Written by Jennifer Deutsch, Chief Marketing Officer and STEM Lead at Park Place Technologies.

The announcement from Mattel, the makers of ‘Barbie’, that they have recently launched ‘Vaccinologist Barbie’ modelled in the likeness of Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert, co-creator of the world’s most distributed Covid-19 vaccine, AstraZeneca, stirred STEM followers to consider the massive strides that the Barbie doll persona has undergone in six decades. An influential and formative part of girls’ play times across the world, many of the most popular original Barbies were accompanied with stereotyped female-facing job roles –such as Cabin Crew Barbie or Secretary Barbie. In reality, Barbie has had over 200 careers since the Teenage Fashion Model launched in 1959. After the first glamourous teen doll launch, the makers quickly developed new Barbie designs that were synonymous with aspirational ambitions of the day. In the 1960s, Astronaut Barbie arrived four years before man stepped on the moon. In the 1980s, she became a CEO with Day to Night Barbie at a time when few women held places in the boardroom, and in the 1990’s she ran as Presidential Candidate Barbie before female candidates had ever made it to the US ballot. While we are yet to see a female US President, Barbie’s career choices certainly seem to be forerunners in shaping the changing the workplace.

So, what of her STEM ambitions? While Barbie already held a career as a Computer Engineer as voted by an online poll in 2010, it wasn’t until very recently that successful STEM aspirational models have made regular appearances into the range. The latest dolls are modelled on female trailblazers who have used their STEM skills to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. Mattel states that it hopes that introduction of their Dame Sarah Gilbert doll will inspire little girls to pursue careers they had previously never heard of, with Gilbert herself noting, “I’m passionate about inspiring the next generation of girls into STEM careers and hope that children who see my Barbie will realise how vital careers in science are to help the world around us.”¹

But does the creation of a doll in the likeness of Gilbert – and in fact of five other women working in STEM areas (one of which created a reusable gown for frontline Covid-19 staff) – really set the scene to encourage more girls to take STEM subjects and careers at advanced levels? To understand the likely impact of the new dolls, you first have to acknowledge the extraordinary accomplishment of Gilbert herself, who, within the space of two weeks, led the team that designed the vaccine producing 2 billion vaccines worldwide in 2021 alone. The impact of the vaccine, and Dame Sarah, will be forever etched in history, in the same way that children learn of Marie Curie’s advances in finding treatments to cancer. While it has to be applauded that Mattel have recognised Dame Sarah’s contribution in helping to bring an end to the pandemic, it appears from former Barbie doll launches that the ripple effect takes around ten years before the inspired vaccinologists of tomorrow will take off for UK universities.

However, the future is encouraging for the latest female STEM intake cohort into UK universities as more girls have selected STEM subjects at Advanced levels. Between 2011 and 2020, the number of women accepted onto full-time STEM undergraduate courses increased by 50.1%, taking females proportionally to 41.4% of STEM undergraduates. Perhaps playing with Computer Engineer Barbie or Robotics Engineer Barbie in the twenty tens decade was an influencing sub conscious forerunner for their final university choices?

In the specialist field of vaccinology, over ten women globally – including Gilbert – are also noted as being instrumental in the progress we see today fighting Covid-19. Often, they are successfully combining careers with motherhood and that’s also important if we are to move away from the motherhood vs career conundrum. It’s heavily documented that Dame Sarah is a mother of triplets who themselves participated in trials.

So just as Surgeon Barbie paved the way as one of the first female consultants in the operating theatre in the 70’s, we need to continue the encouragement of increased diversity in the workplace. And that message starts at pre-school play. STEM females and Barbies are proud and proven to be solving the most pressing issues of the day.

About the author

Jennifer Deutsch is the CMO and STEM Lead at Park Place Technologies, a committed STEM employer and advocate organization. Park Place partners with IWIsh in Ireland to advance STEM efforts in that country through internships, laptop donations and a twin schools program.

References

¹The Guardian Newspaper. 4 August 2021: Vaccinologist Barbie: Prof Sarah Gilbert honoured with a doll.

