • An updated user interface (part of LogicMonitor’s new UI design), making it easier than ever for customers to search for LogicModules. • Sharing functionality that allows customers to search for and rate both core and community-sourced LogicModules, as well as package and publish their own LogicModules to share with the community. • Packages, which aid customers in finding integrations grouped together by the technology they want to monitor, eliminating the need to locate each individual LogicModule to install the latest updates. • LM-Endorsed, a new tier of community-submitted LogicModules that goes through a stricter content review based on the LogicModule Style Guidelines and receives elevated support from LogicMonitor. • Safe LogicModule Merge (SLM), which helps customers update and preserve customisations on core LogicModules with only a few clicks. Customers can also see the final results before importing these updates, allowing them to maintain continuity. To learn more about the LM Exchange, view LogicMonitor’s featured integrations or visit the LogicMonitor blog.

Creating Immersive Experiences using AR and VR
Setting the context: The outbreak of COVID-19 has impacted many aspects of our life (social and personal) which in-turn ha impacted businesses. One of the key challenges has been mobility with strict restrictions on physical movement across several parts of the world (both self-imposed and administration imposed). Due to this, many art galleries and retail stores, have been shut down indefinitely. thereby adversely affecting the business and livelihood of those associated with them. However, customers are interested to purchase artifacts and products that led to innovative approach to selling and offering customer experience, albeit virtually. There was an immediate need of designing alternative modes of purchasing the same goods without walking into these physical locations by risking their health and well-being.. Customer also would like to continue having the same experience on shopping in the physical world.. Most of the existing digital solutions were not designed to offer an immersive experience to the users. Additionally, as businesses depend on social interactions, brick and mortar establishments were finding it difficult to retain their customer base. Customers ere are also missing out on experiences like in-store shopping, attending events/exhibitions, etc. Hence, the shift has taken place to offering s digital and immersive solutions to compensate the above-mentioned shortfalls.\ Zensar's innovative Solution- Immersive Art Gallery Virtual Walkthrough: Our innovation hub, Zenlabs worked on integrating AR and VR technologies to create a focused solution that offers a virtual walkthrough for an Art Gallery but can be used by other entities like retail stores, museums etc. Our solution provides VR + AR 3D walkthrough for an Art Gallery. We’ve replicated an Art gallery using 3D models and the user can explore the same by walking around in AR/VR. Based on the user’s preference, he/she can choose to experience the setup in AR or VR. For VR: This solution can be experienced on a VR headset if available. Otherwise users can navigate around the walkthrough like a First-Person Game. This can be done using keyboard for laptop and swipe gesture for mobile phones. For AR: The user can use their device to walk into an AR portal door (virtual). This virtual door leads them to the virtually simulated Art Gallery. The user can walk around using their device like they would in an actual gallery. This solution also works on Mixed Reality headsets like HoloLens to give complete immersive experience to the users as if they are walking in the real art gallery (WIP). • Users can get information (price, artist, date of creation, etc.) regarding the paintings by clicking on them. • Provision of customizing the Gallery: The solution provides option to customize the gallery by customizing floor/wall texture and colors, upload paintings of your choice, lightings etc. through a web-based dashboard. • The solution can be easily extended/replicated for other use cases like retail stores, manufacturing facilities, shop floors, education and training sessions, webinars, product launches, real estate showcases, etc. What’s unique about this solution? • Most immersive solutions require the user to install an app on their mobile phones for AR or use headsets for VR. Our solution is platform agnostic and can be experienced on a web browser as well, thereby on any device that has a web browser. The user can choose the preferable technology - whether they want to experience this in AR or VR based on the need (p[lease refer to “How this solution helps” section) • As discussed above sections, our solution is customizable, and the changes will reflect in the walkthrough in real time • Our solution is modular, and hence, any third-party interfaces like linking to any IoT platform, Asset Management framework, PLM software, etc. can be easily done using REST APIs. What is innovative about our solution • Most immersive solutions require the user to install an app on their mobile phones for AR or use headsets for VR. Our solution is platform agnostic and can be experienced on a web browser as well, thereby on any device that has a web browser. The user can choose the preferable technology - whether they want to experience this in AR or VR based on the need (p[lease refer to “How this solution helps” section) • As discussed above sections, our solution is customizable, and the changes will reflect in the walkthrough in real time • Our solution is modular, and hence, any third-party interfaces like linking to any IoT platform, Asset Management framework, PLM software, etc. can be easily done using REST APIs. Technology Snapshot: • The solution is developed using Unity3D Creation Engine • Mozilla WebXR SDK and ARFoundation framework are used for developing VR and AR features, respectively. • The 3D models are .obj files, created using Blender. • The solution is published in WebGL so it can be easily embedded on websites, but based on the business focus, the solution can be published as a mobile app as well. Key benefits: • This solution provides close to real, immersive experience to the end users without the need for them to physically go outside • Reaching out to a larger customer base- No barriers of geography, no restrictions of social distancing. People from across the globe can experience this solution from the comfort of their home. • This solution (especially the VR Part) aims at democratizing shopping experience for all. It will provide equal opportunities for specially-abled people to a more enhanced user experience by significantly reducing safety concerns and physical effort Future Roadmap: • Additional features like digital payment gateways, customer support modules etc. are going to be interfaced with our solution. • In process of using Photogrammetry to create 3D models to reduce lead time to develop/modify the solution. • We are also working to make this walkthrough more interactive by providing multiplayer VR experience, i.e., multiple people can be connected to the walkthrough at the same time using their virtual Avatars, just like in real life.

SML Group Unveils New 3D/AR Platform Digitiz3DTM to Digitize Labels & Trim Design Processes
SML Group, a global retail branding and RFID solutions provider, unveiled its internal 3D and Augmented Reality (AR) visualization platform, Digitiz3DTM. The new virtual product development tool will empower retail business owners (RBOs) and garment vendors around the world to better streamline their labelling and trims processes in order to increase overall speed and flexibility needed in today’s challenging market. Without 3D and AR modelling, design operation processes are often tedious, consisting of time-consuming alteration rounds, endless physical samples, and wasted fabric that have both cost and environmental repercussions. Digitiz3DTM addresses these challenges directly through technology that eliminates the need to touch or wait for physical samples – and instead provides customized garment catalogues with high-quality previews that demonstrate how various branding items would look on each garment or product. This includes: • Trims and packaging visualizations • Hardware colors and finishes explorations • AR library of assets for designers (i.e. labels, tags, buckles, buttons, packaging, etc.) “Given today’s complex landscape of remote workforces, the challenges within the supply chain and logistics, and increasing demand for more virtual, touchless experiences, 3D and AR technology adoptions have and will only continue to grow as a critical tool in retail’s arsenal,” said Gary Moskovciak, Senior Vice President of the Americas Region at SML Group. “The industry is evolving. Just look at major brands like Tommy Hilfiger, who pledged that by the end of 2020 100% of their collections would be designed entirely in 3D and who hit 65% as of May. It’s just one example of this market shift utilizing digitalization in support of more efficient, cost effective, and sustainable retail operations with many others following suit. We’re excited to bring this opportunity to life for our customers as part of our continued innovation that serves them.” SML Group’s 3D models are created through a combination of various software platforms and Digitiz3DTM, which seamlessly integrate with rendering software.

