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NETWORKcomputing 

I N F O R M A T I O N A N D C O M M U N I C A T I O N S – N E T W O R K E D www.networkcomputing.co.uk 

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MARCH/APRIL 2018 VOL 27 NO 02

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COMMENT 

COMMENT 

THE BEST NETWORK POSSIBLE 

BY RAY SMYTH, EDITOR 

We live in an uncertain world: of that there can be no doubt. We are advised 

that the current skills shortage in IT and cybersecurity will get worse before it 

gets better, and yet I have noted that one response to the shortage is to 

increase salaries for some IT staff from that same, limited pool. While this will be welcomed 

by the beneficiaries, it's well known that the positive effect of a salary increase 

will be short-lived, and it is actually unlikely to prevent employees accepting a role 

with an even better salary offered by a competitor. But does any of this contribute to a 

better, more operationally aligned, secure networked estate? 

I have never held back in encouraging those working in IT and networking to get 

more involved in their organisation: involved so that they can spend more time and 

resources doing what the organisation really needs and dissuading it from embarking 

on a path of networked anarchy, where functional line managers do what they want, 

when they want, and connect it to the network - all too often with board approval, 

even if tacit. 

The essentials of a well-functioning, business-aligned, realistically secure network will 

never change. These values should always be paramount and enable the organisation's 

objectives, reviewed regularly and refined and adjusted, in order to at least be in 

step with organisational changes, and ideally to lead them. When combined with 

competent scrutiny and a shared and evolving understanding, the digitally transformed, 

digitally driven organisation will naturally attract and retain the best people. It 

might even help to create some. 

EDITOR: Ray Smyth 

(ray.smyth@btc.co.uk) 

REVIEWS: 

Dave Mitchell 

Ray Smyth 

SUB EDITOR: Mark Lyward 

(netcomputing@btc.co.uk) 

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writing, from the publisher. 

So if you have got this far then why not send this to your CEO, to whom I say: if your 

organisation is digitally driven (and that should be all of you) then you must think hard 

about how you will truly integrate your IT operations with the organisation you seek to 

create. Yes, you will have to pay those you recruit the going rate at the very least, but 

this alone will be sufficient to satisfy the emerging breed of organisationally integrated 

IT and networking professionals. They should probably want your job and may ultimately 

be best suited. It's over to you... 

Ray Smyth - Editor, Network Computing. 

Ray.Smyth@BTC.CO.UK | https://twitter.com/ItsRay? 

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MARCH/APRIL 2018 NETWORKcomputing 3

CONTENTS 

CONTENTS 

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 8 

AI AND YOUR NETWORK.....10 

We continue our artificial intelligence focus this 

issue with insights on how to begin your AI 

journey and the computing power and 

capacity required to do so. We also look at 

how AI can augment network security, and 

consider the next decade of AI development 

EDITOR’S COMMENT......................3 

The best network possible 

COMPANY NEWS............................6 

Market Dynamics: making sense of the market 

NETWORK NEWS............................7 

Moves, adds and changes 

VERSION X......................................8 

The latest networking news 

ARTICLES 

THE AI SANITY CHECK..................10 

By Professor Peter Cochrane at the University 

of Suffolk 

THE REINFORCING BENEFITS OF AI..11 

By Derek Lin at Exabeam 

INTELLIGENCE THAT IS ARTIFICIAL..12 

By Ken Gilmour at invinsec 

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE...20 

Is improvement a bigger goal than 

alignment in the enterprise? Terry Blevins at 

The Open Group and owner of Enterprise 

Wise LLC considers the enterprise 

architecture challenge 

WHEN STORAGE 

BECOMES DATA..................26 

Do we need to consider storage media or 

should we consider data holistically? Mark 

Peters and Scott Sinclair at the Enterprise 

Strategy Group share their views 

IoT SECURITY THAT WORKS...22 

IoT devices extend the attack surface of 

networks, but what can be done to combat 

this, and how should the risk be 

understood? Professor William Webb at 

Weightless SIG explains 

NETWORK COMPUTING 

AWARDS 2018.....................28 

The Radisson Blu Edwardian in London was 

the venue for this year's Network Computing 

Awards. Discover more about the 2018 

winners in our special round-up feature 

THE AI POWER STRUGGLE.............13 

By David Hogan at NVIDIA 

PACKET MINING: THE GIFT THAT 

KEEPS ON GIVING.......................17 

By Cary Wright at Endace 

TRUST THAT KNOWS 

NO BOUNDS................................18 

By Barry Scott at Centrify 

NETWORKED AUDIO....................19 

By John Ellis at Shure 

CONTAINING EXPECTATIONS.......21 

By Marco Ceppi at Canonical 

SMART CONNECTIVITY 

BY DESIGN...................................25 

By Oli Barrington at R&M 

TRANSPARENT I.T..........................27 

By James Cockroft at Coeus Consulting 

SHOW PREVIEWS 

IP EXPO MANCHESTER.................15 

25th-26th April at Manchester Central 

UC EXPO LONDON....................16 

16th-17th May at ExCel London 

PRODUCT REVIEWS 

ALTARO VM BACKUP - UNLIMITED 

PLUS EDITION...............................14 

NETSCOUT AIRCHECK G2...........23 

4 NETWORKcomputing MARCH/APRIL 2018 @NCMagAndAwards 

WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK

The first dedicated 

Recruitment EXPO 

for cyber security 

professionals 

Thursday 5th April 2018 

UWE Conference Centre, Bristol 

www.CyberSecurityExpo.co.uk 

The Bristol Expo 

is FREE to attend 

Come and meet the 

companies hiring within 

Cyber Security. 

Find out about 

the latest hot jobs 

100s of job vacancies 

available on the day. 

Free entry into 

the Security 

Cleared EXPO 

Industry Partners:

COMPANYNEWS 

MARKET DYNAMICS: MAKING SENSE OF THE MARKET 

IN A REGULAR LOOK AT RESULTS AND KEY BUSINESS ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR SUPPLIERS INTO THE 

NETWORKING AND IT MARKET, NETWORK COMPUTING SUMMARISES THE EDITORS SELECTIONS 

It's not just technology that has to 

evolve and change: organisations too 

must make sure they remain relevant 

and in tune with their market. Having 

launched the Riverbed Digital 

Performance Platform, Riverbed 

Technology has also unveiled a new 

brand identity, which they say is to 

accelerate their strategy to deliver 

industry-leading solutions to maximise 

digital performance and fuel new growth 

opportunities in a $30 billion plus market. 

Subbu Iyer, SVP and Chief Marketing 

Officer at Riverbed explains, "Digital 

business is now mainstream and digital 

performance defines business success. 

Riverbed has also evolved significantly in 

the last few years, with entirely new 

offerings that have enabled us to deliver a 

modern IT architecture for today's digital 

enterprise. The result of these efforts is the 

new Riverbed Digital Performance 

Platform, which helps maximise 

performance across every aspect of a 

customer's business, allowing 

organisations to fundamentally rethink." 

According to IDC, at least 50 per cent of 

global GDP will be digitised by 2021, 

with growth driven by digitally-enhanced 

offerings, operations and relationships. 

They expect digital transformation 

spending to reach $2.1 trillion in 2021. 

Cybersecurity company Webroot has 

announced double-digit year-on-year 

annual recurring revenue growth for the 

second quarter of fiscal 2018. This marks 

the sixteenth consecutive quarter of 

double-digit, year-on-year revenue 

growth. Their business segment grew by 

31 per cent, more than 5 times the 6 per 

cent growth analyst firm Radicati tracks as 

the annual growth rate for business 

endpoint security solutions worldwide. 

In the consumer segment, Webroot grew 

by 4 per cent year-on-year, which 

according to Webroot's calculations is 2.6 

times the pace of worldwide security 

spending in the consumer security 

software segment. 

Mike Potts, CEO of Webroot said, "[This] 

highlights the demand for our solutions as 

businesses and consumers face an 

increasingly complex landscape of 

cybersecurity threats. Our momentum 

further validates that Webroot has the 

most sophisticated threat intelligence 

engine in the industry, integrated with 

leading technology partners." 

As part of their ongoing strategy to 

expand across Canada, eStruxture Data 

Centers has acquired Kolotek from Gaz 

Métro Plus. This will allow both eStruxture's 

and Kolotek's existing customers to take 

advantage of multiple physical locations in 

the greater Montreal region, improving 

multi-site and disaster recovery options 

while adding to eStruxture's collective pool 

of network providers. 

The latest Tech Barometer from Moore 

Stephens, the accounting and advisory 

firm, has revealed that the average 

enterprise value of technology companies 

on the Alternative Investment Market 

(AIM) has reached £111m. This is a 24.9 

per cent increase from 30 June 2017 and 

a 50 per cent increase for the full year. 

The continued growth in value of these 

stocks has resulted in a resurgence of tech 

IPOs with seven in the second half of 

2017, raising £114m in total. This is a 

stark increase to just the one to take place 

in the previous half-year. 

Dougie Hunter, Director at Moore 

Stephens said, "Six months ago we 

predicted an increase in IPO activity and 

this has certainly been the case. In total, 

more than £1.2bn was raised by 

technology companies on AIM throughout 

2017 - it really is a booming market." 

UK headquartered Software Services 

Company Clearvision has reported 

another year of record growth. Turnover 

rose to more than £22m at the end of 

2017, from £17.3m, representing a 27 

per cent year-on-year increase. Founder 

and CEO Gerry Tombs attributes the 

phenomenal growth to the continued trend 

for digital transformation across all 

business types and size, as well as their 

innovations and expansion into new areas, 

in particular its capability to take teams 

and technology to the cloud. The 

independently owned business operates 

across five locations, with headquarters in 

Southampton and employs 90 people. NC 

Disclaimer - all information published in this article is based upon fuller submissions provided under general release. Any interested party is urged to verify 

any information printed here, prior to using it in any way. Neither Network Computing nor it publishers accepts any responsibility for the accuracy of the 

information contained in this article. 



NETWORKNEWS 

NETWORK NEWS - MOVES, ADDS AND CHANGES 

A REGULAR LOOK AT THE STORIES INVOLVING PEOPLE, COMPANIES AND SOLUTIONS 

The threat posed by networked IoT 

devices is significant, especially at 

this early developmental stage. 

Gartner, using survey data from recently 

acquired CEB, says that nearly 20 per 

cent of organisations observed at least 

one IoT-based attack in the past three 

years. Much will have to change if this 

attack surface is to be defended. To protect 

against these threats Gartner forecasts 

that worldwide spending on IoT 

security will reach $1.5 billion in 2018, 

a 28 per cent increase from 2017. 

Commenting, Ruggero Contu, 

Research Director at Gartner explains 

that "Organisations often don't have 

control over the source and nature of 

the software and hardware being 

utilised by smart connected devices. We 

expect to see demand for tools and 

services aimed at improving discovery 

and asset management, software and 

hardware security assessment, and penetration 

testing. In addition, organisations 

will look to increase their understanding 

of the implications of externalising 

network connectivity." 

With the number of IoT devices set to 

quadruple by 2024, has anyone considered 

the impact that these devices will 

have on the network operators? The 

huge number of devices and subscribers 

accessing the network will have consequences 

for operators, says Robin Kent, 

Director of European Operations at 

Adax. He explains that operators will 

need to prioritise traffic, asking "Can 

you imagine if the smart grid were to 

stop working to prioritise advertising?" 

As if to underline the future risk, Robin 

explains that, "If you think back 20+ 

years, this can be likened to the advent 

of SMS, whose volume of messages 

caused problems for the voice network. 

The solution, to offload SMS messages 

and reroute them to give the priority to 

voice, highlighted a problem that wasn't 

anticipated." 

A 'wait and see' policy may have its 

merits, but not when it comes to digital 

transformation - and this is especially 

true in the retail sector. Mark Baker, 

Field Product Manager at Canonical 

says that, "In the digital age, technology 

is the differentiator, and ignoring the 

importance of innovation is akin to 

accepting failure. Those businesses 

which do so won't be around in five 

years' time." 

Continually evolving retail will be 

essential in order to compete in a world 

where traditional web shop solutions, 

which rely on templates, will no longer 

offer enough flexibility to consumers 

used to shopping with multiple devices. 

"The older systems are also difficult or 

impossible to adapt for the omni channel 

sales and logistics - these are musthaves 

for long term sales success and 

customer loyalty," says Baker, who concludes, 

"In the digital age, technology is 

the differentiator and ignoring the 

importance of innovation is akin to 

accepting failure." 

When faced with pressure on all sides, 

it is easy for network and IT staff to 

become unfamiliar with their network 

estate and in turn the nature of the 

security breaches taking place, including 

acknowledgment that a security 

breach could quite feasibly go unnoticed. 

