NC Jan-Feb 2022

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 

“YOU WILL MEET A STRANGER...” 

Predicting the year ahead in cybersecurity 

DATA ARCHITECTURE 

Time to step away from 

legacy systems? 

OUTAGES TAKE A TOLL 

Assessing the hidden cost 

of network downtime 

LIFE ON THE EDGE 

Uniting business and IT 

at the network edge 

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 VOL 31 NO 01

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TIME FOR A SECURITY BOOSTER 

In January the UK Government unveiled its 'Cyber Security Strategy: 2022 to 2030', the 

first governmental strategy of its kind, backed by £37.8 million in investment "to help 

local authorities boost their cyber resilience." This eight-year strategy represents a muchneeded 

boost to public sector security, which has been subject to increasing security attacks 

since the start of the pandemic. 

According to Calvin Gan, Senior Manager, Tactical Defence at F-Secure, these attacks 

"Revealed the weakness in security implementation, while the impact has been devasting for 

some institutions (leak of public health data, high ransom payment, or systems used for 

scam activities). Since the increase in attacks, it has become apparent that the public sector 

systems would need further security strengthening while staffs' cybersecurity awareness has 

to be elevated further." Calvin continued, "With the call for better security practices, controls, 

and management in these institutions, the new strategy is a welcomed move especially 

when dedicated budgets are being allocated to improve the cybersecurity posture. It is 

with the hope that lack of resources would no longer be the main blocker for better security 

improvements. Perhaps a first step is to look again at the entire estate of public sector 

systems and identify the current risks that are posed to them." 

The Goverment Strategy was also welcomed by Zeki Turedi, CTO EMEA, CrowdStrike, 

who commented that "The UK, in common with every democracy in the world, faces significantly 

increasing cybersecurity threats. The government is right to take action as these 

threats from state sponsored adversaries and criminal groups continue to grow, annually. 

The Cyber Security Strategy is a step in the right direction, especially with its emphasis on 

collecting events and identifying them before they become more serious incidents or 

breaches. Hand-in-hand with this is enhancing the UK's detection abilities, which the strategy 

also identifies. This is critical as the faster there is visibility into the initial stages of an 

attack, the better chance there is to stop breaches." 

You'll find more on the security outlook for 2022 in our predictions feature this issue, 

where a panel of industry experts share their cybersecurity forecasts for the next twelve 

months. We also have an article from Phil Dunlop at Progress on the need for proactive 

network monitoring for potential security breaches. The parameters and perimeters of our 

networks are evolving, with the need for hybrid working and edge networks becoming 

increasingly apparent as a result of the pandemic. It's safe to predict that the threat landscape 

will evolve alongside them too. NC 

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WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK @NCMagAndAwards JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 NETWORKcomputing 03

CONTENTS 

CONTENTS 

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 2 

SOFTWARE QUALITY.............20 

Dr. Gareth Smith at Keysight Technologies 

discusses why software quality now 

determines business success - and how 

organisations can take steps to improve theirs 

CYBERSECURITY IN 2022.....08 

We asked a panel of industry experts for their 

cybersecurity predictions for the year ahead, 

while Phil Dunlop at Progress explains how 

proactive network monitoring tools can block 

breaches before they can occur 

THE NETWORK EDGE...........22 

Our feature on edge computing looks at 

the benefits of Smart Edge Monitoring and 

application-aware networks, and offers a 

guide to uniting business and IT at the edge 

COMMENT.....................................3 

Time for a security booster 

INDUSTRY NEWS.............................6 

The latest networking news 

ARTICLES 

DEMYSTIFYING 5G..........................16 

By David Fraser at Intel 

IS KUBERNETES THE RIGHT FIT FOR 

YOUR I.T.?......................................17 

By Erik Sonnerskog at zsah 

A CLEARER VIEW OF VDIs................19 

By Robert Belgrave at Pax8 UK 

GAINING THE SMART EDGE............22 

By Sanjay Radia at NETSCOUT 

LIVING ON THE EDGE.....................23 

By Russ Kennedy at Nasuni 

UNIFIED AT THE EDGE....................24 

By Reggie Best at NS1 

DELIVERING APPLICATION-AWARE 

NETWORKS....................................25 

By Daniel Blackwell at Pulsant 

ASSESSING THE RISK OF IoT...........27 

By Matthew Margetts at Smarter Technologies 

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED............32 

By David Higgins at CyberArk 

DATA ARCHITECTURE............30 

Is it time for UK businesses to step away 

from legacy systems and migrate to a new, 

fit-for-purpose data architecture? Toby 

Balfre at Databricks shares his thoughts 

THE HIDDEN COST OF 

DOWNTIME........................34 

Alan Stewart-Brown at Opengear 

considers the impact of network outages 

on staff wellbeing and explains how Smart 

Out-of-Band management can help ease 

the outage load 

CASE STUDIES 

EXTREME NETWORKS TRANSFORMS 

BORAS STAD INTO A SMART CITY.....18 

One of the largest cloud-managed network 

installations in Sweden enables secure, reliable 

public Wi-Fi and simplified network management 

A SUPERFAST SERVER SOLUTION......28 

Superfast IT protects profitability for Wilkes 

Tranter with Arcserve ShadowProtect 

PRODUCT REVIEW 

VERITAS BACKUP EXEC.......................14 

SOLARWINDS SQL SENTY...............26 

04 NETWORKcomputing JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 @NCMagAndAwards 

WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK

INDUSTRY NEWS 

NEWSNEWS 

NEWS NEWS 

NEWS NEWS NEWS NEWS 

NEWS NEWS 

Progress introduces WhatsUp Gold Free Edition 

Progress has announced a free edition of Progress WhatsUp 

Gold, its award-winning IT infrastructure monitoring software. 

WhatsUp Gold empowers operations teams to monitor and 

manage their business applications and the resources that 

support them to ensure high levels of performance and 

availability. The Free Edition includes network discovery, 

mapping, alerting, reporting and virtual monitoring for up to 20 

devices simultaneously or 10 devices when advanced add-on 

features such as Network Traffic Analysis, Application 

Performance Monitoring or Log Management are in use. 

"The volume of connected endpoints for the typical enterprise 

network has exponentially grown over the past several years," said 

Jason Dover, VP, Product Strategy, Enterprise Application 

Experience, Progress. "By providing the Free edition of WhatsUp 

Gold, Progress enables smaller organisations and Dev/Test teams 

to gain control and visibility that was previously unattainable." 

Perle expands support for device access 

Perle Systems, a global manufacturer of secure device 

networking hardware, have announced IOLAN SCG 

Console Servers that incorporate EIA-232, EIA-422, and EIA- 

485 signals on a single RJ45 interface with support for up to 48 

ports. The ability to individually configure each interface type 

using software commands enables organisations to access and 

support a variety of serial-based devices in their network. 

I 

OLAN SCG Console Servers help organisations increase the 

value of their serial-based equipment by enabling secure serial 

data transmission across existing Ethernet networks without costly 

or complex infrastructure changes. Easy to set up and manage, 

the IOLAN SCG's software-selectable RS232/422/485 

interfaces simplify configuration and eliminate mechanical 

tampering associated with DIP switches. And, because a 

standard unit can be shipped across multiple sites, regardless of 

specific serial devices deployed at each location, last-minute 

hardware configurations are minimised and total cost of 

deployment ownership reduced. 

A united network solution for Old Trafford 

Extreme Networks had entered a multi-year partnership with 

Manchester United to become the Club's Official Wi-Fi 

Network Solutions Provider and Official Wi-Fi Analytics Provider. 

The installation of Extreme Wi-Fi 6 access points at Old Trafford 

will begin later this year to transform the fan experience with fast, 

reliable Wi-Fi connectivity and increase the Club's capability to 

deliver high-performance, low-latency and secure digital 

services. Additionally, Extreme will help Manchester United 

access real-time network analytics to drive more personalised 

and informed decisions around both the fan experience and 

overall venue operations. 

The deployment of Extreme Wi-Fi 6 access points at Old 

Trafford Stadium will power faster wireless speeds and low 

latency, providing the highest quality connection and a 

performance boost for secure fan-facing technology such as 

mobile ticketing and other digital offerings. ExtremeAnalytics will 

provide Manchester United with rich data sets and insights 

around performance and usage, dwell time and location-based 

services – in real-time. As a result, the club can continuously 

review and optimise venue management by identifying stadium 

bottlenecks, overcrowded concessions and other consumer 

traffic patterns, while gaining insights into fan activity to better 

customise experiences and pinpoint sponsorship opportunities. 

Juniper Networks expands its SASE architecture 

Juniper Secure Edge is the newest addition to Juniper Networks' 

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. This new 

solution delivers Firewall-as-a-Service (FwaaS) as a single-stack 

software architecture, managed by Security Director Cloud, to 

empower organisations to secure workforces, wherever they are. 

Secure Edge provides unified policy management from a single 

UI for all security use cases, meaning that policies can be created 

once and applied anywhere and everywhere, including user- and 

application-based access, IPS, anti-malware and secure web 

access within a single policy. 



INDUSTRY NEWS 

Juniper Secure Edge supports the remote workforce whether 

employees are in the office, at home or on the road with secure 

user access to the applications and resources needed to do their 

job effectively. Security policies go with the user, protecting the 

them, their device and applications without having to copy over or 

recreate rulesets. Organisations can leverage existing investments 

and seamlessly transition to a full SASE architecture at their pace. 

Neos to deliver new dark fibre network for North-West UK 

Neos Networks has been chosen by Jisc - suppliers of a 

digital network and supporting services for the UK's higher 

education and research sector - to deliver a new Dark Fibre 

network spanning the North-West of the UK. The new network 

will replace Jisc's existing Janet North network which currently 

serves the region. It will provide gigabit capability to all the sites 

using the new network, with some seeing a ten-fold speed 

increase compared to their current offering and all achieving 

high-capacity speeds up to 100Gbps. 

The contract was awarded following a competitive tendering 

process and is the latest instalment in Jisc's ongoing overhaul and 

rationalisation of 15 regional networks connected into the 

organisation’s national backbone infrastructure. As well as this 

latest North-West network contract, Neos has previously secured 

the contracts to upgrade and merge two Midlands networks into 

one new high-speed, high-capacity network, and also the 

contract covering Jisc's South of England network. 

CMS Distribution launches Cloud Powered by Flexiscale 

CMS Cloud Powered by Flexiscale is a fully-featured cloud 

platform enabling the channel to provide a full range of 

cloud services under their own brand, without the time, cost and 

complexity of running their own infrastructure. Resellers can now 

provide their own cloud services portfolio to support digital 

transformation, including pre-packaged virtual appliances, IaaS, 

PaaS, Hosted Desktop and Hybrid Working Solutions, with full 

predictability of costs, whilst maintaining full commercial and 

contractual control. 

"Flexiscale bringing CMS Cloud to our reseller base is a really 

exciting proposition," said Nick Bailey, Director of Vendor 

Alliances at CMS Distribution. "CMS is a real trusted source in IT 

and now we have the perfect vehicle to help VARs and resellers 

of all sizes to address their customers' digital transformation 

needs, whilst keeping the full relationship with that customer. 

CMS and Flexiscale can fully support an opportunity and 

provide local expertise quickly and reliably. Offering this service 

means that our partner base can more easily move to 

consumptive IT and all the benefits that go with that." 

Cloud Expo Europe London 2022 is on the horizon 

Ciloud Expo Europe London 2022 is approaching fast. The 

leading global gathering of cloud specialists, service 

providers, innovators, and business leaders takes place at ExCel 

London from 2-3 March. Attendees willl be able to discover the 

latest products and services from all the leading suppliers, and 

immerse themselves in over one hundred hours of expert-delivered 

conference sessions and meet with all your peers! 

Visitors to Cloud Expo Europe will meet hundreds of leading 

service providers, including IBM, Wasabi Technologies, Maria DB, 

Fujitsu, IONOS Cloud, OVH Cloud and Tencent Cloud to name a 

few. Learn from hundreds of hours of conference sessions, 

delivered by industry-leading speakers sharing their challenges, 

successes, and latest hardware. Don’t miss Tim Berners-Lee, 

inventor of the World Wide Web, alongside speakers from Zoom, 

WHO, Lloyds Banking Group, McDonald’s and Marks & Spencer. 

