 Okay guys, you can hear me well. You can see the background. Yeah, I will meet myself and stop the video. So, Mohammad, what is the agenda? There is someone who is introducing for the first 20 minutes. Is that right? Yes, I will be introducing at the beginning. Then you will start the session. Yes. After that there will be a Q&A. Later on Mr. Faraz will start the second session and there will be also Q&A after the second session. And that's it. This is the agenda. That sounds good. I will kind of meet myself, stop the video. That is no equal, etc. And then I will turn back. I mean, I will be on the line. Okay, perfect. Hello, good morning. I cannot hear you. Yeah, I can hear you. Hi, Dana. Hi, Faraz. Mohammad, can you guys see me clearly also? Yes, can you just put it to the left, please? Are we, am I swapping with Mayank? Are you swapping with what? With Mayank. Yes, we'll start with Mayank and the second session will be presenting by you. Sounds good. It's 10 o'clock, so we'll just wait for five minutes to give time for more attendees to join. Mayank, are you there? Hey Mohammad, how are you doing? I think the mass may not be necessary, right? Okay, we'll start in one minute. Hello, everyone. I would like to welcome you to the digital forum, digitizing value of how to leverage digital transformation to drive more value for your SMB, organized by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in collaboration with BWC Middle East. My name is Mohammad Al-Asri and I'm leading the digital transformation program for the SMEs at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. The development of SMEs and their assistance in digital transformation is certainly an essential element in contributing to the knowledge economy and achieving Qatar's national vision to 2030. And the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology is committed to achieve the goals of this vision. The DTC program encourages SMEs to start using information technology and raise awareness of the benefits of using modern technology in the business sector, which contributes to digital transformation and building the desired future for Qatar from several projects, one of which is the digital transformation program for SMEs. We are glad to mention that from the beginning of the program in 2017 till date, more than 3,000 small and medium-sized companies have participated and over 10,000 digitized transform through over 300 workshops. Our forum today will present the framework of success from two topics that every business needs to take into consideration in the digital transformation journey. The first topic will be workforce and workplace in a post-pandemic world and the second one will be cloud acceleration for SMEs. It's my pleasure to introduce Mr. Maiang Saxena, director consulting of BWC, who will be presenting a deep dive on the workforce of the future for SMEs in Qatar. Mr. Maiang, you can start your presentation. Thanks, Mohamed. Let me kind of start by doing a quick sound check. You can hear me still okay, right? Am I audible? Is this fine? I'll assume. Yeah, we can hear your mind. Okay, thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to be presenting to you the topic of workforce and workplace in the post-pandemic world. I've been researching this topic for around past 15 years now trying to understand what has been changing in our work, the nature of work, the nature of our workforce and the nature of our workplace. I remember when I started researching this topic around 15 years back, the millennials were just joining the workforce and we did not know how to address the needs of millennials in the workforce. And you talk about millennials and people would say, well, we don't understand them. And now in 2021, when I talk about me not being millennial, people say, well, we don't understand you anymore. So the work and workforce has changed quite considerably over the past 15 years of me doing this research. However, in the past couple of years due to the pandemic, this disruption has been at a phase that we have not seen in many years before that. So me along with a set of consultants and research in PwC, we took it upon ourselves to understand what's really changing now. When we talk about the work, when we talk about our workforce, when we talk about our workplace and we publish a lot of our findings globally including in Qatar and the region. And we realize it really important for us to reach out to our communities and can share with them our research and our experience. And this is something which I wanted to do over the next 40 minutes or so. So I'll be sharing my screen and we will be going through, we'll really start with the objective of this master class. And then we will talk a bit more about some of the topics as well. Great. So I'm sure that you can see my screen right now. Yes, we can. Great. So during the next 40 minutes, I'll be sharing some of our research which is on the topic of work, workforce and the workplace. At the same time, we will also be having the format that we'll be taking will be a set of questions. We'll be kind of tell you about how you can log in and you can respond to some of the questions as well. So it's really important for us for you as much as you can listen to me as consultants and researchers. We will also give you an opportunity of sharing your thoughts with the audience. So I'll talk about that in a minute about how you can log on to a questionnaire platform and answer some of the