Succeed today, plan for tomorrow

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Introducing Westcon 04

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Silver Sponsor Profile 25

Cloud Sponsor Profile 41

Thank You 46

Our Solutions 22

Message from Dave Rosenberg Westcon Group Managing DirectorAustralia and New Zealand

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Introducing WestconWestcon Group Imagine is New Zealand’s premier information technology event, run by Westcon Group NZ – a specialist IT distributor of category-leading unified communications, network infrastructure, data centre and security solutions, with a global network of specialty resellers.

This year, we’re celebrating our 10 year anniversary and putting the spotlight on some of the latest best practice solutions IT has to offer. In this special electronic publication we feature our vendors represented at Imagine 2014 and focus on some of the trends shaping technology - and business today and in the future. We hope these technology insights help you to succeed today and plan for tomorrow.

Succeed today, plan for tomorrow

In 2004, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates made one of the worst predictions of all time in the IT industry: “Two years from now, spam will be solved”.

Alas, the problem of spam isn’t anywhere near being solved; some research I found on this recently shows that 14.5 billion spam messages are sent out each day globally and that it accounts for 45% of all email. In fact, in New Zealand, 56% of C level executives identified security as a key deployment area according to the IDC C series survey completed in June 2014.

It was also 2004 when an iconic industry event started in New Zealand. What was the event? Datastor Forum. Set up with the vision of introducing new technologies and innovations to the market, its core theme was Secure, Protect and Manage. It was focused on how your data is stored, how it is managed once stored, and the important issue of securing the information. Information Lifecycle Management and recovery point and time objectives were a big focus.

Over the next decade Datastor Forum, and more recently Westcon Imagine, has become an iconic industry event in New Zealand and now also Australia.

Fast forward to 2014, a lifetime in the technology sector, we have the internet of things, cloud, software-defined networks, flash storage, collaboration, unified communications, i-everything and about the only thing which hasn’t changed is the rapid adoption on new acronyms and the rate at which technology is moving.

However, Westcon Imagine 2014, although it has evolved, has retained the same goal as when we started – a single daylong event where resellers, vendors and end customers can come together and collaborate to learn about new technologies, ideas and solutions.

04 Imagine 2014

The Best Practice Series this year is focused on what you in the business are doing today and how the adoption of technology can do this better, while also looking at what is coming next – innovations and solutions for the future customer experience. Some of these the customer may not even think they need yet. Westcon has always led the way in both solutions for the existing business requirements but also with innovations and new technologies such as Westcon 2.0 (formally Greenhouse).

Recently you would have seen the announcement of the acquisition of Verecloud and the creation and launch of Westcon Cloud Solutions. Outcome-based services are here, whether it be private or public cloud. New Zealand has played an integral part of this, having developed and piloted the Westcon Cloud Portal.

Westcon Imagine has become a flagship event in the ANZ region, it demonstrates that distribution is more than just shipping goods and providing finance. Whether it be innovating with new ways of distribution or technology, adding value through unique channel services or embracing market shifts, we have a strong track record in providing value to our partners.

It is important to note that these events could not happen without the support of our vendors. I would like to acknowledge their hard work and support in making this event happen. It is their involvement that makes Imagine the huge success it is.

Dave Rosenberg Westcon Group Managing Director, Australia and New Zealand

Introducing Westcon

05 Imagine 2014

Westcon Cloud: Poised for growth

“We’re not just talking about it. We have a robust strategy which is now in execution phase and we are poised for growth in our cloud solutions business.”That’s the simple message from Darryl Grauman, Westcon Group APAC Director, Services and Cloud Solutions, as the leading distributor stakes its claim in the ‘digital distribution’ market.

Westcon Group NZ launched its Cloud Managed Services platform in July, allowing customers to purchase software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings through an in-market approved channel of New Zealand resellers supported by the company.

Says Grauman: “I think our CEO Dolph Westerbos summed it up really well when he said: ‘Cloud is the next stage in distribution: Westcon Group began as a distributor of physical products; we then became a leader in distributing software; and we will now lead the way in services distribution.’”

Grauman says digital distribution – connecting cloud service providers and end-users via the reseller channel – is that next evolution.

“Westcon’s ability to blend hardware, software and cloud services is our ultimate objective,” he adds.

Ask Grauman what Westcon’s cloud strategy includes, and he’s equally direct.

“The best way to answer is to explain what it does not include. We have made a strategic decision not to build our own cloud services, and not to compete with our resellers who want to build their own cloud services,” he says.

“Our intent is to bring cloud service providers together with resellers so that resellers are able to augment their business by adding cloud services and creating a solid annuity revenue stream.”

Grauman says Westcon’s offering is more than just brokering cloud solutions.

“I like to think we have it right and that we can put our hand on our heart and say we have done it and are fully operational.

“Many other organisations are out there brokering cloud by on-selling other parties’ cloud solutions via traditional, manual distribution methods – many have websites that advertise cloud solutions that can be procured by phone call or email.

“Westcon now have a complete capability where we can digitally, automatically distribute cloud services to end users via our reseller partners. Resellers and end-users can access their consumption and billing information online and

06 Imagine 2014

real-time, via our digital distribution platform.

Grauman says the cloud offering provides plenty of advantages for resellers.

“We have the ability to assist resellers to transform their business to include a cloud services capability via our resellers’ transformation playbook programme and our pre-populated, vetted, cloud catalogue.

“If resellers don’t embrace a certain degree of cloud, then their business could be at risk. In addition, most resellers, even those who have built some cloud services, can’t build them all and will probably enhance their own offering with other solutions from our catalogue,” he adds.

“And then there’s our cloud broker platform’s ability to assist resellers in the monthly billing of consumption-based cloud services,” he adds.

The offering also has plenty of benefits for end-users, Grauman says.

“New Zealand businesses are usually guided by their trusted resellers. If a reseller has a combination of their own cloud services and components of our catalogue, New Zealand businesses can be provided with robust cloud services at an affordable price.

“Providing the end-user an ability to see all of their cloud services consumption and billing, real-time, via a portal interface, will enable them to monitor and manage usage.”

He notes too, that because Westcon deals with cloud service providers at a global or, at a minimum, regional level, it has the ability to aggregate buying power and bring services to resellers at a price-point better than they would otherwise be able to access.

Meanwhile, for Kiwi cloud providers, Grauman says Westcon Cloud Solutions has been ‘born in the cloud’ and therefore acts globally.

“The cloud solutions providers we have in our catalogue, subject to contracts and commercials, will be available in all regions as we roll our cloud programme across the globe.

“This provides Kiwi cloud vendors with access to markets they would otherwise not have been able to access.”

He says Westcon is trying to make the process ‘as simple as possible’ for CSPs by releasing its SDK for onboarding to the digital distribution platform and providing a single interface for orders and billing.

“Hopefully, this will enable Kiwi CSPs to get on with what they are best at: developing the solutions and promoting them in export markets.”

‘Perfected’ right hereThe company had the foresight to establish a global cloud team, running across North America and ANZ to define the distributor’s cloud strategy and figure out who to partner with and how to execute.

New Zealand has been the testing ground for Westcon’s cloud solutions, which were perfected here in preparation for global roll out – something Grauman is justifiably proud of.

“The key to a good strategy is that it’s actually executable. Therefore we needed a region to raise their hand to be the first pilot region to test and refine the concept. And being the innovative Kiwis we are, we stepped up and volunteered.

“Alongside our global team, we developed the processes to onboard cloud service providers (CSPs) and cloud service resellers (CSRs) commercially, legally, operationally and technically.

“I can confidently say that the New Zealand team are now considered the best global onboarding team for cloud.”

Westcon began working with Colorado-based platform provider Verecloud more than 18 months ago, collaborating for more than a year to build the digital distribution platform. Come early 2014, new CEO Dolph Westerbos recognised the intellectual property Westcon had put into the platform and how much of a strategic advantage owning its own platform would be for Westcon. By September a deal had been done, and Westcon acquired the assets of Verecloud.

For more information, contact Jason Hole: jason.hole@westcongroup.co.nz

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“I can confidently say that the New Zealand team are now considered the best global onboarding team for cloud.”

Imagine 2014

http://www.westcongroupimagine.co.nz

Platinum Sponsor Profile

Paging Dr Watson: Cognitive computing with a twist

IT’S THE STUFF OF BUSINESS UTOPIA: BEING ABLE TO PROVIDE SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE, OBTAIN EXPERT ADVICE OR ACCELERATE PROFESSIONAL RESEARCH VIA SIMPLE NATURAL LANGUAGE QUERIES.Until now, it’s just been a dream. We caught up with IBM’s Jason Leonard to discuss how his group of Watson solutions is changing the way industries use information to make this a reality.

So what is Watson and how is it being used?

IBM has been working hard on its Watson artificial intelligence – or cognitive computing – technology for a number of years, it’s essentially a system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, and learning as it gains more experience.

“We’ve been talking about Watson for some time. It’s an extraordinarily powerful platform that is transforming industries and professions by providing expert advice and through its ability to learn to get better and better over time.

The real focus here is that natural language interaction. Instead of forcing people into lengthy search, we’re using a Watson-style interaction to mask the complexity and make it easy to use. For example, a customer can ask about the best products for their specific circumstances. An investment analyst can ask: What are the factors that will drive the price of iron ore in 2015? A life

sciences researcher can ask Watson which proteins to target for further research.

Watson solutions are currently being used across a range of industries for a variety of outcomes, for example it’s being used at Australia’s Deakin University, ANZ Bank, Bumrungrad International Hospital and recently the Singapore Government also announced it plans to enhance citizen interaction and community engagement with Watson.

What have been the common problems within the analytics market? Why do only a small fraction of business professionals use analytics tools as part of their decision making process? Too complex? Difficult to access?

Today’s separate analytics tools are designed for different kinds of analysis and data tasks and struggle to deliver a unified experience that brings together a complete set of self-service enterprise data and analytics capabilities.

With traditional analytics tools business

The democratization of knowing.In the past, you practically needed a PhD in statistics

to unearth knowledge from big data.

That’s why IBM is introducing Watson™ Analytics—a

breakthrough natural language–based cognitive

service. It’s a cloud-based offering that will soon be

available to provide instant access to powerful

predictive and visual analytic tools. No PhD necessary.

Which benefi ts drive employee retention the most?

Which deals are most likely to close? What are the key

drivers of my product sales? Just ask your question,

and Watson Analytics can help guide you to the answer.

A new way to work is made with IBM Watson Analytics.

ibm.com/watsonanalytics

IBM and its logo, ibm.com, made with IBM and Watson are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. See current list at ibm.com/trademark. ©International Business Machines Corp. 2014.

Platinum Sponsor

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Platinum Sponsor Profile

Imagine 2014

professionals identify their problem, and have to work with consultants to select and then implement the various different tools that will help them get the answers to their questions. Often the expense of implementation and skills needed to drive the myriad of analytics applications are just too complicated for the average business professional to incorporate in their day to day activities.

IBM Watson ushers in a new era of analytics, but how can the offering bring big data to the masses?

We’ve been talking about Watson for some time. It’s an extraordinarily powerful platform that is transforming industries and professions through providing insight into problems that we’re previously too hard or complicated to tackle with traditional analytics applications. But up until now even some of those instances were very narrow and deep with a very specific purpose for specific set of questions.