This is reinforced from a recent 

survey by Balabit: The Unknown 

Network Survey. 

From the survey, 83 per cent of businesses 

agreed that technology can be 

effective in preventing breaches, but 73 

per cent believed that technology struggles 

to keep up with security threats. 

Csaba Krasznay, Security Evangelist at 

Balabit says, "Security is no longer 

about simply keeping the bad guys 

out... What's really alarming is that the 

majority of businesses know very little 

about the nature of the security breaches 

that are happening to them. Many 

even admit that a security breach could 

quite feasibly go unnoticed. That's how 

loose a grip we've got on them, or how 

little we really understand them. We 

know about breaches, sure - but we 

really don't know enough." NC 



PRODUCTNEWS 

VERSION X 

VERSION X 

VERSION X 

VERSION X 

VER 

WITH PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENTS RANGING FROM THE TRIVIAL TO THE BIZARRE, THE EDITOR 

DISTILS THE ESSENCE OF THOSE THAT ARE OF INTEREST TO THE NETWORKING COMMUNITY 

Full management visibility of the IT 

estate is progressively getting harder, 

and the benefits on offer from the use 

of virtual infrastructure increase this challenge. 

It is with this in mind that 

SolarWinds has added new functionality 

with a pair of product updates that offer 

broader and deeper performance monitoring 

capabilities across physical and virtual 

infrastructures, particularly in hybrid environments. 

The newest version of 

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor 

extends support to a wider range of leading 

all-flash arrays, while the latest update to 

Server & Application Monitor permits deeper 

visibility into interactions between a set 

of servers running business applications. 

Christoph Pfister, Executive Vice President 

of Products at SolarWinds said, "Finding 

clarity through the haze of complexity is 

vital to successfully keep today's heterogeneous 

and distributed IT environments running 

smoothly. With support for more leading-edge 

storage vendor solutions and 

deeper visibility into the connection 

between critical infrastructure resources, our 

system management updates give IT professionals 

more powerful tools to overcome 

complexity and optimise performance." 

Continuing the theme of growing complexity, 

fast effective testing of network 

operation is essential to keeping users 

working, and it seems there is a trend 

among tester providers to do this. The latest, 

from IDEAL software, is based on some 

free software updates for the SignalTEK NT 

network transmission tester, SignalTEK CT 

cable transmission tester and the NaviTEK 

NT Plus and Pro network trouble shooters. 

For significant enhancements, such as 

improved wire map and port discovery 

information, users can download the free 

updates from their website. 

There is a lot said about security and as 

each breach or compromise is disclosed, 

the task seems to get increasingly tougher. 

In the midst of this uncertainty there is however 

some comfort and hope offered in the 

form of encryption, which continues to be a 

significant tool for those wanting to protect 

their data. Interconnection and data centre 

company Equinix has launched its 

SmartKey. This global key management 

and encryption Software as a Service aims 

to simplify data protection across any cloud 

or destination. The service leverages their 

globally interconnected platform of more 

than 190 international Business Exchange 

data centres in 48 markets, to securely host 

encryption keys separate from, but in close 

proximity to, the data located across networks 

and hybrid multi-cloud environments. 

Commenting, Christina Richmond, 

Program Vice President, Worldwide Security 

Services, at IDC said, "Digital transformation 

efforts by enterprises and service 

providers are moving more data and systems 

to the cloud, pushing an ever-increasing 

amount of sensitive enterprise and customer 

data to be stored in multi-tenant, 

shared computing and storage environments. 

This trend is being driven by data 

sovereignty requirements like GDPR, creating 

demand for secure data localisation 

solutions like key management-as-a-service 

offerings, including Equinix SmartKey." 

Innovations such as 5g and IoT are 

responsible for increasing the complexity of 

the networks that they rely on to function. 

In response to this, Juniper Networks has 

been sharing its vision for simplifying service 

delivery in complex metro networks. 

Metro Fabric is designed to provide an 

adaptive, agile and secure network infrastructure 

for simplified service creation and 

delivery in the metro. The variety of services 

and the number of connected devices supported 

across metro networks - the layer of 

a service provider's infrastructure most 

commonly associated with connecting subscribers 

to the internet - has recently 

expanded exponentially. 

Ethernet business services, popular applications 

like Netflix and Skype, IaaS offerings 

like Amazon Web Services and a 

throng of IoT devices have proliferated, 

and this will only continue with emerging 

5G rollouts. The result is a complex web of 

legacy products, manual processes and 

divergent architectures and protocols that 

have hindered true innovation and rendered 

it difficult for service providers to 

keep up with bandwidth demands and cost 

constraints, explains Juniper. 

Juniper's Metro Fabric, they claim, comprises 

the industry's only disaggregated 

programmable photonic layer. Service 

providers building metro services for 

mobile, business, cable, fibre residential 

and direct public cloud use cases can now 



PRODUCTNEWS 

SION X 

leverage a modern service creation platform 

to quickly and efficiently deliver new 

revenue-generating services. Juniper says it 

is now introducing the initial building 

blocks of the refreshed metro: two new 

ACX Series Routers, as well as a new PTX 

Series Packet Transport Router. The company 

also intends to continue executing 

against its plan to deliver a Self-Driving 

Network across its networking portfolio, 

including the new Metro Fabric. 

Sally Bament, VP at Juniper Networks said, 

"In our commitment to engineer simplicity 

into all layers of the network, we are excited 

to deliver these new capabilities focused on 

transforming how service providers modernise 

service delivery in the metro. By combining 

adaptive and predictive software with 

new and existing network infrastructure 

offerings, we are evolving our solutions to 

enable service providers to deploy a metro 

network capable of faster service creation 

and time-to-revenue for a new generation 

of services and applications, including 

emerging 5G and IoT services." 

As if to prove that networking technology 

and deployment continues to progress and 

evolve, Cisco has announced an extension 

to its intent-based networking vision, bringing 

greater visibility to what they consider to 

be the biggest blind spot for IT: the widearea 

network (WAN). Made up of disparate 

networks outside of the control of IT, the 

WAN connects employees to applications, 

no matter where those employees might be. 

Its fragmented nature means that IT often 

has limited ability to specifically determine 

problems and get real-time information. 

Now, Cisco is helping by providing the 

capability to forecast WAN problems before 

they happen, while quickly isolating and fixing 

issues when they do occur. The rise of 

multi-cloud IT environments has exacerbated 

the traditional complexity of the WAN and 

magnified its challenges. IDC's 2017 

Worldwide SD-WAN Survey discovered that 

almost 3 out of 10 organisations considered 

network outages to be a top WAN concern, 

with the same number stating that they need 

better visibility and analytics to manage 

application and WAN performance. 

Building on their recent push toward 

intent-based networking, Cisco says it is 

driving this network revolution to the WAN 

and introducing innovations to provide IT 

with the vital visibility and insight into the 

WAN that will help keep businesses up and 

running. Cisco SD-WAN vAnalytics provides 

visibility, forecasting for applications and 

bandwidth planning, what-if scenarios and 

actionable recommendations. Cisco Meraki 

Insight, meanwhile, helps administrators to 

optimise the end-user experience by providing 

valuable insight into WAN and SaaS 

application performance, significantly 

reducing the time it takes to isolate and 

resolve issues. 

Scott Harrell, Senior VP and General 

Manager, Enterprise Networking at Cisco 

explains, "We have set an ambitious goal 

for ourselves of transforming the entire network, 

from campus to branch, data centre 

to edge. The WAN is a vital part of the network 

and is one of the toughest to manage. 

As we bring insight into the WAN with 

these new innovations, we get closer to 

delivering end-to-end intent-based networking 

to help our customers eliminate downtime 

and save money." 

Vikram Makhija, General Manager, 

Cloud Business Unit, at Cloudera has been 

speaking about what he describes as the 

industry's first machine learning and analytics 

Platform-as-a-Service built with a 

Shared Data Experience (SDX). "Cloudera 

Altus with SDX enables businesses to build 

and manage multi-function analytics use 

cases in the cloud, integrating data engineering, 

IoT, customer and operations analytics, 

with machine learning," said Makhija. 

"We offer a proven solution for businesses 

to capitalise on the value of their data, 

avoiding the analytics cloud sprawl problem 

through the simplicity and scale of our 

modern cloud platform for machine learning 

and analytics." 

Commenting on the Cloudera news, IDC 

says that "In 2017 and beyond, IT buyers, 

which include the various LOBs considering 

investing in big data and analytics and 

cognitive computing, would have to consider 

more than just a single use case within 

their respective business units. Big data 

analytics (BDA) has been well established 

on the ROIs and relative ease at which 

each individual business unit is able to 

adopt a BDA solution and rapidly apply it 

within their environment. The common 

challenge faced is when attempting to 

scale or replicate success achieved to more 

LOBs or function groups." NC 



FEATUREAI 

THE AI SANITY CHECK 

ALL THE BALLYHOO IN THE MEDIA ABOUT 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HAS BEEN 

FOCUSED ON THE CRUDEST FORMS OF THE 

TECHNOLOGY. PETER COCHRANE, 

PROFESSOR OF SENTIENT SYSTEMS AT THE 

UNIVERSITY OF SUFFOLK, EXPLAINS WHAT 

HAPPENS AS WE STEP ONTO THE SECOND 

RUN OF THE AI LADDER 

All of the commercial AI available 

today is the simplest and crudest 

manifestation imaginable. At a 

fundamental level it does one thing and 

only one thing well; pattern recognition in 

the form of matching or classification. 

Intelligent search, speech, music and face 

recognition, cancer cell detection and 

identification, abnormal crowd and 

business or market behaviours are typical 

of the abilities found in today's 

applications space. 

The numerous techniques used on this 

first rung of the AI ladder embrace Neural 

Networks; Deep Learning; Heuristics; 

Vector Machines; Markov Decisions, et al. 

And all are basically advanced 

mathematical/probabilistic modelling and 

decision making techniques. But despite 

their essentially simple basis, they have, 

and continue to yield remarkable and 

powerful results. It might just be that we 

are seeing an 80 per cent of reward for a 

mere 20 per cent of effort and 

sophistication. 

An often posed question asks why it has 

taken so very long for AI to deliver on the 

promises of 50 years ago. The short 

answer is hardware technology density and 

complexity. Only in the last 5 years have 

we enjoyed computing hardware of 

sufficient transistor destiny and processing 

power to realise powerful AI at an 

affordable price. Exemplified by 

comparing the 1985 Cray 2 with the 2012 

iPhone 5, we all now have a much 

cheaper supercomputer in our pocket! 

The list of AI contributions to our 

civilisation is already formidable and in 

some niche areas AI now far exceeds 

human abilities. These include medical 

diagnosis; general knowledge; short term 

stock trading; wargaming; business 

modelling; every computer, board and 

card game; document reading and 

analysis; cellular and DNA analysis; 

autonomous robotics, and so on. 

So, what happens next? Very recently, 

one particular application lifted a foot 

onto the second rung of the AI ladder. 

After trying all of the known gaming, 

analytic, and predictive approaches to 

GO, the AlphaGO team remained 

confounded by failure. GO is the most 

complex game invented by man and 

presents more decision options than the 

number of atoms in the universe. And 

therein lies the problem - none of the 

standard techniques described above can 

deal with such complexity, and teaching a 

machine the rules and how to play like a 

human just results in mediocre humanlike 

results. 

How did they crack this problem? 

AlphaGo was programmed to watch and 

learn. After watching game after (human) 

game to learn the rules, it then played 

over 30 million games against itself. 

Having thus become a skilled player, with 

more game playing experience than all the 

GO Grandmasters that ever lived, it was 

ready to do battle against our best 

champion. No surprise; it won every game 

and AlphaGo is now the world champion. 

The next decade is going to see a raft of 

new AI entering the arena on this second 

rung. They will be will be big 

gamechangers in chip, circuit and network 

design, autonomous vehicles, surgical 

robots, robotics for the workspace and 

home, autonomous weapons of war, 

intelligent search and find, human intellect 

amplification - again, the list is endless. 

Just how and why this should be so is 

revealed by the nature of Intelligence as 

defined here: I ~ log2[1 + AS ( 1 + PM 

)], where I = Intelligence, A = Actuator 

(output), S= Sensors (input), P = 

Processing Power and M = Memory. 

Whilst it is possible to have intelligence 

without memory or processing power, it is 

impossible sans sensors and actuators. 

