EdgeConneX, a global data center operator with regional headquarters in Singapore, is firmly set on catalyzing this shift. By deploying edge data centers across key markets in the Asia-Pacific region and forming strategic partnerships with local industry leaders, the company will establish a robust network infrastructure that aligns with recent escalating data demands through cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The APAC data center market is fit to burst

Source: Shutterstock

Kelvin Fong, EdgeConneX’s Managing Director for the APAC region, said: “Cloud technology and the increasing adoption of AI, are likely to lead to significant expansion into markets beyond the traditional APAC markets of Singapore and Hong Kong.” These new markets are developing now in India and Indonesia due to burgeoning digital transformations in their economies and throughout the region.

Mr. Fong noted that governments in Southeast Asian countries are also being more proactive and supportive towards digital infrastructure development. Leaders have picked up on how digital advancement can lay the foundation for exponential economic growth in the coming years, by attracting new skill sets, creating employment opportunities, and fostering innovation and global competitiveness.

Fiber investment has also worked as a data center investment driver. Don MacNeil, EdgeConneX’s Chief Revenue Officer, said: “Investments in fiber optics hold great significance, both domestically and across the wider region. They are notably simplifying the challenge of connectivity and adding essential network diversity.”

How EdgeConneX is reaching APAC

Malaysia

Government digitalization in Malaysia has spurred interest in expanding its data center infrastructure. Mr. Fong said: “The local government is playing a catalytic role by facilitating land sales, ensuring power availability, and streamlining administrative processes. These efforts are attracting data center operators and end-users to the area.”

Malaysia was also taking advantage of the data center moratorium in Singapore, which was only lifted in 2022, and attracted much of the country’s outbound traffic. As a result, the industries in Johor and Kuala Lumpur have seen significant growth and are now key markets.

He added that there are new opportunities for “mega-campuses” in Greater Kuala Lumpur rather than just the center, where limitations on space and power availability make it expensive. Mr. Fong said: “In fact, they have already opened up some of the technology parks just to cater to the hyper-scalers.” Last year, EdgeConneX unveiled its plans to build data centers in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Bukit Jalil in Greater Kuala Lumpur, and Cyberjaya, with nearly 300 MW of total capacity. Malaysia’s dense network connectivity, power availability, multiple port cities, and connections to 22 submarine cables position it as a strategic data center destination.

Indonesia

Indonesia is Asia’s third most populous country, and its population is still growing, so data demands are likely to continue escalating in parallel. In 2022, EdgeConneX acquired the GTN data center, which allowed the company to gain an initial foothold in its ninth market in Asia. In September this year, it secured $403.8 million in investment to support the growth of a 120 MW hyper-scale data center campus in Jakarta. As well as the capital, Mr. Fong says that Eastern Java and Batam are becoming key data center markets in Indonesia. He said: “They’re not just drawing in international demand, but also experiencing substantial domestic interest. With a thriving community of e-commerce and fintech enterprises in Indonesia, there’s a significant surge in locally-driven demand.”

China

In December 2021, EdgeConneX unveiled its new strategic partnership with leading Chinese data center provider Chayora to help expand its solutions throughout the mainland, including in Tianjin and Greater Shanghai. Tech Wire Asia recently spoke with Chayora CEO James Wei, to discover his insights on how China can sustain a thriving data center landscape going into 2024.

Philippines

In 2022, EdgeConneX forged a partnership with Aboitiz InfraCapital to capitalize on its extensive local market knowledge, as well as its land and power assets in the Philippines. Presently, discussions are underway with potential customers about breaking ground.

Mr. Fong noted: “Aboitiz brings a wealth of essential components to the table for success in the market. With ownership of power resources and real estate, as well as involvement in the construction industry, they offer crucial assets. These complement our [EdgeConneX] global data center platform, build, and operational capabilities, which is why we’ve partnered with Aboitiz.”

India

EdgeConneX has partnered with Adani Enterprises, India’s largest multi-infrastructure organization, since 2021. The joint venture ‘AdaniConneX’, has already set up a data center in Chennai and aims to build out 1 GW of data center capacity by 2030.

Mr. MacNeil stated: “Adani not only brings just the local infrastructure expertise of the Adani Group but, more importantly, the infrastructure supporting power transmission and generation. Adani Group has a similar goal for renewable, sustainable energy; to be at 25 GW by 2025, and it’s well underway. So, in many cases, India has the advantage of significant, fresh investment on all aspects – not only digital infrastructure but also the broader infrastructure requirements.”

Challenges faced by the APAC data center industry

One of the main challenges of expanding the data center industry in Asia is doing so sustainably. Getting access to renewable energy directly, rather than via carbon offsetting, can be difficult in certain countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Mr. Fong said: “The region’s commitment to sustainability is evident, with countries like Indonesia and Malaysia planning to significantly ramp up their renewable energy generation in the coming years. These initiatives will eventually power the burgeoning data center industry, ensuring a greener and more sustainable digital future for Southeast Asia.”

EdgeConneX is making significant strides in sustainable data center development, even in countries where it is less straightforward. For example, the deal struck for the hyper-scale data center campus in Jakarta was explicitly for ‘sustainability-linked senior facilities’, meaning it will be equipped with sustainability capabilities. Adjustments will be made to the financing terms when EdgeConneX meets certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) concerning the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of data centers, the use of renewable electricity, and achieving safety goals.

Looking to the future

Source: Shutterstock

As Mr. MacNeil noted, “Over the next 24 months, we will see the impact of the next wave of data center expansion, driven by AI, building on the already healthy pace of growth of Cloud. All of that also driving the virtuous infrastructure expansion in connectivity through terrestrial fiber optics and submarine cable expansion – it’s exciting to be a part of this wave.”

According to the Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Report 2023-2024, the region posted a 9 percent growth rate in digitally deliverable exports from 2015 to 2022, outpacing the global average of 6.8 percent. Now, the continuation of this growth is paired with ambitious sustainability and net-zero goals, pledged by many APAC countries including China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.

EdgeConneX’s strategic vision and collaborations aim not only to meet the burgeoning demands of Cloud and AI but also committed to contributing to growth in a responsible and sustainable manner across the Asia-Pacific data landscape.

Mr. Fong said: “This sets the momentum for our investments in Indonesia and Malaysia. We aim to seize this market opportunity as it begins to rise. Therefore, pinpointing the optimal locations and timing is crucial for our success in this endeavor.”