A COASTAL resort town was alive with the sound of music and glee on Monday as hundreds of holidaymakers gathered for the second – and last – event of the season.

Party in the Park, a one-of-a kind event held at Lyons Robin Hood Holiday Park, in Rhyl, saw tourists and holiday homeowners alike celebrating the end of Wales’s lockdown restrictions, as well as the beautiful weather that blessed the coast this bank holiday weekend.

Crowds gathered at the popular park, which is nearing it’s 100^th year anniversary, to watch the exclusive live entertainment, guest acts, and Robin Hood Ranger shows that were put on courtesy of the family-run business.

This free event, which included stilt walkers, food and drink, face painting, and a bouncy castle, as well as tribute acts by Olly Murrs and Dua Lipa, was the Lyons’ group’s way of bringing some fun and excitement to the coast.

Event organiser and entertainment manager at Lyons Holiday Parks, Martin Mugglestone, said his main intention was to “give people something to smile about” and to “bring a taste of Glastonbury to North Wales” in light of festivals being cancelled for a second year due to the pandemic.

He said: “Seeing the kids enjoying themselves outdoors all day, being able to run around again without a care in the world, was absolutely brilliant. So much work went into the organisation of Party in the Park, and it’s really paid off – despite the uncertainty around restrictions easing, and the weather of course!

“It’s also truly demonstrated the value of our brilliant Robin Hood Rangers, Jayd, Jenna, Hannah, Emma, Craig and Lewis, who are again doing what they were born to do – but were deprived of during lockdown with restrictions in entertainment and live events.

“The fact we were able to have hundreds of people coming together, dancing, singing, and enjoying the food and drink put on by the wonderful food and beverage team at Lyons, is just incredible. Party in the Park was a true celebration of people and connections, and we’re so glad so many people got to enjoy it for free while visiting Denbighshire.”

Joseph Lyons Mound, company director, said: “As a leading holiday park, who have over 100 years in helping bring holidaymaker’s dreams to life, we naturally have extremely high standards when it comes to guest experience, our types of entertainment, and what it is that will bring joy to families visiting North Wales. This event definitely had that extra bit of magic – and a huge thank you to the wonderful team at Lyons Robin Hood who went above and beyond to help make our second Party in the Park extra special.”

Party in the Park will be back with a bang next summer, so be sure to follow the group on Facebook to stay in the loop about how to get free tickets to this exclusive event!

Funds Europe, the business strategy magazine for Europe’s asset management professionals, has launched FundsTech – a new online magazine and events business focused on technology solutions for the fast evolving European funds technology industry, reflecting the growing interest in this sector.

FundsTech gives readers a complete 360-degree end to end view of the market, covering everything from strategy, digital innovation, research, news, trends, thought leadership, to commentary and regulatory issues.

Aimed at asset managers, pension funds, insurance companies, wealth managers, fund managers, and providers of asset services, including custodians of funds, lawyers, and brokers, FundsTech was created in response to growing demand for detailed analysis and thought leadership on the technologies now transforming the world of asset management.

FundsTech will be first with new technology research. For example, to mark its launch, it has published a new research report, ‘Future of Distribution’ from Funds Europe and technology provider Calastone, which highlights how cryptocurrencies are increasingly impacting asset management.

90% of the 96 fund management professionals surveyed indicated cryptocurrencies would form a larger part of their product ranges in the future – up from 9% now. The survey also highlighted that ‘digital’ will be the main factor affecting distribution in the coming years and 85% said ‘technology platforms’ will be a distribution channel they will target.

Nick Fitzpatrick, Group Editor of Funds Europe and FundsTech says, “The adoption of technology in the fund management industry was almost ‘glacial’ in the past. However, in the past two years there’s been an explosion of technology solutions that are reshaping the fund management industry. It’s an evolving and dynamic growth area, which is why we launched FundsTech.”

David Wright, Co-Publisher and Business Development Director, Funds Europe and FundsTech said, “FundsTech is dedicated to this exciting space, bringing all the latest insights, trends and overviews of the industry together in one place. We aim to help our readers understand which technologies can improve how they work, lower their costs, so they can make the best decisions for their business and improve their investment outcomes.”