Cloud Expo Europe 2022 sits at the heart of the most complete 

and exciting technology event gathering on the planet, Tech 

Show London, encompassing DevOps Live, Cloud & Cyber 

Security Expo, Big Data & AI World and Data Centre World – 

creating an unmissable technology event. Join your peers, 

partners and friends face-to-face at Cloud Expo Europe, for the 

first time in 2 years by registering for your free ticket at: 

www.datacentreworld.com/BTC 

NEWS NEWSNEWS 

NEWS 

NEWS NEWS NEWS NEWS NEWS 

NEWS 


FEATURE: CYBERSECURITY 

FORECASTING THE YEAR AHEAD IN CYBERSECURITY 

FROM RANSOMWARE TO RISK 

AVERSION, NETWORK 

COMPUTING ASKED 

INDUSTRY EXPERTS FOR THEIR 

2022 CYBERSECURITY 

PREDICTIONS 

Mike Sentonas, Crowdstrike CTO 

2021 was a challenging year for security 

teams. Ransomware remains one of the 

most lucrative forms of cybercrime around 

and unfortunately, with cybercriminals 

becoming more sophisticated and 

advancing intrusion techniques, it is 

expected to continue in 2022. 

Along with gaining control of company 

systems and exfiltrating sensitive data, in the 

past year we have seen threat actors increase 

their use of the double extortion ransomware 

model. Here, threat actors threaten to leak 

this sensitive data, increasing the pain 

threshold for the victim. This is because 

companies don't want sensitive data leaked 

to the internet for competitors and journalists 

to see. According to CrowdStrike's 2021 

Global Security Attitude Survey, 88% of UK 

businesses who paid an initial ransom were 

extorted for more money, paying out an 

additional $497,826 USD on average - 

when the initial ransom payment was 

already, on average, a hefty $1.22 million to 

$1.45 million USD. We anticipate that this 

double extortion ransom model will continue 

to grow in sophistication in 2022. 

Another trend we have observed is the 

growth of the underground economy built 

around data exfiltration and extortion. The 

stress of a cyber breach very rarely stops 

once the organisation has or has not paid 

up. In addition to sensitive company data 

ending up on a public data leak site, some 

criminals have been known to sell files to 

each other or even to a competitor in a 

foreign market. This means that even if a 

company has paid one criminal gang, 

another could emerge from the shadows and 

demand precisely the same thing. 

Ransomware is a pervasive problem and for 

ill-equipped businesses, there doesn't seem 

to be an end in sight. Cybercriminals are 

revamping their entire infrastructure of 

tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) 

and will continue to feast on under-resourced 

and unprepared security teams. It is vital for 

security teams, in 2022, to better position 

themselves by patching any gaps in their 

cybersecurity posture to combat these 

persistent attacks. 




distributed environment that is coming to 

shape our reality. Breaking out of this binary 

perspective and realising that networking 

technology is much more powerful and 

nuanced will be the key to success for firms in 

2022 and beyond. 

John Morrison, Senior Vice President EMEA 

Extreme Networks 

Traditionally, most businesses have 

considered networks to only consist of two 

separate layers: software and hardware. In 

2022, organisations will begin to discover 

the value of viewing their networks holistically 

and will come to appreciate how their 

networks are in fact multi-layered. 

Going forward, networks will only continue 

to become more intricate and complex, with 

many more parts now comprising the whole. 

Thus, companies must reflect on their 

infrastructure in the same way - as a whole. 

They can do this by finding ways to combine 

the power of cloud management with nextgeneration 

switches and access points, 

utilising the likes of AI and ML and deciding 

whether public cloud, private cloud, and/or 

on-premises solutions best cater to them. This 

approach allows them to achieve both 

diverse business connectivity and their 

commercial needs. 

These actions are vital for firms to futureproof 

themselves and become what we call 

'infinite enterprises' - enterprises which are 

capable of scaling, meeting users wherever 

they are and delivering a consumer-centric 

experience where technology revolves 

around the user's needs. Making possible 

networks that can meet these goals reliably 

and securely will keep people connected, 

engaged and productive in the more 

Guy Podjarny, Co-Founder & President, Snyk 

2021 proved that supply chains are more 

susceptible than ever to cyberattacks. The risk 

is growing largely because of the increasing 

reliance on proprietary and open source 

code and is compounded by the speed and 

complexity of modern apps, as well as the 

increasing sophistication of potential 

intruders. In 2022 we'd expect to see this 

trend continue, with geopolitical tensions still 

high and COVID continuing to drive 

businesses to become digital and embrace 

cloud faster. 

However, there are things developers can 

do to mitigate further risk. They need to 

identify and fix weaknesses in the 

components they use, and invest in strong 

security hygiene practices. Security teams 

should embrace a DevSecOps approach, 

focusing on helping the people doing the 

work make secure decisions and investing in 

breaking silos and increasing automation. 

While developers can't stop people from 

attempting to hack and exploit their systems, 

they can stop them from succeeding. Putting 

security at the heart of the development 

process is the only way to achieve that at scale. 

David Maidment, Senior Director Secure Device 

Ecosystem, Arm (a PSA Certified co-founder) 

As the growing number of IoT devices has 

soared, the ecosystem has uncovered a 

number of security challenges in the bid to 

make devices more secure, while adhering to 

the maturing regulatory landscape. In the last 

three years, an ecosystem of over 50 partners 

have collaborated around PSA Certified in 

order to provide a common framework 

around IoT security, which is critical to our 

connected future. Having a program that 

encourages broad adherence to regulations 

and that drives a common language in the 

growing ecosystem is vital. 

In 2022, we expect perceptions of IoT security 

to shift from it being a cost to a necessary value. 

With laws, regulations and baseline 

requirements changing the way we see security, 

there's a growing recognition of the importance 

of best-practice security and the risks of inaction. 

Third-party evaluation and certification 

frameworks will continue to play an increasingly 

central role in driving consistency across 

markets and to building trust and assurance in 

connected devices. 

This year we anticipate that the ecosystem will 

take proactive IoT measures to protect devices 

based on the Root of Trust. Moving away from 

siloed approaches to hardware security, 

leveraging cross-industry collaboration and 

embracing a secure-by-design culture will act as 

a catalyst for trusted IoT deployment at scale. 



risk exposure is unacceptable. This means 

beginning to evaluate and implement the 

principles of a secure enterprise, starting first 

and foremost with understanding security 

compromises will happen as cyber hackers 

deploy more sophisticated attacks. Tech 

pros should also implement detection, 

monitoring, alerts, and response along the 

kill chain and engage in red team/tabletop 

exercises to measure effectiveness. 

implementation. Additionally, the third-party 

cloud providers used by companies must be 

scrutinised for their data protection 

methodology and overall security culture. 

Thomas LaRock, Head Geek, SolarWinds 

Cybercrime has reached a new peak with 

the onslaught of ransomware attacks and 

data breaches in the last several months. 

The 2021 SolarWinds IT Trends Report 

details how organisations experienced 

medium exposure to enterprise IT risk over 

the past year. Although the survey 

respondents felt their existing risk mitigation 

and management policies/procedures were 

sufficient, it's absolutely critical for 

organisations and tech pros to adopt a 

mentality where even "medium" risk 

exposure is unacceptable. 

We expect to see two trends emerge in 

2022 in response to the evolving threat 

landscape. As the rate of attacks continues 

to accelerate in lockstep with hackers' attack 

methodologies and schemes developing at 

scale, more tech professionals and 

organisations will look to cloud service 

providers, managed service providers 

(MSPs) and managed security service 

providers (MSSPs), and other third-party 

security tools (like those offered by Microsoft 

365® subscriptions) to supplement their 

own IT policies and keep pace with the new, 

more effective security measures. 

Tech pros and the IT community at large 

will better secure the enterprise by 

normalising a sense of risk aversion - that is, 

moving from simply accepting the current 

exposure to a mindset where any level of 

Craig Lurey, Co-Founder & CTO, 

Keeper Security 

2021 saw a record number of cyberattacks 

and data breaches. We expect this to 

escalate in 2022 with the permanent shift to 

a remote workforce for many organisations. 

There are growing concerns around data 

leaks as employees remotely access 

corporate data and infrastructure from 

company-issued and personal devices like 

laptops and mobile phones. These devices 

and employees are, unfortunately, prime 

targets for data leakage and device 

infection. Additionally, the expanded usage 

of cloud-based services and data storage 

also expands the footprint and potential 

sources of data leaks, whether accidental or 

through 3rd party breaches. 

The most important thing business leaders 

can do when it comes to remote work 

vulnerabilities is to develop strong access 

management protocols. This means 

establishing a zero-trust framework as a 

non-negotiable component of any security 

Daniel dos Santos, Research Manager at 

Forescout Research Labs 

Ransomware will continue to dominate the 

cybersecurity space in 2022. As a relatively 

simple form of attack that can be highly 

effective and profitable, bad actors will start 

broadening the devices and technologies 

they will go after. 

We will see more attacks on vulnerable IoT 

devices that will be used as a gateway to 

gain access to company systems. Third-party 

software and devices with known 

vulnerabilities that are hard to fix will also 

increasingly move into the spotlight as they 

allow cybercriminals to cause huge 

disruptions. And compromised Operational 

Technology systems will be the Holy Grail 

for many bad actors, giving them an iron 

grip on the organisation they want to extort. 

As ransomware attacks will evolve in 2022 

and beyond, so will the cyber defences that 

companies need to invest in to adequately 

protect themselves. These must include full 

device visibility and control tools, ongoing 

cybersecurity audits and maintenance, 

stringent policies that are regularly updated 

as well as powerful network segmentation 

solutions that, in the worst-case scenario, 

can limit the fallout of an attack. NC 



MARCH 9TH & 10TH 2022 

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ONLY THE EARLIEST DETECTION BEATS SECURITY BREACHES 

ORGANISATIONS ARE FAILING TO UNDERSTAND THE TRUE VALUE OF THEIR NETWORKS AS A 

CRITICAL TECH ASSET, ACCORDING TO PHIL DUNLOP, VP EMEA AT PROGRESS 

It's not enough to know the likelihood of 

a cyber attack, its impact or average 

cost. It's not even enough to have 

security alerts set up on all systems, with 

false positive distracting teams. The only 

way to protect an organisation's network 

from security breaches, internally or 

externally, is with the most proactive 

network monitoring. Enterprises need to 

take their investment in network monitoring 

seriously to secure their tech assets. 

Cybercriminals are not choosy about 

industry or organisation size, and while the 

large enterprises might be able to afford to 

take the hit of an attack, a smaller 

company can be wiped out by one. It's fair 

to say that organisations don't truly value 

their networks as a critical tech asset - but 

they hold the key to minimising the risk of 

cyber attacks. 

As businesses expanded their digital 

ecosystems during the pandemic, adding 

in apps, technology and remote-based 

users, this increase in touch points 

revealed more attack surfaces for 

cybercriminals to target. Critical data is at 

risk, with hackers gaining in intelligence 

about networks, connections, and 

vulnerabilities to break through any chink 

in your security armour. To add to this, 

users have become more complacent - 

doubling the risk. 

It's vital to have the most proactive 

network monitoring tools which can detect 

suspicious activity and thwart any potential 

breaches before they happen. Using the 

right security tools, the network can offer a 

heads-up that a breach is occurring and 

clues to conduct forensics to learn the 

details and block further attacks. The main 

considerations to be a step ahead of 

attack agents are to obtain deeper visibility 

and holistic mapping of your network 

infrastructure and attached applications, 

services, and devices. Knowing your 

vulnerabilities, the potential threats and 

the earliest ways to detect network 

breaches, is vital. 

BREACHES - KNOW YOUR ENEMY 

Data breaches have been around ever 

since the existence of data, but the facts 

remain that they are getting bigger, and on 

the rise. The UK Government's Cyber 

Breaches Survey 2021 reported that four in 

ten businesses (39%) have experienced 

cyber security breaches or attacks in the 

last 12 months. 

No industry sector is safe from cyber 

threats, with even 26% of charities having 




a breach in the last 12 months, and hardly 

a day goes by without yet another breach 

notification by an organisation or cyber 

attack alert against a country by a nationstate 

actor. 

THE RISING COSTS OF DATA 

BREACHES 

According to the 2021 IBM Cost of a Data 

Breach Report, the cost of data breaches 

has risen 10% in the last year, the biggest 

increase in the last seven years. The cost of 

a breach rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 

million, the highest recorded. 

Moreover, costs were even higher when 

remote working was presumed to be a 

factor in causing the breach, increasing to 

$4.96 million. According to IBM's report, 

the average cost was $1.07 million higher 

in breaches where remote work was a 

factor in causing the breach, compared to 

those where remote work was not a factor. 

The percentage of companies where 

remote work was a factor in the breach 

was 17.5%. 

It's also taking longer for tech teams to 

diagnose breaches. The IBM Report found 

that it takes on average 287 days to 

discover, identify and contain a healthcare 

data breach and healthcare and financial 

industries spent the most time in the data 

breach lifecycle. 

KNOWING YOUR NETWORK MEANS 

PROTECTING IT 

You know your own network better than 

anyone else - or should do. There are 

some instrumental ways to deflect attacks 

by using this network knowledge to your 

advantage. An effective network traffic 

analysis solution will help spot the hackers 

and avoid business disruption, a six or 

seven figure bill, or even worse. 