FlashBlade
Data has never been more crucial for businesses, and data volume growth over the last couple of years has been staggering. With 90 percent of all data in existence today created in the past two years, and 80 percent of data set to be unstructured by 2025 (estimated to be 175 zettabytes in total). Data analytics represents an opportunity to turn this unstructured data into insight; promising the ability to innovate faster and extend competitive advantage. The benefits of analytics are beyond compelling, and analytics investments power success. Recent research from ESG concludes that companies taking full advantage of analytics are 4.8x more likely to increase revenue, 3.2x more likely to improve customer satisfaction, and 2.4x more likely to enhance operational excellence. Roadblocks to analytics While the benefits of investing in a mature analytic platform are obvious, there are several challenges that prevent companies from being able to achieve their analytic goals and dreams. As log analytic architectures scale, their performance begins to become unpredictable, causing slowdowns in search queries and their subsequent processes. As a distributed system that manages a magnitude of data ingest, a large part of search performance relies on the ability of the administrator to predict which data will be queried. But as companies mature their pipelines and utilize more and more data to glean insights – it is becoming harder for administrators to accurately forecast which data should live where and for how long. The result is a substantial slow down for ad-hoc and forensic searches as well as complex queries. Additionally, as the analytic platform matures and more data is ingested, infrastructure can be overwhelmed and search capabilities across the board are impacted. This can lead to overprovisioning of infrastructure and increased costs. In addition to unpredictable performance, the tightly coupled nature of compute and storage that traditional log analytic deployments use leads to disruptions and complexity as these environments scale. As capacity needs grow, customers are forced to deploy unnecessary compute resources as well and experience lengthy and impactful rebalancing processes. Likewise, if a customer needs to grow their compute resources, they are forced to grow the capacity as well whether they need to or not. Another issue is that often the teams that run and manage log analytic applications are not the same teams that manage infrastructure. Because of this, there are often dramatic impacts to data pipelines in the form of performance issues, strained resources or outages. The application owners struggle to meet demand of their systems due to the struggling infrastructure, and the infrastructure teams don’t understand the application requirements and dynamics in order to quickly adapt to the ever changing demands. To augment this many customers are looking to deploy their pipelines in the cloud, giving up ownership of their data for the promise of a carefree, persistent infrastructure so they can focus on driving results. But the promise of the public cloud isn’t free from it’s own unique challenges like security risks, unpredictable and exorbitant costs and the loss of data autonomy. The promise of cloud-like agility quickly crumbles as the solution grows and customers find themselves trapped in a rigid solution they no longer can afford to support. Businesses want to overcome the challenges that are preventing them modernizing their analytic workflows and realizing the full potential of their data. Enter FlashBlade(R), the industry’s first unified fast file and object storage platform. FlashBlade - unique in solving modern analytics challenges When it comes to analytics, fast matters. The power of all flash coupled with the ability to scale in multiple dimensions is enabling our customers to experience the speed of distributed systems with the simplicity of a consolidated platform. Flashblade’s ability to scale capacity, performance and concurrency allows data architects to utilize the same system for a multitude of analytic applications, providing a single accelerated tier of storage for the most demanding data pipelines. A modern data architecture needs to be simple to run, simple to manage and simple to scale. Flashblade is the first data platform in the industry to offer both native file and object support as well as a highly adaptive architecture that enables even competing and disparate workloads to effectively utilize the same accelerated tier of storage. These capabilities along with FlashBlade’s ability to scale enable data scientists to focus on their data pipelines instead of battling the infrastructure needed to run them. In addition, a modern data architecture needs to protect a customer's investment, ensuring that they can innovate now and well into the future. Like any other business critical app, an analytics pipeline cannot afford an outage. Any outage, planned or unplanned will have a detrimental impact to analytic pipelines and business insights. FlashBlade ensures that performance and capacity are always available for your most demanding workloads. This enables a true cloud like experience whether off-prem, on-prem or both. Its simplicity of scale for performance and capacity ensures that data scientists have the resources they need to accelerate their data insights. Accelerating time-to-market - Man AHL One company already benefiting from the power of FlashBlade is Man AHL. Based in the UK, Man AHL is a pioneer in the field of systematic quantitative investing with more than $24 billion in assets under its management. Its entire business is based on creating and executing computer models to make investment decisions. The company adopted FlashBlade to deliver the massive storage throughput and scalability required to meet its most demanding simulation applications. The impact of FlashBlade was noticed immediately. Some of the company’s researchers found that the introduction of FlashBlade made it easier to use Spark for performing multiple simulations. One of them experienced a 10x-to-20x improvement in throughput for Spark workloads compared to the previous storage system. The company’s CTO, Gary Collier stated: “The greatest benefit for Man AHL from Pure FlashBlade is significantly improved productivity for the team and accelerated time-to-market,” this has helped extend Man AHL’s competitive advantage in the market even further. Trusted by leading companies around the world - LiquidNet Liquidnet provides a global institutional investment network that many of the world’s largest asset managers use to seek liquidity and investment opportunities, and a key to helping them with their execution decision-making is superior analytics. LiquidNet utilises FlashBlade to perform timely trades and generate real-time analytics that its institutional trading clients rely on to produce outstanding results. Liquidnet’s application development and analytics teams are employing modern tools like Elasticsearch, Spark, and Kafka and needed infrastructure to keep up with their workload demands. The ability to process large volumes of streaming data in real time, and the ability to make a data set available to multiple workloads simultaneously have proven key to staying at the leading edge of the market, thanks to FlashBlade. LiquidNet’s Global Head of Product Support, Mani Venkateswaran, went as far as to say: “FlashBlade provides state-of-the-art technology that significantly reduces our time-to-market with capabilities of high value to our clients. FlashBlade has been a huge enabler toward our goal of real-time analytics.” Delivering real-time analytics previously was not feasible because its legacy storage systems lacked the I/O and parallelism needed to move very large data sets fast enough. LiquidNet now joins countless others relying on FlashBlade to make a difference through analytics every single day.

Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT utlises AI and Machine Learning to offer greater management and automated data centre servicing
Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT is a vendor-agnostic, Cloud-based Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software platform that enables data centre operators and channel partners, including Value Added Resellers (VARs) and Managed Service Provders (MSPs) to proactively monitor, manage and maintain data centre business continuity from remote locations. It makes use of Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and intelligent benchmarking techniques to analyse aggregated data from infrastructure components and deliver detailed insight into the operation of a data centre. The software leverages Internet of Things (IoT) technology, now commonplace in data centre components and subsystems including racks, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and cooling equipment to enable both end-users and partners to proactively anticipate capacity and efficiency problems before they arise’ delivering more secure, resilient and efficient operations. Using Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and intelligent benchmarking techniques, EcoStruxure IT can analyse aggregated data from a wide variety of sources to provide analytical insight into every aspect of a data centre, or edge computing environments operation. Recent enhancements to EcoStruxure IT include the addition of Monitoring & Dispatch Services and the availability of a public Application Programming Interface (API). Monitoring & Dispatch Services, powered by analytics from the EcoStruxure IT data lake, allow customers to glean insightful, data-driven recommendations to maintain system uptime and shift from being reactive to proactive in maintaining distributed IT infrastructure. The approach combines 24/7 expert remote monitoring and troubleshooting by Schneider Electric’s engineers with next-business-day, on-site support, including replacement parts, when necessary. This ensures timely address of maintenance and service issues and simplifies the management of widely distributed IT assets, particularly in Edge data centres with no permanent onsite technical personnel. The EcoStruxure IT Public API allows partners and third-party software developers to integrate EcoStruxure into their preferred systems, extending the reach of the DCIM platform seamlessly into existing environments. This increases the overall visibility of data centres and edge compute to maintain uptime, detect faults or capacity issues before they become critical. The system offers more insightful, data-driven reporting and makes smarter decisions for more efficient and resilient operations. As a cloud-based software platform EcoStruxure IT is quick and easy to install, and scalable across distributed data centres. Its standards-based vendor-agnostic approach means that it can be used with equipment from any vendor that is compliant with common industry standards. Real-time updates and status reports can be delivered 24/7 to anywhere via the EcoStruxure IT Expert mobile application, allowing maintenance personnel to monitor the systems remotely and proactively maximise uptime and maintain mission critical continuity, from any location.

Zensar’s DevX-an innovative Developer Experience gets results for a progressive bank
Setting the context Zensar customer, a progressive bank had a plethora of latest tools and technologies; yet was struggling to manage the overall cost of quality (business goal). The customer team had deployed DevOps with individual state of the art tools, processes and automation, yet the Cost of Quality remained high. They noticed that automation had just sped up the process, leaving the silos intact. Zensar’s approach-what was innovative? Zensar introduced ‘DevX’ which is it’s innovative "Developer Experience" framework, which focuses on transforming the implementation from technology to experience. Traditionally developers work in silos - put in their code, do unit test (if at all) and pass on to QA for testing. They then, move to the next feature. QA does the testing and passes on to Release Manager, who creates the Release and passes on to Operations team. They deploy onto production. This process doesn't bring the end-to-end ownership to a single entity. An issue is everyone’s responsibility and yet no one takes ownership. Zensar’s ‘DevX’ framework, designed to focus on the experience of Developers/Testers/Release Manager/Operations. They conducted workshops with each to understand their pain points and how their work can be streamlined by eliminating any manual steps so that they can focus on what they do best.With this developer understanding, we integrated the existing toolset and gave one-tool-per-role, to focus on the experience. For e.g. IDE was made the experience focus for a Developer - and all toolset (Source Code, Agile Sprint, CI System, Deployment) was made available through the IDE. For a Release Manager, Jira became the experience focus - all Release Management activities could be carried out from this one tool. Thus, the focus moved from toolset to experience. Next, we focused on you-code-it, you-build-it, you-maintain-it mentality, thereby bringing in complete ownership of Release/Feature/User story. If a developer wrote lousy code, he would have to explain how to deploy it and would be called in when it broke in Production. Next step was to enable QA and Security in all aspects of the software delivery. Each feature/user story was self-tested by everyone for it's quality and security. Benefits to customer or Project Outcomes The bank now had a developer focused outlook, tailored processes, could leverage their existing tech investments. This made the developers happier in the overall process. • 10% reduction in the cost of quality (from 25% to under 15%) • Over a phased plan of 6 months, the cost of quality gradually reduced by 10% (from 25% to under 15%) The bank was able to meet its business goals effectively, in a cost-effective way, which also helped in happier customers.

