30 November 2021 - Security Buyer Magazine

Bosch equips new Chinese ‘Mega-Airport’

Industry Sectors, Middle East News Desk, Product News / Editor

Bosch has equipped the new Chinese mega-airport Chengdu Tianfu International with video security, a PA and voice alarm system, and a conferencing solution, ensuring safety and security for passengers and airport staff as well as enhancing comfort and ease-of-use for travellers. Chengdu Tianfu International, in Sichuan province, serves China’s quickly booming ‘garden’ megacity, an emerging hub for commerce, culture, and finance – with the new airport pegged to be the third-busiest for airport traffic following Beijing and Shanghai. The installation of the audio and video technology was customised for the unique architectural requirements of the airport complex, which opened this June, including two terminal buildings that reference the ancient Golden Sun Bird totem unearthed in 2001 from Chengdu City’s Jinsha Ruins. Due to the unique design of the terminal buildings, ‘standard’ security cameras were not appropriate for installation as the ceilings were far too high for traditional solutions. Placing regular cameras on this ceiling would drastically reduce the quality of their image feed and produce a poor viewing angle. Instead, Bosch Flexidome panoramic cameras were integrated into the interior design of the building and were either installed on walls or concealed within information boards. Each panoramic camera is able to monitor a semi-circle area with a radius of 25 meters, a detection range of 25 meters in distance, and with a 180-degree viewing angle. This allowed the airport to install far fewer cameras, cutting the total number down by 75% from 4,000 standard cameras for a typical project of this scale to 1,000 panoramic cameras – thus saving costs on the cameras as well as on wiring and installation. Additionally, competitors’ panoramic cameras usually use four lenses, reducing the image quality. Bosch Flexidome cameras, however, use just one lens – improving brightness, colour, and clarity. The precision tracking capabilities and high-quality video stream of the cameras ultimately frees up human resources for the airport and allows incidents or events to be followed without additional staff on the ground. In the flight area, the airport deployed four 4K-resolution Dinion IP cameras to monitor the runway. As this area of the airport is very long, stitching software is used to combine the images of these four cameras into one complete image, covering the entire runway and allowing Chengdu Tianfu to monitor the whole take-off and landing process. Guaranteeing seamless customer experience with superior acoustics As the interiors of the terminal buildings feature many glass surfaces, which cause sound reflections, Chengdu Tianfu needed to determine how to deliver a high level of speech intelligibility with minimal distortion, no matter where the passengers were located. The design team ran acoustic simulation software to ascertain how many loudspeakers were needed for the terminal areas as well as the placement of the arrays. For flight announcements as well as voice alarm and evacuation more than 9,000 loudspeakers were installed, covering 700 broadcasting zones and integrated via a Bosch Praesideo system, assuring passengers can clearly hear announcements in all parts of the terminal. Additionally, announcements can be broadcast with accuracy to passengers travelling through other areas of the airport complex, such as the adjoining hotel. Bosch also provided the Dicentis Wireless Conferencing System for the adjoining supporting airport offices. Meanwhile, the Praesensa public address and voice alarm system deployed at the airport hotel is integrated with the rest of the site, so passengers staying at the hotel can be alerted to ongoing events in the airport. Due to these integrated sound and video systems, the airport is able to guarantee security and safety for passengers while also providing a seamless experience for customers and staff. Media contact Rebecca Morpeth Spayne, Editor, Security Portfolio Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 920 Email: editor@securitymiddleeast.com

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Digital Barriers wins Supplier of the Year Award

Middle East News Desk / Editor

Digital Barriers has been named ‘Breakthrough Supplier of the Year 2021’ by Vodafone Group for its video surveillance solutions. Digital Barriers delivers edge Al and IoT enabled video surveillance products and solutions and has a global go-to-market partnership with Vodafone Business to deliver to customers. The award was part of Vodafone’s 2021 supplier awards and recognises the partnership and cooperation between Digital Barriers, Tomorrow Street and Vodafone Procurement Company which has supported Vodafone’s continuous drive for operating efficiency and delivering benefits to customers. The company will soon be launching CloudVis – a new cloud-based video surveillance as a service solution that will be world’s first cloud video security system that works in real-time, on any connection with any device, anywhere. The new service will be available through an exclusive, global, go-to market partnership with Vodafone Business. Ninian Wilson, global Supply Chain Director and CEO, Vodafone Procurement Company said “Digital Barriers has really stepped up to the challenge in the last year and the CloudVis solution will become a key part of our enterprise offerings.” Commenting on the award Digital Barriers Chief Executive Officer Zak Doffman, added “We are hugely proud to be recognised by Vodafone as a top supplier. It is a strong endorsement of what we are trying to achieve as a business and gives us great confidence for the future relationship with Vodafone.” Media contact Rebecca Morpeth Spayne, Editor, Security Portfolio Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 920 Email: editor@securitymiddleeast.com