To explore EdgeConneX’s comprehensive array of cutting-edge data centers throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and to inquire about tailored data center solutions for your business, visit the EdgeConneX website today.

The post The view of APAC data centers in 2024: Trends, challenges, and EdgeConneX’s impact appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Edge-as-a-Service enables organizations to have access to networks, operations and edge computing for real-time automation and processing. For most organizations today, processing data at the edge would mean better insights, especially when it comes to meeting customer demands.

Simply put, with Edge-as-a-Service, SaaS providers gain access instantly to an edge deployment model for their solutions. This means they do not need to build or manage their own edge network. However, there are some challenges to Edge-as-a-Service. The biggest one would be linked to network coverage. As it collects data and produces insights in real-time, the network for Edge-as-a-Service needs to be the strongest.

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And when it comes to the network, the main challenge would be providing seamless coverage, especially in areas that are away from fixed terrestrial networks. Apart from that, Edge-as-a-Service could also experience surges that require the network to support its demand.

As such, NTT, a provider of Edge-as-a-Service to enterprises, has announced a multi-year partnership with SES, a leading global content connectivity service provider via satellite. The partnership will bring together NTT’s expertise in networking and enterprise-managed services with SES’s unique satellite capabilities to deliver reliable connectivity to enterprises.

Utilizing SES’s O3b mPOWER and NTT’s fully managed Private 5G and Edge Compute, the solution is intended for companies operating in regions where terrestrial networks are lacking and enterprises wanting to leverage high-performance connectivity to increase their efficiency and grow revenue. Through the combined versatility of Private 5G networks and satellite technology, this end-to-end solution is expected to propel industries – such as energy, mining, maritime, manufacturing, industrial, etc. – that have otherwise been limited by connectivity today and will need to ramp up their digital transformation plans and increase revenue streams.

According to Miriam Murphy, CEO of Europe at NTT Ltd, as organizations grapple with the challenges of a rapidly changing world, it is now more important than ever to leverage the power of technology to drive growth and innovation.

For John-Paul Hemingway, Chief Strategy Officer at SES, the partnership is one of its kind as both companies jointly provide comprehensive and resilient connectivity solutions for customers around the world.

“In addition to its predictable low latency capabilities, O3b mPOWER’s best throughput and full flexibility on asymmetric or symmetric services will result in the seamless integration and extension of terrestrial and satellite networks, enabling our customers to unlock the full potential of emerging technologies like 5G, IoT, and cloud computing, and drive digital transformation across industries,” he said.

(Source – NTT)

Perfecting Private 5G and Edge-as-a-Service

The joint solution will deliver coverage to over 190 countries with public-private roaming. In addition to NTT’s Private 5G and Edge Compute capabilities, NTT will also provide use-case consulting and design, application development, system integration, implementation, and managed services, while SES will provide end-to-end satellite networks via O3b mPOWER that will be seamlessly integrated with NTT’s offering.

Olivier Posty, Country Managing Director Luxembourg, NTT Ltd explained that private 5G is a transformative power that enables enterprises to build upon existing network infrastructure and deliver reliable, high bandwidth, and low latency connections for multiple use cases operating on a single Private 5G network.

“As our customers continue to innovate, network partners with the right skills and expertise will be critical to success in today’s competitive market. NTT’s robust Private 5G network-as-a-service full-stack solution, delivered on-premises, at the edge, or as a cloud service, is complemented by NTT’s 24/7 remote monitoring services and a CIO self-service portal, ensuring that NTT’s full stack of managed Edge Compute services delivers real-time actionable intelligence to drive processing efficiency and accelerate business performance,” added Posty.

NTT’s Edge-as-a-Service offering includes IoT, Edge Compute, and Private 5G connectivity delivered by NTT across its global footprint. NTT’s Edge-as-a-Service is a unique, fully managed, integrated solution that accelerates business process automation, enabling enterprises to quickly deploy their applications more securely and monitor them closer to the edge, thereby reducing downtime, improving user experience, and optimizing costs.

The partnership between NTT and SES comes as organizations are increasingly turning to technology to drive growth and innovation. Organizations recognize the positive impact of high-speed connectivity and resilient networks on business operations, driving demand and fueling widespread digital transformation. By leveraging their respective strengths, NTT and SES are well-positioned to provide customers with the innovative Edge-as-a-Service solutions they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world.

The post NTT partners SES to improve Edge-as-a-Service and Private 5G offering appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

In fact, the number of internet users in Malaysia has been consistently growing, reaching almost 29.5 million users in 2022. This expansion, along with the increased dependence on the internet for work and personal communication due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in a higher volume of cyberthreats targeting the workforce.

The state of cybersecurity in Malaysia

According to Surfshark’s 2022 Q2 report, Malaysia ranked eleventh among countries with the most data breaches in the cybersecurity category during the second quarter of 2022. The research also showed that between April and June 2022, the data of 665,200 Malaysians was compromised.

These threats pose a significant challenge for organizations that have adopted a hybrid work model. As companies have accommodated the massive shift to a mix of in-office and remote work, they have encountered complexities in their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Tech Wire Asia had the chance to speak with Michael Dickman, Chief Product Officer at Gigamon, who provided insights on how deep observability represents a new frontier in enhancing security and observability tools through actionable network-level intelligence.

According to Dickman, the evolving cyberthreats have led organizations to adapt their threat mitigation strategies by increasing their network visibility and harnessing the power of observability.

“Taking it a step further – organizations that enhance traditional capabilities and leverage metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) with deep observability, provide their IT leaders with valuable, real-time network-derived intelligence. This intelligence allows organizations to access the depth of insight needed to troubleshoot the toughest problems and root out the most sophisticated threats,” he commented.

The rise of cloud and edge computing

The market is already seeing increased investments in cloud services, with 51% of global IT leaders considering it a priority over the next few years. Similarly, spending on edge technology will continue to rise. With varied investments, it seems extremely likely that there will be a diverse assortment of technology used across IT teams. This often results in tool fragmentation that makes it harder to mitigate organization-wide risk. As a result, the cost and complexity that comes in managing digital environments often escalates, which can limit an organization’s ability to advance within their industries.