VMware Unlocks the Power of Kubernetes for 70 Million-Plus Workloads Running on vSphere
VMware, Inc. unveiled new offerings to help customers further accelerate their app and infrastructure modernization initiatives. VMware vSphere 7 Update 1, VMware vSAN 7 Update 1 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 product releases streamline customer adoption of Kubernetes and support stateful applications with new developer-ready capabilities and enhance scalability and operations with new features. VMware today also announced Tanzu editions—packaging portfolio capabilities to address the most common scenarios customers encounter in their modernization efforts. “A year ago, we embarked on an effort to help customers succeed along each step of their app and infrastructure modernization journey,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “Today, we take a leap forward to unlock the potential of Kubernetes for hundreds of thousands of VMware vSphere customers. Our new solutions and offerings help remove the guesswork out of Kubernetes and provide the requisite capabilities needed to help customers’ achieve their modernization objectives.” Delivering Developer-Ready Infrastructure In a year’s time, VMware has delivered a comprehensive software stack that enables customers to develop new modern applications as well as modernize existing applications and infrastructure. At VMworld 2019 US, VMware unveiled the Tanzu portfolio and the tech preview of Project Pacific—to rearchitect vSphere into an open platform using Kubernetes APIs. In March 2020, VMware introduced the Tanzu portfolio for modern applications. Additionally, VMware delivered on the first phase of Project Pacific with VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu—which provides hybrid cloud infrastructure with consistent management for both VM-based and container-based applications. (Read VMware App Modernization press release). Today, VMware is delivering on the next phase of Project Pacific with new product releases to help customers rapidly adopt Kubernetes. VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu will provide a simple way for hundreds of thousands of vSphere customers globally to get started with Kubernetes and modernize the 70 million-plus workloads running on vSphere. Customers will be able to take advantage of existing investments in technology, tools and skillsets to quickly set up and provision Kubernetes clusters in support of modern applications. Specifically, vSphere with Tanzu will allow customers to configure enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure with their existing network and block or file storage in less than an hour. (1) This includes enabling customers to extend vSphere Distributed Switch support for Kubernetes clusters. vSphere with Tanzu will also allow customers to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials (with option to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition) or choose their own L4 load balancing solutions. Using VMware vCenter Server, customers will be able to deploy Kubernetes clusters in minutes, provision role-based access and allocate capacity to developers. (2) The integration with VMware Tanzu allows administrators to manage consistent, compliant and conformant Kubernetes while providing developers self-service access to IT infrastructure. Additionally, VMware is introducing new capabilities across its HCI and hybrid cloud platforms to further support customers’ modern applications needs. VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 with VMware Tanzu will introduce the vSAN Data Persistence platform—a framework for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) enabling modern stateful services such as NoSQL databases and object storage to integrate with the underlying infrastructure. The integrations will enable customers to run their stateful applications with lower TCO and simplified operations and management. Today, VMware is announcing that Dell EMC ObjectScale will be integrated and validated on the vSAN Data Persistence platform. VMware is also announcing partnerships and co-engineering efforts with Cloudian, DataStax and MinIO to integrate and validate their respective offerings on the platform. Partners will introduce plug-ins in support of the platform over time. (3) In conjunction with partners, the new platform will enable customers to: • Allow developers to use Kubernetes APIs to provision and scale stateful services on-demand in a self-service model with minimal administrator intervention; • Deliver integrated service health and capacity monitoring through dedicated dashboards in vCenter; • Leverage service-aware infrastructure operations to enable service availability during infrastructure changes including maintenance and lifecycle management; • Run stateful services with optimal storage efficiency. Simplifying the Customer Journey through the VMware Tanzu Portfolio Building on today’s new product releases, VMware is simplifying how customers realize compelling outcomes with the capabilities of its VMware Tanzu portfolio. VMware is introducing VMware Tanzu editions—packaging portfolio capabilities that address the most common enterprise requirements to modernize infrastructure and applications. The VMware Tanzu editions lineup consists of Basic, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. VMware Tanzu Basic is an add-on to vSphere that entitles customers to run Kubernetes as part of their vSphere environment. VMware Tanzu Standard edition enables customers to run and manage Kubernetes across multiple clouds with a single, open source aligned distribution, and centralized management of policy across clouds, clusters and teams. The Basic and Standard editions will be available this quarter; the Advanced and Enterprise editions will be available later with more details to follow. Scale Infrastructure without Compromise and Simplify Operations Beyond the app and infrastructure modernization updates introduced today, VMware vSphere 7 Update 1, VMware vSAN 7 Update 1 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 are introducing new capabilities in support of customers running traditional workloads. New features and enhancements will enable customers to scale their infrastructure and simplify their operations, including: • Monster VMs – vSphere 7 Update 1 virtual machines (VMs) scale up to 24 terabytes (TB) and 768 vCPUs to deliver “monster VMs” in support of resource intensive applications such as in-memory databases. • Cluster Scale Enhancements – vSphere 7 Update 1 has expanded support for the number of hosts per cluster by 50% for a total of 96 hosts per cluster. • HCI Mesh – vSAN 7 Update 1 introduces HCI Mesh, a unique software-based approach for disaggregation of compute and storage resources that helps customers to scale incrementally. This feature helps customers to reduce CAPEX by sharing capacity across clusters while lowering OPEX as they reduce the amount of storage resources managed by scaling efficiently. • Compression-Only Option – This new vSAN 7 Update 1 option will allow customers to enable compression-only instead of deduplication and compression. Customers will benefit from an increase in usable capacity and improved performance across both all-flash and hybrid systems without compromising space efficiency for databases. • Enterprise-Ready File Services – vSAN 7 Update 1 now offers all of the most common file service protocols by adding support for the SMB v3 and v2.1 protocols. Additionally, vSAN File Services now features Active Directory integration, a critical component of enterprise-ready file storage, and Kerberos support for network authentication. With these new capabilities, customers can use vSAN for both block and file storage for most use cases. • Remote Clusters – New remote cluster capabilities enable VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 to extend its operational capabilities to edge locations and branch offices. • vVols Integration – New vVols integration into VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 with Tanzu provides a common storage management framework for external storage. • VMware Skyline Support for VMware Cloud Foundation – VMware Skyline brings proactive intelligence to VMware Cloud Foundation by identifying management and workload domains and proactively surfacing VMware Cloud Foundation solution findings.

iboss Cloud Platform
iboss redefines the cybersecurity landscape with its cutting-edge technology and unique patented containerized cloud architecture to ensure a smoother and more seamless transition to the cloud than any other security vendor. Built 100% for the cloud, iboss delivers Network Security as a Service, in the cloud, to ensure all Internet traffic is secured for compliance, web filtering, malware defense and data loss at all times. Because of containerization, iboss cloud changes the way cloud security is delivered, allowing organizations to migrate from traditional network security appliances to security delivered in the cloud. With mobility, cloud application use and bandwidth use exponentially increasing by the day, using traditional means to secure cloud connectivity with appliances is ineffective as the traditional network perimeter has eroded. The iboss platform is critical to ensure fast and secure connections to cloud applications and enable cloud adoption in a secure and scalable way. iboss cloud secures user Internet access on any device, from any location, in the cloud making the cloud-first future a reality.   Proxy appliances were not designed for the modern, cloud-driven, world. They were designed to protect network traffic for users within offices, yet those users are working from home. They were designed to handle a predefined amount of network traffic, yet the volume of traffic is increasing exponentially by the day. Network proxy appliances were designed to decrypt and inspect limited amounts of encrypted HTTPS traffic. However, over 99% of all browsing time is over encrypted HTTPS connections according to the Google HTTPS Transparency Report. Proxy appliances were not designed for the cloud driven and mobile world. iboss ensures you get all of the network security capabilities found in proxy appliances, without the appliances and at infinite scale. This reduces infrastructure costs, reduces labor and is designed for the work from home and mobile future. With Covid, users are not sitting behind the proxy appliances. They are working remotely, from home. If the network traffic does not traverse the appliances, it cannot inspect or protect that data. Because of this, organizations leveraging on-prem proxy appliances are forced to send network data from remote users through slow VPN connections to provide network security. This is unsustainable and results in slow connections which reduces productivity and increases costs. The iboss cloud platform provides all of the capabilities found in traditional appliances, except without the gear. It allows network data from remote users to be secured directly in the cloud, eliminating the unnecessary data backhaul through VPN connections. This results in fast connections, increased end-user productivity and reduced costs.   The iboss cloud runs as a complete SaaS offering in the cloud. It has infinite computing power to decrypt any volume of traffic. As encrypted traffic increases, your costs do not as iboss will process, decrypt and inspect all traffic automatically. This includes the large volumes of traffic from remote work from home users.   With iboss cloud, all network traffic is always inspected before going to the cloud, regardless of user location. It can also generate the log events and drill down reports needed to ensure a strong cybersecurity posture for all users, from all locations, at all times. In addition, the iboss cloud can force network traffic to business applications while preventing traffic to personal cloud accounts, such as Google Drive. This reduces shadow IT and data loss from users, including those that work from home. When moving to a cloud-based gateway platform, typically the ability to maintain unique source IP presence in the cloud is lost. With iboss, each customer gets dedicated source cloud IP Addresses which are associated with the organization. Any data traversing the global cloud gateways in iboss cloud will have a uniquely associated IP Address that can be mapped to the organization. Users always appear to be accessing the Internet from within the organization regardless of location.   The iboss cloud platform offers a 100% drop in replacement for proxy appliances converting a data center from simply hosting legacy proxy appliances to becoming a private cloud Point of Presence. The private cloud is linked to the global iboss cloud and immediately converts appliances to a modern private cloud extension of the iboss cloud global footprint. In addition, since the private cloud is linked to the global iboss cloud footprint, all users outside of the private cloud network automatically send their traffic to iboss cloud. When the time comes, the private cloud is turned down and nothing changes for the organization as the private cloud was seen as just another data center within the global iboss cloud footprint. This is only possible due to the patented containerized architecture of iboss.   The largest organizations of the world have quickly migrated to iboss for cloud security as part of their cloud transformation strategy. Moving to iboss has made employees more productive, as faster access to cloud applications and collaboration tools by applying security in the cloud have allowed users to collaborate with speed and ease. Secure cloud connectivity is critical for cloud transformation and iboss makes this possible ensuring cloud adoption and acceleration is available to customers of all sizes.

OVHcloud Connect evolves to support hybrid and multi-cloud strategies
OVHcloud has announced its new private, secure connection solutions to support enterprise multi-cloud and hybrid cloud projects. OVHcloud Connect solutions are built on the expertise of the European leader in cloud networks and a strong partnership with connectivity leaders Equinix and Megaport. The adoption of multi-cloud strategies (combining multiple providers) and hybrid cloud strategies (combining private, public and/or on-premise cloud environments) continues to be a topic for debate among IT leaders. As well as the specific advantages of each approach, businesses need to maximise their continuity of operations and have greater freedom of choice as they coordinate a suite of bespoke services. OVHcloud is facilitating access to these technologies by unveiling two new solutions: • OVHcloud Connect Provider, a solution developed in partnership with Equinix and Megaport. OVHcloud Connect Provider simplifies the implementation of multi-cloud and hybrid architectures by interconnecting the various enterprise cloud environments with OVHcloud data centres around the world. • OVHcloud Connect Direct, offering the most secure way to build a decentralised hybrid cloud via direct, private connections between OVHcloud data centres and each client’s on-premise information system. Reinforced multi-cloud access through strong partnerships By partnering with Equinix, the world’s digital infrastructure company, and Megaport, a world leader in cloud connectivity services, clients using OVHcloud solutions will now benefit from global coverage. This includes over 700 points of presence (PoPs) for interconnecting their services with their chosen providers. These new solutions provide an opportunity for businesses around the world to combine their existing infrastructure with an open, reversible and interoperable cloud. “We are very pleased to further develop our partnership with OVHcloud and to continue to support this European cloud leader’s growth over the last 10 years. The availability of OVHcloud Connect on Platform Equinix® will help accelerate the adoption of OVHcloud by enterprises that use the cloud for increasingly mission-critical applications. This direct interconnection facilitates the implementation of innovative and high-performance hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, with the flexibility to create connections to OVHcloud anywhere in the world in a few minutes.” says Nicolas Roger, Director, Global Solutions Architects at Equinix. “Our integration with OVHcloud Connect makes it easy for businesses to bypass the internet and privately connect to OVHcloud in real-time from more than 700 Megaport enabled data centres globally. Megaport’s point-and-click portal enables customers to provision secure, scalable connections that empower multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and cloud-to-cloud architectures in minutes. We are excited to partner with OVHcloud to bring their powerful cloud solutions to more enterprises in more locations around the world,” said Matt Simpson, Vice President of Cloud Product at Megaport. More choice for businesses Clients seeking to interconnect their services with OVHcloud Connect are able to select the number of private connections and traffic capacity of each individual link (from 200 Mbps to 10 Gbps). Traffic on the OVHcloud network is included in the stated fees, making costs transparent and predictable for each client. “Hybridisation and multi-cloud have become a basic part of enterprise cloud strategies today, but rolling them out and using them can still be difficult for companies. With OVHcloud Connect, we bring a set of secure, no-nonsense network solutions to our clients, leveraging a solid collaboration with our partners Equinix and Megaport. By combining OVHcloud Connect solutions and the vRACK virtual private network made available to all our clients, we ensure they benefit from a private and fully secure connection to all OVHcloud services,” says Alain Fiocco, Chief Technology Officer for the OVHcloud group.