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Nebulon launches smartIaaS for cloud service providers

UK News Desk / Rebecca Morpeth-Spayne

UK-based service provider Inca Cloud is first to build a new multi-cloud service alternative to the public cloud on Nebulon smartInfrastructure Nebulon announced the Nebulon smartIaaSTM solution, designed to help cloud service providers deliver new services at a lower cost across both hosted and customer-owned data centres. Nebulon also announced that UK-based service provider Inca Cloud has chosen the Nebulon smartIaaS solution with Supermicro as a part of its new cloud service, WSO by Inca. The service will be built for both hosted and private cloud deployments and will provide enterprises with a multi-cloud solution as an alternative to standalone Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) today are focused on developing new services and revenue sources, reducing service delivery costs by optimising infrastructure and operations, and maintaining high customer satisfaction by minimising availability risks and security threats. Achieving these goals can be a challenge for those CSPs deploying single-use hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology versus a fully open platform providing a common experience across hypervisors and bare metal use cases. HCI also puts significant pressure on service costs because its data services consume up to 25% of server resources — effectively one-in-four servers and related software purchases are lost to HCI overheads. In addition, both HCI software updates and server operating system maintenance take critical storage resources offline placing data and committed customer service level agreements at risk. Nebulon’s smartIaaS solution is a blueprint that helps CSPs drive incremental revenue growth by provisioning, monitoring and maintaining application infrastructure in both the CSP data centre as well as that in the customer’s own data centre via a single API. With this capability, CSPs can easily leverage their orchestration platforms to deliver new multi-cloud services with a common cloud-like experience for their clients. CSPs can also take advantage of additional Nebulon solution blueprints for bare-metal- and Kubernetes-based services, extending their offerings beyond hosted virtualisation services. “60% of enterprises have repatriated at least one application back from public cloud infrastructure services to their on-premises data centres due to previously unforeseen reasons, including cost, security, and compliance,” said Scott Sinclair, Practice Director at Enterprise Strategy Group. “As we see organisations become more strategic about which workloads are in which locations, they will increasingly expect the same experience and operational simplicity no matter which data centre they choose. Nebulon delivers that consistent, simple experience for both enterprises and service providers and its timing could not be better.” The Nebulon smartIaaS solution can help CSPs in three other ways. Firstly, it can streamline the costs of a CSP’s existing services by offloading all data services from the server CPU, memory, and network to a next-generation IO controller in each server called an SPU (services processing unit). CSPs can therefore use 100% of their servers for their hosted applications, therefore buying fewer servers and software licenses and lowering their costs by 33% on average. Secondly, smartIaaS can also help maintain high customer satisfaction by keeping storage resources online during software updates and server maintenance thereby reducing availability risks. And, lastly but arguably most importantly, the Nebulon smartIaaS solution includes a zero-trust security model with end-to-end encryption to minimise security threats. UK-based cloud service provider Inca Cloud, has chosen the Nebulon smartIaaS solution as a part of its new multi-cloud service, WSO by Inca. With WSO, Inca can provide enterprise clients with a single platform to provision and maintain workloads in the public, hosted or private cloud data centre. The public cloud is a ‘rental model,’ and while appropriate for certain use cases, is two to four times more expensive when compared to other alternatives. With WSO by Inca, monthly costs are completely transparent for public cloud, hosted and private data centre deployment options. This service also provides an extensive library of machine images, as well as a common cloud-like experience independent of data centre type. With the help of Nebulon smartInfrastructure, Inca is able to deliver this breakthrough, yet cost-effective, multi-cloud service to its customers. “Inca is pioneering a multi-cloud service model for enterprises unlike anything offered in the industry today,” said Damon Dance, Director of Sales at Inca Cloud. “With a Nebulon-based Supermicro foundation for the hosted element of our multi-cloud service, we are able to bring to market a ‘smart’ vision that would have been impossible to deliver just a couple of years ago. Customers can now retain the flexibility and operating model which make the public cloud so appealing whilst regaining the control it removes, and improving both predictability and cost advantages for their cloud deployments.” “In order for cloud service providers to not just survive, but thrive and lead in a competitive market, they need the ability to attack growing trends with differentiated solutions,” said Siamak Nazari, CEO at Nebulon. “There is a massive opportunity for CSPs to offer solutions, which provide a more cloud-like experience for enterprises repatriating or retaining workloads in private or hosted data centres, and I am thrilled that our smartIaaS-based Inca solution will allow customers to do just that.” To stay up to date on the latest, trends, innovations, people news and company updates within the global security market please register to receive our newsletter here. Media contact Rebecca Morpeth Spayne, Editor, Security Portfolio Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 922 Email: editor@securitybuyer.com