However, on September 16, we released a version of Watson aimed at the general business user. The real focus here is that natural language interaction. Instead of trying to hard wire the user to the tool or database, we are using a Watson style interaction to mask the complexity and make it easy to use.

It’s all about the front end ability to interact with an extraordinarily complex set of tools and data.

Our intention is to make the base level accessible to everyone at no charge, forever. With that you can upload limited data and perform basic analysis and get a sense of the tool.

When you move into paid levels, you can work with larger, more complex data sets from a wider array of sources, collaborate with others, etc.

What stands IBM out from the crowd in this growingly competitive data market? Key features?

Watson Analytics is a game changer for big data and analytics. The cloud-based service, available in a ‘freemium’ model delivers a unified analytics experience automating the steps of data access and refinement, predictive analysis and visual storytelling - all the while using natural language dialogue.

Rather than having to decide which analytics tool to use based on the type of big data you’re working with, Watson Analytics immediately provides you with a visual story that illustrates what you need to know. No special skills are required either, as users can quickly and easily dive right in and begin exploring big data. Watson Analytics can be likened to a ‘data scientist in a box’.

How can Watson Analytics help all business people, from sales reps on the road to company CEOs?

Watson Analytics is fine tuned for the everyday business user including

§ Those in marketing, sales, operations, finance and human resources, who are motivated and under pressure to better understand data to quickly find answers on their own.

- A marketing professional can ask: What are the key drivers of my product sales?

- An HR professional can ask: Which benefits drive employee retention the most?

- A sales rep can ask: Which deals are most likely to close?

§ Business analysts, whose jobs are centred around processing information for the organisation, and who want to go beyond measuring and start understanding data. But, they might not have access to advanced analysts such as data scientists, statisticians, data miners, or BI architects.

§ Data scientists, who can typically spend 40-80% of their time on data preparation, can use Watson Analytics as an accelerator.

§ IT, who can deliver improvements in productivity to business users without having to support multiple solutions, ungoverned data sources, or rogue data analysis projects.

Could IBM’s Watson do for Analytics what Search did for Google? Do you think this move will help IBM own the analytics market?

We certainly hope so. We’re on the cusp of creating an entirely new category for analytics with this new service.

There are other companies like Tabluea who have tackled parts of this problem, such as visualisation. But IBM is the first company to pull this altogether into one integrated suite that offers powerful breakthroughs of predictive analytics that a wide array of people --with or without analytical skills-- can use.

We’re also the first and by far the most advanced in allowing natural language interaction with data, thanks to the work we’ve done for our Watson customers.

To find out more go to https://ibm.biz/WA-home

“ Our intention is to make the base level accessible to everyone at no charge, forever.”

11 Imagine 2014

http://www.westcongroupimagine.co.nz

Gold Sponsor Profiles

Making your protection software-defined

YOU MAY BE WELL ON YOUR WAY TO SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING, BUT HOW ABOUT YOUR SOFTWARE DEFINED PROTECTION?That’s the question posed by Hamish Sopher, Check Point New Zealand Country Manager, who says today’s multi-threat environment calls for an operation resilient, multi-layered protection that is segmented across multiple enforcement points - software defined protection (SDP).

“SDP is a new, pragmatic, security architecture and methodology offering an infrastructure that is modular, agile and most importantly, secure.

“Such architecture must protect organisations of all sizes at any location: headquarters, branch offices, roaming through smartphones or mobile devices, or when using cloud environments.

“Protections should automatically adapt to the threat landscape without the need for security administrators to follow up manually on thousands of advisories and recommendations.

“These protections must integrate seamlessly into the larger IT environment, and the architecture must provide a defensive posture that collaboratively leverages both internal and external intelligent sources.”

Sopher says perimeters are no longer defined and the attack surface is no longer only at the company edge, with smart devices allowing us to communicate and send files and images at the press of the button.

Our information is also online and available for hackers to use against us by enticing us to click on a link in an email that looks like it’s from a trusted source, but actually contains malware.

“And threats are growing more intelligent every day with the online sale of exploit kits and techniques for obfuscating known malware.”

Not only are attacks more sophisticated, but hackers are more motivated – and not only by financial gain, with nation states and hacktivists seeking to gain a technological edge or promote a political position.

“BYOD, mobility and cloud computing have revolutionised static IT environments, introducing the need for dynamic networks and infrastructures.”

All of which, Sopher says, is creating a perfect storm.

“Threats can target employees and their devices when they’re mobile. As threats grow more intelligent every day, we need to define the right methodology to protect enterprises in this ever-changing threat landscape.

“Also, as technology advances, security must advance with it. This includes adding additional layers of protection as viewed through a pragmatic security architecture and methodology.

“Multi-layered, segmented security can help protect enterprises in this ever-changing threat landscape,” he adds.

“Although there is a wide proliferation of point security products, these products tend to be reactive and tactical in nature, rather than architecturally oriented.

“Today’s corporations need a single architecture that combines high performance network security devices with real-time proactive protections.”

He says organisations can build the SDP architecture using Check Point products and security services across networks, hosts and mobile and cloud environments.

Sopher says Check Point knows security can be complex to implement. “Our philosophy is that security without management is not really secure, so we have invested heavily in providing a comprehensive and unified security management system.

“It translates your security strategy into a secure reality with unified policy and event management. Not only is it highly efficient, but it also gives you full visibility into the security posture of your company.”

Gold Sponsor Profile

Software-defined Protection (SDP) is a new, pragmatic, security architecture and methodology offering an infrastructure that is modular, agile and most importantly, secure.

The SDP architecture partitions the security infrastructure into three interconnected layers:

§ An enforcement layer that is based on physical and virtual security enforcement points and that segments the network, as well as executes the protection logic in high demand environments

§ A control layer that analyses different sources of threat information and generates protections and policies to be executed by the enforcement layer

§ A management layer that orchestrates the infrastructure and brings the highest degree of agility to the entire architecture.

By combining the high-performance enforcement layer with the fast-evolving and dynamic software-based control layer, the SDP architecture not only provides operational resilience, but also delivers proactive incident prevention for the continually changing threat landscape.

For more information visit www.checkpoint.com

14 Imagine 2014

Taking a Mini approach to simplification

JUST AS COMPANIES COME IN ALL SIZES, SO DO THE IT NEEDS OF BUSINESS, BUT ONE THING REMAINS FAIRLY CONSISTENT: A DESIRE FOR SIMPLICITY.In a 2012 Techaisle survey of SMB organisations, 72% of respondents said that ‘IT vendors should simplify technology’.

It’s a message Cisco has taken to heart with its Cisco UCS unified computing solution. Originally designed for the data centre, Cisco UCS unites computing, network, storage access and management into a single cohesive system – something Cisco says is a ‘radical simplification’ compared to traditional systems.

Now the vendor has taken things a step further, with the UCS Mini, which has been optimised for branch and remote offices, point-of-sale and smaller IT environments with deployments of two to 15 servers.

“This solution delivers servers, storage, and 10 Gigabit networking in an easy-to-deploy, compact form factor,” Cisco says.

“The key reason for developing this was to bring the full power benefits of the Cisco UCS platform to a wider audience.”

The Mini is expected to prove popular in New Zealand, with our predominantly SME market and a large number of customers needing fewer servers but still wanting the robust management capabilities provided by UCS Manager.

The UCS has become the fastest growing and now number one selling blade server in New Zealand, Cisco says. “This has been explosive growth achieved in just five years.”

The Mini also moves the fabric interconnect inside the chassis, reducing power and cooling needs and shrinking the solution footprint.

Cisco says the Mini leads to an 86% reduction in provisioning times, 77% reduction of cabling, 74% reduction of ongoing management costs and a 53%

reduction of power and cooling costs.

“As computing systems increase in scale, they also increase in complexity,” says Cisco. “And as the complexity increases, so does the expense of deployment and ongoing management.

“Today, more than 70% of IT budget is spent simply to maintain and manage existing infrastructure [according to a 2008 Forrester report]. As a result, IT organisations must continually increase resources to maintain a complex and inflexible infrastructure, versus using them to rapidly and effectively respond to business needs.

“IT organisations are looking for ways to substantially decrease cost of ownership, while increasing IT business value.

“The Cisco Unified Computing System helps address these challenges by streamlining data centre resources, scaling, service delivery and radically reducing the number of devices requiring setup, management, power and cooling, and cabling.”

Speaking last month as the vendor announced an expanded UCS portfolio, including new fourth-generation UCS Rack and Blade Servers for application performance and new UCS Director solutions to manage Big Data infrastructure workloads, Paul Perez, Vice President and General Manager for Cisco UCS, said rapid changes in the way applications are architected and delivered are being driven by the demands of big data, the internet of everything, mobility, video and cloud.

“We are in a new world where data sets and application scale are rapidly growing and the opportunities for businesses to capitalise on the deeper intelligence and faster decisions they afford are really taking off.”

Gold Sponsor Profile

The Cisco UCS Mini solution components include:

The Cisco UCS B200 M3 server, harnessing the power of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 product family, up to 768GB of RAM, two hard drives, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet to deliver exceptional levels of performance, memory expandability, and I/O throughput for nearly all applications.

Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis accommodating up to eight half-width UCS B200 M3 Blade Servers. Dual-voltage AC (100-120V and 200-240V) and 48V DC power supplies make Cisco UCS Mini ready for global deployment.

Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect

Cisco UCS Manager, providing unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components in a UCS Mini solution. It offers an intuitive GUI, a command-line interface and robust API to manage all system configuration and operations.

Optional components include C-Series Rack Servers and Cisco UCS Central Software for managing multiple instances of Cisco UCS Mini.

For more information visit www.cisco.com

15 Imagine 2014

From big data to data lakes

RESEARCH SHOWS THE MORE DATA-DRIVEN AN ORGANISATION BECOMES, THE GREATER ITS SUCCESS.Gartner states that organisations integrating new, high-value and diverse information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%. Additionally a SAP survey revealed that 90% of organisations that employ predictive analytic software agreed it had given them a competitive advantage.

“However, many companies are struggling to handle, process and interpret the overwhelming amount of data – both existing and new – in a timely and effective fashion,” Arron Patterson, Chief Technology Officer, EMC New Zealand, says.

“The opportunity is to redefine traditional data architectures characterised by rigid, difficult-to-scale, proprietary configurations to a modern ‘data lake’, characterised by agile, scale-out, open architectures via on-premises or cloud delivery models.”

Patterson defines a data lake as ‘a platform that provides for storage, management and analysis of Big Data by bringing together real time, near real time or batch data from disparate sources across multiple protocols’. He says a key requirement for data lakes are comparatively high levels of processing performance with simple, cost-effective and secure management of massive volumes of data.

He says leveraging big data effectively opens up numerous exciting opportunities for customers, including gaining deeper customer insights for optimised targeting, decreasing operational costs through predictive/forecasting based applications and gaining more accurate insight in detecting fraud and assessing risk. It also opens the doors to introducing new products and services, monetising information, changing industry dynamics or making positive societal impact.

But in order to fully capitalise on big data, organisations need to move from siloed IT infrastructure to a data lake where data is immediately analysed and value created - then stored if required.

