Schneider Electric’s remote monitoring software, EcoStruxure™ IT Expert, delivers IT resilience and uptime for Birmingham Women and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust
Founded in 2017 as a merger between two existing hospitals, the Birmingham Women and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist provider of healthcare services for more than 140,000 patients. The Trust’s operations are supported by an extensive IT infrastructure system, whose functions were consolidated and integrated across both of its hospital campuses. They include two on-premise edge data centres, a growing number of distributed network closets and more than 100 UPS systems that safeguard critical equipment and patient data against loss in the event of a power outage.

Continuous uptime is the top priority for the Trust’s IT department to enable always-on patient-management and clinical applications. To ensure continuous operation in the event of a failure, the Trust maintains a detailed disaster recovery (DR) plan, which sees its data centres act as fail-over resources to one another. A critical element of the DR plan is the extensive network of UPS systems, deployed across a number of edge computing locations, which provide instantaneous battery backup to vital equipment in the event of a temporary power loss. It is essential that these batteries are in good working condition should they ever be called upon in the event of a sudden power interruption, and so they are to provide supervising personnel with adequate warning of any performance degradation.

Traditionally, manual inspections were required to check the health and status of its backup power and IT equipment. However, given the distributed nature of their infrastructure, the Trust had begun to experience longer intervals between inspections, increasing both the risk of battery malfunctions and of downtime to its IT applications. Realising that it needed to improve the resilience of its IT and UPSs, the Trust engaged the support of Advanced Power Technology (APT), a specialist provider of energy efficient power and cooling systems and Elite Partner, Schneider Electric.

Increasing resilience

In collaboration with Advanced Power Technology (APT), Schneider Electric deployed its EcoStruxure IT™ Expert software at the Birmingham Women and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. The open, vendor-agnostic and interoperable data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) platform provided the Trust with a dedicated remote monitoring solution, offering real-time data-driven decision-making, increased resiliency and uptime for its distributed IT and critical backup power systems.

Use of EcoStruxure IT Expert software replaced the Trust’s manual-inspection regime for more than 100 of its uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), which were distributed throughout the hospital to safeguard critical equipment and patient data with a continuous centrally monitored cloud-based system. This transformed the resilience and reliability of all equipment by providing timely warning of issues such as the impending end of life of any battery so that its replacement could be arranged in good time without having to engage in time consuming and sporadic manual inspections.

Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT Expert software helps monitor and manage the UPSs’, battery systems and edge IT infrastructure. Its cloud-based architecture allows the Trust to connect its data centres, distributed IT and backup power systems, and monitor them from a central console. Further, it enables status updates and alarms to be routed to any remote device, providing real-time visibility and preventing downtime.

Data-driven decision making

EcoStruxure IT Expert is an advanced remote monitoring tool providing wherever-you-go visibility, alarms, preventive management capabilities, and data-driven recommendations to mitigate security and failure risks and drive efficiency. It is part of Schneider Electric’s IoT-enabled EcoStruxure architecture.

Additional capabilities within EcoStruxure IT Expert also allow the Trust to monitor environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity, which can affect the performance of its IT and network infrastructures. In these environments, cooling efficiency is essential and network closets can suffer from dust and poor ventilation. Here EcoStruxure IT Expert enables the IT department, in collaboration with estates management, to provide detailed information to key stakeholders. This will help drive investments that will not only maximise uptime, but enable the Trust to manage its hardware assets in a more sustainable and efficient way.

Customer results

“The annual inspections traditionally provided assurance that the UPS systems were sufficient to meet the needs of emergency operations,” said John Thompson, managing director of APT. “Unfortunately, when called upon in the moment of need, the Trust found this approach to be lacking. The installation of EcoStruxure IT Expert means the team now has continuous 24x7x365 assurance of the UPS’s operational status, as well as the runtime available to support its critical loads.”

“Through EcoStruxure IT, we’ve got a great tool from a leading vendor, which gives us complete peace of mind,” said Jas Purewall, ICT Infrastructure Manager, Birmingham Women and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. “We can assess the impact of additional loads and use data from the application to decide whether to scale the UPSs up or down, right-size them, or optimise the system for efficient operations.”

“For healthcare professionals, the availability of power infrastructure and mission-critical systems is a non-negotiable,” said Marc Garner, VP, Secure Power Division, Schneider Electric UK&I. “Our EcoStruxure software offers the Birmingham Women and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust greater visibility, increased resilience and will help mitigate downtime across its distributed edge environments.”

Migration of Finance Applications to Google Cloud
What exactly is novel about the product / process / innovation? Cloud transformation project where the critical eFinance applications of an international client were migrated from an on-premises data centre to Google Cloud Platform. It was a unique project due to the complex and heterogeneous source environments and a equally complex target design.

The target landscape involved a mix of Google Cloud Platform services and Google’s Regional Extension Bare Metal Service (BMS) offering to address compliance or oracle licensing, BMS was still maturing and did not offer many of the modern cloud service and integrations. Additionally, the use of Oracle Virtual Machine on BMS was another key differentiator and added to overall complexity

How does the process / product break with the conventional ideas /process in its field?

Conventional process of migration is to use available tools in the market / from the cloud provider. However, in this case we used multiple approaches to perform the migration from the heterogenous source (Oracle Cloud, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database Appliances & VM Ware) to Google Cloud platform and Oracle Virtualised environment.

Backup solution also was new, where we used Google’s Actifio backup for both GCP and BMS environment. In addition to this we used Oracle VM backup to perform VM level backups to address the shortfalls of Actifio backup Solution.

DR solution of the BMS platform was a completely unique solution designed with a blend of multiple technology components.

How does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exist?

It was a completely new design and gone through multiple iterations of design discussions and decisions to finally address all the requirements.

BMS hosted servers had a requirement to integrate with public hosted services – BMS did not offer any native integration with GCP internet gateway services. In collaboration with Cloud vendor a bespoke solution – NATVM was designed to address this technology restraint

Migration approaches used were also unique due to the nature of source and target platforms.

How do customers benefit from the product / process or innovation?

Customer benefitted from being able to migrate the workloads within the stipulated time as per their data center exit schedule. Reduction in technical debts for the applications where we did a redeployment with OS / DB / App upgrades. Customer also benefitted from cost saving in terms of change in platform and consumption model. Alignment to the overall organization cloud strategy also adds into the benefits.

NinjaOne - Unified IT Management Platform
Tangible outcomes of the project Over the past five months, Focus IT Managed Services have had a 25% increase of the amount of endpoints, growing from approximately 1600 to 2000, they have added 10 new customers and welcomed three new technicians. Since switching to NinjaOne, they’ve had more incoming customers than ever before. The Driving Force Behind the Project At the start of this year, Focus IT Managed Services were looking for a tool that could help automate a lot more of their processes and thereby remove manual work that slows down both their end users as well as their own technical staff. The project was set up to find and implement a solution that would be easy to use, create more time to add value to their business and would allow them to grow while keeping the high level of service to their customers. The solution they had in place was an RMM which used its own scripting language which would require substantial time of the staff to learn. So the solution they were looking to implement had to be easy to use and easy to learn for new hires. Furthermore, the speed of the current platform was slowing down as they grew their business and added more endpoints to manage. Thirdly, Focus at the time were using an on-premise solution which required them to spend time themselves to manage the infrastructure and also the solution they had in place was lacking options for alerting staff that was out of hours or not on the helpdesk itself. Focus IT Managed Services is an MSP that specialises in security and therefore needs a solution that helps keeping their customers secure and makes it easy to ensure their client’s machines are running the latest and safest versions of the software available and have their security software installed. Driving Innovation and Compliance The team at Focus chose to implement NinjaOne’s unified IT Management platform because the automation in the tool was simple to learn and yet well-equipped to free the time of the technical staff at Focus to work on strategic projects by decreasing the ticket volume. Tasks that took hours a week like patch management and simple repetitive tasks were easy to script and run reliably. At the moment the team at Focus, for example, doesn’t spend time on freeing disk space. The automation runs multiple scripts as soon as the ‘free disk space’ drops below a specified parameter. This automatically creates a ticket, documenting the task, and next it auto-remediates the issue by running the scripts for freeing disk space. After they have run, it checks if the problem is solved and closes the ticket when this has been the case. The team at Focus has since the completion of the project grown to a total of 15 people, adding three new technicians in the last five months. The growth has never been this fast and the associate director ascribes the short learning curve of NinjaOne to be a growth lever for the company. In addition, the team was also very pleased to find out that NinjaOne doesn’t charge anything for onboarding, training or implementation. Unlike their previous solutions, NinjaOne is a 100% cloud based solution. And because of that there is little need for the technicians at Focus to spend time on keeping their IT management tool well managed and up-to-date. This time is now spent on their client’s needs. The Patch Management Engine in NinjaOne has proven to be very reliable and has enabled Focus to increase their patch compliance now to 99,5%. Which is a statistic they are proud to be able to share as a security focused MSP. The team no longer has to spend hours to check whether machines have been patched successfully. The monitoring tool does the heavy lifting here and also enabled the team to report on things they couldn’t easily report on before. For example showing the devices that have bitlocker disabled for a client is now a matter of seconds and is very easy to do. This has transformed from something that was a far more complex and manual task for team previously. At Focus, this project has caused the team to change the way they work in more than one way. Not only is the ticket volume much lower, also the flexibility the team gained from having access to their tool on mobile devices made a positive impact on their workflow. Because of the NinjaOne App, technicians now can receive notifications on their phone and tablets when something happens and can resolve issues even when they are not at the help desk. The Challenges The project of implementing an IT management tool that is going to touch so many sides of the business for an MSP is one that you don’t undertake without a good reason and before you have assessed all the possible risks and challenges. The team at Focus shares that it's always going to be a question of: "Is it going to be painful to implement?" The team at Focus first set up a trial environment of the NinjaOne platform and tested whether the platform was as reliable as promised. During the trial the product basically sold itself and the team at Focus reported they were pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness of the account management team as well the support team at NinjaOne. The team shared: “In terms of our implementation of it, we didn't find it difficult to implement it at all. In about three weeks we were completely done and had rolled out the system to all our customers.”

Hyper Intelligent Automation Implementation by Brillio led to significant overall cost savings and cost optimization with 500+ FTEs saved
About Client: The client is an American-based Multi-National Corporation providing leading financial technology services, globally. They were looking to drive automation throughout their organisation to ensure that tasks such as document processing, loan processing, cheque data, dispute/fraud documentation and audit documentation which would aid in the reduction of FTEs and ultimately, a reduction in their overall operating cost. Brillio partnered with the client in their transformation journey to digitalize their front and back-office tasks by co-strategizing workshops to assess and discover automation opportunities. Brillio proposed a roadmap to automate 170+ use cases helping client in reducing their headcount to the tune of 500+ resources. However, we have initially implemented 4 uses cases and we plan to implement a further of 50 use cases by Q4 of 2022. Similarly, rest of the use cases will be implemented every quarter, in phases. The detailed description of one such use cases is as follows: Challenges: High cost of resources • Mundane manual effort • Repetitive tasks • Time consuming processes • Lack of automation Example- Often a merchant would return a cheque back to the customer which needs to be scanned and uploaded to the remittance manager application by the Customer Data Center team, before the customer receives it. When returning cheques back to customers, merchants must attach a digitally scanned letter/document stating the reason for such a return. However, these must be validated, and corresponding case would be updated in CRM-PeopleSoft. This cumbersome process needs an innovative solution to reduce manual effort and prolonged time for such validation and updating. Solution for use case: Brillio’s solution ensured that this problem was immediately and effectively solved through the automation of cheque data extraction and processing by combining RPA Technology (for workflow automation), AI/ML Model and Deep Learning models for: • Data pre-processing • Entity extraction (to extract meta data from doc) • Build a reason rejection model (to build a semantic model to identify reason for cheque rejection). Through this, the data extraction model from handwritten/digital document was made easy and further processing of data on BU applications was performed via RPA Bots, thereby ensuring reduction in time and mundane manual effort by cutting down on repetitive tasks. Similarly, all 170+ use cases were identified, and solutions were developed to automate the same and implement them. POC and Recommendation- Before implementation of use cases, Brillio provided a POC with open source and commercial tools to showcase capability around document extraction/OCR (to maintain accuracy for extracted document) and NLP along with an assessment on scalability of the client with regards to document processing, loan processing, cheque data, dispute/fraud documentation and audit documentation and recommended a change from RPA- BluePrism to UI Path (e.g., pdf splitter functionality ais better in UI Path and allows easy integration with the AI/ML model) to accommodate all the use cases identified. Implementation phases of the use cases: • Initial Process Assessment (IPA)- UI path for AI/ML, IBM Watson, Azure cognitive services along with open source and NLU. • Detailed Process Analysis (DPA). • Automation and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). • Deployment - making this model available as a service for RPA to consume for implementing an end-to-end automation without any manual intervention. • Hypercare, Sign-off and Transition. • Warranty Support, FTE Release and Final Sign-off. Risks faced: Since every project is prevalent in a dynamic environment, it is bound to have certain risks. Brillio ensured that these were identified at an early stage and established mitigation strategies to ensure smooth automation transformation for the client. • Financial risks - cost overruns and requirement of further tools, licenses or change in environment scale and size. • Operational risks – For example, real-time dynamic input data (in case there is a deviation from the trained data while developing the AI/ML model). • Technical risks - Adaptability to changing system entities during RPA workflows development and deployment which could also result in sensitive data being processed by BOTs. • Execution risks - Delays in establishment of connectivity/permissions for accessing environments from our network. Benefits and impact: • 20-25% reduction in Implementation Costs • 0 or no manual errors and reduction in time delays due to it • Overall cost savings and cost optimization with 500+ FTEs saved

Virgin Media O2 selects Arista Networks for largest innovation of core UK telecommunications network to support next generation service delivery strategy
As part of an ongoing project to modernise its UK telecommunication network, Virgin Media O2 has undertaken a major project to replace its legacy core IP network with a more flexible and largely cloud driven alternative. To meet its need for performance, reliability and support for its software defined future, Virgin Media O2 turned to Arista’s Cognitive Cloud Networking technology to help deliver the resiliency, performance and open approach that would support next generation service delivery including the move to DevOps and successful delivery of 5G

Delivering unparalleled digital employee experience at a European Multinational Mining Company
What happens when you empower people? What happens when you become obsessively customer centric? (Creating customer delight in every interaction) At HCL we confronted these questions and pushed the envelope as a technology partner to a European mining company in solving their unique digital challenges. About the client: The client is a global multinational mining company headquartered in London. It is among world's largest producer of platinum, as well as being a major producer of diamonds, copper, nickel, iron ore and metallurgical and thermal coal. The engagement: HCL is providing customer end-to-end Infrastructure, End User Computing (EUC), and Cloud services. The strategic partnership between the two companies has been performing, constantly evolving and is ahead of the industry in maturity (more mature than peers in the mining and heavy manufacturing industry). HCL and the customer have made significant progress towards the Digital Workplace of the Future. Key snapshot below: o HCL scope covers EUC support, EUX remodeling strategy and target operating model. o Standard operational metrics are matured and reported through self service and manual dashboards. o Digital literacy is maturing for office workers o User personas have been defined and service personalization has been implemented for end user services based on user roles and access privileges o ITSM processes and service catalogue are standardized and matured o Global standardized platforms have been deployed for UC, Collaboration, Self-service, and automation of ITSM o Workstream collaboration, unified communication and knowledge management capabilities and technologies are enabled through global platforms such as cloud office suite o HCL is leading continuous service improvement through technology automation and introduction of best practices from its global experience Key Technology Priorities: • Establishing regional service desk with English as operating language for providing support to UK & Ireland and rest of Europe o Scope of service operations to cover client’s permanent employees, contractors, vendors, and Remote users/ mobile users o Channels of communication to be Web, Phone, Chat, and E-mail o Service deck to operate 8x5 local business hours London and UK and stand by support for off business hours • A three-tiered service desk to facilitate best end-user satisfaction and better resolution o Service Desk operation o GAM (Global Account Management) o Remote Desktop Operations • Tools investment o ITSM and Chat tools o Self-service Password re-set tools o All other infrastructure tools like access to Active Directory, SCCM, Office 365 etc. to enable support o For reporting – MyXnalytics and ITSM reporting functions o Telecom infrastructure – IP phones, DID procurements, Headsets, Laptops, Network, IVR, ACD • Communication methodology o Communication to business on any changes in the service desk operations o Communication to business on any changes in the service desk communication channels • Knowledge transfer o Transition of knowledge from India desk to UK desk o Sign off on the updated run book as per new scope HCL Solutions: WorkBlaze is HCL’s digital end user experience monitoring tool equipped with AIOps, real-time workplace analytics to spot trends and correlate, remediate issue before they are widespread, and gather contextual user feedback to enhance employee experience and productivity. It provides a unique User Experience index (UEI) across devices, applications, and network to bring proactiveness in the ecosystem and reduce the IT-user gap. Embracing the COVID challenge: With the advent of 2020 businesses hurriedly went into a complete remote work model in a matter of weeks. The pandemic drastically changed the ways of working. HCL helped the customer solidify their digital workplace strategy and brought out many initiatives to support business continuity of the customer while safeguarding the workforce. Proactive monitoring and auto ticketing - Case in point was on site support teams, who were needed to be physically present to support end-user issues and requests. WorkBlaze facilitated ‘Auto Tickets’ creation for on-site support groups based on device alerts from WorkBlaze. This program was rolled out for 100+ VVIP user devices as this user group needed personalized support. Threshold of each device alert was defined, and auto tickets were routed to location based SFO. These personalized services helped bridge the gap during locked down and onsite teams were also utilized efficiently. Device information display – During lockdown end user reach outs to remote support teams increased 3 to 5-fold. Majority of these queries were around mandatory software like VPN or admin installations etc. The remote users however struggled to share mandate information like IP address or device names with remote support teams. This activity was taking up to 10 minutes. WorkBlaze solved the problem by displaying mandate information on desktops so users could share the information within seconds. Performance and device experience – Unnecessary applications at the Start Up menu were leading to extended device logon duration and thus were resulting in poor experience. WorkBlaze auto heal action automatically selected and disabled those applications which should not be enabled at Start Up menu. Service desk empowerment – WorkBlaze integration to ServiceNow led to tremendous improvement in service desk performance due to WorkBlaze remote heal features. For any impacted configuration item information from WorkBlaze was pulled including all device health information which was then displayed to support agents. The information also included recommended resolutions/fixes. All this helped in isolating issues/ stage containment of issues i.e. resolving issues at L1 stage which would have otherwise gone to L2/L3 stages. The end results were fewer service desk tickets creation, faster resolution, and lower cost of solving issues. End User feedbacks – Elaborate and comprehensive campaigns were designed in WorkBlaze to capture end-user feedbacks. Execution of these feedback gathering campaigns helped uncover some key operational issues. • Battery health issue: Battery health issues were spotted using WorkBlaze feedback campaigns. The increasing trends alarmed WorkBlaze monitoring about underlying issues. This was also in correlation with our proactive batter monitoring remote actions. WorkBlaze team further investigated devices under warranty, and these were later picked with vendor for replacement. • Printer issue: End user feedback trends also alarmed monitoring team about printer issues which were not visible among Incidents. The team proactively picked this trend for investigation and underlying global printer issue was identified. Compliance posture - Local Admin identities were created on End users' devices which earlier were not even targeted by GPO due to conflicting policies, WorkBlaze remote action automatically disable all local identities from customer devices, this remote action has resulted in improvement on your Security Compliance trend. Break away from the pack: Tailored initiatives/projects Live Chat - HCL’s end-to-end AI enabled cognitive virtual assistance solution- Lucy. A unified one stop shop for all end-user queries (IT, Travel, HR, procurement, finance, & all others) providing a single source of truth. It is made available on web and both desktop and mobile versions of MSTeams for customer employees. It mimics human interactions, learns, and adapts to user needs through smart conversations by leveraging enterprise-grade Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). As it understands users’ profiles, personas, job roles etc., it provides tailored & dynamic responses, thus becoming a single point of contacts for end users. An important note here is that any standard self-service bot (A ‘Tell Bot’) is trained on Frequently Asked Questions and provides Standard Operating Procedure. The onus remains on users to understand and follow the steps to complete a task. On the other hand, our solution’s integration with various applications and its natural language processing abilities provides it sense and act abilities (A ‘Do Bot’). Take an example when Lucy encounters users’ queries like why their computer is slow. Lucy is integrated with HCL’s end user experience monitoring solution WorkBlaze. It interacts with WorkBlaze, analyses user computer performance data and checks user experience score, diagnoses the problem and basis user persona & job role, provides recommended actions. Once user confirms, Lucy performs these actions to resolve issues. Lucy has been trained for over 5 years on 500+ IT and non-IT use cases, so it works as an out of the box solution which can be implemented very quickly. Additionally, in some specific cases where Lucy is unable to assist the end user, it offers the option to the user to instantly transfer the chat to a Service Desk agent or create a ticket in Service Now. IAutomate – It helps automate end user IT Operations like User on-boarding, off-boarding account modifications, mailing list creation and updates etc. In customer environment, Service Requests, Scheduled Tasks, adhoc Bulk modification or creation requests and Incidents are handled via IAutomate. The tool automatically executes the Runbook based on the Service Request received and resolves ticket post notifying end user. In case of failure ticket is transferred to Service Desk queue for further checks. The system is ‘continuously learning’ and customizable as per requirements. VVIP Red Button/ Dedicated Executive Support – There was a need for a dedicated support for top customer executives, the need got intensified during the pandemic driven remote work as employees moved away from office. The app is deployed on Microsoft Teams connecting VVIPs to dedicated Support immediately with a single click along with option of scheduling a call back at desired time. This app is also integrated with ServiceNow to create ticket for dedicated VVIP Support Group. A highly skilled workforce capable of handling all types of end user issues is tasked to handle VVIPs in UK, through emergency support app in Power Apps Virtual Agent. Other Initiatives: • Reduced software crashes: Compattlerunner.exe was used in windows telemetry. This started crashing since windows’ 19 upgrade. This was fixed using patch provided by Microsoft after logging ticket. Post this software stability score improved by 52% • BoxSync to OneDrive migration: performance of existing solution was compared to new solution to capture app performance and other issues. Memory usages was seen increasing in devices using OneDrive post migration from BoxSync. • Disabled Skype addon and conversation history: Skype Addons degrade Outlook performance, hence WorkBlaze auto heal solution disabled all Skype addons automatically from end user devices. • AOVPN and Pulse VPN comparison: DEX scores for both solutions were compared to ascertain impact of VPN on overall user experience. AO VPN performance was dropping while Pulse VPN was seen improving Measuring Outcomes To measure the value in terms of End User Experience, new KPI’s designed and onboarded, End User experience divided into four value drivers, Empowerment, Simplicity, Confidence and Satisfaction. Comprehensive approach to user experience transformation: 1. Empowerment – Educating users with cutting edge knowledge programs and equipping them with tools to become more self-reliant 2. Simplicity – Providing intuitive and user-friendly services which are easy to engage with and use 3. Trust/confidence – Enhancing users’ confidence through assured and timely resolution of issues/ queries/ requests 4. Satisfaction – Constantly meeting users’ expectations of service quality and usefulness New KPI’s were designed to capture end users' sentiments, tool usage and ticket trends to understand value drivers designed. For example, usage of Self-Service Portal, Shift Left Trends, Proactive Ticketing, Auto heal Results, MTTR and Hop count reduction. These KPI’s are designed to quantify the value driven out of several initiatives undertaken to Empower End Users. Impact Contractual SLAs for HCL services are constantly reported as green and trending positive and the governance is observed to be effective by the client IAutomate reduced turnaround time from 8 hours to less than 10 minutes. 75% of GAM Tasks automated, while EUC Incident closure for Alert tickets is approx. 70% Inc. Closure – 70% Proactive remote heal led to continuous improvement in DEX score taking it above par with industry standards. Unique attributes of the engagement 1. Going above and beyond client needs/asks to create industry beating results even during pandemic 2. Solving together – End suer feedbacks through WorkBlaze surveys to unearth issues 3. Taking charge of customer success – VVIP red button enablement 4. Obsessive customer centricity – Live assistance, Experience driven KPIs, XLAs

NinjaOne Unified IT Management Platform
Tangible outcomes of the project Over the past five months, Focus IT Managed Services have had a 25% increase of the amount of endpoints, growing from approximately 1600 to 2000, they have added 10 new customers and welcomed three new technicians. Since switching to NinjaOne, they’ve had more incoming customers than ever before. The Driving Force Behind the Project At the start of this year, Focus IT Managed Services were looking for a tool that could help automate a lot more of their processes and thereby remove manual work that slows down both their end users as well as their own technical staff. The project was set up to find and implement a solution that would be easy to use, create more time to add value to their business and would allow them to grow while keeping the high level of service to their customers. The solution they had in place was an RMM which used its own scripting language which would require substantial time of the staff to learn. So the solution they were looking to implement had to be easy to use and easy to learn for new hires. Furthermore, the speed of the current platform was slowing down as they grew their business and added more endpoints to manage. Thirdly, Focus at the time were using an on-premise solution which required them to spend time themselves to manage the infrastructure and also the solution they had in place was lacking options for alerting staff that was out of hours or not on the helpdesk itself. Focus IT Managed Services is an MSP that specialises in security and therefore needs a solution that helps keeping their customers secure and makes it easy to ensure their client’s machines are running the latest and safest versions of the software available and have their security software installed. Driving Innovation and Compliance The team at Focus chose to implement NinjaOne’s unified IT Management platform because the automation in the tool was simple to learn and yet well-equipped to free the time of the technical staff at Focus to work on strategic projects by decreasing the ticket volume. Tasks that took hours a week like patch management and simple repetitive tasks were easy to script and run reliably. At the moment the team at Focus, for example, doesn’t spend time on freeing disk space. The automation runs multiple scripts as soon as the ‘free disk space’ drops below a specified parameter. This automatically creates a ticket, documenting the task, and next it auto-remediates the issue by running the scripts for freeing disk space. After they have run, it checks if the problem is solved and closes the ticket when this has been the case. The team at Focus has since the completion of the project grown to a total of 15 people, adding three new technicians in the last five months. The growth has never been this fast and the associate director ascribes the short learning curve of NinjaOne to be a growth lever for the company. In addition, the team was also very pleased to find out that NinjaOne doesn’t charge anything for onboarding, training or implementation. Unlike their previous solutions, NinjaOne is a 100% cloud based solution. And because of that there is little need for the technicians at Focus to spend time on keeping their IT management tool well managed and up-to-date. This time is now spent on their client’s needs. The Patch Management Engine in NinjaOne has proven to be very reliable and has enabled Focus to increase their patch compliance now to 99,5%. Which is a statistic they are proud to be able to share as a security focused MSP. The team no longer has to spend hours to check whether machines have been patched successfully. The monitoring tool does the heavy lifting here and also enabled the team to report on things they couldn’t easily report on before. For example showing the devices that have bitlocker disabled for a client is now a matter of seconds and is very easy to do. This has transformed from something that was a far more complex and manual task for team previously. At Focus, this project has caused the team to change the way they work in more than one way. Not only is the ticket volume much lower, also the flexibility the team gained from having access to their tool on mobile devices made a positive impact on their workflow. Because of the NinjaOne App, technicians now can receive notifications on their phone and tablets when something happens and can resolve issues even when they are not at the help desk. The Challenges The project of implementing an IT management tool that is going to touch so many sides of the business for an MSP is one that you don’t undertake without a good reason and before you have assessed all the possible risks and challenges. The team at Focus shares that it's always going to be a question of: "Is it going to be painful to implement?" The team at Focus first set up a trial environment of the NinjaOne platform and tested whether the platform was as reliable as promised. During the trial the product basically sold itself and the team at Focus reported they were pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness of the account management team as well the support team at NinjaOne. The team shared: “In terms of our implementation of it, we didn't find it difficult to implement it at all. In about three weeks we were completely done and had rolled out the system to all our customers.”