Along with interviews and profiles, roundtable, and panel discussions – FundsTech includes 20 different channels covering key subjects such as Digital Assets, Cryptocurrency, Tokenisation, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain/DLT, Robo-Advisors and Open Finance.

FundsTech also runs sponsored events and roundtables and offers profile opportunities. Its current sponsors are Oracle, Calastone, Metrosoft, Amundi Technology and Milestone but they are keen to hear from other companies interested in sponsorship.

For more information visit: www.fundstech.com

A BUSINESSMAN from Hillingdon is celebrating the success of his cleaning product company.

Christopher Foster launched his business, SPH2ONGE in 2017 after struggling to find a sufficient product to help him absorb the water from defrosting his freezer.

He found the ideal material – an ultra-absorbent sponge, which wasn’t yet on the market – and after finishing up with the freezer, ordered 1,000 and set up the business to make a bit of extra cash and have fun on the side of his job as an estate agent.

After going months without making many sales, Christopher decided to start giving some away for free and went from selling one sponge a week, to shipping off six or seven black sacks full of orders weekly and by 2019 he quit his job and started working full time on the business.

Although the 36-year-old still works from his flat in Hillingdon, the business runs out of a factory in Kettering, with a second factory opening in Telford soon.

The products are stocked in stores across the country, including Robert Dyas, The Range and Matalan.

It has also expanded into the US, with a centre in California serving its American customers.

Christopher said: ‘I was earning around £2,000 a month when I decided to quit my job, which I thought at the time was a place I would stay at and be comfortable. I was sneaking off on my lunch break at work to take black sacks to the post office and I knew that it was time to do it full time. I never imagined that I’d be making the number of sales that I am now.’

The company turns over seven figures a year with lowest-priced product being £1.75 and highest being £7.99.

The products have been used and loved by many celebrities, including cleaning and household faces, Mrs Hinch and Lindsay Queen of Clean, who frequently post about the products on their Instagram, as well as The Only Way of Essex’s Amy Childs, ITV’s Sally Morgan and reality star Jake Quickenden.

Christopher hopes to inspire others to follow suit and consider starting their own brands, even on a low budget.

He said: ‘I think people are wary of starting a business because they think they need to have loads of money or qualifications behind them, but it isn’t the case. I started out on a low budget and with no qualifications at all. By no means do I have a business degree or anything – I failed my exams as a kid. I just had the drive to do it and it worked for me so it can work for anyone.’

As a rise in variants spurs new uncertainties around the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses around the globe are tasked with developing a long-term plan and work model, whether in-person, remote or hybrid, that meets the needs of employees and the business. Amid this transition, Entrust, a global leader in trusted identity, payments and data protection, set out to uncover what is needed to secure the world’s hybrid workplaces in its new data study, “Securing the New Hybrid Workplace.”

Entrust surveyed 1,500 business leaders and 1,500 general employees from 10 countries to better understand how workers from the manager level to the C-suite are preparing for a new hybrid workplace. Key findings include:

• Hybrid is here to stay, but security concerns are high: The overwhelming majority of respondent companies are moving to a long-term hybrid workplace approach. In fact, 80% of leaders and 75% of employees said their company is currently using a hybrid model or is fully remote and considering a hybrid work model. But, 54% of employees reported up to six instances of lost productivity due to network access issues and leaders cite home internet security (21%) and leakage of sensitive company data (20%) among their top security challenges.

• Visitor management is an in-office priority: Having a detailed record of who has been in and out of a company’s office is a larger priority in 2021. 96% of business leaders and 93% of employees agree that it is important for their company to have a system in place that logs and tracks visitors who enter and exit the building when employees work in the office.
• Home office data security presents new challenges: Businesses need to change their data security approach now that employees are more decentralized than ever before. However, while data security is a priority for leaders with 81% saying their company has offered employees training on it, only 61% of employees said their company offers this training, indicating a communication gap.