Fungible DPU
Fungible DPU is a new class of microprocessor powering next generation data center infrastructure. Optimized for data interchange and data-centric computations, the Fungible DPU is designed to improve the performance, economics, reliability, and security of data centers built on scale-out principles, and to do so at scales from a few racks to many thousands of racks, all within a single building. Recognized as the third socket in data centers alongside the CPU and GPU, the Fungible DPU is in prime position to power next generation compute, network, storage, security and analytics platforms. The Fungible DPU delivers game-changing performance, footprint and cost efficiencies for next generation, scale-out networking, storage, security and analytics platforms. Fungible is the category leader for high performance specialized silicon for storage servers. All the innovations out there are software innovations (running on x86 servers) whereas we have both the software and hardware innovation. One of the key network transformation technologies enabled by the Fungible DPU is TrueFabric. TrueFabric is an open standards based network technology that enables the disaggregation of compute and storage resources at all scales. TrueFabric provides a set of eight essential properties. These are scalability across many orders of magnitude, full any-to-any cross-sectional bandwidth, low predictable latency, fairness, congestion avoidance, fault tolerance, end-to-end software defined security, and the use of open standards to deliver excellent economics. No existing technology provides all these properties in a single implementation. TrueFabric therefore opens the door to a single universal data center network that can be used for all networking tasks within a data center. This maximizes the value of the network and enables a truly general and powerful computing infrastructure. Another aspect that sets the Fungible DPU apart is it has both performance and flexibility. This is due to a clean slate approach in designing the Fungible DPU. Unlike Smart NICs (which may have performance) which are limited flexibility in the datapath. The Fungible DPU comprises two core innovations that are tightly interwoven: First is a programmable data-path engine that executes data-centric computations at extremely high speeds, while providing flexibility comparable to general-purpose CPUs. The engine is programmed in C using industry standard tool chains and is designed to execute many data-path computations concurrently. This unique innovation enables the Fungible DPU to be fully customized to address the most stringent high-performance requirements visible today. Second is a new network engine that implements the endpoint of a high-performance TrueFabric that provides deterministic low latency, full cross-section bandwidth, congestion and error control, and high security at any scale (from 100s to 100,000s of nodes). The TrueFabric protocol is fully standards compliant and interoperable with TCP/IP over Ethernet, ensuring that the data center leaf-spine network can be built with standard Ethernet switches and standard electro-optics and fiber infrastructure. network can be built with standard Ethernet switches and standard electro-optics and fiber infrastructure. Fungible also provides a full suite of software that enables the Fungible DPU and the products it powers to be used “out of the box”. This includes data-path stacks, host drivers and agents for x86, and a set of centralized cluster services that provides management, control and visibility of a large number of Fungible DPU-enabled products. Fungible DPU Enables End-to-End Storage Benefits Improved performance Fewer x86 cycles consumed with storage virtualization improved tail latency with True Fabric Enables diskless servers (remote boot) & bare metal services End-to-end compression to save network bandwidth End-to-end encryption Pool local and remote drives

Qumulo Leads Customers to the Cloud with Launch of Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3
Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3 is the first-ever native cloud service that enables organizations to consolidate and manage their unstructured file data no matter where it resides. Qumulo Shift copies and moves file data from any Qumulo on-prem or public cloud file system into Amazon S3. Qumulo transforms file data to object in an open and non-proprietary format making it directly accessible to the thousands of cloud-native applications and services designed for Amazon S3. This architecture provides users with complete enterprise file system capabilities and performance coupled with the scale, flexibility and power of the S3 environment. This capability represents both a technology and business model innovation, providing users the freedom, choice and flexibility to use their data where it is most strategic, without adding cost or additional integration. To date, enterprises have been unable to easily move their critical file data to the cloud, stranding their data from the applications and services they need to use. Complicating cloud adoption even further, these organizations have been forced to completely re-architect their application workflows in order to utilize data in the cloud. Traditional legacy file systems are limited in their ability to help customers leverage the cloud, causing expensive and time-consuming application refactoring and forcing users into proprietary data formats. With Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3, organizations can now take full advantage of their valuable and growing file data and create faster business outcomes leveraging the cloud. Users can migrate and store data from thousands of sources to Amazon S3, making it easier for that data to natively interact with AWS services such as Amazon Sagemaker, AWS IoT Greengrass, and more. https://qumulo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ShiftForAWS_DataSheet.pdf https://qumulo.com/resources/qumulo-leads-customers-to-the-cloud-with-launch-of-qumulo-shift-for-amazon-web-services/ https://qumulo.com/resources/qiy-amazon-shift/ https://qumulo.com/product/cloud-products/

BitDam Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for email, cloud drives and other collaboration platforms
BitDam brings a disruptive approach to cybersecurity which stops malware and phishing threats before they reach end user via cloud email, cloud drives, instant messaging, and other collaboration platforms. While current cybersecurity solutions are based on knowledge of previous attacks, limiting their ability to detect unknown threats that were not seen before, BitDam’s unique attack-agnostic technology enables it to provide remarkably higher protection, especially when it comes to unknown threats (as soon as they emerge). This breakthrough cloud-native technology is expected to change the cybersecurity landscape, stopping the arms race between offensive and defensive cyber. BitDam ATP is proven to detect and block the 20-40% of advanced threats that bypass leading email security solutions such as Microsoft’s Office ATP and Proofpoint TAP, helping organizations of all sizes and sectors protect against cyberthreats saving them millions of dollars. What makes it different? BitDam’s approach to security is completely opposite to the dominant industry mindset where solutions are designed to react to known threats and behaviors, and where the protective measurements are modeled based on knowledge of past threats. Instead of chasing after the newest known cyber threats and wait for the next unknown attack, BitDam focuses on what can be known for sure – legitimate applications (such as word, PPT, browsers etc.) and their genuine ways of behavior. BitDam learns the normal code-level executions of business applications and based on this whitelist, determines whether a file or weblink is malicious or not, regardless of the specific malware it may contain. This 100% attack-agnostic technology drives remarkably higher protection and allows detection of new attacks at first sight.

Sequitur Labs EmSPARK 2.0 Security Suite for Critical IoT Device Protection
Sequitur Labs would like to submit the EmSPARK™ 2.0 IoT Security Platform for the Cloud Security Innovation Award. EmSPARK 2.0 is the next generation in embedded system security to prevent high-value, edge devices from being compromised. Version 2.0 now features powerful security defenses for critical intellectual property, secure chip-to-cloud integration and over-the-air (OTA) firmware update protection. Built on three pillars of product security – design, build and sustain, EmSPARK 2.0 provides device manufacturers with the firmware, tools and APIs needed to properly execute IoT protection. EmSPARK provides a robust security framework protecting embedded firmware, keys and security-critical assets through the entire device lifecycle. It enables silicon hardware security features, secure device provisioning, and API access to essential trust services such as secure storage, firmware updates and payload verification. With as many as 60 billion smart devices expected to be online in the coming years, it is imperative for IoT manufacturers to implement a best-practices approach that ensures that products, applications and systems are not vulnerable to malicious attacks. By implementing a pre-packaged software security suite like EmSPARK 2.0, OEMs have a technical solution that enables them to overcome steep learning curves, ensure personnel resources are available to focus on core capabilities and reduce critical time to market.” The EmSPARK Security Suite was designed to address solutions in industries where embedded security is paramount such as industrial control, building automation, the smart home, machine vision, automotive communication, and medical devices. Earlier this year, Sequitur Labs worked with Arrow Electronics on protecting security-conscious IoT edge devices with the debut of Arrow’s Shield96 board, a trusted Linux reference design that is equipped with EmSPARK to help customers create customized production-ready systems. With an increasing number of successful projects underway, Sequitur Labs is actively supporting Arrow with important embedded system security implementations. EmSPARK 2.0 enables critical device security features on the IoT developer’s silicon of choice; supporting secure boot, OTA updates, failovers and IP protection throughout the device’s lifecycle. Sequitur additionally supports customers’ implementations with non-recurring engineering (NRE) services for faster time to market. Additional features include: • Software provisioning • Trusted applications and APIs providing cryptography, key and certificate management, secure storage, and chip-to-cloud integration • Support for platforms from NXP® Semiconductors, Microchip Technology Inc. and others • Pre-loaded EmSPARK™ 2.0 software on the arrow.com Shield96 development platform for fast time to market • Free software evaluation kit