Michael Dickman, Chief Product Officer at Gigamon

“To stay ahead of emerging threats and better manage these costs and complexities, organizations must adopt a more collaborative IT approach and break down technology silos,” said Dickman. “A holistic view across multi and hybrid-cloud applications is necessary to maintain a strong security posture.”

Additionally, NetOps, SecOps and CloudOps teams must work more closely to find a common workflow with IT tools, and train their teams to use the enriched data observability solutions offered. Only then will organizations be able to holistically manage their cybersecurity, and fully realize the transformational promise of a resilient and responsive digital infrastructure.

Dickman emphasized that organizations in various sectors, whether private or public, need to collaborate closely with third-party providers to integrate the most recent cybersecurity recommendations from federal authorities. To stay a step ahead of cyber adversaries, a united effort is required, where all parties involved collaborate to harness collective intelligence and enhance defenses accordingly.

Addressing future challenges in observability for enhanced cybersecurity in Malaysia and beyond

Dickman noted that as the threat landscape persistently evolves, organizations will consistently confront new challenges. To combat this, deep observability enables IT leaders to spot rogue activities quickly and effectively. Identification in a timely manner is critical to take proactive measures, assess threat actors that could be lurking in the network, and determine next steps. In fact, 75% of IT leaders cite observability as critical to forming a strong security posture and mitigating threats.

“Specifically, teams are facing an increasing number of security challenges with Kubernetes as it becomes a more common way to deploy applications in cloud environments,” said Dickman. “Organizations need visibility into Kubernetes containers to be able to track sessions and detect when a vulnerability is exploited by an adversary.”

Deep observability can support defense in-depth with a higher level of visibility into how and when Kubernetes are accessed.

Gigamon’s unique deep observability solutions

Pandemic-driven digital transformation has led to 82% of large organizations using hybrid cloud environments, increasing complexities and security risks. Gigamon’s Deep Observability Pipeline (DOP) enhances cloud, security, and observability tools with real-time network intelligence, enabling defense-in-depth and performance management across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

DOP offers elastic visibility and analytics for data-in-motion across any cloud network, covering internal and external traffic. Its visibility-as-code feature integrates with cloud automation for on-demand scaling, ensuring enhanced security, compliance, and performance to support digital transformation initiatives.

“Furthermore, the DOP goes beyond current observability approaches that rely exclusively on the logging of MELT by providing organizations with deep observability capabilities for any network tool. This added value allows the DOP to deliver the “ground truth” of data-in-motion to cloud tools, including observability into east-west traffic containers and unmanaged devices through network application metadata,” explained Dickman.

The Gigamon team’s DOP has also been integrated with AWS and other leading cloud platforms and tools, which provides a unified view across hybrid infrastructure that is easy for customers to leverage within their existing tool stack.

Gigamon has partnered with an expanding ecosystem of partners, including Dynatrace, Sumo Logic, New Relic, and AWS, to integrate network-derived intelligence for clients like Lockheed Martin, Johns Hopkins, Under Armour, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Together, they enhance customers’ cloud, security, and observability tools with real-time network intelligence from packets, flows, and metadata, enabling defense-in-depth across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

The post Bolstering cybersecurity in Malaysia: Deep observability for cloud environments appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The move to the cloud – which underpins so much of business technology today – is often motivated by an organization’s desire to drive cost reductions, as well as reap its agility and scalability benefits.

While these benefits are real, many organizations have discovered that without the right architecture and governance, the desired cost reductions fail to materialize.

The cost of cloud adoption is fast becoming a challenge for organizations across Asia Pacific to manage, with cloud bills estimated to go up by 30% year-on-year.

This has come into focus over the past year, as organizations have renewed their focus on profits. No longer can organizations satisfy their investors with growth alone. Profitable growth is essential for organizational success.

In December 2022, The Asian Development Bank revised its 2023 economic outlook for APAC downward by 0.3 percentage points from its forecast in September. Compounding these macroeconomic challenges is the rising cloud costs that organizations contend with. According to a study of enterprises by S&P Global Market Intelligence in 2022, more than half of tech buyers surveyed said they had spent more than their allocated public cloud budgets the year before.

As such, business leaders will have to re-evaluate their cloud options as they focus on operational efficiency and cost visibility in the new year. What then is the solution to these emerging challenges, and an organization’s evolving cloud needs while they seek to manage costs?

Matthew Lynn, Director, Cloud Computing, APJ, Akamai (Source – Akamai)

Here are three considerations for IT and business leaders when they are deciding on their cloud platform:

Benefits of the cloud: Cost transparency and accountability

In this economic climate, affordable pricing is high on the agenda.

Central to keeping costs manageable is a clear and unified view of an organization’s billing and usage. It is crucial for organizations to work with a provider that can organize their data, and provide them with a unified view, enabling them the ability to trace costs and usage information.

This will help provide cost transparency and accountability across the organization, so resources can be scaled quickly, according to real-time business needs.

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Financial Operations, or FinOps for short, has been created as a new discipline to help organizations manage the financial challenges of cloud, by bringing together cross-functional teams, including Finance, IT, and DevOps, in a collaborative effort to control costs.

A key factor influencing cloud costs is vendor lock-in. After an initial rush to capture the perceived benefits of cloud, many organizations find themselves beholden to a single provider with significant switching costs. Vendor lock-in presents a key challenge, with many organizations having no choice but to continue upping their cloud spending.

Third-party optimization tools and services can help support a FinOps culture within organizations by providing relevant insights into how and where its cloud budget is being spent. For example, cloud usage insights can help sales teams when they are reviewing quotations for potential and present clients alike. And at the same time, help DevOps teams understand which service features are most in demand, and which are not.

A cloud-smart approach to selecting workloads

Enterprises must seek to align the right workload to the right cloud platform based on their technology and business needs.

Instead of arbitrarily deploying workloads to any available cloud, this means auditing workloads and understanding what they need to run most effectively. This workload-first approach would enable organizations to benefit from a breadth of providers serving multiple needs without worrying about complex processes or high costs.

Another approach to consider is investigating alternative cloud options with a forward-looking view. This would be crucial for IT decision-makers to maintain visibility and autonomy of their organization’s IT direction. As they weigh their options, they should ensure that their chosen cloud offering is able to provide flexibility, with services that can be modified according to a company’s business needs and with an organization charged for only what they eventually consume.