“With the uncertainties of the last year and a half, many organizations are well-adapted to remote work. With leaders planning the future state of their workplace models, we wanted to ask how they are adapting security and identity for the hybrid workplace: how are leaders and employees prepared to protect data and sensitive information? How will office security evolve? Will adapting to hybrid workplaces multiply vulnerabilities…or will enterprises choose smart security strategies to enable employees wherever they work?” said Anudeep Parhar, Chief Information Officer at Entrust. “With the study overwhelmingly indicating the desire of 91% of employees to work in a hybrid model moving forward, this data study provides businesses insight about how to democratize work from anywhere and incorporate security practices into their hybrid approach by working with companies like Entrust to implement solutions such as passwordless and biometric authentication, mobile identity verification and more.”

Perfecting the hybrid work model

There is no question employers are leaning into a clear desire among employees for hybrid work options, with 68% saying they are considering hiring talent that resides in geographically diverse locations. For employers following this trend and hiring employees in a new, hybrid environment, there are several ways to improve and secure the onboarding process.

The study found business leaders are improving training methods (53%), rolling out new or improved collaboration tools (47%) and implementing mobile ID issuance for remote employees. Furthermore, leaders are taking steps to maintain internal security as they incorporate a hybrid model, with 51% rolling out one-time password technology, 40% utilizing biometric authentication and 36% using mobile identity verification, citing the desire to stay ahead of hackers and protect their internal data.

Maintaining and enhancing security in the office environment

As companies start bringing workers back to the office, the ongoing pandemic raises the stakes of physical security to include health, safety and infosecurity. For example, companies must consider best practices when they begin to open their doors to visitors outside their internal workforce once more. Entrust found support for organizational visitor management is overwhelming, with 96% of business leaders and 93% of employees agreeing that it is important for their company to have a system in place that logs and tracks visitors who enter and exit the building when employees work in the office.

With this in mind, companies will begin paying more attention to who’s going in and out of the office building. Reasons for this enhanced scrutiny of visitors is primarily due to caution surrounding COVID-19, with 83% of leaders and 84% of employees citing the risk of spreading COVID-19 as the top reason it is important to have a system in place that manages and tracks guests. Other reasons included protecting confidential information (65% of leaders and 55% of employees) and avoiding physical harm to employees (61% of leaders and 62% of employees).

Merging data security with work from home standards

Business leaders also agree that it is imperative to consider the intersection of data security and work from home standards. Fortunately, it appears that the introduction of hybrid work has resulted in a step in the right direction for workplace data protection. In fact, while 81% of leaders said their company has offered employees training on data security, the overwhelming majority (86%) said it was offered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating a trend towards enhanced data security.

Unfortunately, while leaders are offering this training, only 61% of employees said their company offers this training, indicating a communication gap between leadership and their employees. By communicating these trainings to employees, leaders can help reduce the risk of security threats including phishing and ransomware attacks.

A global view

Naturally, while the Securing the New Hybrid Workplace data study takes a holistic look at the top trends of hybrid work, some individual countries presented data that is particularly intriguing. Some top findings of key international trends and takeaways include:

• 65% of employers in Japan say they have offered data security training for the hybrid work model, but only 36% of employees agree, indicating a potential gap in communication or training execution.
• Businesses in Saudi Arabia (89%) and the United Arab Emirates (87%) are by far the most willing to consider hiring talent that resides anywhere in the world. Businesses in the United States and Singapore are the next most likely to hire talent anywhere in the world, both with 73% of leaders indicating they would be willing to hire global talent.
• Businesses in Indonesia are particularly likely to implement cutting-edge security technologies into their business practices, with 75% of employers saying they have utilized one-time passwords and 69% indicating they utilize biometric authentication.
• Of the countries surveyed, respondents from Germany indicated the lowest productivity impact due to network access or login delays with 49% reporting that they have never had an issue, and 27% reporting only 1-3 incidents. By comparison, in the United Kingdom, only 25% reported no issues, with 34% reporting 1-3 incidents.

Securing the New Hybrid Workplace is a study of 1,500 business leaders and 1,500 employees in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. The data was gathered and distributed by Entrust in 2021. The study examines new data surrounding hot topics including best practices for hybrid work, office visitor management systems and how hybrid work affects workplace security. To learn more about the Securing the New Hybrid Workplace data study, download the first of three reports and access more content and insights, visit www.entrust.com/lp/en/securing-the-new-hybrid-workplace.