Hull University Teaching Hospital
Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust selects ANSecurity for rapid VPN capacity upgrade to meet surge in remote working due to COVID social distancing requirements. Background Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has around 1,000 inpatient beds, employs more than 8,900 full and part-time staff and provides planned and emergency hospital services for almost 603,000 people in Hull and the East Riding. A Major Trauma Centre for the region, the trust provides critical care services, with beds for intensive care and high dependency at both Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital. It also runs the Eye Hospital and Hull Women and Children’s Hospital, which includes a 26-cot neonatal intensive care unit. Challenge The Trust, which welcomes around one million patients through its doors every year, has seen numbers swell during the ongoing COVID Pandemic. Yet behind the scenes, the need to maintain social distancing for staff while still giving access to critical clinical and administrative systems has required more use of virtual private network (VPN) access. As Mike Barnett, Technical Services Manager for Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust explains, “We have always had some capacity for remote working – maybe 40 to 50 staff but COVID’s requirement for more home working forced us to increase our capacity quickly to roughly 10 times that number.” However, the Trust’s existing solution based on equipment from Juniper Networks and Pulse Secure which has been running for around 7 years was not powerful enough to handle this increased workload. The system was also not as user friendly as the Trust would have liked, and the upgrade would also allow it to deploy a certificate-based authentication system that is not only more secure - but also easier to manage for IT staff and remote users. Solution With time of the essence, Barnett the Trust contacted ANSecurity, an Elite level Pulse Secure partner. ANSecurity had previously designed and successfully implemented the original VPN as well as a major Multi-Factor-Authentication project for the Trust several years previously. To meet the initial spike in demand, ANSecurity arranged a rapid deployment of an “In Case of Emergency” (ICE) licensing plan that allowed the Trust to temporarily expand the number of VPN users on the platform to around 400. Yet with the number of remote users expected to grow further, it was decided that the hardware appliances where not up to the task. ANSecurity then created a migration plan to help the Trust deploy newer appliances and deliver a seamless upgrade – crucially – without any downtime. “We have used the Pulse VPN for a substantial amount of time,” explains Barnett, “It’s built into our Outlook Web Access, Microsoft exchange and as a proxy and front-end for our web servers. Over the years, we have made quite a few customisations, so it was essential that the migration retains all our integrations and not force us to have to reconfigure all our backend systems or client devices.” The IT Services wide project defined the scope of work and the new design was also validated by senior ANSecurity technical architects to ensure the VPN capability would meet the needs of the Trust – with room to scale if demand increased further. ANSecurity worked closely with the Trust’s network and server teams that where critical to the deployment along with the helpdesk and first line teams to ensure that the project was carried out successfully from an end user perspective. To meet social distancing rules, the joint effort was carried out IT team via remote access to configure the new VPN appliances – taking care to ensure that all the customisations were rebuilt and tested to ensure a swift migration. The upgrade, which took place late one evening, required getting both the new and legacy VPN appliances running in parallel along with equivalency testing to ensure all features were working as planned. A minor configuration change in the Trust’s firewall settings – and the switchover was complete. “ANSecurity helped to ensure the changeover was painless, and we didn’t get any helpdesk support calls from remote users – which is always a plus,” says Barnett. Outcome The new VPN with its upgraded hardware has helped the Trust to seamlessly provide secure, remote connectivity to more users. The higher capacity appliances have been valuable for allowing larger data sets such as X-Rays and CT scans to be reviewed by external consultants, and Barnett adds, “The entire project was delivered by ANSecurity in a timely fashion without any issues.” In terms of the ongoing partnership, “We have a good working relationship with ANSecurity,” says Barnett, who has been with the Trust for 17 years. “Like any relationship, there are good parts and a few problems, but the important thing is that any issues we have had have always been resolved professionally with the support of ANSecurity.” “This was a project where we needed to move quickly and that’s the key, we trust ANSecurity to get the job done and they have never let us down. This upgrade and expansion is a great example of why they have been a valuable partner to the Trust for such a long time,” he concludes.

Data Dynamics enables file modernization into a data lake for data sharing with classification and search for a global customer experience technology and services company
StorageX 8.5 is a next-generation solution for file storage management. It helps customers with more real-time insights and automation around file access security, anomaly detection, intelligent multi-cloud, and agile metadata and access pattern analytics, which are used to drive data management actions. This allows customers to correlate file access, file ownership, and utilization, driving data management policies to reduce the surface area for ransomware attacks, making immutable copies of data, driving data tiering, creating data lakes, and location optimization. StorageX 8.5 provides intelligence-based data analytics and mobility in a hybrid cloud environment. The release of our globally recognized StorageX software provides support for cloud-to-cloud mobility and interoperability for migrations to Azure File, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Platform, and S3 Object Storage. It simplifies the migration process by providing templates that guide best policy creation and management practices, which can be configured and managed via a robust suite of API. A financial institution with over 6,000 offices across more than 80 countries was migrating from legacy NAS platforms to NetApp Data ONTAP. The customer’s unstructured data had grown exponentially over the years with no global consistency of storage and varying legacy standards as a result of multiple acquisitions. The customer’s data was also distributed over 100 locations in order to provide minimal latency for end-users. However, with end-user compute rapidly moving from users’ offices into centralized core data centers, a consolidation of the data was also needed during the migration whilst driving consistency across the global footprint. The data was hosted on legacy hardware across the globe that in some cases was over 13 years old and they wanted to move it into the NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP Storage Platform. They were also extensively using Microsoft DFS that provided an abstraction layer for their CIFS. They wanted a reliable and secured solution for automating their migration process. Data Dynamics’ StorageX solution offered a unified and centralized platform to manage CIFS and NFS migrations from legacy NAS platforms to NetApp Data ONTAP. StorageX simplified and automated the migration process including providing a means of updating the DFS links automatically. The automated, policy-based approach used by StorageX maximized user data access and minimized cutover windows, user downtime, and other disruptions related to file storage rebalancing, migrations, consolidations, and tech refreshes. StorageX provided a single and unified console to manage the migrations supporting various sources and destinations, including cross-platform support for NetApp, Windows, and other heterogeneous resources. StorageX helped the customer with data migration by consolidating their data centers and in parallel introduced effective data governance, intelligent data insights, and data lifecycle management. With this data consolidation project, the customer could easily drive global standardization for enhanced downstream automation, significantly improved efficiency as well as next-level risk management. The customer deployed a single instance of StorageX in each major geographical location and deployed Replication Agents (RA) in each data center. Policies were created in the StorageX server and sent to the RA that drove the data movement based on the policy settings. This automated the process and ensured that the infrastructure deployed was consistent across all the data centers globally. StorageX 8.5 enabled customers to manage and consolidate petabytes of data with a single pane of glass. It also provided the intelligence required for the migration, consolidation, and archiving of file data in large, complex, heterogeneous file storage environments. The engagement with the customer evolved and accelerated, resulting in consolidation from 112 locations globally down to 65 and involved migrating 40PBs of data that was distributed across 35,000 volumes on 876 filer nodes, delivering data location optimization, cost savings of over $37M, and data analysis. This was a clear example of customer trust as the data managed grew by a whopping 300% by the end of the project.

Namecheap Builds a Next-Generation Hyper-converged Cloud with StorPool Storage and AMD EPYC™ Processor-based Servers
Project Overview Namecheap is the world’s second-largest domain retailer and a global hosting provider. Having put a lot of effort into creating a robust and functional platform that would meet the high demands of their customers, Namecheap wanted to build a next-generation hosting service that further improved the availability and reliability of their services. Their legacy setup consisted of a fleet of bare-metal compute servers with local storage devices. Having multiple individual servers resulted in ‘noisy neighbour’ issues where some users’ workloads consumed too many server resources. This led to service disruptions for other users’ workloads and other problems like single points of failure, downtimes during server upgrades, and extra time spent on managing the infrastructure. To rethink the entire server deployment model, Namecheap chose to go with a next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) deployment. HCI enables seamless compute and storage scalability, deploying additional servers with distributed storage as you grow. Namecheap needed a primary storage solution based on a high-performance server platform with next-generation I/O capabilities. Namecheap searched for a solution that would automatically deal with node and drive failures, network problems and other unexpected technical issues. The hosting provider needed a reliable storage solution that would give maximum speed in terms of IOPS and throughput while delivering low latency. The new solution also needed to come with enterprise-class SLAs to assist their team. Namecheap chose StorPool Storage aſter extensive research of the alternatives - they evaluated the StorPool solution and tested all possible hardware failure scenarios at various performance loads to validate that StorPool delivers the fastest rebuild times with no impact to production workloads. Technology Stack Used • Applications: Shared hosting virtual servers • Cloud Platform: OpenNebula • Hypervisor: Linux® KVM • Storage: StorPool Storage • OS: CentOS • Network: Juniper • Servers: Supermicro (Single socket AMD EPYC™ 7742, all NVMe SSDs) The Implemented System Namecheap deployed a new cPanel Shared Web-Hosting infrastructure powered by StorPool, consisting of 8 clusters with 10 hyper-converged nodes each. After analyzing the performance and potential TCO savings of the second generation AMD EPYC™ processor, the decision was to move future HCI infrastructure to single socket AMD EPYC™ processor based nodes, providing up to 128 PCIe® Gen 4 I/O lanes as well as more than 200W per server of power savings over traditional dual-socket systems. To achieve the required compute density and I/O throughput, Namecheap chose Supermicro servers with 64-Core AMD EPYC™ 7742 processors, NVMe SSDs and Intel® NICs. Net Benefits of StorPool AMD EPYC™ Processor-based Solution - Extremely reliable and speedy storage platform - the hosting provider has reported a significant boost in performance and accomplished the key result they were expecting - to increase the density of VMs hosted per rack within the same power limits. - Namecheap was able to deploy 20% more servers in each rack and run 60% more applications per HCI cluster compared to the initial configuration - Exceptional IOPS at low latency while consuming very few CPU cores (2 to 4 CPU cores) and memory (1GB RAM per 1TB raw space), enabling effective utilisation of the hardware resources The new cloud infrastructure based on AMD EPYC™ CPUs, combined with StorPool's next-generation storage solution, delivers the reliability and high availability, crucial for Namecheap to retain its customers and attract new users. https://storpool.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/StorPool_Case-Study_AMD-NameCheap_2022.pdf Namecheap’s key benefits from implementing StorPool: • End users are experiencing improvements in service quality and performance • Low resource consumption lets processors run compute tasks • High density of highly available shared hosting workloads • Eliminated service downtimes and the need for maintenance windows • Experienced Hands-on Support with Enterprise-class SLAs Transferability StorPool is a leading software provider that develops the most reliable and speedy storage platform on the market. Public and private cloud builders - Managed Services Providers, Hosting Services Providers, Cloud Services Providers, enterprises, and SaaS vendors - use StorPool Storage as the foundation for their clouds. StorPool converts sets of standard servers into primary storage systems for large-scale cloud infrastructure. The software comes as an utterly hands-off solution - we design, deploy, tune, monitor, and maintain your StorPool Storage system so that your users experience a speedy and reliable service. StorPool Storage systems are ideal for storing and managing the data of primary workloads that demand extreme reliability and low latency - databases, web servers, virtual desktops, real-time analytics solutions, and mission-critical software. StorPool simplifies our customers’ cloud infrastructure, removes all the pains they experienced with legacy storage products, and supercharges their revenue and profits. Our customers’ specific benefits from StorPool Storage vary depending on their use cases, technology stacks, and scale. However, the core capabilities of StorPool are that it is reliable, agile, managed with ease, utterly hands-off, and speedy. Under the hood, StorPool builds out shared-storage pools out of DC-grade storage drives directly attached to standard servers to create the ultimate storage solution. These pools provide standard volumes to the virtualised, containerised, or bare-metal workloads running in a cloud. StorPool has native plug-ins for Cloud Management Platforms like OpenStack, OpenNebula, CloudStack, Kubernetes, and OnApp. It also supports VMware, Oracle VM, Hyper-V, XenServer, and almost all other technology stacks. We designed StorPool Storage for large-scale deployments, but it has efficient resource consumption and can start small. Each storage system scales seamlessly online - adding drives or servers expands both its capacity and performance. Adjusting StorPool volume size and performance also happens online without disrupting user workloads. The updates for StorPool are also carried out online, without any interruptions to your services. StorPool doesn’t need specialised hardware components to deliver all of the above.

Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board
Today the challenge of protecting data has never been greater. Data now is not only held on our local site, but also in public clouds and SaaS solutions. This project was novel as the customer needed to protect backup data and provide DR for all these above scenarios and did not want to have their protection on the Public Cloud, therefore not relying on backup solutions inherent to the chosen cloud providers. Our CloudCover solution allowed them to protect and replicate their data from, on-premise servers, Azure servers, and Microsoft 365, giving the not only backups of their data, but the ability to achieve near real-time failover of their systems, so they would have minimal interruption should disaster hit. The project gave them on-site and offsite protection for all their data, giving them not only speedy recovery but the immutability all businesses need today to protect them from Ransomware and other Cyber nasties. CloudCover from virtualDCS combines leading business continuity solutions to achieve the required goals and the customer’s objectives. When challenged with this scenario, other service providers in the marketplace would have to recommend multiple solutions from different vendors, and in many instances recommend protecting data with the same vendor as is holding the original live system. (e.g. backing up Microsoft 365 to Azure, or protecting Azure with Azure) Using the technologies in this way meant that our team could protect both the onsite and public cloud workloads to the DR site in question, across different locations with ease. The most obvious solution would have been an off-site cloud-based, or tape-based backup. However, the desired RPO and RTO meant that our team had to think outside the box. This resulted in top-tier applications working together to provide quick and reliable offsite protection. The customer now has the peace of mind that should a disaster occur at the sites, they can failover to replica VMs on our platform with minimal user interruption. Customers have peace of mind and continuous monitoring using our solution. They know if they have an incident, they have protection and a recent copy minimizing data loss in case a disaster does strike.

Open-E JovianDSS
At Open-E, we work to provide peace of mind by ensuring that the data is always accessible, secure and stored properly via a software solution that offers high performance, the best TCO on the market, and ever-increasing data availability capabilities. We believe the safety of business starts with the safety of data. Thus, we aim to build data storage software that can be used as the foundation of any business development, safety, and success. Our Business Continuity and Disaster recovery solution Open-E JovianDSS has proven its role in numerous implementations. For example, the recent implementation of an Internet service provider Limitis GmbH has become a great success in terms of reliability, scalability, speed, and performance. High Availability was ensured at both locations with over 30 km distance between them.

Mike Wardell
Mike is the CEO of Giacom joining in Aug-16 as Finance Director, progressing to the MD position in Apr-17 before taking the helm as CEO in Aug-17. Mike successfully transformed Giacom from a Hosted Exchange provider into an award-winning Cloud Marketplace The original business model involved building Giacom’s own products but with the increase in cloud adoption Giacom would have been too slow to take advantage of the opportunity with this approach, Mike identified that a change of strategy was needed. Mike’s vision has transformed Giacom’s provisioning portal into an all-inclusive marketplace, partnering with best-in-class vendors allowing the business to scale rapidly under his direction. Through Mike’s drive and passion, Giacom now employs more than double the number of people to consistently innovate and drive change. Mike led the business post LDC investment into an MBO with Livingbridge before selling the business to Daisy, shortly followed by a demerger into DWS where the business now resides alongside DWS and Union Street brands to create a group that serves all the comms and cloud requirements for businesses across the UK. Mike also leads the Commercial Team at a group level as Chief Commercial Officer which encompasses the Sales, Marketing, Product, Commercial and Partner Experience teams across the group. Prior to Giacom Mike spent 14 years in the telecommunications industry as part of several successful management teams in a wide variety of positions. The vision he has laid out is to truly help and support IT companies by investing in marketing, technology and support making them as effective and efficient as possible He’s ensured our core company values remain at the heart of Giacom, which are centred around its people and its partners Giacom has grown almost 20-fold in Mikes 6-year tenure and is now targeting its next landmark of £100m turnover. Giacom supports over c.4k partners and over c.100k SMB's and now has over 2 million licences across the platform Mikes history has been a great story but the future looks even more exciting!

Ian Luckett
Ian Luckett is a multi-talented MSP business growth expert with over 20 years' experience as a mentor, coach and business strategist. Over the years Ian has worked with hundreds of Channel Businesses by helping MSP Business Owners to unlock their true potential and build confidence which results in significant improvement in personal and business results. Ian’s sole purpose is to help more people, make a bigger impact and change more lives.

CSL Router Pro & Broadband
Today, the connectivity market is flooded with self-managed solutions, often utilising portals. However, in many use cases, such as retail where they have shops full of customers, it’s not viable for companies to self-manage connectivity. CSL Router Pro is unique because its connection is proactively managed and monitored to ensure it provides an always-on service. CSL offer a fully encrypted broadband service with a secure 4G failover, ideal for critical IoT applications. This broadband service comes with an integrated 4G backup SIM, via CSL Router Pro, to ensure access to and from the system is always available. This is all provided as part of a fully Managed Service. CSL co-ordinate all services to arrange for the installation of everything on the same day. This includes Broadband, Router and 4G SIM. This also ensures one point of contact for support on all aspects of the solution. Their dedicated team of IoT experts includes Solutions Architects who are responsible for supporting our customers through managed solutions like CSL Router Pro. With a private network connection with a wide range of superfast upload speeds, CSL ensures enhanced levels of security to manage and protect data associated with critical installations. All variants provide multiple secure network connections, increasing resilience and improving the reliability of the supported applications. CSL Router Pro & Broadband is the ideal solution for critical applications with high data usage or requirements for constant access, with the benefit of unlimited data transfer or streaming via the private broadband service. It should also be noted that the solution can also offer fixed IP Addresses – public or private to suit any application.