In a multi-cloud environment, this means that enterprises can shop cloud workloads to better predict and optimize the cost of cloud. The right provider will offer enterprises the flexibility to choose the most optimal workloads to host in a multi cloud environment.

Zolvit, a legal tech start-up and India’s largest Governance, Risk, and Compliance service provider, faced a similar challenge of managing their cloud infrastructure across several cloud providers because of the increasing complexity of managing the customer experience and keeping up with cost and maintenance requirements.

A key concern was initially how it could manage its workloads, from development and staging to QE and production, while minimizing deployment times to power, scale, and accelerate these different workloads and applications securely around the globe. With Akamai Cloud Computing, Zolvit is estimated to save close to 30% on their IT expenses and has started to benefit from higher performance delivery per dollar, a sign that developers were more productive in staging environments, deployment, and in ensuring the right amount is being used for the right workloads.

Cloud benefits: prioritizing the developer experience and an open-source framework

While some enterprises may feel locked in with their existing hyperscale clouds, there are also now more open-source technology and tooling options that enable enterprises to build, run and secure applications from the cloud.

Organizations should take a cloud-native view, by selecting tools and processes that operate consistently across multiple providers, as opposed to a platform-native architecture which leverages the proprietary tools of a single cloud provider.

In fact, one of the biggest benefits of these developments is that developers can now move faster as a result – thus speeding up the rate of innovation globally, and in our region. This means that as cloud adoption continues to grow in Asia Pacific, we can expect the speed of innovation to grow at the same time.

Developer productivity is as pivotal to business success in the cloud as core elements like performance, security, cost, service, and global footprint to the edge. With developers often regarded as the engine room of modern digital innovation, it is crucial that cloud resources work for them, and account for their needs of ease of use, simplicity, and programmability from the platforms where they deploy apps.

Findings by Techstrong Research has revealed that the cloud landscape is changing as buyers increasingly put the developer experience on the same footing as core technical and performance capabilities of cloud infrastructure services.

As such, when selecting a cloud provider and solution for the organization, a consideration should be made as to whether the offering is intuitive for a developer’s use. For example, if developer-friendly IaaS and PaaS platforms are offered to make it easy for them to set up a virtual machine or container to build and run applications.

From the cloud to the edge – how organizations can remain fast and agile as they scale globally

In the coming years, as 5G and IoT gains ground, enterprises will have a growing need for a continuum of compute from the cloud to the edge, to be closer to where billions of end users are, and tens of billions of connected devices will be.

However, as cloud becomes critical across every kind of organization in Asia Pacific, so will the complexity and cost of running it. Enterprise IT teams will need to rise to the challenge of meeting a large and growing number of requirements, from application performance to infrastructure scaling to security, data sovereignty, all while managing costs in a challenging economic environment.

Security is also another vital component to any multi-cloud setup, as cybersecurity threats continue to plague all businesses, and the cloud presenting another in-road for cybercriminals to exploit organizations’ weaknesses within their cloud infrastructure.

Ultimately, cloud platforms must have global reach, significant outbound network capacity, and high data security capabilities to keep up with the rapid growth in scale and complexity of enterprise workloads. Organizations should make every effort to ensure that their chosen cloud platform and provider are able to understand and account for these needs, as they continue to navigate their digital future.

The views in the article are that of the author and may not reflect the views of this publication. 

The post How organizations can reap the benefits of cloud, without cloud bill shock appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Enterprises’ adoption of cloud computing is increasing rapidly in Southeast Asia. In Malaysia, the cloud computing industry is projected to grow to US$ 3.7 billion with a 13% CAGR by 2024. Despite the shift towards the cloud, the remaining on-premise equipment becomes even more crucial as it is the lifeline for connecting to the cloud.

Cloud technology migration brings several advantages to businesses. Besides providing scalability, cost savings, and better security compared to on-premise solutions, it allows companies to access real-time data and analytics for better and faster decision-making.

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Enterprises rely more on cloud technology to develop apps as well as to enhance customer experience, enhance safety and security, and become more sustainable. This involves upgrading their on-premise physical infrastructure (power, cooling, networking) and ensuring employee connectivity to critical applications through resilient edge solutions.

Tech Wire Asia caught up with Adrian Koh, the Head of the Secure Power Division for Malaysia and Brunei at Schneider Electric, to discuss the benefits and future of cloud computing for Malaysian companies and how it can assist in meeting business sustainability objectives, while also identifying the hurdles and obstacles in cloud computing.

The cloud adoption trend in Malaysia.

Malaysia is experiencing a shift in how businesses operate, with cloud computing driving force behind this change. This technology has become popular among companies in the country, and for a good reason. The benefits of cloud computing have been able to optimize operational costs, increase return on investment (ROI), and reduce IT equipment, leading to enhanced business sustainability and a reduction in the carbon footprint. Clouds offer scalability, making them a more accessible solution than local servers.

Adrian Koh, the Head of the Secure Power Division for Malaysia and Brunei at Schneider Electric (Source – Schneider Electric)

The potential and outlook of cloud computing for Malaysian organizations still hesitant about making a move are immense. For these organizations, the loss of competitive edge is a significant concern, as traditional systems are becoming increasingly inefficient and increasing costs and risks over time. However, the transition to cloud computing can be difficult, so businesses need to find the right partner to guide them through the process.

“One of the challenges faced by businesses in Malaysia when it comes to cloud computing is the shortage of skilled talent,” Koh noted. “There is a gap between the demand and supply of knowledgeable professionals, making it difficult for organizations to find the right expertise. Furthermore, many skilled professionals leave the country for better opportunities and higher compensation packages, exacerbating the problem.”

Security is also a significant concern for businesses, as they are often hesitant to store data externally due to concerns about security measures. Finally, the cost of adopting a cloud service and the need for data migration across functions make many businesses hesitant to invest, as they fear employee resistance and a potential loss of investment.

To overcome these challenges, businesses in Malaysia must follow some best practices while implementing cloud computing. According to Koh, these best practices include having a well-planned migration system, communicating and getting buy-in from employees, utilizing expertise, and continuously evaluating and updating the system. Additionally, businesses must ensure that the right metrics, physical and cybersecurity monitoring, operational practices, and redundant power and cooling are in place to ensure tangible improvements.

Moving to the edge despite the advantages of the cloud.