Connexus Cloud
IPC’s Connexus Cloud managed Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) for data, voice and enterprise connectivity, financial institutions can trade faster and become more agile than ever before. Connexus Cloud provides adaptive, on-demand connectivity throughout the trade lifecycle across multiple asset classes – equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, and their derivatives - futures, options, forwards and swaps. More than 2,000 sell-side sites encompassing leading investment banks, brokers, dealers, inter-dealer brokers and prime brokers are part of Connexus Cloud. IPC has continually invested in making Connexus Cloud not only the best, but the best value trading solution. The Connexus Cloud suite of mission-critical managed solutions includes Connexus Extranet, Connexus Ethernet, Connexus WAN for managed virtual private network (VPN), and a full suite of Trader Voice services including Connexus Voice & Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) with advanced SIP functionality. All services are delivered over unified access. Connexus Cloud is protocol-agnostic and supports FIX messages, transaction standards, unicast/multicast market data, all trader voice circuit types as well as other industry protocols. Connexus Cloud is also a Blockchain Optimised Network, and IPC is a member of the R3 Blockchain Community. Other products included in the Connexus Cloud suite include Connexus Chrono, IPC’s industry-leading global synchronised Time as a Service (TaaS) solution built with compliance in mind; FX Hub, a low latency, co-located performance solution engineered to address the most complex FX trading challenges; Fixed Income Marketplace, a premier holistic connectivity solution which helps enable market participants to trade fixed income instruments electronically or via voice; Global Exchange Reach, providing exchanges a local presence in a remote region to expand their reach; and Connexus Hub, which facilitates a flexible model for services with global availability at premier colocation facilities. Lastly, the scope of IPC’s Connexus network is another factor in which it is unparalleled. Participants in IPC’s Connexus Cloud are connected to a community of more than 200,000 users from over 6,600 capital market participants across the globe, including buy-side and sell-side firms, trading platforms, market centers, liquidity venues, interdealer brokers, application and market data providers, and clearing/settlement services. The sell-side leverages Connexus Cloud to connect to the buy-side community to provide trade lifecycle services and enable the execution of a range of trading strategies around the world.

Smarter SaaS By TBSC
Our latest product Smarter SaaS for Microsoft 365 Launched in May 2020. Smarter SaaS is the quickest, easiest, and cost-effective smarter SaaS management tool. Smarter SaaS has the approval and support of Microsoft, as TBSC is an ISV partner and Smarter SaaS is included on App Source and Marketplace. Smarter SaaS aids in software asset management, adding value to our resellers and end users through the Microsoft 365 discovery & inventory features, along with automatic reharvesting, recommendations, and cost-savings. Smarter SaaS tracks and monitors Microsoft 365 users in real-time, giving accurate and actionable data. Optimisation is the key to effective SaaS deployments. With Smarter SaaS analysis, automated capabilities and project consulting ensure subscription management which delivers optimal ROI on your investment. Smarter SaaS is a cloud-based Software Asset Management solution that optimises Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions. Smarter SaaS automatically recommends how to reduce IT costs whilst finding the best Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions for every user. Likewise, the installation process is quick, and the dashboard is easy to use and understand. Smarter SaaS has helped many of our customers avoid pesky Microsoft audits, save money on Microsoft 365 licenses, and boost Microsoft 365 application usage. Our product is a month to-month subscription and works as an add-on to MSPs businesses.

Hyve VMware cloud
What, exactly, is novel about the process/product or innovation? Hyve Managed Hosting is the first cloud hosting provider in the UK to implement a fully-managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud with DDoS defence built in and a network capacity that exceeds a terabit . How does the product or process break with conventional ideas or processes in its field? Hyve’s fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud is a high performance solution which also offers security, networking and platform/server management layers. It is designed to support businesses of all sizes. How does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists? How do customers benefit from the product/process or innovation? Hyve’s customers are able to access the fastest possible I/O without the high cost with SAN technology. They benefit from support which is available around the clock. Running on VMware allows Hyve to offer high availability on all virtual machines as well as a a 99.999% SLA Why Hyve? Hyve Managed Hosting offers colocation and hosting services across 35 worldwide locations. Through strategic partnerships with leading data centre and bandwidth providers such as Equinix and Global Switch, Hyve gives customers access to world-class, Tier 1 networking with fully managed Tier 3+ data centres across a range of cloud hosting solutions. Hyve was the first cloud hosting provider to break conventions and set up a fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud within the UK, as well as having a network capacity that exceeds a terabit . The company virtualised and consolidated all of its clients onto a virtualised platform before cloud hosting was initially offered by other providers, which now enables Hyve to deliver the high performance, reliability and scalability its customers need. In a market dominated by global brands, Hyve is known for providing colocation and hosting services backed by market leading service and support, based on its ‘extra-mile’ customer service ethos. Choosing an enterprise colocation or hosting partner is not a simple decision. With Hyve, the difference lies with its dedicated team of experts, available 24/7 through a non-tiered support system, offering a truly personal approach to service. Keeping customers “always-on” This approach is coupled with powerful enterprise-grade infrastructure which has enabled Hyve to deliver consistently high levels of uptime in the past three years. With an ongoing commitment to investment in industry-leading storage solutions, Hyve is also able to provide the fastest possible I/O without the premium price tag of other complex SAN technology. This reliability is what attracted Creditplus to utilise the managed enterprise cloud solution from Hyve for its new, industry-first ‘self-serve’ car financing solution. Creditplus needed a reliable, managed hosting environment for its virtual showroom, so approached Hyve to host its website after experiencing ongoing issues with the previous provider. The Creditplus developers required a stable and scalable system to build its application on and the migration process was the biggest challenge. It was expected to take a dedicated team at Creditplus over three months to complete, but Hyve took control and managed the migration with one member of technical staff, allowing Creditplus to continue working on other important elements surrounding the implementation of its digital strategy. Going beyond the ordinary: Market-leading performance Performance matters little without reliability, and business hosting demands the highest hardware specifications available. Hyve provides a ‘no compromise’ infrastructure with performance, scalability, reliability and security at its core. Unlike many other hosts, Hyve doesn’t pack shared servers with thousands of domains. Instead, Hyve ensures that each server has plenty of resources available for the number of domains hosted – fewer domains per server. All of Hyve’s cloud services are built on HPE BladeSystems and HPE 3PAR tiered storage arrays, and running on VMware allows Hyve to offer high availability on all virtual machines with a 99.999% SLA. All solutions are fully managed by Hyve and can be set up to run across multiple data centres for disaster recovery. Sam Bond, Head of Digital Delivery, at Creditplus stated “From the first meeting, Hyve ensured all questions were answered before signing contracts. The plan was cost-effective and meant resources internally could be used for other key projects.” Ensuring exceptional service Hyve’s highly flexible and extremely proactive approach to customer service is undoubtedly its key differentiator when it comes to its hosting and colocation services. Supported by its ‘extra mile’ support culture, Hyve’s customer service team are available 24x7x365, with rapid response times starting from just 20 minutes. The company operates in small teams, so that technical staff can keep up familiarity with clients and build long standing relationships. By working with Hyve, Creditplus has been able to deliver a groundbreaking online self-serve platform for customers, that is underpinned by Hyve’s attention to customer service. Explaining why Creditplus chose to work with Hyve, Bond said: “As the development team began to plan the delivery of this ‘self-serve’ journey, we realised we were in need of a multi-server system, and more importantly, consistent and proactive support from a secure, reliable and managed service provider.” Since deploying Hyve, new features and bug fixes have been iterated and deployed on their servers. One of the key benefits is the reassurance of knowing that the team at Hyve is available when they are needed to implement critical action on their behalf, all without requiring any internal resources. “In the future, as Creditplus’ marketing campaigns increase and traffic is driven to the site from various PR activities, it’s imperative the architecture will be able to handle dynamic loads and adjust accordingly. Our utmost trust is with Hyve to support this,” added Bond. Trusted cloud hosting solutions Hyve offers a wide range of cloud service offerings, enabling customers with any requirements to find a suitable solution. These offerings include the four main types of cloud: managed, private, public, and hybrid. Managed cloud Hyve’s fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud builds upon its performance and scaling capabilities by adding security, networking and platform/server management layers. It also offers a range of management services across the whole infrastructure stack, supporting businesses of all sizes. Private cloud Hyve’s private cloud runs on hardware fully dedicated to each individual organisation, and the absence of shared resources ensures that customers have the highest level of security for their data. Public cloud Businesses can reduce the risks of adopting a public cloud service provider, such as AWS, Azure or Google, by working with Hyve to create a realistic deployment plan and to add the vital layer of continuous management. Unlike other public cloud offerings, Hyve’s customers have to go through an extensive vetting, checking and due diligence process before they can access the network, giving businesses complete reassurance. Hybrid cloud Hyve’s hybrid cloud offering is a flexible cloud hosting solution that can utilise a combination of on-premises, private cloud and managed cloud services that all work in tandem. Using only the fastest and most robust hardware available, this approach provides businesses with the security and control of a private cloud, and the flexibility and cost savings presented by the public cloud. Customer feedback Please find below some more customer success stories and reviews. https://www.hyve.com/why-hyve/success-stories/ https://community.spiceworks.com/pages/hyvemanagedhosting https://www.serchen.co.uk/company/hyve/ https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/hyve.com http://www.hostsearch.com/company-info/hyve.asp https://clutch.co/cloud/profile/hyve