DSP-Explorer MSP of the Year
DSP-Explorer began in 1999 and set out to become a trusted technology partner for companies that wanted to invest in Oracle and SQL Server technologies. We now support multi-vendor, heritage, cloud and hybrid database infrastructures around the clock. As a pioneer of Database Managed Services for over 23 years, we remain, almost uniquely, specialists for both Oracle and Microsoft core database technologies as well as both Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Recent Managed Services Project: EPoS's desire to expand on its success in the UK and enter other geographic locations was hampered by the fact that it was reliant on a legacy datacentre which was no longer fit for purpose and did not allow for the scalability required. As Microsoft was the native technology, EPoS was happy to remain with this vendor for their upgrade but had concerns about the viability of their custom-made application with newer technology. DSP-Explorer specialists worked in partnership with the EPoS team to assess the various options available and decided upon the best approach. We then architected a hosted solution to migrate their estate to Microsoft Azure, which would allow them to scale into other geographies using the Azure global network of data centres. After the EPoS in-house team was satisfied with the testing they carried out, we created a production environment. During the transition, we also provided a managed service to troubleshoot problems with their environment until EPoS were ready to switch off the legacy data centre. Following a successful transition to Microsoft Azure, EPoS have an enterprise solution that is now scalable and deployable in any azure data centre globally. This will allow EPoS to enter new markets to expand its service offering. The new environment was successful and now EPos can set up in new geographies to expand their service offering to generate new business with an enterprise solution which is now scalable and deployable in any Azure data centre globally. What makes our Managed Services different: The customer support component of our managed services is now complete, and DSP-Explorer is excited to unveil exciting new projects. As part of our customer excellence strategy, DSP-Explorer provides a special managed service customer portal - a personalised central page with all necessary information, additional resources, informative tutorial videos and FAQs. The portal is open to all our existing customers as an accessible & informational area. We have introduced a new Customer Excellence function, which is completely dedicated to enhancing overall customer happiness. Our customer service manuals have been updated and upgraded for easier access and reading as part of the new function. We have also defined the major incident management process, which will enable us to manage the incident process above and beyond. Since our business always puts the needs of the client first, customer recognition is extremely valuable across the board. WorkDove was introduced earlier this year, and it has proven to be a useful tool for completing the feedback loop on favourable customer comments as well as for adding to the “voice of the customer.” Partner/customer endorsements: "I’d like to congratulate the team at DSP for being the first partner in the UK to achieve Modernised Oracle Partner Network expertise in Managed Services. Great to see DSP securing another UK first! Well done and congratulations to all involved." - Mike Handley, Head of License and Cloud Systems, Western Europe, Alliance & Channels at Oracle "Congratulations to both @DSP-Explorer and @claremont_oracle. The coming together of both businesses is excellent news for the Oracle ecosystem and builds upon the ‘Oracle Anywhere’ strategy to provide a complete portfolio of Oracle services across #Oracle Database, #OracleCloud and #OracleApplication." - Mike Handley, Head of License and Cloud Systems, Western Europe, Alliance & Channels at Oracle "Our relationship now is so much more than just client-and-supplier; it is a genuine partnership. It’s more valuable to us as it means we grow and develop as an organisation while working with DSP-Explorer." - IT Manager | BRITA UK “DSP-Explorer provided an extremely valuable service giving us insight into our Oracle setup that we were not aware of. I was impressed with the level of attention they gave and it gave me the confidence to continue working with them after the review." - Tungsten Network "We live and breathe this every day but it was really impressive how quickly DSP-Explorer got on board with our systems and processes in order to start delivering results from the outset." - Head of Infrastructure | Zopa

Delivering unparalleled digital employee experience
The client is a global multinational mining company headquartered in London. It is among world's largest producer of platinum, as well as being a major producer of diamonds, copper, nickel, iron ore and metallurgical and thermal coal. The engagement: HCL is providing customer end-to-end Infrastructure, End User Computing (EUC), and Cloud services. The strategic partnership between the two companies has been performing, constantly evolving and is ahead of the industry in maturity (more mature than peers in the mining and heavy manufacturing industry). HCL and the customer have made significant progress towards the Digital Workplace of the Future. Key snapshot below: o HCL scope covers EUC support, EUX remodeling strategy and target operating model. o Standard operational metrics are matured and reported through self service and manual dashboards. o Digital literacy is maturing for office workers o User personas have been defined and service personalization has been implemented for end user services based on user roles and access privileges o ITSM processes and service catalogue are standardized and matured o Global standardized platforms have been deployed for UC, Collaboration, Self-service, and automation of ITSM o Workstream collaboration, unified communication and knowledge management capabilities and technologies are enabled through global platforms such as cloud office suite o HCL is leading continuous service improvement through technology automation and introduction of best practices from its global experience Key Technology Priorities: • Establishing regional service desk with English as operating language for providing support to UK & Ireland and rest of Europe o Scope of service operations to cover client’s permanent employees, contractors, vendors, and Remote users/ mobile users o Channels of communication to be Web, Phone, Chat, and E-mail o Service deck to operate 8x5 local business hours London and UK and stand by support for off business hours • A three-tiered service desk to facilitate best end-user satisfaction and better resolution o Service Desk operation o GAM (Global Account Management) o Remote Desktop Operations • Tools investment o ITSM and Chat tools o Self-service Password re-set tools o All other infrastructure tools like access to Active Directory, SCCM, Office 365 etc. to enable support o For reporting – MyXnalytics and ITSM reporting functions o Telecom infrastructure – IP phones, DID procurements, Headsets, Laptops, Network, IVR, ACD • Communication methodology o Communication to business on any changes in the service desk operations o Communication to business on any changes in the service desk communication channels • Knowledge transfer o Transition of knowledge from India desk to UK desk o Sign off on the updated run book as per new scope HCL Solutions: WorkBlaze is HCL’s digital end user experience monitoring tool equipped with AIOps, real-time workplace analytics to spot trends and correlate, remediate issue before they are widespread, and gather contextual user feedback to enhance employee experience and productivity. It provides a unique User Experience index (UEI) across devices, applications, and network to bring proactiveness in the ecosystem and reduce the IT-user gap. Embracing the COVID challenge: With the advent of 2020 businesses hurriedly went into a complete remote work model in a matter of weeks. The pandemic drastically changed the ways of working. HCL helped the customer solidify their digital workplace strategy and brought out many initiatives to support business continuity of the customer while safeguarding the workforce. Proactive monitoring and auto ticketing - Case in point was on site support teams, who were needed to be physically present to support end-user issues and requests. WorkBlaze facilitated ‘Auto Tickets’ creation for on-site support groups based on device alerts from WorkBlaze. This program was rolled out for 100+ VVIP user devices as this user group needed personalized support. Threshold of each device alert was defined, and auto tickets were routed to location based SFO. These personalized services helped bridge the gap during locked down and onsite teams were also utilized efficiently. Device information display – During lockdown end user reach outs to remote support teams increased 3 to 5-fold. Majority of these queries were around mandatory software like VPN or admin installations etc. The remote users however struggled to share mandate information like IP address or device names with remote support teams. This activity was taking up to 10 minutes. WorkBlaze solved the problem by displaying mandate information on desktops so users could share the information within seconds. Performance and device experience – Unnecessary applications at the Start Up menu were leading to extended device logon duration and thus were resulting in poor experience. WorkBlaze auto heal action automatically selected and disabled those applications which should not be enabled at Start Up menu. Service desk empowerment – WorkBlaze integration to ServiceNow led to tremendous improvement in service desk performance due to WorkBlaze remote heal features. For any impacted configuration item information from WorkBlaze was pulled including all device health information which was then displayed to support agents. The information also included recommended resolutions/fixes. All this helped in isolating issues/ stage containment of issues i.e. resolving issues at L1 stage which would have otherwise gone to L2/L3 stages. The end results were fewer service desk tickets creation, faster resolution, and lower cost of solving issues. End User feedbacks – Elaborate and comprehensive campaigns were designed in WorkBlaze to capture end-user feedbacks. Execution of these feedback gathering campaigns helped uncover some key operational issues. • Battery health issue: Battery health issues were spotted using WorkBlaze feedback campaigns. The increasing trends alarmed WorkBlaze monitoring about underlying issues. This was also in correlation with our proactive batter monitoring remote actions. WorkBlaze team further investigated devices under warranty, and these were later picked with vendor for replacement. • Printer issue: End user feedback trends also alarmed monitoring team about printer issues which were not visible among Incidents. The team proactively picked this trend for investigation and underlying global printer issue was identified. Compliance posture - Local Admin identities were created on End users' devices which earlier were not even targeted by GPO due to conflicting policies, WorkBlaze remote action automatically disable all local identities from customer devices, this remote action has resulted in improvement on your Security Compliance trend. Break away from the pack: Tailored initiatives/projects Live Chat - HCL’s end-to-end AI enabled cognitive virtual assistance solution- Lucy. A unified one stop shop for all end-user queries (IT, Travel, HR, procurement, finance, & all others) providing a single source of truth. It is made available on web and both desktop and mobile versions of MSTeams for customer employees. It mimics human interactions, learns, and adapts to user needs through smart conversations by leveraging enterprise-grade Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). As it understands users’ profiles, personas, job roles etc., it provides tailored & dynamic responses, thus becoming a single point of contacts for end users. An important note here is that any standard self-service bot (A ‘Tell Bot’) is trained on Frequently Asked Questions and provides Standard Operating Procedure. The onus remains on users to understand and follow the steps to complete a task. On the other hand, our solution’s integration with various applications and its natural language processing abilities provides it sense and act abilities (A ‘Do Bot’). Take an example when Lucy encounters users’ queries like why their computer is slow. Lucy is integrated with HCL’s end user experience monitoring solution WorkBlaze. It interacts with WorkBlaze, analyses user computer performance data and checks user experience score, diagnoses the problem and basis user persona & job role, provides recommended actions. Once user confirms, Lucy performs these actions to resolve issues. Lucy has been trained for over 5 years on 500+ IT and non-IT use cases, so it works as an out of the box solution which can be implemented very quickly. Additionally, in some specific cases where Lucy is unable to assist the end user, it offers the option to the user to instantly transfer the chat to a Service Desk agent or create a ticket in Service Now. IAutomate – It helps automate end user IT Operations like User on-boarding, off-boarding account modifications, mailing list creation and updates etc. In customer environment, Service Requests, Scheduled Tasks, adhoc Bulk modification or creation requests and Incidents are handled via IAutomate. The tool automatically executes the Runbook based on the Service Request received and resolves ticket post notifying end user. In case of failure ticket is transferred to Service Desk queue for further checks. The system is ‘continuously learning’ and customizable as per requirements. VVIP Red Button/ Dedicated Executive Support – There was a need for a dedicated support for top customer executives, the need got intensified during the pandemic driven remote work as employees moved away from office. The app is deployed on Microsoft Teams connecting VVIPs to dedicated Support immediately with a single click along with option of scheduling a call back at desired time. This app is also integrated with ServiceNow to create ticket for dedicated VVIP Support Group. A highly skilled workforce capable of handling all types of end user issues is tasked to handle VVIPs in UK, through emergency support app in Power Apps Virtual Agent. Other Initiatives: • Reduced software crashes: Compattlerunner.exe was used in windows telemetry. This started crashing since windows’ 19 upgrade. This was fixed using patch provided by Microsoft after logging ticket. Post this software stability score improved by 52% • BoxSync to OneDrive migration: performance of existing solution was compared to new solution to capture app performance and other issues. Memory usages was seen increasing in devices using OneDrive post migration from BoxSync. • Disabled Skype addon and conversation history: Skype Addons degrade Outlook performance, hence WorkBlaze auto heal solution disabled all Skype addons automatically from end user devices. • AOVPN and Pulse VPN comparison: DEX scores for both solutions were compared to ascertain impact of VPN on overall user experience. AO VPN performance was dropping while Pulse VPN was seen improving Measuring Outcomes To measure the value in terms of End User Experience, new KPI’s designed and onboarded, End User experience divided into four value drivers, Empowerment, Simplicity, Confidence and Satisfaction. Comprehensive approach to user experience transformation: 1. Empowerment – Educating users with cutting edge knowledge programs and equipping them with tools to become more self-reliant 2. Simplicity – Providing intuitive and user-friendly services which are easy to engage with and use 3. Trust/confidence – Enhancing users’ confidence through assured and timely resolution of issues/ queries/ requests 4. Satisfaction – Constantly meeting users’ expectations of service quality and usefulness New KPI’s were designed to capture end users' sentiments, tool usage and ticket trends to understand value drivers designed. For example, usage of Self-Service Portal, Shift Left Trends, Proactive Ticketing, Auto heal Results, MTTR and Hop count reduction. These KPI’s are designed to quantify the value driven out of several initiatives undertaken to Empower End Users. Impact Contractual SLAs for HCL services are constantly reported as green and trending positive and the governance is observed to be effective by the client IAutomate reduced turnaround time from 8 hours to less than 10 minutes. 75% of GAM Tasks automated, while EUC Incident closure for Alert tickets is approx. 70% Inc. Closure – 70% Proactive remote heal led to continuous improvement in DEX score taking it above par with industry standards. Unique attributes of the engagement 1. Going above and beyond client needs/asks to create industry beating results even during pandemic 2. Solving together – End suer feedbacks through WorkBlaze surveys to unearth issues 3. Taking charge of customer success – VVIP red button enablement 4. Obsessive customer centricity – Live assistance, Experience driven KPIs, XLAs

EBC Group Managed Service Provider of the Year
As a managed IT service provider, we offer a wide range of IT solutions, cloud hosting, cyber security, print & data solutions. We work with about 500 clients throughout the UK across all industries. We have three data centres through which we provide a range of cloud solutions to our clients. Our primary data centre is situated within Telephone House, at Birmingham BT Tower, which is the third largest communication hub in the UK. This location and our partnership with BT ensuring our cloud services provide unrivalled connectivity, resilience and latency. With over 30 years of experience, we provide our clients with the technology they require to run their business smoothly and securely. We pride ourselves on our expert industry knowledge that ensures we deliver the most innovative, future-proof solutions. We work with carefully selected technology partners to ensure they share our values of high quality, honesty and scalability. Our team carries out continuous training with our vendor partners to ensure we are providing the highest level of expertise to our clients across all areas of technology. Our certifications and accreditations provide our clients with the peace of mind that they are working with a trusted, compliant and recognised technology partner. We have been certified with a number of International Organisation for Standardisation accreditations as well as Cyber Essentials Plus, so our clients can be confident that our services always meet expectations. We have worked on many exciting projects this year, including a cloud transformation project with financial software company Hoge 100, a new cloud solution for the BMW Motorrad WorldSBK team, a cloud managed wi-fi solution for Selly Park Girls School and stadium wi-fi for Worcester Warriors Rugby Club. We worked with financial software company Hoge 100 to provide them with a more effective cloud solution. They were finding it expensive and time-consuming to add clients into their hosted environment. Their existing environment also provided a slow and unstable customer experience. After a full consultation and assessment of the various Cloud options available, Hoge100 awarded EBC Group the contract to host their specialist software system within their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (ebcCloud) platform. EBC Group’s solution focused on providing Hoge 100 with a highly scalable, reliable and secure platform which can grow in line with their fast-paced business. The platform allows Hoge 100’s academic and commercial clients to interact with their specialist software system via a secure remote desktop environment, which in turn provides them with secure access to their applications and web based finance portals. In addition, Hoge 100 also utilise EBC Group’s ebcCloud platform to host a series of public facing online payment portals. Each Hoge 100 tenant has their own secure remote desktop environment which leverages the power of Active Directory with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to enforce a high level of security protection. We worked with The BMW Motorrad WorldSBK team to find a way to deal with the vast amounts of information that they acquire on the test track and at the circuits. They needed to be able to transfer the data back to their headquarters in Munich, where a team of engineers could process the information. Using the EBC Group Cloud, they are able to data transfer instantaneously and securely to their headquarters and this can take place remotely, whether the team are on the test track or on the circuit. The data is transferred during each session so that it can be analysed in real-time, second by second which is vitally important to the entire team for them to make split-second crucial decisions regarding performance during a race. Selly Park Girls School’s vision to expand the school and build upon their existing academic success was previously hindered by an ageing Wi-Fi system that was limiting the school’s digital capabilities. Ongoing Wi-Fi issues meant connection across the campus was very limited and slow, with an ageing 7 access point HP system providing very little coverage. Aware of the need to keep up with digital growth, Selly Park engaged with EBC Group with a view to upgrading their outdated solution to a more robust and accessible cloud managed wi-fi system. To ensure Selly Park School were investing in a solution that would meet their educational needs now, and in the future, discussions were held to outline exactly what they wanted from the system. They now have a Wi-Fi system which covers the whole school and is inclusive for students and staff. The state-of-the-art system is future-proofed and will grow with the school’s demand. They have been able to use upward of 45 laptops in one room, with no connectivity, network or internet issues. EBC Group are the official IT partner to Worcester Warriors and have implemented a range of IT services for the club as well providing them with IT support. We worked closely with the club to provide them with a full range of managed IT services during a period of upgrades and innovation, including IT infrastructure, full IT Support, an on-site matchday IT engineer and future-proofed systems providing them with the ability to work remotely. Following these IT upgrades, Worcester Warriors were looking to further enhance the matchday experience for supporters and commercial functions, by installing new high-speed connectivity and business grade Wi-Fi throughout Sixways Stadium. We provided them with State-of-the-art Xirrus Wi-Fi technology, designed for use in outside venues and other large crowded areas which our team of IT technicians configured across the stadium. Xirrus Access Points and network configurations ensure that users get maximum bandwidth even when thousands of people are accessing it at the same time or using high-demand media or apps. Capacity can also be added as Wi-Fi needs increase. Our clients were extremely pleased with the outcomes of these projects. Customer satisfaction is at the heart of everything we do and this is how we have built strong long term IT partnerships with many businesses over the years.

MSP Offering
At NinjaOne, we believe in transformational not transactional support and we understand and appreciate that MSPs need choices so it’s no surprise that we're rated year after year as the top RMM. In terms of our MSP offering, we provide localised support as well as account management. We’re pleased to reveal that our average first response time is 60 minutes, and we pride ourselves on outstanding customer support. What’s more, our support team is not just US based, we have a full support team for EMEA which is how we achieve the high level of support and speed. From the beginning, we’ve acknowledged that MSPs operate best when they have flexibility and the option to build the right stack that works best for them, without being locked into a particular ecosystem. With that in mind, we’ve had a continuous commitment to building best-in-class integrations with other channel-leading software, including Autotask, ITGlue, Brightgauge, and others. What’s more, our Global SVP of Strategy and Support, Michael Shelton, and SVP of Account Management, Armando Najera, can stop any release from happening to ensure a positive customer experience. We can also report that we have a - < 1% monthly account churn. Our vision was to evolve from a single product to a multi-product company. For this reason, in addition to our remote monitoring solution, we released NinjaOne Documentation and NinjaOne backup. We’ve received outstanding feedback and a CSAT score of 98 for our customer support overall. NinjaOne’s customer success team strives to build substantial and long-lasting relationships, starting from day one. Our free and unlimited onboarding service makes getting up and running quick and easy. When a client speaks to someone at NinjaOne, they can guarantee they will be connected with an extremely knowledgeable, friendly NinjaOne team member straight away. What’s more, if a customer service member does not have the answer, due to the way that the business is structured, it is very easy for that engineer to access the right person and resources to get the answers that are required. Most queries are wrapped up on the same day that a ticket is opened, which means we can expedite and speed up repairs with customers. We’re proud to be able to receive such positive feedback from customers, such as David Jamieson, Managing Director at Vital Service - “Do not be afraid to ask for help. The strength from our point of view is, there are benefits to having Ninja as a product, but at the same time the real benefit is in the relationship. That is something we cannot replace. That is the real benefit of Ninja.” The NinjaOne training team’s ongoing mission is to provide valuable technical advice and marketing materials to aid you as you grow your business. We provide resources through various mediums that make not only the onboarding and troubleshooting process intuitive and seamless, but help you make the most of your RMM. In all of our actions, the channel is always in focus and we are specifically pursuing a channel-first strategy. For this reason, we also regularly revise our constantly growing channel partner program. Always with the aim of offering our channel partners the best possible support. Over the past few years, we have become an industry leader, winning ever larger deals and steadily increasing our MSP market share. In the process, we have almost doubled our headcount from 250 to 400. Our Unified IT Management Platform helps consolidate and centralise your IT management with 100% natively integrated solutions. Every NinjaOne module interacts natively with the entire platform, giving rich contextual visibility into end-user requests, endpoint health, and network security. What’s more, NinjaOne enables work from anywhere, giving you unparalleled visibility into and control over all your IT assets without the need for on-prem servers or end-user VPNs. In addition, we’ve always given MSPs the option to avoid long-term contracts and commitments by paying month-to-month if they prefer. As we grow, we remain deeply committed to the channel, and one thing partners can expect to see from us moving forward is even more involvement in the community. We’ve made strategic hires dedicated to it, and we’re enjoying more and more community collaboration on both internal and external efforts. We knew that MSPs and IT staff needed tightly integrated, unified tools that were easy to use yet powerful enough to handle almost any task. That's why we designed every product in NinjaOne to leverage a centralised endpoint management platform to enable automation and scalability.

Kaseya
Kaseya® is the leading provider of complete IT infrastructure management solutions for managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT organizations. Through its open platform and customer-centric approach, Kaseya delivers best in breed technologies that allow organizations to efficiently manage, secure, and backup IT. The Kaseya IT Complete platform is the industry’s most comprehensive, integrated solution suite purposely engineered to help IT both run and grow the business. It empowers businesses to command all of IT centrally, easily manage remote and distributed environments, simplify backup and disaster recovery, and automate across IT management functions.

ExaGrid Reseller Partner Program
ExaGrid’s unique Tiered Backup Storage architecture combines performance, low cost and true scale-out storage to replace low-cost primary disk or first-generation inline deduplication appliances. ExaGrid has been working with resellers for 15 years and has earned a top class reputation. ExaGrid’s Reseller Program includes: meeting maker bonuses, SPIFFs and a deal registration program.. ExaGrid has resellers in over 50 countries worldwide. ExaGrid offers many innovations in its ExaGrid Reseller Partner Program, including: • No inventory required • No milestones or commitments required • Deal registration for resellers who bring opportunities to ExaGrid to protect margin • SPIFF programs for reseller sales reps and solutions architects • Meeting maker bonuses for customer prospect meetings • ExaGrid co-sells with its own sales force including technical field systems engineers • ExaGrid performs all customer support and the resellers gain all future orders for appliance and maintenance and support renewals

Acronis
Your success is our success. That’s why the Acronis #CyberFit Partner Program helps accelerate your business growth with robust sales, marketing, and technical support. With the assistance of industry experts, you can ensure that your service provider business is equipped with the cyber protection services needed to succeed.

RackFam: Bringing two families together
About our culture Racker culture sits at the heart of Rackspace Technology’s organisational strategy. We are proud that we are “valued members of a winning team on an inspiring mission”. Following a return to hybrid ways of working in the summer of 2022, we faced a challenge to unite Rackers in an engaging way, while re-energising that mission. About #RackFam The idea for #RackFam began as a conversation between two Rackers - which led to hosting an amazing Family Fun Day event that brought hundreds in the EMEA region together in the Rackspace Technology office in London – our EMEA HQ. Opening the doors to children and extended family members – #RackFam was about connecting two families together: our personal family and Racker (work) family. #RackFam was an inclusive day where we met or re-connected with colleagues while sharing an outdoor picnic, entertaining our mini-Rackers with fun games and events, and proudly showing our families where we spend so many of our working hours. We had not been able to host any event of this scale since 2019. For new Rackers, it was an opportunity to feel like they had joined a real community, and for longer-serving Rackers, we re-ignited the spirit that existed prior to the COVID-19 crisis and lockdown. Hybrid-engagement and external benefits Alongside this event was a virtual raffle, with all funds raised directly supporting nine different charities nominated by Rackers across the UK including Guide Dogs Cymru, Tommy’s, Mind, Syrian Sisters and Blood Cancer UK. As part of our hybrid engagement strategy, the virtual raffle also allowed Rackers working in other UK locations to actively participate in the #RackFam experience regardless of their location. The primary focus of #RackFam was driven by our desire to reconnect internally, however, the benefits are far reaching, and in addition to internal engagement, we’ve seen significant engagement across external social media too. This supports our talent acquisition strategy and our brand reputation – delivering an average 35% engagement rate and reaching tens of thousands organically. #RackFam was managed entirely by volunteer Rackers, which contributes to our existing global wellbeing initiatives and volunteer commitments. We worked to minimize environmental impacts by using local suppliers and recyclable materials wherever possible. What next? As a concept, #RackFam is a unifying concept that can be applied across the Racker family. At the time of writing, Rackers in India are planning their own #RackFam event and plans are being developed for the next one in EMEA. As you’ll see from the pictures included with this entry, everyone had a great time! Take a look at our wrap-up video on Canva: https://www.canva.com/design/DAFKUoaSZ_8/xSfm13VzPpfvaG_YydMS1A/watch?utm_content=DAFKUoaSZ_8&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=publishsharelink

Company Culture Initiative
Our People Are at the Heart of Kingston’s Success From the beginning, our founders, John and David, focused on creating an environment where people could come together, work hard and have fun. They modelled the values of respect, fairness and flexibility as Kingston’s standards of conduct. As new employees and global offices join the Kingston family, our core values continue to be passed along, wholeheartedly: • Respect – for one another in our culturally diverse environment. • Loyalty – to our long-term partners. • Integrity and fairness – in all aspects of our business. • Flexibility and adaptability – in responding to our customers’ needs. • Investing in our employees – to continually improve our most valuable resource. • Having fun – working in the company of friends. When you join Kingston, you become part of a diverse, hard-working team dedicated to delivering the best products and services to its customers. This, combined with a positive, values-driven work culture which respects diversity and encourages employees to have fun in the company of friends. What Sets Our Culture Apart? • A friendly, supportive work environment. • An open plan office environment that fosters good communication between employees at all levels. • Casual dress every day, not just on Fridays. • Subsidised public transport to our EMEA HQ in Sunbury on Thames. • Subsidised lunches. • Employee-run clubs including a wide range of sports, a singing group and a ‘calorie counters’ group. • Social events and charity fundraising events throughout the year. • Wellbeing initiatives, including on-site yoga classes, on-site massage, on-site health screening, financial education and employee assistance. Diversity is at Our Core 57% of Kingston’s senior management are women. At EMEA, we have employees from 43 different nationalities and 46% - 54% is the ratio of female to male employees. “It is down to us, as industry leaders, to make a change for future generations. Children and girls in STEM have been an important focus for us and I strongly advise other companies to take the same approach.” – Ann Keefe, Regional Director UK & Ireland, Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP. We Work with Incredible UK Charities Including: • Apps for Good: A charity that provides free technology courses to students, inspiring them to find their passion in IT. We recently sponsored the Community Champions category. • The Girls’ Network: A mentoring charity that we are proud to support. Some of Kingston’s team members offer a one-to-one mentoring scheme to help young girls improve their confidence, feel less pressured to fulfil society’s expectations, help them to focus on school and feel more positive about their future career choices. • On a more local level, we support two schools, including talking to them about the industry and inspiring them to choose a career in tech. We’re Serious About Being Socially and Environmentally Responsible As a company with global reach, we recognise how our business can contribute to and impact the communities we work and serve in. Through our sustainability initiatives, we are committed to continuously improving our business practices, both ethically and purposefully, to ensure a healthy and sustainable environment for future generations to come. Environment: Kingston products are always designed with quality materials that ensure the end user’s safety is top priority and tested to meet appropriate standards where they are sold to ensure everyone enjoys Kingston products when used for their intended purposes. We are committed to managing the environmental impact of our products and processes and utilise ISO frameworks to govern those processes. Commitment – We are committed to preserving the integrity, success, quality and security of our company, through continual improvement of the prevention of pollution, information assets and availability, and providing a safe work environment. We commit to comply with relevant and applicable legislation and regulations, and with other requirements to which our organization subscribes. These are appropriate to the nature and scale of the environmental impacts related to our activities, information security, products and services, and occupational health and safety risks. Accountability – We are accountable to our customers and interested parties. Reliability – We deliver reliable products and services. Empowerment – We are empowered to be flexible and to continually improve our processes. Transparent Reporting: We strive to make improvements in our sustainability efforts to ensure we can maintain long-term partnerships with our communities and customers. We share our sustainability efforts through various reporting platforms. Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) – As the creator of global sustainability reporting standards, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)* reporting platform is utilised by Kingston to disclose the environmental and social impacts by each of our sites. In following and participating in GRI reporting, we aim to transparently disclose our purpose, vision and strategy to improve upon the environmental and social impact of our business. Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) – To remain a fully transparent company and business partner, Kingston reports annually on climate impacting activities and their governance by utilizing the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)* reporting platform. This globally used sustainability platform requests comprehensive data on climate impacting activities which Kingston, and outsourced activities, collectively contribute to. This data is collected from each of our sites located worldwide, and provides a method of not only measuring but improving upon the impact that we have on our communities. Community: We understand our role as a global citizen and are dedicated to creating a positive impact in the communities in which we live, work and serve. Supply Chain Management: Kingston Technology is a member of the Responsible Business Alliance and we always conduct our business operations in an ethical and environmentally responsible manner and hold our business partners in our supply chain, from customers to suppliers, to the same standards.