About Entrust Corporation

Entrust keeps the world moving safely by enabling trusted identities, payments and data protection. Today more than ever, people demand seamless, secure experiences, whether they’re crossing borders, making a purchase, accessing e-government services or logging into corporate networks. Entrust offers an unmatched breadth of digital security and credential issuance solutions at the very heart of all these interactions. With more than 2,500 colleagues, a network of global partners, and customers in over 150 countries, it’s no wonder the world’s most entrusted organizations trust us. For more information, visit www.entrust.com.

With recent research^[1] showing a 7.9% increase from 2019 to 2020 in adults expecting to create a new business in the next three years, Innovate UK, which runs the Young Innovators Awards, has teamed up with the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) to explore the importance of role models in business and learn which role models have inspired the current generation of business leaders and innovators.

This new research^[2] by Innovate UK and FSB finds that 75% of entrepreneurs grew up with dynamic role models, yet 78% of female business owners didn’t see role models the same gender as them, and over half (54%) of people from ethnic minorities didn’t have role models the same ethnicity as them.

Just under a third (29%) of small business owners said that not having relatable role models meant their entrepreneurial journey has been slower (16%) or they are not as successful as they feel they could have been (13%). However, 12% said that not having relatable role models actually motivated them more.

While 44% of SME business owners had grown up with an entrepreneurial family member, only 11% cited a relative as the most significant role model in influencing their business decisions. This suggests a connection between the two life choices, even if it is often unconscious. With 76% of business owners saying a role model helps entrepreneurs build successful businesses, rising to 81% when looking at female leaders, its clear more work needs to be done to raise the profile of a diverse range of business owners to inspire the next generation.

Emily Nott, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Innovate UK says:

“One of the themes that often comes through when talking to our young innovators is about the importance – and often the absence – of relatable role models. So many female leaders think role models are important, yet our research found over two thirds did not see female business role-models when growing up. It’s great that people can find inspiration in other genders and ethnicities, but still raises concerns that people can’t find relatable role-models – and the hidden impact this could be having on innovation in the UK. This makes the visibility of diverse role models even more important.”

The Young Innovators Awards recognise young people from across the UK with great business ideas who have the potential to become successful entrepreneurs and future leaders in innovation. Innovate UK understands the impact of role models – not only do the winners benefit from a £5,000 grant, a year’s living allowance, and one-on-one business coaching, but Innovate UK also runs a campaign to raise the profile of the winners to inspire other young people into innovation. This year, 49% of the Young Innovators are female; nearly a third are Black, Asian or from an ethnic minority background; 17% have a disability and the projects cover all regions across the UK.

There’s also support for those looking to develop their business idea through member organisations such as FSB. SME owners said the key benefits of joining such organisations were networking/mentor opportunities (41%), a sense of belonging/community (23%) and Access to legal/HR/finance advice (16%).

FSB National Chair, Mike Cherry, says: “Inspiring young people to set up their own business is crucial to maintaining an innovative, dynamic, and prosperous economy long into the future. As this research suggests, relatable role models have an important part to play in ensuring that the dream of starting a business is shared by young people in every part of the UK and from a fully diverse range of backgrounds. Without that, the UK will be failing to harness potential entrepreneurial talent, and in turn missing out on future jobs, growth and creative ideas.”

Details on our latest Young Innovators can found here. If you’re an inspiring young innovator, check out how Innovate UK could support you here: https://ktn-uk.org/programme/young-innovators/

Written by Adrian Taylor, Vice President, A10 Networks

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of digital resiliency in the modern era. With 37% of U.K. employees working from home, and a shift online for consumer activities from banking and retail and media, to entertainment and healthcare, ensuring application performance and application availability became a matter of survival for most companies. Whether people are working or going about their personal lives, they expect a high-quality user experience for the applications they use—every time, with no excuses—with cybersecurity they can count on to protect customer data and privacy. These demands have made the application delivery controller (ADC) one of the most important components of modern digital infrastructure.