1. Set and enforce network security policies 

If you don't already, you should have good 

network hygiene in place to ensure that 

everything is disciplined and set up as it 

should be. This means ensuring that the 

network is configured and running through 

policies, thresholds, and alerts. 

Setting up important policies, such as 

how bandwidth is allocated, the network 

segregated, or websites blocked are 

established, is critical. Your network 

monitoring tool should make regular 

checks that compliance is met, and flag to 

IT administrators if any requirements are 

outstanding. 

2. Finding rogue devices 

Through the process of discovery, 

automated network monitoring can find 

new devices such as Wi-Fi access points 

and secure these entry points. New wireless 

routers are a well-known hacker's 

goldmine, so it's important to identify and 

secure them, or take them offline. 

3. Spot the distributed Denial of Service 

(DDoS) attacks early 

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) 

attacks are among the most common and 

devastating form of attack. These 

malicious attempts to disrupt the normal 

traffic of a targeted server, service or 

network by overwhelming the target with a 

flood of Internet traffic, prevent traffic from 

moving. Computers as well as other 

networked resources such as IoT devices 

can be affected. Acting on early signs is 

vital to mitigating its impact. Since network 

monitoring continually tracks all your traffic 

flows and alerts IT with any anomalies, you 

might notice traffic increasing beyond the 

point of your preset baselines. The system 

has insight into what constitutes a normal 

traffic spike, and what indicates a problem 

such as DDoS. 

In locating these traffic spikes and what 

devices may be flooded, you're 

immediately a step ahead. Applications 

will be slowing, packets are lost, and the 

network is suffering from unacceptable 

latency. Without this continual network 

monitoring, DDoS attacks can easily go 

unnoticed. 

4. Spot data exfiltration and dark web use 

Bandwidth is a key indicator for many 

security and performance issues, therefore 

Network Traffic Analysis is vital. In 

analysing NetFlow, NSEL, S-Flow, J-Flow, 

and IPFIX you can see details of 

resources, departments, groups or even 

individuals using the bandwidth. In 

tracking these trends, any suspicious 

behaviour shows up, such as botnet 

attacks and network takeovers, exfiltration 

of data by cybercriminals, DDoS attacks, 

and data mining. 

Network Traffic Analysis is invaluable for 

security forensics, discovering unauthorised 

applications, tracking traffic volumes 

between specific pairs of source and 

destinations, and finding high traffic flows 

to unmonitored ports. It can monitor all 

network sources for known Tor ports and 

spot or block access to the Dark Web. 

YOUR NETWORK AS A SECURITY 

GUARD 

Early detection is vital to preventing or 

minimising attack impact. An organisation's 

network can be the key indicator for a 

potential breach, spotting signs and 

patterns that flag to forensics to learn the 

details and prevent further attacks. 

The network is the main IT highway on 

which attacks traverse, and it is a premium 

attack surface for cybercriminals. It's 

therefore critical to be a step ahead of 

hackers through using deep visibility and 

holistic mapping of your network 

infrastructure and attached applications, 

services, and devices. Only by gaining this 

visibility through advanced network 

monitoring can you safeguard vulnerable 

areas and head off breaches as they 

attempt to gain access. NC 



Veritas Backup Exec 


PRODUCT 

REVIEWPRODUCT RE 

The most valuable asset that an 

organisation possesses is 

information. Its stock in trade - 

physical assets, products and cash in the 

bank - can be counted, but without 

access to the information it needs to run 

its business, it is powerless and 

incapacitated. It cannot run its accounts, 

progress work, complete its projects or 

pay its employees. 

Consequently that data has to be 

protected from all threats to its integrity, 

from computer and software 

malfunctions, operator negligence, 

communication and procedure problems 

to criminal activity. It also has to be easy 

to implement and mandatory in its 

processes. Each and every employee in 

an organiaation, whether remote or on 

site, has to be part of the solution, and 

every bit of data stored needs to be 

backed up so that, in the event of a 

failure anywhere, the most recent 

information is immediately available to 

restore the system to full operating 

efficiency. 

This is the focus of a full, holistic, data 

management and security system, Backup 

Exec, developed by Veritas, who have just 

released their latest software revision. 

Holistic implies a total solution with all 

elements interconnected and made 

effective by reference to the whole. 

Whether a company is running all types 

of physical systems, operating within 

Windows, Linux, UNIX and AIX, and using 

any kind of data storage device from 

disk, tape, VTL, Cloud, HCI, OST and 

others, every format and function is 

subordinate to the process of saving and 

securing data. 

As valuable as data is, however, 

different organisations have different 

requirements, and Veritas offers its unified 

data security solution at different levels, 

allowing companies to choose what level 

of protection they need, what to back up, 

where to store it and how to pay for it. 

This is probably particularly relevant in 

the current working environment, with 

increasing numbers of people opting to 

work from home, using insufficiently 

secured private computer systems. 

VERITAS BACKUP EXEC 21.4 

One of the main features of the latest 

release is a focus on ransomware. 

Criminal organisations like to take the 

easy way out. They used to mount 

physical assaults on a company's assets 

but become exposed by having to turn 

those assets into cash. Hence the 

exponential increase in the use of 

ransomware, which describes exactly 

what it does - the freezing of an 

organisation's information by accessing 

and overwriting its data files, pending the 

payment of a large ransom. Gaining 

access to a company's information is 

quick and easy if it resides in an 

unprotected environment, and little 

further action is required but to wait for 

the ransom to be paid - or otherwise. 

To counter this, Veritas has introduced 

Ransomware Resilience - a feature of 

Veritas Backup Exec, the leading data 

management and security solution, which 

has been providing organisations with 

simple and secure data protection for 

some time. Backup Exec's Ransomware 

Resilience prevents data files on a wide 

range of media servers from being 

modified by unauthorised processes. It 

uses AI processes to monitor and actively 

inform administrators about data attacks. 

Ransomware Resilience is just one of a 

number of vital data management tools 

available in the unified backup and 

recovery solution. Information is 

perpetually in a fluid state and can be 

held on private, public or hybrid clouds in 

Microsoft, Linux, UNIX or virtual 

workloads. Integrated with VMware, 

Microsoft and Linux platforms Backup 

Exec can protect one to thousands of 

servers and virtual machines from one 

user console. 




V 


The speed of recovery is also crucial. 

Backup Exec provides Instant Recovery 

and Recovery Ready capabilities for 

VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, 

and Instant Cloud Recovery with 

seamless failover for Microsoft's Azure 

Cloud in case of disaster. Support is also 

available for other generic S3 

compatible cloud storage solutions like 

AWS and Google. 

That's, potentially, a lot of data flying 

about at some speed, and to cut down on 

disk space and data transmission rates, 

Backup Exec uses deduplication wherever 

it can, which eliminates unnecessary 

duplication and, with it, disk space and 

data processing requirements. 

SIMPLE AND MANAGEABLE 

Veritas, and earlier, its well known 

predecessor, Symantec, have been 

providing structured data protection for 

the last 30 years. During that time they 

have developed their solutions to be 

simple and manageable, enabling users 

to quickly spot, track and monitor every 

backup and recovery. 

Dashboards and wizards are used 

throughout Backup Exec to provide job 

and backup status and to progress them 

with a few simple clicks. Users can be 

assured that their data is fully protected 

against any system or physical threat, 

and, just as important, that they have 

achieved regulatory requirements - a fact 

usually ignored that might enable 

organisations to reduce their corporate 

insurance costs. As a unified solution, 

implementation of Backup Exec also 

eliminates the need to source niche or 

other third party applications to plug any 

missing gaps in the protection offered. 

BACKUP EXEC IMPLEMENTATION 

PLANS 

Not every organisation needs the same 

level of functionality or license terms. The 

former comes at Bronze, Silver and Gold 

levels, which determine the level of 

support required, and organisations can 

opt to buy a perpetual license, which will 

be upgraded automatically as new 

versions are released, or fixed term 

subscription licenses which come with the 

same level of support but only for the 

term of the license. Upgrades are, of 

course, always available to suit a 

customer's growing needs. 

Veritas Exec Backup is available in 190 

countries, offering unified data protection 

to many organisations within each. It goes 

beyond this, however, as compliance 

regulations are not the same in each of 

these countries. Veritas suggests that in 

those, countries where this may be of 

some concern to check with Veritas to 

ensure that their chosen solution conforms 

to local regulations - for example, cloud 

deduplication capabilities are now 

supported for Google Cloud in Delhi, 

Melbourne and Toronto, and Microsoft 

Azure in East Asia (Hong Kong), Korea 

Central (Seoul), Norway East (Oslo) and 

Switzerland North (Zurich). 

There are probably three key 

parameters that you need to remember 

when you consider Veritas Backup Exec - 

multi-cloud, virtualisation and security. 

Multi-cloud relates to a unified solution 

that covers the vast majority of temporary 

and permanent systems that you would 

find in any organisation. Virtualisation 

reflects the fluid state of information as it 

progresses through an organisation, and 

security, quite simply, is the adoption of 

an effective backup and recovery solution 

that guarantees complete and utter data 

protection. Veritas Backup Exec 21.4 is 

the enhanced 'go-to' application to 

protect your data with fast and effective 

protection or recovery. NC 

Product: Veritas Backup Exec 

Supplier: Veritas 

Web site: www.veritas.com 


OPINION: 5G 

DEMYSTIFYING 5G 

THERE ARE STILL MANY MISCONCEPTIONS THAT NEED 

CLARIFICATION WHEN IT COMES TO 5G, ACCORDING TO 

DAVID FRASER, TECHNICAL SALES DIRECTOR COVERING 

COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE PROVIDERS IN EMEA AT INTEL 

The 5G network paves the way to major 

innovation in the field of 

telecommunications, from industrial 

automations, telemedicine, self-driving cars 

to augmented reality. It also enables the 

implementation of a connected network 

between Internet of Things (IoT), Edge and 

the Cloud to meet demand and enable realtime 

optimisation. 

In the UK, the 5G network was established in 

2019 and was initially introduced by two 

network providers - EE and Vodafone. Since 

then, all four major communication services 

providers (now including Three and O2) are 

rolling out 5G across the UK. Ofcom's annual 

Connected Nations Report published last 

December reveals a significant increase in the 

use of 5G devices over the past twelve months 

in the UK. The report also highlights the 

majority of UK homes are located in an area 

with outdoor 5G coverage. 1 

However, for 5G to reach its full potential, 

there are a number of misconceptions 

surrounding the technology which need to 

be clarified. 

1: Previous network generations have similar 

capabilities to 5G 

In reality, each network generation is classified 

based on a set of telephone network standards 

and compared to older cellular and wireless 

standards, 5G is designed to produce better 

connectivity between people and businesses. 

For example, 2G has a frequency of 

2.4Ghz, while 5G has a frequency of 5Ghz. 

What this means is that 5G has larger 

coverage capabilities and provides an 

enhanced connectivity speed. Additionally, 

older network generations are limited to a 

smaller number of channels compared to 5G, 

which means that users operating within the 

5G range can have multiple devices 

accessing the same network without the fear 

of overcrowding. With 5G allowing many 

more devices to connect to the network, it has 

enabled businesses to gather and act on a 

greater amount of previously untapped data. 

5G also delivers up to 1,000x more capacity 

than 4G, creating a favourable environment 

for IoT deployment. This benefits a number of 

industries on a global scale from 

manufacturing, agriculture, retail to 

healthcare and smart city infrastructure. 

2: The deployment of the 5G network 

increases security risks 

This is in fact true: adopting any new 

technology is likely to increase the risk of 

security breaches. Perimeter-based security is 

no longer sufficient to secure the core 5G 

network, due to its extended surface and the 

amount of entry points that can be exploited. 

However, security professionals have 

developed integrated solutions to help 

prevent potential security risks at an early 

stage. Planning and investment early on are 

crucial for any new technology as it helps to 

create a sustainable cybersecurity strategy. 

3: The 5G roll-out is too slow to ever reach 

industry expectations 

The truth is that industries are in a constant 

state of evolution and 5G is just at the 

beginning of its implementation. 5G has huge 

revenue-generating potential for businesses 

who can develop quality personalised services 

in hours, rather than weeks or months. 

However, the speed of the roll-out is strongly 

influenced by the global network infrastructure. 

We must switch to a cloud-native, softwaredefined 

infrastructure to be able to reach the 

full potential of 5G. 

4: The capabilities of 5G are limited to 

phone devices 

5G goes far beyond the use of a cell phone. 

Society today is constantly evolving and with 

the introduction of technology such as 5G, 

we're striving to become more connected then 

ever. In a world of connected devices, smart 

homes and cities will eventually be powered by 

the 5G network. From houses that give 

personalised energy-saving suggestions which 

reduce environmental impact to traffic lights 

that change their patterns based on traffic flow, 

5G applications relying on added capacity will 

be available on all network connected devices. 