Splashtop
Based in Silicon Valley, Splashtop Inc. delivers next-generation remote access and remote support software and services globally, across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Middle East, and Africa. Splashtop’s cloud-based, secure, and easily managed solutions serve customers that include everyone from multinational enterprises and academic institutions to small businesses, MSPs, and individuals.

The Hollins School project
iQuila, were able to transform the safety assurances for the students at The Hollins secondary school in Accrington, Lancashire. The Hollins was the first school in the UK to install iQuila. The main advantage of the connectivity technology is that it creates an environment for remote users that exactly duplicates the safe environment in school. In addition, iQuila can support and manage thousands of connections simultaneously so students have an uninterrupted connection to the school’s online resources. “We have a duty of care to protect our students and part of this is embracing technology that provides them with school-filtered Internet access at home,” said Steve Campbell, former Head Teacher at The Hollins and now CEO designate of the LET Education Trust. “The Internet is a major safeguarding issue, but by using iQuila we can fully encrypt any device that connects with our network through a simple software download. As well as protecting students, this will provide a high degree of reassurance to parents too.” Another benefit to students at The Hollins, is that iQuila makes school software freely available to them at home. The school has organised this to reduce the financial burden on households and give all students the opportunity to learn remotely rather than being forced to complete work on the school site. “The first set of students to start using iQuila at home have been our GCSE classes,” continued Mr Campbell. “It has been a difficult year for them, and they are already seeing the benefits of safer, more secure Internet access and the easy use of crucial software wherever they happen to be studying.” Javed Younis, a parent of a year 11 pupil at The Hollins, said: “I have had concerns about my son and other children browsing online or being involved in group threads, and the iQuila software has given me much greater peace of mind. Previously, my son asked me to help him remove pop-up boxes when he was watching online gaming videos, and they were clearly inappropriate. No parent wants their child to be exposed to this, so I feel very positive that through iQuila, he is being safeguarded when is on the Internet at home, and he completely understands the reason for downloading iQuila and keeping safe.” iQuila becomes active on any device as soon as the user logs-in to ensure immediate protection. While it can be used on school-owned and personal devices, students have the option to turn off the software on their own devices at home. Developed in the UK, iQuila is the world’s first ‘full’ Layer 2 software defined network which means that it provides a layer of security, performance, reliability and transparency that is not found in layer 3-type virtual private networks. The Virtual Extended Network in the solution uses AI to learn about the type of data traffic that appears on the remote connections and their journey into the office/school network. It optimises connectivity by prioritising certain data streams and filtering out duplicate data streams, common in the home, among other things. As well as providing a connection that does not drop, even during high-speed travel or in areas of poor broadband, iQuila offers high level encryption and secures the device itself for maximum protection. It is generally used by businesses and organisations to connect multiple sites and remote workers, and this is the first time it has been used by a school in this way. David Sweet, CEO of iQuila, said: “Being able to extend the safety blanket of school-filtered Internet to students at home is something we’ve been passionate about for a long time. We recognised the potential our technology had for changing the face of learning at home many years ago and it’s been a pleasure working with a forward-thinking, progressive school like The Hollins to make it a reality for thousands of students. We know the difference it is already making to so many young people and teaching staff, and we look forward to rolling it out to many more schools in 2022.” Steve Campbell also added “the formation of the new LET Education Trust will allow us to share this exciting development with all schools within the Trust, keeping our pupils safe while using the Internet or studying remotely.”

Giacom World Networks Ltd
Giacom provide cloud services via the channel to UK SMBs through our online portal, Cloud Market. We have over 3,600 ITC partners and we’re 100% focused on supporting them. And we must be doing something right – over the years we’ve seen consistent growth in revenue: +38% (£48.89M) FY20, +20% (£58.62M) FY21, and predicted +29% (£75.64M) for FY22. We provide an exceptional range of services and solutions to our customers, covering productivity, cybersecurity, email, and more from the best vendors in the market such as Sophos, Acronis and Microsoft (in fact, as a well-established Microsoft Gold Partner, we currently deliver a massive 22M+ Microsoft licenses to 79K+ end users). Accessing our Cloud Market portal is simple and hassle-free– there’s no minimum spend, expert technical support and marketing materials are free. We also offer time saving integrations, and simple monthly billing. WE PUT OUR CUSTOMERS AT THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING WE DO. It’s no surprise we offer customers different types of tailored support, whatever their goal. Take one of our MSP customers, SoConnect, for example. Having been a Giacom partner for 4 years they asked for our support in delivering Microsoft solutions. They wanted to expand their product portfolio and acquire new quality customers but were unsure how to go about it. We provided them with the resources they needed to reach their revenue goals, including: • 1-2-1 coaching from our Marketing Manager to plan and launch campaigns to end users • Specialist support from our Microsoft experts • Our in-house design team created SoConnect branded marketing materials for them to deliver to their end users • High-impact sales training sessions for them to present their solutions to end users and seal the deal Over the last 9 months we've invested £8.5K Marketing Development Funds (MDF) and the results speak for themselves. Although their acquisition campaigns are on-going, here's the ROI SoConnect have seen so far: • Generated leads worth £79K annually • £36K annualised revenue won so far • Total growth on the account +£13K since May 2019 And they’re thrilled with the results. In our recent NPS customer service survey they scored us 10/10, commenting: “Excellent help and advice on Microsoft portal.” HERE’S WHAT A FEW OF OUR CUSTOMERS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT GIACOM. “Absolutely brilliant, really no comparison to my other supplier … with the other supplier it was so slow and laborious to add or change products within there… Giacom’s Cloud Market portal is just no comparison. I’m over the moon!” - Bob Winters, Cranberry Networks Ltd ‘One of the reasons we went with Giacom is their Cloud Market portal, when we compared it other CSP’s they just didn’t seem anywhere near as good. Giacom’s portal is very easy and straight-forward to use.’ – Tim Rookes, True MSP ‘Giacom’s Cloud Market portal made our NCE transition easy. Every single customer converted fine except for one, but this was quickly rectified through Giacom’s support team. Super easy, hassle-free and we converted them all in one working day!’ – Luke Watts, Roundworks IT

Nerdio
Nerdio empowers Managed Service Providers to deploy, manage, and optimize infrastructure, PaaS services and virtual desktops in Microsoft Azure. We provide the path and tools for MSPs to build or streamline their Azure practices in the most efficient way possible from an operational, cost and customer experience perspective.

Tiered Backup Storage
ExaGrid has brought innovation to an area of storage (backup storage) that has not seen true innovation over 20 years. ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage approach is the only storage solution built for backup and that solves all six backup storage challenges: low disk usage for cost, low WAN usage, backup performance, restore performance, a fixed-length backup window as data grows, and a non-network-facing tier (virtual air gap) with a ransomware recovery solution.

Infinidat continues double-digit growth
Infinidat has had an incredible year since last year’s submission for the SDC honours. Not only did the company have several major announcements: InfiniSafe® Cyber Storage Resilience Software (included at NO charge in all Infinidat platforms), the InfiniBox™ SSA II, substantial updates to the InfiniGuard® modern data protection and cyber storage resilience platform, InfiniOps™, and dramatic expansion of this guaranteed SLAs including the ONLY cyber storage resilience guarantees in the industry for any primary storage platform, but also strong success as a company. This success includes: • 40% YtY Bookings Growth FY ‘21 • 68% YtY Q4 ‘21 Bookings Growth • 25% of the Fortune 50 use Infinidat Solutions • >130% YtY Revenue Growth in Fortune 100 Customers FY ‘21 • Continued new executives hires since last year’s submission: CMO, SVP of EMEA+APJ Sales, Sr. Director of EMEA+APJ Channel, President of US Federal Unit and others FY ’21 and FY ‘22 • Strong recognition by storage analysts: • Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage – Leader for 4th Year in a Row – ‘21 • DCIG Top 5 Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service – ‘22 • GigaOm Leader and Fast Mover in the Sonar Report on Enterprise Ransomware for Block Storage – ‘22 • CRN 5 Star Channel Partner Program – ‘22 • Gartner Peer Insights Reviews (reviews are by END USERS) • InfiniBox SSA II – 5 out of a possible 5 • InfiniBox SSA – 4.9 out of a possible 5 • InfiniGuard – 4.8 out of a possible 5 Infinidat continues to get the best attention from Storage analysts and several have noted that Infinidat’s new guarantees, InfiniSafe, and InfiniBox SSA II are setting NEW standards for the entire industry. In short, Infinidat continues to gain rapidly in the high-end enterprise storage market with additional solutions and very, very, very strong innovation. Infinidat has grown substantially and launched several new platforms and solutions highly lauded by storage industry analysts since the last submission. Additionally, as noted by several storage analysts – such as the Gartner Peer Insights – that Infinidat’s customers love our solutions, support, and continuing innovation.

Host in Ireland Orchards in the Community
Biodiversity loss is happening at an unparalleled rate and bees are critically endangered. They contribute to 70% of our crops, but sadly, 33% of Irish bees are facing extinction, including almost 90% of our bumblebees by 2050 at the current rate of decline. Bees are an indicator for biodiversity in general and once a species is extinct it cannot be reversed. The balance of nature is affected forever. Host In Ireland and its data centre industry partners have united to make a difference with the DCs for Bees initiative, the world's first data centre pollinator plan. We have pledged to raise awareness, advocate, and most importantly, take - and inspire others to take - action to make Ireland more pollinator friendly and ensure the survival of our pollinators for future generations. From the start, we made the conscious choice to step outside of the norms and work alongside the Irish National Biodiversity Centre and the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan. These organisations are leading the way in reversing the trend of population reduction of bees in Ireland through research-based, ethical and indigenous methods. This collaboration has ensured the actions we take mitigate the consequences of our actions and be as impactful as possible. As a result, the Irish data centre industry became the first to work in conjunction with these organisations to launch an industry-wide science-based programme to help reduce or even reverse the extinction of our bees. Dr Úna FitzPatrick from the All Ireland Pollinator Plan, noted: “Host in Ireland was the first industry-wide organisation to approach us about how they could help address bee declines in Ireland. We are delighted that Host in Ireland and its data centre industry partners have stepped forward and are uniting to make a difference.” As communities recover from the effects of the Covid pandemic, creating a sense of collective purpose will be a critical part of this recovery. One of the key pillars of DCs for Bees is Orchards in the Community. We sought out “homes” for orchards throughout Ireland in order to collaborate with local communities, and collectively assist in the reverse of the decline of Ireland’s Pollinators. Orchards have played an important role in communities for many centuries, providing a focal point, a gathering space, and a place where people and nature successfully work together to create abundant harvests. Orchards provide vital green spaces in our cities and towns, where people are encouraged to interact with nature either through becoming custodians of the trees or by simply being around them and enjoying their shade, beauty and fruit. In 2021, 54 organisations pledged more than 1,260 orchards to be planted across Ireland in the 2021-2022 planting season (November through March). Orchards in the Community is the first project of its size and scale to connect hundreds of communities, schools, employees and organisations with biodiversity action across 32 counties in every single county in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. As a project of this scale and depth across the country has never taken place before, sourcing such a volume of fruit trees in one planting season was a huge challenge. With only a small network of partners and a target of planting at least one orchard in every county on the Island of Ireland, the task of finding community groups and individuals across the length and breadth of the island was daunting. However, working with the National Biodiversity Data Centre we made a number of key contacts within the Tidy Towns organisation, along with a large number of schools and word spread quickly. The success of the Orchards project was so great in its first year, a decision was made to roll the project forward into the 2022-2023 planting season. We have announced we are extending this project and increasing the target from 1000 mixed fruit tree orchards to 2750, which is the equivalent to nearly 14,000 fruit trees right across the country. The growing wait list of schools and community groups across the country are already lined up to take the next batch of orchards. The project has provided a means for organisations, schools & community groups to foster an appreciation of, and awareness for, protecting and encouraging biodiverse habitats in our local areas. In one of the most unique aspects of this programme, Host in Ireland is collaborating with the Irish National Biodiversity Centre to jumpstart the creation of pollination corridors throughout Ireland. Orchards in the Community will enable – for the first time in Ireland – the ability to track concurrent pollination success by planting uniform orchards in multiple locations within the one growing season. Each person/organisation/community group who plants an Orchard is asked to, once a year, go out and record the number of apples, plums or pears growing on the trees and upload this count onto the National Biodiversity Data Centre website. This Pollination Service can only be conducted when the same species of trees are planted during the same dormant window in various locations around the country. This 'like-for-like' count will give an accurate picture on the levels of pollination across the country. In addition, there is also now a map tracking each of these Orchards to potentially jumpstart the creation of pollination corridors throughout Ireland. For now, they can act as pollination rest stops. The overall success of the Orchards in the Community project, and the DCs for Bees programme in general, has inspired colleagues around the world to implement similar projects in their own communities. The Host in Ireland team is providing guidance on project implementation, while organisations work with local authorities to choose the best tree and plant mixture to best enhance the biodiversity of their communities.

Schneider Electric University provides industry-leading professional education platform, to bridge the data centre sector skills gap
As the world leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, Schneider Electric takes few things more seriously than its people. With more than 128,000 employees in over 100 countries, the organisation has a strong and demonstrable track record to developing talent and as part of its commitments to diversity, equality and inclusion, the company runs many global initiatives to ensure the data centre and energy management industries remain a thriving and opportunistic environment for STEM professionals. Today, however, the data centre industry is facing an endemic skills shortage. Research detailed within the Uptime Institute Annual Data Center Survey 2021 estimates staff requirements will grow globally from about 2.0 million full-time equivalents in 2019 to nearly 2.3 million in 2025. Further, 32% of respondents reported having difficulty retaining staff. More worrying is that 47% are having difficulty just finding qualified candidates for open jobs, meaning that as data centre capacity demands increase, the skills gap grows ever wider. Attracting and retaining new talent within the industry, which is the heart of the global, digital economy, is now reaching a critical point. Schneider Electric and its leading brand of physical infrastructure systems, APC™, has long recognised this requirement and before its acquisition by Schneider Electric in 2006, a group of forward-thinking industry professionals at APC created the ‘Data Center University’ as a free resource to help train and upskill the next generation of engineers. Their vision was simple, to offer a series of industry accredited training courses that would support the professional development of industry stakeholders and prepare them to build the data centres of the future. Meeting market demands Fast forward to 2022, and the university has stayed well ahead of the pace of change. Now branded the ‘Schneider Electric University’ it has grown to offer more than more than 200 data centre, energy efficiency and sustainability courses, all available as self-paced, one-hour modules, and delivered in 14 different languages – helping industry professionals to level-up their skills, training, and experience. It provides energy education from anywhere, for efficiency everywhere, and is accredited by 25 different industry CPD bodies including the Electrical Contractors Association (ECA), Engineers Ireland, and the Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP). As an industry-first the Schneider Electric University has remained completely impartial, with all courses being completely vendor-agnostic. To-date it has delivered over 1,000,000 courses to more than 650,000+ users globally, with 180+ countries represented by its users, and offers a crucial lifeline for industry professionals seeking to advance their skillsets and stay ahead of technological change. It does this through on-demand, easily accessible modules which can be accessed through an e-learning online platform using a mix of audio/visual tools. From building controls to sensors, boilers and energy efficiency, the courses are separated by ‘colleges’ of data centre or energy efficiency, and again by topic. Its professional development tab also allows individuals to follow recommended training paths for specific job functions, ensuring they gain access to the most relevant training. University certification requires completion of a selection of the 85 available courses within the Professional Energy Manager (PEM), or the 14 courses in the Data Center Certified Associate (DCCA) qualification. Certification exams can only be taken once the equivalent of 50-70 hours learning have been completed, underpinning the credibility of the University. Exams for the PEM qualification are delivered in partnership with the Institute of Energy Professionals, which is one of the longest-running energy education programmes globally, and one of only two schemes recognised by the US government. Exams for the DCCA qualification are developed by Schneider Electric’s Data Center Science Center, a world-leader in data centre research. Furthermore, by being specifically designed as a vendor-neutral, CPD-accredited professional development platform, the University enables trainees to gain real-world knowledge and experience, which can be applied universally, without the need to retrain or reshape their areas of expertise around vendor-led technologies. Future proofing the sector The availability of skilled professionals to work and acquire new knowledge remotely is essential for enabling the technology industry to respond to new and unexpected challenges. For example, during the peak first year of the recent pandemic, it was reported that 86% of all people working remotely were doing so as a direct result of Covid-19. This drastic shift placed an enormous strain on companies’ existing infrastructure and showed just how important a role data centres, networks and digital technologies play in the global economic landscape. By encouraging data centre stakeholders to continue their professional development, Schneider Electric University is directly addressing the data centre industry skills gap: helping businesses to attract, retain and retrain new and existing talent. Further, it is leading the sector, helping to drive diversity, equality, and inclusion, and supporting the next generation of STEM professionals. “Schneider Electric University has been a proven free resource to assist data centre professionals from around the world in advancing their careers, learning new technologies and providing the latest guidance on sustainability and energy efficiency initiatives. With more than one million courses delivered to-date and over 650,000 users globally, we believe the University can provide easily accessible education to countries where it’s needed most and play a key role in addressing the industry skills challenge.” Tom Clune, Global Program Manager, Schneider Electric University

N-Able
N-able, Inc. the solutions partner helping IT services providers deliver security, data protection, and remote monitoring and management services. N-able fuels IT services providers with powerful software solutions to monitor, manage, and secure their customers’ systems, data, and networks. Built on a scalable platform, we offer secure infrastructure and tools to simplify complex ecosystems, as well as resources to navigate evolving IT needs. We help partners excel at every stage of growth, protect their customers, and expand their offerings with an ever-increasing, flexible portfolio of integrations from leading technology providers. n-able.com

Opentext Security Solutions
OpenText™ Security solutions harness the cloud and artificial intelligence to provide comprehensive cyber resilience solutions for businesses, individuals, and managed service providers.

Northern Marine Modernizes Critical Fleet IT Systems With Scale Computing HyperCore and Edge Computing
Scale Computing is a market leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions. The company’s SC//Platform and SC//HyperCore edge computing solutions enable organizations around the world to scale their IT infrastructure without compromising performance. SC//HyperCore saves time and valuable resources because the software, servers, and storage are all in a fully integrated platform. The same innovative software and simple user interface power a user’s infrastructure regardless of their hardware configuration. Using patented HyperCore™ technology, the award-winning self-healing platform identifies, reduces, and corrects problems in real-time. SC//HyperCore makes ensuring application uptime easier for IT to manage and for customers to afford. In this particular project, maritime providers can run their critical onboard IT applications with self-healing, automated infrastructure. Northern Marine Group is a ship management and marine services provider. They provide a full spectrum of ship and offshore management and wide-ranging service solutions for training, travel management, marine supply, ship agency, marine engineering, and offshore catering. Headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland, their diverse fleet of technically managed vessels includes a wide range of tankers, ferries and offshore assets. Each of Northern Marine’s vessels relies on a host of critical applications, such as navigation, crew management, cargo management, accounting, security, maintenance systems, and even digital entertainment systems for the crew. If their onboard internet is intermittent, their navigation will fail, and it will be impossible for a ship’s navigator to chart a course. Business leaders at Northern Marine were looking to update their IT infrastructure. Specifically they wanted to upgrade existing deployed IT infrastructure onboard their vessels, address intermittent internet connectivity including satellite connectivity and latency, ensure servers remain online and operational with minimal downtime, reduce exposure to expensive en route repairs, and comply with regulatory requirements, all while dealing with no IT personnel onboard. Replacing or repairing any part of a ship’s onboard operating environment is very complex and can take days to fix depending on the ship’s location. For Northern Marine, highly available, reliable IT infrastructure that was easy to manage was a must, and optimizing operations with self-healing, automated infrastructure for all applications was a critical next step. Northern Marine deployed Scale Computing SC//HyperCore clusters to run their operations smoothly while at sea, with the first 27 ships deployed in 2019 and 2020. Immediately, the Scale Computing solution offered the following benefits: SC//HyperCore is easily and quickly deployed and easy to manage Designed and deployed server cluster to achieve zero downtime Self-healing, intelligent automation enables IT managers to spend less time on menial tasks; while at sea with intermittent connectivity, the ability to heal without a central brain or IT intervention was critical Increased productivity and lower TCO Modular cluster architecture provides instant scalability Northern Marine immediately noticed enhanced performance and simplified management as soon as the solution was deployed. With the Scale Computing rollout, Northern Marine was able to build a single virtualized server, export it and send it to all of the vessels, saving around four hours per build. Other immediate benefits included: Simplified and reduced management time Complete redundancy – always on 24/7 Business continuity Snapshot replication and backup Ready for future deployments at sea 90% less time to rebuild: Restoring a system/VM on a vessel, for example after a cyber-attack, takes a fraction of the time, with less hours and stress for crew and shore-based support staff 90% less time to install a Docker application: Installing a new Docker application takes a fraction of the time compared to the same installation on the old Hyper-V environment

