Post Industry Event POV: Security Concerns Are Still Challenging Enterprise Progression

Last week, several of BOHH Labs’ leaders, CEO, Simon Bain, COO and SVP of Business Development, AJ Jennings and SVP of Partner Engagement, Marina Simonians, attended the inaugural Arrow Technology Summit in Denver, a premier event for IT Value Added Resellers (VARs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Systems Integrators (Sis).

The Arrow Technology Summit is for IT partners and solution providers who are actively seeking the information, opportunities and relationships that will grow their bottom line. ATS brings together leading industry experts to give you the actionable information and perspectives you need to grow your IT business.

At BOHH Labs, we are big fans of industry events, as they are a great opportunity to understand market trends and challenges, share information, learn from peers, and speak directly to people on what problems they need addressed and what they are currently lacking. ATS was no different and was a great summit focused on bringing companies together to address the changing digital enterprise landscape.

BOHH Labs was honored to not only attend but be a sponsor at the event and showcase our breakthrough technology, Intelligent Secure Data as a Service (SDaaS), that enables businesses to strengthen their offerings to data-driven industries, especially in the areas of security, edge computing, the internet of things, hybrid cloud, data intelligence, analytics and next-gen data centers.

One of the most interesting takeaways was understanding that all the companies we met with are plagued with the same challenge: the desire to embrace digital innovation into their solutions and help customers unlock the value of their data analytics, yet they are unable to securely open up their data. We heard countless stories from senior execs wary of the current data security solutions that promise protection with solutions that rely on application level security, data masking applications and other encryption algorithms that have been proven to leave open massive security threats. We heard everything from those who were terrified of losing keys, opening up databases to the cloud, and even those unsure of how to back up their databases.

It is evident enterprises are looking to increase their value with innovative digital services and maximize the value of their data assets. However, data security is challenging enterprise progression. As part of these conversations, we were delighted with the reaction received by our SDaaS solution to address these setbacks.

SDaaS uniquely protects all data, while maintaining security for searching, analytics, and use, unlocking valuable data to become an asset for companies and preventing data breaches. Our service acts as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data, and has no reliance on a keystore, which resonated with many who are wary to keeping encryption keys proven to be ineffective. Instead, its uses an AI engine to manage the encryption process to completely mitigate any access to data by attacking a keystore. SDaaS encrypts down to the sub-field level with each encryption process being handled with a uniquely derived key which is never stored, eliminating internal and external threats while protecting data at rest, in transit, and in use. 

As a result, SDaaS enables enterprises to securely deploy innovative applications, cloud services, and analytics that they desperately need, without opening their data to massive, widespread, and malicious security threats. 

Overall, it was a very successful event with over 300 companies attending and we gave 60 demos on how our solution is uniquely suited to enable partners and resellers in their efforts to leverage valuable new insights on customer and company data, while preventing internal and external data breaches. We left the summit upbeat with our message and solution resonating with most of the conference attendees.

How the BOHH Labs/Approyo Partnership Can Accelerate the Transition to SAP HANA in the Cloud

The enterprise technology landscape is rapidly changing, and more companies are embracing digital transformation and integrating cloud services to enhance business agility, efficiency and extract analytics. In fact, technology leader in business applications, SAP, has pegged a deadline of 2025 for when it will terminate support for its ECC6 on-premise solution.

For businesses looking to migrate to more advanced SAP HANA systems in the cloud, this may seem like a long way off, but the deadline shouldn’t be the only driving force behind your migration strategy. Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions offer businesses a vast array of benefits, as they look to harness the potential of digitization and business transformation.

However, digital transformation is an evolving market and there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For businesses to be successful in their transformation to cloud-based SAP HANA solutions, there must be collaboration, and Approyo and BOHH Labs have teamed up to offer SAP customers seamless migration to SAP HANA cloud environments. Approyo CEO, Chris Carter, and BOHH Labs CEO, Simon Bain, illustrate below how strategic partnerships can create a best in breed solution that bring success for the end customer.

Chris shares:
As part of the push to move to the cloud, SAP has developed SAP S/4HANA, which is built on the advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and is an entirely new generation of SAP Business Suite. It fundamentally redefines how enterprise software creates value across industries with instant insight. SAP S/4HANA also personalizes the user experience on any device and natively connects to Big Data, the Internet of Things, and business and social networks - all in real time.

