Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 15 | Page 7

ISSUE 15 EDITOR’S COMMENT www.intelligenttechchannels.com PUBLICATION Intelligent briefings for Middle East and Africa channel partners EXPONENTIAL DATA GROWTH DRIVING CLOUD INNOVATION Mechelle Buys Du Plessis, Managing Director, Dimension Data Grassroot approach for GCC digital skills Stress testing your DevOps environment Security policies mapped to business outcomes ALI MATAR CHARBEL KHNEISSER ANT ALLAN LINKEDIN TALENT SOLUTIONS RIVERBED GARTNER EDITOR’S NOTE I n this issue of Intelligent Tech Channels, we focus on the larger technology ecosystem around storage. Every day, we see vendor products and solutions beginning to look closer into what tomorrow’s IT landscape will look like. Compute and storage specifications will increasingly move away from the foreground into the background. Reliability of access to compute and connectivity, speed and accuracy of business intelligence, data integrity and management, agility to adapt and change to the business environment, will increasingly become principal factors of consideration for the organisation. The ability to scale the performance of storage is rapidly accelerating the inroads of artificial intelligence to handle complex and large data structures. Says Pure Storage’s Christian Putz, “A fundamental reason why deep learning has seen a surge in success is the continued improvement of models with larger data set sizes. As of 2016, a rough rule of thumb is that a supervised deep learning algorithm will generally achieve acceptable performance with around 5,000 labelled examples per category, and will match or exceed human performance when trained with a dataset containing at least 10 million labelled examples.” Savitha Bhaskar at Condo Protego, Phil Dawson at Gartner, Mechelle Buys Du Plessis at Dimension Data, Nick Jheng at Synology and Khwaja Saifuddin at Western Digital also bring in their deep insights into the subject. In an easy to read blog: Building Tomorrow’s Digital Enterprises, Deepak Narain at VMware impressively explains that yesterday’s enterprises cannot be merely transformed to prepare themselves for the digital era, they need to be rebuilt. Another good blog is from Ali Matar at LinkedIn Talent Solutions, titled: Grassroot approach required for creating GCC digital skills. He argues that while there is a significant mismatch between the fastest growing job skills globally and in the GCC, a corrective approach inside the GCC starts within the education sector. In our closing blogs, Ant Allan at Gartner points out that security policies need to be mapped to business outcomes. It is not merely sufficient to chalk out awareness programmes, they must also show the impact on business. Rob Theis at Digital Shadows drills down into corporate and board compliance practices around cybersecurity breaches. Board members can no longer avoid discussing their organisation’s security profile or risk being shown as negligent to future threats. Thoughtful reading here! Managing Partner Richard Judd [email protected] Managing Partner Stuart Lynch [email protected] Editor, ITC Arun Shankar [email protected] Managing Editor and Editor ICIO Middle East Mark Bowen [email protected] Editor, ICIO Europe Alix Pressley [email protected] Business Development Manager Susan Paul [email protected] +971 50 544 7141 Head of Design and Production Pippa Sanderson [email protected] Senior Digital Manager Charles Brandreth [email protected] Lynchpin Media © 2018 Intelligent Tech Channels is a Lynchpin Media publication for IT professionals with an interest in the Middle East. If you wish to apply for regular free copies then please email [email protected] Lynchpin Media is a boutique publisher registered in the United Kingdom. Company number 8096230 5 Burnside Court Leominster Enterprise Park Herefordshire, HR6 0LX Arun Shankar 7