Zero Downtime and 46% Faster MTTR with Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Dedicated Backup Hosted on AWS Workspace and vCenter
Product Description Building a customized and sustainable virtualization solution in today's ever-changing IT landscape requires high-performance application servers and high-capacity storage servers. MSys Technologies experts created a "Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)" dedicated backup with enterprise-grade data protection, compute, storage, and network for enterprise customers. The product resolves the traditional backup issue of workload IO data protection and the secondary storage backup issue for all the crucial applications/VMs running on the data center (cluster). MSys experts created an efficient, scalable, unrivaled, unified, and tiered storage solution that provides cross-platform file sharing, backups, and iSCSI and virtualization applications. The product lowers costs, enhances the infrastructure for zero downtime, and helps resolve backup and data protection bug backlogs 58% faster. What exactly is novel about the product/process or innovation? MSys Technologies' Data and Storage experts innovated in the field of business servers and introduced a powerful Double Server. • The server integrates an application and a storage server into one, creating a server-grade hardware design with RAM expandable to 1TB • The product optimizes mission-critical tasks and provides top-notch performance for Big Data computing MSys product sustenance helped the customers resolve issues quickly and enhance the legacy storage infrastructure by adding a troubleshooting framework for traditional storage and backup resources. • The product's unique feature IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), supports intelligent system monitoring, controlling, and hardware logs. The product offers various data recovery options. • The RTRR (Real-Time Remote Replication) function supports real-time or scheduled data backup to a remote server and uploads files to a remote folder with a faster backup time and better backup efficiency. The Hyperconverged solution provides various security options to increase productivity and efficiency, such as encrypted access, IP blocking, and more. Here are a few more features that make this product an industry-leading application: • Single Page Management application written in React JS • Microservices REST API in Node JS and Python • Distributed scheduler to manage all internal jobs • API Gateway implementation with Role-Based Access Control • Live updates to UI through WebSocket How does the product or process break with conventional ideas or processes in its field? Traditionally enterprises used a SAS controller with expanders to use the total capacity of supported drives on a single controller. The Hyper-Converged solution from MSys adopts multiple SAS controllers and streamlines the architecture with improved connectivity and performance. MSys experts leveraged the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and added a troubleshooting framework using plugins and integrated enhancements to provide enterprise-grade data protection. • The Hyper-Converged solution provides the ability to enhance their Big Data computing to gain further insights, opportunities, and values that can drive actions for additional impact • The solution best suits enterprise environments that continuously demand high-performance simplified IT management, uninterrupted service, and optimized virtualization environments • It offers a server-grade virtualization environment and supports Double-Take Availability to provide comprehensive high availability and disaster recovery The solution allows Virtualization Station to create a passive backup virtual machine for the primary physical server or establish two virtual machines. The second virtual machine is a backup virtual machine that provides failover support to the primary system and enables continuous service and data protection. How does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists? MSys storage product sustenance experts deep-dived into the cyclomatic and cognitive complexities holding the client's legacy systems back and causing the bug backlog to pile up. They identified the need to simplify the infrastructure and truncate the time it takes to resolve storage issues. The team created a troubleshooting framework with plugins and integrated enhancements for traditional storage and backup resources. While managing the bug backlog, another MSys team began working on smarter monitoring dashboards that could help the client observe the necessary metrics at a single stop. The solution supported online capacity expansion by cascading multiple RAID expansion enclosures. This allowed enterprises to gain maximized ROI on capacity planning for Big Data. The scale-up solution can gradually expand total storage capacity to meet the customer's demand. Below are the crucial features of the MSys sustenance solution that helped the customers resolve the customer escalations quickly and enhance the legacy storage infrastructure: • An automated framework for VM troubleshooting, including installation and commissioning • Easy plugins for enterprise applications like Active directory • End-to-end monitoring dashboard integrated with legacy infrastructure • Customized OS Images, AD integration, IPV6 support, HDD, and other specifications per faster resolution needs for customer escalations • Automated dashboard troubleshooting and vulnerability checks for VMs Notable Tools and Technologies AWS Workspaces: • For secure and reliable 24X7 support for L3 escalations • Secure endpoint access for remote teams with 99.99% uptime • Centrally managed environment for immediate customer support vCenter: • Easy deployment management server for patch deployments and virtual appliance management • RESTful APIs for scalable storage resource management for the client • Secure, centralized control for quick responsiveness and easy access control and monitoring How do customers benefit from the product/process or innovation? The Hyperconverged Infrastructure created by MSys technocrats leveraging AWS Workspaces and vCenter resulted in the following tangible benefits for the customers: • Legacy infrastructure enhanced for zero-downtime and 46% faster Mean Time to Recovery • Reduced L3 resolution time by 58% • Excellent performance: 3,500+ MB/s throughput and 250,000+ IOPS • Enables up to 10 times faster IOPS performance and lowers I/O latency three times • Quick and Consistent 24X7 troubleshooting and customer support for L3 escalations • Surveillance Station offer a professional surveillance solution with a user-friendly management interface • A Double Server for hosting VMs and accommodating virtualization storage in one box lowers cost and increases efficiency MSys Storage Engineering Services: https://www.msystechnologies.com/services/storage-consulting-services/

All-in-one business continuity/disaster recovery solution for M365
Company and organization leaders want to rest easy at night knowing their Microsoft 365 data is safe - free from threats - but also easy to recover should a disaster occur. Sys admins, MSPs and VARs want to meet this need and to serve their customers efficiently and effectively while keeping an eye on their bottom line to be profitable. They seek robust, high-performance solutions to do so but find it inconvenient to have to get these from different vendors, needing to learn (and train their staff) to use different interfaces, face different billing systems and structures, receive different levels and types of support, and so on. These issues are magnified because of the challenges they additionally face to hire and retain top tech employees in a highly competitive job market. 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup addresses all these needs by providing a convenient all-in-one solution that can be centrally managed. 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup is reliable, tried and tested, quick and easy to use and learn, and ahead of the curve when it comes to combatting ever evolving threats, thanks to ongoing research by Hornetsecurity’s inhouse security labs and innovation by its development team. 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup is innovative as it provides state-of-the-art email security that protects against spam, viruses, phishing, and ransomware, and offers email signatures and disclaimers. Users can also benefit from Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), defending their employees against the most sophisticated email attacks, as well as providing automated email continuity to prevent unexpected downtime, and legally compliant email archiving to keep all emails safe and searchable. Additionally, it includes backup and recovery for endpoints and Microsoft 365 data in mailboxes, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint.

CloudCover K8
CloudCover K8 is built on Kasten technology and was developed to help organisations confidently run their applications on Kubernetes. It is is a born in the cloud/Cloud Native data management platform that integrates with all major Kubernetes distributions both on-premise and within leading Hyperscalers, including AWS and Azure. Although Kubernetes provides enterprise organisations with the high availability, mobility, and scalability of application services, these benefits do not automatically extend to the data. Without the right protection in place, Enterprise organisations are leaving themselves at risk of data loss from application failures, insider attacks, cyber-security threats. Designed for enterprise DevOps teams, using Cloud native architectural principles, CloudCover K8 provides a simple, scalable and secure system for backup and restoration, application mobility and disaster recovery. Not only does CloudCover K8 provide backup of data and the ability to recover to the source platform, it also allows mobility to the numerous aforementioned targets, across public and private clouds, on and off-premise. This is achieved by treating the containers as an entire application, with configurations, rather than bits and bytes. Without a Kubernetes backup solution in place, critical data is at risk from within the Kubernetes application. In addition to protecting this data, CloudCover K8 also provides Enterprise operations teams with the following: Backup and Disaster Recovery • Application specific protection: Extend workflows and protect applications around business priorities. • Complete application protection: Automatically capture and protect an entire application stack. • Policy based protection: Manage backups at scale and apply policies to auto-discovered applications. • Ransomware protection: Backup data off-site with immutability. • Automated imports and restorations: Automatically import and restore application changes to save time and ensure complete up-to-date protection. Application mobility • Avoid vendor lock in: Seamlessly move applications across public and private Cloud Infrastructures and reduce egress and ingress fees. • Automated workflows: Easily migrate applications with scheduled, on-demand workflows. Avoid the need for custom scripting. • Isolated environments: Provide the migration between non-federated clusters for environment isolation and operational controls.

InfiniSafe allows enterprise storage to be part of the overall cyber security strategy and help thwart malware and ransomware. Because of InfiniSafe several storage analysts have noted Infinidat is establishing a new standard for the entire storage industry.
With cyber security top-of-mind for not only CIOs and CISOs, but also CEOs and Boards of Directors, InfiniSafe® brings the storage industry to the forefront of helping thwart cyberattacks. The InfiniSafe cyber resilience technology solution is available across Infinidat’s entire award-winning enterprise storage platforms: InfiniBox®, InfiniBox™ SSA II, and InfiniGuard®. InfiniSafe delivers powerful cyber resilience capabilities to help thwart and recover from cyberattacks. InfiniSafe enables the creation of cyber-resilient environments in four essential areas: ⦁ Immutable snapshots ⦁ Logical air-gapping ⦁ Fenced forensic environment ⦁ Near-instantaneous recovery InfiniSafe encompasses a detailed solution to help companies expand cyber resilience throughout their entire primary storage and secondary storage infrastructure. Our InfiniSafe Cyber Storage Guarantees on our InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA II platforms guarantees that an immutable snapshot can be recovered in one minute or less. All this included in our platforms at NO additional charge. InfiniSafe is very, very unique in the enterprise storage industry. It is the first comprehensive cyber resilience common technology across both primary and secondary storage, making it easier for partners to support, sell, and service. Allows storage to be part of the comprehensive corporate cyber security strategy, expanding partner margin and revenue opportunity. It is the most comprehensive feature set for cyber resilience in the storage industry with the full features of Immutable snapshots, Logical air-gapping, Fenced forensic environment, and Near-instantaneous recovery. InfiniSafe includes the ONLY primary storage guarantees on cyber storage resilience in the market (guaranteed immutable snapshots with 1 minute or less recovery times), giving customers the solid backing and partners a strong sales tool to use. Key differentiators for InfiniSafe are: A) High-end only enterprise cyber resilience solutions. B) Comprehensive licensing model – no piecemeal charging for our cyber resilience InfiniSafe as it is included NO CHARGE, making us very easy to transact with. C) Most comprehensive cyber resilience solution on the market that spans an entire portfolio. D) Multiple recurring revenue models with cloud-like consumption that now have full cyber resilience with InfiniSafe. E) Much lower cost solution for cyber resilience, as InfiniSafe is not an additional charge but competitors usually charge extra for cyber resilience. F) Technical advisors assigned to all accounts for free that understand cyber resilience and the importance of storage for a full cyber strategy. Cyber Security was the #1 CEO (yes, CEO) concern in the May 2021 Fortune 500 survey, IDC did a BOD study in Feb 2022 and cyber security was the #1 concern, and in the March KPMG survey the same. InfiniSafe allows enterprise storage to be part of the overall cyber security strategy and help thwart malware and ransomware. Because of InfiniSafe several storage analysts have noted Infinidat is establishing a new standard for the entire storage industry.

Industry-first all-in-one security and backup service for Microsoft 365
Launched in September 2021, 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup is the only solution on the market to cover all aspects of security, compliance and backup for Microsoft 365, protecting against spam, viruses, phishing and ransomware; with email archiving, encryption, advanced threat protection, email continuity, signatures and disclaimers -- and it also includes M365 data and user endpoint backup and recovery. This provides companies with data protection, while also ensuring continuity thanks to inbuilt backup and recovery capabilities. More info: With 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup, we have created a comprehensive cloud security bundle that includes everything needed to protect email and data in Microsoft 365. The solution not only provides our customers with holistic security, but also greatly reduces the workload for IT administrators, as all features can be controlled and managed centrally from an intuitive interface. We want to save our customers from having to find their way through a jungle full of security tools and show how simple and reliable email and data security can be. 365 Total Protection is the only solution on the market to cover all aspects of security, compliance and backup for Microsoft 365. Choose from various bundles to suit your business needs, and enjoy state-of-the-art email security that protects against spam, viruses, phishing and ransomware; plus email signatures and disclaimers. You can also benefit from Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to defend your users against the most sophisticated email attacks, automated email continuity to prevent unexpected downtime and legally compliant email archiving to keep all emails safe and searchable. You can even opt for backup and recovery for endpoints and Microsoft 365 data in mailboxes, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint. 365 Total Protection‘s tailored integration with Microsoft 365 simplifies your entire experience: from signup, to setup, to feature and user management. Its central console is a perfect blend of data privacy and ease of use, enabing you to do more and worry less. WHY Company and organization leaders want to rest easy at night knowing their Microsoft 365 data is safe - free from threats - but also easy to recover should a disaster occur. Sys admins, MSPs and VARs want to meet this need and to serve their customers efficiently and effectively while keeping an eye on their bottom line to be profitable. They seek robust, high-performance solutions to do so but find it inconvenient to have to get these from different vendors, needing to learn (and train their staff) to use different interfaces, face different billing systems and structures, receive different levels and types of support, and so on. These issues are magnified because of the challenges they additionally face to hire and retain top tech employees in a highly competitive job market. 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup addresses all these needs by providing a convenient all-in-one solution that can be centrally managed. 365 Total Protection Enterprise Backup is reliable, tried and tested, quick and easy to use and learn, and ahead of the curve when it comes to combatting ever evolving threats, thanks to ongoing research by Hornetsecurity’s inhouse security labs and innovation by its development team. WHO Hornetsecurity is the leading security and backup solution provider for Microsoft 365. Its flagship product is the most extensive cloud security solution for Microsoft 365 on the market, providing robust, comprehensive, award-winning protection: Spam and virus filtering, protection against phishing and ransomware, legally compliant archiving and encryption, advanced threat protection, email continuity, signatures and disclaimers. It’s an all-in-one security package that even includes backup and recovery for all data in Microsoft 365 and users’ endpoints. Hornetsecurity Inc. is based in Pittsburgh, PA with North America offices in Washington D.C. and Montreal, Canada. Globally, Hornetsecurity operates in more than 30 countries through its international distribution network. Its premium services are used by approximately 50,000 customers including Swisscom, Telefónica, KONICA MINOLTA, LVM Versicherung, DEKRA and CLAAS.

N-able Cove Data Protection - Cloud-first data protection as a service
The problem with traditional backup services If you talk with any IT professional about backup two things often come up. Firstly, they sometimes struggle to manage the multitude of products strung together to create a complete service, and secondly, they struggle to find the right people with the right skills to manage those products. Add on top of this the administrative weight of legacy systems, which can crush the dwindling resource of IT teams, and you have a serious problem. To manage these issues, IT teams have long accepted sky-high costs and extreme inefficiency as the standard fare of implementing a robust backup service. It's this backdrop which saw N-able develop its Cove Data Protection™ service. Cove is a cloud-first, data protection as-a-service product that modernises data protection for efficient backup and business-class disaster recovery. Its appliance-free, direct-to-cloud capabilities along with its advanced disaster recovery features are designed specifically to provide the cost efficiency, scalability, and reliability that MSPs and small businesses require. Ransomware raises the stakes Furthermore, while most backup products were designed for traditional, natural, or physical disaster scenarios, cyber attacks are today’s biggest threat. Cove not only helps with ransomware recovery, but its foundational architecture also reduces the size of the attack surface in two ways. First, primary backup storage is in the cloud, off the local network and out of the reach of ransomware by default. Second, because Cove is a fully hosted SaaS application, the data protection application itself is also protected against bad actors roaming your local network. With key recovery resources protected, customers are less likely to feel they must pay the ransom, and MSPs are better positioned to get systems up and running again promptly. The benefits of truly cloud-first architecture Customers report that Cove is up to 90% less labour intensive than legacy backup solutions. Meaning that in real terms users are able to go from spending 40 hours per month on backup administration, checking, and troubleshooting down to four hours; from consuming the time of three full-time support technicians down to around half of a full-time equivalent; and from 95 tickets per day down to nine. The time savings are real, and have a real impact on staff morale when talented technicians are freed for new strategic projects. The efficiency doesn’t end with time savings. Cove’s proprietary architecture means that incremental backups move 60 times less data than with traditional image-level backups, allowing for more frequent direct-to-cloud backups, even where network bandwidth is limited. This translates to better recovery point objectives. The additional Standby Image feature, released in June 2022, further makes Cove a complete and comprehensive disaster recovery solution. Making it easier to create, manage, and report on virtual server images in a user’s location of choice, providing a head start for fast and flexible disaster recovery. Backup storage in N-able’s purpose-built private cloud is included in the price of Cove. Users can manage the product from a single, user-friendly dashboard. Data protection management for servers, workstations, and Microsoft 365 data across multiple customers and locations are all accessible from this single point. This dramatically reduces the amount of time needed to log into and out of multiple products or multiple customer instances to perform status checks. Instead, at-a-glance colour coded charts show in seconds if everything is good across all customers and all data sources. Cove also makes local storage optional, reducing or removing the ever-growing storage management burden that comes with traditional backup products. Some vendors may claim to be cloud-first, but in reality, are simply legacy local-first architectures with bolted-on cloud features that add cost and complexity. Cove’s direct-to-cloud data protection as a service offers a completely different approach that saves time, money and resources while delivering robust and reliable data protection. Customers love Cove just as much as we do Cove is currently in use by more than 12,500 MSP partners, protecting over 140,000 customer businesses. Earlier this year we announced a milestone for Cove where we surpassed protections for over 1.2 million Microsoft 365 end user accounts. Cove’s innovative approach has had significant impact on our customer’s business: “Nobody cares about a backup solution when it is not needed, but as soon as there’s a problem, it is instantly the most important product. The reliability and thoroughness of Cove give us everything we need to protect against every disaster imaginable for our servers and workstations. We not only have experienced its robustness in action, but I can also finally sleep at night.” - Joshua Wragg, President, NexusTech, LLC “Since switching to a cloud-first approach, we’ve been able to recover money in staff time. I’d say we’ve recovered about 10 hours a week in real terms. That’s billable time that can go elsewhere. We’re talking $1,500 a week at a minimum,” - Paul Foley, Director, Procision IT. Additional detailed customer experiences and commentary are available at https://www.n-able.com/re-think-backup.

ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage with Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery
Ransomware attacks are a constant and are in the news on a daily basis. If a ransomware event occurs, the last line of defense is the backup storage where data can be restored from. Virtually all backup storage solutions are network-facing and vulnerable to attack. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage with Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery is the only solution that offers a non-network-facing tier (air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 50 SeriesFIPS 197 Certified & XTS-AES 256-bit Encrypted USB Drive for Data Protection
Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 50 SeriesFIPS 197 Certified & XTS-AES 256-bit Encrypted USB Drive for Data Protection “Kingston has been one of the pioneers in supplying hardware-encrypted USB solutions to the global market, and it still leads the market today. Kingston is committed to providing customers with strong data security for mobile data and to ensure compliance to laws and regulations such as GDPR. In 2016, Kingston purchased IronKey, which was a company known for developing encryption solutions for the U.S. Government and military. Today, the Kingston IronKey branded hardware-encrypted drives are the best-known drives in the data security market. The foundation of hardware-encrypted drives is to properly implement the state-of-the-art encryption algorithm, such as the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in the latest XTS mode. Kingston offers drives with FIPS 197 certification, which means they were lab-tested to verify they are properly encrypting and decrypting data. For higher security, Kingston offers FIPS 140-2 Level 3 drives which are designed for military-grade applications with strong anti-tampering protections. For example, the Kingston D300S series of drives is NATO-certified as an example; the S1000 series is used by governments worldwide as a best-in-class encrypted drive. All Kingston drives include Brute Force attack protection. That means that someone guessing a password has 10 retries before the password either locks up or resets the drive by crypto-erasing the data. Brute Force attack protection is a differentiator from software encryption that does not block the unlimited guessing of passwords with powerful computers and tools. In addition, firmware on the drives is digitally signed to block BadUSB attacks; if the firmware is replaced by a bad actor, the controller will detect it and “brick” the drive. Starting in May 2022, Kingston has launched new IronKey drives that have incorporated additional security options to make drives even more user-friendly and secure: 1. Multi-Passwords: Kingston’s new Vault Privacy 50 (VP50), Vault-Privacy80ES (VP80ES) now incorporate multi-password option. Customers can now enable multi-password mode. The VP50 allows for up to 3 passwords and VP80ES allows up to two. In the case of VP50, the Admin password can be used to unlock a drive if Brute Force attack protection was triggered on the other passwords and locked them, allowing small and medium businesses to locally manage their drives. Multi-passwords address Kingston’s customers’ #1 request for data recovery options should a password be forgotten. In addition, new regulations for forensics often require companies to account for what data was on a recovered drive or drive returned by an employee; using the Admin role and password, VP50 drives can be unlocked to reset the User password and/or access the data that is stored on the drive. 2. New Passphrase mode: Complex passwords are still there, but people are getting fatigued with remembering them. Passphrase allows for new passwords from 10-64 characters long; this means customers can use passwords that are lists of words, a sentence, a line from a poem or lyrics, etc. They are much easier to remember and hard to guess. The FBI recommended that people use passphrases of 15 or more characters as stronger password security for encrypted drives. 3. New Eye symbol: Entering a new password can be fraught with typos. VP50 and VP80ES are the first mainstream drives to allow for users to click on the eye symbol and see their password. No more typos! 4. New Virtual Keyboard: VP50 adds a virtual keyboard to enter the password for Windows and macOS. This new feature can block keyloggers and screenloggers that try to capture the keys being entered. When designing the IronKey VP80ES External SSD and VP50 USB drive, Kingston has been single-minded about strong data security. A keypad drive, whether using physical buttons or a touch screen like VP80ES, can be attacked by analysing fingerprint traces on the keys. VP80ES comes with a Key Randomizer feature, set by default, that scrambles the digits and rows of alphabet keys upon every login; in this case, a Mission Impossible style of attack by analysing fingerprint smudges is not feasible. The potential situations where you’d get the most benefit from Kingston IronKey hardware-encrypted drives are quite different to typical usage scenarios of traditional external storage, though. We believe this will be well understood by customers, who will make the right choice for their needs using a trusted company with a strong track record.” – Tiago Gomes, Flash Business Manager, Kingston Technology.

Infinidat's InfiniBox™ SSA II Solid State Array drives true innovation: Faster Performance, Expanded AIOps, and Comprehensive Cyber Resilience
The InfiniBox™ SSA II enterprise storage platform is an all-flash array for highly transactional workloads requiring consistent, microsecond latency for every I/O and delivers latency as low as 35microseconds. Infinidat’s intelligent learning algorithms and patented Neural Cache allow 90% or better of I/Os to be serviced at DRAM speed. Combining this with an optimised path to solid-state storage ensures outstanding end-to-end performance. The InfiniBox SSA II is enterprise-class storage platform with unmatched high availability, extensive cyber resilience, autonomous automation, high reliability, comprehensive AIOps integration, and ease of use that includes the benefit of our performance, 100% availability, and cyber recoverability guarantees. Infinidat is the ONLY small company in the Leadership quadrant of the latest Gartner Primary Storage Magic Quadrant for the 4th year in a row. What makes the InfiniBox SSA II innovative is the comprehensive enterprise focus. Let’s look at an example of a Global Fortune 50 financial services customer. This Fortune 50 customer has told us they love the AIOps infrastructure integration, ease of use with our autonomous automation to reduce operational manpower, and our Neural Cache technology, which means they get optimal performance for their real-world workloads with NO performance tuning, as neural cache does that autonomously and automatically, and 100% availability. In this customer’s configurations, the InfiniBox SSA II outperformed competitors’ all-flash arrays by 3X in ALL real-world Oracle RAC testing. Additionally, they are saving 3.5X on CAPEX and OPEX for their storage environment compared to their 3 former all-flash array vendors. Infinidat has publicly disclosed that >25% of the Fortune 50 are our customers. And in Gartner Peer Insights Reviews (reviews are by END USERS) the InfiniBox SSA II has received a 5 out of a possible 5 rating by end users. Key differentiators for the InfiniBox SSA II are: A) High-end enterprise focus only solutions. B) Comprehensive licensing model – no piecemeal charging for features/functions making us very easy to transact with. C) Multiple recurring revenue models with cloud-like consumption. D) Software-centric design architecture using off-the-shelf hardware components with comprehensive enterprise-class data services such as snapshot, immutability for cyber resilience, 3 and 4 site replication, and autonomous automation so almost no end-user management is needed for the platforms. E) ONLY vendor to offer primary storage cyber resilience guarantees for partners to offer to end users. F) Most comprehensive cyber resilience solution, which is included for free, that guarantees the recovery of an immutable snapshot in ONE MINUTE OR LESS. G) extensive AIOps technology both in the storage array and integrated with 3rd party AIOps vendors (VMware, ServiceNow, RedHat etc), H) technical advisors assigned to all accounts at NO charge. InfiniBox SSA II drives true innovation. Storage analyst Evaluator Group noted: “Infinidat’s achieving 35 microseconds of latency is significant not only for the company with the new InfiniBox SSA II solution, but it also sets a new bar for the storage industry.” ESG noted in their technical evaluation “Based on customer testimony, the InfiniBox SSA II has exceeded their expectations in delivering optimal application performance for any given mix of traditional and modern workloads, without the burden of excessive costs.”