“Many companies start a few big data projects and gain incremental value, but the keys to success are to maximise opportunities through the transformation of people, processes and technology from your current situation to a data driven enterprise. The path to become data driven starts with a business case, or alternatively a business driven process to use big data as a means to meet clear, tangible goals. The more agile you are in capturing big data, deriving insight from it and creating or updating applications to reflect newer insights, the more data driven you will become. This allows you to grow your business through rapid iteration with the ability to quickly add new features or application logic based on analytics.”

Patterson says the first step to becoming a data driven enterprise is a well trained and experienced staff who can collaborate with the business and IT to uncover an optimal use case for business value.

“Often you can get a big data project started by focusing on a key business process that is already supported by your existing business intelligence and data warehouse environment, and leverage big data to take that business process to the next level. Create a reproducible methodology that’s right for you where the business and IT work together to ask the right questions to uncover big data use cases. Organisations that have started this journey recognise that its not enough to just collect big data in Hadoop, but to continuously ask the right questions to solve business problems – that’s the real value.”

For more information visit www.emc.com/campaign/bigdata/index.htm

Gold Sponsor Profile

The EMC Federation offers a low-risk, best-of-breed approach to create a Big Data strategy that addresses the technology, people, and processes required to successfully complete a Big Data project, optimise IT infrastructures, and become a data-driven organisation. With minimal up-front costs and by leveraging existing IT investments, the EMC Federation ensures organisations identify the right Big Data use cases for fast return on investment, backed by an efficient Data Lake solution that significantly lowers the economics of managing data and adapts to diverse processing and storage demands. In order to maximise value across the organisation, the EMC Federation offers agile application development and Platform-as-a-Service hosting to quickly create new applications that operationalise insight.

16 Imagine 2014

The next evolution in next-generation firewalls

WITH COMPANIES STRUGGLING TO KEEP PACE WITH THE INCREASING VOLUME AND SOPHISTICATION OF CYBERATTACKS, IT’S TIME FOR FIREWALLS TO STEP UP - AND TIME FOR AN EVOLUTIONARY ADVANCEMENT IN NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALLS (NGFW).

“Today’s IT environments are becoming ever more complex, with a moving target of corporate and bring your own applications, devices and cloud services,” says Tim Nagy, Systems Engineer Director ANZ for Juniper Networks. “Technology to detect and mitigate malware attacks is important, but there are often compromises of effectiveness and manageability,” he adds.

The security industry continues to respond to the changing threat landscape with a variety of disparate new detection technologies. Unfortunately, it’s an approach that results in companies struggling to manage a patchwork of uncoordinated security tools, leaving a gap between detection and enforcement at the firewall.

“Many NGFW include integrated capabilities, such as Intrusion Prevention Systems, antivirus signatures and proprietary reputation feeds, but they are closed systems that are not capable of taking full advantage of the highly diverse third-party and custom feeds utilised by customers,” Nagy says.

“For many years, firewalls focused on rules that did traffic enforcement at Layer 3 and 4. As more complex applications and threats became more common, it was necessary to have application inspection all the way to Layer 7, often with integration of intrusion prevention (IDP).”

Nagy says this was still very static change management for policy updates and downloads for IDP signature definitions.

Adding user awareness to the firewall added a certain amount of dynamic control, allowing different policy enforcement for users or groups – what most think of as NGFW. However, Nagy says there are two

issues with this. “The static nature of the firewall is not enough for enforcement against today’s threats and the NGFW features are great for enterprise edge, or perimeter, firewall, but not that useful for securing applications in the data centre.

Enter the dynamic intelligent firewall and Juniper Spotlight, which brings additional intelligence into the firewall and streamlines the security enforcement process using dynamic policies which leverage the intelligence feeds.

Juniper Spotlight links security intelligence to policy enforcement for rapid protection against advanced threats.

Customers can quickly take action on intelligence from varied threat detection technologies, aggregating threat feeds from multiple sources – including Juniper and third party threat feeds and threat detection technologies you deploy – to deliver open, consolidated, actionable intelligence to firewalls across the organisation.

A more dynamic approach comes into play if attacks do get inside the network with application security in Juniper’s AppSecure features enabling the firewall to detect what applications-based rules on traffic ingress or egress.

Using a feed of known command-and-control networks to dynamically build policy on the perimeter firewall to stop infected hosts getting back to their C+C and further spreading is also a factor, Nagy adds.

For Nagy, and Juniper, the perfect intelligent network provides a way to detect and mitigate against threats at every level of the kill chain, from reconnaissance to data exfiltration.

Gold Sponsor Profile

In September, Juniper Networks announced new advancements in its security capabilities, extending the Juniper Networks Spotlight Secure threat intelligence platform and linking it with firewall policies in Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways.

These new advance security capabilities empower users to quickly take action on intelligence from varied threat detection technologies by immediately pushing enforcement rules to SRX firewalls to cut off command-and-control traffic, isolate infected systems and effectively combat a diversity of threats targeting networks.

Administrators are able to define enforcement policies from all feeds via a single centralised management point. This novel approach frees users to choose the most appropriate threat detection technologies available, including feeds customised to their business, rather than being locked into only the intelligence data offered by their firewall vendor.

Juniper’s advanced security solutions make centralised management of Juniper’s SRX and virtual Firefly Perimeter firewalls easier with the addition of Junos Space Security Director’s integrated logging and reporting functionality, with additional role-based access controls that manage next-gen security services such as firewalls, application security and unified threat management.

For more information visit www.juniper.net

17 Imagine 2014

Freeing IT from location constraints

IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. BUSINESSES – AND THEIR APPLICATIONS AND DATA – SHOULD BE BASED WHERE THEY NEED TO BE FOR THEIR BUSINESS. It seems a simple enough premise, however Prasanna Gulasekharam, Country Manager, New Zealand for Riverbed Technology, says too often businesses have been constrained by technology.

The company, best known for its WAN optimisation tools, has been repositioning itself more strongly around location independent computing in recent years.

“Businesses should be where they need to be for their business to run well, and technology should work around you and give you the best experience,” Gulasekharam says.

“In the past, businesses have blended around technology, because technology hasn’t been able to cope with it. We are now able to empower them to do business where they should be doing it.

“Businesses need to be able to put their applications where it’s most appropriate for them, whether it’s getting it as-a-service, or putting it in someone else’s data centre or wherever.

“Putting applications where they should be is what is happening. Our philosophy and technology blends in to make that happen.”

But hosting applications and data in the most optimal locations does have issues.

Long distances and multiplying locations in the physical world cause latency, which slows down applications, and bandwidth limitation issues, which increase costs, affecting application performance and impacting collaboration and productivity, he says.

Application performance affects business, and location affects application performance.

For CIOs and IT managers, there’s a

challenge too in gaining visibility and control of all the resources, including those shared with others in public clouds and those managed on-premises across often highly distributed enterprises and then optimising the experience for end-users.

“In the modern enterprise, nothing ever goes away. It’s like an archaeological dig, extracting data from the different layers of technology that have built up over time,” Riverbed says.

“Mainframes are still doing heavy lifting. The client-server layer, laid down in the ‘80s and ‘90s followed. Then the web layer started in the 90s. Now there’s SaaS delivered from public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds – and increasingly delivered to mobile devices.”

That creates islands of infrastructure, in data centres and the cloud through to in mobile devices.

Add the various permutations of applications on top of that.

Says Gulasekharam: “We have technologies that give you a visual of what the whole environment looks like, where the pain points are or where we could make things better, and then we have technologies to make things better, whether it’s load balancing across clouds or back through data centres, accelerating a particular part of the network, getting data to the cloud, all of that stuff.

“No longer is the data centre necessarily in a room within their organisation or at a Datacom. Some applications might be with Datacom, some might be best suited in Amazon. How do you decide? We give them a picture of what goes best, where and we give them the tools to do that.”

For more information visit www.riverbed.com

Gold Sponsor Profile

Riverbed offers a complete platform for location-Independent computing, ensuring applications perform as expected, data is available when needed and performance issues are detected and fixed before end users even notice.

The Riverbed line-up includes:

SteelHead WAN optimisation which accelerates delivery of applications to the branch and from the cloud, and allows IT to prioritise mission-critical apps over the fastest networks.

SteelApp ADC to optimise secure and scalable delivery of applications from private or public clouds to users anywhere.

SteelFusion storage delivery to reduce TCO and expedite branch office backup, recovery and restore of applications and data after disasters or outages.

SteelCentral for performance management and centralised management.

SteelScript to facilitate programmability, interoperability and intelligence across the Riverbed platform.

SteelStore cloud storage applicance which integrates with existing backup and archiving infrastructure.

18 Imagine 2014

Cyber security is not enough: Think resilience

THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND MODERN ATTACKS, AND IMPLEMENT THE RIGHT PROCEDURES AND RESPONSE STRATEGIES AS A RESULT, IS AN ART WHICH STILL REQUIRES PERFECTION IN BUSINESS.As security breaches rise on a yearly basis, security specialist Symantec believes defence begins with acceptance.

An acceptance that despite robust defence measures, cyber attackers still find a way through, acknowledging such threats is not an admission of defeat, rather an effective method to improve response and resilience in moments of crisis.

“Symantec is witnessing a significant shift in attacker behaviour,” says Mark Shaw, Technology Strategist – Information Security (Pacific), Symantec.

“The most advanced attackers are now often plotting for months before pulling off significant, wide-scale campaigns against entire industries, like the retail or banking sectors.

“They are more organised and calculated than ever before. Cybercrime is a very big business with an alarming number of players, bolstered by the size of their extended gangs.

“Defenders face both more effective adversaries and a continually growing threat landscape.”

Given this fiendish game of cat-and-mouse, Symantec says the best strategy is not the isolated removal of threats, but a slow, determined and on-going process of Cyber Resilience.

“Businesses are at a critical juncture and must accept that a paradigm shift in how to protect information is taking place,” Shaw adds.

“We’re never going to have enough people to match the bad guys one-on-one – but we can be smarter.

“The first step in being smarter is transitioning our thinking from cyber security to cyber resilience.”

For technology to be harnessed productively and add meaningful value to work and lives, Symantec says users need to be able to use it safely and securely.

“Organisations need to recognise that no company is immune from a breach and no network is 100% safe,” Shaw adds.

“Believing that a network is bullet proof from security attacks puts people, economies and resources at greater risk.

“The sooner businesses recognise this reality, the sooner appropriate responses can be developed or refined and impact to businesses minimised.”

IT professionals have a critical role here only if they can:

1 Effectively baseline where their organisation’s Cyber Resilience is at

today. This has to be done faster and with more rigour than previously.

2 Make their people part of Cyber Resilience strategy. Educate everyone in

their organisation’s supply chain to balance the innovation they want with the Cyber Resilience they need.

3 Use a Cyber Resilience strategy for long-term strategic competitive advantage in

their organisation.

It is impossible to predict all the new cyber threats which your organisation will face - some are yet to be dreamt up.

No organisation is immune to hostile attacks so start today, be part of the resistance.

Gold Sponsor

If the ‘idea grenades’ lobbed in this manifesto hit home, join up with the experts at Symantec whose digital security risk assessment Symantec Cyber vs. Risk Calculator, security products and services are helping millions of users, including thousands of CEOs to make their organisation cyber-resilient.