Undoubtedly, the future of technology will be 

shaped by the mass roll-out of 5G. However, 

for it to be successful, demands fundamental 

changes to be made to the Cloud, the network 

and our devices. NC 

1 Connected Nations 2021: UK report 

(ofcom.org.uk) 



OPINION: KUBERNETES 

IS KUBERNETES THE RIGHT FIT FOR YOUR I.T.? 

ERIK SÖNNERSKOG, HEAD ENGINEER AT ZSAH MANAGED-IT 

SERVICES, EXPLORES WHY KUBERNETES ARCHITECTURE IS SUCH 

A SUPERB FIT FOR WEB-SCALE ORGANISATIONS - BUT MAY 

SIMPLY BE OVERKILL FOR OTHERS 

Kubernetes is a standardised, opensource 

program for managing 

containerised workloads and 

programs. It is claimed to be many things 

and has a great many fans in the tech 

space - and with good reason. 

Kubernetes has a whole raft of benefits. It is 

incredibly efficient, improving workloads and 

response times across broad IT infrastructures, 

and ultimately resulting in more portability 

(although not a cure), shortened software 

development cycles, and reduced cloud-data 

consumption. Naturally, this in turn leads to 

quicker and cheaper IT projects. 

According to a 2021 study by VMWare, 

95% of respondents reported clear benefits 

from using Kubernetes, with 56% choosing 

resource utilisation (56%) as the main 

advantage, and 53% pointing to shortened 

software development cycles. 

Despite this clear show in confidence in this 

open-source tool, not every business will find 

it the cure-all solution it is hyped up to be. 

Kubernetes architecture is a good fit for webscale 

organisations, and there is no doubt 

about that - trust me, I am certainly an 

advocate. However, to recommend it to all 

businesses is not fair or accurate - and may 

simply be overkill. After all, there is a reason 

that Google, Spotify, Airbnb, Tinder, Reddit, 

and many other giant web-based 

organisations use it. 

IT FAVOURS LARGE DEPLOYMENTS 

Kubernetes is not easy to configure manually, 

monitor or optimise. Its preferred and default 

settings are automated, and doing things any 

other way is not easy. These setting favour 

larger scale deployments, the kind that 

wouldn't configure individual workloads 

manually anyway. This again becomes an 

issue when it comes to monitoring. For 

example, if servers in a cluster were running 

at 25% capacity, it wouldn't tell you - 

meaning you are wasting money on an overprovisioned 

infrastructure. Again, as this is an 

issue that gets more problematic the smaller 

your organisation and IT system is, it favours 

the bigger players. 

IT'S (VERY) COMPLICATED 

Firstly, Kubernetes is fractured, and comes 

with many parts that aren't considered simple 

to put together and utilise. Although a slightly 

chaotic development may be characteristic of 

open-source projects, this one, unlike others, 

lacks a streamlined way to control it. Your 

typical Linux distribution consists of many 

different pieces of software too, but unlike 

Kubernetes, you can install and manage all 

of them in a more centralised way. 

Furthermore, these different parts in other 

open-source software are more similar than 

they are different. For example, Red Hat and 

Ubuntu are different, but similar, whereas if 

you wanted to go from OpenShift to VMware 

Tanzu (both within Kubernetes) you'd face a 

significant amount of learning to do. Not 

ideal for a one-man-band IT team. 

Secondly, it runs purely on code. Every input 

need unique code written, specially 

augmented for each purpose. Again, this isn't 

an impossibility, it is just a lot of effort, skill 

and time spent - so naturally benefits largescale 

uses and users that have time, expertise 

(and ideally a whole team) dedicated to it. 

Do you see a pattern here? Ultimately, 

Kubernetes requires a certain level of 

dedication that is just not worth it unless the 

pay-off is significant, or the infrastructure 

impacted expansive. This means that its 

complex nature can cause problems 

concerning one's local development 

environment, which could then impact 

productivity throughout the business. 

YET, IT IS A BRILLIANT THING 

However, by no means are these limitations a 

criticism of its brilliance. In fact, Kubernetes, 

when used in the appropriate context, and 

with realistic and relative aims, can work 

wonders for businesses looking for costeffectiveness. 

If you were to look back three 

or five years ago it would have been a bold 

move to thrust Kubernetes into operations. 

Back in those times, it was an unknown with a 

lot to prove, but today, this could not be 

further from the case - with hundreds of 

thousands of IT teams using Kubernetes daily 

within their operations. NC 


CASE STUDY 

EXTREME NETWORKS TRANSFORMS BORÅS STAD INTO A SMART CITY 

ONE OF THE LARGEST CLOUD-MANAGED NETWORK INSTALLATIONS IN SWEDEN ENABLES SECURE 

AND RELIABLE PUBLIC WI-FI AND SIMPLIFIED NETWORK MANAGEMENT 

In partnership with NetNordic, Extreme 

Networks has established one of the largest 

cloud-managed network infrastructures in 

Borås Stad, Sweden, transforming the 

municipality into a smart city. The new 

infrastructure delivers faster and more 

advanced connectivity, extending secure public 

Wi-Fi for its citizens, local government, 

schools, and services, while automating and 

simplifying network management for the IT 

team. The transition to smart cities is designed 

to provide more sustainable resources to 

residents, while improving quality of life and 

fueling business innovation. 

Municipalities in Sweden are required by law 

to provide critical welfare services such as 

schools, childcare, social services, and elderly 

care, among others. The departments and 

institutions that power these services require a 

robust, secure network infrastructure to share 

information seamlessly and securely. As a 

result of the global pandemic, Borås Stad has 

also worked to roll out new services, such as 

Wi-Fi connected medical wristbands which 

allow immediate contact with doctors, realtime 

heartbeat monitoring, and user location 

information - making reliable, high-speed Wi- 

Fi critical for proper care. 

The ExtremeCloud IQ platform reduces the 

complexity of network management, 

streamlines operations, lowers maintenance 

costs, and provides visibility into actionable 

data and insights from network usage to 

performance. 

Borås Stad as a smart city is another example 

of how Extreme Networks is helping to lay the 

groundwork to integrate 5G and Wi-Fi and 

deliver cloud-based networking services to 

gain more visibility and better manage 

networks across the city. Extreme helps provide 

a seamless connectivity and authentication 

experience between 5G and Wi-Fi networks, 

ensuring uninterrupted connectivity for users. 

Key Benefits of the new infrastructure include: 

Advanced public Wi-Fi connectivity: Borås 

Stad has deployed approximately 3,500 

ExtremeWireless Wi-Fi 6 Access Points to 

deliver reliable coverage, improved 

network capacity, and faster data speeds 

across the city's services. As a result, Borås 

Stad can deliver seamless digital 

experiences in sectors such as education 

and healthcare, attracting businesses to the 

city and supporting rapid economic growth 

in the region 

Streamlined network management and 

insightful data: ExtremeCloud IQ has given 

the city's IT staff full oversight of its network 

infrastructure, enabling nearly all 

operations to be accessed and viewed in a 

single cloud network management 

solution. By reducing the complexity of 

managing the networking infrastructure, 

the 3-person engineering team can scale, 

manage, and maintain over 3,500 access 

points and millions of connected devices 

with ease. Additionally, ExtremeAnalytics 

enables the team to optimise the network 

and leverage insightful usage trends to 

improve consumer experiences. 

Andrzej Kardas, Chief Technology Officer, 

Borås Stad "Extreme Networks has been a key 

partner in helping us to build a smart city that 

meets the current and future demands of our 

citizens. Leveraging Extreme's solutions, we've 

created an advanced cloud-managed network 

that helps us roll out new initiatives through 

seamless, world-class public Wi-Fi - with 

minimal overhead, management, and 

maintenance required on our end. We're 

proud to have established Borås Stad as a 

modern and dynamic smart city." 

Boris Germashev, Senior Regional Director 

Northern & Eastern Europe at Extreme 

Networks added, "Borås Stad was struggling 

to provide its growing population with fast and 

reliable public Wi-Fi, resulting in connectivity 

issues that absorbed a lot of the IT teams' 

time. But with the deployment of 

ExtremeCloud IQ, Borås Stad has proven that 

with the right cloud-managed network and 

solutions, a city can cost-efficiently streamline 

all networking operations, increase 

connectivity, and enhance services without 

complicating its fundamental infrastructure. 

Borås Stad has now established a strong and 

functional network to provide the best 

possible public service benefits 

for its users." 



OPINION: VDIs 

A CLEARER VIEW OF VDIs 

ROBERT BELGRAVE, CEO OF PAX8 UK, 

EXPLAINS HOW REMOTE WORKING IS 

DRIVING THE NEED FOR VIRTUAL 

DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURES 

Working from home provided many 

benefits for both employers and their 

employees. The ability to work from 

the comfort of their own homes and skip the 

time-consuming commutes has enabled 

people to cut costs and simultaneously increase 

comfort. Employers could focus on internal 

operational efficiency while reducing overhead 

costs of their companies, and employees could 

concentrate on working comfortably without 

fear of work being disrupted. 

However, with these shifts and the evergrowing 

societal drive towards efficiency, 

companies are being propelled towards new 

technologies to facilitate these changes. There 

is a need to implement virtual desktop 

infrastructures (VDI), creating an accessible 

workspace anytime, anywhere, that can drive 

the productivity of workforces in a simpler, 

cheaper and easier way that also integrates 

with cloud-based resources. Cloud technology 

is one of the innovative technologies 

pioneering this adaptation to virtual working. 

NAVIGATING THE REMOTE WORKING 

LANDSCAPE 

While it has many benefits, the difficulties 

surrounding remote working landscapes cannot 

be ignored, and it is the duty of enterprises to 

find ways to combat them for a productive, 

proactive and protected workforce to exist. 

A number of these problems are centred 

around companies providing the provision of 

adequate portable devices to a company's 

workforce to enable them to work from home 

efficiently. This creates financial spikes which 

many businesses cannot afford or sustain. 

There is a vital need for in-house software and 

devices connected to work servers through 

cloud integration so that day-to-day actions 

can be carried out seamlessly, without the 

provision of multiple devices and software. 

With industries becoming increasingly 

competitive, it is imperative for companies to 

brainstorm innovative solutions to engage the 

global market successfully, while their 

employees work away from the office. 

Businesses are finding that investing in VDIs 

prevents dependency on localised environments 

and gives access to desktop management 

through a virtual environment instead. 

CHANGING THE SCOPE OF REMOTE 

WORKING 

Access to VDIs not only aids big business but 

also smaller corporations that have less 

funding. The utilisation of cloud technology is 

pivotal for companies to offer their employees 

the ability to flawlessly work from home during 

long periods of time, from any location 

globally. The cloud allows the virtual desktop 

to exist without concern and allows companies, 

big or small, to not have to provide laptops 

and other devices to each employee during 

remote working. With the internet, they have 

constant access to the cloud, and therefore to 

their work servers from a singular device. 

As the ramifications of remote working were 

weighed up last year, studies showed that 59% 

of workers believed that in-office working felt 

substantially more cyber secure than when they 

worked remotely from home. However, 

connecting to a specific desktop environment 

from one secure server allows online traffic 

monitoring to be far easier, also making it 

simpler for security patches to be made. Cyber 

attacks on systems hosted on the cloud are far 

more difficult to achieve, as cloud systems 

utilise more robust cybersecurity measures than 

a single household PC that only uses internal 

hard drives. In addition, having this centralised 

system ensures that regular back-ups occur so 

that employees cannot lose data from 

forgetting to save and backup their files. 

As well as being safer and increasingly more 

accessible, VDI's also provide much more 

flexibility. Troubleshooting and installations can 

be carried out by system administrators without 

detriment to the employees, and any upgrades 

that are needed can be actioned having no 

effect on the end user's productivity. 

THE FUTURE OF VDIs AND THE CLOUD 

Overall, the remote working landscape is 

becoming commonplace and is popularising 

globally, due to the recent pandemic. 

Contractors and mobile employees are better 

able to access their files and the resources they 

require in order to do their job effectively and 

efficiently. Distance is no longer an issue, nor is 

the type of device accessible to them to 

undertake the tasks. 

VDIs increase simplicity, allowing tasks to be 

completed faster and with a smoother user 

experience while keeping sensitive data and 

personal information secure. The future of 

enterprise is sure to find success with the 

utilisation of hybrid cloud ecosystems and virtual 

desktops which certainly do not break the bank. 