Connection and networking is essential for 

true cognition and self-awareness and we 

are affording AI this facility through our 

networked mobile devices, sensor nets and 

IoT. The ultimate outcome will be human 

empowerment and intellect amplification, 

plus of course, a few surprises in the form 

of emergent behaviours… NC 



FEATUREAI 

THE REINFORCING BENEFITS OF AI 

AI IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR TRADITIONAL 

NETWORK SECURITY BUT HAS THE POTENTIAL 

TO BOLSTER IT. DEREK LIN, CHIEF DATA 

SCIENTIST AT EXABEAM EXPLAINS HOW AI- 

BASED BEHAVIOUR MONITORING CAN 

AUGMENT NETWORK SECURITY USING A MORE 

DYNAMIC APPROACH TO THREAT DETECTION 

Whichever way you look at it, the 

task of keeping networks safe from 

security breaches is becoming 

harder, perhaps even impossible. The 

constantly growing threat landscape, 

combined with tighter headcounts and larger 

volumes of organisational data makes for a 

worrying outlook. Simply put, there aren't 

enough people in most IT security teams to 

cope with the number of potential threats. 

For this reason, many forward-thinking 

organisations are turning to technology in 

order to find effective solutions to some of 

today's most pressing network security issues. 

The growing popularity of AI-based 

behaviour monitoring is a prime example. 

WHAT IS AI-BASED BEHAVIOUR 

MONITORING? 

AI-based behaviour monitoring harnesses 

the power of data analytics and machine 

learning to mitigate one of the biggest 

network risk factors: the user. Machine 

learning algorithms analyse the behaviour 

trends of network users over time and 

create baselines on a per-user basis. 

Benchmarking routine (normal) behaviour 

in this way provides the context needed to 

establish abnormal user activity which can 

be quickly identified and flagged. By 

contrast, conventional network monitoring 

tools lack this context, increasing the 

chances of suspicious behaviour being 

missed, or conversely, normal behaviour 

being deemed suspicious and creating 

false positives. 

For example, an HR employee accessing 

financial information using the network may 

initially appear to be abnormal, but if they 

have a history of doing so, as the result of 

working with the accounts team on employee 

payroll, then this activity could in fact be 

normal. Machine learning engines can track 

and correlate this in line with established 

benchmarks, meaning that a false positive 

will not be thrown up each time it occurs. 

The concept of benchmarking user 

behaviour in this way isn't new, but to do it 

manually takes a significant amount of time 

and resources, both of which are usually in 

short supply for IT security teams. AI-based 

systems do it much more efficiently, meaning 

security personnel are free to focus their 

attention elsewhere. Furthermore, AI-based 

systems can adapt to new patterns of user 

behaviour and refine acceptable parameters 

over time, meaning that real threats are 

quickly spotted and false alarms minimised. 

AI IS REINFORCEMENT, NOT 

REPLACEMENT 

While the benefits of AI-based behaviour 

monitoring are numerous, it isn't a magical 

fit-and-forget solution to resolve user-centric 

network security issues. Misleading 

marketing from vendors, combined with poor 

audience understanding has led to some 

organisations getting carried away, thinking 

they can cut down their IT teams and entrust 

their network security to the new AI 

guardians instead. This is folly. 

While AI-based solutions can greatly 

improve the understanding of user behaviour 

across the network, careful management 

from skilled security experts remains critical. 

Rather than being viewed as a replacement, 

AI should instead be seen as a powerful 

reinforcement for existing security practices 

and personnel, adding intelligence and 

helping to reduce wasted time. 

An effective AI-based behaviour 

monitoring system can consume significant 

amounts of data, compile user activities into 

timelines, and analyse them against 

benchmarked behaviour in a matter of 

minutes. This same task would take an 

experienced incident response analyst days, 

weeks or even months. Freed from this 

manual task, the analyst can then spend 

more time reviewing the user sessions 

created for suspicious behaviour deviations, 

or verifying the alerts that the AI system has 

triggered, creating a win-win. 

The challenges faced by network security 

teams are both numerous and difficult. 

Adopting technology such as AI-based 

behavioural monitoring can significantly 

reduce the workload, removing many of the 

more time consuming manual tasks that 

effective network security requires. However, 

it shouldn't be seen as a magical 

replacement for skilful IT security personnel, 

rather a powerful reinforcement that can 

greatly improve any team's operational 

effectiveness. NC 



FEATUREAI 

INTELLIGENCE THAT IS 

ARTIFICIAL 

AI-BASED CYBERSECURITY IS 

NOT AN 'INSTALL AND LEAVE' 

OPTION. KEN GILMOUR, CTO 

AT INVINSEC EXPLAINS WHY 

Forget everything you've seen in sci-fi 

movies or read in sci-fi books about 

Artificial Intelligence. Forget about 

all the amazing and scary things AI 

promises to do and the jobs it will replace. 

AI of any kind has some major and 

fundamental flaws. 

Firstly it has no common sense. As a 

human, you might bake a cake so that 

other people can eat it. Humans 

understand this as a part of being human, 

but AI is unable to rationalise the concept. 

Secondly, AI has no understanding of what 

it sees. AI doesn't yet know how to solve 

crimes. It may recognise a pattern when a 

crime is taking place, but is currently 

unable to solve a crime that has already 

happened. If you are considering an AIbased 

cybersecurity deployment for your 

organisation, remember these points. 

HOW CAN AI LEARN IF THERE IS 

NOTHING TO TEACH IT? 

Let's consider a simple pattern recognition 

example. Say that you sell gadgets online 

and you've just installed your new supercool 

AI cybersecurity system. Your new 

investment uses its brain to automatically 

block attacks, meaning that you can relax. 

You will probably want your new AI 

system to learn about your customers' 

browsing habits, and so you decide to 

install it months before your biggest 

annual event, Black Friday. It's doing 

great and learning what's normal and 

what isn't. It's looking at simple patterns, 

such as multiple failed logins and, 

realising that these are brute force 

attacks, blocks them accordingly. 

GOING LIVE 

After several months you are more 

confident that you can detect multiple 

variations of attacks that previously you 

had no signatures for. Confidence is high 

that your security AI solution understands 

your unique environment, and you're 

hopeful that when Black Friday comes, 

nothing will take you down. 

On the day before, everything is 

prepared. At exactly midnight, you're 

going to launch some amazing deals that 

will create significant revenue for you. At 

23:50 you see some attacks. The system 

detects them and successfully thwarts the 

attackers. At 23:59:59, all of your 

customers start refreshing their web page 

so they can reload their choices. They 

don't need to do that because your 

website will automatically update them. 

Maybe you expected it, maybe you didn't. 

Has your AI seen this before and does it 

know what to do? 

Your AI thinks it's detecting a DDoS 

attack because it sees thousands of IP 

addresses competing for the same 

resource at the same time and a 

significant bandwidth increase. Your AI 

security solution blocks prospective 

customers and you lose several minutes 

trying to switch it off so that customers can 

connect and transact. You lose some 

customers who gave up after a few 

minutes; they're not patient, and they look 

for the deals elsewhere. 

With no choice, you disable your sole 

security mechanism because it's blocking 

your customers. The attack you saw at 

23:50 was a real attack and now you 

can't detect it. The attacker gets in, 

hijacks accounts and steals money from 

your customers. 

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? 

This is not an unrealistic scenario. It 

becomes obvious that you need humans in 

a Security Operations Centre (SOC) 

watching the patterns that the AI is 

recognising to make common sense of the 

problems and understand the scenarios. 

You also need other patterns written by 

humans to help the AI recognise variations 

of those patterns so that you can optimise 

the work of the humans and make them 

more cost-effective. 

AI is not something which can be trusted 

on its own. The solution to your security is 

defence in depth. AI helps, but do remember 

that its intelligence is artificial. NC 



FEATUREAI 

THE AI POWER CHALLENGE 

COMPUTING POWER OF A SUITABLE TYPE AND CAPACITY IS AN 

ESSENTIAL FIRST STEP IN STARTING THE AI JOURNEY. DAVID 

HOGAN, SENIOR DIRECTOR ENTERPRISE AT NVIDIA EXPLAINS 

Fuelled by GPU (Graphics Processing 

Unit) deep learning, we're in the early 

stages of a new computing era: AI 

computing. We know that early investment 

in new technology can provide first mover 

advantage, but it's also natural to 

approach it with scepticism and caution. 

Additionally, figuring out how to get 

started with AI can be daunting. So what's 

the best way to get your head around AI 

and understand what it can do for your 

organisation? Consider the following as 

you start your journey. 

EMBRACE THE NEW AND LEARN 

FROM OTHERS 

AI was once the stuff of science fiction, but 

now autonomous racing cars take to the 

track, artificially intelligent chatbots answer 

customer queries, and deep learning helps 

to find new ways to battle diseases like 

cancer. Industries like automotive and 

healthcare have been quick to adopt AI 

and are already reaping the benefits, 

creating new products, services and 

solutions. Accordingly, others can learn 

from those that have gone before in other 

verticals and seize the opportunity to be a 

pioneer in their own. 

GOOD QUALITY DATA - AND 

LOTS OF IT 

The success of deep learning systems is 

measured by the level of accuracy they 

achieve. This requires a huge amount of 

training data, as well as sophisticated 

neural networks which can learn from 

these vast datasets without forgetting 

past experience. 

Cutting corners on data collection is 

unwise. If you want to get the best results, 

you need to ensure that your datasets 

incorporate high-quality, labelled data. 

Implementing a clear workflow is crucial 

for enterprises wanting to capture the type 

and volume of data that they will need. 

HIRE AND RETAIN 

The demand for skilled staff far outweighs 

supply; it's becoming an increasingly 

competitive job market for deep learning 

developers. But building the right team is 

critical to a successful long-term AI 

strategy. Investing in a balanced, 

experienced and talented team allows a 

business to stand out from the crowd, and 

attract still more talent. 

To retain talent, you'll also need to 

provide them with the right space to grow 

and develop, as well as cutting-edge 

computing tools to do their work. Your 

research team will have to execute 

thousands of training jobs as they build 

your systems, so ensure they have the 

compute power required. 

TESTING: CLOUD-BASED DEEP 

LEARNING DEVELOPMENT 

PLATFORMS 

The prospect of investing in and 

maintaining deep learning hardware and 

software can seem challenging. In the 

last six months alone one framework, 

TensorFlow, has gone through six 

different versions. 

You can make life easier by taking 

advantage of cloud-based tools that 

provide a managed deep learning 

environment that scales to your needs. 

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure 

and Google Cloud all offer cloud-based 

GPU instances for deep learning, ideal for 

testing and proof of concept projects. The 

NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) also simplifies 

software tools for GPU deep learning, 

providing ready-optimised containers, 

frameworks and libraries that are 

automatically updated. 

SUCCESS REQUIRES FLEXIBILITY 

AND STABILITY 

Creating a stable platform for developers 

in the midst of an extremely dynamic deep 

learning ecosystem is crucial. Developing 

an end-to-end production pipeline can 

help ensure you nurture innovation, while 

not losing sight of the aims of the project. 

Establishing a baseline performance 

model and useful metrics can provide 

insights into project performance and 

allow for easy comparisons between 

models. Testing against these metrics 

regularly will make it easier to measure 

progress and reveal where improvements 

can be made. 

Remember that AI algorithms rarely live in 

isolation. When deployed as products, they 

will have to meet a number of nonfunctional 

requirements. If your system is 

constrained by power consumption, 

latency, memory or something else, then 

you will need to understand, control and 

react to this requirement from day one. NC 



PRODUCTREVIEW 

Altaro VM Backup - 

Unlimited Plus 

Edition 

PRODUCT REVIEW 

PRODUCT 

REVIEWPRODUCT RE 

Data backup has had a chequered past 

and has often been an afterthought. It 

is now a critical component of IT 

operations, digital transformation, security and 

compliance, with a definitive role and 

lifecycle. This is embraced and enabled by 

Altaro VM Backup version 7.6, available in 

four versions. Here we review the fully 

featured, Unlimited Plus edition. 

We downloaded the installer (less than 

150MB) ran install, and were quickly 

presented with a guided three-step set-up, 

which dealt with licensing, specifying a backup 

location and our backup targets. Using the 

default settings we had a credible 

configuration in less than fifteen minutes. 

Complexity of storage estate will naturally 

increase this, but it's very intuitive to get things 

working and advanced options can be 

considered using familiarity, understanding 

and evolving requirements. 

Five backup locations are offered: Physical 

Drive, Network Path (LAN), Cloud (Azure), 

Altaro Offsite Server and Drive rotation. How 

these are used depends on an organisation's 

policy and compliance, but each can be 

granularly adjusted to suit. The flexibility 

offered allows a Disaster Recovery (DR) site to 

be established. 