History shows that working alone on Cyber Resilience is a futile exercise as “those who do not learn lessons from the errors of the past, will repeat them.”

But through Symantec, there is strength in numbers when it comes to cyber warfare. It is more effective and efficient to join forces, pool intelligence and develop strategies with organisations that share the same beliefs as your organisation does.

IT’s new role is to be the Centre of Excellence for Cyber Risk assessment to provide new signposts for executive leaders to gauge their organisation’s Cyber Resilience.

Digital dangers transcend IT, departmental and even national boundaries. Cyber resilience is a team sport played by leaders. Like you. Catch the train now, it is ready to depart.

For more information visit www.emea.symantec.com/web/regpage/cyber_manifesto/en/

For partner enquiries, please contact Sam Taylor, sam.taylor@westcongroup.co.nz or 021 944945

For customer enquiries please contact Chad Kelly, Chad_kelly@symantec.com, 0274 345 764

19 Imagine 2014

Meeting the challenge of the Always-on Business

AS CONSUMERS, WE EXPECT ZERO DOWNTIME FROM APPS AND WEBSITES. WHY SHOULD IT BE ANY DIFFERENT FOR YOUR BUSINESS?After all, in today’s interconnected and global business environment we’ve left behind the perimeters of the nine-to-five working day, and continued access to information and applications 24/7 is a critical driver of business success.

We are, says Charles Clarke, Technical Director for APAC at Veeam, ‘in the era of the Always-On Business’ where customers, partners, suppliers and employees expect access to information and applications at any time, from any device and with no tolerance for downtime or data loss.

According to Veeam’s annual Data Protection Report 2013, the average cost per hour of downtime is more than US$300,000, factoring in loss of productivity, labour to fix the problem and loss of revenue and reputation. With the average outage lasting around five hours, it’s easy to see why organisations need to be able to recover data almost instantly, to avoid that potential US$1.5 million pitfall.

The challenge, Clarke says, comes in predicting and avoiding outages where possible, and minimising the impact when it does occur.

He says while it has always been possible to have high availability, it was often cost-prohibitive and complex. The modern data centre, built on virtualisation and the cloud, helps bridge the gap, but data protection toolsets are often designed with the old paradigm in mind.

“At Veeam, we have seen organisations regularly struggle with legacy tools and as a result not get the best return on investment from newer parts of their infrastructure. This leaves a clear gap between the goal of always-on availability and the cost and complexity of solutions – such as standalone servers – retrofitted

to try and match the dynamism of the modern data centre,” he says.

“Businesses can start to meet the challenge of ‘always-on’ by implementing multi-tiered data recovery. Organisations should apply the gold 3-2-1 rule to keep valuable data intact. For comprehensive data protection, have 3 copies of data with one in production, on 2 different media and 1 stored offsite.

“Veeam makes provision for onsite data recovery that can also be streamed to a cloud provider, ensuring offsite archives can be retrieved.”

Clarke says Veeam’s range of patented recovery methods reduce downtime for virtual workloads to minutes, representing a ‘massive’ saving in time to recovery and minimising the outage.

“Customers regularly report recovery point and time objectives of less than 15 minutes.”

“However, the best outage is the one which never occurs and Veeam tools provide predictive analysis so unnecessary downtime can be sidestepped.”

And having backup without regularly tested recovery is a waste of time and resources, he adds.

“Having a plan will not suffice, it has to be completed with routine recovery testing that ensures all operations are functioning the way they should. Veeam has patented technology that allows for automated recovery testing of every backup, every time, ensuring backups are recoverable.

“This eliminates the time taken for unsuccessful recoveries.”

For more information visit www.veeam.com

Gold Sponsor Profile

Keeping your business up and running at all times is critical.

Businesses today require 24/7 access to data, efficient management of exploding data growth and little tolerance for downtime.

Veeam Availability Suite enables the Always-On Business by providing solutions that deliver availability for the Modern Data Center, built on virtualisation and the cloud.

Among the key features are:

§ High-speed recovery: Providing rapid recovery of what you want, the way you want it

§ Data loss avoidance: Near-continuous data protection and streamlined disaster recovery

§ Verified protection: Guaranteed recovery of every file, application or virtual server, every time

§ Risk mitigation: Low-risk deployment with a production-like test environment

§ Complete visibility: Proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before operational impact

20 Imagine 2014

The new business platform: The Software Defined Enterprise

IN A WORLD WHERE AGILE IS EVERYTHING FOR BUSINESS, ‘SOFTWARE DEFINED’ IS REACHING BEYOND THE DATA CENTRE.We’re entering the age of the Software Defined Enterprise – transforming businesses while reducing costs, increasing business agility and safeguarding data security.

Aaron Steppat, VMware Australia and New Zealand’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, Software Defined Data Centre, says businesses utilising a software defined enterprise can expect IT to keep pace with their growing requirements and demands, enabling them to gain a competitive edge through reducing their time to market and time to value.

“IT can remove the silos, assign more budget to innovation and go beyond being a solution provider and become a true business partner.”

Steppat says ‘software defined’ liberates resources from the old client-server era of IT and facilitates the transformation into the mobile-cloud era.

“Through our approach of abstraction, pooling and automation, VMware is able to extend virtualisation beyond compute and into networking, security, storage and availability, all while enabling efficiency, agility, control and choice,” he adds.

“This approach means that applications and the infrastructure needed to power and secure them are provisioned faster; operated and managed more effectively; and then presented with contextual awareness of the user and the device to enable the best user experience possible.”

The VMware Journey Benchmark Survey, 4th Wave 2013, showed that software defined enterprises are 37% more responsive to IT requests while saving 30% of both operations and development staff time and increasing revenues 26% due to new applications and IT services.

They were also investing 50% of their budgets in innovation and able to secure

nearly 66% more budget than their less mature counterparts.

Steppat says VMware delivers the capabilities needed to build a software defined enterprise on the infrastructure already in place, providing a much better ROI and TCO than competitors.

“VMware also maps out a clear journey for our customers across a variety of use-cases and business aligned outcomes, whatever the customers’ maturity today.”

Steppat says the cornerstone of the software defined enterprise is VMware’s virtualisation platform, vSphere.

“We enable the network virtualisation element through our NSX portfolio, and software defined storage is subsequently delivered through our storage policy based management engine and our hyper-converged VSAN (Virtual SAN) capability.

“In addition to this robust virtualised infrastructure, we wrap our vRealize Cloud Management Platform around it to enable class and market leading automation, operations and business management. This layer provides through policy, the ability to model an application once, deploy it many times and in many places – even in non-VMware infrastructure environments – with governance.

“At the same time as we deploy the application, we also integrate with the networking and storage layers to connect, secure, store and protect the workload to guarantee service levels.

“Next, we provide visibility into the health and performance of the application, and ensure it’s the right size so the infrastructure is maximised for both capacity and efficiency.

“Finally we derive the cost of your infrastructure, how it compares with other providers and the intelligence to track via tagging, who is consuming what.”

Gold Sponsor Profile

VMware has a multi-pronged approach to the software defined enterprise, harnessing its vCloud suite, Virtual SAN and NSX for the software defined data centre, while vCloud Air and VMware Horizon Suite add cloud and mobility.

VSAN provides radically simple storage, with policy-driven per VM SLA, vSphere and vCenter integration, scale-out storage, built-in resiliency, SSD caching and converged compute and storage.

Meanwhile VMware NSX provides the platform for network virtualisation.

vCloud Air – previously vCloud Hybrid Service – built on VMware vSphere, quickly and seamlessly extends your data centre into the cloud using the tools and processes you already have.

Rounding out the key offerings is VMware Horizon Suite as the platform for workforce mobility.

For more information visit www.vmware.com

21 Imagine 2014

http://www.westcongroup.co.nz

http://www.westcongroup.co.nz

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SilverSponsor Profiles

Enterprise IT is changing: Act now with Actifio

THE LANDSCAPE OF ENTERPRISE IT IS CHANGING, FUELLED BY ORGANISATIONS’ DESIRE FOR IMPROVED RESILIENCY, ENHANCED AGILITY AND A SMOOTH TRANSITION TO THE CLOUD.

Actifio virtualises data, allowing CIOs and their teams to provide data protection, test and development and analytics, as well as disaster recovery and business continuity through a single storage platform, from one golden copy of its production data.

The end result is a faster time to provision, more time to develop and test in a given project timeframe, improved code quality due to using a current-state database, and a faster time to delivery and revenue.

Actifio worked with Westpac NZ to deliver a virtualised system which enables the company to engage with 100% of its production data sets. Previously, the business was only engaging with 20% of the data due to the cost associated with using a full copy of existing data. This meant that a full 80% of data was left untested.

Since partnering with Actifio, Westpac NZ has improved its IT agility and is now able to deliver new products to market within two months.

“Actifio provides improved resiliency through instant data access for data protection and disaster recovery,” says Budd Ilic, Regional Manager ANZ,

Actifio. “Our technology has no backup window, and recovery time objectives (RTOs) are often measured in minutes not hours.”

The company recently hosted its annual Copy Data Forum in Sydney, Australia inviting existing customers, prospects and partners to learn about deploying Actifio solutions.

Actifio experts and local customers demonstrated how Actifio solutions enable more efficient IT operations whilst eliminating legacy data management tools. The sessions also provided businesses with a better understanding of how to recognise and manage copy data.

Ilic says the proven business impact of Actifio solutions derives from the ability to decouple strategic application data from rapidly commoditising physical infrastructure, and allowing enterprises to put data where it needs to be, when needed.

“Actifio is your on-ramp to public, private, and hybrid cloud-based systems, ensuring your data follows your applications wherever they live.

Our products can deliver an order of magnitude reduction in total cost of ownership via

the elimination of multiple software licenses for point tools, up to a 10X reduction in storage costs, and up to a 70% reduction in network bandwidth costs.”

Gartner recognised Actifio across four areas – copy data management, recovery assurance, data deduplication and continuous data protection – of its 2014 Hype Cycle for Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery.

In the report, Gartner placed copy data management on the Hype Cycle for the first time, listing Actifio as the leading vendor in this category. Gartner noted that IT organisations’ historical use of different storage and software products for backup, archive, replication, etc, have resulted in over-investment in storage capacity, software licenses and operational expenditure costs associated with managing excessive storage and software. Copy data management can ‘dramatically’ reduce the need for multiple unmanaged copies of data and cut costs associated with multiple disparate software licenses and storage islands, Gartner notes.

For more information visit www.actifo.com

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Imagine 2014

Protecting IT in small businesses and branch offices

IT EQUIPMENT DEPLOYED IN SMALL BUSINESSES OR BRANCH OFFICES IS OFTEN INSTALLED IN AREAS THAT ARE LESS THAN CONDUCIVE TO PROPER PERFORMANCE.

Maybe it’s a cramped closet, a small room jammed with supplies, or even a section in the middle of the office.

Often that equipment is no less important to the business than servers in a state-of-the-art data centre are to a major corporation, says Simon Smith, Regional Manager, Schneider Electric IT Business. In either case, if the servers go down, the business may lose money or even customers.

“So don’t wait for a catastrophic event to occur to take steps to improve the IT equipment’s environment and supporting infrastructure,” he urges.