Despite the advantages of the cloud, more businesses are moving to the edge. This is due to increased connected devices and the need for more data processing. Edge computing provides a physical computing and storage infrastructure near where the data is generated, reducing data link latency and improving data privacy and compliance with regional data privacy regulations. It also addresses the high expense and inefficiency of resources by improving data processing and transport time and increasing the availability of data when and where it is needed.

“Most industries are heading towards Industrial 4.0, where ET (Engineering Technology) and IT (Information Technology) are merging. Industry 4.0 is focused on connected devices that process more data before it is transported to the cloud. Edge computing ensures that data is secured and provides security within the edge computing itself,” explained Koh.

Schneider, a leading company in this area, has four pillars for moving to the edge – sustainability, efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. These pillars focus on responsibly meeting business needs without compromising the future, optimizing cost, speed, and capital to increase ROI, accommodating new technologies, and reducing vulnerability to unplanned downtime.

Schneider’s EcoStruxure platform is part of their edge software and digital service program. This program was recently launched to support IT solution providers in growing their software and digital service business, managing customer lifecycle and generating recurring revenue streams.

“In May last year, we announced the expansion plan of our new full-fledged Service Operations Center,” Koh added. “This supports businesses in realizing the full potential of digitization, and we are working towards doubling our services in the next four years, with 2022 as a pilot in providing enhanced digital solutions, consulting services, and service contracts to enterprises, aligning their business growth strategies with Malaysia’s digital goals.”

When compared to Singapore, Malaysia is still in the early stages of its cloud computing journey. Singapore is a crucial hub for digital infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region, with most of its hyperscale data centers deployed there. Currently, it has more than 60 data centers with a footprint of over 250 megawatts. However, with the increased investment by hyper scalers in Malaysia, the country has the potential to catch up and become a key player in this area.

The post Rising demand for cloud technology: why enterprises are moving to the edge  appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Smarter, more integrated technology is already transforming businesses, strengthening research, and changing how we collaborate with colleagues in this digital world. As artificial intelligence and edge computing proliferate, bringing power and efficiency to countless industries and activities, we see tremendous changes coming our way in 2023. Here are some of the emerging technologies–especially those set to change our world soon.

Augmented reality will power workplaces of the future.

In our new hybrid world of work, technology will create enhanced experiences and digital meetings, wherein attendees will be projected ‘holographically.’ They will feel nearly as real as being there in the flesh. For presentations, product launches, or meetings with other organizations, augmented and mixed reality will offer a new way to make an impact, with life-size ‘holograms’ that can interact with virtual objects; for example, to show off a new prototype or to explore a ‘digital twin’ of a real-world object. Technologies that can bring teams together, even if they are working across several continents, will advance significantly in the future hybrid, remote, and increasingly global workplaces.

Blended realism in the metaverse will change the way we work.

In the past few years, we have witnessed an immense technological shift and expansion to the virtual world or Metaverse. Reportedly, the potential impact of the metaverse on GDP in Asia is US$0.8T-US$1.4T per year by 2035, roughly 1.3 – 2.4% of overall GDP. The Metaverse market is expected to register a CAGR of 41.6 % by 2027.

Teams will learn to collaborate, share and work in immersive spaces – what we refer to as the Enterprise Metaverse – and that will drive the adoption of the technology. Rather than games such as flight simulators, ‘job simulators’ – immersive training – will drive the adoption of the metaverse. However, while the metaverse is making the hybrid workplace more immersive, interactive, and collaborative, it can also make remote workers feel distant from the reality of collaborating physically in real meeting rooms, as currently trending mixed reality avatars are based on 3D rendering, making the workplace ‘too virtual’. Lenovo’s ThinkReality solution uses blended realism, which uses a set of 3D scanners to accurately create an interactive, highly photorealistic avatar – a game-changer in the world of metaverse conferencing. This could present remote employees in a better light than even those on-premises because reality is nowhere near as easily modified.

Further, towards the growth of enterprise metaverse, the company is developing advanced metaverse technologies such as AR optics, all-elements meta-space construction algorithms, robotics, edge computing, etc., which can offer intelligent metaverse solutions for various vertical sectors, including smart manufacturing and the electric power industry. Today businesses need to make Smarter IT choices to leverage the Metaverse and fully merge physical and virtual worlds. As the virtual workplace constantly evolves, companies can adopt flexible IT infrastructure under Lenovo TruScale – an ‘as-a-service’ provision to consistently have access to upgraded infrastructure, scale up or down as per the requirements, and stay relevant in the metaverse era.

Sumir Bhatia – President, AP, Lenovo ISG (Source – Leonov)

AI at the Edge will create smarter industries.

With AI at the Edge, businesses can leverage fast access to data-driven intelligence to respond to business requirements in real-time. AI at the Edge will smoothly unlock real-time patient monitoring and diagnoses in healthcare, efficient traffic management systems in smart cities, predictive maintenance on the manufacturing line, etc. Lenovo’s ThinkEdge SE450 is already minimizing business complexities, enhancing compute power in remote locations while tackling security challenges and generating accurate insights faster. Shortly, AI-enabled Edge servers may analyze multiple video feeds from cameras in the aisles of shops to watch for large quantities of items being removed at the same time and monitor deliveries to help stores to manage their inventory better and rapidly adjust to supply and demand, improving profit margins and ensuring customers get what they paid for.

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Multi-access edge computing (MEC) will power smart cities.

In the future, intelligent cameras will manage traffic in ‘smart cities, cutting pollution, congestion, and road accidents – and edge servers will enable everything from holographic teaching to augmented reality shopping. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) means that requests are processed within the smart city rather than traveling to some far-away data center, meaning that queries can be answered within milliseconds. In Barcelona, a pilot project shows the power of edge computing, with 3,000 Lenovo servers across the city enabling internet-of-things devices and cameras to deliver data where needed. In the future, edge computing could even help cities hit pollution targets by controlling traffic lights, so cars drive more fuel-efficiently.

Supercomputing will save lives worldwide.

The growing volume of data worldwide has kept researchers busy scouring extensive datasets. In today’s quickly moving world, time is of the essence, even a matter of life and death. Faster research outcomes in healthcare can amount to that bit of difference between life and death for patients worldwide. Thereby increasing the demand for high computational power to process data faster. HPC is increasingly becoming popular, and a preferred choice of researchers and scientists helps improve and accelerate disease diagnosis and even helps identify the best care pathways. For example, machine learning systems enabled by HPC can be trained to identify anomalies within images, such as patient scans, through comparisons with broader datasets.