Using the sidebar we explored Advanced 

Settings. Application Consistent Backup (ACB), 

enabled by default, will truncate transaction logs 

and ensure the VM is aware a backup has been 

taken. A new feature in this version, Continuous 

Data Protection (CDP) can backup as frequently 

as every five minutes. It's a feature to use with 

caution, and ACB cycles will mostly be less 

frequent. It's worth understanding the 

connections, because if a backup doesn't 

complete in five minutes it will immediately start 

the next one, effectively reducing frequency. 

Backup Health Monitor runs in the 

background, except when CDP is enabled. It 

ensures that backups are viable and that any 

bad blocks are self-healed. Storage capacity is 

always an issue with backup, and Altaro 

manage this using standard and custom 

Backup Policy options. This is complemented 

by GFS (Grandfather, Father, Son) Archiving, 

also new to 7.6, forming an essential part of 

backup operations. 

Managing by exception is aided with optional 

failure notifications by email and 7.6 

Deduplication ensures that data is stored only 

once. Change Block Tracking allows fast 

backup by reducing scanning and 

incrementally backing up. Volume Snapshot 

Service (VSS) can be disabled for non- 

Microsoft sources. All remote backups are 

encrypted by default and cannot be turned off, 

as they can for local backups. 

Like all Altaro functions Restore is highly 

intuitive, and with a target and location 

selected it simply gets on with it, while the 

Dashboard keeps you briefed. There is an 

option to undertake a test restore and even to 

restore a complete VM instance: in this case 

there is an option to disable the network to 

avoid IP conflict. It is possible to restore a 

single file, email or complete Virtual Disk. 

Verification and Sandbox Restores can be 

scheduled and boot from backup is especially 

important when facing a Ransomware attack. 

If, for example, you were running CDP and 

had an idea when a compromise took place, 

you could select an appropriate restore point, 

boot, and safely run. 

Reports provide Dashboard insight to all 

operations. The ingenious Get Help feature 

provides Telephone, Email and Chat support 

and can generate error reports and even 

provide remote support. 

It's quite possible that some smaller 

organisations may not understand what they 

should backup, in which case the default steps 

will quickly get them to a secure, defendable 

backup status. From here, experience and 

backup experiments, combined with easy 

creation can produce an extremely tailored, 

highly effective data backup and disaster 

recovery solution. 

With Altaro, VM backup and DR is assured 

and no longer a worry or a chore. NC 

Product: Altaro VM Backup Unlimited Plus 

Edition 

Supplier: Altaro Software 

Telephone: +44 (0) 203 397 6280 

Web site: www.altaro.com 

Email: info@altaro.com 

Price: £650 per host 



SHOWPREVIEW 

IP EXPO 

MANCHESTER, 25TH 

TO 26TH APRIL 

IN NEED OF INSPIRATION, 

GUIDANCE OR HELP? CONFUSED 

BY CLOUD OPTIONS, NEEDING A 

CYBER SECURITY UPGRADE OR 

WONDERING HOW TO MAKE AI 

WORK FOR YOU? IP EXPO IS 

BACK IN MANCHESTER TO HELP 

IP EXPO, Europe's largest enterprise IT 

event series, returns to Manchester Central 

on 25th-26th April. The two day event will 

bring together experts and visionaries from 

across the technology industry to share their 

views on the hottest technology issues of the 

moment. The event is organised around six 

main themes as follows. 

CYBERSECURITY MANCHESTER 

With GDPR coming into force 29 days after 

IP EXPO Manchester and data breaches 

happening daily, IP EXPO Manchester has a 

significant focus on cybersecurity for 2018. 

Across the event, security gurus, white hat 

hackers and legal experts will be delivering 

cutting edge advice and insight into security 

issues. The opening keynote for the event will 

be delivered by former GCHQ Director 

Robert Hannigan, who will provide a 

reminder for everyone on cyber best practise 

and the new threats that organisations face. 

Bradley Maule-ffinch, EMEA Portfolio 

Director for the IP EXPO Event Series 

comments that, "In the era of GDPR we 

want visitors at IP EXPO Manchester 2018 

to walk away confident so that they can 

execute the cybersecurity strategy that is 

best suited for their business. To do this, 

we're bringing together experts from across 

industry and academia to share their vision 

and knowledge on cybersecurity in the 

year ahead." 

DATA & ANALYTICS 

Data is the fuel of the modern, digitally 

transformed organisation. But if you're still 

paddling through data lakes rather than deep 

diving for insights, IP EXPO Manchester 

keynote speaker Dr Hannah Fry, Lecturer in the 

Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for 

Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL, will be able 

to give you some inspiration. Her opening 

keynote on 26th April, The Joy of Data, will 

have you think twice about how you apply 

analytics to get the most from your data. 

CLOUD & IoT 

Cloud and IoT have changed how 

organisations operate. At IP EXPO Manchester, 

speakers and exhibitors will be delving into the 

next evolution of cloud, looking at how to 

manage multi-cloud environments, how cloud 

improves collaboration and cost efficiency, and 

how IoT can operate at scale. Highlight 

speakers include Nick Martin, Head of 

Google Cloud, Retail & CPG at Google and 

Ian Massingham, Worldwide Lead, AWS 

Technical & Developer Evangelism at Amazon 

Web Services. 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 

AI is here to stay, but rather than the future 

depicted in films like Blade Runner, Deep 

Learning, Data Science and AI enterprise 

applications are headlining the AI track at IP 

EXPO Manchester. Visitors will be able to get 

the AI facts straight from the companies and 

people at the cutting edge of current AI 

development. Highlight speakers include Lorna 

Mitchell, Developer Advocate at IBM Watson 

Data Platform and Katie Gibbs, Head of 

Consulting and Delivery at Heron. 

DEVOPS 

If you want to make continuous delivery and 

agile architecture a reality in your organisation, 

then make sure to check out the DevOps track 

at IP EXPO Manchester. Speakers such as 

Adrian Daniels, Solutions Architect at CHEF, 

and Emily Freeman, Developer Advocate at 

Kickbox will be educating attendees on 

everything you need to know to help create a 

high performing DevOps team which forms a 

key part of your organisation. 

NETWORKS & INFRASTRUCTURE 

Networks and infrastructure is the backbone of 

modern IT. At IP EXPO Manchester, exhibitors 

and speakers, including George Tunnicliffe, 

Head of IT Operations at National Theatre 

and Tom Arbuthnot, Unified Comms Architect 

at Modality Systems, will dig into the solutions 

and strategies for building efficient 

infrastructure capable of meeting the growing 

demands of future technology trends. NC 

For further information and to register for 

free for IP EXPO Manchester 2018, please 

visit: www.ipexpomanchester.com. Get 

involved on Twitter using the 

#IPEXPOManchester hashtag. 



SHOWPREVIEW 

UC EXPO | EXCEL LONDON | 16TH 

TO 17TH MAY 2018 

SMARTER COLLABORATIVE WORKING IS NOW 

THE NORM AS ORGANISATIONS TAKE 

ADVANTAGE OF NEW METHODS, 

TECHNOLOGY AND BEST PRACTICE. UC EXPO 

DIGS INTO COLLABORATION CONUNDRUMS 

FOR ITS 2018 EVENT 

Smarter collaboration is the backbone 

of modern working, but is the school 

curriculum doing enough to provide 

students with the collaboration skills they 

need? Workplace demand for 

collaboration skills is high and 

organisational leaders must ensure that 

they provide the collaboration tools that 

their employees need and expect. 

"Workplace habits are changing at an 

incredible pace. Generational changes 

mean that many employees now expect to 

have flexible working practices, cool 

benefits and the latest technology as 

standard. As a result, the demands of 

unified communications and collaboration 

technology evolves rapidly too," comments 

Bradley Maule-ffinch, EMEA Portfolio 

Director for UC EXPO. "We're bringing 

together the world's leading influencers 

and brands to discuss the next evolution in 

smarter collaboration technology." 

Over two days, presentations, seminars 

and panel debates from industry leaders, 

and over 100 exhibitors, will provide 

attendees with the opportunity to discuss 

the most advanced technical solutions 

available. This will equip them to address 

their communication and collaboration 

challenges and develop a plan for their 

future, unified capability. 

HIGHLIGHT SESSIONS 

Kim Wylie, Head of Customer Change and 

Transformation at Google Cloud, will 

share her insights for building a culture 

where knowledge is a shared resource and 

employees act like owners. She will also 

discuss the psychology of change, why so 

many employees struggle to adopt new 

technologies and processes, how leaders 

can effectively inspire new ways of working 

and the role of teamwork and culture in 

bringing collaboration to life. 

Dave Michels, Principal Analyst at 

TalkingPointz will look at what's driving 

the adoption of Workstream 

Collaboration, why the shift matters, and 

key considerations in selecting a strategy. 

He will be covering how messagingcentric 

solutions for enterprise 

communications are filling a gap that 

most enterprises didn't realise they had, 

bringing with it a new set of vocabulary, 

services and providers. 

Dr Nicola Millard, Head of Customer 

Insights & Futures at BT Global Services 

Innovation Team will explore how we can 

override our inner Neanderthal when it 

comes to virtual working and effectively 

collaborate with people we may never 

actually meet. She'll also be looking at 

questions such as do we need offices 

anymore as more business takes place in 

digital space? How do we ever turn off in 

a world of constant connection? How do 

we create common ground for 

collaboration as we bring together a 

diverse, disparate and dispersed set of 

people? Do digital employees need a 

different type of digital leadership? 

Michael Affronti, VP of Product at Fuze, 

will be sharing his view of future 

workplaces and how, when, and where 

people like to work; what makes work 

effective; the role of automation and AI, 

and to what extent we are unlocking 

human potential. 

PANEL DEBATE 

Some industry leaders will also be going 

head to head with a series of panel 

discussions to debate and challenge the 

topics of the moment. The panels are set 

to cover a range of topics, including the 

role of AI in the future of work, the pros 

and cons of collaboration tools, 

technology and techniques, what the 

workforce of the future will look like and 

their requirements. There will also be 

general discussion on the year ahead, 

revealing what the panellists believe could 

be game changing. 

UC EXPO will also provide attendees 

with access to over 100 exhibitors and the 

opportunity to get hands-on with the next 

wave of collaboration technology in the 

future tech demo zone, including cutting 

edge interactive whiteboards and 

augmented reality headsets. NC 

UC EXPO 2018 takes place 16th to 17th 

May 2018 at ExCeL London. Registration 

is free at www.ucexpo.co.uk and get 

involved on Twitter with #UCEXPO. 



OPINION 

PACKET MINING: THE GIFT THAT 

KEEPS ON GIVING 

MAKING ASSUMPTIONS WHEN NETWORK 

PROBLEMS OCCUR IS NOT A GOOD RESPONSE. 

CARY WRIGHT, VP PRODUCT MANAGEMENT AT 

ENDACE EXPLAINS WHY IT PAYS TO KEEP AN 

OPEN MIND WHEN TROUBLESHOOTING 

As IT professionals know all too well, 

not all outages and performance 

problems are created equal, and 

many just cannot be blamed on the 

network or Internet Service Providers. 

If the network driving your site isn't 

optimised or suffers performance 

problems then delays and outages can 

happen, which can cause huge losses in 

revenue. Shopify's global Black Friday 

trading results are a great example: with 

revenue take running at $130k a minute, 

even a short outage can be devastating. 

As businesses progress through their 

own unique digital transformation, their 

network can become their business. This 

is a reality that requires some attention, 

and here are a few things to consider. 

THE DEEPER CAUSE 

The fact is that the problem before you 

may not be the network or your ISP. All too 

often when performance takes a dive it's 

easiest to blame the ISP or the network, 

but quite often it's deeper than that. For 

example, for several months a remote 

branch of a leading Asian bank was 

experiencing a bank teller application 

issue at random intervals throughout the 

day, freezing customer transactions for up 

to 15 minutes each time. 

A packet capture appliance was 

deployed on the link into the data centre 

to record exactly what was happening. 

When the problem reoccurred, the 

Operations team was able to go back 

and look at the transactions in detail 

using the recorded network history. 

The packets were getting delivered 

correctly and the network layer was 

healthy, but the application was taking up 

to 15 minutes to respond. It turned out 

that a new version of the bank's teller 

application had been rolled out a few 

months previously, and it had a bug 

between the application and the database 

that caused the database to occasionally 

lockup and stop responding to queries. 

CONGESTED TRAFFIC 

Poor quality video conferences are also 

often blamed on the network, and quite 

often the network is actually the source of 

the issue, but often for different reasons 

than originally thought. For example, if 

someone's running a video conference 

and the video quality starts to degrade, it 

could be down to processes like a 

network backup taking place at the same 

time: your network may just be congested. 

A lot of backups happen over the WAN 

link to the cloud service provider. Your 

backup traffic should have low priority 

compared to your video traffic. If your 

video traffic is not getting preferential 

treatment, it may be that something has 

been set wrong in your backup 

application or your IP network and all 

services are getting equal treatment. 