Powering IT equipment is typically not as simple as plugging it into a wall outlet because they require UPS to prevent damage or data loss in a power outage, and appropriate power distribution.

“A UPS with a capacity up to about 2,000 volt-amperes (VA) can be plugged into a standard 10A household (or office) wall socket. A 3kVA system typically requires a 16A wall socket, and UPS systems greater than 5kVA are typically hardwired from an electrical panel – meaning you need an electrician.”

Smith says most equipment, notably servers, is dual-

corded, so they can, and should, be plugged into separate UPSs or rack PDUs for redundancy. “Even better, plug the UPSs into separate circuits, each fed by different breakers.”

Using UPS systems which can be managed remotely is a good idea for branch offices, enabling IT staff to get notifications about issues such as low batteries or overload. Some PDUs have switchable outlets, so equipment status can be monitored remotely and a hung server rebooted remotely, for example.

While small businesses may consider it difficult to justify the cost of a rack enclosure, a rack is a fundamental structure, enabling proper organisation of equipment and cables to prevent cables turning into a rat’s nest.

“And when you avoid the rat’s nest of cables, you’re likely to reduce downtime from human error.

“Racks are recommended for loads greater than 2kW because they promote proper airflow for cooling IT equipment by helping isolate hot and cold air streams so equipment is breathing cooler air.”

Some racks have locking doors providing additional security, especially important

in open areas. Enclosed racks can include noise dampening so the fan noise from IT equipment doesn’t distract office workers.

APC by Schneider Electric has been the leading manufacturer of physical IT infrastructure solutions for the past 25 years, Smith adds.

“We’re known for our industry-leading InfraStruxure solution for data centres. We brought together our UPS, management, rack, power distribution and cooling offers to create a comprehensive solution for smaller environments called InfraStruxure for small IT.

“This solution can be utilised by IT managers in any small IT setting. Whether it is a small data centre, an IT room, enterprise branch or network closet.

“Just because IT equipment isn’t housed in a traditional data centre doesn’t mean it’s not vital to the business.”

To learn more about proper protection techniques, check out Schneider Electric white paper number 174 at www.apc.com/whitepaper/?wp=174 or call 0800 333 373.

For more information visit www.apc.com

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Imagine 2014

Enterprise mobility grows as #GenMobile workers drive wireless uptake

WHETHER IT BE BUSTLING COFFEE SHOPS OR DESERTED AIRPORT LOUNGES, A NEW BREED OF WORKERS, STUDENTS AND CUSTOMERS ARE MOVING AWAY FROM THE TRADITIONAL WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENT, AS THE #GENMOBILE REVOLUTION KICKSTARTS AN ENTERPRISE-LEVEL SHIFT TOWARDS MOBILITY.

Relying heavily on mobile devices for every aspect of work and personal communication, #GenMobile workers are forcing the enterprise to embrace secure, high-performing and personalised mobility networks.

“#GenMobile is a new mode of working,” says Mark Verbloot, Director, Systems Engineering, Aruba Networks ANZ. “People are now working at work, home and anywhere in-between and this is subsequently placing heaving demand on networks.”

Recent Aruba findings reveal the changing characteristics of this emerging group of workers, workers who demand flexible locations and hours to suit a shift in attitudes towards mobility within the workplace.

The global study of 5,000 people found that nearly 60 per cent of respondents prefer Wi-Fi at the expense of other connections, and 49 per cent want the option to work remotely.

“#GenMobile workers are using devices which are predominantly wireless only, such as tablets and smartphones, but they expect the same levels of connectivity, experience and security no matter where

they are working from,” adds Verbloot, alluding to the pursuit of productivity within the mobility space.

“For enterprises to deliver the necessary infrastructure to keep workers productive when connected, the architecture needs to address the four S’s: Stable Air, Secure Air, Simple Air and Smart Air.”

Incorporating architecture that acts like a utility in that it’s constantly operating, Verbloot says enterprises must also provide security that’s not intrusive, mobile services that require no manual entry logins as well as location-relevance and priority for mobile apps.

“Aruba is the conductor in the orchestra of #GenMobile,” he adds. “We have carried out extensive research covering all four areas, and there’s no question that we lead the market.”

With global customers such as Microsoft, Google and Starbucks, as well Crown Law and Canterbury District Health Board in New Zealand, Aruba has deployed thousands of access points across the world, positioning the company as a standout leader within the mobility industry.

“Wireless is fast becoming the networking solution of choice within enterprises,” adds Steve Coad, Managing Director, Aruba Networks ANZ. “Organisations must embrace the needs of #GenMobile workers and draw on a mobility solution which embraces the next generation working standard, such as 802.11ac.

“Enterprises have little choice and must consider wireless connectivity issues such as functionality, density, hot spots, guest access and lots of other contributing factors.”

A provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise, Coad says Aruba designs and delivers Mobility-Defined Networks that empower IT departments, including the growing scale of #GenMobile workers.

“More businesses are looking at the wireless office concept as wired connectivity becomes obsolete,” Verbloot adds.

In a world where wired is the past and wireless is the future, when it comes to accommodating #GenMobile, Aruba are very much in the present.

For more information visit www.arubanetworks.com

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Imagine 2014

AudioCodes realises Unified Comms vision with Westcon deal

WITH A VISION OF BECOMING THE INNOVATIVE LEADING SUPPLIER OF CONVERGED VOIP & DATA SOLUTIONS FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS AND ENTERPRISES, AUDIOCODES’ OFFERS A BROAD RANGE OF SOLUTIONS FOR BOTH SERVICE PROVIDER AND ENTERPRISE DEPLOYMENTS.

A 20-year telecommunications market veteran, according to a recent Infonetics Research report, the company nearly doubled its enterprise Session Border Controller (SBC) market share from 2Q13 to 2Q14, posting 35% growth from 1Q14.

“AudioCodes offers the market a wide portfolio of uniform ESBCs,” commented Diane Myers, Principal Analyst, VoIP, UC, and IMS for Infonetics Research. ”Their integration with leading software vendors such as Microsoft, Genesys and BroadSoft is driving demand for the products.

“Enterprise session border controllers (SBCs) are gaining acceptance worldwide and are growing at a fast clip, mainly driven by medium and large businesses deploying Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking services as a way of consolidating, centralising, and increasing the utilisation of their trunking infrastructure.

“SBCs are being positively impacted by the growth in SIP trunking and the increased migration of businesses to IP PBXs.”

AudioCodes’ VoIP products are deployed by service providers in the least cost routing, SIP, and mobile markets, as well as by

small, medium and large Enterprises for their unified communication networks in over 100 countries.

These solutions are built around the company’s field-proven VoIP product range that includes session border controllers (SBC), digital and analogue media gateways, IP phones, and a diverse suite of communications and management software applications.

“We are pleased to have been recognized by Infonetics as a dominant player in the ESBC market,” adds Nimrod Borovsky, VP Marketing, AudioCodes.

“The company has been investing significant efforts in its SBC offering over the past few years and the consistent growth in SBC revenues and market recognition demonstrates our success.”

Such is AudioCodes’ standing as a leading provider of VoIP (Voice over IP) technologies and Voice Network products, Westcon Group has joined forces with the company to provide a strengthened unified communications offering in the New Zealand marketplace.

Mark Baker, Westcon Group General Manager Vendor Business, describes AudioCodes’ portfolio as a “strong offering that will add

immediate value and broaden Westcon Group’s unified communications offering in New Zealand.”

The partnership, which was revealed in April 2014, will help AudioCodes’ provide customers with the ability to deliver business-class communication solutions to their end-user communities, through provision of the latest range of business telecommunications solutions.

AudioCodes also has the ability to deliver innovative solutions for virtually any voice communications environment, offering reduced total cost of ownership, enhanced features and superior voice quality.

Partnering with Westcon Group reinforces the company’s commitment to assist Kiwis businesses move to the next level in unified communications.

As a value added distributor, customers will also benefit from Westcon Group’s full range of proven, value-added offerings that the channel has come to expect, such as certified product training, effective pre and post-sales engineering support, on-site support, and much more.

For more information visit www.audiocodes.com

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Imagine 2014

Nine evergreen criteria to enable mobile collaboration

MOBILE COLLABORATION OFFERS THE OPPORTUNITY TO SPEED UP BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS, IMPROVE MOBILE AND REMOTE WORKER ENGAGEMENT, AND CREATE NEW REVENUE STREAMS WHILE SHORTENING SALES CYCLES.

Yet, just as it does with any integration, finding the best solution remains a daunting challenge, says Tony Simonsen, Managing Director Avaya Australia and New Zealand.

“Most businesses want a solution that supports the latest technologies and, when it comes to mobile collaboration, a solution that seamlessly integrates office communications with smart devices.

“However, it’s critical decision-makers don’t get swept up in the tornado of technology advances and in the process forget factors that will always remain critical to a business.”

Simonsen says those key criteria, which should never change, include:

Total Cost of Ownership. It’s imperative to take into account all costs: maintenance, CapEx, expected upgrades, expected energy consumption, and more. Measure this over a five-year period for all prospective solutions and the business will have a better picture of predicted expenditure for the life of the solution.

Simplified Management and Administration. A solution should save time for IT Managers, not increase time spent on tasks – and

managers are constantly looking at ways to simplify workloads. As such, businesses should consider browser-based tools for managing IT processes such as security and user profiles– such as Avaya VENA Fabric Connect, which enables network administrators to virtualise and optimise routing in their private clouds and data centres.

Scalability. A solution should cater to current needs but be easily expanded when the need arises.

User Experience, Features and Applications. SMEs need a single solution with the gamut of communications applications: voice, data, text and video. Avaya’s Scopia video solution is one offering that covers the breadth of enterprise comms applications required.

Devices and Device Independence: Ensuring employees are comfortable with the device they’ll use daily is a critical component to any solution, but it is often overlooked. Choosing the right devices helps enable greater employee engagement. And businesses are increasingly allowing staff to also bring their own device which in turn further increases productivity and lowers device acquisition costs. Key to managing disparate devices on a network, Avaya Live Engage

takes remote conferencing collaboration to the next level with a cloud based, 3D virtual environment.

Resiliency/Redundancy: Companies need a network that is available and reliable. To decrease acquisition and maintenance costs and enable remote access, businesses should look at a system that offers redundancy through software rather than hardware.

Third-Party Integration: Finding a system that integrates with applications your employees use daily – such as an alert system that integrates with Microsoft Outlook – will increase employee satisfaction while decreasing training time.

Plug-and-Play Provisioning: If your company experiences frequent employment changes, plug-and-play provisioning is essential to enable the quick integration of a new employee and/or device to the network.

Support: Ensuring you pick the right technology from the right manufacturer, through a reseller you trust, is critical. Check the reseller’s certifications to ensure they’re adept at installation and, equally, support afterwards.

For more information visit www.avaya.com

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Imagine 2014

Moving beyond fear with business assurance technology

SECURITY TECHNOLOGY CAN FOCUS ON PREVENTION AND PROHIBITION - AND INSTIL A CULTURE OF FEAR. OR IT CAN CENTRE ON POSSIBILITIES AND ENABLE COMPANIES TO UNLEASH THEIR FULL BUSINESS POTENTIAL.

Blue Coat says the threat landscape is evolving so quickly, that we are seeing a shift toward a new approach that integrates real-time protection, dynamic analysis and post-breach investigation and remediation.