questions. And hopefully through a combination of your own reflections on some of these topics along with the research findings that we'll be sharing with you, it will give you a chance to really reflect on what needs to change in your respective organization in terms of the workforce and in terms of the workplace. So the format that we're taking will be some of the topics. We will be going through a questionnaire platform and then we'll be sharing with you some of the corresponding research that we have published on this topic. So we'll be starting the topic with the topic of work and what is changing in the arena of the work. But before we do that, we want to start with doing a bit of a pulse check in the room. And this is really a pulse check of what is a sentiment about the economy. I think that's really important to kind of start with that because we will just get to understand the temperature of the room and what are you guys thinking in terms of where the economy is heading. And this will also be almost a question to help us understand what the platform is working or not. And everything is good from a technology standpoint. So, look, let me tell you about how you can log on to the platform. Can you see my screen and you can see that there is a question on the screen? Do you see that? Yes. Okay, so what I encourage you to do is you can use whatever device you have. You can have a mobile phone or you may have a tablet or you may have a laptop doesn't really matter. You can see if you can log on to www.mentai.com and can you enter the code which is on the top, right? It should be fairly straightforward. You don't have a login. You can just log on and you can use the code. And if you see the questionnaire. Can you share the website or the link for the questionnaire, please? I can definitely do that. I also want to check whether you can see it on my screen because you should be able to see it on my screen as well on the top. Do you see that on the top of the screen which is www.mentai.com? You can just go to the second slide. I think you have it on the second slide because now the slide which you open does not have any link or website. Okay, so you don't see it on the, do you see the question on my slide? What do you see? Do you believe the global economy growth will improve? Correct. On the top of that, do you see a website address on the top of this slide? Otherwise, I don't mind. I just kind of put it down for you. Now do you see the website and the code on the screen now? Yes, now we can see it. Okay, so we will be kind of really using the same site for, there are some six questions that will be answering during the course of this conversation. And I will give you some time to properly log in. Once you log in, if Muhammad you can also confirm that you see the question on your device. Oh yeah. Right, so you must be announcing this question. Do you believe the global economy growth will improve? This is the question. That's right. I will give everybody maybe a minute to answer, also give you kind of a minute to answer because I'm sure some of you will be, the first question always takes a bit longer to answer. And so I'll give you a minute or so and then we will, for the remaining question, we'll just take a minute. I think it will be quite straightforward, quite simple. But for this question in particular, we'll maybe take a question. Some of this research is really, really important for us. I mean, as you are really answering some of these questions, it really helps us understand the pulse of the SMB sector in Qatar and compare it with really similar responses that we have gathered globally on some of these questions. And it's good to kind of see what I'm seeing on the screen right now, which is 62% of you. It's likely reducing now, 57% of you will see this economic growth improving. 21% saying that this stays the same and 21% saying it's going to decline. In the next year, I must say that, you know, as much as we see a degree of optimism among the SMB sector in Qatar, these sentiments are, when we ask the question globally, we get a more optimistic view. And one of the reasons that we get much more optimistic view is that I think there is generally a view that vaccine has been more or less more successful than what was anticipated maybe a year back. And a lot of the positivity, a lot of optimism is also really about how well the organizations have been able to transform their workplace. This was not something that we were anticipating and how the organizations have been able to manage the disruption, how much organizations have been able to invest in the new skills and kind of reach out and keep the employees engaged. So it's good to see 57% improvement, 60% positivity at the same time when I compare this to the global organizations. What we really see here is a more positive view where a lot more organizations globally are talking about really a string of optimism compared to what we were observing in the past three years or so. And I think it's really important to kind of lay this context because we cannot be positive and the people who are here who could not have been positive if we were not able to kind of handle the question of, address the question of workforce in the workplace. I just want to check when a bit earlier you could see the results, right, as I could see, or you could not. I just want to do a bit of check. So I'll just go back to the screen that I was sharing earlier. I just want to make sure that