STORMY PACKETS 

Misconfiguration in the network can also 

be an issue. It causes lots of garbage 

packets to be generated through the 

network and a misconfigured network can 

cause packet storms. It could be 

something as simple as a routing loop 

that's accidentally been set up because 

someone put a cable in the wrong port 

on a switch, sending out messages 

thousands of times per second, rather 

than once every 20 seconds. 

This example of a packet storm, a 

bunch of packets that overwhelm the 

network, taking up all available 

bandwidth, creates a critical situation. 

Once the fault occurs, the only thing 

businesses can do is dig into packets to 

see what is going on and resolve the 

responsible misconfiguration. 

It is becoming increasingly common for 

organisations to deploy dedicated 

network recording solutions to reduce the 

discovery time surrounding such network 

challenges. Having the ability to inspect 

packets enables those responsible to 

quickly determine if the problem source is 

the network itself, or if the problem is 

more deeply seated in an application 

issue such as overloading, 

misconfiguration or a bug. NC 



SECURITYUPDATE 

TRUST THAT KNOWS 

NO BOUNDS 

BARRY SCOTT, EMEA CTO AT 

CENTRIFY SAYS THAT THE 

ONLY WAY TO BALANCE 

SECURITY AND AGILITY IN 

IAAS ENVIRONMENTS IS THE 

DETERMINED USE OF ZERO 

TRUST 

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms 

offered by the likes of Amazon Web 

Services (AWS) support the innovation and 

app-driven business models that many 

organisations are migrating towards. But in 

their race to embrace digital transformation, 

some overlook that security in the cloud is a 

shared responsibility - the risks of which are 

potentially huge. 

The answer is Zero Trust security, 

delivered by focusing on identity and 

embracing the principle of 'never trust, 

always verify'. This allows organisations to 

manage their IaaS risk and secure their 

systems, data and users. 

IAAS AT RISK 

Estimates suggest that 89 per cent of 

organisations have adopted the public 

cloud, running 41 per cent of their 

workloads there. Yet it's a complex picture, 

with hybrid cloud being the preferred 

enterprise strategy as IT infrastructure is 

spread between multiple providers. 

Increased complexity increases threat 

opportunities both inside and outside the 

organisation. Trusted and untrusted users will 

access corporate resources from their own 

devices anywhere, anytime and can no 

longer be easily separated. Identity sprawl, 

silo-based systems, password-based logins 

and a spectacular rise in phishing attacks 

underlines the risk for IaaS environments. 

The stakes couldn't be higher yet the 

outcome of poor Identity and Access 

management (IAM) is ever present. For 

example, the infamous Uber breach when 

hackers obtained their AWS credentials. In 

fact, static passwords lay at the heart of 

many breach incidents. According to 

Verizon in its 2017 report, 81 per cent of 

hacking-related breaches used stolen 

and/or weak passwords. 

ZERO TRUST IN ACTION 

Given the risks, Zero Trust Security is the 

only sure way to secure IaaS systems and 

hosted applications. Zero Trust means 

verifying users using multi-factor 

authentication (MFA), regardless of user 

type, or the resource being accessed. Access 

decisions must be adaptive and dynamic. By 

ditching static passwords, phishing can 

virtually be eradicated, making it much 

harder for hackers to access cloud systems. 

Next you need to verify the device, 

meaning that identity-centric preventative 

controls must be extended to the endpoint, 

so that systems can appraise trust levels and 

on-device security and tie these to the user's 

identity to create an overall risk score. For 

example, a user requesting access on a 

device that they use every day establishes a 

certain level of trust when compared to that 

user logging-in via a shared workstation. As 

risk increases, the appropriate controls kick 

in, requiring additional factors of 

authentication, or restricting access. 

Limiting access and privilege is another vital 

component of the Zero Trust model, which 

must be tightly managed. That's why 

restricting access according to the well-worn 

principle of least-privilege provides just 

enough access inside each application for 

users to do their jobs. These applications 

often contain large amounts of critical data, 

and because they're accessed by more users 

within the organisation, they become easy 

targets. So the more critical the data, the less 

the privilege offered, which requires the 

increased use of MFA to ensure identity. 

Finally, for Zero Trust to work it must be able 

to learn and evolve over time. Platforms that 

gather information about the user, endpoint, 

application, server and policies are ideal 

because they can learn and baseline normal 

behaviour and spot unusual activity which 

might indicate a breach. Behaviour analytics 

are invaluable to administrators and can be 

used to ascertain the level of risk in real-time 

and provide key insights to determine when 

policies should be changed. 

The good news is that you don't need to 

spend big to extend best practice security to 

the cloud. With the right approach and 

guiding principles like MFA everywhere, 

least privilege and user accountability, your 

IaaS environment can be as secure as your 

data centre. NC 



OPINION 

NETWORKED AUDIO 

AS BUSINESS SERVICES 

CONVERGE ON THE 

NETWORK, THOSE INVOLVED 

MUST SPEAK THE SAME 

LANGUAGE. JOHN ELLIS, 

REGIONAL SALES MANAGER AT 

SHURE, EXPLAINS HOW TO 

APPROACH THE AV/IT 

CHALLENGE 

Video and audio conferencing has 

significantly evolved as it has moved 

from hardware to software based 

solutions. Google Hangouts and Skype for 

Business would both be examples. This 

approach offers savings and greater 

flexibility for organisations along with user 

experiences, which are good - but if the 

audio equipment isn't up to the job then it 

can all become a bit fraught. 

The need for both AV and IT teams to 

understand each other and collaborate 

effectively has never been so important, but 

can they talk the same language, and what 

are the challenges of integrating networked 

audio with an IT network? 

Most IT departments haven't really had to 

deal with networked audio until now, but if 

their audio service is to work efficiently, a 

successful integration will be essential. In 

achieving this, one of the biggest 

challenges is providing reassurance to the 

AV team that everything they require can be 

provisioned on the network, and that both 

groups can work together effectively. 

Network security is a substantial topic for 

the network team and it will be one of the 

first things that IT departments will want to 

address. But because audio operates in 

real-time, it needs to be afforded some 

network priority. Also, from a project 

perspective, when working with networked 

audio, a lot of the commissioning has to be 

completed onsite, which will always be 

more challenging than commissioning 

offsite. Typically, AV professionals will find 

themselves working with unfamiliar IT 

infrastructure, and this requires planning 

and disclosure. 

The apparently reasonable request for the 

definition and detail of the IT infrastructure 

may cause the IT department to be 

defensive, if only because of security 

concerns. With all of this in mind and as 

convergence between AV and IT continues, 

do we need a new breed of 

communications professional servicing 

both disciplines? 

It has been quite normal for specialists to 

focus on their chosen area and all too 

often working independently from the IT 

team. There is now so much being 

deployed across networks that AV 

integrators have begun to employ network 

architects who can take a holistic view of a 

customer's estate and successfully bring all 

of the disciplines together. 

In addition to the need for AV and IT to be 

well versed in each other's work there's also 

a need for standardisation - and this is now 

starting to happen. Shure has worked with 

QSC to deploy a global standard, but the 

continuing challenge is to keep deployment 

and standards consistent. 

IT convergence is not new, and there has 

been a growing number of independent 

technologies coexisting on the network for 

some time, but now these technologies 

need to start talking to each other in a 

way they haven't previously. As an 

industry, we must embrace this and 

change our approach. 

We are contributing to this by hosting 

regular seminars aimed at AV 

commissioning engineers, installers, AV 

designers and audio engineers. We aim to 

offer them a better understanding of the IT 

networking standards commonly used in 

today's audio transport protocols, along with 

practical, hands-on, demonstrations. 

The convergence of AV and IT departments 

is improving, but there are still probably 

more AV people learning about IT than IT 

learning about audio. AV manufacturers are 

working to produce IT standards-based 

equipment which will make it much easier 

for AV and IT departments to implement 

networked audio and to collaborate well. 

AV teams need to understand the 

challenges of running audio across the 

production network and educate 

accordingly. In turn, IT departments must 

understand that the AV industry is not 

going to be foolish enough to add 

products to a network that will compromise 

that network's security. NC 



OPINION 

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTS OR 

STRATEGIC ADVISORS? 

IS IMPROVEMENT A BIGGER GOAL THAN 

ALIGNMENT IN THE ENTERPRISE? TERRY 

BLEVINS, A FELLOW OF THE OPEN GROUP AND 

OWNER OF ENTERPRISE WISE LLC CONSIDERS 

THE ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE CHALLENGE 

How should Enterprise Architecture 

(EA) align with business operations? 

When I am asked this I wonder if it is 

the right question to start with. I'm not a fan 

of the concept of alignment outside of 

mechanics: outside of the physical space, 

alignment isn't strong enough and is 

typically too indirect for impact. Instead, I 

prefer to consider how EA can improve 

business operations. Besides, if EA efforts 

aren't driving business operation 

improvements, then perhaps it is time to 

reconsider the EA investment. 

Given my position is it reasonable to say that 

the answer is just an unequivocal yes, with an 

imperative to deliver good enterprise 

architecture? Well, sort of - but no 

architecture is a solution, it is part of a path 

towards a desired solution. EA is an essential 

element on the journey of driving 

transformation or enterprise-level changes. 

There is much to do to ensure that EA has the 

intended impact, and some of these things 

aren't adequately covered by EA methods 

alone. 

So, what is needed from enterprise architects 

beyond the fundamental goal to improve 

business operations? 

WORK WITH BUSINESS OPERATIONS 

AT THEIR TEMPO 

In its simplest form, an enterprise comprises 

three main areas; operations (business or 

mission), management (governance) and 

development. Operations are where the 

business or mission processes produce the 

enterprise's value proposition. Management 

provides the governance to see that the 

necessary things are done to ensure 

continuous delivery, and development is 

where improvements are made to people, 

process, policy and technology capability, to 

enable delivery. 

Typically, enterprise architects work in 

development. However, there is opportunity 

for them to work closely with operations 

(similar to the DevOps) to experience and 

understand operational issues. The enterprise 

architect could also use their extensive 

knowledge to solve problems. By working 

closely alongside them, they can gather realtime 

information about the enterprise that gets 

captured in the EA which will ultimately help 

solve future issues. 

ANSWERS AND GUIDANCE 

ON-DEMAND 

I have attended countless meetings where an 

enterprise architect stands in front of their 

leaders and explains the EA model. What 

really should be done is to demonstrate the 

questions that can be answered and the 

insights discovered relating to operations. 

More importantly, an enterprise architect 

needs to answer operations questions as they 

arise. The key is to talk less about architecture 

models and provide more operations-focused 

guidance. The enterprise architect can thereby 

build trust with the real decision-makers. 

Without this, they will not make an impact. 

ENABLE INFORMATION IN A 

SERVICE FASHION 

I am a big fan of service orientation. Not 

software, but human service orientation. I 

believe the best setup for EA organisations 

is a service-oriented model which provides 

services to the rest of the enterprise. These 

types of service would be divided within 

operations, management and 

development, where each division provides 

specific solutions designed to answer 

important questions for each division. 

These answers usually appear in the form 

of information or guidance. 

CONNECT THE EA BOXES TO 

OPERATION GOALS 

We've all seen the boxes-and-lines view of 

an EA where the boxes and lines are 

connected. To support and improve business 

operations, the goal must be to become first 

class citizens in the enterprise architecture. 

Certain elements of the model are necessary 

to deliver those goals: people, process, 

policy and technology, as well as computers 

and networks. These key elements must be 

connected to articulate all the necessary 

components of the solution, and those lines 

must possess real values that help to 

measure contribution towards the goals. 

In summary, there are clearly enterprise 

architects who are equipped for the task and 

these are the ones you'll want to seek out 

and leverage for the benefit of your 



OPINION 

CONTAINING 

EXPECTATIONS 

BEST PRACTICE IS THE MISSING 

PIECE OF THE CONTAINERS 

PUZZLE, SAYS MARCO CEPPI OF 

CANONICAL. CAN BEST 

PRACTICE DRIVE THE INDUSTRY 

FROM CHAOS TO ADOPTION? 

With its performance, cost efficiency 

and scalability benefits, the use of 

container technology for running 

applications in the cloud is fast becoming a 

hot topic in IT. A recent survey reported that 42 

per cent of organisations are already using 

containers and 451 Research predicts that this 

market will be worth $2.7 billion by 2020. The 

technology may still be in its relative infancy, 

but its many advantages are already 

prompting a wide variety of businesses to take 

the plunge. 