Equinix Unveils Fully Automated and Interconnected Bare Metal Service
Equinix, Inc., the world’s digital infrastructure company, announced the availability of Equinix Metal™, a fully automated and interconnected bare metal service. Equinix Metal provides digital businesses with an automated, “as-a-service" deployment method to build their foundational infrastructure and take advantage of the global reach, interconnected ecosystems and trusted partners available on Platform Equinix®. Equinix Metal is available today in Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers across four global metros (Amsterdam, New York, Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.), and is expected to be available in 14 global metros by early 2021. With this new service, companies have the option to deploy the physical infrastructure of their choice at software speed across Equinix’s trusted platform. Together with other digital infrastructure building blocks in the Equinix portfolio, customers now have a broad range of physical and virtual deployment alternatives to place infrastructure wherever they need it and connect to everything they need to succeed. Featuring native integration with Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric®, which has been renamed Equinix Fabric™, Equinix Metal helps enterprises seamlessly deploy hybrid multicloud architectures and quickly access thousands of networks, enterprises and clouds on Platform Equinix. By delivering high-performance dedicated servers in minutes via popular developer tools in both on-demand and reserved models, Equinix Metal helps businesses extract greater value from Platform Equinix's rich ecosystems more quickly, more easily and in more places than ever before. Building upon the recent acquisition of Packet—as well as technologies developed at Equinix—the addition of Equinix Metal expands Equinix’s ability to help more companies gain digital advantage. By combining Packet’s expertise in API-first, hardware automation and provisioning with Equinix’s global reach, interconnection prowess and proximity to valuable ecosystems, Equinix Metal offers a powerful infrastructure building block on which digital leaders can deploy and scale their preferred infrastructure with agility and confidence. Highlights/Key Facts: • With Equinix Metal, digital leaders can gain competitive advantage by building foundational infrastructure to directly and securely connect people, locations, clouds and data that matter most to their business. Key features of Equinix Metal include: o Automated: Equinix Metal is a fully programmable, easy-to-use and scalable solution. Businesses can click-and-configure, provision via API and common libraries, or leverage popular tools to quickly and reliably deploy and manage hybrid multicloud architectures. o Interconnected: Equinix Metal includes industry-first native integration to Equinix Fabric, a global, software-defined interconnection service available in 46 strategic markets. In under 15 minutes, users can deploy dedicated bare metal infrastructure across global locations and connect to Equinix Fabric for low-latency access to thousands of networks, enterprises and clouds. o Production Ready: With the acquisition of Packet in March 2020 and the integration of organic technology, Equinix Metal launches with a proven track record of performance, security and reliability trusted by hundreds of SaaS companies, enterprises, global service providers and open source projects. o Ecosystem Friendly: By focusing on automating foundational hardware and supporting integrations to DevOps, hybrid cloud and open-source software solutions like Kubernetes, Equinix Metal extends the company’s strategy of enabling customer choice through supporting neutral ecosystems. • Equinix Metal can address a broad set of use cases that value global reach and participation within digital ecosystems, including: o Hybrid Cloud—Deploy secure infrastructure that is proximate to ecosystems and enables reduced CAPEX and incremental scaling at software speed. o DevOps Automation—Rapidly provision physical infrastructure with robust, well-documented APIs and immediate access to supported ecosystem integrations. o Global Edge Delivery—Reduce latency, expand global reach and accelerate time to market to drive better end-user experiences. o Security & Compliance—Benefit from single tenancy and private connectivity, with access to hardware level security protocols. Quotes: • Raj Dutt, Founder and CEO, Grafana Labs “Grafana provides its mission-critical observability platform to the largest companies in the world. By deploying Grafana Cloud on Equinix Metal and adding direct, private connectivity through Equinix Fabric, our customers can more easily and securely interact with their metrics, logs and dashboards across on-prem, public or private cloud, or at the edge.” • Chris Wright, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Red Hat “Red Hat has championed an industry vision for open hybrid cloud architectures, with a consistent foundation from bare metal to virtualized infrastructures and the cloud, enabling customers to truly build any app anywhere. Collaborating with partners like Equinix to help enable our customers' hybrid cloud success is a key part of that vision, which is why we are pleased to be working with them to deliver Red Hat OpenShift on the Equinix Metal service.” • Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, ESG “With COVID-19 we’ve seen enterprises accelerate their digital transformation plans from years to months. Today’s digital leaders are increasingly gaining a competitive advantage by leveraging infrastructure choices that meet their exact needs and can be deployed globally and interconnected. By augmenting its portfolio of foundational services with high-performance, fully automated compute, the addition of Equinix Metal can help digital businesses extract greater value from Platform Equinix’s rich ecosystems and global interconnection fabric and rapidly deploy the physical infrastructure of their choice.” • Sara Baack, Chief Product Officer, Equinix “Equinix Metal is another important step forward in our product portfolio, enabling enterprises to bring together and interconnect hybrid multicloud infrastructures at global scale on Platform Equinix. With Equinix Metal integrated with Equinix Fabric, infrastructure customers can move at software speed, and tap into the global reach, interconnection value, and unparalleled community of ecosystem partners that digital leaders have come to expect from Equinix.”

Cloud Maker: Diagrams to Code
Cloud Maker is completely transforming the way that businesses and IT professionals design and deploy complex cloud solutions. Cloud Maker is a powerful cloud automation platform that turns the complexity of writing Infrastructure-as-Code and complex DevOps processes into the simplicity of drawing a cloud solution diagram. To deploy complex cloud solutions at scale, engineers and businesses currently have to adopt complex infrastructure-as-code languages and DevOps practices. Whilst these technologies are hugely powerful; there is a significant shortage of skills available that can work with these technologies. This lack of skills is known as the Cloud Skills Gap, and is the single biggest problem facing CIOs globally, inhibiting their ability to digitally transform. Cloud Maker takes an entirely novel approach to Cloud Automation. Currently, most automation technologies focus on code generation and require engineers to be experts in Cloud Infrastructure-as-Code. Cloud Maker, on the other hand, leverages the existing skills of engineers by enabling them to draw a cloud diagram using the Cloud Maker diagramming interface, configure the diagram visually, and then deploy to the cloud without having to write a single line of Infrastructure-as-Code. At its heart, Cloud Maker leverages a proprietary universal compiler that can take a diagram and convert it automatically to the Infrastructure-as-Code language of choice - whether its Azure ARM, AWS Cloud Formation, Google Cloud Manager Templates or even Terraform! Not content with a visual design interface and automatic code generation, Cloud Maker also has machine learning built-in. Trained on millions of infrastructure-as-code templates, the Cloud Maker machine learning model understands how cloud solutions fit together and guide engineers to diagram valid cloud solutions. This AI assistance helps further close the cloud skills gap. Cloud Maker breaks with conventional ideas and processes in its field. Currently, the majority of automation solutions are aimed at engineers that understand how to code, but completely neglect engineers that either don't have the time to wrangle with complicated and often messy Infrastructure-as-Code languages or simply don't have the skills to do so. If it's not a coding language, then the automation platform is a traditional forms-based "control panel" that does not fit seamlessly into the engineers' normal cloud design processes. Instead, Cloud Maker has analysed how engineers work within a cloud solution workflow. What is clear is that every engineer, whether cloud skilled or not, always starts their cloud journey by diagramming the infrastructure they need to build. Traditionally this is in standalone diagramming apps like Microsoft Visio or Lucid Chart. Now with Cloud Maker, engineers can draw their diagrams (with AI assistance), configure their cloud solution visually, and then either export the automatically generated Infrastructure-as-Code or use the in-built deployment engine to deploy to the cloud. This unique AI-assisted cloud diagramming, configuration and deployment approach completely transforms the way that businesses and engineers can design and deploy cloud solutions. Taking a process that takes days and turning it into a seamless workflow completed in minutes. This massively increases the productivity of existing cloud skilled engineers as well as enabling lower-skilled engineers to access cloud technologies that were previously inaccessible. Cloud Maker is benefiting customers across the globe with over 3000 users already signed up and partnerships with Ingram Micro and Microsoft (and in use by over 200 of Microsofts own Cloud Solution Architects). Cloud Maker is enabling businesses globally to digitally transform, democratising the cloud and closing the Cloud Skills gap.

Pulseway RMM - Workflow Auto-Remediation Technology
Pulseway, a world leader in providing IT management solutions, has recently released its brand-new Automation Engine that combines workflow auto-remediation technology with an intuitive, visual workflow editor. This drives a powerful and sophisticated workflow engine that allows users to define auto-remediation paths including unlimited triggers, external scripts and user-defined custom fields. By allowing responses, however complex, to be defined for foreseeable issues, auto-remediation has benefits for both IT staff and end users. For the user, this minimizes disruption as issues are dealt with often before they notices, ultimately improving the service level they are getting from their IT department. For the IT support team, it reduces the time they are reacting to situations and allows them to proactively work on delivering strategic initiatives that can improve the end user experience further. This move from reactive to proactive working improves the working life of the IT team by freeing up time and minimizing those stressful situations that can often occur when trying to fix problems. While many solutions may allow one response to a trigger event, Pulseway allows you to set unlimited, nested triggers and paths for an array of alerts depending upon your needs. You can be as detailed as needed but the real strength is in being able to create different layers of actions to take if the first triggered response does not resolve the issue. In effect this can replicate the manual problem solving process by working through a list of possible solutions to the problem. The Pulseway intuitive, visual workflow editor means it is simple for anyone to start building workflows with its selection of dropdown menus for triggers and possible actions. The potential complexity that is allowed in a workflow also means that the most experienced technician can define workflows to define advanced resolutions thus meaning their expertise can be spread across more customers than if they were resolving issues manually every time. To show how the use of nested triggers can effectively replicate a manual problem solving exercise let’s take a fairly common issue - a high CPU usage notification for an app server. A typical response to this would be to restart the IIS service and delete the notification. Most workflow solutions would allow you to define this step in a trigger, but if that is not the cause, then the problem will reoccur. So in effect this isn’t resolving the problem, just delaying it. With Pulseway workflows you could go on to define additional steps, e.g. you could define another trigger that will fire if the first step has executed but the high CPU usage notification has recurred within an hour (so likely to still be the original problem), that will try to kill the top running process and delete the notification. It is possible to define a further step that should the original notification appear again within the hour, you can run a script that will instruct the load balancers to divert traffic to a failover node and then send an email to an escalation distribution list that the node is malfunctioning. Pulseway automation workflows support 15 standard triggers out of the box and these include common events such as low disk space, high CPU usage, ping error, service stopped and user logged in. When any of these are selected in the editor, the user is then presented with a list of 16 actions including the ability to define conditions, as well as standard actions such as starting and stopping services and running a task. To supplement the already powerful functionality of the workflow engine, you can define the running of external scripts as a trigger action to extend beyond the values within Pulseway. Additionally you can define custom fields and use the output from these scripts to populate the custom fields giving further control. Other actions include being able to run a pre-existing patch policy and sending a personalised email using values from within the workflow. Pulseway workflow automation is a powerful tool that can help stretched IT departments and MSPs trying to maintain services against a backdrop of reduced budgets, the disruption caused by the sudden surge in remote working and potential staff shortages. The inclusion of custom fields, external scripts and unlimited nesting effectively allows a user to customize their RMM solution to fully support their unique environments and operational circumstances. Technicians can view workflow execution history from anywhere on their mobile device using Pulseway’s mobile app and can even run automation tasks. If auto-remediation does not solve a specific problem, they can use their mobile device to resolve the issue wherever they are, whenever it happens. Any actions they take to solve this can be documented and added to a new workflow in the future to prevent it happening again.