At the same time, maintaining application performance and application availability for existing resources isn’t enough to guarantee survival. In today’s digital business environment, you have to stay agile and innovative to compete, grow, and thrive. In fact, even facing an uncertain economic outlook over the past year, a full 65% of businesses have or plan to invest in digital transformation spending during the pandemic. That puts DevOps front-and-centre in digital business strategy as companies seek simple, streamlined ways to develop, deploy, change, and manage applications. The results speak for themselves: companies that use DevOps achieve 46x more software deployments and 440x faster lead time for changes. Here again, the ADC has a critical role to play in enabling the full speed and agility DevOps makes possible.

Of course, simply deploying ADCs isn’t a solution in and of itself; meeting these requirements depends on having the right application delivery controller capabilities and deploying them in the right way. Here are a few things to consider, to ensure that your application delivery infrastructure is meeting the digital transformation needs of your business and customers.

Using ADCs to Ensure Application Performance, Application Availability, and Cybersecurity

Whether it’s customers or employees who are using your applications, the experience you provide has a direct effect on digital business performance. If customers become frustrated or are unable to use your applications or services effectively, they can take their cash—and their loyalty—to a competitor. Without reliable application performance and application availability, your workforce can grind to a halt, sending waves of disruption throughout your business. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute which equates to more than $300,000 an hour.

Your application delivery controller solution can help you maintain a high-quality user experience by enabling a unified approach to managing performance, troubleshooting problems, and optimising traffic across complex environments with holistic visibility into devices, applications, policies, users, and more across data centres and clouds. By gathering and analysing data from across your hybrid infrastructure, you can work proactively to detect anomalies sooner, diagnose problems more accurately, and resolve issues more quickly. Global server load balancing functionality can intelligently guide application traffic to the best available site for each user to ensure the best possible service.

Ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and rapid failover across cloud providers is essential to keeping employees productive and customers satisfied. As part of its global web traffic management capability, your ADCs can assess the health and response time of each site in your environment, then make intelligent adjustments to application traffic to prevent a failed server from affecting users. Similarly, an ADC solution can help you use a public cloud as a backup for your on-premises data centre using global server load balancing to determine when and how to tap into that capacity, then reroute traffic accordingly.

While application performance and application availability are the foundation of user satisfaction and loyalty, a cybersecurity breach can destroy that trust in a flash. As ransomware attacks, DDoS, and other threats grow in sophistication, and enterprise environments become more distributed and dynamic, cybersecurity and compliance become critical challenges. Your ADC solution can provide a unified policy infrastructure across every platform you use, making it easier to provide the same, consistent protection for applications and services wherever they are deployed. By managing authentication consistently across cloud and on-premises platforms, you can support a Zero Trust security model while providing employees with the right level of access for their needs. Protective measures such as security analytics, DDoS protection, web application firewalls (WAF), authentication, modern SSL/TLS encryption standards, and threat intelligence enable a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity for defence in-depth.

Supporting DevOps—While Simplifying Management at Digital Speed

DevOps isn’t just a core methodology for digital transformation—it’s also a set of technical requirements. To enable development and operations teams to collaborate effectively across the software development lifecycle, you need to provide simple, streamlined ways to develop, deploy, change, and manage applications. A standard set of automation tools across platforms can help teams work efficiently, bring new staff up to speed more quickly, and ensure consistent best practices. Real-time continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) visualisation can help teams catch costly errors before applications enter production.

The rapid pace of digital transformation can increase both cost and management complexity. By providing a single point of management across your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environment, with comprehensive visibility and analytics for actionable intelligence, your ADC solution can help your staff use resources more efficiently, make better decisions, avoid errors, and simplify operations.

Written by Chris Martin, Channel Leader for EMEA and APAC, A10 International

2020 was an extraordinary year and, if nothing else, the last 18 months have certainly accentuated the importance of digital resiliency. Now, as we move into a recovery phase post pandemic, our own research, undertaken earlier this year, highlighted that the workforce won’t return to pre-COVID working practices, and that we should expect a hybrid approach to the office environment. The research analysed how senior IT professionals in communication service provider organisations will adapt to a post-COVID-19 world, and the challenges they face with a more distributed workplace. It found that 67% believe their customers will continue to operate with employees working from home even post-pandemic.