This growth has resulted in an explosion of 

start-ups appearing in the market, all focused 

on building, managing or providing container 

services and adding to the plethora of 

container-based solutions already released by 

virtually all the major cloud providers and 

vendors. However, there are some challenges 

that need to be overcome. While this thriving 

market has created an abundance of choice 

for customers, it has also made it difficult for 

businesses to understand exactly what the best 

choice is for them. 

A disconnect has also emerged between the 

interest being shown in containers and its 

adoption, with many enterprises hesitating due 

to security and implementation concerns. 

These are issues that the industry should be 

keen to solve. 

REMOVING THE RISKS 

Despite the promise of containerisation, many 

businesses are yet to be fully convinced. 

Certain industries, such as financial services, 

have been quick to embrace containers, but 

CIOs and IT managers in other sectors are 

still unsure if the technology is the right 

option for them. 

This hesitation is to be expected, as any new 

technology comes with risk. One way of 

calming these fears is for the industry to 

establish best practice guidelines that 

businesses of all sizes can follow. Currently 

missing from the world of containers, this is 

primarily because early adopters are 

attempting to figure out what best practices 

should look like as they go along, all in an 

effort to get ahead of their competition. 

By collaborating to provide 

recommendations for the creation, 

deployment and usage of containerised 

applications, vendors and customers can 

consolidate their experiences and help the 

industry to develop, offering adopters' 

confidence in their deployments. 

A CALL FOR STANDARDISATION 

Another way the industry can kick-start 

adoption is to foster greater levels of 

standardisation. Without common building 

blocks for everyone to adhere to, 

organisations can't be sure that the technology 

they adopt will work as expected. This has the 

potential to hinder the progression of 

technology, but once the industry agrees on a 

certain base standard, it's a different story. 

Organisations, once shown a clearer path 

along which to travel, can be sure that the 

fundamental aspects of the technology - 

regardless of their choice of vendor - will work 

in the same predictable way. 

The world of containers is no exception. By 

creating a standard way to build and manage 

container technology, all customers can be 

assured that their technical expectations will be 

met which will leave them free to pick the best 

solutions to suit their specific objectives. 

Various industry bodies are already in place 

to help shape the future of the industry. For 

example, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) 

which is focused on creating open industry 

standards around container formats and 

runtime. There's also the Cloud Native 

Computing Foundation (CNCF) which boasts 

138 members after less than two years of 

activity. These include the world's six largest 

public cloud providers, and its membership 

continues to grow at a significant rate. 

These changes will help the world of 

containers evolve from chaos to widespread 

adoption and realise the promise of a 

technology that will undoubtedly play a key 

role in the next evolution of IT for many 

years to come. NC 



SECURITYUPDATE 

IoT SECURITY THAT 

WORKS 

IoT DEVICES EXTEND THE 

ATTACK SURFACE OF 

NETWORKS, BUT WHAT CAN BE 

DONE TO COMBAT THIS, AND 

HOW SHOULD THE RISK BE 

UNDERSTOOD? PROFESSOR 

WILLIAM WEBB, CEO OF THE 

WEIGHTLESS SIG EXPLAINS 

Recently, the IoT has been hit by a number 

of security attacks, including denial of 

service operations and the hacking of 

home networks - home networks that are all 

too often used by employees for their 

professional use. As the number of connected 

devices explodes and their importance 

inevitably increases, the effort that hackers put 

into breaking systems will only grow, as may 

their gains. 

Overcoming threats of this sort is businessas-usual 

for the conventional Internet, mobile 

telephony firms and other IT systems. Defences 

comprise two elements: firstly as good a level 

of protection as possible using encryption, 

authentication and AI analysis, and secondly 

the ability to rapidly react to threats that 

breach these defences with software updates. 

The same approach will be needed to secure 

IoT deployments. 

The challenge however for IoT is not so much 

in knowing how to deliver secure systems in 

principle, it is implementing it in practice on 

devices with very small amounts of memory 

and processing power, connected across 

wireless connections with limited capabilities, 

and where preserving battery power is 

operationally essential. 

Unfortunately, many early IoT 

implementations have compromised on 

security, and this has enabled a growing 

number of hacks and breaches. While many 

different approaches to security are possible, 

it seems likely that the optimal design for IoT 

will comprise: 

A shared secure key embedded within the 

IoT chipset, in much the same way that a 

secure key is embedded in cellular SIM 

cards. This has proven to be the best way 

to deliver authentication and encryption. 

An update capability that can broadcast 

and allow millions of devices to listen to 

and receive a downlink software update. 

Without this, sending the update to 

individual devices one-at-a-time can take 

days or months and consume most of the 

available network capacity. This will 

result in a massive number of lost data 

packets using a non-managed uplink 

network protocol. 

The ability to update the entire security 

suite should algorithms be shown to be 

compromised. This is important in IoT, 

where some devices can be in the field 

for 10 or more years, during which 

time security algorithm design will 

inevitably evolve. 

Enabling a system design of this sort requires 

a standards body that can oversee the 

allocation and distribution of shared keys and 

where the world's best security experts can 

provide their input. It requires a radio design 

with significant downlink capability, ideally in a 

flexible manner, so that the downlink/uplink 

ratio can be varied dynamically, providing 

more downlink capacity when a broadcast 

update is required. And it requires a standard 

where best practice security is embedded deep 

into all of the layers. 

This is exactly what we have achieved. We 

employ shared secret keys with mutual EAP- 

GPSK authentication with a trusted third party 

in a similar manner to the cellular industry and 

use best-practice algorithms such as AES-128 

from US security bodies. Additionally, we have 

a flexible broadcast mode that can deliver 

software updates to all devices, or to selected 

subsets, such as those belonging to a 

particular user group. We can deliver 

completely new cypher suites over the air if 

needed and traffic analysis within the network. 

Using AI and big data analytics we can detect 

unusual behaviour such as devices sending 

more messages than expected, so that those 

devices can be quickly disabled until the 

problem is resolved. 

Even the most innocuous IoT device can 

become the source of a security-breach. 

Unlike traditional IT, recalling all devices is 

logistically impossible, and would probably be 

financially disastrous. Clearly, security is an 

area where absolutely no risks can be taken, 

and weightless technology embodies the best 

possible security principles to address known 

and unattended risks. NC 



PRODUCTREVIEW 

AirCheck G2 from 

NETSCOUT 

PRODUCT REVIEW 

PRODUCT 

REVIEWPRODUCT RE 

Evolving from home user self-sufficiency, 

Wi-Fi - more accurately Wireless LAN - is 

often misperceived as simple, plug and 

play technology. But wireless networking is 

mission critical, complex and challenging to 

support - especially without infrastructure insight. 

Driven by convenience, wireless networks are 

everywhere, and while most require credentials 

for access, they can also adversely impact one 

another. Despite the fact that your laptop 

confirms internet connectivity and good line 

speed, the user experience may be 

characterised by slow throughput, intermittent 

connectivity, application error and downtime. 

Multiple factors can coalesce to create a 

fractious wireless experience. Most are easy to 

address once they are identified, quantified 

and understood. The AirCheck G2 from 

NETSCOUT, updated in November 2017, is a 

convenient handheld tester that puts the 

network technician in firm control. 

Powered on, a top-level screen with 7 options 

conveniently outlines capability: Networks, 

Channels, Access Points, Clients, Interferers, 

Auto Test and Ethernet Test. To establish our 

base line, we ran Auto Test and were greeted 

with an easy to understand assessment of Air 

Quality which showed the in-range channels 

and any interference. From here we examined 

individual Access Points (APs) in great detail 

and tested them. 

Using the touchscreen we selected Networks 

which displayed those available. For each, we 

could determine the number of APs, signal and 

noise level, connected clients, security, and 

when it was last seen. 

Selecting the WLAN channel with the greatest 

signal strength is rarely the best option. To this 

end Channels informs decision-making by 

displaying Channel usage, 802.11 and non 

802.11 devices, AP's using that channel, and a 

visual indication of noise level. Selecting a 

Channel provides further insight, including 

applications in use, and utilisation over time. 

APs, the last physical point of a WLAN, can 

only be assessed by understanding signal 

strength, noise, and security. Using Access 

Points, we examined this and insight included 

the BSSID (MAC address), Signal to Noise 

Ratio and frequency. 

Visualisation throughout is excellent and 

everything is colour coded for rapid triage: 

green is good, orange potentially a problem 

and red requires attention. However far you 

drill into detail, the home button on the status 

bar does just that, while another icon saves 

results to a PDF. A free Link-Live account stores 

results and creates timeline profiles. 

Clients revealed all in-range associated and 

unassociated devices - including another 

AirCheck G2! Because the WLAN radio 

spectrum is unlicensed, it is heavily congested 

with energy from a range of devices or 

Interferers. Interferers can be wireless and nonwireless 

devices as innocent as a neighbour's 

AP, a microwave oven, a forgotten AP, or an AP 

covertly installed for illegal network access. 

Interferers will list candidate details including 

the affected channels, device type (we 

observed a microwave oven), average and 

peak power, and when its effects were last 

seen. It's not possible to eradicate all problem 

sources, but the AirCheck G2 provides 

everything needed to configure a WLAN 

around them. 

Whether using a Tablet or a Wi-Fi telephone, 

people expect to move around and stay 

connected. Using the Roaming test facility it's 

possible to understand dynamic network quality 

by repeating a PING as you move. This helps 

to ensure a seamless network experience. 

Throughput is the best way to understand user 

experience and the AirCheck G2 can run an 

iPerf test. The Kit option provides a small tester 

that acts as an iPerf server and a directional 

antenna to locate unknown RF sources. 

Wireless networking needn't be a dark art, 

and with decent insight it is logical and easy to 

manage. The capability provided by AirCheck 

G2 is as essential to WLAN provision as fuel is 

to an engine. Without insight, the best you can 

hope for is to coast unguided, downhill… NC 

Product: AirCheck G2 

Supplier: NETSCOUT 

Web site: 

http://enterprise.netscout.com/aircheck 

Email: kim.kingsbury@netscout.com 

Price: £1,848 pounds excluding VAT 



OPINION 

SMART CONNECTIVITY 

BY DESIGN 

CONNECTIVTY REQUIREMENTS 

ARE CHANGING BEFORE OUR 

EYES. OLI BARRINGTON, 

MANAGING DIRECTOR UNITED 

KINGDOM & IRELAND AT R&M 

EXPLAINS HOW TO BEAR 

DOWN ON THE CHALLENGE 

According to Cisco, global mobile data 

traffic will approach 50 exabytes per 

month by 2021. But before we 

consider how to ensure that the appropriate 

networks are in place, let's understand the 

trends driving this bandwidth demand. 

Mobile device users expect uninterrupted HD 

video and access to cloud-based applications 

from any location. 5G will boost demand for 

highly reliable connectivity, placing huge 

demand on the transfer capacity of cellular 

phone antennas. In order to allow providers to 

develop and deliver the services that users 

want, fibre optic cables to base stations will be 

required for backhaul. 

Cloud is another vital driver. IDC claims that 

half of all global value creation will be 

digitised by 2021. The increase of digital 

decentralised business and production 

processes will further boost data volumes. 

Billions of sensors, cameras and other devices 

connecting in coming years to support Internet 

of Things (IoT) applications will increase data 

volumes to allow continuous data analysis. 

Edge data centres are used to avoid latency 

and ensure local data availability, while cost 

benefits, consolidation and cloud requirements 

are driving the rise of hyperscale data centres 

and advanced (autonomous) mobility solutions 

that require networks with blanket availability 

and high-performance connectivity. Functions 

for smart buildings are also being 

incorporated into data networks. This enables 

more efficient use of resources, increases 

flexibility and helps organisations to realise 

sustainability goals. 

MAKING IT WORK: ESSENTIAL 

CONSIDERATIONS 

Connectivity will need to be ubiquitous: LANs, 

WLANs or mobile solutions with limited reach 

won't suffice. Cabling digitisation has to be a 

fundamental component of all planning, from 

office buildings, factories and homes, to 

transportation systems, public infrastructures 

and smart cities. How to determine and 

implement a solution and ensure it remains 

effective is a challenge. 

Ultra-high density cabling and network 

infrastructure will be essential to meeting the 

challenges brought by the data explosion and 

particularly by hyperscale or edge data 

centres. This need for higher density is driving 

changes to enclosures, cabinets and racks. 

Planning must anticipate this imminent 

increase and the need for more ports and fibre 

optic cables between and within data centres, 

as well as at access points. 

The next bandwidth evolution might happen 

quicker than you think, so looking beyond 

today's specifications, you may want to go 

further than 10G or 100G and focus on 

ensuring connectivity for the next 50 years or 

so. Also, it's essential to ensure the availability 

of skilled workers, as apps are no substitute for 

installers and experts that can care for millions 

of ports, antennas, cables and so on. 