you can see the results on the screen right now. This is the result about check, right? Correct. And you see 60% positive. Do you see a pie chart on the screen? No, there is no 60% actually. Not the mentee, Mayank. We can't see mentee. Oh, you can't see my screen right now. No, not mentee. We can see the slide deck with the CO survey results. Oh, okay. I see. I will, look, I think it's just maybe how we are sharing our screen. Let me just try to go back to the Zoom and share mine. Can you see the screen right now? Yes, there is a 60% in rule. Okay, so this was the result of the survey that we just did right now, right? Hopefully in the next five or 10 minutes I'll understand Zoom a bit better as well. So I was thinking that maybe you can see my screen as I'm seeing my screen. So what we see here is 60%. This is the response of the team that is, of our colleagues who have joined this session. And I think that 60% while this is really positive, globally we see a more positive result, right? At the same time, I think it's also good to kind of address that 60% which is positive is definitely I'm sure going to be a positive trend over the past couple of years. And the reason that we see a positive trend in the sentiment of our participants today is because how well we have been able to address the questions about the work, how well we have been able to address the question of our workforce needs over a period of time. I will now go back and try to kind of share my presentation and I will try to move back and forth between the presentation and the website because that's the format that we're taking. In case we face any challenges with technology, Mohammad and Dana just guide me in case you don't see the screen in that fact. So hopefully you can see the presentation right now. Yes. Great. So we talked about this slide a bit earlier as well. The overall sentiment when it comes to global CEOs has been very positive and this has been positive due to really how well the organizations have been able to address the challenges. Work and workplace. I will move to the topic of work. Where we look at how the work has been disrupted, the nature of work has been disrupted. Due to the latest technologies coming into picture. And I would like to understand from you in terms of how this corresponds to your SMB sector. So how does, how is the work, the nature of work changed in your respective organizations. And I, the question that we are really asking here is what are the technologies that are have disrupted your work and then we'll begin sharing the findings from the similar survey that we conducted in Qatar a bit earlier as well. I will now move back to the questionnaire and so that you'll be able to see it on your device as well. So in this particular question that we are asking you about, we have got some of the technologies that I mentioned over here. And we want to understand that from an SMB sector in Qatar, what are these technologies that have disrupted your organization. Hopefully you can see my screen. Hopefully you can see the same question on your devices would like to get your response about the technologies that have disrupted your organization. And this time around I can understand that you can see the results as well as appearing on the screen. Ten more seconds and then we'll look at how people responded earlier. It's very interesting to see cloud computing being, it's very interesting to see cloud computing being acknowledged as the most disruptive technology. And I think that should come a very good segue into the sessions which we're asked to be conducting a bit later as well. And there has been so much of instances in cloud computing in the state of Qatar. I'm not really surprised at all to see cloud being considered as one of the most disruptive technologies among the SMB sector as well, as much as this is for really any other entity instead of Qatar. Great. Look, this is very helpful to see the response of you looking at cloud computing and machine learning and kind of things. And this has really disrupted the way we define work, the way we define skills, the way we define our workplace. This is also quite consistent by the way with a lot of research that you've conducted in this area over the past few months and others in the state of Qatar globally as well. And I'll be kind of sharing with you and comparing it with what we saw a bit earlier. Now, this is what the response that you see has been research that we did in state of Qatar. There were around 800 respondents in state of Qatar. And you see that cloud computing, of course, has been there at the same time. Machine learning internet of things has been quite prominent. And I think the key message that we got from our engagement with various entities instead of Qatar is that how the digital channels are disrupting work. So now digital channels are being more and more, not just for people to work remotely, but also in terms of how do you sell, how do you shop. And that is causing disruption in terms of how we define work. Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence is causing a lot of disruption. You know, the things that how you can harness the power of data and analytics is something which has changed quite considerably the required skill sets and how we perform our work. And then there are basically what we call as four IR technologies, which also came on, including Internet of Think, which came across quite consistently in our discussion with various software clients in the state of Qatar. So it's good to see a similar, similar themes being echoed. And I am sure that you'll be kind of thinking about how the definition of work has been changing in your respective workplaces because of disruption caused by technologies. I will kind of skip this question. Also, I'm just keeping a bit of a check on the time. And I'll go to a slightly more interesting topic, which is a topic of workforce. I think all of us can acknowledge that the work is changing quite a bit. It has changed quite considerably in the past couple of years, but what has been the impact on the skills and what has been the impact on the workforce is something which is, I suppose, a slightly more provocative or something that we try to get our heads around. And what I'll do is I will be asking you a question about your employee sentiment. I think it's really important to understand the sentiment of the employees. What are they feeling and what are their hopes and fear? It's really important to get a gauge on that and this is something which some of the organization do better than others. And I'll really appreciate if we again go back to the mentee and we try to answer the question about your employee sentiment, how the workforce has been thinking, feeling and what do you think the needs are. I'll go back and share my screen and hopefully you'll be able to see the same on your screen as well. So here we have got the question about your employee sentiment. So we are trying to understand how the workforce is feeling in the state of Qatar, especially in the SMB sector. And you will see four questions on your device where we are asking you about really from your employee perspective. What do you think in terms of technology providing more opportunities than risk? Sentiments about automation putting people job at risk. What is the confidence that your employees can adopt to the new technologies? And what do you think has been the willingness of your employees to give you access to their personal data? I think all of these are really, really important question to understand and really delve into the mood and sentiments of your employees and would like to get your view and then I'll share with you what employees actually think. This is again coming from a very similar survey that we did across the employee population in the state of Qatar. The result that you'll be seeing will be really Qatar results. This is Qatar findings about the workforce in this new work. Maybe I'll give 10 more seconds and you can see the results on your screen as well. So you can continue to see that. I think this is quite interesting what I see on the screen as the results are forming. Technology providing more opportunities than risk is actually quite consistent with what we hear from the employees in the state of Qatar and globally. When you're saying automation is putting many people job at risk and there's almost center of scale sentiment. What we hear from the employees instead of Qatar is actually more pessimistic view in the sense that there is a greater degree of anxiety about people having a degree of insecurity about the job. So generally what we see about the employees and this is something from your point of view when you listen to your employees. You realize that employees are confident about their ability to learn new things. They are confident that technology is providing opportunities. So there is a confidence that we see in the state of Qatar employees who are working with you and similar organizations. But there is a higher perception of the job insecurity. So when I look at this result comparing it to what we listen on the ground. I think something that you may want to be aware of from this masterclass is that there are I think more employees who have concerns about their job than what you perceive from your employees perspective. So if I share with you the result from the global and of course the Qatar work that you've done. You will realize that and we have to share this presentation. I'll be happy to share with you everybody who's attending a lot more research. We are kind of bringing a lot of different research into this conversation and this research is what we call as hopes and fear research. And in Qatar we realize that while the while as you have pointed out technology provides opportunities but in the state of Qatar employees do think that their job is at risk. And I think one of the key themes that should be your kind of take away from this masterclass is that it's really an importance to build a bit more trust in your in your workplace. There is a trust deficit as much as employees are confident about their skill set. So building trust is something really really important for the employees to be more confident about the job security. I will I'll move to the very interesting question about the skill set. No conversation about. There is a. He has a ticket in. I don't have a ticket. Might be you. I know we can maybe hear you. I don't know whether. Okay. So no discussion about the work in the workplace and the employees can be complete without radio conversation about the skills. We are all aware of of how the skills are changing and how those different skills are becoming important. But we always get surprised when we ask this question to to an audience and and ask them about what skills are important. So if you if you don't mind I can switch to to the to the survey you'll be able to see a question on your on your