Cloud computing has certainly made the VDI 

landscape more inviting, and with the level of 

scalability that it provides, the possibilities of 

work infrastructure are becoming increasingly 

endless. It is now an accelerated, integral part 

of many organisations where IT strategies 

across the globe can be more accessible, 

more secure and much safer to use. NC 


OPINION: SOFTWARE QUALITY 

WHY SOFTWARE QUALITY IS VITAL IN A DIGITAL-FIRST WORLD 

BY DR. GARETH SMITH, GENERAL MANAGER OF SOFTWARE TEST AUTOMATION AT 

KEYSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES 

The pandemic has rapidly accelerated 

the pace of digital transformation 

and software has become vital to 

how we work, live, and learn. As the 

world becomes more digitised and 

dependent on digital products, this has 

put the quality of software in the spotlight. 

With rapid digitalisation showing no sign 

of slowing, software-based innovation and 

development will continue. And with poor 

software quality estimated to have cost the 

US economy a staggering $2 trillion in 

2020 organisations must find a way to 

balance the speed of release with 

software quality. 

To understand more about software 

quality, we asked Dr. Gareth Smith, 

Keysight's General Manager of Software 

Test Automation, to explain why software 

quality now determines business success 

and how organisations can take steps to 

improve it. 

1. Why is software quality important? 

For the last decade, organisations have 

focused on releasing new apps and 

services as quickly as possible to keep up 

with rapidly changing demands and 

support digital transformation. However, 

with the push for speed of delivery, 

software quality has often lagged behind. 

The quality of software is critical in a 

digital-first world. For example, an 

undetected flaw can trigger system 

outages, and a misconfiguration of cloud 

platforms can result in a data breach or 

data loss. Software defects drastically 

increase the cost of development. And, 

once software is released, the cost of 

finding and fixing is significantly higher than 

during the design/development phase. 

2. How can organisations improve the 

quality of their software? 

With rapid software development, testing 

and monitoring must be prioritised to 

provide a frictionless, high-quality (omnichannel) 

digital experience that results in 

successful user outcomes. The nextgeneration 

software testing platforms 

support this by incorporating the latest AI 

techniques that learn from real 

application usage, historical bug patterns, 

and which application behaviours yield 

the most critical business outcomes. 

These platforms can automatically 

generate tests that focus on the user 

journeys in the application that are the 

most important to business success. This 

end-to-end intelligent test automation 

within a DevOps framework allows 

companies to deliver improved quality 

software faster while freeing up teams to 

increase their productivity. 

3. How is DevOps impacting testing 

strategies? 

DevOps is about breaking down silos 

between different teams to coordinate and 

collaborate to produce better, more 

reliable products faster. By adopting a 

DevOps philosophy, teams have increased 

confidence in the applications they build, 

are better able to meet customer needs, 

and achieve business goals faster. 

The success of DevOps is intrinsically 

linked to test automation, as manual 

testing cannot address the ever-expanding 

test surface with increasing release 

frequencies. However, it's not enough to 

automate a handful of tests or 

administrative processes. To succeed in 

the digital age, development and test 

automation engineers must collaborate 

with the operations team to ensure 

software and applications deliver on their 

ultimate goal of delighting users. 

4. How is AI changing test automation 

strategies? 

AI enables test automation to move 

beyond its scope of simple rule-based 

automation. It utilises algorithms to 

efficiently train systems using large data 

sets. Through the application of 

reasoning, problem-solving, and machine 

learning, an AI-powered test automation 

tool can mimic human behaviour and 

reduce the direct involvement of software 

testers in mundane tasks. 

Intelligent test automation evaluates the 

functionality, performance, and usability 

of digital products rather than simply 

verifying code. It incorporates AI, ML, and 

analytics to test and monitor the user 

experience (UX); it analyses apps and real 

data to auto-generate and execute user 

journeys. The result is a smarter way to 

continuously test software and apps, 

whatever they are running on. 

AI-based tools eliminate test coverage 

overlaps, optimise existing testing efforts 

with more predictable testing, and 

accelerate progress from defect detection 

to defect prevention. This, in turn, 

improves software quality. 



OPINION: SOFTWARE QUALITY 

5. Why is there a shift towards continuous 

quality? 

With the reliance on digital, testing must 

shift from a verification-driven activity to a 

continuous quality process. Teams must 

incorporate quality into every phase of 

software development and automate the 

process. Continuous quality is about 

adopting a systematic approach to finding 

and fixing software defects throughout the 

entire software development lifecycle 

(SDLC). It reduces the risk of security 

vulnerabilities and bugs by helping find 

and fix problems as early as possible. 

6. To improve the quality of software, do 

you need to add more technical 

resources? 

No. AI is making the process of 

designing, developing, and deploying 

software faster, better, and cheaper. It's 

not that robots are replacing 

programmers. Instead, AI-powered tools 

make project managers, business 

analysts, software coders, and testers 

more productive and more effective, 

enabling them to produce higher-quality 

software faster and at a lower cost. 

Here at Keysight, our intelligent 

automation platform allows citizen 

developers to easily use our no-code 

solution that draws on AI and analytics to 

automate test execution across the entire 

testing process. It empowers and enables 

domain experts to become automation 

engineers. The AI and ML take on 

scriptwriting and maintenance as a 

machine can create and execute 

thousands of tests in minutes, unlike a 

human tester. 

7. What are some of the future trends you 

expect to see related to software quality? 

The importance of software quality will 

continue to grow as the pace of digital 

adoption accelerates. Every digital 

organisation must continuously monitor 

the performance of digital properties and 

how users are interacting to ensure it 

delivers the best possible experience. Here 

are 5 trends that we believe will happen 

in the world of QA in the next 3 years: 

1. Quality Assurance will become a profit 

centre rather than a compliance 

function. Unless your software is 

released first, has an amazing UX, 

flawless functionality and great 

responsiveness, your business will likely 

struggle or fail. But if you manage to 

achieve those goals, you will succeed. 

As such, leveraging QA to continuously 

measure this and predict a hit or a miss 

is a profit centre - not just a 

compliance function. 

2. User Experience is the key differentiator 

for your business. Your UX is your shop 

window - it draws your customers and 

needs to keep them there. It had better 

be excellent, or you'll be left behind. 

3. Performance. If you have performance 

delays of greater than 3 seconds at any 

point, your business will fail. 

Millennials have little patience, 

Generation Z has even less! 3 seconds 

is the amount of time your customers 

will wait for a delay before heading to 

a competitor. Better and continuous 

load and performance testing are 

needed to ensure scale and 

responsiveness. 

4. The Digital Nemesis. Testing must 

become even smarter, a digital nemesis 

can find the weak spots intelligently in 

any system using AI-powered "chaos 

engineering," highlight them and allow 

them to be fixed before anyone ever 

knows. This applies to functionality, 

performance, UX and security. 

5. End-to-end Fusion Testing. From 

hardware to UX. Gone are the days of 

testing one layer of your stack or one 

type of testing. Testing the 5G handset, 

testing the 5G base station, testing the 

network load, testing the application 

ability to handle load, functional 

testing, API testing, performance 

testing, security testing, testing on iOS, 

testing android, testing cloud testing 

Windows etc. etc. etc. 

But what about testing the entire endto-end 

system with all layers, end-toend 

workflows and interaction points? 

Without doing so, we never truly test the 

system in production; we never truly can 

isolate a problem because it might not 

happen without the interaction between 

different layers or under different 

interacting tests conditions. So now we 

need to take testing to the next level - 

with multi-layer fusion testing - bringing 

together the skills of the hardware, 

network, software and UX testers into 

one end-to-end framework. NC 

About the author 

Dr. Gareth Smith leads Keysight's software 

test automation group. Previously Gareth 

was CTO at Eggplant - the pioneer in 

intelligent test automation, acquired by 

Keysight in June 2020. Gareth has a rich 

history of innovation in software, serving 

in leadership roles at Apama, Software 

AG and Progress Software. NC 


FEATURE: THE NETWORK EDGE 

GAINING THE SMART EDGE 

SANJAY RADIA, CHIEF SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT AT NETSCOUT, EXPLAINS HOW TO IMPROVE CLOUD 

AND NETWORK EDGE PERFORMANCE WITH SMART EDGE MONITORING 

With pandemic-driven remote and 

hybrid work becoming a long-term 

fixture for many businesses, mass 

migration to cloud services and the network 

edge has put a large strain on corporate 

network services. In addition to this, largescale 

performance interferences make it 

harder for ITOps teams to identify and resolve 

the problem. Smart Edge Monitoring (SEM) 

solutions are the most effective way to fix 

these disruptions. 

NEW CHALLENGES FOR IT TEAMS 

Numerous IT organisations have been able to 

move past the initial events of the COVID-19 

pandemic with new ways to keep up with the 

changing needs of business technology 

infrastructure such as SaaS adoption, digital 

transformation, hybrid work models, and cloud 

migrations. These events have sparked the 

widescale adoption of cloud service and rapid 

migration to the network edge. However, the 

repercussions of this have caused poor network 

performance and lack of visibility, which has 

decelerated the rate at which problems can be 

resolved within networks. 

Many IT teams are struggling to keep up with 

these new challenges which include dealing 

with increased maintenance costs, 

inconsistencies with network access 

permissions, low quality service performance, 

lack of controls, and poor visibility. When new 

cloud services are integrated within an 

established environment, this can make the use 

of these capabilities much less straightforward. 

To meet the needs of today's dynamic 

infrastructure, IT teams need full visibility from 

all angles. 

IT teams mitigating cyberthreats, network 

outages and service delays can have 

widespread implications to business continuity. 

Additionally, the credibility of an IT team can be 

put at risk when network services seriously fail. 

When new endpoints, remote devices, 

providers, and applications are introduced to 

an established network, this only increases the 

level of difficulty for IT teams to manage all at 

once. If this wasn't already complicated, the 

initial costs of sustaining and overseeing 

networks also increases. 

REDUCING NETWORK DELAYS 

Solutions like Smart Edge Monitoring (SEM) 

allow full visibility throughout multi-cloud 

environments to mitigate poor performance 

issues. SEM is effective in general ITOps 

management through monitoring and 

identifying issues within a digital network 

environment across organisational and 

technological boundaries. SEM ensures a highquality 

end-user experience that is accessible 

from any location, service, or network for users 

within an organisation. 

Multi-vendor environments are complex and 

pose one of IT's most difficult challenges in 

detecting and resolving related problems. 

SEM seamlessly tackles this through 

integrated analysis, which can quickly 

recognise what the end-user is experiencing 

and can detect the exact issue and why it is 

occurring. With this capability, the solution 

makes considerable reductions in real time to 

resolve application issues such as video, data, 

VoIP, UCaaS, and SaaS. 

THE BENEFITS OF SMART EDGE 

MONITORING 

Organisations can gain limitless visibility 

throughout various application domains with 

SEM solutions as they can remove the obstacles 

preventing optimum network performance. 

Additionally, SEM can run network performance 

analyses and is capable of troubleshooting 

errors across dense multi-cloud environments. 

As global companies continue with their 

hybrid workforce model, SEM can detect 

performance disruptions in its early stages 

within a transaction ecosystem. Its capabilities 

allow it to reach anywhere, for example a user's 

home network, WAN, data centre, database 

servers, and SaaS and cloud providers to 

identify the cause of the issue. 

Cloud migrations create inconsistencies in 

visibility which can result in post-launch 

performance disputes. Before, during, and 

after a user's experience, SEM can examine 

this and utilise cloud-based applications to 

support and resolve any issues. Users working 

from home, in remote offices, in regional 

branches, or on the main campus often 

experience a low performing network when 

using programmes such as Microsoft Teams. 

SEM can detect the cause of the problem 

ranging from poor call quality, audio 

interference and join-meeting delays. 

IMPROVING VISIBILITY 

Information collected within multiple clouds and 

the network edge offers IT teams a more vivid 

picture into cloud services at multiple levels. A 

more accurate cloud service surveillance and 

faster detection of cloud-related problems will 

effectively speed up repairs. This data can be 

helpful during thorough analyses, resulting in 

shorter problem-solving times, earlier threat 

detection capabilities and active network 

optimisation. To achieve this complete picture, 

IT teams should consider investing in highquality 

solutions and prioritise bandwidth 

deployment, device status, traffic movement, 

and the end-user experience. NC 




LIVING ON THE EDGE - EFFECTIVE DATA 

MANAGEMENT FOR THE NEW ECONOMY 

OUR WORKPLACE IS FOREVER CHANGED - WE'RE NOW 

WORKING AT THE EDGE, ACCORDING TO RUSS KENNEDY, 

CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, NASUNI 

Pre-pandemic, the enterprise edge was 

typically a regional office. But, as work 

habits change, we are becoming a 

remote office of one - working from 

multiple locations, with a day or two in the 

office or a customer site, and the rest of the 

time working from home. 

But such a wholesale shift to very fluid, 

hybrid/remote working demands that IT 

teams must ensure instant access to 

resources, files, and applications, wherever 

the employee is working. However, evolving 

these dynamic hybrid working models are 

often hamstrung by unseen costs coming 

from different directions. 