“This approach closes the gap that exists between ongoing security operations and incident discovery, containment and resolution, and provides greater security at the core of the data theft issue: the intersection points between users and data.

“The net result: businesses can move beyond fear and start focusing on possibilities.”

Blue Coat says 2015 will be the year where technology trends continue to take shape and transform the way organisations do business.

“Enterprises are beginning to recognise the importance of developing an advanced risk-based security strategy where decisions are made through the process of evaluating the vulnerability of systems, the nature of threats and the sensitivity of data.”

The company offers not only some of the industry’s most advanced and sophisticated security technology, but also the vision and expertise that demonstrate how security technology provides business value.

Known as Business Assurance

Technology, Blue Coat delivers solutions through a comprehensive array of technologies, products, services and capabilities that provide total protection – while helping enterprises identify and leverage new opportunities.

The company was recently recognised as the market leader in business assurance technology, being named the 2014 Web Security Vendor of the Year across Asia Pacific by market research firm, Frost & Sullivan.

The award recognises the company’s ‘exemplary growth and performance’ in 2013 throughout Asia

Blue Coat takes a holistic approach with its Advanced Threat Protection solution that integrates technologies from the Blue Coat Security and Policy Enforcement Centre and the Resolution Centre to deliver a comprehensive lifecycle defence that fortifies the network.

The solution blocks known advanced persistent threats that are often associated with the theft of sensitive data. It proactively detects unknown and already-present malware and automates post-intrusion incident containment and resolution. This makes it possible for day-to-day security operations and advanced security analytics

teams to work together, protecting and empowering the business.

Blue Coat’s PacketShaper helps enterprises control bandwidth cost, deliver a superior user experience and align network resources with business priorities:

§ Reserve bandwidth for critical applications

§ Contain disruptive traffic and slow bandwidth increases

§ Embrace new trends such as BYOD, video, cloud and social media

§ Eliminate potential bandwidth increases

The PacketShaper S-Series products are designed to meet the needs of today’s demanding enterprise network environments. Supporting throughputs ranging from 10Mbps to 10Gbps, these platforms include auto-discovery and classification of 900+ applications and tens of millions of websites.

Other benefits include Cloud-connected classification engine with real-time update; real-time monitoring and reporting of application performance and bandwidth consumption, and application-level bandwidth policy with asymmetric shaping and dynamic partitioning.

For more information visit www.bluecoat.com

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Imagine 2014

Security analytics: Helping you do more, with less

YOU’VE GOT YOUR SECURITY TECHNOLOGY IN PLACE AND YOUR SIEMS AND LOGS – NOW YOU NEED AN AUTOMATED METHOD TO LEVERAGE THOSE EXISTING NETWORK SECURITY TOOLS.

Enter security analytics, heralded by some as ‘the next big thing’ in IT security.

Mick Stephens, Regional Director, Australia and New Zealand at FireMon, says by integrating a layer of security analytics, intelligence and automation into an existing network security infrastructure and processes, organisations can more effectively find, correct and ultimately avoid gaps in their security framework.

“Intelligent automation of tasks, such as firewall rule administration, allows greater speed of service delivery while ensuring compliance requirements are always met,” Stephens adds.

It is, he says, a way to do more, with less, and achieve better security outcomes.

“We can provide overwhelmed security, risk and compliance teams with automated intelligence to more effectively achieve key objectives. Automate the repetitive, time-intensive security tasks and free up skilled resources to focus on the complex issues that need the human touch.”

He says the increasing complexity of delivering IT security outcomes in the face of increased ‘breaches of significance’, and the obligations of aligning these outcomes to corporate and

industry regulations and compliances, is driving the need for security analytics.

“This is then wrapped in the shroud of downward budgetary pressure and the increasingly problematic issue of finding and retaining quality security staff.

“This all leads to organisations needing to do much more with less. Freeing up an organisation’s resources to address these broader issues by automating security processes, but doing this in an intelligent and analytical way, is a step to achieving this outcome.”

In a recent survey FireMon commissioned, 73% of respondents considered their firewall policies ‘somewhat complex’ to ‘out of control’.

“Cleaning up and tightening the process around the commission and, as importantly, the removal of rules, unquestionably decreases the risk surface. This is even more complex in multi-vendor environments, not to mention adding next-gen firewalls into the equation.”

Stephens says FireMon’s Security Manager is a ‘real-time, proactive analytics solutions’, rather than a post-event log analytics SIEM.

“Security Manager is a complementary addition to a

SIEM and can be integrated with all primary providers’ solutions. Both have a place, but the better your security posture (as an example, the cleaner the firewall rule base is) the less likely an organisation is to have security breaches and less need for post-event analysis.”

FireMon provides real-time collection and analytics of security device configurations, with related analysis and reporting, rule clean-up and resource efficiencies, audit and compliance clean-up and reporting, among others.

Changes are detected real-time and alerts issues on unauthorised changes. The analytical data is then used for intelligent automation of repetitive, time intensive security tasks. Historic and real-time data is also used for predictive modelling of threat scenarios based on an organisation’s current configuration.

“For example, in a network planning and risk assessments project where there is a need to allow additional services, connection of business partners or in the case of business mergers, new divisions, we can assess and predict the potential access risks prior to deployment.”

For more information visit www.firemon.com

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Unified communications’ changing face

DEMOCRATISATION, DECLINE, WAR... NO, WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THE LATEST MOVIE, BUT INSTEAD THREE MEGA TRENDS SHAPING THE UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS MARKET.

Soren Schoennemann, Managing Director, Jabra, Australia and New Zealand, says the democratisation of technology, decline of location and the war for talent are leading to increased demand for UC and highlighting the importance of Jabra’s field of expertise: audio devices.

He says the democratisation of technology, with both hardware and software better designed and available at lower costs, means small and medium sized businesses can now access technology once restricted to those with large budgets.

“The democratisation means companies can now access technology that allows them to compete with organisations of any size, located anywhere.

“Factoring in BYOD adds to the demand of employees. They are only too aware of the benefits technology brings to their lives and they demand their employers provide them the tools to make them more productive.

“From an audio device perspective, we see headsets that offer multi-connectivity, noise cancellation technology,

NFC, increased battery life and a range of other features that make the technology easier to use and more functional.”

At the same time as technology is getting more affordable for the masses, Schoennamann says organisations are being required to do more with less resources - and less staff.

“Organisations are increasingly making use of technology to facilitate employee collaboration.

“The rise of working from home has resulted in an increasingly mobile work force, which means the traditional office has been replaced with a laptop, internet connection and headset, enabling the employee to work wherever they can get online.

“Our audio devices directly support organisations who are experiencing this decline of location, by enabling their employees to work where they want, be it from home, the coffee shop or in the office.”

He cites the example of the recently released Jabra Motion Office, which features triple connectivity,

connecting a single headset to a traditional deskphone, smartphone and UC platform. The headset can work with the smartphone out of the office, and when paired with the base in the office enables connectivity with softphones and deskphones while supporting increasingly popular practices such as hotdesking.

Completing the trifecta of trends is the war for talent, where Schoennamann says the insatiable appetite for the best and brightest employees has ‘kicked off an arms race of sorts’.

“Organisations are investing more in key real estate such as headquarters and technology as they fight to be seen as a great way to work.

“Audio devices can help combat the war for talent by enabling companies to provide employees with best in class technology that enables them to work where they want, and how they want. This allows companies to position themselves importantly as a great place to work.”

For more information visit www.jabra.co.nz

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Philips Cloud Base: Efficiency meets IT security

COST EFFICIENCY, SECURITY AND EASE OF MANAGEMENT – WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE ABOUT THAT?

The three are among the key benefits virtual desktop infrastructure can deliver to enterprise IT, says Graham Dunn, Director of MMD, the New Zealand agent for Philips IT Displays.

“With every element in the VDI landscape coordinated from a single point of administration in the enterprise, IT managers can maintain strong safety and security systems for the entire working space of their organisation, and eliminate the chance of maverick software entering the system.

“All the data is secured in the cloud and synced with the main server – ready for instant-on access when users sit down to work,” he adds. “It’s just a smarter way to manage IT.”

With VDI, IT organisations can maintain all data and software on the centralised server and deploy a simple all-in-one client on the user side. User desk space is freed up, data on the server is viewed securely from the client and IT resources spent on the client side are greatly reduced.

And with that in mind, Dunn says the new Philips Cloud Base brings VDI within easy reach of enterprises, and is set to streamline IT in

organisations with its ‘all-in-one simplicity’.

The zero client all-in-one ready solution enables users to attach their current Philips monitor to the stand and plug directly into their enterprise VDI environment for access to centralised IT applications, data storage and security.

Versions are available for both VMware infrastructure and for Citrix and the ergonomic stand enables users to attach any Philips S, P or B line monitor of between 19 and 29 inches. A mouse and keyboard can be connected directly to the base, and no separate PC or notebook is required.

“It provides all of the benefits of maintaining data and software on the server, and eliminating the need for computing power on individual desktops,” Dunn says.

Observing a clean desk policy, with less noise and not tangle of cables, is also easy with the system, Dunn says the offering fits right in with the ‘clean, reliable IT’ concept, being easy to deploy and easy to manage, and a cost-effective way to transform a monitor into a zero client.

“Since enterprises can use existing Philips monitors

with the new base, there is no need for additional outlay on hardware. It simply plugs into the virtual desktop infrastructure that the enterprise already has in place,” he says.

“The potential savings are impressive: Enterprise IT with zero-client technology using the Philips Cloud Base drives down the total cost of IT ownership by reducing the acquisition costs for computing devices.”

An added bonus: with up to 90% savings on electricity, the Base helps cut power bills while also being good for the health of the planet, giving the enterprise a green footprint that benefits the planet as well as the businesses operating expenditure.

“The Philips Cloud Base might deliver all-in-one simplicity, but there is nothing ‘one size fits all’ about its design,” Dunn says.

“The stand is adjustable to the users eye level, and can be swivelled, tilted and rotated as required – all of which ensures the screen is in exactly the right position to ease the physical strains of a long working day.”

For more information visit www.philips.co.nz

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Polycom: Winning the UC battle in NZ

IN NEW ZEALAND, THE UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS MARKET IS LOOKING FOR THE EASE OF USE AND SIMPLICITY THAT DRIVES FAST ADOPTION OF NEW UC TECHNOLOGIES.

That’s the expert assessment of James Brennan, Director, APAC Solutions Marketing, Polycom, who believes success is measured by the delivery of intuitive systems that allow for a consistent look and feel across entire organisations.

“Microsoft Lync provides the most complete end to end UC solution,” Brennan says. “When combined with the quality of Polycom audio and video devices and infrastructure, the end user experience is hard to beat - they find it simple and powerful which drives adoption and ROI.”

According to Frost & Sullivan research, Microsoft Lync is a disruptive factor in the New Zealand UC market because it gives Microsoft the ability to offer core functionality such as IM, presence, voice and video on a single platform.

“It also offers the widest breadth of UC functionality over any other platform of its kind, and is highly interoperable with open standards-based video solutions,” adds Brennan, who believes New Zealanders have always embraced new technologies that allow them to connect to themselves and the world.