We are already providing research organizations in healthcare, civil services, etc., flexibility, reliability, and performance to meet the ever-growing workload requirements and intelligently drive innovation. Our TruScale High-Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS) is delivering the power of supercomputing to organizations of all sizes through a cloud-like experience. The Indian Institute of Technology – Jodhpur (IIT-J), one of the country’s premier technology institutes, selected Lenovo’s new HPC platform, which is based on our ThinkSystem SR645 and SR665 servers, to build a future-ready HPC platform to meet the long-term requirements of their researchers and accelerate their research outcomes.

The ever-changing technological environment has made it imperative for businesses to be ready to adopt new and emerging technologies to stay ahead of the curve and secure a competitive edge in the market. At Lenovo, we strive to develop innovative solutions that can empower businesses to keep up with the pace of constantly emerging trends.

The views in this article is that of the author and may not reflect the views of Tech Wire Asia. 

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Tech innovations bring all sorts of benefits. They can help boost productivity and provide people with new, high-quality products and services that raise their general standard of living.

Technology has advanced throughout the past ten years, beginning with revolutionary concepts and ending with humans coming up with innovative ways to turn those ideas into reality. Examples of this include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and so on.

Lenovo “smartified” the tech world

At its recent Tech World event, Lenovo shared its vision for the progression of collaboration across users, locations, and devices to unlock limitless potential in both real-world applications and the metaverse. The way people work, learn, and interact with the digital world will be defined by the new ideas, approaches, and upcoming technologies that Lenovo highlighted, according to the company.

In order to address one of humanity’s biggest challenges, the company also revealed its vision for net-zero emissions, which they have been working to refine with collaborative tech innovations.

“At Lenovo, we believe in technology. We are doubling our investment in innovation,” said Lenovo Chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang at Tech World. “In a fast-changing world, our commitment remains unchanged, [and that is] to make lives better, work more productive, and our planet more sustainable. And this has to be done through new IT with the client, edge, cloud, network, and the intelligence working together to deliver the promise of technology.”

According to Yang, technology is transforming the workplace and home of the future into a fusion of the virtual and physical worlds, made possible by the power of new IT infrastructure that is pervasive, expected, and on demand. All industries are becoming digitalized and “smartified” through innovation, which is also helping in finding solutions to humanity’s most pressing challenges.

At Tech World, Lenovo unveiled new products, including the first public demonstration of rollable proof of concepts for smartphones and laptop computers. By incorporating computing onto rollable screens, consumer pain points are addressed, and productivity in hybrid working environments is increased. This combines productivity, entertainment, and connectivity on a dynamic, adjustable, and larger screen, but on a smaller device form factor.

In addition, Yang unveiled Cyber Spaces, a captivating interactive and physical holographic solution for collaborative and immersive telepresence communication. In response to the ongoing data explosion, Lenovo also demonstrated how its innovations, backed by AI and edge computing, are enabling quicker data processing at its source, altering city streets, precision medicine, and retail marketplaces.

Tech innovations leading to the metaverse

The metaverse will open up a brand-new era of highly personalized, immersive digital experiences that mix the real world with the virtual one and inspire innovative new business use cases.

Lenovo’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Yong Rui, spoke on the company’s plans to create metaverse tech solutions to facilitate intelligent transformation. He emphasized how Lenovo’s core technology and breakthroughs spanning devices, servers, software, and solutions will connect the virtual and physical worlds.

“On the device side, we have the industry-leading ThinkReality AR/VR devices. On the infrastructure side, we offer world-class Edge servers like the ThinkEdge SE450. On the software stack, we offer stAR-Studio for Metaverse editing and stAR-Scan for Metaverse space construction,” commented Rui. “On the solution side, we develop end-to-end solutions tailored for vertical industries. Moving forward, Lenovo is willing to build an open metaverse ecosystem, along with like-minded industry partners.”

Lenovo also made several other key announcements. They include the Lenovo Freestyle app that provides easy pairing and transformation of a tablet into a portable second screen to expand desktop space or a wireless touchscreen for a laptop, enabling universal control and collaboration between a tablet and PC.

There is also the Ready For Platform feature, which is available on Motorola Edge smartphones, extending smartphone functionality to larger screens and enabling mobile desktop experiences, console-like gaming, multimedia streaming, and video conversations.

To cater to the future of work, Lenovo unveiled its Remote Work Enablement solution, which enables remote workers to easily set up and provides hardware, software, and premium services directly to employees. The company also demonstrated its Smart Services product, which anticipates repair needs and streamlines the network of parts, service engineers, and logistical support.

For the education sector, Lenovo highlighted how their Virtual Classroom solution gives students access to virtual teachers who can give them individualized tests and recommendations.

From immersive audio/video communication to collaboration in a virtual real, overlaid environment to brainstorming in a virtual reality space, Lenovo is establishing a new experience that blurs the lines between the virtual and the real.

But it wasn’t just new products that were unveiled at Lenovo Tech World. Ken Wong, Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo’s Solutions & Services Group, discussed how the role of a CIO has expanded as the world digitizes. Ken also highlighted the value of industrial metaverse solutions, the importance of digital workspace solutions and how optimizing track management for engineers can improve infrastructure such as public transportation, in real time.

In the journey towards a sustainable future, Executive Director of Lenovo’s Global Sustainability Services, Claudia Contreras, points out that Lenovo’s services can help customers work toward their own sustainability goals, no matter where they are in their journey.

In addition to sustainable product innovations, Laura Quatela, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Lenovo shared sustainable improvements Lenovo is making to lead the way in low-emissions manufacturing, as well as Lenovo’s intentions to share and report its progress for a credible, collaborative approach to emissions reduction. These sustainability efforts were bolstered by Yang’s closing announcement of Lenovo’s commitment to a vision for net-zero by 2050.

The post Lenovo lights up the “Tech World” with smarter innovations appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

In an effort to lower the cost and complexity of their infrastructure and boost creativity, businesses are rapidly deploying and using cloud services. This is why companies are turning to multi-cloud, which can provide a variety of advantages for their business, including flexibility, regular best-of-breed updates, and options for choosing vendors.