Take business-critical applications: their 

performance could be degraded if massive 

amounts of data are recalled from a public 

cloud service. And if IT is having to 

maintain multiple file copies and backup 

files across different offices, this will quickly 

consume capacity licenses. Meanwhile, 

globally-distributed teams working on the 

same datasets simultaneously often cause 

latency and file version control issues which 

could be calamitous during a complex 

design project or a big tender. 

In a recovering economy, organisations 

must ensure they have a practical hybrid 

working model and enough staff to handle 

increased workloads. But they also need 

more effective strategies for managing 

their data and optimising this remote 

working at scale. Enterprises adapted 

skilfully to the pandemic's early phases; 

now with so many resources deployed at 

the network edge, they need smart 

thinking to make these operations more 

profitable in the longer-term. 

This shift to companies working optimally 

at the edge while controlling costs is being 

accelerated by new cloud-native storage 

and file system infrastructures which enable 

organisations to store, protect, synchronise, 

and collaborate on files at any scale, across 

any number of global offices. Companies 

can now consolidate data across multiple 

public clouds, modernise their apps without 

hurried rewrites, and deliver faster 

application performance without them 

being tripped up by cost and capacity 

hurdles as demand returns. 

This advance is being achieved in three 

main ways. First, these platforms enable IT 

teams to cut business and storage process 

costs by eliminating unnecessary copies of 

data - without compromising their ability to 

recover from outages and ransomware. For 

example, a UK charity migrated to a single, 

cloud-native global file system at the start 

of the pandemic and standardised 

information for 1,500 employees. 

Staff still have fast access to files, whether 

they work from home during restrictions or 

flexibly afterwards, because the new 

platform's edge appliances cache files 

locally. In addition, the IT team has been 

able to do away with time-consuming 

processes to replicate workflow data or 

provide backups to a secondary data centre 

for disaster recovery needs, saving IT 

resources for more productive work. 

Second, cloud native storage standardises 

information across the globe so that teams 

in scientific research or engineering as well 

as organisations adopting new machine 

learning and IoT applications, can 

collaborate on the same datasets or 

enterprise applications, irrespective of their 

location and as operations are scaled up. 

In a striking example, a global 

engineering firm that had previously 

suffered project delays as end users 

struggled to access big design files by 

WAN, replaced its data silos with a global 

storage and file system. Company 

engineers at locations worldwide now enjoy 

LAN-speed access to the same files - they're 

working at the edge but are doing so more 

productivity across what is now a virtual, 

global office. 

Thirdly, cloud file storage means that 

organisations can deal with ransomware 

attacks without operations being disrupted 

or paying any ransom demanded. New 

cloud-based file storage systems allow 'roll 

back' of business-critical files to the exact 

time prior to an incident and quickly restore 

files locally. In our emerging world, where 

distributed workforces are the norm, 

organisations know their critical knowledge 

assets are safe from an attack or outage 

and employees will resume productive work 

much sooner - sometimes in minutes. 

Cloud native file storage is enabling a 

new economy where we can work at the 

edge and do so more dynamically and 

profitably. NC 



UNIFIED AT THE EDGE 

REGGIE BEST, VP OF PRODUCTS AT NS1 EXPLAINS HOW TO 

SUCCESSFULLY UNITE BUSINESS AND IT INTERESTS AT THE EDGE 

The business interests and technology 

objectives of organisations can no longer 

operate in siloes. They must come together 

with the shared goal of delivering the best 

possible digital experiences to users, regardless 

of where they are located. This can only happen 

if all stakeholders work together to modernise 

application delivery and connectivity - but 

achieving this can be a challenge to coordinate. 

Let's look at why business and technology 

executives are working towards the same 

goal, what barriers they are encountering and 

how they can push past these barriers to build 

new business value, enable innovation and 

meet customer requirements. 

OPTIMISING APP PERFORMANCE 

Applications are essential to customer and 

employee experiences. Customers rely on apps 

to stream content, make purchases, manage 

their accounts, seek support and engage with 

brands. Likewise, employees have never relied 

more on apps to communicate with each other 

and remain productive. 

Optimal app performance, therefore, is 

business-critical, directly impacting employee 

efficiency as well as customer satisfaction, 

brand loyalty, and revenue, however it 

requires resilience, performance, agility, and 

scale. These are recognisable IT objectives, 

but they are now just as relevant to business 

leaders, and if they want to deliver superior 

user experiences, business and technology 

executives must collaborate. 

CREATING A DISTRIBUTED APPLICATION 

DELIVERY INFRASTRUCTURE 

To ensure NetOps and DevOps teams have 

the resources they need to innovate, business 

and technology executives should consider 

three important factors: modern customers, 

modern applications, and the need for a 

modern "connectivity fabric". Customers today 

are in highly distributed locations using 

applications on multiple devices. What is 

common is their demand for superior app 

performance. By delivering this, companies 

improve loyalty and give themselves a 

foundation to grow their customer base. 

Such a decentralised audience demands a 

distributed application delivery infrastructure 

with minimal latency. The best approach is to 

use a network of multiple cloud and CDN 

providers who can bring content and resources 

close to users with redundancy built-in should 

one cloud or CDN provider go down. Bringing 

all this together is the "connectivity fabric" - the 

underlying foundational technologies that 

support application infrastructures so that the 

expectations of every audience are served, 

regardless of location or device. 

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES IN 

DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS 

The main barrier to achieving this is existing 

hybrid non-cloud-native architecture that is 

split between on-site and cloud. This might 

mean that they have to allow for the cost of 

maintaining legacy infrastructure, including the 

core network, while seeking a way to optimally 

deliver apps in a world that demands a more 

flexible, distributed approach. 

Some businesses use technologies that solve 

specific problems but fail to integrate. Others 

are overwhelmed by the massive amounts of 

data their infrastructure generates. In addition, 

there can be a misconception that these issues 

will be managed by employing a larger 

workforce. The truth is only automation can 

make effective millisecond-to-millisecond 

decisions based on massive amounts of data. 

MAKING THE EDGE THE END GOAL 

Companies must change how they think and 

push their strategies out to the edge if they 

want to remain competitive by providing the 

best digital experiences. Edge connectivity 

allows resources to be delivered as close as 

possible to the people who need them, across 

multiple different platforms. When considering 

infrastructure, IT and business teams must also 

shift to a "cloud-native" mentality, even as part 

of a hybrid environment. The cloud allows for 

rapid scaling, both up and down, based on 

real-time demand. 

To ensure that DevOps and NetOps teams 

can quickly and reliably access resources, it is 

essential to decentralise access to core network 

services. This introduces agility, avoids the 

bottleneck of waiting for a central authority to 

coordinate access to infrastructure and network 

resources, and boosts autonomous innovation 

while still upholding security best practices. 

Business and technology executives want to 

deliver applications to customers in a resilient, 

distributed fashion and keep their 

development and network teams innovating. 

Moving away from a siloed approach, 

aligning objectives, and working together will 

create a strong foundation for the future of 

their organisations. NC 

At NS1 Reggie Best spearheads efforts 

supporting product strategy, messaging, and 

positioning, while building relationships with 

key stakeholders across all business units to 

ensure success. 




DELIVERING APPLICATION-AWARE NETWORKS 

WITH AN EDGE 

DANIEL BLACKWELL, PRODUCT MANAGER AT PULSANT, 

EXPLAINS WHY ORGANISATIONS NEED TO MOVE TOWARDS 

APPLICATION AWARE NETWORKING, AND HOW EDGE 

NETWORKING CAN HELP REDUCE LATENCY AND 

PERFORMANCE ISSUES 

The shift towards hybrid working has led to 

a rise in the adoption of SaaS, cloud 

services and distributed applications. As a 

result, it's now more important than ever that 

organisations know where applications are 

moving throughout their infrastructure, and 

how best to manage and control them to 

deliver optimal performance. 

No longer limited to a central location, 

enterprise applications are growing in volume, 

complexity, and distribution. All of which is 

increasing pressure to ensure performance, 

reliability, and security. Today's modern 

application stack requires a modern network. 

And for network operators, this means a shift 

towards application-aware networks with 

detailed reporting and intelligence to route 

applications down the best path. 

WHY VISIBILITY IS KEY 

In today's digital economy, application 

experience can make or break a business. Yet, 

achieving visibility over applications isn't easy, 

and often the time to troubleshoot and identify 

the root cause of a latency or performance 

issue and develop a resolution can eat up 

valuable time. Greater visibility from an 

application-aware network would allow 

businesses to understand and fix application 

issues faster, saving the time and cost of 

traditionally complex troubleshooting. 

THE ROLE OF SD-WAN 

A fundamental building block for creating an 

application-aware network is the 

implementation of SD-WAN (software-defined 

networking in a wide area network) that gives 

visibility over applications and enables 

organisations to control and direct traffic 

intelligently and securely from a central 

location across the WAN. 

Unlike traditional WAN architectures which 

lack the central visibility and control required 

for distributed IT environments, SD-WAN 

delivers a step change for businesses, 

providing the agility for changes to be made to 

simultaneous devices at the simple push of a 

button, saving time and increasing efficiency. 

Organisations can enforce their own policy, 

based on user experience, with priority given to 

the most business-critical applications so they 

avoid problems such as jitter, lag or brownouts. 

And because they are able to reduce the time 

required for configuration and troubleshooting, 

businesses employing SD-WAN 

benefit from significant operational cost 

savings. As more organisations adopt SaaS 

and cloud-based services, SD-WAN, and 

application-aware networking are therefore 

becoming business-critical necessities. 

THE ROLE OF EDGE COMPUTING 

In fact, the application-aware network requires 

the use of tools such as SD-WAN. By 

understanding what applications are used 

across the network, organisations can classify 

and apply appropriate application tuning to 

ensure optimum performance for each user. 

However, application-aware networking can 

also work alongside an edge computing 

strategy to drive further efficiencies. 

Edge computing is the confluence of cloud 

and physical data, which exists wherever the 

digital and physical world intersect, and 

enables data to be collected, generated, and 

processed to create new value. It either works 

independently from SD-WAN and applicationaware 

networking, or in conjunction to enable 

organisations to identify and prioritise 

application traffic. 

APPLICATION-AWARE NETWORKS 

Spurred on by the pandemic, the need for 

application-aware networks has never been 

more prominent. As networks become 

increasingly software-defined, businesses have 

an opportunity to use greater levels of 

application intelligence to improve business 

connectivity, efficiency, and performance. 

By combining the operational and visibility 

benefits of application-aware networks and 

SD-WAN, with the latency benefits of edge 

computing, organisations can deliver a 

more reliable and consistent experience to 

users, regardless of the strength of network 

connection. At the same time, 

organisations can benefit from quicker 

troubleshooting, ultimately reducing strain 

on workloads and freeing teams to focus 

on more strategic priorities. NC 



SolarWinds SQL 

Sentry 


PRODUCT 

REVIEWPRODUCT RE 

Vast numbers of businesses rely on 

Microsoft SQL Server to deliver essential 

services, but performance issues and 

downtime will result in a poor customer 

experience and loss of revenue. Performance 

monitoring in larger organisations is a primary 

role of database administrators but to achieve 

smooth operations, they cannot rely on 

manual diagnostics. 

There are plenty of database monitoring tools 

on the market and SolarWinds SQL Sentry 

stands out as not only does it provide full 

visibility across SQL Server, Azure SQL 

Database and SQL Server Analysis Services, 

but also monitors and reports on Windows 

Hyper-V and VMware hosts. This allows it to 

provide a complete picture of all your 

databases and associated host systems, 

making it easy to troubleshoot, fix problems 

and optimise performance. 

It's simple to deploy as we loaded the SQL 

Sentry client and portal on a Windows Server 

2019 Hyper-V VM in thirty minutes. It will 

require a separately purchased SQL Server 

database to store all diagnostics, performance 

and reporting data, but for our lab testing 

environment we used the free SQL Server 2019 

Express which worked fine. 

Further configuration is undemanding as after 

a brief onboarding process, we started 

declaring monitored targets to the SQL Sentry 

client. Once we'd added details of our local 

SQL Server hosts, the client checked for 

availability of Windows metrics such as CPU, 

memory, processes and storage activity and 

then added them to the explorer menu to the 

left for easy selection. 

SQL Sentry started monitoring our databases 

immediately and revealed a wealth of valuable 

information in its central pane. Graphs are 

provided for database activity, waits, memory 

usage and I/O plus host system network, CPU, 

memory and disk activity. 

You can see all the action in real time or 

choose a specific time period by selecting start 

and end dates and times from the upper ribbon 

menu. We particularly liked the colour coded 

graphs as we could easily see whether specific 

activities were being caused by a database 

instance or other non-related host processes. 