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Arista joins Microsoft Intelligent Security Association

News Desk / Ghyslaine Cordrey

Arista Networks announced it has joined the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), an ecosystem of independent software vendors and managed security service providers that have integrated their solutions to better defend against a world of increasing threats. Arista was nominated based on an integration between Arista’s NDR (Network Detection and Response) platform and Microsoft Azure Sentinel. This integration enables faster remediation of threats by combining network context and threat detection with log-based and endpoint insights within Azure Sentinel. Arista NDR analyses full network packet data to enable a number of autonomous use cases, including insider threat detection, threat hunting, digital forensics and incident response. Powered by Arista AVA (Autonomous Virtual Assist), an AI-enabled decision support system, the NDR platform discovers, profiles and classifies network entities such as devices, users and applications across campus, data centre, IoT and cloud networks. AVA pre-computes answers for questions a highly skilled analyst would ask by looking at network data as well as querying threat intelligence sources, open source intelligence and partner solutions within the MISA ecosystem and beyond. Using this information, the platform surfaces the weak and early signals of a network issue along with corroborating evidence to establish conviction and identify the broader scope of the attack. This enables the SecOps team to disrupt an adversary’s objectives at the earliest stages of an attack. “Customers have invested in a variety of security solutions in their battle against modern cyber threats,” said Rahul Kashyap, VP/GM Arista NDR Security Division. “Responding to the adversary requires a coordinated effort across these solutions so that risks can be mitigated and impact minimised. Microsoft shares this vision and we are pleased to collaborate by bringing the high-fidelity detection and response signals from AVA and our NDR platform into Microsoft Azure Sentinel and MISA.” As networks have evolved, organisations are often blind to 50% or more of their infrastructure, including IoT and contractor devices and cloud workloads. Adversaries target this expanded attack surface, but these attacks often go unnoticed due to the underlying device’s lack of security agents or log sources. Integrating Arista NDR with Azure Sentinel delivers broad visibility into network entities, threat detection and incident response capabilities for this otherwise unmanaged infrastructure. Security teams benefit from rich, entity-centric context that can be used through Azure Sentinel workbooks to correlate data collected from other IT and security solutions. “The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association has grown into a vibrant ecosystem comprised of the most reliable and trusted security software vendors across the globe,” said Maria Thomson, Microsoft Intelligent Security Association Lead. “Our members, like Arista, share Microsoft’s commitment to collaboration within the cybersecurity community to improve our customers’ ability to predict, detect, and respond to security threats faster.” To stay up to date on the latest, trends, innovations, people news and company updates within the global security market please register to receive our newsletter here. Media contact Rebecca Morpeth Spayne, Editor, Security Portfolio Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 922 Email: editor@securitybuyer.com

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Blue Hexagon comments on cloud security research

News Desk / Ghyslaine Cordrey

Research from ESG and Cado Security reveals 89% of 150 companies surveyed have experienced a negative outcome in the time between detection and investigation of a cyber-attack on their cloud environments. Research further revealed it takes an average of 3.1 days to begin an investigation of a known cloud breach after data capture and processing. Other key findings include: 74% of security professionals say their organisations need additional data and context to conduct forensics investigations in cloud environments. 64% say it takes too much time to collect and process data to perform a timely investigation. 35% of cloud security alerts are not investigated. Saumitra Das, CTO and Co-Founder, at Blue Hexagon said, “This is very important research and a key issue we see within organisations. Cloud security has too often been left to developers and ops people who are not security experts. There is too much focus on hygiene and hardening despite the fact that a fully hardened cloud with no misconfigurations is a very hard goal to achieve. As a result, organisations do not even have visibility into an attack, both when it is happening or for incident response and forensics. There needs to be renewed focus on cloud threat detection and response and not just posture assessment and hardening. In addition, cloud security alerts need to be prioritised so the most egregious problems get fixed otherwise there will just be a deluge of tickets to be worked on which then explains the 3.1 days.” “The key here is not 3.1 days but whether the important problems are fixed in hours and the less risky ones fixed over time.” To stay up to date on the latest, trends, innovations, people news and company updates within the global security market please register to receive our newsletter here. Media contact Rebecca Morpeth Spayne, Editor, Security Portfolio Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 922 Email: editor@securitybuyer.com

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