However, this is causing growing complexity – customers are losing more and more control over how users access various types of clouds, and expenses are also rising. Organizations are also becoming aware of the widespread cloud sprawl, and it’s becoming a daily challenge for them.

Therefore, to properly implement multi-cloud, Dell Technologies is introducing Multicloud by Design. Multicloud by Design has two key fundamental tenets: the first is ensuring that they can provide a portfolio of software and services that aid in bringing cloud services to any location where data resides.

DELL HOPING TO SIMPLIFY ZERO TRUST FOR ORGANIZATIONS

Aaron Raj | 7 October, 2022

“The second fundamental is we’re building out a powerful multi-cloud ecosystem that is going to empower our customers with the freedom of choice to deploy any type of cloud,” said Sam Grocott, Senior Vice President, Product Marketing at Dell Technologies.

Extending cloud to the edge for a successful business transformation

As organizations generate data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, smart sensors, and other devices on the edge of their networks, and as the clouds have received a lot of attention, this data must be gathered, stored, and processed in order to meet the growing demand for real-time, data-driven decision-making.

Hence, in order to help customers securely manage and orchestrate edge applications and infrastructure for deployments at a global scale, Dell Technologies launched Project Frontier, which will deliver an edge operations software platform integrated with Dell’s edge portfolio.

As more businesses want to manage and protect data at the source, yet have little access to IT support, the complexity of edge operations — in settings ranging from production floors and retail stores to remote wind turbines — is increasing.

According to a 2022 IDC survey, putting together a full-edge solution is the most challenging component of edge deployments for 42% of businesses. Organizations want a simple and efficient solution to manage and secure the broad ecosystem of edge technologies since the amount of data generated is increasing as much as nine times annually, and is predicted to reach 221 exabytes by 2026.

The next frontier of business transformation is at the edge — where devices, infrastructure, and data come together to deliver real-time insights at scale, according to Gil Shneorson, the senior vice president of edge solutions at Dell Technologies. The company is witnessing exponential growth in applications running at the edge.

“With this growth comes complexity. It’s not feasible to have IT staff deployed at every edge location. Our decades of edge experience combined with our new solutions help customers simplify their edge and streamline their data to gain insights ranging from factory safety and the speed and precision of patient care in hospitals, while providing more choice in how they realize their edge and multi-cloud technologies,” said Shneorson.

Application orchestration, infrastructure management, and an edge secure environment are the three main features that drive Project Frontier.

“We believe the combination of these features is quite unique. The element of secure device onboarding is very transformational. For instance, we can ship equipment to customer sites that can be powered, connected to a network, and automatically deployed without a human touch while also having zero trust. That significantly increases security while lowering complexity for edge customers,” he added.

Securely scale edge operations for any enterprise use case

Customers can expect the following from the Project Frontier edge operations software platform:

• Combine existing and new enterprise edge use cases using their preferred software applications, IoT frameworks, operational technologies (OT), multi-cloud environments, and future technologies supported by an open design.
• End-to-end supply chain security solutions are used to support Zero Trust-enabled security protection spanning edge applications, data, and infrastructure from design to deployment.
• End-to-end edge operations that are more efficient and reliable thanks to centralized management, zero-touch deployment, and secure device onboarding.
• Automation to simplify edge installations and operations across potentially thousands of edge requirements, requiring little or no in-field IT skills.
• Integration of storage and computation hardware at the edge with workloads for easier maintenance and enhanced security.
• Global planning and support services are provided across 170 countries, to help design edge deployments and provide a roadmap for expanding customers’ edge infrastructure to meet new demand.

“We will continue to innovate at the edge. We’ll keep releasing new edge-optimized products and industry-specific vertical solutions that use those products. We invite our larger customers and partners to participate in an edge design program through the Project Frontier Software Platform,” Shneorson concluded. “Participants in that program will have access to Project Frontier as it develops so that we can have a continuous feedback loop and make sure that, when it launches, it meets their needs as intended.”

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For McLaren, working fast and collecting loads of data points are nothing new as an elite racing unit, comprising not just the drivers but the hordes of technicians, engineers, mechanics, data scientists, as well as all the race-day entourage a top-level race crew tends to accrue at a major event like the Singapore Grand Prix, the curtain closing final race of the 2022 Formula One calendar.

Motorsports, unlike perhaps a lot of human-only sports, have been highly technical and technologically focused for decades. Performance gains and competitive advantage are measured in tiny fractions; such is the gap between the top teams. And thanks to VMware Workspace, McLaren can now wholly embrace edge computing to transmit the sort of data performance that matches up to their high expectations on race weekend.

VMware became an Official Partner of McLaren earlier this year, just before the 2022 French Grand Prix in July, and unlike a lot of sponsors who might receive brand visibility on the McLaren Formula 1 car and the race suits of drivers Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris, the multi-cloud services provider brings as much to the racetrack as it takes away – perhaps more so.

VMware technology powers McLaren with its SD-WAN (software-defined wireless area network), allowing the team to grasp bonded networks and use smart traffic shaping so that connectivity is guaranteed wherever the users are located – on the paddock, in the garage, and even on the track.

OFF TO THE RACES – TALISMAN STEERS DATA INTELLIGENCE TO HYPER-COMMERCIALIZE SPORTS, STARTING WITH FORMULA 1

Joe Devanesan | 25 February, 2021

Running highly advanced applications and crunching streams of data requires powerful support and data storage, and McLaren needs it live and in real-time for optimum performance. With apps in the public cloud, out of their own data centers, and even at the edge trackside, McLaren can tap into VMware’s Workspace multi-cloud architecture to get a better understanding of the data and optimize its use to peak efficiencies, all while maintaining a secure cloud footprint so that sensitive team data does not get exposed and is securely maintained for future analysis, as befits a race team on the cutting edge of its field.

Workspace is a ‘VMware Anywhere Workspace’ SaaS solution, meaning it can be deployed anywhere to the edge to deliver a seamless user experience to all stakeholders who need such accessibility and connectivity, integrating access control, application management and multi-platform endpoint management across all devices – including for guests who show up on race day, and need to be able to interact with the stats and analysis on their tablets and phones.