Automation and documentation will become 

a challenge. No human can document and 

manage hundreds of thousands of ports and 

links without some automation. Complete 

automation of infrastructure and asset 

management is absolutely critical. 

Finally, and to increase the likelihood of 

success, you'll need to examine the three 

variables involved in achieving higher data 

rates - more fibres, more wavelength and 

higher modulation - before deciding to invest 

in the latest optical connectivity. These need to 

be weighed according to requirements. 

Balancing cost-effectiveness with performance 

in each part of the network is essential. 

REALISING A LASTING SOLUTION 

Integrating cabling design into building 

information systems to evaluate effectiveness 

upfront and on an ongoing basis is one 

method of realising smart connectivity. Another 

tactic would be to try looking at every building 

project as a data centre and applying widely 

available and understood best practices. 

It is vital to choose components that are 

robust, reliable and repairable and that 

require little maintenance. Include connectivity 

engineering as a standard component of 

design, building and maintenance plans, 

along with structural engineering and electrical 

cabling. The processes, evaluations and 

maintenance schedules commonly used in 

these areas can simply be extended to 

structured cabling. NC 



OPINION 

WHEN STORAGE 

BECOMES DATA 

DO WE NEED TO CONSIDER 

STORAGE MEDIA OR SHOULD 

WE CONSIDER DATA 

HOLISTICALLY? MARK PETERS, 

PRACTICE DIRECTOR & SENIOR 

ANALYST AND SCOTT SINCLAIR, 

SENIOR ANALYST AT THE 

ENTERPRISE STRATEGY GROUP, 

COMBINE THEIR VIEWS 

The terms legacy and emerging when 

combined with the word storage can 

seem either obvious or innocuous - 

perhaps both. They're probably things that 

you simply accept as givens or maybe dismiss 

as marketing speak. In much the same way, 

you might not pay attention to phrases like 

'tomorrow's performance today', or 'futureproof 

your system'. They are catch-all's that 

probably don't get given that much thought. 

Indeed, if you were to stop and consider 

this topic, you might get stumped, or at least 

frustrated, quite quickly. Is the distinction 

between the terms legacy storage and 

emerging storage simply the age of an 

installation, or perhaps the market longevity 

of a particular type of device? Maybe legacy 

just means any standalone system that 

doesn't fit neatly into a cloud, converged or 

software-defined world? Perhaps anything 

without flash is just old-hat? And how would 

we begin to layer the terms meaningfully 

upon the real world, given how mixed, 

muddled, and granularly-constructed most 

data centre, private or public storage 

ecosystems are? 

The truth is that neither of these distinctions 

are the crux of the issue. The distinction 

between legacy and emerging storage is not 

a given media or a particular system. The 

difference is not a particular physical 

storage thing, but is about an overall 

approach to data. 

At the risk of being obvious, storage is part 

of infrastructure, which in turn is part of an 

overall system, which in turn is designed to 

get stuff done. Stuff in this case means, of 

course, to provide the data to run 

applications, which in turn supports 

organisations and their objectives. Stuff 

matters. Indeed, the magic and value of 

what IT can do is increasingly obvious 

across our entire lives. But IT carries this 

out, increasingly, out of view, and perhaps 

that is how it should be. People and 

businesses used to be focused on, and often 

consumed by, the minutiae of how IT 

outcomes get delivered; these days, we just 

want the outcomes. 

This is categorically not to say that the 

emerging storage approach matters less 

than the legacy storage systems did - in 

fact it's probably the exact opposite. This 

is because achieving the kind of 

integrated, automated, app-aware and 

self-optimising storage (we really should 

start saying data) ecosystem we want, will 

demand exceedingly sophisticated 

engineering and support. 

Whereas the legacy storage arena proudly 

paraded its speeds-and-feeds, with new 

hardware releases as the cause for 

celebration and specialised tools and 

people to tweak all the literal and figurative 

knobs, the emerging data approach 

automatically subsumes whatever hardware 

it is given and dynamically and optimally 

orchestrates the resources across any given 

set of workloads. Moreover, the emerging 

approach invariably also wraps in analytics 

and security, and these are integral to the 

data system, and not applications layered 

onto heterogeneous storage systems as an 

afterthought. 

There's one last important point to make. 

The term emerging should not be interpreted 

as suggesting that all these new and 

desirable storage/data abilities for 

contemporary IT are only nascent or 

imminent. You can do this today. The term 

emerging is simply pointing out that 

adoption is only just beginning. The 

potential rewards for doing so are significant 

in terms of ease, efficiency, TCO, and 

security, and as with so much in IT, all it 

requires - and we know this is nothing like 

as easy to do as it is to write - is to figure out 

and focus on what you need to achieve. 

Moving from legacy to emerging requires 

you to stop thinking of storage as a list of 

disparate needs and items, and to start 

thinking instead of data, holistically. NC 



OPINION 

TRANSPARENT I.T. 

ENTERPRISES ARE STRUGGLING 

TO ADAPT TO DIGITAL WORLD 

DYNAMICS. IN AN EVOLVING 

ROLE, IT LEADERS MUST 

DEMONSTRATE VALUE AND 

PROVIDE COST TRANSPARENCY, 

EXPLAINS JAMES COCKROFT, 

DIRECTOR AT COEUS 

CONSULTING 

Once upon a time, IT existed to 

simply provision robust and 

reliable computing resources to the 

business. Today, information technology 

represents the heart of the enterprise. That's 

quite a change. 

The process of bringing the IT department's 

capabilities to the forefront of the enterprise 

requires IT to deliver value to the 

organisation, and IT leaders now find 

themselves under mounting pressure, not 

simply to justify their costs, but to 

demonstrate that they are actively 

contributing towards business growth. Yet IT 

departments are not as efficient at enabling 

transformation in the enterprise as they may 

believe; rarely do they adapt internal 

processes so that they can report 

transparently on the IT cost and benefit. 

FRONT OF MIND COSTS 

If IT is to take a leading role then cost 

transparency must be at the forefront of the 

CIO's mind, as it forms the very foundations 

of the department's relationship with the rest 

of the organisation. If the business can't 

understand what value IT is contributing, 

then there is no way of evaluating how it can 

inform business decisions. 

In a recent survey we carried out, this very 

point was highlighted by separating 

enterprises that are fully cost transparent 

from those that are partially or not cost 

transparent. The report found that these cost 

transparency leaders are far more likely to 

be trusted by the board as true partners. This 

leading group represents just 12 per cent of 

respondents, indicating that the 

overwhelming majority of IT departments 

have some way to go before they are fully 

cost transparent. 

But why does cost transparency matter? 

When compared to their less transparent 

counterparts, cost transparency leaders are 

twice as likely to be represented at board 

level and much more likely to link the 

performance of the IT operations and its 

employees to recognisable, measureable 

and genuine business outcomess. 

BOARD IT 

So what steps can IT take to win the trust of 

the board and provide their departments 

with the agility required to succeed in the 

digital age? The first step to ensuring 

transparency across IT is to align the 

department's objectives with those of the 

wider business. From the outset, there should 

be a clear case for cost transparency which 

lays out what exactly needs to be 

documented, for example, improved cost 

information, benchmarking or improved 

pricing. The next step is to prioritise where to 

focus first, as cost transparency cannot be 

achieved overnight. Should it be 

infrastructure, specific projects, or perhaps 

business-critical applications? Again, the 

priorities should be formulated to align 

and support the business' overarching 

strategic goals. 

A NEW APPROACH 

Another consideration for IT leaders 

embarking on the cost transparency journey 

is to address the structure of their data and 

the way that costs flow through the 

organisation. Exploiting cost transparency 

needs new processes, new behaviours, and 

a significant amount of communications and 

training. There may even need to be new 

roles and capabilities within the 

organisation. And with Brexit and GDPR 

around the corner, this is an opportune 

moment to address these points. 

If IT is able to explain its value to the 

business, it is more likely to be regarded as 

a trusted partner by the rest of the business. 

Cost transparency frames discussions 

around service, performance and risk. It also 

provides the justification for further 

investment in IT services. It is therefore a 

critical step to building a trusting partnership 

within the business. Those organisations that 

have built cost transparency are better able 

to demonstrate full value to the business, 

and this in turn enables the partnership to 

develop, with IT viewed increasingly as an 

integral part of the business. NC 



AWARDS2018 

SPONSORED BY 

A BIG NIGHT FOR NETWORKING 

THE 2018 NETWORK COMPUTING AWARDS WINNERS ARE HERE! 

The Network Computing Awards ceremony took place in London on 22nd Match. Former 

cricketer, Graham Cowdrey, was Master of ceremonies for the night. He was assisted in 

presenting the Awards by comedian Patrick Monahan as well as Ray Smyth and Dave 

Bonner of Network Computing. All the of results can be seen in the following pages along with 

information on the winning product, company, project or individual. Please note, the awardwinning 

products will not necessarily be the only solutions or the newest solutions available from 

the respective vendors. We recommend that you contact these vendors to learn more. 

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Dell EMC - N4000 Series 

RUNNER UP: Allied Telesis - Secure Enterprise SDN (SES) 

The N4000 switch series offers a power-efficient and resilient 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) 

switching solution with support for 40GbE uplinks for advanced Layer 3 distribution for offices 

and campus networks. 

The N4000 switch series has high-performance capabilities and wire-speed performance 

utilizing a non-blocking architecture to easily handle unexpected traffic loads. The N4000 series 

includes dual internal hot-swappable 80PLUS-certified power supplies for high availability and 

power efficiency. The switches offer simple management and scalability via flexible user port 

stacking at 10Gbps or 40Gbps. 



AWARDS2018 

DATA CENTRE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Sudlows - A:LIST 

With the increasing reliance on data centre systems to support day to day businesses, Sudlows 

knows the importance of the design and build of reliable, resilient and efficient data centres. 

The latest offering from Sudlows' Data Centre Testing and Commissioning Team is the 

Advanced Load Integrated Systems Test, known as 'A:LIST'. 

Designed specifically for testing critical data environments by replicating the power and 

heatloads which will be installed, the A:LIST can provide a detailed analysis of your facility. The 

multi-award winning A:LIST has the ability to match the planned load closely, providing data 

centre operators the peace of mind that their data centres are running efficiently and 

effectively. 

RUNNER UP: Allied Telesis - X550 10 gig switch 

IT OPTIMISATION PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: KEMP Technologies - KEMP 360 Central 

KEMP 360 Central provides centralised management and control of application delivery assets, 

enabling reduced operational overheads and improved application uptime. From a single 

interface, KEMP 360 Central provides application owners and network managers with a unified 

view of the status and performance of their application delivery infrastructure, enabling rapid 

detection of issues and reduced management effort. A single KEMP 360 Central instance can 

manage multiple ADC instances across multiple environments including on-premises and cloud. 

With support for third party ADCs and integrated cloud load balancers, KEMP 360 Central is 

invaluable in hybrid cloud or cloud migration scenarios. 

RUNNER UP: F5 Networks - BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager 

TESTING / MONITORING PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Netreo - OmniCenter 

Netreo's OmniCenter provides single-pane-of-glass dashboard views into the entire IT enterprise. 

Infrastructure, telephony, applications, email, virtualisation and cloud services - all on one 

beautifully crafted screen, along with powerful incident management functions and automated 

reporting. OmniCenter is appliance-based (hardware, virtual or cloud-based) with no clients, 

agents, or probes - so implementation is a breeze. We use a simple, consumption-based 

subscription model in which all modules, functionality, and support are embedded into one low 

fee. No surprises. No terms. No hassles. We make enterprise-class monitoring tools available in 

a way that no one else can compete with. 

RUNNER UP: iTrinegy - NE ONE Desktop Network Emulator 

CLOUD TELEPHONY PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Natterbox - AVS 

Natterbox delivers a global Cloud Telephony Platform. Unique as the world's first and only end 

to end telephony service to be 100% embedded and managed within the Salesforce platform. 

Natterbox empowers businesses to use live CRM data to deliver concise personalised, phone 

journeys, with high call quality, around the globe. Natterbox is fully downloadable through the 

Salesforce AppExchange including a Cloud PBX, Contact Centre and call recording, offering a 

true no hardware, no software cloud based solution. 

With Natterbox you can increase efficiency, improve productivity and enhance your overall 

customer experience. It's time to prioritise your phone! 

www.Natterbox.com. 

RUNNER UP: Cisco - Cisco Unified Communications Manager 



AWARDS2018 

CRM PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: webCRM - webCRM 

RUNNER UP: Smarty Software - Smarty CRM 

WebCRM is a cloud based, sophisticated CRM system for Small to Medium Enterprises, that is 

relatively quick to implement and straightforward to evolve. The system enables managers and 

users to more effectively manage leads and activities, opportunities and quotes, orders and a 

ticketing system for customer service. The marketing module provides detailed profiling on any 

aspect of the system information facilitating highly targeted email marketing. These processes 

are supported with an easy to use reporting and dashboard system. 