You can zoom in and out of the panel, and 

if you drag the mouse across an area of 

interest in one graph, SQL Sentry 

automatically highlights the relevant areas in 

all the others. Under each database instance 

in the left pane are options to view top SQL, 

blocking SQL or deadlock metrics in an 

Outlook-style calendar. You can drill down 

deeper for more information. 

SQL Sentry neatly solves the knotty problem of 

deadlock diagnosis as you can view these in 

considerable detail. The playback feature is 

quite brilliant as this shows you the sequence of 

events that caused the deadlock, successful and 

unsuccessful lock requests, code rollbacks and 

what the victim was. 

Proactive alerting features are provided by 

linking general, failsafe, audit and advisory 

conditions with actions. Choices for the latter are 

extensive as if a condition threshold is breached, 

SQL Sentry can execute a program, script or 

SQL command, log events, issue an SNMP trap 

and send emails to multiple recipients. 

The SQL Sentry portal provides a great 

overview of your entire monitored environment 

with its home page presenting a handy health 

score, along with at-a-glance status views of 

each monitored database and Windows server. 

Alerts can be pulled up for a chosen date 

range and custom dashboards created for 

database and host activity. 

SolarWinds SQL Sentry provides the 

information businesses demand to ensure their 

databases run smoothly and won't impact on 

customer services. It's easy to deploy, provides 

an incredible amount of information about 

database, OS, virtualisation and cloud 

operations, and its proactive alerting ensures 

minor database issues won't turn into 

productivity sapping emergencies. NC 

Product: SQL Sentry 

Supplier: SolarWinds 

Web site: www.solarwinds.com 

Price: £1,100 per monitored database exc VAT 



OPINION: RISK ASSESSMENT 

ASSESSING THE RISK OF IoT 

IF YOU'RE PLANNING TO BECOME A SMART OFFICE THEN IT 

MAKES SENSE TO START WITH A RISK ASSESSMENT, 

ACCORDING TO MATTHEW MARGETTS, DIRECTOR OF SALES 

AND MARKETING AT SMARTER TECHNOLOGIES 

The number of businesses using 

connected technology and the Internet 

of Things (IoT) is growing at a fast 

pace. These days, most organisations are 

using some kind of IoT technology in their 

day-to-day operations. 

Improved connectivity provides businesses 

with almost unlimited benefits, from greater 

efficiency, lower overheads and greater 

potential for profitability. However, it also 

introduces new avenues for cybersecurity 

attacks. The cost of connectivity is that attackers 

with nefarious intentions are looking to exploit 

vulnerabilities in IoT technology. That's why it's 

imperative to conduct a risk assessment. 

Assessing risk in your organisation is a 

continuous process of discovering 

vulnerabilities and detecting threats-from the 

individual, to individual devices, 

applications, sites, data networks and the 

organisation as a whole. 

In an ever-evolving cybersecurity threat 

landscape, security is not a one-time action. 

Conducting a holistic risk assessment allows 

for current and future-forward risk mitigation. 

A good risk assessment includes up-front 

technical measures along with ongoing 

practices that enable organisations to 

evaluate their cybersecurity risks and establish 

actions and policies that minimise threats 

over time. Along with finding vulnerabilities, 

it's equally important to prepare staff and 

equip the organisation with processes and 

practices to respond quickly and efficiently as 

soon as a vulnerability is discovered. Security 

should come standard with your data 

network, and with a virtually impenetrable IoT 

network, you can build in defence by default. 

ZERO TRUST IS A MUST 

Your data network should use a zero trust 

model to ensure that unknown entities are not 

able to gain any access. By design, devices 

and users are not automatically trusted. 

Instead, the system constantly checks users 

and devices when they try to gain access to 

any data, at both a network and device level. 

END-TO-END ENCRYPTION 

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) prevents third 

parties from accessing data while it's being 

transferred from one end device or system to 

another. With E2EE in place, only the intended 

recipient can decrypt the data being 

transferred. Along the way, it's secured against 

any tampering from any entity or service. 

IoT technology provider Smarter 

Technologies owns the private Orion IoT 

Data Network, the world's first fully end-toend 

IoT low-power radio network solution. 

This unique and proven system was 

developed alongside a long-standing 

involvement in the tracking and recovery of 

high-value assets such as cash in transit. 

Smarter Technologies conducted a cyber 

risk assessment for the Financial Conduct 

Authority (FCA), a financial regulatory body in 

the United Kingdom. The FCA receives 

information from many sources, including the 

Met Police, City of London Police and I-IMRC. 

These information partners required 

significant assurances that sensitive 

information shared would be appropriately 

secured; otherwise, they would stop sharing 

information with the FCA. 

The FCA were planning to move their 

business intelligence and information storage 

to a cloud-based platform. They required 

assurances as to the risks associated, as well 

as a secure migration strategy. Smarter 

Technologies conducted a full vendoragnostic 

IS1&2 Risk Assessment complete 

with treatment plan, development of a 

security strategy and ethical phishing 

roadmap. A specific cloud security 

assessment fed into the cloud security 

strategy. The key findings from both of these 

deliverables were detailed in a report for key 

stakeholders to discuss the findings and 

implement a risk mitigation strategy. 

A SAFER FUTURE FOR A 

CONNECTED WORLD 

The world continues to be more connected 

than it has ever been. A holistic, and ongoing 

focus on cybersecurity is a requirement, not a 

nice-to-have. Defending against the IoT 

threats of today and tomorrow requires 

continual risk assessment to secure your IoT 

solutions. As the threat landscape evolves, so 

must you. Partnering with an expert in risk 

management empowers your organisation to 

manage risk so that you can focus on 

harnessing the true business value of your IoT 

solutions and products. NC 


CASE STUDY 

A SUPERFAST SERVER SOLUTION 

SUPERFAST IT PROTECTS PROFITABILITY FOR 

WILKES TRANTER WITH ARCSERVE 

SHADOWPROTECT 

Aserver failure is a potential nightmare for 

any business. For an accountancy 

practice such as Wilkes Tranter, if 

employees are unable to access the applications 

they need, client services and profitability are at 

risk. Thanks to Superfast IT and Arcserve 

ShadowProtect, when one of Wilkes Tranter's 

vital servers failed, the firm experienced less than 

30 minutes of downtime. With minimal impact 

on employee productivity, Wilkes Tranter was 

able to continue to serve its clients, safeguarding 

satisfaction and profitability. 

From IT to cloud, Superfast IT helps its 

customers establish and manage solutions that 

are secure, reliable and cost-effective. From its 

office in Stourbridge, the company works with 

more than 65 clients across the West 

Midlands, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and 

Shropshire. Superfast specialise in IT support, 

managed cyber security, cloud, backup, 

Microsoft 365 and connectivity to help 

business owners simplify IT. 

THE CHALLENGE 

Superfast's customers include Wilkes Tranter, 

which offers accountancy, audit and tax 

services to local businesses across multiple 

industries including construction, 

manufacturing, retail and service. The 

company's 36 employees use their specialist 

skills to provide clients with first-class 

services and advice to help them develop 

and grow their businesses. As an 

accountancy practice, employees use a wide 

variety of business applications that are 

accessed via remote desktops to simplify IT 

management and updates. 

With billing generated from the re-charge of 

time, Wilkes Tranter cannot afford for its IT 

systems to be unavailable. "Even an hour's 

downtime could impact profitability for the 

accountancy firm," confirms James Cash, 

Managing Director at Superfast IT. "An IT 

outage would also be hugely frustrating for 

employees and could affect client satisfaction." 

So when the company's remote desktop server 

suffered a hardware failure and employees 

were unable to access their critical applications, 

Superfast IT had to act fast to get them back up 

and running as quickly as possible. 

THE SOLUTION 

Superfast IT has worked with StorageCraft for 

more than 10 years to ensure all its clients have 

reliable backup capabilities. "Arcserve 

ShadowProtect has been a crucial tool for us for 

the last 10 years," explains Cash. "We've 

standardised all our clients on ShadowProtect as 

it's so flexible. We can virtualise backup images 

on the fly, restore to alternative hardware and 

even use it to resolve issues with laptops, as we 

can use ShadowProtect to port the operating 

system to another device while we fix the 

original." In total they protect more than 70 TB 

of data across all its clients with ShadowProtect, 

taking hourly backups as standard. These 

backups include 2 TB of data from Wilkes 

Tranters' essential accounting applications, tax 

processing systems, email and file servers. Using 

ShadowProtect, Superfast IT backs up servers to 

local storage, then replicates data to its own 

datacenter and a secondary offsite location. 

Thanks to these measures, when Superfast IT 

received an automated alert early one 

morning that a Wilkes Tranter server was 

down, it was able to respond quickly. Superfast 

IT engineers Mark Poulding identified remotely 

that the RAID card had failed and promptly 

went onsite to restore services. "We needed a 

replacement part before we could repair the 

server, which would take some time," he 

explains. "Using the ShadowProtect backup, 

however, I was able to virtually boot the server 

from my laptop and run all the essential 

systems from there with immediate effect." The 

replacement server part was delivered that 

afternoon and the server was back up and 

running later that day. 

THE RESULT 

Thanks to ShadowProtect and Superfast IT, 

Wilkes Tranter experienced just 30 minutes of 

downtime instead of eight hours. Employees 

were able to continue working without loss of 

billing hours, and clients were completely 

unaware of any issues. "Working with Superfast 

IT and ShadowProtect provides us with 

confidence that when an IT incident occurs, we 

can keep serving our clients," comments James 

Ellwood, Director at Wilkes Tranter. "It is vital to 

business continuity." The ability to help its clients 

restore business continuity so quickly is key to 

Superfast IT's reputation and competitive 

advantage. With ShadowProtect, the team has 

great visibility and control over backups and the 

replication process across all its clients and can 

rapidly recover their systems and data should 

they need to. It is also extremely scalable. 

"Arcserve's MSP subscription model means we 

can quickly provision and terminate servers 

when we update client infrastructure," adds 

Cash. "We have a great relationship with 

Arcserve, which we see continuing into the 

future so we can continue to provide our clients 

with peace of mind that their critical systems 

and data are protected." NC 



NOMINATIONS 

OPEN SOON 

We believe that you - the readers of Network Computing - have always been splendid judges. 

Very shortly we will be asking you to put forward the products, companies and people that 

have most impressed you for the Awards of 2022. 

Look out for further announcements from us. 

WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTINGAWARDS.CO.UK 

ATTENTION VENDORS: 

We invite you to put forward your customer success stories for the NETWORK PROJECT OF 

THE YEAR. Also, independent product reviews must be completed by the end of May in order 

for a solution to be a contender for the BENCH TESTED PRODUCT OF THE YEAR. The 

review process itself can take around a month so you should make a booking sooner rather 

than later. Contact dave.bonner@btc.co.uk 

A BIG THANK YOU......... 

For becoming the Chief Event Sponsor for the Awards of 2022

OPINION: DATA ARCHITECTURE 

MAKING THE MOVE TO A NEW DATA ARCHITECTURE 

HOW CAN UK BUSINESSES 

MIGRATE TO A NEW, FIT-FOR- 

PURPOSE DATA 

ARCHITECTURE? TOBY BALFRE, 

VP FIELD ENGINEERING EMEA, 

DATABRICKS SHARES HIS 

THOUGHTS 

It is no secret that many businesses find it 

difficult to break away from legacy IT 

systems in favour of more modern data 

architectures. But like many relationships on 

the rocks, getting the confidence to actually 

initiate the breakup is the biggest challenge. 

So, for any UK businesses needing that 

extra push or final reason to break up with 

legacy systems, such as Apache Hadoop, let 

me explain why you should rip the plaster 

off. Simply put, these systems can be hard to 

manage and costly. They are incredibly 

resource-intensive with the need for highly 

skilled people to manage and operate the 

environment. With exponential data growth 

across many businesses, and the need for 

more advanced analytics like machine 

learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), 

there will be fewer advanced analytics 

projects deployed in production on older 

software such as Hadoop. 



OPINION: DATA ARCHITECTURE 

So, how can UK businesses build a new 

fit-for-purpose data architecture and where 

can they start? 

MOVING ON 

If you speak to many CIOs, the 

shortcomings of Hadoop are 

acknowledged and understood. According 

to a global Databricks and MIT study 

surveying chief data officers, chief analytics 

officers and chief information officers, 50% 

said they are currently evaluating or 

implementing a new data platform to 

address their current data challenges. A 

common problem lies in presenting the 

alternative data architectures that are 

available, and how CIOs can migrate 

seamlessly. Making that first jump away 

from on-premise can be a daunting task 

and if a new migration is deemed 

unsuccessful, too slow or too costly, this 

could have serious ramifications. 