“Lync is no exception,” he adds. “New Zealand is one of the earliest adopters of Lync, the size and scale of which rival larger markets. Cutting edge customers are deploying complete Microsoft Lync and Polycom solutions that are transforming their organisations to create a culture of collaboration.”

As one of the leading Lync voice markets for Polycom in APAC, Brennan believes Kiwi customers are looking for an integrated solution, and recognise that Lync voice delivers.

“Our phones support the full Microsoft user experience, meaning that finding who you need, their availability and connecting to them is drop dead simple,” he adds.

Market leader…A clear leader for video and voice collaboration in New Zealand, Polycom holds a majority position when it comes to installed base and ongoing business, standing tall as the number one Microsoft partner for voice and video collaboration.

So much so that 76% of Lync voice handsets are Polycom, with the UC experts offering over 40 products that integrate with Lync.

“We are winning three

times more deals when our video and voice solutions are partnered with Microsoft Lync,” adds Brennan, explaining that all Polycom voice solutions are Lync 2013 certified.

“The reason that we continue to win in the New Zealand market is the value that we provide to our customers. Our vision is simple – to unleash the power of human collaboration.”

Most users know Microsoft’s operating systems and software and Polycom handsets support this full Microsoft user interface experience.

“The migration to video collaboration is less daunting when it merges seamlessly with familiar applications like Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Office,” says Brennan.

Lync voice and Polycom audio also provide the lowest TCO in the market.

“The key to a successful deployment is to offer more than product and through working with Microsoft and our partners we provide a high level of consulting services, including adoption and operations.”

For more information visit www.polycom.com

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Smart sets the bar high for collaboration

SMART BY NAME, AND SMART BY NATURE, SMART TECHNOLOGIES IS UPPING THE ANTE WITH COLLABORATION TOOLS IT SAYS UPENDS DISENGAGEMENT AND FREES STAFF FROM UNPRODUCTIVE MEETINGS.

The collaboration solutions provider’s products reach across business, government and education markets, offering a range of products designed to ensure meetings are intuitive, productive and collaborative, allowing everyone to contribute, whether participants are on-site or joining remotely.

The company recently introduced Westcon Group as a value-added distributor of Smart Enterprise collaborations solutions across New Zealand and Australia, with plans to build on its 20-year history of serving the region.

Westcon Group is offering reseller partners in the region access to Smart Visual Collaboration solutions, working to provide comprehensive sales, installation and services for customers, while also developing new and extendex enterprise offerings.

“Unified communications is a critical requirement for any business, with a proven ability to boost workplace productivity and efficiency — and Smart Technologies is at the heart of this transformation,” Dolp Westerbos, CEO, Westcon Group, says.

“Westcon Group is dedicated to helping resellers leverage this opportunity via our

deep technology expertise in unified communications and unmatched knowledge of the channel, as evidenced by our successful relationship with Smart in other regions across the globe.”

The growing relationship sets the stage to better meet the expected in crease in demand for business communication and collaboration solutions.

Neil Gaydon, President and CEO, SmartTechnologies, says Smart Visual Collaboration Solutions focus on freeing knowledge workers from traditional meeting room experiences.

“That process is more effective with a value-added distribution model which expands new markets and allows customers to unleash their productivity.”

The Smart Visual Collaboration Solution, features the innovative ‘unbound workspace’, using Smart Board interactive flat panels to enable levels of content ‘never seen before’, the company says.

“Whether in a hallway brainstorming session, a meeting room or in a remote location, you have the ability to simply pick up a pen or use your finger to work collaboratively with complex visual data.

“That way, everyone can

contribute to the meeting, upending disengagement and freeing knowledge workers from unproductive meetings.”

The combination of Smart interactive flat panels and Meeting Pro software make Smart Enterprise solutions easy-to-use, with meetings starting with the touch of a finger. Among the innovations Smart claims are the Smart Room System for Microsoft Lync and the Smart kapp digital capture board, a new product category for the enterprise market, which Smart claims revolutionises the inefficient dry-erase board.

Smart kapp allows users to write, draw and capture ideas using dry erase Smart ink markers, just like the old school dry-erase board. Work images can be instantly saved, converted to PDFs and sent to anyone, anywhere.

Smart kapp technology dramatically improves collaboration for people in remote locations as well, giving them the ability to follow the evolution of ideas in a Smart kapp session in real time with iOS or Android devices able to save content as snapshots and share work in real time the company says.

For more information visit www.smarttech.com

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Why enterprises must make sense of cyber security

AS FORMER TARGET CEO GREGG STEINHAFEL WILL NO DOUBT ATTEST, RECENT CYBER ATTACKS ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE SECTOR CONTINUE TO CAST SERIOUS DOUBT OVER SECURITY PRACTICES IN BUSINESS.

“The cyber security space is evolving at a rapid rate,” warns Gerry Tucker, Country Manager ANZ, Websense.

And while organisations are spending 80% of budgets on traditional defence mechanisms, recent Gartner findings show these solutions to be only 30% effective against modern threats.

“This poses a challenge for all organisations in making sure their security postures stay up to date with this changing security landscape,” adds Tucker, emphasising the importance of implementing up-to-date data protection strategies in enterprise.

“Organisations need to work towards the creation of a technology architecture and security posture which provides proactive detection, correction and prevention across the integrated threat lifecycle.

“This requires organisations and security professionals to change their thinking in terms of how they view the threats that they face in terms of external and insider threats.”

Positioned as a leading vendor in safeguarding organisations from security threats, Websense is a global player when it comes to protecting businesses from advanced cyber attacks and data theft.

Providing an integrated

solution across the entire threat lifecycle, incorporating multiple points of entry including web and email, Tucker says Websense has “invested heavily” within this space, ensuring watertight security protection for organisations.

Billed as best-in-class security with a unified architecture, Websense TRITON security solutions offer dynamic threat defences, advanced data protection and compliance in a unified solution.

“Websense provides not only detection but increased levels of cyber-intelligence to our clients, to stop threats in their tracks,” adds Tucker, championing the advanced analytics and real-time protection of the Websense TRITON architecture.

“Through the implementation of an integrated security architecture that leverages the most advanced cyber intelligence network in the market, with advanced technology that analyses content in real time based on content and context, we are able to demonstrate a significantly improved security solution across the threat lifecycle.

“Furthermore our technology can be deployed quickly in order to get a quicker return on investment.”

Specialising in enterprise

security, Tucker is well placed to comment on the data protection strategies deployed across enterprise, strategies which should be “based on the needs of the business and its business processes.”

“Technology needs to be the enabler rather than the driver,” adds Tucker, alluding to the company’s excellent standing within the market.

“Businesses must identify which pieces of data are both high risk and high value, and then map this insight to business processes.”

Tucker accepts however that “not all data loss is malicious”, but by starting with a business conversation at the outset, an organisation will be better able to cut through the noise and identify risks and target the appropriate processes and technology.

“Choosing solutions that enable a faster return to the business is key to ensuring the success of a data security project,” he adds.

Operating in an age where creating and maintaining a clear security policy is critical, Websense offers more than just solutions, adding protection strategies and cyber intelligence to its leading portfolio of security services.

For more information visit www.websense.com

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Cut the confusion and make storage intelligent

WOULD YOU BUY A FERRARI JUST FOR YOUR DAILY COMMUTE?

Gavin McLaughlin, VP of Worldwide Marketing at X-IO says deploying a costly all-flash array, based on an assumed continuous maximum workload for data centre applications, isn’t too dissimilar to buying that costly Ferrari for the daily commute.

He says many workloads experience performance spikes which dramatically increase I/O requirements as the result of a boot storm, a recompose or a large surge in end-user productivity. But that doesn’t mean you need the Ferrari.

Instead, McLaughlin says data centre managers should strive for the right mix of efficiency, economy and performance so their virtualised infrastructure can easily handle performance spikes while remaining cost-effective.

“It’s no secret there is an abundance of storage solutions on the market from which businesses can choose.

“Some vendors reduce cost and increase their margins through the use of consumer-grade hard and solid state disk drives. While this can lower upfront costs, it increases risk and can severely limit the lifetime of the array, increasing the TCO,” McLaughlin says.

“Many vendors also design their arrays with ‘best practices’ around capacity utilisation without a strategic way of balancing workloads or cost efficiency.

“Together, these can prove to be detrimental to overall data centre efficiency and IT buyers must choose solutions that guarantee no performance loss when 95% full, as well as a comprehensive warranty.

X-IO’s Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) systems are based on two decades of invention and investment by storage industry experts and McLaughlin says the company’s intelligent adaptive flash hybrid storage systems can automatically balance workloads to ensure data centres are operating at the highest possible efficiency.

“Instead of assuming all workloads are best deployed on flash storage – which isn’t the case with sequential workloads for example – X-IO’s ISE hybrid storage dynamically analyses performance I/O and organises data across the best, most efficient and effective storage media for the workload,” McLaughlin says.

He says because the ISE automatically optimises

performance demands, they operate more efficiently, last longer – with a five-year standard warranty as the company’s much touted ‘zero touch storage’ promise – and offer improved price for performance.

“There’s [also] a misconception in the marketplace that hybrid storage is a compromise, achieving the cost effectiveness of disk and the performance of flash, but there’s more than meets the eye when looking at real-world workloads,” he adds.

“Some hybrid deployments that use SATA consumer-grade drives and SSDs for cache are much closer to this idea of a compromise. On the other hand, when looking at I/O performance, X-IO’s use of enterprise-grade SAS and intelligent adaptive flash make our ISE solutions much more comparable to all-flash arrays.

“More importantly, in real-world, customer-based proof of concept testing, X-IO’s hybrid arrays were shown to give the same performance as competitive all-flash arrays, but at a third of the price and half the power consumption.

For more information visit www.xiostorage.com

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HTTP is the new TCP

Getting Wyse to cloud computing

As organisations deploy more applications within their business, the question of how they can secure themselves becomes ever more important.

F5 says organisations are seeking competitive advantage through more custom applications than ever before, and those custom applications are generally

using web architectures/technologies because that’s what the cool kids are using these days.

“From a security perspective, those custom apps are all tending towards using port 80 or port 443 – as we say, http is the new TCP.

“All regular traffic goes through those ports, so you can’t block them using a

‘normal’ firewall,” F5 says.

“We know how to do application delivery and are leading the charge to make applications more secure wherever they reside, and wherever the user is, and whatever type of device they’re using to access it.”

For more information visit www.f5.com

Cloud client-computing is replacing the unsecure, unreliable, energy-intensive and expensive PCs, while lowering the total cost of ownership and providing a superior user experience.

Leading the way is Dell Wyse. The company’s portfolio includes industry-leading thin-, zero- and cloud

PC client solutions with advanced management, desktop virtualisation and cloud software supporting desktops, laptops and next generation mobile devices.

Last month the company unveiled its Dell Wyse WSM 7, which it describes as a secure and easy-to-manage desktop virtualisation

software solution, capable of delivering almost any Windows application to a run on a physical or virtual desktop as though on a PC. Dell Wyse says the WSM removes security risks and management complexity.

For more information visit www.wyse.com

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Effortless data meets private cloud ’EFFORTLESS DATA’ IS THE MANTRA FOR OVERLAND STORAGE, AND THE COMPANY IS NOW DRIVING SOLUTIONS THAT CAN BE USED IN THE CLOUD.