WebCRM can be integrated with a large number of popular systems including Office 365, 

Sage, Xero and QuickBooks plus most telephony systems. 

STORAGE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Buffalo EU B.V. - TeraStation TS51210RH 

RUNNER UP: Lenovo - Storage DX8200D 

BUFFALO's TeraStation 51210RH is a high performance 12-bay network storage solution ideal 

for businesses requiring a reliable RAID-based network storage solution for business critical 

applications. Increased speed and reliability is achieved with a 10GbE connection and enterprise 

class hard drives. 

With the powerful Annapurna Labs Alpine AL314 1.7Ghz Quad-Core processor and 8GB of 

fast DDR3 ECC memory, TeraStation 51210RH provides exceptional performance during file 

transfers and everyday NAS functions. It is available partially-populated with 8 or 16 TB, and 

fully-populated with 24, 48 or 96 TB. Partially populated models are ideal for users needing a 

small start with less initial investment. 

SECURITY PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Rohde and Schwarz CyberSecurity - TrustedGate 

RUNNER UP: Arbor Networks - Arbor Cloud 

The cloud security solution TrustedGate enables companies to work securely in cloud computing 

environments (e.g. Google Drive, Magenta, Box.com) and collaboration tools such as SharePoint 

and Office 365. It combines encryption, virtualisation and fragmentation of sensitive documents 

for maximum protection of critical information. Users are able to distribute data on multiple 

clouds and servers in order to manage governance, risk management and compliance demands 

that require data to be protected according to the current state of the art or saved in a given 

region (e.g. GDPR). Document-centric encryption and role-based access control ensure that data 

is shielded against cyberattacks. 

NETWORK MANAGEMENT PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: SolarWinds - NPM 

RUNNER UP: Allied Telesis - Vista Manager EX 

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a powerful and affordable network 

monitoring software that enables you to quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve network 

performance problems and outages. 

SolarWinds develops its network management software upon the Orion Platform, which is 

highly scalable and unifies data from multiple parts of the stack into an application-centric 

view. This powerful platform gives IT departments the flexibility to add modules as their needs 

grow, deepening visibility into their environments. It can monitor, visualise, and analyse the 

performance of networks, applications, systems, storage, and databases. 



AWARDS2018 

SD-WAN VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Citrix 

Citrix aims to power a world where people, organisations and things are securely connected and 

accessible to make the extraordinary possible. We help customers reimagine the future of work by 

providing the most comprehensive secure digital workspace that unifies the apps, data and 

services people need to be productive, and simplifies IT's ability to adopt and manage complex 

cloud environments. Citrix solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organisations including 99 

percent of the Fortune 100 and 98 percent of the Fortune 500. 

RUNNER UP: Silver Peak 

HARDWARE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Opengear - IM7200 

The IM7200 streamlines remote management of network, server and power infrastructure in 

data centre and remote environments, ensuring business continuity, secure and reliable access. 

Available in range of models offering between 8 and 48 ports, the next generation IM7200 

combines Smart OOB out-of-band management with Failover to Cellular and delivers 

proactive monitoring and remediation. 

RUNNER UP: WatchGuard - Firebox M5600 

SOFTWARE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Natterbox - AVS RUNNER UP: Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity - R&S PACE 2 

Natterbox AVS offers the complete telephony solution, including Cloud PBX, CTI, Contact Centre 

and Call Recording within Salesforce. It enables transparency, flexibility and support, without 

needing to escalate to third party telephony suppliers. Natterbox is available worldwide; serviced 

by our 8 global data centres, providing quality of service, reliability and reduced complexity. 

You can either replace your existing phone system, with one that is 100% embedded in 

Salesforce. Or alternatively, integrate and enhance your existing phone system with our OTT 

solution, benefitting from the full contact centre integration. 

Accelerate productivity, transform customer experience and improve your data integrity - all 

within Salesforce. 

BENCH TESTED PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: NetScout - LinkRunner G2 NetScout – AirCheck G2 RUNNER UP: SolarWinds - NPM 12.1 

"We're honoured to have not one but two products distinguished by such an esteemed industry 

leader," commented Stefan Pracht, General Manager for Handheld Network Tools, NETSCOUT. 

"Both products dramatically improve efficiencies for IT professionals, and we're thrilled that the 

benefits they bring have been recognised at this high level." 



AWARDS2018 

NETWORK PROJECT OF YEAR 

WINNER: Nuffield Health / Silver Peak 

- PUBLIC / NOT FOR PROFIT SECTOR 

Nuffield Health, a leading not-for-profit healthcare organisation, chose Silver Peak to transition 

its legacy MPLS networks to an SD-WAN and embark upon a cloud-first IT strategy. Since the 

deployment, Nuffield Health has reduced WAN traffic by up to 75 percent and realised a 4-6x 

increase in available bandwidth, enabling its users to use data-critical applications for patient 

care and customer needs 

NETWORK PROJECT OF THE YEAR - PRIVATE SECTOR 

WINNER: iMarket / iTrinegy 

iMarket Communications specialises in VoIP TDM over Ethernet trader voice and data solutions 

for the financial, banking and energy industries. When a client purchases an iMarket Private Line, 

iMarket assumes full responsibility for buying the required links from the carrier. 

To minimise its risk, iMarket selected iTrinegy's NE-ONE network emulator to verify, prior to 

signing any contract, that its equipment was going to work properly and not be adversely 

impacted by any latency or jitter. Testing with NE-ONE confirmed that its devices were well able 

to perform in such environments. Since then, the NE-ONE has been used to identify the 

tolerance limits of iMarket's systems. 

THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT AWARD 

WINNER: VoiceSage - Interactive Voice Messaging 

RUNNER UP: Natterbox - AVS 

VoiceSage is delighted to announce it has won the title of 'Return On Investment' - a win that 

marks an unprecedented sixth year of success at the Awards. The fact that VoiceSage's solutions 

allow brands to deliver a consistent and rich customer experience and realise tangible business 

improvements is believed to be the main factor behind the win. 

"Our win this year is especially important to us, as proven customer ROI is testament to the 

contribution our solution makes to enabling brands to proactively engage with customers in 

ways that are simple, immediate, and offer great choice across channels," commented CEO 

James J Kett. 

THE CUSTOMER SERVICE AWARD 

WINNER: Brookcourt Solutions 

RUNNER UP: NBM Technology Solutions 

Commenting on thei win, Brookcourt CEO Phil Higgins said "As a true testament of customer 

service and value to our clients, Brookcourt are delighted to have won The Customer Service 

Award of the Year 2018. Great achievements are nurtured with the cooperation of many 

minds with a common vision working toward a common goal. Brookcourt's award winning, 

customer centric approach ensures we continuously keep ahead, we are honoured to have 

won this award." 



AWARDS2018 

NEW PRODUCT OF THE YEAR – HARDWARE CATEGORY 

WINNER: Allied Telesis - SwitchBlade x908 Generation 2 

The Allied Telesis SBx908 GEN2 is the ideal solution for the modern enterprise network core. This 

stackable modular switch also has the capacity to support Smart City and IoT networks. The 

SBx908 GEN2 delivers a future-proof network with superior flexibility, coupled with the ability to 

stack multiple units. 

The high-capacity 2.6 Terabit fabric eliminates bottlenecks, effortlessly streams video and 

ensures all traffic in large networks is delivered reliably. Flexible hot-swappable expansion 

modules (XEMs) support 10 Gigabit, 40 Gigabitand 100 Gigabit in the future to easily expand 

the SBx908 GEN2 to meet network traffic demands, both now and well into the future. 

RUNNER UP: Dell EMC - PowerEdge T640 

NEW PRODUCT OF THE YEAR – SOFTWARE AND SERVICES CATEGORY 

WINNER: Check Point Software Technologies – Check Point Infinity 

Check Point Infinity is the first consolidated security across networks, cloud and mobile, providing 

the highest level of threat prevention against both known and unknown targeted attacks to keep 

you protected now and in the future. Infinity leverages unified threat intelligence and open 

interfaces, enabling all environments to stay protected against targeted attacks. 

By focusing on prevention rather than detection only, Infinity blocks the most sophisticated 

attacks before they occur. Check Point Infinity architecture consolidates management of multiple 

security layers, providing superior policy efficiency and enabling to manage security through a 

single pane of glass. 

RUNNER UP: Natterbox - AVS 

THE INSPIRATION AWARD 

WINNER: Andy Hirst IEng, MIET, CDCDP, ATD - Technical Director, Sudlows 

Andy Hirst IEng, MIET, CDCDP, ATD - Technical Director, Sudlows 

With over 25 years' design and management experience in the electrical industry, Andy has been 

instrumental in leading the transformation of Sudlows from a £2million data cabling company to 

an award winning £48million critical infrastructure provider. Andy is often in demand by both 

press and industry conferences to offer his opinion and views on Key critical infrastructure topics. 

After initially joining Sudlows to relaunch the electrical division, Andy become a Board Director 

and works closely with his fellow directors to define the growth strategy and commercial direction 

of the business. Andy's critical contribution has ensured that strategic growth is planned and 

controlled with significant investment in sourcing a high standard of engineers and designers in 

all disciplines around the data centre environment. Andy is a key figure within the critical 

infrastructure industry and has collected several awards for his technical work. 

RUNNER UP: Ian Moyse 

THE "ONE TO WATCH" COMPANY 

WINNER: Endace 

Endace provides high performance platforms for network performance and security analytics 

tools, providing agile functionality whilst saving both capex and opex and meeting the business 

need for long hardware depreciation cycles. 

The Endace Fusion Programme brings together best of breed functionality to ensure that 

analysts always have access to the tools they need in an ever-changing network and security 

landscape. The scalability and interoperability of EndaceProbes simplify incident response 

workflows, ensuring that problems are solved quickly and conclusively, the first time they occur. 

RUNNER UP: Algosec 



AWARDS2018 

DISTRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Nuvias 

RUNNER UP: NBM Distribution 

Nuvias is a fast-growing high value, solutions-defined EMEA distributor with a portfolio covering 

a comprehensive range of IT solutions. The focus is currently on three areas - Cyber Security 

(based on the former Wick Hill); Advanced Networking (based on the former Zycko) and Unified 

Communications (based on the former SIPHON). In July 2017, Nuvias added Benelux value 

added distributor and security specialist DCB to the Group. All four award-winning companies 

had previously demonstrated their ability to provide innovative technology solutions from worldclass 

vendors, and deliver market growth for vendor partners and customers. 

RESELLER OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Q Associates 

RUNNER UP: Brookcourt Solutions 

As an award-winning platform, data and services specialist, Q Associates are helping 

organisations across the commercial and public-sector drive innovation and leverage the best 

services and technologies. including: 

Expert IT consultation and advisory services 

Converged, hyper-converged and cloud-based solutions 

Data protection, compliance and information security 

Our people make us different. Our technical experts are there to remove your IT complexity, 

enable digital transformation and help you meet the changing demands of your business through 

a number of IT solutions. 

PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Silver Peak - Unity EdgeConnect 

RUNNER UP: Netreo - OmniCenter 

Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution 

Delivered in both virtual and physical appliances, the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect softwaredefined 

WAN (SD-WAN) solution dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of building a 

WAN by providing the flexibility to use any combination of transport technologies – including 

broadband – to connect users to applications. EdgeConnect is the industry's leading SD-WAN 

solution that frees businesses from their dependency on routers. In addition, EdgeConnect is 

application-driven, so it automatically learns and adapts to constantly changing network 

conditions. Fully compatible with existing WAN infrastructure, EdgeConnect provides a graceful 

migration to an SD-WAN and, ultimately, to the thin branch by simplifying the WAN architecture. 

COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Nuvias 

RUNNER UP: Brookcourt Solutions 

Nuvias Group is the pan-EMEA, high value distribution business, which is redefining 

international, specialist distribution in IT. The company has created a platform to deliver a 

consistent, high value, service-led and solution-rich proposition across EMEA. This allows partner 

and vendor communities to provide exceptional business support to customers and enables new 

standards of channel success. Nuvias currently has three main practice areas - cyber security, 

advanced networking and unified communications. Nuvias has 21 regional offices across EMEA, 

as well as serving additional countries through those offices. Turnover is around US$ 500 million. 



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COLLABORATION CLOUD NETWORKS A.I. 

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Register FREE today and save £35 

*Visitors not registered by 7pm on Tuesday 15th May 2018 will be charged a fee of £35. 

Find out more at www.ucexpo.co.uk 

2017 

SPONSORS:

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