StorMagic ARQvault Video Management System for Retail Store Environments
StorMagic ARQvault Video Management System (VMS) software lets retailers capture video anywhere, store it forever and find it fast. It is based on the ARQvault Active Intelligent Repository (AIR) architecture and can reduce storage costs by at least 50 percent versus other solutions. ARQvault was purpose-built to store, manage and utilise video and other unstructured data. It is ideal for capturing, storing, using and managing video at individual stores, or can be used and managed centrally. There are many benefits of surveillance video, not only to look back, but to look forward and provide business insight. Retailers are creating video assets that provide tremendous value but also require massive amounts of expensive storage. To use and maintain these assets with evolving retention, compliance and legal requirements, retailers can rely on ARQvault VMS to manage video, scale easily when needed, and make video easy to find and use, all at a reasonable cost. For retailers, surveillance video storage can be complicated and expensive. Large retail chains suffer from spiralling costs and complexity as solutions are deployed across many store locations. Retail SMEs may have lower store counts, but face their own difficulties with limited budgets and resources. In addition, the use of video surveillance systems is growing at a significant rate, used not only for deterrence and detection, but as a tool for insight and analysis for retail organisations. More cameras in more stores with higher quality requirements is creating an explosion of video data for retailers. ARQvault VMS lets retail security and IT managers capture video anywhere, store it forever, and find it fast. Using open systems, there is no vendor lock-in, and users, cameras, sites and storage expand easily. Existing servers and storage can be used, saving on incremental costs. Automated tiering optimises performance and reduces storage costs by at least 50 percent in a secure, easy-to-manage system. Low-resolution proxies require ~5 percent of the storage space of high-resolution originals and can be used for day-to-day search, which dramatically improves network performance. High-resolution originals can be moved to lower-cost storage yet remain an active part of the repository and are available on demand when needed. The use of metadata throughout the system enables speedy, intelligent search while multiple tiers of storage make sure data is always available. StorMagic ARQvault VMS is a powerful video surveillance solution. It solves the challenges retailers face to store, manage, find and use video as they add more cameras capturing higher-resolution video in more sites. It helps retailers by improving ease of use and performance while reducing storage costs, so they can afford to capture all the video they want, store it for as long as they want (even forever), and find and utilise it easily for business benefit. ARQvault VMS uses the ARQvault AIR architecture, which was purpose-built to manage video and other unstructured data. Ideal for capturing, storing, using and managing video, ARQvault is: Active: all storage is an active part of the repository – ARQvault knows where all video is stored and actively seeks, finds and retrieves any video in real time, no matter its age or location. Intelligent: ARQvault VMS uses policies to move video to different storage tiers, creates low-resolution proxies for fast retrieval, and uses metadata and analytics integration for rich analysis. Repository: a collection of vaults creates a federated repository. ARQvault software combines different and distributed storage resources into an integrated system for video shared across the network. Vaults consist of a server, storage and ARQvault software. StorMagic solves retail IT problems by offering a flexible, robust, easy-to-use, cost-effective video surveillance solution. ARQvault VMS advantages include: Flexible Supports thousands of cameras and camera standards Provides configurable live-views and a massively scalable video wall Works with existing servers and storage, integrates with other video management systems Robust Offers extensive camera controls Is always available, with distributed and replicated video storage Provides security and complete chain-of-custody reporting Simple Is easy to use and manage, from a single console or multiple locations Finds what’s needed fast with intelligent search using rich metadata Expands easily, by adding servers, storage, and/or vaults Cost Effective Saves 50% on storage vs. other solutions Can use existing servers and storage Reduces network congestion with low-res proxies For retailers with a few, hundreds or thousands of store locations, ARQvault VMS combines and shares distributed storage resources, can actively search, playback and view any video in real time, and uses policies to automatically move video to different storage tiers, improving performance and reducing costs.

Take advantage of Data Dynamics' award-winning StorageX solution to manage data smartly
•StorageX 8.5.1 is Data Dynamics’ leading unstructured data management solution that delivers policy-based data management with no vendor lock-in. • With StorageX 8.5.1, enterprises can modernize their infrastructure to drive cost reduction, risk mitigation, and policy automation. • StorageX 8.5.1 provides next-generation capabilities about file storage management, giving customers more real-time insights and automation around file access security, anomaly detection, intelligent multi-cloud, and agile metadata and access pattern analytics, all of which can be used to drive data management actions. • This allows customers to correlate file access, file ownership, and utilization and then create data management policies that reduce the surface area for ransomware attacks, make immutable copies of data, drive data tiering, and optimize storage by location. Features of StorageX 8.5.1: The mobility feature of Storage X provides for intelligence-driven, automated data migrations to meet the needs and scale of global enterprises. Having migrated over 400 petabytes of data encompassing hundreds of trillions of files, this feature is trusted and proven and delivers without a single byte of data lost. Identify workloads and migrate data based on characteristics such as the least-touched files, files owned by specific users or groups, or hundreds of other actionable insights. StorageX 8.5.1 Migration is a powerful migration engine that moves large volumes of data across shares and exports with speed and accuracy. o Move files seamlessly from NAS to NAS or server to server for a technology refresh. o Provide automatic provisioning of filesystem security at the destination. o Enable predictable results with cutover estimation and full audit reporting. The StorageX 8.5.1 Management Portal dashboard shows graphical reports of unstructured file analysis such as age, activity, and file type to empower enterprise optimization through workload tiering and archiving redundant, obsolete, and trivial data. When deployed on a virtual server, StorageX will facilitate the rapid identification of datastores attached to servers on other platforms. Once those datastores are identified, a StorageX migration policy will keep the data in sync between the two platforms until the server is ready to be cutover. Migration will happen behind the scenes while transparent to users and applications using the server. With the actionable insights gained from metadata file analytics, StorageX can seamlessly move petabytes of data to the optimal location resulting in greater productivity and lower storage costs. Selectively migrate data bi-directionally for agility and protection on-premise, private cloud, and the edge. Mobility functionality is built for scalable performance and data connectivity to address disaster recovery from the cloud, backup to the cloud, and hybrid cloud deployment. Users can quickly move workloads back and forth between on-premise and the cloud to protect users’ investment, maximize flexibility, and increase productivity. By being deployed on a single application that runs on virtual servers, StorageX provides a single pane of glass for moving data from any server personality like Windows or Linux. One StorageX Universal Data Engine (UDE) can move hundreds of terabytes. Adding additional UDEs is a simple process and provides a way to scale to petabytes of data and thousands of data stores. StorageX also provides a robust REST API, which can be integrated into any workflow. Benefits of using StorageX 8.5.1: Provides actionable insights for data location optimization. Save storage costs by moving data sets to the optimal locations. StorageX provides automated policies for seamless migration and reduces the risk. The product helps in Scaling enterprise data migration with UDEs while meeting their cutover time. Customers typically reduce their overall storage costs by 50%, faster time to value by 66%, and improve storage management productivity by 10X. With its capability to meet cutover expectations using scalable UDEs, StorageX has optimized more than 350 PBs totally for its customers, saving 170+ years in project time and $170 MM in the total cost of storage.

Brillio implemented end-to-end Infrastructure Management on Azure achieving ~53% higher First Level Resolution (FLR) leading to faster resolution & cost savings
About the client: Client is one of the world's leading industrial thread manufacturers serving the Apparel and Footwear industries. Objective: To improve availability of IT infrastructure and operations on cloud with the help of round the clock support services and transformational initiatives which would lead to no/ minimal business disruption. Challenges: 1) Frequent Outages: The client's IT infrastructure was facing frequent outages which was resulting in loss of business and degraded customer experience. Azure infrastructure was not being monitored. 2) Siloed Operations: Lack of synchronization amongst multiple IT teams leading to fragmented and inconsistent user experience. 3) High Manual Effort: Significant manual effort spent on non-value adding activities. Lack of automation leading to high manual effort spent on simple activities such as catch and dispatch of tickets. 4) Need for multi-lingual support: Given the global presence of the client, there was a need for support in English, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. 5) High number of issues for End user computing: Legacy ways of managing EUC devices leading to surge in number of issues with EUC devices. Solution: Our proposed integrated and unified model of operations considering people, process & technology was appreciated by the client as it ensured that teams are not operating in siloes thereby improving efficiency. Brillio provided solution for continuous improvement and innovation rather than just keeping the lights on. With the help of our deep understanding of the landscape and detailed historical ticket analysis, we could recommend pointed technology transformation themes leveraging brillioone.ai and their expected impact. Brillio had already helped the client execute world's first SAP to Azure migration. Once migrated to Azure, Brillio was tasked with setting up an effective & efficient support model on Azure. Brillio implemented an integrated operating model with cross-skilled technology teams to monitor & manage Client's IT infrastructure and support the users while ensuring zero business disruption during the transition to Brillio. We also undertook technology transformation initiatives to modernize client's IT infrastructure and improve availability and resiliency. Brillio, also with the implementation of brillioone.ai FinOps module for cloud cost optimisation was able to bring down the total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the client. We provided the client with Multilingual ServiceDesk and EUC support to cater to user requests with 24X7 coverage. As a managed service provider, we Integrated the operations L1/L2/L3 support) by leveraging monitoring & management of infrastructure across: • Azure platform • OS • Storage & backup • Network • SAP We were also successful in automating repetitive and mundane tasks across end user computing, patch management, identity and access management and self-service through brillioone.ai script center leading to improved efficiency. We configured event correlation rules with the help of Solar winds Log and event manager leading to reduction in duplicate alerts and resulting in faster MTTR. Business Benefits: 1) ~40% reduction in MTTR for incidents 2) ~35% reduction in operations cost for client per year owing to outsourcing of support activities 3) ~53% higher First Level Resolution (FLR) leading to faster resolution & cost savings 4) ~30% improvement in end user satisfaction owing to better and consistent end user experience 5) ~60% reduction in outages caused due to IT infrastructure Click the link below to know more about our story: https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/coats

AMD Pensando Distributed Services Platform
Built on the same technology that the hyperscalers use, at the heart of the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Platform is a fully programmable DPU (Data Processing Unit). Optimized to execute a software stack delivering cloud, compute, network, storage, and security services at cloud scale – with minimal latency, jitter, and power requirements. AMD Pensando offers a suite of robust software service packages that implement cloud infrastructure functions for networking, storage, security and observability. These packages can be used as-is and managed via gRPC/REST APIs, and can be a starting point for customers to develop custom solutions. The APIs also allow for the integration of DSC devices into the management and orchestration control plane for cloud providers and allows for DSC lifecycle management, and health monitoring, collecting metrics and configuring policies for networking, storage and security. Unlike its competitors, AMD Pensando delivers the highest level of security through isolated hardware that is architected to be secure from internal and external threats. The AMD Pensando Distributed Services Platform inspects East-West traffic in the data center, applying policies that stop threat actors from moving through the internal network. This is critical as companies are struggling to strengthen data center and network security, not just to combat external threats but confront internal security issues by attempting to achieve segmentation through firewalls, software agents and network switches. The AMD Pensado DPU can be deployed in multiple form factors including as a traditional SmartNIC in cloud provider environments, delivering 8-13x greater performance compared to competitive solutions. In enterprises, as part of the Aruba CX 10000 SmartSwitch, it delivers 100x the scale and 10x the performance at a third of the cost of incumbent solutions with no disruption to existing application infrastructures. The AMD Pensando Distributed Services Platform offers a Software Defined Networking stack, with a programmable P4 DPU and hyperscale software, delivers infrastructure features to cloud customers; the best price-to-performance characteristics; and better east-west and segmented security. The AMD Pensando Distributed Services Platform enables customers to continuously innovate on, and deliver, secure and inexpensive network services at high velocity. What’s more, as showcased at VMware Explore in August, the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card is now one of the first DPU solutions to support VMware vSphere 8, and is the only card to be packaged with multiple vendors’ server configurations, including Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo. Previously known as “Project Monterey”, vSphere 8 on DPUs offloads infrastructure workloads such as networking, storage, and security from the CPU by leveraging the new vSphere Distributed Services Engine. With the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Cards, valuable CPU cycles are freed to be used for business functions and revenue generating applications. AMD Pensando has delivered significant performance benefits to key customers, including: 30%+ CAPEX and OPEX savings 50%+ power savings 5X improvement in network (from 10 MPPS to 50 MPPS) 6X improvement in storage (from 300K IOPS to 2 million IOPS) 40x improvement in cloud-based connection-related performance $28 million (31%) in TCO savings in 20,000 Servers over five years Supporting documents: https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/pensando-dsc-200-product-brief.pdf https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/aruba-cx-10000-series-datasheet.pdf https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/zero-trust-building-secure-data-centers-cx-10000.pdf

iQuila VEN
We’ve created a connection across any internet carrier including 4G/5G and satellite that’s as simple, secure and robust as directly connected devices in the same room. iQuila is the first - and only - network protocol that can do this. Our proprietary protocol removes the bottlenecks of every old and new networking alternative. With iQuila, maintaining a unified, reliable, and secure network is no longer a challenge, even where multiple site locations and a remote/mobile work force has to be need to be factored-in. Using the iQuila Virtual Extended Network (or VEN), you can bridge any device securely to the same network, from any location, by using our always-on agent. iQuila VEN carries Layer 2 traffic over Layer 3, while protecting not only the connection, but the device too – with military grade encryption. What this means is that you can securely and effortlessly carry local network (LAN) traffic, over any internet connection (WAN) – keeping all devices, regardless of where they are located, on the same network.

Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll Solution
About Zalaris Zalaris are a comprehensive, market-leading HR & payroll services and technology supplier specialising in providing transactional business services supported by a single, cloud-based, global solution. At Zalaris, our mission is to simplify HR and payroll administration and empower our customers with useful information so that they can invest more in their people. Our values bind us together as one company, shaping how we behave towards each other, our customers, and our partners across the markets we serve. We believe that everyone matters and that the best results are achieved not by being the best in the team but by bringing the best out of your team. What is Novel about the Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll Solution? Zalaris offer a single platform covering the entire HR and payroll “Hire-to-Retire” process, providing a single global source of truth. The Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll solution allows customers to process multicounty payroll through one solution. It provides a unified, consistent experience regardless of industry, size, population construct and geography. The solution is considered a tier-one software, yet Zalaris are indiscriminate of company size. The software supports a broad demographic of customers ranging from single-country three hundred employee companies to global three hundred thousand employee companies. The solution has been carefully designed to support even the most complex processes and requirements with minimal training to use. The solution is highly intuitive and workflow-oriented, supporting role-based authorisation and access levels. The Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll solution has integration capabilities that enable connectivity to any third-party solutions. These automated integrations utilise push technology, not manual file transfer, allowing customers to enjoy the solution’s flexibility to accommodate their needs. This can be hugely beneficial to ensuring legal compliance across any geography. Zalaris also supports its customers by offering to spread the implementation cost across the length of the project to protect its customers’ capital expenditure (cap-ex) and by offering the option to TUPE staff who would be made redundant. How does the product break conventional ideas? How does it go beyond marginal improvements? The Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll solution breaks conventional ideas by offering a single HR and payroll solution covering the entire “Hire-to-Retire” process, resolving the challenges of relying on fragmented solutions and processes within one organisation across multiple sites or countries. This approach allows for greater visibility across an entire multicounty organisation, providing accurate, holistic data to inform better decision-making. The solution is entirely cloud-based, breaking the convention of organisations using and maintaining outdated, on-premise solutions. The Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll solution goes beyond marginal improvements by automating 98.7% of processing. This automation profoundly improves accuracy and reduces human error rates, unlike conventional solutions, which rely heavily on manual efforts to produce payroll output. Furthermore, by using a single streamlined solution, Zalaris can extract data in its purest form, and report on any aspect of the data with perfect accuracy. Additionally, because Zalaris uses the solution internally, Zalaris employees are incentivised to provide feedback and recommendations for improvements. This feedback, along with feedback from customers, helps to continuously evolve and improve the solution by creating additional capabilities to adapt to new demand. These updates are constantly being rolled out, all free of charge for customers to use and enjoy. How do customers benefit? The benefits to the customer are abundant, but perhaps the single most important benefit is the assurance that excellent rates of accuracy in payroll, finance and reporting is guaranteed every time. Ensured due to the removal of massive amounts of manual effort and inefficiency processing HR and payroll information. Moreover, the Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll solution is cheaper than running an on-premise solution in-house. By leveraging the solution, it enables the customer to reduce the back-office costs of supporting a potentially inefficient, outdated, in-house solution and reinvest money back into their core business. The Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll solution also has the flexibility to adapt to new requirements as the company evolves and grows over time. The Zalaris Cloud HR and Payroll solution is one of the most secure solutions globally. It is trusted by major international organisations, including banking institutions, which require the highest levels of assurance. Customers can also be sure the system is always legally compliant, as Zalaris’s specialist staff work diligently to ensure this is the case. Zalaris has been operating for over 20 years and has a pool of over one thousand HR and payroll technology experts available when a customer requires them. It is like having an international department of over one thousand people who can be called upon for their expertise and knowledge. Furthermore, Zalaris operate under a service level agreement with the customer and offer service credit availability in the rare cases where a service level agreement is breached. Zalaris also offer local service management supported by local Zalaris teams present in the country where the client is based. This localisation is not only to provide people who can speak the local language but who are physically present in that localation because they typically have the greatest depth of knowledge in local practices and legislation. The system also eliminates hours of training time as it is intuitive to use. Zalaris Key Differentiators Zalaris are big enough to scale and small enough to care and have a strong focus on its “Know Your Customer” process. This process ensures that customers feel we are a department within their business rather than a service provider. Zalaris’ large global presence drives scalability so that customers can be supported with large employee numbers. As Zalaris customers grow, they continue to reap the benefits of using a single technology platform across all operating countries. Zalaris are committed to always having a local presence where its customers are, supporting processes requiring local knowledge, and further enhancing its global service capabilities. Zalaris has achieved a Customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +50 compared to an industry average of +30, which alone proves that the Zalaris HR and Payroll Cloud solution goes above and beyond the industry standard. Zalaris endeavours to improve on this technology by adding intuitive enhancements. Previous significant enhancements have included an interactive portal, a mobile solution, and an electronic document archiving solution capable of managing GDPR-regulated documents. Zalaris’ system operates with 98.7% automation and seamless integration to core HR systems and third-party applications. Zalaris’ multi-client cloud infrastructure is an easily integrated solution with zero system downtime for the payroll platform, underpinning efficient operations, scale, access to innovations, and cost benefits. Best practices around legislation, compliance and data security are at the heart of Zalaris’ solution and transactional practices. This added assurance of maintaining compliance within the Zalaris solutions is always at zero cost to the customer. Zalaris work with all its customers to create flexible commercial and operating models to suit their needs. This flexibility has included measures such as reducing the upfront investment needed to begin their HR transformations or adapting the service delivery models to meet specific requirements. No matter the size or level of support, all customer projects taken on by Zalaris UK receive pro-bono executive sponsorship from a member of the Zalaris UK senior leadership team.

BrightCloud® Cloud Service Intelligence, part of BrightCloud Threat Intelligence
OpenText Security Solutions helps customers in their cyber resilience mission by embedding security and data management software and best practices across an organisation. Our comprehensive, award-winning security and data management solutions (Webroot and Carbonite) deliver end-to-end cyber resilience that keeps organisations’ data secure and protected. We stop lateral movement if systems or data have been compromised so businesses can quickly recover from cyberattacks and accidental data loss. We provide: • The most comprehensive solution for cyber resilience with products that span email, endpoint, and DNS protection • Managed detection and response (MDR) • Endpoint, server, and cloud backup • Disaster recovery • Information archiving • Security awareness training and more Our integrated security and data management product portfolio is unmatched in SMB and mid-market enterprises and protects over 95 million devices across home users, businesses, and technology partners. Over 23,000 MSPs and VARs worldwide use and sell our cyber resilience solutions. What, exactly, is novel about the product/process or innovation? BrightCloud Threat Intelligence is our proprietary sixth-generation machine learning-based threat intelligence platform, which powers our portfolio of solutions and is leveraged by over 140 leading security vendors worldwide. It has the broadest threat coverage model, fewest uncategorised objects, and the most historical records enabling it to provide real-time, contextual insights to prevent zero-day threats which others cannot replicate. BrightCloud® Cloud Service Intelligence, part of BrightCloud Threat Intelligence, enables Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) and other security and technology vendors to enforce data-centric security policies and prevent unwanted interactions with cloud services and associated applications. Through a suite of three components – Cloud Application Classification, Cloud Application Function, and Cloud Application Reputation – partners can use BrightCloud® Cloud Service Intelligence to identify, classify, and block/allow access based on the application’s classification, functions, and reputation score. By leveraging a reputation score, organisations can choose the level of application reputation risk appropriate for their needs. Additionally, the score incorporates the BrightCloud® Domain Safety Score. This patent-pending technology assesses the cybersecurity risk to users and networks from visiting a specific domain, whether encrypted through HTTPS or not. How does the product or process break with conventional ideas or processes in its field? Cyberattacks' ever-increasing volume, speed, and sophistication require a move beyond traditional security. Today's cybercriminals are launching dynamic, stealthy threats that are targeted and designed to infiltrate defences through multiple network entry points. Technology and security vendors can't risk their customers' trust or diminish the potential value of their products and services due to a lack of reliable, real-time intelligence. Therefore, companies need BrightCloud Cloud Service Intelligence as it is as dynamic as the attacks they are looking to defend against. It can keep ahead of the proliferation of today's threats and protect against new threats that may only live in the wild for hours or minutes. How does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists? The risks in securing cloud applications are straightforward: if IT doesn't know about an unsanctioned application or service, they can't adequately protect it or its data accesses and stores. Organisations are increasingly turning to CASB vendors to address cloud service risks, enforce security policies, and comply with regulations. The real-time threat intelligence is built into this new cloud-specific solution, utilising over 10 years of innovation at the forefront of AI and ML to provide a new era of real-time visibility to all modern users. With limited market offerings available to manage cloud access and applications efficiently and strategically, having access to this calibre of cloud-specific threat intelligence presents a compelling competitive advantage for IT partner organisations. How do customers benefit from the product / process or innovation? With BrightCloud® Threat Intelligence Services, customers can overcome the pace of malware creation and render the next generation of web-based threats obsolete; identify and protect their customers from malicious actors in real time; and secure an expanding corporate network perimeter with web, file, and mobile security solutions. It is integrated with existing security solutions through the Webroot® software development kit (SDK) and an easy-to-use REST API. Depending on the service, it may be combined in three modes (hosted, local database, or hybrid), allowing them to select the integration and deployment type best suited to their needs.

NodeZero - A Disruptor in the Penetration Testing Space
NodeZero is an autonomous penetration testing platform that continuously assesses an enterprise's attack surface, identifying ways an attacker could chain together harvested credentials, misconfigurations, dangerous product defaults, and exploitable vulnerabilities to compromise systems and data. NodeZero helps organizations focus on fixing problems that can actually be exploited, saving time and resources spent chasing false positives. While so many are focused on vulnerabilities and malware on endpoints, understanding the attack paths an attacker could use to exploit an organization at risk is key. Pentesters, vulnerability scanners, and installed agents create alerts on potential vulnerabilities and breaches; however, a large majority of all vulnerabilities are unexploitable – which is a huge time and resource suck for security teams. NodeZero is a true self-service SaaS offering that is safe to run in production and requires no persistent or credentialed agents. Customers can assess their entire organization in a matter of hours, versus waiting weeks or months for consultants to manually run scans and produce reports; and the platform helps clients focus on fixing problems that can actually be exploited, saving them time and resources. NodeZero gives IT administrators and network engineers 'security superpowers,' enabling them to operate like ethical hackers with 20 years of experience and act as a force multiplier for MSP and MSSP partners. Horizon3.ai’s vision is to deliver continuous attack paired with continuous defense -- the ultimate purple team -- executing a find, fix, verify loop that gets smarter with every interaction, all delivered as an autonomous security platform. NodeZero is a generational leap beyond a traditional pentest – organizations often see that for themselves from the moment they give our autonomous pentesting platform a shot. NodeZero surfaces risks and weaknesses that would never have come up during a general vulnerability scan as it chains together attack tactics and techniques to illuminate your most critical impacts an attacker could generate. Take for example a recent NodeZero operation run by an organization in the wholesale distribution sector. What at first appeared to be minor “password issues” led to a high-risk attack path enabling NodeZero to access the domain admin accounts, and even break into the organization’s Azure cloud environment. From here, NodeZero could pivot and impact day-to-day operations, such as compromising their business email, but more to follow on that below. To start, NodeZero performed a host discovery and found weaknesses through the LLMNR (Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution) protocol, poisoning a host and capturing an unverified credential. (LLMNR is a service used by Windows to resolve hostnames to IP addresses when a DNS request fails in a network.) The first thing NodeZero did at that point was to try to crack the hash, which it did in under five minutes. NodeZero obfuscates usernames and passwords prior to destroying those records after every pentest, in order to verify that NodeZero was successfully able to obtain them. In this case, “when we see a capital P at the beginning and an exclamation point at the end, that doesn’t bode well,” says Monti Knode, Director of Customer Success with Horizon3.ai. This usually, as you likely already know, means it’s a default or extremely common password. Making matters worse, this was a privileged account. Now that NodeZero had the name and password, it attempted to log in to the domain – and in this case, it was able to do so as a Domain Administrator immediately leading to a domain compromise on this domain controller with full read/write access permissions. Domain compromise not once but twice A business email compromise enabled NodeZero to take a regular user’s credentials – found while trying to log into the domain – and leverage that to find other credentials. It then could find a domain user, impersonate them, and gain additional control over a second domain admin. With this second credential, NodeZero elevated a regular user with no rights to domain admin by taking advantage of the noPAC vulnerability. A little background: In mid-December 2021, noPac, a public exploit that combined two Microsoft Active Directory design flaws, was released; it allowed escalation of privileges of a regular domain user to domain admin, which then enabled malicious actors to launch multiple attacks, including domain takeovers or ransomware attacks. That’s why this vulnerability was at the top of the weakness list. NodeZero offers a Fix Action linking to the knowledge base information needed so the organization could move on a fix action to get those domain controllers patched and protected. NodeZero offers context for the vulnerability, related credentials and impacts, and the knowledge needed to fix and maintain so the organization has the education and tools to keep it updated in the future. The impact component is vitally important, as by offering context scoring, the customer can see why a weakness that leads to critical impacts in a network gets prioritized to the top of the list of recommended fixes. The customer can even rerun a “1-click Verify” pentest on just those hosts where there is a known weakness. “Something like this should be a fairly easy one to do, and we highly recommend it – follow our Fix Actions for those noPac vulnerabilities, select the 1-click Verify option to follow up, and then rerun this more surgical operation as soon as you get the chance,” says Knode. NodeZero was also able to execute a business email compromise chaining an attack from the previously successful LLMNR poisoning technique. In this case, NodeZero found that this user was a tenant on the company’s Azure account and from the domain user, was able to pivot for further access. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) was not activated, so NodeZero was able to gain access into their Azure cloud environment and then get into Outlook. With this valid domain account, NodeZero accessed 25 business emails, and as proof, NodeZero showed the customer the subject lines of the emails it was able to access. NodeZero took advantage of the Active Directory login because MFA was disabled on Azure. With MFA turned off, NodeZero stuffed the newly captured credential and the issue bumped up to a 9.9 on the criticality scale. Implementing Multi Factor Authentication is recommended throughout network zones and data access points, and it was highly recommended that MFA was turned “on” for cloud access, limiting an attacker’s ability to take advantage of their Azure service. Some of these paths can get complicated, but there are fix-actions the customer can go forward with. They had password and credential policy problems, but there were some really high priority fixes they could remediate and see immediate risk reduction. Organization don’t have to fix everything, but they need to fix what matters most, and then verify the fix by running a pentest and aligning it to the scope to see immediately if the fix worked. One question that comes up time and time again in IT is: are the solutions I’ve already paid for effective? The NodeZero customer success team asks an organization if they received any alerts about this vulnerability. Was it detected, logged, alerted to, and was it stopped? In these instances, this did not happen. When NodeZero was able to dump these credentials, an EDR should absolutely have issued an alert and their antivirus solution should have stopped it. We recommended this organization go back, check logs to see if the incident was detected and logged, and if it wasn’t, ask how someone was able to dump your credentials and why it wasn’t logged, alerted, or stopped. From there Horizon3.ai went through the ops, helped plan a strategy, and looked at next steps. Customers can also take the information NodeZero provides in its reporting features to take the steps on their own. With NodeZero, Horizon3.ai isn't trying to ‘pwn’ organizations, we want to make sure their security stack is putting out every ounce of protection they want from it.