screen. And and we will talk a little bit more about what are the skills that you are prioritizing as an SMB sector. In order to manage the address the new world in the post in the postcode period. Right. So hopefully you can see this question on your screen will would really appreciate you. Get your get your responses. That's the skills that you see here are that typically rate quite high in in the world that we do when we ask this question globally really. And I will really benefit from I'm sure everybody will benefit from looking at the responses of the SMB sector. So this is very interesting what I see on my screen right now I think you can see the results as well Mohammed right on the screen now. With the workforce question what is the new skills in your organization. Yeah. And you can see the results as well. Right. The results. No. Oh you can. Okay. Can you see the results now. It's no we can see the results. Okay. Look so I'm not necessarily aware whether you could see the results earlier or not. Could you see this result as well. Mama can you see another result on my screen right now. What for your employees. Okay. Yeah. There might be some issue in how you see the results. I will just make sure that you know everybody who participated in this in this conversation is able to see the result will be sending this across to you that you have got for your all the results as a ready reference. But here you can see the results now. Right. Mama just confirm it. Look it's very interesting for me to see a digital engagement being a very high high priority skill. And data analysis being a high priority skill. Data analysis as you can imagine rates very high whenever we ask this question as as organizations like SMB sector in in Qatar you know you're looking at what kind of skills that need to be present in the organization in the post COVID world. Data analysis is of course very highly rated. Whether it's SMB or whether it is large large giants. But I'm quite pleased to see digital engagement being very highly rated as a skill set. This is becoming more and more important and I must say that typically in the global survey this does not rate as high as we would expect but it's always pleasant to see. This being rated high by the SMB sector. Data visualization is of course something that kind of rates quite high globally and regionally and communication as well. Right. I think if if we have learned something from the COVID period we have learned how important is to communicate in a hybrid world. And communication has become quite important. It's a skill set because the way we communicate now and and the challenge of communication has become quite quite extensive over a period of time. So it's it's good to see it's good to kind of see our thinking about the about the workforce in terms of the skill sets and also thinking about the workforce in terms of the the challenge and hope and fear of our of our workforce in SMB sector. And I'll be sharing with you the corresponding results from similar survey that we have conducted in instead of. So compared to compared to what you responded, you know data analysis is something which has almost everybody who responds to it. I have a question to various entities in state of Qatar data analysis always comes as high priority skill communication always comes with a high priority skill. What I saw today different in the SMB sector is how much you emphasize on digital engagement. This is this is something that we do not hear that often but but I'm not surprised. I think that's that's quite important skills to in the post world and I'm and this is something that I'm sure you will be investing in investing your resources. So we talked briefly about the workforce also for the sake of time I want to talk about the workplace, which is almost like the third thread in our conversation today. The workplace conversation is is very often a conversation about how do we incentivize or how do we compensate our employees in the in the new world right I think some of the things. Some of the paradigm of compensation giving people you know cash heavy compensation structure which had become almost like a norm especially in this part of the world especially in in Qatar has taken a little bit of a beating in the So the entire cash let's pay our employees cash and that's what they that's what they value what becoming almost a thinking a very strong thinking a lot of a lot of employers really having a all cash package. This has this has been challenging quite considerably in in the in the in the period and employees have changed their kind of preference in terms of what the value from the employers. And we have connected a lot of research in this topic and and I'll be sharing some of the research findings but I would like to kind of hear from you first in terms of what you think your employees value. When it comes to compensation in the in the post in the post code world and and we will quickly go back to the survey. And I will present that you can you can see my screen hopefully now we can see now we can see the question. You can see the question on your on your on your devices as well. So here we're really asking you a question as an assembly sector for for these four elements financial compensation work life training and development and benefits. Do do you think this importance has increased or or decreased in the in the post code world do you think your employees want more financial compensation do you think your