Former world champion Lewis Hamilton grins at McLaren team telemetry data in the pits in 2008. At the 2022 Singapore Grand Prix, diehard McLaren fans can see some of that data up close on their mobile devices. (Photo by MARK RALSTON / AFP)

With the applications and data streams delivered via Workspace, “you can look at the same weather charts the strategists look at. You can watch the race. You can look inside the garage and even see some of the telemetry coming from the cars,” said Ed Green, McLaren Racing’s head of commercial technology, while speaking at the VMware Explore conference last month.

Green demonstrated an instance at VMware Explore where a specialized tire technician accessed real-time information from trackside. “He’ll be analyzing all of the data coming from the car to predict what tire we should move to next,” Green said. “That’s critical in this modern era of Formula One racing.”

And guests can get to partake in that real-time info sharing too, heightening the intuitive interactivity with their favorite motorsport team. After all, “it’s no good saying we’re one of the most technically advanced sports on the planet when all you can do in our hospitality area is just look down on the garage,” Green pointed out.

VMware’s Workspace platform performance has been so critical for delivering and managing applications across multiple devices and form factors that McLaren is harnessing it for a new fleet of Android devices that McLaren provides to employees in the field.

“We put Android phones into people’s pockets, all running Workspace ONE, allowing us to deliver secure access right to the edge. So the engineers can look at trackside data on their phones in a secure way,” Green explained, but highlighted that VMware cloud security kept the devices safe. “If those devices leave the circuit, we know we can shut them down and keep them secure.”

Lando Norris of Great Britain and McLaren and Daniel Ricciardo of Australia and McLaren. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)

Ultimately, the powerful, speedy edge computing performance of VMware is what makes the difference – for a team like McLaren, the difference between pole position and losing. “Once these two cars make their way around the track – and Lando [Norris] and Daniel [Ricciardo] do it at 200 miles an hour – 300 sensors are producing a terabyte-and-a-half worth of information that we have to analyze to try and find the edge. And when I talk about edge, it’s milliseconds,” Green concluded.

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Any effort to implement digital transformation must first consider the network. The network must adapt architecturally and operationally as applications have grown in importance to business outcomes and as cloud and multicloud have altered the application environment – especially given how connected practically everyone in this world is.

According to Insider Intelligence, Southeast Asia alone will have the second-fastest growth in internet users globally in 2022, with an annual increase of 3.1%. The number of internet users will rise by 53.9 million since 2019, when 54.0% of the region’s population went online.

In his keynote address at the annual Aruba Atmosphere Conference – SEATH and India in Bangkok, Thailand, David Hughes, Chief Product and Technology Officer, HPE Aruba, said, “Networking is shifting from thinking about it as managing a whole set of devices, towards delivering a service to your users, and enabling business outcomes. When we consider how we can make your job easier, what do we consider? How can we help you in filling those deficits?”

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The need for network modernization is what these challenges are accelerating. According to Hughes, “you need to modernize your network if you want to be nimble, if you want to be able to cope with the unexpected, and if you want to be able to see around those corners.”

How network modernization accelerates the sense of “connected”

The Aruba Atmosphere Conference this year has brought together business-driven organizations from the region to explore the greatest industry practices, foster insightful technical discussion, and sharpen new skills regarding the most recent updates that will aid in continuously modernizing their networks.

Key executives and industry experts discussed Aruba’s always-on innovations in a presentation centered around three fundamental technological principles: agility, automation, and security.

• Agility: Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) adoption is becoming more and more simple, enabling unified, cloud-native, standards-based architecture while optimizing financial and human resources.
• Automation: By achieving streamlined processes and AI-powered automation, networks that enable distant, branch, campus, and cloud connectivity may be planned, deployed, and managed with less time and effort.
• Security: Importance of enhanced threat detection and protection by applying built-in identity-based access control and dynamic segmentation, leveraging zero trust and SASE frameworks.

Static networks are no longer able to fulfil evolving security standards or keep up with expanding business demands. It is strongly advised that businesses establish a modern network architecture when they begin digital transformation activities and adjust to hybrid work environments. This enables businesses of all sizes to execute their main business processes from anywhere thanks to a smooth and secure connection.

Along with the global growth in as-a-service solutions and the rise of hybrid workplaces, HPE GreenLake for Aruba is revolutionizing how businesses operate. In order to stay up with the speed of business, HPE GreenLake keeps up with essential use cases including hybrid work, connected retail, and hybrid learning as well as enabling businesses to quickly deploy them.

Making connections anywhere, anytime has become more important than ever, and according to Steve Wood, Vice President of APJ at Aruba, “Enterprises that prioritize digital transformation and acceleration will be able to address the tough challenges that come with network orchestration, management, and security to eventually drive business growth.”

David Hughes, Chief Product and Technology Officer, HPE Aruba, presents on the need for network modernization.

Key Announcements on Aruba’s next generation networking devices

The transformation of WAN and security architectures with a unified Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) fabric, one that enables organizations to architect a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), is also essential to delivering the highest quality of experience for customers, employees, and IT teams.

The Aruba EdgeConnect Enterprise SD-WAN platform most recently received the ICSA Labs Secure SD-WAN Certification, making it the first SD-WAN platform to do so. The accreditation highlights Aruba’s industry-leading SD-WAN and security capabilities, giving customers flexibility and assurance in implementing important network and security transformations.

Aruba expanded it further by launching the first self-locating wireless infrastructure and the Open Locate project to standardize methods for exchanging location information.

Mark Verbloot, Senior Director, Product, Solutions and Systems Engineering, APJ, HPE Aruba, claims that high precision GPS receivers have been incorporated inside all of Aruba’s new 600 series access points. Aruba’s announcement of this is not brand-new. They did, however, announced to enable the software to make use of these GPS receivers now.

“There’s two parts to this, the GPS receiver is used to automatically determine its absolute reference both in height as well as position and use that to automatically be positioned on a floor plan. In addition, we’ve got something called fine time measurement (FTM), or also known as IEEE 802.11mc. This is a standard where devices or clients can accurately measure their position from a fixed point, using time-of-flight measurement – basically measuring how long it takes to receive a signal or a ping from a known reference point,” explained Verbloot.

Together, these two components made up what Aruba referred to as “Open Locate.” Verbloot declared that Aruba will provide these to the entire industry. It is intended to allow them to advertise the exact location of the access point from the access point beacon. Therefore, any client can obtain that information and determine precise location, regardless of whether it supports FTM or not.

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