ExaGrid
ExaGrid offers the largest backup storage system in the industry, with the best backup performance; its backup speeds are three times faster than traditional dedupe appliances, and the ability to restore data 20 times faster. In addition, ExaGrid’s unique Tiered Backup Storage architecture also offers the most cost-effective solution for long-term retention. ExaGrid provides its customers with a scalable backup storage solution that supports more than 25 backup applications and utilities, protecting an organization’s investment in its existing backup environment while offering flexibility for future plans to change or add backup processes. ExaGrid’s Unique Approach: Tiered Backup Storage Disk-cache Landing Zone (Performance Tier) • ExaGrid writes directly to disk for the fastest backup performance • ExaGrid restores directly from disk for the fastest restores and VM boots Long-term Retention Repository (Retention Tier) • ExaGrid tiers long-term retention to a deduplicated data repository to reduce storage and resulting storage costs Backing up to low-cost disk is fast for backups and restores, however, with longer-term retention, the amount of disk required becomes extremely expensive. To reduce the amount of disk for long-term retention, deduplication appliances reduce the amount of storage and cost, however the deduplication is performed inline on the way to the disk which slows down backups to about one-third the performance of disk. Also, the data is only stored in deduplicated format resulting in extremely slow restores and VM boots as the data has to be reassembled, or rehydrated, for each request. In addition, deduplication appliances are scale-up storage which only adds storage capacity as data grows, resulting in backup windows that continue to grow as data grows, expensive forklift upgrades, and forced product obsolescence. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage writes directly to disk for the fastest backups, and restores directly from disk for the fastest restores and VM boots. ExaGrid then tiers the long-term retention data to a deduplicated data repository to reduce the amount of retention storage and resulting cost. In addition, ExaGrid provides a scale-out architecture where appliances are simply added as data grows. Each appliance includes processor, memory, and network ports, so as data grows, all resources required are available to maintain a fixed-length backup window. This scale-out storage approach eliminates expensive forklift upgrades, and allows for mixing appliances of different sizes and models in the same scale-out system which eliminates product obsolescence while protecting IT investments up front and over time. ExaGrid offers the best of both worlds by offering low-cost disk for the fastest backup and restore performance tiered to a deduplicated data repository for the lowest cost retention storage. The scale-out storage architecture provides a fixed-length backup window and is low cost up front and over time.

Qumulo Unleashes the Power of File Data in the Cloud
Qumulo is the leading file data platform for multi-cloud environments, providing unrivaled freedom, control and analytics for file data at massive scale. Fortune 500 companies, major film studios, and the largest research facilities in the world trust Qumulo to help them innovate with their mission-critical digital files. The Qumulo experience makes file data management simple with a simplified management console in the cloud, a single platform for all workloads, and access to customer success experts on your schedule. Qumulo also meets the needs of Enterprise data security, identity and access management policies, allowing Qumulo to be made available to developers and DevOps teams looking to access the data needed for the applications they are building and deploying into production. The company’s recent launch of Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3 allows enterprise organizations to take full advantage of their valuable and growing file data and create faster business outcomes leveraging the cloud. Users can migrate and store data from thousands of sources to Amazon S3, making it easier for that data to natively interact with AWS services such as Amazon Sagemaker, AWS IoT Greengrass, and more. Supporting Documents https://qumulo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ShiftForAWS_DataSheet.pdf https://qumulo.com/resources/qumulo-leads-customers-to-the-cloud-with-launch-of-qumulo-shift-for-amazon-web-services/ https://qumulo.com/resources/qiy-amazon-shift/ https://qumulo.com/product/cloud-products/

Hyve Managed Hosting
What, exactly, is novel about the process/product or innovation? In the past year, Hyve Managed Hosting has experienced a significant increase in the number of new customers. It has also expanded global operations, creating its own exchange network in South America. How does the product or process break with conventional ideas or processes in its field? One of the major innovations introduced in the past 12 months was Hyve’s Desktop as a Service solution, which powers remote working by offering access to an office-based IT infrastructure. How does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists? How do customers benefit from the product/process or innovation? Hyve’s technology has allowed its customers to cope with the unprecedented demands of remote working prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. It is the UK’s leading independent managed hosting provider and is involved in exciting, innovative projects on a global scale. Introduction to Hyve Hyve Managed Hosting is a fully managed, UK-based, cloud hosting provider with a passion for technology. Utilising a small business ethos, Hyve focuses on providing the highest possible levels of tailor-made support and management, alongside unrivalled performance and reliability. Delivering an attentive, 24/7/365 service, Hyve is constantly empowering its team of experts to provide innovative cloud solutions for its wide range of customers. Founded in 2001 by entrepreneurs Jon Lucas and Jake Madders, Hyve is based in Brighton, UK and has been delivering an extensive range of professional cloud services for nearly twenty years. Hyve is completely independent and self-funded, and the directors have consistently reinvested profits back into the company, enabling the impressive growth that Hyve has seen over recent years. Over the past year, Hyve has seen a 17% increase in new customers and works with household brands such as the NHS, Caffe Nero and Anglia Ruskin University. It isn’t just in the UK that Hyve is attracting business. Its partnership with Equinix, one of the world’s pre-eminent data centre businesses, means its hosting, colocation and managed services are available in every continent, across 35 international locations. This means customers benefit from tier 3+ facilities around the globe that offer best-in-class connectivity, reliability, security and performance. A year of expansion, growth and improved services In the past year, Hyve has significantly expanded its South American presence in Bogota, Colombia, to accommodate one of its large media clients. The client had a need for astronomical bandwidth allowance; so much so that Telefonica, the biggest ISP in the continent, had to upgrade its own network capacity to cater for Hyve’s tremendous output. With the notion of ISP peering seemingly redundant in Colombia, Hyve decided to create its own exchange network for South America. Hyve is now working with vendors across the continent to facilitate interconnection between the Americas. Hyve’s strategic partnership with Equinix means that by the end of 2021, it will be able to offer further global data centre locations including Mumbai and Mexico. As part of a global expansion plan, Equinix is also currently developing 23 of its existing sites, enabling Hyve to provide carrier-neutral data centre spaces across 5 continents for its valued customers. Supporting businesses through Covid-19 With Covid-19 sending everyone out of the office, Hyve has been proudly helping its customers stay online and remain fully operational during the global pandemic, regardless of where they are in the world, or what device they are using. This year also saw the launch of Hyve’s Desktop-as-a-Service product; a remote working solution that has allowed customers to access their business desktops, emails, systems and applications from home, taking the headache out of running IT infrastructure in-house during such turbulent times. Cloud specialists The cloud market is extremely competitive and with the likes of global brands such as Amazon, Google and Rackspace offering a range of services, Hyve has found its own place in the market for success. Hyve was the first UK cloud hosting provider to break conventions and set up a fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud within the UK, as well as having a network capacity that exceeds a terabit to ensure they can meet the varying demands of their customers. The company virtualised and consolidated all of its clients onto a virtualised platform before cloud hosting was initially offered by other providers; this now enables Hyve to deliver high performance, reliability and scalability that outperforms the competition. Cloud offerings Hyve has a wide range of cloud service offerings, enabling customers with any requirements to find a suitable solution with the company. These offerings include the four main types of cloud: managed, private, public, and hybrid. Managed cloud Hyve’s fully managed, multi-tenant VMware cloud builds upon its performance and scaling capabilities by adding security, networking and platform/server management layers. It also offers a range of management services across the whole infrastructure stack, supporting businesses of all sizes. Customers are allocated a personal Account Manager and a team of expert technical engineers to work on their account, who ensure that the solutions Hyve offers are effectively implemented and managed successfully. This prevents customers from getting stuck with automated call centres, and ensures a personal level of engagement at all times. Private cloud Hyve’s private cloud runs on hardware fully dedicated to each individual organisation, and the absence of shared resources ensures that customers have the highest level of security for their data. Customers also receive full control of every aspect of their servers, allowing for total jurisdiction over what and where data is stored. Hyve always offers round-the-clock support available for any customer who needs assistance, for added peace of mind. Public cloud Businesses can reduce the risks of adopting a public cloud service provider, such as AWS, Azure or Google, by working with Hyve to create a realistic deployment plan and to add the vital layer of continuous management that reassures customers that their data is in safe hands. Like with the private cloud offering, customers using Hyve’s public cloud services receive the same essential support whenever and however required. Unlike other public cloud offerings, Hyve’s customers have to go through an extensive vetting, checking and due diligence process before they can access the network, giving businesses complete cybersecurity reassurance. Hybrid cloud Hyve’s hybrid cloud offering is a flexible cloud hosting solution that can utilise a combination of on-premise, private cloud and managed cloud services that all work in tandem. Using only the fastest and most robust hardware available, this approach provides businesses with the security and control of a private cloud, and the flexibility and cost savings presented by the public cloud. Hyve is also able to offer industry-leading SLAs whilst making every aspect of the customer’s platform faster. Also, any legacy applications or localised data on-premises becomes part of the overall platform, allowing for optimum efficiency. Going the extra mile Unlike many other hosts, Hyve doesn’t pack shared servers with thousands of domains. Instead, Hyve ensures that each server has plenty of resources available for the number of domains hosted, meaning fewer domains per server and less risk of bottlenecks. All of Hyve’s cloud services are built on HPE BladeSystems and HPE 3PAR tiered storage arrays, and running on VMware allows Hyve to offer High Availability on all virtual machines as standard, with a 99.999% SLA. All solutions are fully managed by Hyve and can be set up to run across multiple data centres for disaster recovery. Hyve engineers become an extension of customers’ businesses. They are involved right up to the application layer, including performance tuning, database management and even source code support. Hyve’s ethos is built on going the extra mile.