Certainly, the consumer shift online is here to stay, whether that be for public services, retail, entertainment, or healthcare. Again, while some will return to shopping on the high street or going into the civic centre to pay their council tax, others will continue to enjoy the convenience that online delivers.

Technology Trends Fuelling Demand

Despite the disruption of the last year and a half, business has continued to evolve, and our channel has continued to grow as a result of five key trends.

The first is the acceleration and proliferation of IoT. In 2020, there was a noticeable shift in the types of businesses adopting IoT, which is now becoming mainstream as enterprises move from experimentation to deployment across global operations.

The second and probably most notable trend is the shift to the cloud as organisations continue their digital transformation journeys. In fact, cloud services spend was already growing much faster than on-premises IT spend at the beginning of 2020, and this momentum has only increased during the pandemic.

Thirdly, 5G deployment and the associated security issues is very much front-of-mind, which was also reflected in our research. When it comes to 5G, just under one-third of respondents (31%) we surveyed stated that maintaining a quality service and avoiding service outages were top security challenges. While 21% said unpredictable subscriber usage with changing patterns on the network was a top challenge. And certainly, we see channel partners helping customers with cloud migration and the adoption of 5G as they address concerns around network security and the current lack of agility and visibility throughout the IT infrastructure.

Overcoming Operational Complexity

 This brings me to the fourth trend which is around operational complexity. As organisations, regions and countries go in and out of lockdown and need to scale up or scale back certain initiatives, it has created significant IT challenges. In today’s digital business environment, you’ve got to stay agile and innovative to compete, grow, and thrive. In fact, even facing an uncertain economic outlook over the past year, 70% of businesses planned to maintain or increase digital transformation spending during the pandemic. As a result, we have seen high demand for solutions like A10 Thunder ADC and Harmony Controller, which empowers businesses to deliver secure application services across traditional data centres, and private, public and hybrid cloud environments. This solution underpins our vision to help businesses become more secure, responsive and agile as they bridge traditional and cloud-based application environments.

Finally, as ransomware attacks, DDoS, and other threats grow in sophistication, and enterprise environments become more distributed and dynamic, cyber security and compliance become critical challenges. Again, our research showed how important it is for organisations to protect against such threats. Forty-three percent stated that DDoS protection service for enterprise customers was a top security priority in 2021, while 39% of respondents said ransomware protection services for enterprise customers was their highest priority.

Focused Programmes that Support the Channel

All these trends have created demand for our products and services and have remained focus areas for both A10 Networks and our channel partners. To address these trends, we introduced five key channel initiatives at the start of 2021 in order to focus support and resources in these key areas:

• Deal registration is paramount; we have had deal registration incentives running since the beginning of the year to ensure partners register leads in line with our areas of focus and business growth.
• Distribution underpins our channel strategy and we have continued to recruit new partners across the region to ensure that we are well represented in all territories.
• Building our ecosystem and partner network is key to our ongoing success. Our focus here is on partnering with players who are strong in key verticals and can bring talent and expertise to our customers.
• Partner enablement: we launched a new technical ambassador programme, through which our technical team are mentoring our partner’s technical teams.
• Finally, the Lead the Way initiative, which utilises our partner network to develop leads and marketing initiatives via our partner portal.

With channel front and centre to all our programme activities, we renamed our partner tiering model to: Member, Advanced and Elite, and we launched our Elevate to Elite programme designed to help accelerate our partners’ growth and enable them to fast track through the various partner levels.

Building a Bigger Footprint

Our channel strategy encompasses APAC, EMEA and South Asia and provides us a unique perspective across a large segment. This allows us to consolidate and coordinate our channel strategy to an ever-greater degree while also allowing for flexibility to manage customer and channel needs across individual countries and regions. But, above all, we appreciate that some countries will be emerging at a different pace to others, as lockdowns and restrictions are enforced and relaxed. Therefore, our overriding priority is the security and safety of our partners and customers around the world; we’re committed to working with them to achieve this.