employees want more of work life. Do you think your employees want more of training do you think employees want more of more of benefit. And as you are kind of populating your answer let me let me tell you that this is a question that we we ask and we have asked our clients not just instead of Qatar we have asked this question to our clients globally whether it's from from from US to Australia in the past past year or so and and what I'm going to see on on the screen right now the emerging picture is also quite consistent with what we see globally and one of the benefit which has become quite important has been or maybe a couple of benefits have become quite important consistently gets get mentioned are one access to mental health facilities and counseling because covid took a toll on the well being and medical being of people and that's something that we should be aware of that that our employees are our workplace can be can can become a bit challenging this new way of working and become a bit bit challenging for our employees. And the second thing that comes consistently in the in the past year or so it's all about benefits with respect to leading in a virtual world. So many of our managers who were very comfortable with managing the real team a team of people who were there in their in their offices can face a challenge with respect to how do you can indeed the virtual team. So what I see on the screen right now is that and by the way Bob can you see the results as well or you can't. What I didn't tell you what did you say you can you see the results. Yes we can see the results. Okay. Okay. So what do you what do you see it on the screen is that compared to the financial compensation work life is becoming more important. This is definitely consistent with what we hear from cut in Qatar and what we hear globally from from your view. You're saying the financial compensation and training and development is almost similar. What we are not listening to our employees. Reason globally and locally is that training and development is becoming more and more important. Especially because of the new skills if it necessary to succeed in the post pandemic world and the benefits are becoming quite important. It's somewhat similar to what we hear globally but I can quickly present present to you. What what has been our findings in this area from from the research that we've conducted. So you can hopefully keep keep seeing my screen. Sorry mama that I've been shifting back and forth between presentation and the and the survey. But the compensation increasingly in the past couple of years and over a period of time. We constantly see that employees value cash lesser work life is something which has exponentially grown in the past few months and year. Training and development is being sought after much more by the employees than what was a bit earlier. The entire view that we can take care of our own upskilling. We can take care of our own benefits and our own health insurance. We can take care of our kind of benefits and needs has to be taken care of. It has something which has been challenged and I think the role of the corporate to provide a better work life better benefits and better training and opportunities has become really important. In the in the doing the COVID in the post COVID world. So it's something for you to think about in terms of your workplace. It's good for you to realize that there has been renewed interest of a clear interest from the employees expectation from the employers that you will be investing in there. In their work life you'll be looking at a more balanced organization. You'll be looking at the training more but more than what has been an expectation in the past and the benefits especially when it comes to health care mental health are becoming more and more in demand by by the employees. With that I'll move to one maybe the last topic as far as the service concern. And this is basically looking at the future and trying to understand from you what will it take for you to succeed as an SMB in the post COVID world. So what is your workplace priority and we will give you a couple of choices. Of course it's very difficult to have an exhaustive list of options here. So we'll give you some options with rate quite high from from the research that we have done globally. And would like to kind of listen to you and understand from you that what you think is your priority for success in the post in the post COVID world. I will move to the questionnaire and hopefully you'll be able to see that on your screen as well. So when we ask this question globally in terms of you know what will it take to succeed in terms of workplace in the post post COVID world. There are four four kinds of answers which come across quite consistently and I would like to kind of understand from you whether this holds true for you as well. People talk about. Okay, so there's always a view about new digital practices so our clients tell us that we need to change the way we recruit people we need to change the way we train people. In the in the post COVID world and this is really important for us to succeed. How do we adapt our workplace to become more hybrid more virtual is something which also respect high change in culture and mindset. Very often the data is available very often the channels are available. But the change in culture and mindset is something which again gets later very high. Some of our senior senior employees say that look this