iLand
iland is a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS). Industry analysts recognize iland as a leader in disaster recovery. The award-winning iland Secure Cloud Console natively combines deep-layered security, predictive analytics, and compliance to deliver unmatched visibility and ease of management for all of iland’s cloud services. With headquarters in Houston, Texas, London, UK, and Sydney, Australia, iland delivers cloud services from its cloud regions throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Fungible DPU
Fungible DPU is a new class of microprocessor powering next generation data center infrastructure. Optimized for data interchange and data-centric computations, the Fungible DPU is designed to improve the performance, economics, reliability, and security of data centers built on scale-out principles, and to do so at scales from a few racks to many thousands of racks, all within a single building. Recognized as the third socket in data centers alongside the CPU and GPU, the Fungible DPU is in prime position to power next generation compute, network, storage, security and analytics platforms. The Fungible DPU delivers game-changing performance, footprint and cost efficiencies for next generation, scale-out networking, storage, security and analytics platforms. Fungible is the category leader for high performance specialized silicon for storage servers. All the innovations out there are software innovations (running on x86 servers) whereas we have both the software and hardware innovation. One of the key network transformation technologies enabled by the Fungible DPU is TrueFabric. TrueFabric is an open standards based network technology that enables the disaggregation of compute and storage resources at all scales. TrueFabric provides a set of eight essential properties. These are scalability across many orders of magnitude, full any-to-any cross-sectional bandwidth, low predictable latency, fairness, congestion avoidance, fault tolerance, end-to-end software defined security, and the use of open standards to deliver excellent economics. No existing technology provides all these properties in a single implementation. TrueFabric therefore opens the door to a single universal data center network that can be used for all networking tasks within a data center. This maximizes the value of the network and enables a truly general and powerful computing infrastructure. Another aspect that sets the Fungible DPU apart is it has both performance and flexibility. This is due to a clean slate approach in designing the Fungible DPU. Unlike Smart NICs (which may have performance) which are limited flexibility in the datapath. The Fungible DPU comprises two core innovations that are tightly interwoven: First is a programmable data-path engine that executes data-centric computations at extremely high speeds, while providing flexibility comparable to general-purpose CPUs. The engine is programmed in C using industry standard tool chains and is designed to execute many data-path computations concurrently. This unique innovation enables the Fungible DPU to be fully customized to address the most stringent high-performance requirements visible today. Second is a new network engine that implements the endpoint of a high-performance TrueFabric that provides deterministic low latency, full cross-section bandwidth, congestion and error control, and high security at any scale (from 100s to 100,000s of nodes). The TrueFabric protocol is fully standards compliant and interoperable with TCP/IP over Ethernet, ensuring that the data center leaf-spine network can be built with standard Ethernet switches and standard electro-optics and fiber infrastructure. network can be built with standard Ethernet switches and standard electro-optics and fiber infrastructure. Fungible also provides a full suite of software that enables the Fungible DPU and the products it powers to be used “out of the box”. This includes data-path stacks, host drivers and agents for x86, and a set of centralized cluster services that provides management, control and visibility of a large number of Fungible DPU-enabled products. Fungible DPU Enables End-to-End Storage Benefits Improved performance Fewer x86 cycles consumed with storage virtualization improved tail latency with True Fabric Enables diskless servers (remote boot) & bare metal services End-to-end compression to save network bandwidth End-to-end encryption Pool local and remote drives

SaltDNA
SaltDNA are a multi-award-winning cybersecurity company based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that builds secure enterprise mobile communications solutions. SaltDNA offers ‘Peace of Mind’ for Organisations who value their privacy, by giving them complete control and secure communications, to protect their trusted relationships and stay safe. SaltDNA was formed in 2013 by a group of tech entrepreneurs with a shared history in enterprise security, telecoms, network optimisation and app development. As a company SaltDNA has shown extremely high levels of growth. 2019 was a record-breaking year for SaltDNA expanding their partner programme and gathering customers across 6 continents. SaltDNA were one of the UK’s Most Disruptive Companies by D/SRUPTION and One of Europe’s best in first ever ‘Ones to Watch’ list by the European Business Awards. SaltDNA is the first company to provide a solution for encrypted communications between devices with centralised control for the enterprise. SaltDNA’s product provides secure voice, messaging, conference calling, broadcasting and image or file transfers for busy executives. Its customers include global law firms, financial institutions, defence and security clients, oil and gas companies and large enterprises. Much of the world first became aware of the reality of information interception a number of years ago with the Edward Snowden revelations on the extent of US government eavesdropping; and the News of the World phone hacking scandal in the UK where it was found that members of News Group International routinely hacked into people's private conversations. Since then, reports of phone hacking and communications interception are increasingly more frequent, among other hacking news, the Mirror Group settled 21 claims of phone hacking. According to insurance giant Lloyd's, companies are losing as much as $400 billion to hackers every year, with smartphone being a key target. Mobile phones are a hotspot for hackers to intercept important information about your work and personal life. For more than 70% of US adults, smartphones are the preferred device for accessing the Internet (Gallup, 2014; company information is routinely communicated on smartphones. With the huge number of communication options on a smartphone the attack surface for hacking and for the interception of strategic information is large and growing. What's fueling increased mobile communications intercept is technology. The means to hack a phone, and to intercept information, is readily available to anyone. IMSI catchers, devices for intercepting and eavesdropping on mobile phones are portable, affordable and available for anyone to purchase on eBay, Alibaba and many other websites. Just search for "buy an IMSI catcher". SaltDNA’s rock-solid encryption framework together with its focus on mobile usability, deployment flexibility, and comprehensive control functions make it effortless to strengthen and reinforce our client’s security posture. SaltDNA’s Growth SaltDNA had an extremely successful 2019 being awarded highly commended Technology Company of the Year’ and ‘Fast Growth Business of the Year’ at the AIB Business Eye Awards. SaltDNA’s success was evident throughout 2019 being shortlisted for four awards at the ‘Mobile Industry Awards 2019’, four awards at the ‘Computing Digital Technology Awards 2019’ and another four shortlisted awards at the European IT Excellence Awards 2019. In 2020, SaltDNA were shortlisted for 3 awards in the Digital DNA awards and won the 'Digital Transformation Award' category in the Think Global Awards. In 2019 SaltDNA were also accepted onto Tech Nation’s first ever Cyber cohort. This six month cohort has been launched to assist ambitious UK cyber companies during the scaling process of their company. Furthermore, SaltDNA were selected in the third round of cybersecurity companies joining the LORCA cohort. LORCA set out to support the most promising cybersecurity innovators in scaling and growing solutions to meet industry’s biggest challenges, while building the UK’s international cybersecurity profile. 2019 was a record breaking year for SaltDNA, generating our highest ever annual revenue, and developing a pipeline to provide the company to better it again in 2020. SaltDNA has expanded very quickly in a short space of time. Our go to market strategy is to sell our solution through specialised security providers. SaltDNA only sells through selected partners and never directly to the end customer. Our Partner Agreement has been designed to ensure that both the partners and customers benefit by choosing SaltDNA. Our expansion plans also rely on SaltDNA staying ahead of competitors such as KoolSpan, Signal, Silent Circle and TigerText. SaltDNA has many advantages/differentiators over competitors, both technically and functionally. The majority of SaltDNA’s competitors operate in the consumer market, offering secure communications for consumer use. These organisations believe that encryption alone is sufficient for security, but at SaltDNA we understand that whilst encryption is a fundamental aspect of communications, until encryption is multiplied by the highest level of control, a communications system will be insecure. SaltDNA's high security system provides the same convenient user experience as consumer apps but in a safe and protected manner, enabling the customer to have full, centralised control of the system at all times. SaltDNA Enterprise is the best armour organisations have to protect trade secrets and other sensitive, strategic and proprietary information when communicating on mobile devices. It is a software solution that is more than a secure mobile app: it has a web-based management platform for dynamic provisioning of secure mobile voice and text communications. SaltDNA also only deal with enterprises and official organisations, and have built their features around this market. The SaltDNA secure communications system allows professionals to carry out one-to-one and conference calls, one-to-one and group messages, file/image transfer and secure message broadcast capabilities. A key differentiator that SaltDNA has over competitors is that SaltDNA provides organisations to control who speaks to who within their company. SaltDNA provides a secure management system to ensure companies have complete control over all employees contact lists and communications, making it easier to manage communications, and facilitating the operation of closed user groups. SaltDNA also provides organisations with the ability to own their secure communications platform, by provisioning an on-premise deployment, or by developing a full white labelled version of the system, or both if they wish. SaltDNA as many other unique features such as the ability to restrict users from taking screenshots, the ability to prevent users having the capabilities to download documents & images and the ability for users to purge messages from their device & all recipients devices too - a function that can be done manually, or have a timer setting. The feature list for SaltDNA is improving constantly, with SaltDNA offering many features that are exclusive to the market such as, secure broadcasting, message/call content archival, closed user groups, file/image transfer, burn functionality (message can be removed from both devices (sender and receiver) by either party regardless of where it originated), and 24/7 support. SaltDNA have a small team but one that is highly skilled with a very good mix of talented youth and experienced mentors. As a company we ensure that every employee has a small share of ownership of the company. We have found that this has facilitated a real team ethos and provides staff with the motivation to make SaltDNA a success. Our team is filled with drive and determination to grow the company and become a top global Cybersecurity firm. “After careful review of all available solutions it is clear that SaltDNA is the only solution which takes the need for management, compliance and encryption seriously. The others are just dressed up consumer apps.” Joe Hancock, Head of Cyber Security, Mishcon de Reya