Seagate Lyve Cloud expands to new regions
Seagate Technology is to expand Seagate® Lyve™ Cloud regions and offerings including Lyve Cloud Archive storage service and Lyve Cloud Marketplace. The expansion reinforces the company’s commitment to solving today’s data complexity challenges and serving the mass data ecosystems with the object storage service designed for multicloud freedom. The expansion plan includes new Seagate Lyve Cloud regions in Oklahoma City, Washington DC, and Dallas in the United States (U.S.), as well as the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Japan. The new regions will complement the company’s existing Lyve Cloud presence in the U.S. and Singapore, for a total of 10 regions with 16 availability zones. The company is also rolling out Lyve Cloud Marketplace, a one-stop shop for Seagate Lyve Cloud validated partner solutions. Lyve Cloud Marketplace will enable customers to purchase tailored solutions from Seagate Lyve Cloud partners and enjoy an integrated procurement and billing process from a single platform. Additionally, Seagate is launching Lyve Cloud Archive, a unique and independent cloud storage service that delivers breakthrough total cost of ownership (TCO) without complex data management tiering or hidden fees. Seagate Lyve Cloud Archive provides TCO advantages with uncompromised features of Seagate’s flagship Lyve Cloud object storage service to support data security, mobility and durability. The archival-only cloud storage is ideal for large-scale video and image repositories, secondary data sets, backup copies and any data that lives outside of an analytics or transaction-intensive workflow. As part of the expansion, Seagate is also working to secure Health Information Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance certification in the U.S. Certification will allow the company to extend Seagate Lyve Cloud service to the healthcare industry and medical service providers who must follow stringent data privacy and compliance requirements. “To better serve customers' data management challenges, we are expanding the cloud regions, increasing data accessibility at metro edges, and offering Lyve Cloud Archive with predictable and compelling cloud economics for customers’ mass data growth,” said Ravi Naik, executive vice president of storage services and CIO at Seagate. “Lyve Cloud Marketplace bolsters our offerings by making it easy to find and shop partner applications that integrate with Seagate Lyve Cloud. We are looking forward to growing the marketplace with more partners to come.”

Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage
Wasabi provides simple, predictable and affordable hot cloud storage for businesses all over the world. It enables organizations to store and instantly access an unlimited amount of data at 1/5th the price of the competition with no complex tiers or unpredictable egress fees. Trusted by customers, channel partners, and technology alliance partners worldwide, Wasabi has been recognized as one of technology’s fastest growing and most visionary companies.

InCommand DMaaS
A complete Data Center Management as a Service (DMaaS) platform solution, InCommand is delivered through the cloud to manage all physical aspects of every type of data center including those owned and operated by enterprises, commercial colocation, and cloud environments. Whichever hybrid IT strategy is pursued, and wherever an enterprise locates its entire IT infrastructure estate (be it on premise, in third party data centers or on cloud platforms), InCommand can remotely monitor the data center operations to provide real time data on what is happening inside data halls down to the component level. This enables customer teams to create flexible, efficient and agile environments. Customers save millions of dollars in data center operating costs through energy savings from greater efficiency. This combined with increased utilization of existing physical infrastructure in terms of improved use of physical space, high efficiency power and cooling infrastructure operation. More power is available in the right place at the right time, it cuts losses, and drives day to day operational and long-term sustainability planning. InCommand extends the life of existing data centers by several years. InCommand deployments have been credited with $30m in CapEx savings where an enterprise was able to put off planned new data center construction projects. InCommand DMaaS data uniquely enables oversight and management spanning FM operations, FM DCIM, change control and management, CMMS, and IT DCIM. It does this remotely using a combination of an evolving cloud platform, a NOC staffed 24/7 by Serverfarm experts, and using proven management processes and automated monitoring. It is unique in its depth and range of asset management and reporting. Most DCIM solutions are based on premise, requiring customers to run the software, maintain and ensure data accuracy – this is often true even for cloud hosted DCIM and other DMaaS offerings. InCommand removes the pain of data management from the customer by providing accurate up to the minute updates on infrastructure behavior and performance. This reduces the number of maintenance interventions, uses predictive analytics to prevent outages and provides insight to planned changes to optimize efficiency and utilization of assets. • For FM DCIM, InCommand provides MEP monitoring, environmental sensor monitoring and power/space/ cooling monitoring. • InCommand CMMS provides MEP asset lists, MEP maintenance schedules, MEP servicing vendors and MEP maintenance ticketing. • It handles IT moves/adds/changes ticket tracking and approvals at all levels. Customer and IT teams retain total control of their application performance. • InCommand provides every stakeholder with data ranging across green energy, metrics and accurate asset lists and locations. • InCommand DMaaS clients benefit from accurate dashboard data presented in real time backed by analytic algorithms that efficiently manage data center assets without direct physical interaction. • InCommand removes the reliance on high touch, time intensive and expensive client or third-party physical intervention.

Giacom Cloud Market
Giacom provide cloud services via the channel to UK SMBs through our online portal, Cloud Market. We have over 3,600 ITC partners and we’re 100% focussed on supporting them. Accessing our Cloud Market portal is simple and hassle-free– there’s no minimum spend, expert technical support and marketing materials are free. We also offer time saving integrations, and simple monthly billing. OUR CLOUD MARKET STANDS OUT FROM THE CROWD What makes us different from competitors is that we own our Cloud Market portal, and our in-house development team are constantly upgrading it to improve the experience for our customers. Owning our platform means we can react quickly to vendor updates and implement software changes quicker than other CSPs. A recent example of this is adapting the portal for Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience billing changes… WE SUPPORT OUR CUSTOMERS IN THEIR TIME OF NEED In October 2021 Microsoft announced their New Commerce Experience (NCE) platform, changing the way our Microsoft customers and their end-users are billed. And our partners needed Cloud Market to adapt to these changes fast. After weeks of planning and working late nights, we delivered 10 months’ worth of work in just 4, implementing NCE seamlessly into Cloud Market. An incredible achievement as a direct result of owning our own platform, making us one of the few CSPs to so quickly design and launch an automated NCE procurement solution. THE FIGURES SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES… Giacom has seen impressive and consistent growth in revenue over the years: +38% (£48.89M) FY20, +20% (£58.62M) FY21, and predicted +29% (£75.64M) for FY22. We’ve been consistently recognised for this and our high-quality services. So far this year alone we’ve scooped up Technology Resellers ‘Cloud Distributor of the Year’ and ranked No. 8 of Top 15 Fastest Growing Larger Companies at the Northern Tech awards. BUT DON’T JUST TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT… “Absolutely brilliant, really no comparison to my other supplier … with the other supplier it was so slow and laborious to add or change products within there… Giacom’s Cloud Market portal is just no comparison. I’m over the moon!” - Bob Winters, Cranberry Networks Ltd ‘Giacom’s Cloud Market portal made our NCE transition easy. Every single customer converted fine except for one, but this was quickly rectified through Giacom’s support team. Super easy, hassle-free and we converted them all in one working day!’ – Luke Watts, Roundworks IT ‘One of the reasons we went with Giacom is their Cloud Market portal, when we compared it other CSP’s they just didn’t seem anywhere near as good. Giacom’s portal is very easy and straight-forward to use.’ – Tim Rookes, True MSP

AIOps Platform Reduces Storage Operational Expenses by ~80% with Zero-downtime
Product Description Managing infrastructure without causing disruptions or delays is a real-time problem many organizations face. MSys Technologies experts designed and built an AIOps platform that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to analyze system telemetry. And address infrastructure issues across servers, storage, and virtualized resources at a 70% faster resolution rate. The platform is the industry’s leading AI infrastructure that harnesses the power of predictive analytics, feeds it to Machine Learning, and transforms IT operations like never before. Built using a combination of AI and advanced DevOps/SRE, the product enables: • Predictive Support: Predicts and prevents issues across the infrastructure • AI-driven Operations: Makes managing effortless and allows instant global visibility • Intelligent Infrastructure: Makes infrastructure smarter and enables it to self-improve Our innovative toolchain architecture integrates tools like JIRA, GitHub Enterprise, Jenkins, Ansible, Jfrog, and more, seamlessly with other DevOps tools and processes. This helps developers follow the same consistent flow every time and deliver quality delivery rapidly. What are your product’s / solution’s key distinguishing features and/or USP? MSys’ experts provided a rare conflation of AI and DevOps principles and created a platform focused on preventing disruption and delays that set the product apart from its competitors. The platform uses system telemetry data and develops an understanding of the ideal operating environment for every application in the infrastructure. Advanced ML then uses its predictive analytics capabilities and recommendation engines to predict and prevent any upcoming problematic behavior by identifying the underlining patterns. This unique conflation of AI and DevOps simplifies IT operations and optimizes application performance and resource planning. Some crucial features of the product are: • Automation eliminates repetitive manual tasks, enabling a 2X productivity boost • The cloud-based portal allows predictive analysis to be delivered seamlessly, resulting in nearly 75% fewer environmental trouble tickets • Detailed insights allow the IT team to perform rapid diagnostics and resolution, reducing IT operational expenses by nearly 80% • Real-time data pipeline support makes data readily available across the organization to various teams • Intelligent software development operations ensure a fast and agile development environment • Cross-stack analytics helps pinpoint performance issues with storage, servers, and VMs and makes the infrastructure self-managing, self-optimizing, and self-healing What tangible impact has your product/solution had on the market and your customers? The AIOps platform is the leading infrastructure management platform in the world and creates an uninterrupted experience for its customers. Here are some of the tangible impacts: • Measured availability of 99.9999% across install base • Automated prediction and resolution of more than 85% of customer issues • Enabled lower IT operational expenses by nearly 80% • Saved more than 1+ million hours with predictive analytics • Analyzed more than 1,000+ trillion data points • Collects and analyzes data from more than 90,000 systems worldwide every second What are the major differentiators between your product/solution and those of your primary competitors? The unique conflation of AI and DevOps created a robust AIOps platform powered by CI/CD pipelines and backed by automation and reusable frameworks. Here are some key differentiators: • The platform uses machine learning and predictive analytics to analyze system telemetry. It allows the client to predict and prevent any system outage before it can impact IT. • The platform allows easy scalability by sizing new infrastructure and simulating what-if scenarios. It will enable planning for new workloads with accurate performance, and bandwidth needs predictions. • The platform uses AI to ensure efficiency in code volume, improve slow-release rate, and cut-down long built times. • The platform collects and stores data about the entire environment - from storage, and servers, to VMs. This allows faster detection and resolution of the most complex issues. MSys DevOps and SRE Services: https://www.msystechnologies.com/services/devops-services/

CNAST Contextualizes Cloud Native Application Risk Assessment -- Investigates Application-Level Vulnerabilities
The Cloud Native Application Security Testing (CNAST) platform is an advanced platform that identifies custom code and open-source vulnerabilities, as well as software secrets to reveal the critical, exploitable security issues as an integral part the software development lifecycle. As a result, developers and application security teams receive clear insights that accelerate proper mitigation. With a large number of organizations today hosting application workloads in the cloud, it is imperative that application security be implemented to accommodate the unique security requirements of cloud-based applications. Meeting this challenge head-on, the Oxeye Cloud Native Application Security Testing platform is built from the ground up with the same high degree of agility and scale of cloud infrastructure to address the pervasive number of vulnerabilities materializing in these environments. Cloud native application security testing by Oxeye is focused on the cloud native segment of the AST market. This is imperative as AppSec and DevSecOps professionals are confronted with millions of cloud-native apps industry-wide. In order to protect this new application architecture, the next-generation application manager will be required to conduct proper infrastructure hygiene. To this end, Oxeye supports scalable, ever-changing environments and automatically adapts to changes for an agile testing scope without changes to code or the need to manually intervene. Oxeye’s approach allows users to embed context-aware, application security testing at the most critical point of our development cycle. This leaves no stone unturned as the solution analyzes all potential applicative threats. Included is the deep mapping of all app components and how they communicate with each other; lightweight intelligent testing for active validation, and the context we need in order to map the findings back to teams and dev owners. Key capabilities include: ● Cloud Native Application software bill of materials (SBOM) - Through Oxeye’s unique integration into each application, the platform provides users with an elaborate software bill of materials, deep from within cloud-native environments. ● Cloud Native Application Security Testing Built for Modern Architectures – Oxeye analyzes application code across microservices to identify code vulnerabilities, vulnerable 3rd party packages, and hardcoded secrets as part of the software development lifecycle for clear guidance that enables accurate remediation. ● Multi-Layer and Multi-Service Identification of Exploitable Vulnerabilities - Provides Runtime Code Analysis with no code changes, Vulnerable Flow Analysis to detect vulnerabilities across application microservices, and Active Validation with automatic creation and execution of security tests to validate vulnerabilities prior to reporting. ● Contextual Risk Assessment - Enriches data with infrastructure configuration information from the container, cluster, and cloud layers to calculate risks based on Internet accessibility, sensitive data processing, flawed configuration, etc. ● Clear Remediation Guidance for Developers – Provides developers with application analysis in runtime to reproduce each step of vulnerability exploitation, delivery of the exact line of code where the vulnerability is executed, and vulnerability flow visibility for accurate execution flow tracing that allows for fast identification and remediation of actual issues. Modern applications introduce major challenges to Application Security leaders, with prioritization, visibility, and collaboration on top. The Oxeye platform is the best option for modern application security testing as its vulnerability detection accuracy is second to none. The powerful solution greatly reduces security risk throughout every stage of software development and deployment, alongside providing clear visibility into the application structure and building blocks.

Data Dynamics' unified unstructured data management platform enables end-to-end data management capabilities
Most software support subsets of addressing the challenge and require multiple point solutions. Data Dynamics has taken a unique approach via its Unified Unstructured Data Management Platform that combines its award-winning products StorageX, Insight AnalytiX, and ControlX to provide a one-stop solution for risk mitigation, enhanced data security, secure sharing of sensitive data, and storage optimization. The platform helps in gaining actionable insights, allowing enterprises to identify and classify business-critical and personal information whilst ensuring it is protected and stored in the ‘right’ locations. It helps enterprises unlock the power of end-to-end data management with the following capabilities: Mobility: Provides for intelligence-driven, automated data migrations to meet the needs and scale of global enterprises. Having migrated over 400 petabytes of data encompassing hundreds of trillions of files, this feature is trusted and proven, and delivers without a single byte of data lost. Identify workloads and migrate data based on characteristics such as the least-touched files, files owned by specific users or groups, or hundreds of other actionable insights. It is a powerful migration engine that moves large volumes of data across shares and exports with speed and accuracy. Move files seamlessly from NAS to NAS or server to server for a technology refresh. Enable predictable results with cutover estimation and full audit reporting. The Management Portal dashboard shows graphical reports of unstructured file analysis such as age, activity, and file type to empower enterprise optimization through workload tiering and archiving redundant, obsolete, and trivial data. Selectively migrate data bi-directionally for agility and protection across on premise, private cloud, and the edge. Mobility functionality is built for scalable performance and data connectivity to address disaster recover from the cloud, backup to the cloud, and hybrid cloud deployment. Customers typically reduce their overall storage costs by 50%, faster time to value by 66% and improve storage management productivity by 10X. Security & Analytics: With Insight Analytix integration, the ability to analyze unstructured file content to find any personally identifiable information (PII)/sensitive data and remediate or otherwise act on that information to reduce risk exposure using a combination of AI and ML. The platform addresses a major void existing in the market, enabling user to assess the risk associated with personal and sensitive data as well as automating remediation triggers in a one-stop-shop -- user can move, monitor, or lock down their at-risk data all from the same platform. The remediation analyst may alternatively choose to move the reported sensitive files to more secure and accessible locations. Sensitive files may be moved from one file-share to another file-share & a file-share to an object-store location which includes NFS and SMB based storage technologies. Object storage includes any S3 compliant object store and support for Azure-Blob. This functionality delivers discovery, classify, analyse, tagging, management, and movement of unstructured data in place and in all environments based upon identifying the data that meets compliance handling requirements. The latest upgrade includes flexible and scalable data discovery, deep analytics, and reduced data vulnerability to help organizations ensure maximum accuracy in PII/sensitive data discovery and an upgraded remediation functionality. It empowers enterprises to proactively mitigate risk and provides scalable security remediation with the ability to quarantine at-risk datasets and intelligently re-permission files, all while creating an immutable audit log backed by blockchain technology. It provides the ability to drive security by re-permissioning all types of files through SID mapping. By using blockchain technology to provide a digital chain of custody for files with critical business information, recording every time an audited file is accessed or modified. Compliance: Utilizes both Insight AnalytiX and ControlX, as a part of the Unified Unstructured Data Management Platform, to provide intelligent identification of data sets that contain files with content fields that are associated with regulatory requirements. It provides truly actionable reporting for the enterprise. This allows data custodians to make decisions about what data to store, how to store it, and what level of access and use is appropriate with the individual’s consent. Enterprises can utilize out-of-the-box templates or create their own compliance templates based on their specific requirements. This identification is the first critical step in the process of remediating and meeting regulatory requirements.

Komprise Intelligent Data Management
Komprise is a SaaS platform for unstructured data management. Komprise Intelligent Data Management gives IT and storage architects a means to easily analyze, search and use file and object data across silos, helping them save on storage costs while also delivering long-term value. Komprise customers typically save 60-70% on storage, backup and cloud costs with intelligent data migration and tiering, which automatically moves data to secondary storage so that data always lives in the right place at the right time according to its age, usage or other parameters. Komprise is helping large enterprises modernize data management and mobility and transform operations from a traditional focus on managing storage devices to understanding and managing their data in an open, storage-agnostic way throughout the data lifecycle. Komprise delivers competitive differentiation with an analytics-first approach to data management, supported by: --The Global File Index which provides an easy way to visualize all data and search for specific files across all storage-on-premises or in the cloud. Most enterprises have limited visibility with data being scattered across many different physical locations as well as cloud and on premises storage technology. --The patented Komprise Transparent Move Technology (TMT) moves data without user disruption; data is fully accessible from the source as files, exactly as before, using industry-standard symbolic (sym) links. Komprise allows for cloud-native access to data once it is moved to object storage so users can leverage cloud-native tools for ML and BI. --Elastic Data Migration, which moves data to the cloud 27x faster than standard migration tools and with higher reliability. Slow, error-prone migrations are a common pain point for IT organizations and a barrier to cloud adoption. --In May, 2022, Komprise announced Smart Data Workflows, which gives IT users as well as line of business departmental users, analysts and researchers the means to create automated workflows for all the steps required to find the right unstructured data across storage assets, tag and enrich the data, and send subsets of data to external tools, data lakes and end users. Breaking with conventional wisdom: The three founders of Komprise started the company to address a gap in innovation for managing massively growing volumes of unstructured data which creates complexity and stretches IT budgets from the never-ending need to buy more storage. Most of the world’s data is unstructured and has been created in the last few years, driven by social media, video streaming, autonomous vehicles, edge devices, mobile apps and the overall growth in digitization. According to industry analysts, the world will store 200 zettabytes of data by 2025. In talking to IT leaders, the founders learned that they didn’t want a solution that would get in the way of access to their data and create vendor lock-in. Customers also said they wanted not just analytics but the ability to also take action by replicating, copying or moving data automatically by policy. The solution needed to be vendor agnostic and work across all storage technologies, given that most IT organizations are running in hybrid cloud infrastructure and using several different vendor platforms on-premises, in the cloud and at the edge. Importantly, customers also did not want to disrupt user access: a significant pain point of migrating data to the cloud. Users should be able to access the files exactly as before without even knowing that their data had moved. The founders realized that with their combined background in distributed, fault-tolerant computing, they could build data management software that met these requirements. Today, Komprise customers are large enterprises with a particular emphasis in genomics and life sciences, healthcare, public sector, financial services, and media/entertainment. Komprise helps enterprises in three areas: 1. Gain visibility across all data silos and clouds to make informed decisions on unstructured data management; 2. Flexible mobility: IT users can tier, migrate, replicate, copy, and confine unstructured data sets to optimal storage resources as data requirements change. 3. Increase data value by automating workflows to search, tag and move data to analytics tools in the cloud where it can be easily leveraged in cloud AI and ML tools. This solves a major pain point of data analytics/Big Data initiatives where most of the time spent by data scientists is on finding the right data to move to tools. Two examples: Komprise helped Pfizer stop 20 years of increasing storage costs and save over 75 percent on storage and cloud migration costs. Komprise used analytics across multi-vendor storage environments to plan Pfizer’s data management and data movement to AWS. In the first year, Pfizer migrated two petabytes of cold data to Amazon S3. The Komprise dashboard and management tools allow visibility, with a color-coded data status and age, so the different stages of the data are clearly identifiable. “It’s exciting that our researchers actually want to accelerate data movement using Komprise because they can analyze the data on AWS," says Matt Braunstein, Director of Hosting Data Services at Pfizer. In the five years since deploying body and dash cameras, Indiana’s Boone County’s evidentiary data grew by 3000%. The county courthouse was mandated to indefinitely retain files on all ongoing cases and historical cases. Komprise identified and tiered cold files to Azure, reducing the size of the county’s weekly backups by 88%, lowering backup costs by 72%, and reducing disaster recovery time from a week to a day and and a half. They are also now able to use a smaller all-flash SAN for storage of “active” or “hot” data at 42% of the cost. These are just a few examples of our work across multiple sectors. More can be found here: https://www.komprise.com/type/case-study/