The future lies in a modern data and AI 

architecture that can seamlessly scale and 

go hand in hand with the cloud. It also 

needs to be straightforward to administer 

so that data teams can focus on building 

out use cases, not managing infrastructure. 

Crucially, the architecture needs to provide 

a reliable way to deal with all kinds of data 

to enable predictive and real-time analytics 

use cases. 

A lakehouse platform is increasingly 

becoming the architecture of choice. It 

provides a structured transactional layer to 

a data lake to add data warehouse-like 

performance, reliability, quality, and scale 

but for all data. It allows many of the use 

cases that would traditionally have required 

legacy data warehouses to be 

accomplished with a data lake alone. 

So, migrating to a lakehouse platform 

sounds ideal, but many CIOs will be asking 

how easy it is to get to this point. Let us 

look at some simple steps to take when 

migrating off legacy systems. 

1. Get talking 

Before any successful migration happens, 

data teams, CIOs and CDOs need to talk 

about it. Some logical questions to start 

with are 'Where are we now?' and 'Where 

should we be?' Teams can then go away 

and assess the state of the current 

infrastructure and plan for a new one. 

There will undoubtedly be a lot of 

experimentation and new learnings at this 

early stage. Organisations that want to 

undertake a successful migration need to 

have the right conversations internally to 

understand why their business wants to 

migrate, who needs to be involved and 

how the migration fits into an overall cloud 

strategy, to name but a few things. 

2. Run a migration assessment 

It's not going to be an 'instant spark' with 

any migration project. The most realistic 

approach for most will be to migrate 

project by project. Organisations will have 

to understand what jobs are running and 

what the code looks like. In many 

scenarios, organisations will also have 

to build a business case for any 

migration, including calculating the 

cost for a new lakehouse platform, 

for example. 

3. Get the technical building 

blocks right and evaluate 

At the technical phase, businesses 

need to think through their target 

architecture and ensure it will support 

business needs for the long term. 

Typically, the process entails 

mapping older 

technologies to new 

ones or simply 

optimising them. 

Organisations must 

also take stock of 

how to move their 

data to the cloud 

with the 

workloads. 

Finally, 

organisations need to carry out some form 

of evaluation, target demos and 

production pilots to approve an approach 

for the new data architecture. 

4. Execute 

The final thing to consider is the actual 

execution phase. Migration is not easy, 

however getting it done right the first time 

is essential to how quickly the organisation 

can start to scale its analytical practices, 

cut costs and increase data team 

productivity. To ensure continuity, 

businesses should consider running 

workloads on both their old system and the 

new data architecture, ensuring everything 

is identical. Over time, the decision can be 

made to completely cut over to the new 

data architecture and decommission the 

use case from the older one completely. 

As organisations look to empower their 

teams to do more with data and AI, it is time 

for UK businesses to stop just thinking about 

adopting new data architecture and 

have the confidence to finally 

take this step. The longer 

organisations wait to 'rip 

the plaster off' and make 

this move, the more 

painful it will feel when 

they cannot keep up with 

growing customer 

expectations and 

competitive pressures. NC 



TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED 

DAVID HIGGINS, EMEA TECHNICAL DIRECTOR AT CYBERARK, 

TAKES A CLOSER LOOK AT THREE CYBER ATTACKS THAT DESERVED 

MORE ATTENTION IN 2021 

Unsurprisingly, 2021 saw no 

shortage of cybersecurity 

moments. Attacks that affected 

millions of people made headlines 

recurringly, as companies grappled with 

the aftermath of disruption and breaches. 

The Colonial Pipeline cyber attack, 

alongside a series of other high-profie 

ransomware attacks dominated the 

media and conversations. However, there 

were countless other significant incidents 

- with the potential for far-reaching 

privacy, regulatory and even human 

safety implications - that didn't make 

headlines. While most were 

overshadowed by competing news, or 

simply brushed aside, it's now time to 

take another look at these attacks, as 

many could provide lessons still waiting 

to be learnt. Here are the three most 

significant cyber attacks that merit 

reflection: 

THE FLORIDA WATER FACILITY 

ATTACK 

Beware of widespread vulnerabilities in 

industrial control systems. 

In February 2021, a threat actor 

attempted to poison the water supply of a 

Florida city. Reminiscent of a Hollywood 

movie scene, the cursor on a local water 

plant operator's computer screen began 

moving independently and accessing 

applications that controlled water 

treatments. The attacker behind this 

allegedly boosted the concentration of 

sodium hydroxide in the water by a factor 

of 100. 

No one was injured as a result of the 

operator's prompt discovery and 

immediate steps to stabilise the water 

levels. However, the "might haves" 

loomed large, and the attack underlined 

how serious cybersecurity issues within 

critical infrastructure remain. 

For a variety of reasons, the public 

utilities industry is particularly vulnerable 

to threat actors. For one thing, much of 

the infrastructure that controls industrial 

control systems - the systems supporting 

key services - was developed in the 

1980s or 1990s. Because of the crucial 

nature of utility operations, the creators 

of these systems had to prioritise system 

availability and interoperability over 

security. As these systems got more 

integrated with internet-connected IT over 

time, they became more appealing 

targets for hackers. 

Despite increased spending on 

cybersecurity operations and 

maintenance by both the government and 

private sector, many utility firms are still 

struggling to keep up with increasingly 

sophisticated and highly targeted attacks. 

And the stakes are high; public safety is 

potentially in danger, as proven by this 

episode, in addition to negative publicity, 

brand harm, and hefty regulatory fines. 

"Unfortunately, that water treatment 

facility is the rule rather than the 

exception," wrote Christopher Krebs, 

former director of the US Cybersecurity 

and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), 

following the attack. "Even the basics in 

cybersecurity are often out of reach when 

a business is battling to make payroll and 

keep systems running on a generation of 

technology produced in the last decade." 




THE VERKADA BREACH 

Don't underestimate the dark side of IoT. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides 

threat actors a large attack surface and 

continues to pose a daunting cybersecurity 

problem for businesses, with billions of 

connected devices (and counting). 

Attackers infiltrated Verkada, a cloudbased 

video security firm, in March 2021, 

demonstrating how IoT devices, like other 

sensitive network assets, pose a danger. 

The attackers were able to traverse through 

live feeds of over 150,000 cameras 

stationed in factories, hospitals, 

classrooms, jails, and more, while also 

obtaining sensitive footage belonging to 

Verkada software clients, using authentic 

admin account credentials found on the 

internet. It was later confirmed more than 

100 people within the organisation had 

"super admin" access, each of whom could 

access thousands of customer cameras - 

demonstrating the potential dangers of 

overprivileged users. 

Fortunately, the incident caused only minor 

damage, but things could have been much 

worse. The breach was only the tip of the 

iceberg, demonstrating how dangerous 

unsecure IoT may be. This has raised new 

questions and fuelled ongoing privacy 

debates about how surveillance technology 

should be used, how sensitive data - such as 

bedside footage of a hospital patient or 

proprietary manufacturing processes in action 

- should be stored, and how access to this 

data should be managed. 

While the incident did not receive much 

attention, it should not be overlooked, as 

daily life becomes more networked, the 

subject of "who watches the watchmen" will 

undoubtedly resurface. 

THE TWITCH DATA BREACH 

Understand the importance of least 

privilege access. 

Twitch, a popular video game streaming 

network, was the subject of a potentially 

catastrophic data breach in October 2021. 

Threat actors allegedly took the platform's full 

source code, as well as 125GB of sensitive 

data, including top user pay out information, 

and leaked it online in order to "promote 

further disruption and competition in the online 

video streaming industry." 

The problem was prompted by a "server 

configuration change that permitted improper 

access by an unauthorised third party," 

according to a corporate statement. Such 

misconfigurations, particularly in cloud-based 

environments, are very common, and can 

potentially open a path to sensitive assets 

such as source code and other intellectual 

property. Traditional change control 

procedures for correct configuration are 

exceedingly problematic in the cloud due to 

its dynamic nature. 

While Twitch later stated user passwords and 

bank account information were not accessed 

or disclosed as a result of the incident, privacyconscious 

users were not waiting to find out. 

On the day the news broke, global web 

searches for "how to delete Twitch" increased by 

733 percent, implying the platform's popularity 

could suffer as a result of the hack. The attack 

highlighted the numerous issues businesses 

face when it comes to safeguarding cloud 

environments, as well as the importance of 

least privilege access in reducing risk and 

defending against internal and external attacks. 

As it is often said, "history doesn't repeat itself, 

but it sure does rhyme". These 2021 cyber 

attacks faded from view fast, but the battle at 

the cyber front continues. As cyber tactics 

evolve and threat vectors increase, a look at 

the past gives us valuable lessons that are 

critical to future wins. NC 


OPINION: DOWNTIME 

THE HIDDEN COST OF DOWNTIME 

ALAN STEWART-BROWN, VP EMEA, 

OPENGEAR, CONSIDERS THE IMPACT OF 

DOWNTIME ON STAFF WELLBEING 

Much has been written about the 

financial costs of network downtime. 

Many businesses have lost millions of 

pounds from outages, and the resulting fines. 

Depending on the industry and length of 

downtime incurred, the reputation of the 

business can be hit, leading to further financial 

damage. What has been less extensively 

reported, however, is that outages also have a 

significant impact on every organisation's most 

valuable asset - their staff. 

Through the pandemic, the wellbeing of staff 

has, or at least should have, become a top 

priority for every organisation. The global 

safety assurance specialist, Lloyds Register, 

surveyed 5,500 individuals across 11 countries 

to understand the impact of changing working 

conditions caused by COVID-19. Its report 

found that 69% of employees reported higher 

levels of work-related stress while working from 

home, driven by increased workloads and 

changes to working patterns. 

Against that backdrop of strained mental 

health, the stress of coping with an outage and 

its aftermath including having to deal with 

unhappy or angry customers, can prove all but 

unbearable for service staff. Many IT support 

teams, for example, have had a great deal to 

cope with through the pandemic. From the 

outset, they had to provide remote access and 

IT support for other remotely-located employees, 

often while having to adapt to homeworking 

and the isolation it can bring themselves. 

Many organisations rushed to implement 

cloud computing in the early days of COVID. 

For all the manifest benefits of cloud, mistakes 

and misconfigurations were inevitable. That 

potentially gave hackers opportunities to exploit. 

At the same time, with many networks under 

growing strain from increased traffic and surges 

in demand as digitalisation accelerated, the 

potential for outages to occur also increased. 

Just keeping networks operational has been 

an ever-present concern for these staff. 

Cybersecurity threats have been on the rise 

since COVID-19 and the resulting outages and 

downtime can take their toll on engineers 

facing long journeys to investigate outages, 

followed by a battle against time to get systems 

up and running again. With travel still restricted 

in parts of the world, sending engineers out to 

remote sites to address downtime issues may 

still risk compromising their health and safety, 

or entail the need for quarantine. 

Over and above the financial drivers, 

organisations also need to consider the 

human cost of outages. That in turn highlights 

just how important it is that when disruption 

occurs, companies have an IT business 

continuity plan that enables them to recover 

quickly. They above all need to ensure their 

network is resilient. 

One priority must be ensuring businesses 

have visibility and the agility to pivot as 

problems occur. Many are not proactively 

notified if something goes offline. Even when 

they are aware, it may be difficult to 

understand which piece of equipment at which 

location has a problem. To solve errors, an 

organisation might need to perform a quick 

system reboot remotely. If this does not work, 

there may be a problem with a software 

update or other serious issue. That's where the 

concept of Out-of-Band comes into play. 

In this context, when outages occur, 

organisations can use Smart Out-of-Band 

(OOB) management to establish an alternative 

path into the network and then start working 

on resolving the problem, without having to 

send in engineers to visit the relevant site and 

fix affected devices in person. The OOB 

management network is separate from the 

main production network so even if the 

business is infected internally, it will still have a 

healthy OOB management network. 

OOB allows network admins to provision, 

maintain and manage components such as 

servers, WAN and security devices and resolve 

malfunctions via secure remote access. If there is 

an issue with connectivity, out-of-band solutions 

offer a failover solution, with cellular often 

providing an alternative to wired connectivity. 

In short, having an effective Smart OOB 

management network in place will enable the 

business to securely access the affected 

network and devices, resolve problems and 

support business continuity. In addition, a 

network automation or NetOps approach can 

also help in automating responses to specific 

malicious occurrences. It will additionally 

provide real-time visibility of events regardless 

of the production networks state. 

Such an approach to delivering network 

resilience is critical if businesses are to drive 

network uptime, ensure business continuity and 

significantly reduce the impact downtime can 

bring to employee health and wellbeing. NC 



SUPERMICRO 

MULTI-NODE 

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Construct Your Optimized IT Solutions with Our Twin Family of Multi-Node Servers 

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© Supermicro and Supermicro logo are trademarks of Super Micro Computer, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.

NC Jan-Feb 2022

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