Lee-Ann Tan, Regional Sales Director, APCA and Middle East at Overland Storage, says the company is seeing growth opportunities in the cloud market.

“We are also driving aggressively solutions that can be used with the cloud.”

Overland has packaged its private cloud solution into it’s SnapServer platforms and will also be introducing its Hyper-converged VDI appliance which will address the needs of VDI.

“One of the important

features in our NAS and Scale-Out NAS offering is our capability to deliver a private cloud storage solution,” Tan says.

“We are putting your data into your data centre and leveraging the cloud as a transport layer with a AES 128-bit encryption to ensure security.

“Our private cloud application is essentially free, bundled with our storage, and it allows unlimited usage,” he adds.

Once deployed, the application appears as a

icon on the desktop, from where it can be launched and the storage used like a regular drive.

“This application is available on all popular platforms like Windows, iOS, Kindle, Blackberry, Linus and Android.

“Now, companies can more effectively distribute material, get co-workers to collaborate more effectively and safely, without allowing sensitive company data to sit in the public cloud.”

For more information visit www.overlandstorage.com

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New patterns emerging for enterprise cloud IT’S NO LONGER A QUESTION OF ‘IF’ BUT ‘HOW FAST CAN WE MOVE’ AND ‘WHAT ARE WE GOING TO MOVE FIRST’ WHEN IT COMES TO COMPANIES MOVING THEIR CROWN JEWELS TO AWS.

That’s the verdict from Greg Kieser, Amazon Web Services ANZ Partner and Alliances Manager, who says AWS is seeing a wave of adoption of new cloud-based solutions, with several major patterns emerging.

“The first, as with any big technology shift, is development and test workloads.

“The second use case is for entirely new applications. Bristol Meyer’s Squibb uses AWS to run clinical trial simulations for 64% less cost, in 1.2 hours vs 60 hours.

British Gas has a mobile application letting customers control central heating with a smartphone.”

Kieser says customers are also using the cloud to supplement on-premises applications, or building cloud applications supplemented by on-premises resources. Nokia uses Amazon Redshift to analyse data from its mobile applications, run on-premises. Samsung runs its Smarthub digital content application on AWS, connecting the front-end to their on-premises financial transaction system.

Enterprise applications are also being moved. News UK estimates it will save ‘tens of millions of dollars’ by moving its SAP ERP system to AWS.

“We also have many customers who are migrating out of entire data centres or going ‘all in’ with AWS. News Corp is migrating 3000 applications to AWS by January 2015 and will go from 40 data centres to six, with the goal of having 75% of their IT infrastructure running on AWS.”

For more information visit www.aws.amazon.com

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Making IT simpler with virtual desktopsBUYING TECHNOLOGY ISN’T ALWAYS FUN. THERE’S THE HARDWARE DECISION, THE SOFTWARE DECISION AND THEN THE DECISION ON HOW ALL OF THAT WILL BE MANAGED, SUPPORTED AND FIXED WHEN IT BREAKS.

Steven Robinson, Cloud DC CEO, says virtual desktops have the power to transform that.

“You can have your office ICT delivered to you at an enterprise level, anywhere, any time and on any device on a ‘pay as you go’ model, at an affordable price.

Cloud DC developed OfficeBox with the intent to offer businesses of any size, the ability to manage their corporate data, users and applications with the same

level of service as a large enterprise environment, while delivering those same services over the internet.

Robinson says the ability to provide a corporate IT environment from anywhere in the world with an internet connection gives established and growing business the flexibility to have a mobile workforce, which will increase productivity and efficiency while at the same time reducing the overall cost of IT infrastructure and services

by at least 40%.

“OfficeBox is transforming the way IT is delivered to a business.

“No longer is it a highly technical challenge that requires highly paid highly trained IT staff to deliver, but it is now a simple, easy to manage web procurement exercise that any general administrator can perform.”

For more information visit www.officebox.mobi

FaceMe: Video Conferencing that Just WorksWHILE COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY HAS REVOLUTIONISED BUSINESS, IT TAKES THE HUMAN VOICE TO INFUSE A DEEPER MEANING.

Leading the way in video collaboration with an intuitive user interface and stunning audio and visual quality across organisations, both large and small, FaceMe is changing video conferencing on a global scale.

Banishing historical barriers such as bandwidth issues, firewalls, general usability and even cost, FaceMe’s message is refreshingly simple - ‘Video Conferencing that Just Works’.

“Video is our passion,” says Simon Grieve, VP Sales, FaceMe New Zealand. “Right down to the core fundamentals of how the

products are developed, it’s about making this technology accessible to all users and managing all of the variables in the best way possible.”

With a capacity for 12 way, no download video conferencing in the FaceMe Cloud & inbuilt teleconferencing for up to 25 people at any given time, video and audio conferencing Grieve believes has “never been simpler.”

Speaking as the company continues its growth across the globe, Grieve says FaceMe emulates a meeting environment with

an effective blend of high video quality and unrivalled user experience.

“Ultimately we manage all the variables in the DNA of the product,” he adds. “So that users can just enjoy the experience and not have to worry about the technology.”

In recognising the need for high-level communication tools, alongside human interaction, FaceMe addresses the common grievances of customers, offering a feature set that is leaving the competition wanting.

For more information visit www.faceme.co.nz

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Web security as a business enablerCAN SECURITY BOOST PRODUCTIVITY? FOR SOME KORDIA CUSTOMERS, THAT’S CERTAINLY PROVING TO BE THE CASE.

Defending yourself against increasingly sophisticated web-borne malware, while reducing IT costs and boosting productivity for an increasingly distributed workforce is no easy task.

Murray Goodman, Kordia Head of Product, says Kordia’s OnKor Web Security Service allows customers to realise ‘significant’ cost savings by eliminating the need to purchase, deploy and maintain on-premise hardware or software.

“Intuitive tools make it easy to create, enforce and monitor

effective web use policy. And because the service leverages a user-based subscription customers pay only for what they need and can seamlessly scale their web threat protection as required.”

He says in one use case example the company is seeing customers using OnKor’s granular web security to support the introduction of Wi-Fi in their business to support BYOD, the mobile enterprise and as a value add to customers; keeping users safe from threats and in some cases ensuring web content

being viewed is appropriate.

“You don’t want the person dining at the table next to your family to be looking at inappropriate content, for example.”

But, says Goodman, for Kordia customers, there’s an added bonus to web security: they get feature rich reporting. “In the Wi-Fi use case this allows them to identify new ways of getting their marketing message to these users.”

For more information visit www.kordia.co.nz

Boost for resellers with Plan B’s ‘pay as you grow’ NZ Cloud Backup

IN PROCESSING OVER 100,000 BACKUP JOBS TO THE CLOUD EVERY DAY, PLAN B SHINES BRIGHT AS ONE OF NEW ZEALAND’S LEADING BACKUP AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY SPECIALISTS.

Powering an Asigra-based backup service hosted by Southern Cross Data Centres, NZ Cloud Backup is available exclusively to the reseller channel through Westcon Group.

“Plan B provides a ‘ready-made’ solution that resellers can package in with their other services to provide an opex model to their customers from day one,” says Ian Forrester, Managing Director, Plan B.

“It removes the need for resellers or their customers to make any capital investment or upfront commitments.”

Offering both scalability and flexibility, Forrester says NZ Cloud Backup in a nutshell is a truly ‘pay as you grow’ model, providing a great opportunity for resellers to build an on-going monthly revenue stream without any upfront investment.

“Plan B has built its business on the annuity revenue model so partnering with Westcon to enable resellers to make the move is a win-win situation for all,” adds Forrester, who heads New Zealand’s largest provider of private cloud backup and business continuity services.

With all backed up data

stored locally in the land of the long white cloud, Forrester says the deal allows Plan B to leverage its existing infrastructure and experience as a managed service provider to provide solutions to a wider audience through their existing IT providers.

As Westcon ramps up its investments in their new cloud platform, Forrester believes as a leading ICT distributor in New Zealand it is well positioned to reach the target market for NZ Cloud Backup across the channel.

For more information visit www.nzcloudbackup.co.nz

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Making the complex simple

EVEN AS INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANISATIONS REALISE THE POTENTIAL AGILITY AND COST SAVING BENEFITS OF CLOUD COMPUTING, CONCERNS ABOUT SECURITY AND AVAILABILITY OF CLOUDS PERSIST.

But Symantec.Cloud says there are blue skies ahead – if you are protected when you move to the cloud.

The security company says the path to a protected and confident cloud can be scattered with potholes.

“While the move to the cloud often yields operational efficiencies and business agility, it must not increase your availability or security vulnerabilities.

“Cloud outages and cloud

breaches can be avoided with an approach that aligns with your IT investment strategy.”

The company says whether you want to consume cloud services directly, build your own cloud for internal operations or external reach, or extend into third-party clouds safely and efficiently, it has a path to a protected cloud to help companies be more confident in their cloud.

The company offers a range of solutions in the cloud including Endpoint Protection,

Web Security, Email Filtering, Data Loss Prevention, Email Archiving, Email Continuity and Multi-factor Authentication.

Westcon partnered with Symantec in February to distribute their cloud service portfolio, enabling businesses to reduce infrastructure costs, enable secure access for employees and guarantee performance of their critical applications.

For more information visit http://goo.gl/94OZMh

Westcon has launched a catalogue of cloud services to the New Zealand market, delivered by a select group of local and international vendors. Westcon will continue

to add vendors to this catalogue over time.

A range of Cloud Services are now available to New Zealand Resellers through standard and digital distribution methods. These services are available immediately and enable Westcon Resellers to obtain their own branded, web-based, “Cloud Application Store” where their end-users can digitally procure services.

Check it out on: http://nz.cloud.westcon.com/

Snap: Support critical for reliable networksSTANDING TALL AS ONE OF NEW ZEALAND’S FASTEST-GROWING SERVICE PROVIDERS, SNAP’S RECENT CROWNING AS JUNIPER NETWORKS NZ PARTNER OF THE YEAR REFLECTS THE COMPANY’S SIGNIFICANT INVESTMENT WITHIN THE ENTERPRISE SUPPORT SERVICES SPACE.

Recognised for achieving certification as a Juniper Support Service Specialist partner, the highest Juniper partner status attainable, Snap’s access to technical tools, high-level engineers and advanced training has propelled the company to the cutting-edge of the industry.

“We’ve worked hard to enhance our enterprise offering, ensuring all our services are supported and managed by highly skilled network specialists,” says Charlie Boyd, General

Manager of Enterprise and Wholesale, Snap.

Christchurch District Health Board, tests the boundaries of Snap’s support team daily.

“Snap provides an end to end managed service across our WAN and assists us with our LAN monitoring,” says Chris Dever, CIO, CDHB.

“This teaming has Juniper and Cisco certified people on hand to support our network so I’m confident they have the technical capability - and agility - to resolve issues.”

Boyd insists that enterprise customers should expect this level of support whenever they’re signing up with a new service provider.

“It comes down to the people managing and supporting the service,” he says.

“If the support team doesn’t possess the technical know-how, then rest-assured you’ll pay the price to fix the problem.”

For more information visit www.snap.co.nz/business

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We’d just like to say thanks to all our sponsors

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