DRYiCE Lucy – HCL’s AI enabled cognitive virtual assistant
Enterprises grow at an exponential pace and so do end-user and customer expectations. To transform end-use (employee and customer) experience and to improve productivity and foster innovation, businesses aspire to deploy resources and offer multiple channels of communication. But the IT reality is different. • Users must navigate through multiple systems and applications to get simple routine work done. • Language inconsistency in a global business scenario and inconsistent response to same or similar queries. • Limited availability of resources causes high wait time. Such experiences degrade user experience, drain time and energy, and leave users dissatisfied. At the same time implementing and maintaining a 24x7 multi-lingual human service desk is very costly and resource intensive. That is where HCL’s end-to-end AI enabled cognitive virtual assistance solution DRYiCE Lucy comes into the picture. Lucy acts as a unified one stop shop for all user queries (IT, Travel, HR, procurement, finance, and all others) providing a single source of truth. It mimics human interactions, learns, and adapts to user needs through smart conversations by leveraging enterprise-grade Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). Lucy is integrated with all enterprise applications in the environment be it ticketing system, RPA solution etc. and with Active Directory through rest APIs. It is also available in both voice and chatbot format, across mediums (Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Cisco WebEx, as a widget etc.) and in any language. As Lucy understands users’ profiles, personas, job roles etc., it provides tailored and dynamic responses, thus becoming a single point of contacts for end users. An important note here is that any standard self-service bot (A ‘Tell Bot’) is trained on Frequently Asked Questions and provides Standard Operating Procedure. The onus remains on users to understand and follow the steps to complete a task. On the other hand, Lucy’s integration with various applications and its natural language processing abilities provides it sense and act abilities (A ‘Do Bot’). A case in point of Lucy’s intelligence capabilities is ‘Leave management system’. Lucy assists users by conversing with them and asking details about how many leaves they want to apply for, which type of leaves and start date of leave. It then takes users permission and triggers leave application on behalf of users. Taking another example when Lucy encounters users’ queries like why their computer is slow. Lucy is integrated with HCL’s end user experience monitoring solution WorkBlaze. It interacts with WorkBlaze, analyses user computer performance data and checks user experience score, diagnoses the problem and provides recommended actions. Once user confirms, Lucy performs these actions to resolve issues. Lucy has been trained for over 5 years on 500+ IT and non-IT use cases, so it works as an out of the box solution which can be implemented very quickly. Lucy has a ‘Configuration module’ where admins can configure Lucy for various aspects, a ‘Cognitive module’ to understand and interpret the context of conversation happening in natural language, a ‘Channel integrator’ to integrate Lucy with any communication channel like voice assistants, social media channels and email, an ‘NLP engine’ and a ‘Rule engine’. Lucy’s reporting module provides advanced analytics driven insights and recommendations to quickly identify and address customer paid points. Key customer engagements Engagement 1: Finnish Industrial machinery organization focused on providing technology and services Challenges:  Complex infrastructure and application landscape with multiple data repositories.  Long and manual information retrieval life cycle with lengthy data reconciliation.  Lack of information indexing within multiple repositories leading to inflated timelines.  Sluggish User experience with impact on user productivity leading to decrease in business efficiency. Solution:  DRYiCE Lucy was implemented as a Single Point of Contact available on Customer portal and web for users, eliminating the need of manually routing between and within the repositories.  Lucy leverages its NLP capabilities to converse with the end user and retrieve information.  It ingested and analyzed 83,000 documents spread across 2 different repositories for multiple business domains including HR, Finance, IT and Legal to understand, index and fetch the relevant information.  In a scenario where Lucy could not find a relevant answer in any of the repositories, it fetched that information from external sources (internet) and presented it to the user.  Lucy can also transfer the conversation to a human expert when required or otherwise open a service desk ticket on user’s behalf.  As a next step Lucy will mature into taking actions on user’s behalf driven by RPA integration. Impact:  Enhanced user experience  Time efficient information retrieval  24 x 7 availability  Transformation from search-based experience to a conversation-driven experience Engagement 2: American multinational confectionery food, and beverage holding company Challenges:  To address next-generation needs of customers through technology and automation.  Inconsistent customer experience across communicated channels with long closure cycles.  High turnover rates and Operating costs due to live chats, email, and phone support which needed self-service automation.  High volume of tickets for redundant issues and the need to left shift those. Solution:  DRYiCE Lucy was implemented as a part of client’s Digital Strategy and User First portfolio of tools aimed at transforming user experience in AMEA, LA, NA and UK region.  DRYiCE Lucy trained on 140+ Use Cases covering IT and Procurement FAQs.  As a next step, DRYiCE Lucy will provide a Multilingual platform to support users from all countries in their native languages. Impact:  Improved response efficiency with zero wait time.  Enhanced user experience with more than 60% repeat users.  MIA impact on SD volume is at a significant ~26%  Effort saving of 4k man hours achieved as a result of FCR provided by Lucy  First Call Resolution of 88%  CSAT of 98%

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Closed-Loop Network Automation
What exactly is novel about the product/process or innovation? Enterprises and Service Providers continuously see the need to automate their network services and have traditionally invested in many point solutions to help them build and manage their networks. But these point solutions operate in silos and cannot interact with each other or share data to optimize the overall health and performance of the network. Instead, they operate within their domain and can provide visibility on only certain aspects of the network, resulting in localized decisions which could result in networks performing sub-optimally or even in disastrous shutdowns. Anuta ATOM is a fully integrated solution that delivers network analytics, automation, compliance, and assurance for existing multi-vendor (45+ vendors) physical and virtual infrastructure in one unified platform. It automates use-cases related to Data Center Automation, InterCloud, Micro-Segmentation, Security as a Service, LBaaS, Campus/Access, Branch/WAN, Service Provider IP/MPLS Edge, and Virtual CPE. Anuta ATOM elevates productivity by combining the model-driven architecture with the cloud native technologies such as microservices to deliver one of the industry's most scalable and highly available platform that automates 1 Million+ devices with one software instance. How does it break the convention process in its field that already exists? We can contrast ATOM with the legacy network orchestration products from vendors such as Cisco, Nokia, and Ciena to understand its advantages. Conventional monolithic architecture creates complexity as unexpected failures or upgrades in one component – bring down the whole platform or affect the services delivered. The legacy NSO products have gaps in their multi-tenancy, where they rely on external OSS to provide complete tenant isolation. They also don’t have true Active-Active High Availability; instead, they have Active-Standby that usually results in downtime and inefficient usage of computing and license resources. Legacy products have a siloed approach where they typically need 3 or 4 products, making them difficult to align in terms of capacity, capability, or performance. Multiple products disperse crucial network information in islands of automation, resulting in the loss of valuable insights and high MTTR. Anuta ATOM overcomes all the listed drawbacks with its cloud native (microservices based), resilient HA, and a fully integrated solution that delivers network analytics, automation, compliance, and assurance for existing multi-vendor (45+ vendors) physical and virtual infrastructure for massive scale networking. Anuta ATOM Advantages: - One of the broadest industry coverages across vendors and use cases. - Future proof for the demands of IoT, 5G, and Multi-Cloud - Aligned with open standards - BPMN 2.0, OpenConfig, RedFish, O-RAN, IETF YANG, Swagger OpenAPI, IETF NACM, etc. - BPMN Compliant Low-Code Automation with Workflow - Massive Horizontal scalability to automate 1 Million+ devices. - Flexible to run on any cloud, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. - High Resiliency and Auto-Scale - A powerful interface to define KPIs and corrective actions. - No vendor lock-in with support for 45+ vendors and 150+ platforms - Collaboration infrastructure for Device, Service Model, and Custom App development - Multi-Tenancy & Role-Based Access Control - Automated Server Lifecycle Management to accelerate Cell-Site On-boarding for O-RAN - Service Monitoring and Assurance How does it go beyond marginal improvements? Anuta ATOM software helps Telco and Enterprises to deliver network services faster, eliminate human errors, avoid security violations, reduce OpEx, ensure compliance, accelerate time to market, and transform today's networks into the self-healing, self-annealing, smart networks of the future. ATOM is a modular, extensible, and cloud-native platform that enables operators to rapidly design, customize 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, and Amazon AWS. Feature Highlights: Anuta ATOM is a highly scalable cloud-ready platform for network automation & telemetry. The closely integrated features of ATOM open 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, automating brownfield and greenfield deployments of Physical, Virtual, SDN, and NFV infrastructure across multiple network domains. ATOM's support for Swagger/Open API also enables third-party software integration without any incremental developer effort as it auto-discovers APIs and adds them to pre-built catalog entries saving time and effort. Low-Code Automation: ATOM makes creating a workflow as easy as drawing a Network Diagram in a Visio-like canvas by defining new tasks or picking from a library of available tasks. It includes several pre-built workflows that can automate MOPs, such as: Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP): ATOM utilizes a DHCP-based approach that automates steps such as deploying Day-0 configuration templates, updating software images, and onboarding devices for multi-vendor infrastructure. OS Upgrades: ATOM supports multi-vendor network OS upgrades, including – Cisco, Juniper, F5, Palo Alto, and others, by following industry best practices for pre-and-post checks. The list of other MOPs includes – switch RMA, bulk configuration updates, pre-and-post checks for VPN services- BNG, Cable DAA, MEF, and more. These workflows follow BPMN, an open standard that can be customized to match specific environments. YANG-based Service Provisioning: ATOM supports IETF YANG models, Open Config models, and device native YANG models to automate provisioning complex services such as L2/L3 VPN, LBaaS, FWaaS, EVPN, VPLS, Application Delivery, etc. Further, ATOM manages the complete lifecycle of the services, thus enabling CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations from a simple self-service GUI or via a RESTCONF client. Out-of-Box Libraries: ATOM includes 350+ libraries pre-built within a low-code architecture. The catalog includes simple entries such as RPC calls for issuing show commands to routers or complex entries such as BGP alert correlation. The library also includes sophisticated capabilities such as collecting inventory, archiving configurations, running device diagnostics, reserving IP addresses in Infoblox, opening a ticket in ServiceNow, onboarding a VNF, etc. No code Automation: Simplifying it further, ATOM offers Configlets, which are pre-built, easy-to-use templates that deliver process agility, real-time provisioning, and wide-range integration. Jinja variables inside the configlets empower users to push multiple commands by simply changing values in the templates with options to check configurations pre-deployment. Configuration Management and Compliance: ATOM delivers secure configuration backup, simplified change management, scalable configuration push, detailed compliance audit, 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 Streaming telemetry, SNMP, SNMP Trap, and Syslogs 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 unified view. ATOM's correlation engine will continuously monitor and compare collected data with the baseline in real time. ATOM can raise alarms on the dashboard, notify slack, email, and other utilities of any deviation, or create tickets in the user-preferred platform. 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. Geo Redundancy with Cloud-Native Architecture: Anuta ATOM is containerized and can be deployed in public clouds, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, to manage Small/Medium/Very large-scale networks in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. ATOM furnishes high availability as its components can be deployed across multiple Locations/Sites within the same region to provide fault tolerance against an entire location/site going down. Server Lifecycle Management (SLM): ATOM SLM automates 30+ complex server deployment tasks such as BIOS upgrades, VM & K8S installs, and CNF provisioning. It provides complete visibility across thousands of multi-vendor servers with centralized control, thus accelerating 5G deployments. TMF Support: ATOM’s support for TMF eliminates delays caused by slow processes between service ordering and deployment. TMF provides a common platform for CSPs to create business apps using the open APIs to interact with multi-vendor underlay. The APIs support the initial deployment and the complete service lifecycle, including fault management. Ease of Integration: ATOM includes an SDK to develop applications using a sophisticated description language, query interface, and other productivity tools. Northbound, it includes a comprehensive REST API integrated with cloud portals (OpenStack/VMware/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 development. In addition, ATOM Workflow Automation integrates with OSS, NMS, SDN Controllers, CMDB, IPAM, Syslog / NetFlow Collectors, etc. Further, ATOM integrates with CI/CD tools such as Git to empower networking teams to release software updates to quicken release cycles, lower costs, and reduce development risks. How do customers benefit from the product/process or innovation? Maximize ROI/ROA: As Anuta Networks' solution works for existing physical network infrastructures, customers can continue using the devices they have already purchased and still get complete network agility resulting in higher ROI/ROA. Moreover, Anuta ATOM helps SPs save 100s of $millions of the overall OPEX by virtualizing network resources into logical functions and empowering end-users, i.e., achieving more with fewer people. As a highly differentiated network service, ATOM significantly reduces the CAPEX by eliminating the dependency on multiple platforms to automate network services for a specific use case/vendor. Accelerate Business Transformation: CSPs need scale and speed to deploy new access services such as 5G. Therefore, ATOM focuses on agility and flexibility to adapt to capacity as per the demand. ATOM's renewed focus on low-code/no-code automation and ZTP eases the long learning curve. It reduces errors and processing time by accelerating response and task completion from weeks to minutes. By simplifying deployment steps through SLM, ATOM has brought down onboarding time from 15 hours per device to approximately 70 minutes per device, with over 200,000 managed devices for one of its customers. Minimize Business Risk: While network availability became paramount, security threats multiplied. High-profile network outages (such as Facebook and Amazon) demonstrated the loss to the business, driving up the penalties for SLA violations. Network operators need automation to introduce consistency, avoid human errors, and reduce MTTR. Automation further reduces OPEX and helps employees focus on higher-value add activities, thus aiding retention. In addition, visibility becomes critical to optimize resources and satisfy audit requirements. Capitalize on Technology Innovation: For network providers, multiple opportunities are on the horizon- 5G, AI/ML, Virtualization, Edge Computing, and Cloud. Anuta ATOM's superior business agility and cloud-native architecture allow the creation of an on-demand network service that maximizes client adoption. Interoperability with Ecosystem Partners: ATOM comprehends the need to support multi-vendor servers, storage, and networking hardware with consistent functionality across each task -discovery, inventory, configuration, monitoring, control, diagnosis, and upgrade. 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. ATOM is integrated with leading SDN controllers such as Cisco ACI, Juniper Contrail, HPE DCN, Nuage VSP, OpenDaylight, and northbound portals such as OpenStack, VMware vRealize, and OSS/BSS using REST API. Anuta ATOM supports multiple NFVI, including VMware, KVM, and OpenStack. Active and continuous development of workflows across each platform can be achieved through package upgrades in ATOM. (For a complete list, check out https://www.anutanetworks.com/managed-devices/.) Rapid Customer Adoption: Anuta ATOM received significant traction from Tier-1 SPs and large enterprises. Our publicly referenceable customers include Tata Communications, Telstra, GARR, Japan Post, F5 Networks, Neustar, etc. https://www.anutanetworks.com/customers/ UK’s largest fixed-line, broadband, and mobile service provider have chosen Anuta Networks to handle their Networking demands with ATOMs' advanced device management, image upgrade, compliance, monitoring, and northbound TMF support. With ATOM’s cloud-native solution, A Tier-1 SP in North America lowered the time it took to provision one site from 26 hours to 2 hours, allowing them to deploy all 15,000 cell sites before their January 2023 deadline. GARR, a research network for Italian Universities, deployed ATOM to automate their MOP, including complex software upgrades, service provisioning and inventory management tasks, saving time, and OpEx. A Tier-1 Telco in Africa delivers integrated voice, data, and mobile services for 14 countries with standard L2/L3 VPN provisioning for their Mobile Packet Backbone Network. Anuta ATOM automated the provisioning and monitoring of various VPN services and protocols along with automated software upgrades, FCAPS, and EMS functionality for 250 MX, SRX, and QFX devices. The solution resulted in unified services across multiple OPCOs and reduced the mean time to repair. They also leveraged the geo-redundancy of ATOM to deliver high availability and performance at scale. India's leading direct-to-the-home service provider is deploying the 400G Metro Network with Juniper ACX 7100 and MX 480. ATOM delivered standard EMS features such as device onboarding, configuration management, image upgrades, and compliance. They also implemented threshold-based alerts to inform the customers using ATOM’s alert correlation functionality proactively. In Phase 2, they plan to expand ATOM's scope to automate service provisioning and workflows. One of the US's Tier-1 media and entertainment companies migrated its configuration from IPv4 to IPv6 through ATOM workflow by executing many pre-and post-checks on multi-vendor infrastructure. ATOM also implemented compliance enforcement and ran 100s of compliance rules on 7000 devices within 2 hours. Neustar, a leader in identity and authentication services, deployed Anuta ATOM to automate 26 DCs that scrub DDoS attack traffic at 175Gbps for 11K clients. The Fortune-13 Global Financial Institution, Japan Post, has deployed Anuta ATOM for data center automation in the private cloud for hundreds of individual departments. Customer Use-Cases Our Top-3 customer use cases are: Carrier Core Networks Automation: Anuta ATOM automates Virtual PE, Virtual CE, MPLS L2 VPN, L3 VPN, and Cloud Interconnects using VNFs from Cisco, Nokia, Ericsson, HPE, Juniper, etc. ATOM maintains the entire life cycle of ELINE/ELAN, VPLS, and VPWS services, including provisioning IETF and OpenConfig models, service audit, service monitoring, and closed-loop remediation. ATOM's low-code workflow automation breaks down complex MOP into simple drag-and-drop blocks that can be customized as per user requirements and tasks. It improves the processing of a highly complex ecosystem with multiple vendors providing services such as transport configuration and provisioning, bare metal server provisioning, workload configuration, ticket generation, inventory update, AI-powered dashboard reporting, notifications, etc. 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, Juniper vMX, 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 legacy Cisco ISRs, Cisco IWAN, and SD-WAN controllers. Anuta ATOM automates multiple network functions such as QoS, Segmentation, Firewall policies, Software Upgrade across all network elements, ACLs, IPsec or DMVPN, Policy-Based Routing, Performance Routing, Deep Packet Inspection, WAN Op, Web Security, and Zero Touch Deployment for these CPE devices. The mentioned use cases are achieved with the help of ATOM's low code automation workflows. 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. In addition to these services, ATOM is deployed to maintain configuration and compliance management across the network. Conclusion: ATOM is a fully integrated solution that delivers powerful features based on the modern cloud-native architecture for various use cases and vendors. It accelerates digital transformation such that network teams can deliver faster, minimize errors, reduce MTTR, achieve SLA compliance and eliminate vulnerabilities while improving responsiveness to business needs.

WAN Acceleration: Accelerating IT security, F1 and health
WAN Acceleration technologies are unique. They accelerate data transfers that eliminate data management challenges are known as ‘WAN acceleration’. Bridgeworks patented artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies accelerate organisation's existing technologies and dramatically accelerate their Wide Area Networks (WANs). AI underpins the patented technology to provide process intelligence, mitigating latency and mitigate packet loss. Our solutions, such as PORTrockIT, dramatically improve data throughput up to 98% of bandwidth – regardless of distance. Organisations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is part of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the U.S, a major IT security firm, and an F1 team, can therefore gain significant WAN performance without touching any of your data, maintaining security protocols, governance, and compliance. National Institutes of Health The NIH was originally a PORTrockIT 400 customer. However, it found an additional need to add two of Bridgeworks’ new high end PORTrockIT 800’s last year. They are moving four protocols over the WAN at ‘breakneck speed’. A spokesperson from BKJ Works - New York comments: “This is a non-engineering group, but they have had no problem in installing the devices (each in under 1 hour!). Don't be surprised if they come up with future needs on an even grander scale in the future. I cannot thank Bridgeworks enough for their continued support, fast turn around and meeting all and any of our requests with a willingness to say, ‘Yes we can’. This relationship will only deepen going forward.” WAN Data Acceleration powers the National Institutes of Health’s global data transfer requirements at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services. It is also the world’s largest biomedical research agency. One Bridgeworks' healthcare customer, US-based CVS Caremark, connected two virtual tape libraries over 2,860 miles at full WAN bandwidth. This achieved a performance gain of 95 times the unaccelerated performance. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has gone from never being able to achieve fast datacentre replication over a distance between sites of 2,000 miles, to be able to attain it. The difference between doing it between two machines in the same datacentre and in two machines across two datacentres was 6 MB/s on NetApp Snap Mirror replication. So, they now lose only this amount of time. The NIH wasn’t able to address this issue for a couple of years. NetApp and Aspera couldn’t achieve this. Bridgeworks was brought in to conduct a quick POC that took a couple of days to set it up, and then that was it. The savings come from not having anything previously to protect their data. Bridgeworks has also helped NIH to resolve network infrastructure issues. Although successful, the results aren’t yet in the public domain. Yet it is a substantial multi-million U.S. dollar contract. Accelerating IT security The project with the major IT security firm is also a game-changer. Between November and December 2021, a storage subject matter expert within this company came to Bridgeworks with details about a file transfer problem on a 2Gbps WAN circuit between Colorado, USA, and Bangalore in India. Problem: With data equating to 700TB storage estate, backups are only as good as the ability to restore the data. In order to allow an acceptable transfer time of this data requires a robust solution. There were 2 NetApp units involved in the data migration: one in Bangalore and another in Denver. The transfer was performed using the inbuilt NetApp Snap Mirror feature. It involved migrating data in a follow the sun requirement, and critical data and security was paramount. The allocated WAN bandwidth for transfer was a 1Gb/s controlled by a SD-WAN. But the raw WAN bandwidth was 2 Gb/s. Before PORTrockIT, throughput was typically equating to 2MB/s using Incumbent technology WAN-Optimisation with only 2% unitisation of WAN, and the time to transfer the data was 8.4 days. Phil Hill, Customer Solution Architect at Bridgeworks explains: “Our PORTrockIT solution for this company mitigated the effects of Latency and Packet loss. He says the latency between Denver and Bangalore at 350ms is a lot of latency! The biggest single factor causing latency is distance - even though the speed of light is around 186,282 miles per second – this figure is actually around one third lower when going through fibre optic cables. Although the units can be hardware, sometimes virtual images or cloud machine images are more useful. As time was of the essence and the customer had real looming deadlines, the IT security firm opted for a Virtual Machine (VM) running in VMWare ESX. This made the turnaround for the evaluation-solution really quick. The following table shows the technical specification of the virtual products which would server the customer best. After installing and configuring the PORTrockIT virtual instances the transfer speed increased to 80MB/s – a 40-fold increase and the time taken was reduced to under 6 hours. In this case the benchmark figure we were given was that the customer was only able to move data at around 2 Mega Bytes per second.” Results A spokesperson from the IT security company remarks: “The rate of throughput was incredible. PORTrockIT from Bridgeworks is a game changer. I am a storage engineer with limited networking knowledge. I was able to configure and deploy PORTrockIT in less than 2 hours”. The IT security firm believes that with ‘unthrottled’ conditions and utilising their full 2 Gig WAN, they would be able to transfer data at 200 MBs per second. PORTrockIT is working over a SD-WAN, and they required no other changes to the LAN or WAN configurations. Speaking about the project, Kevin St. Cyr, Tributary Systems inc. of Dallas, Texas says: “We have always impressed with the capabilities of PORTrockIT product, but what they have achieved with the IT security company’s installation takes it to another level. It is a showcase for the capabilities of PORTrockIT. The beauty is, it’s easy to install and it shows the performance that can be achieved over a WAN that was once thought impossible.” WAN Accelerating F1 A Formula 1 (F1) team undertook an evaluation, a proof of concept (POC), which showed the ability of PORTrockIT to make their WAN data transfers 60 times faster than before. The trial was so successful that the team ended it early. Bridgeworks’ brief was to help them speed up data the transfer of data from the Cotswolds in the UK to New England, in the USA. A new Partnership with Prodec Networks was formed in the process, and a spokesperson from Prodec comments: “Regarding the F1 team, from wind tunnel analysis to engineering documents, Formula 1 teams accumulate significant volumes of data. The cars’ sensors (over a hundred of them) tell their own story about the race for the duration of the race and for referral later.” “Needless to say, up to date revisions of the cars’ specific designs need to be easily accessible. How the teams deal with the pressures of reacting quickly to the vast amount of information is often the difference between winning and losing each race. With race data exceeding 150Gb per race weekend, it’s easy to see how our F1 team needed a fast data-transfer solution.”

NordPass password manager Machine Learning-Enhanced Autofill
This year NordPass has introduced a major improvement to one of its key features — autofill. Its form-detecting algorithm became more efficient by introducing machine learning. Before the update, developers had to manually improve the form-detecting algorithm. The part of the autofill algorithm responsible for detecting the type of form now operates with vastly improved performance compared to its previous static iteration. The algorithm is now trained using artificial neural networks to be as accurate as possible. According to NordPass developers, the current accuracy of the algorithm is 99.6%. The new update has two main benefits. The first, more accurate form detection, leads to more accurate autofilling, which results in an enhanced user experience. The second benefit is that machine learning will give developers more time to further improve other aspects of the product. It is important to note that the learning process of the machine learning algorithm is not intrusive. It doesn't take place on users’ devices. It is done by developers and is released with each NordPass update. Users don’t need extra resources on their devices. The learning process takes place in a controlled environment until it is ready to be shipped out. The machine learning process is not entirely autonomous. Before an update, developers collect lots of data, train the algorithm, and get a small file, which then detects forms and therefore improves the entire autofill process.