Like all new things, especially in technology, the updates can be daunting. Approyo can help businesses move SAP applications, such as SAP S/4HANA, to the cloud with tailored implementation roadmaps to ensure every organization undergoes a seamless migration. We are one of the only SAP partners in the world that can migrate SAP applications to the cloud, provide ongoing support and provide long term managed services for hosted cloud environments.

Simon Shares:
While Approyo specializes in making SAP migrations smooth from an implementation standpoint, we combine with their capabilities to make the migration smooth by enabling better security and access to data stored with SAP HANA. We bring security to the data and the business suite, so customers can get simple access to their complex data. We provide total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed and bring enhanced access flow to data within the system.

Chris adds: 
Often companies are hesitant to migrate completely to cloud deployments due to security, performance disruption and accessibility. This includes migrating to the new SAP S/4HANA platform. The BOHH/Approyo partnership is reducing these setbacks.

Simon concludes:
By partnering together, Approyo and BOHH Labs can address customer demands and focus on what our enterprise, integrator and reseller customers need to secure access to their business-critical applications and data in the cloud with minimal disruption. The joint solution between Approyo and BOHH Labs is addressing the challenges enterprises face migrating to the cloud and enables SAP customers to leverage the analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, while gaining a secure method to easily access all enterprise systems to quickly find, search and unlock the value of all their data.

Why Data Access is the Heart of a Competitive Business

- Alan Jamieson, VP of Business Development at BOHH Labs

Businesses are evolving and starting to quickly realize that the data they retain has value to the company, but only if they can leverage it.  In fact, by 2020, some global analysts predict that data will be listed as a company asset, so it has significant monetary value. 

Some businesses already have a data-driven strategy that leverages its rich customer data assets to look for new revenues streams, business opportunities or use its machine performance data to improve efficiency through fewer machine breakdowns or to ensure that production is at its highest level that is already giving them competitive advantage.

Let’s reflect on Fortune 1000 companies over the last decade. Globally, our traditional Fortune 1000 companies are changing, and a significant percentage have fallen off the global stock markets or ceased trading, due to competition from newer entrants.  New online banks have set up business and are winning business from global banking organizations, as they offer more cost-effective services and are better able to understand their customers. New banking companies are looking for customers to use them for multiple services and customers, especially the younger generation, who expect more convenient and real-time 24-7 answers. Why does this matter?  Customer experience is a key business matrix. How customers interact and access their data is important for all parties and traditional banks are not always of the same thinking, or importantly, don’t have the technical systems to know their customer.  Additionally, newly formed companies don’t have legacy infrastructure to consider and are often more agile in their approach.

The greater knowledge businesses have access to through real-time interactions and many years of customer engagement, the greater analytical visibility they can gain on their customer or business operations, which helps make informed decisions on how you can extend or develop that relationship through new services and products.

It’s clear our global use of digital technologies, both in our consumer and work lives, is helping companies get more data on customers/users and their behaviors. The business world is starting to analyze those large volumes of data to drive greater customer and business insight. However, in our increasingly connected world, the variety of data – compliant, sensitive and confidential, plus the volume of data that is being produced, available, and perhaps more importantly, collected, is impacting and challenging many global companies. Data breaches are still occurring on a frequent basis and are a key security consideration in how data is accessed and protected today.

To handle today’s influx of structured and unstructured data, businesses use real-time data warehouses and often archive or store data over 12 months old to reduce its storage or operational costs. While data volumes are growing annually, the overall mix of data types creates the biggest challenge. How do you ensure that authorized users can access sensitive information like pricing, compliant data like Personal Identify Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI) and confidential corporate data, but other business users can do analytics on the overall dataset without seeing the protected data?

BOHH Labs has developed a solution that enables businesses to keep data access at the heart of driving competitive business with our Secure Data as a Service acting as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data, enabling total security on all your stored data. This helps to protect only the compliant or sensitive data fields that can only be accessed by specific users, while importantly enabling a wider business community of users to access the data for analytical purposes.  Making decisions using greater sets of data, helps to make more informed decisions through analytics. Secondly, as our service includes a secure conversational bot, we help companies who have an interest in customer self-service initiatives. Customers securely access data and authenticate through existing applications to access their specific information using voice as opposed to a keyboard, which improves user’s experience, customer services and drive competitive advantage.