digital world give us less sense of control over our employees. You know there is a bit more trust that's necessary in the new workplace and this is something that we're not really used to. We are used to managing the people and managing a culture where everybody's around us. But the degree of trust and loss of control that we feel is quite substantial. And then talent upskilling also rates quite high in our employees. So it's interesting for me. I mean, Muhammad, you can see the results emerging right on the screen as well. Yes. So when I'm going to listen to you, you are talking about emphasis on digital upskilling. I think this is of course very important, you know that roles are changing jobs are changing and hence need for upskilling. I think this has been a kind of theme in our conversation today. You're talking about culture and mindset being quite important. The ways of working be quite important and digital practice of being quite important. In fact, when I can look at this results, you are saying that all of the four are almost as important as the other. How does this compare to our research? I'll be sharing with you now. Now, what you will see is that the culture and mindset actually rates much higher than some of the responses. And I think, and as we kind of delve a bit deeper into the psyche of the organizations and what will take to be successful in this post COVID world, culture and mindset becomes almost the key enabler. You know, as much as we can invest on upskilling, as much as we can bring digital platforms for recruitment and talent management, as much as we can create the hybrid workplace and give people virtual tools to collaborate. Finally, I think what is considered to be a recipe for success is about how well we'll be able to change our culture and mindset of our leadership in the post pandemic world. So this is the result that we get from what I'm going to present to you is from the state of Qatar, but of course, very much in line with what we see globally. So I think maybe a takeaway for you from this specification is that think about the culture, think about the culture, think about the mindset and as much as you think about investment into digital platforms, I think this is quite important for you to be successful in the post pandemic world. So we can talk about some of the themes in terms of work, in terms of workforce and in terms of workplace. And I hope you got a few points to reflect about with respect to your own enterprises. What I want to kind of leave you with are basically three very simple, simple messages. I think it's really, really important to start thinking about how do you kind of build trust in your workplace? I think trust is about culture, trust is about your employees trusting you with their information, people trusting that virtual world is successful and people can be productive. Trust is also about your employees believing that what they do has a clear purpose and trust is about people understanding that you as an enterprise as much you are focusing on economic goals, you're also focusing on the society, on the world that exists beyond the walls of your enterprises. So building trust has become really important and I think that's something that I want to kind of want to emphasize on this conversation. Building skills, I think all of you are absolutely with me when it comes to the importance of building skills. I think it's really important to think about your employees, what are the skills that they need, whether they are in marketing, whether they are in sales, whether they are in operations, how important are the new skill sets for them and I think it's really important to kind of invest on the skill sets. And finally, listen to your employees, right? We are always surprised that what we think to be our employee sentiment is very often not the case. We think that our employees feel secure in the workplace, they feel secure that their jobs are guaranteed. But then when we ask them about this question that we realized that maybe our perception about our employee sentiments were not exactly true. So I want to leave you with these thoughts, build trust, build skills and listen to your employees. I hope you had got a chance to reflect. I really enjoyed presenting this to you and listening to yours as well. Thank you, Mr. Mayank. Now we'll have 10 minutes where Mr. Mayank can answer any of your questions. Please feel free to write them on the chat, please. Mr. Mayank, we have a question. What is cloud computing adoption person among SMEs in Qatar? I think this is a great question to be, I think, maybe addressed to kind of Firas and that's the next topic. Firas, I'm wondering whether you would like to take this question off? Yeah, I actually answered it already on the Q&A and I said that I will show the actual figures during my presentation. So hopefully the team will stay tuned. I have got you a more engaged audience than Firas. And there is another question, Mr. Mayank. When was this global boss done? So we are presenting, by the way, findings from a whole multitude of research that we have conducted. So on employees, whether you're talking about hopes and fear, whether you're talking about the CEO surveys, whether we're talking about the skills. Most of this research that I was presenting to you is six months or lesser. Six months or lesser has been predominantly most of the research that we have conducted. The last question is, was aerial pulse before the latest variant of COVID? So I think the quick answer to that question is that if you're talking about the variant which we found in South Africa day before yesterday, then of course, of course, no. That is very, very recent. And I must say that some of the sentiments in this survey were more pessimistic than what we have done globally. I was thinking that this is because we are finding more and more variants of COVID. So I can understand that why as of today, some of the sentiments have become a bit more pessimistic. Most of the research that was done maybe six months back was, I think, maybe Delta was just starting. And I think the things were a bit more upbeat. But I acknowledge that, of course, these global findings do not consider the fourth variant that we have observed in South Africa last week. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayank. Thank you, Mohammad. It was a pleasure. I will give the floor to Firas. Thank you. And now we will be pleasure to welcome Mr. Firas Suleiman, partner on Qatar Technology and Cyber Leader of BWC, who will be breaking down the question of the cloud or not the cloud. Mr. Firas. Thank you so much, Mohammad. Hello, everyone. Yes, I'm Firas Suleiman, the partner responsible for technology and digital cyber and Qatar in this field for a long time. So cloud is a very dear and important topic for me. I've been through all the evolution that got us to cloud. So this is an important topic. I know a lot of the small and medium businesses care a lot about this question because there's a lot of motivation to use ready-made services in the cloud. So hopefully, I'll give you some good insights in our masterclass. I may just share my screen. I assume you can see me. Yes, we can see the presentation. Okay, perfect. Thank you. So the real question is to cloud or not to cloud. So in this masterclass, we'll look at acceleration. What does it mean to accelerate your journey to cloud as an SMB? In particular in Qatar, but just generally because SMBs share a lot of common features and circumstances worldwide. So we'll talk about what is it? What is cloud and how should you think about it? Should you care? Should you cloud or not cloud? And then how will you benefit from it as an SMB? What are the challenges? I wanted to put also, like my colleague Mayank, some engagement questionnaires, but I didn't know whether everybody would be willing to go on Menti or other sites. So I did not. So this is going to be more me taking some questions over the Q&A. Please feel free to write your questions between every section. I'll pause a little bit to answer a couple of questions if they're urgent. Otherwise, we'll wait till the end. So you are running a small or medium business and meaning you started already or maybe you're about to start. You have this great idea and now you're wondering about what should I do? How do I start my business? You have a lot of questions on your mind as a business leader. You have challenges related to your business, typically. One of them is I would like to go to market very fast. So I have a product in mind. Maybe it's a technology product. Maybe it's a product enabled by technology. So I need a channel, for example, for it. And I need to sell faster or get to my clients through commerce, through mobile apps, through anything. But I need to do it really quick. The second one is, I don't know what I'm going to sell. So I have maybe two or three ideas. I've already started. I'm selling some products, but I have a small shop and I don't know what's next. So what's my next revenue streak? Third question is, what happens if I scale? I have maybe some technology right now, some data center or some servers running. What if I search from 200 users per day to 1 million users or hopefully 1 million, or even 10,000 users per day? What will happen? Will I crash? And will my service be disrupted? Then you often, especially with COVID right now, we ask ourselves, how can I reduce my costs? I'm spending a lot of money on technology constantly by new servers, new software. I have to train my people. How do I benefit? And finally, how do I protect myself? There's a lot of ideas or I hear a lot of news about hacking, about intellectual properties. If you want funneling out or sneaking out and businesses crashing because of those vulnerabilities. So how do I protect myself? I mean, the answer is really, there's a lot of agility that is required when you are a small and medium business. The competitive advantage is transient, meaning you are only valid today and tomorrow you could lose your validity very quickly. And for that, you need to act fast. It's very important to think of that as a driver for you. And you need to constantly act fast, not just at the beginning. And once you have a revenue stream, you're like, okay, I'm done. You need to constantly iterate and act fast all the time. Your long-term strategies are no longer your competitive advantage. I want to sell laptops for the next 10 years. It's no longer a thing. Let me see what I can sell for the next six months. And then I'll see what comes later. So you want to fail, you want to try something fail and then learn from it and then be able to iterate quickly. And for your strategic advantage, you have to respond quickly to others, meaning your clients are your most valuable asset. You want to hear them. It's no longer about selling that laptop or giving them that service. You want to get feedback and then keep iterating, changing based on what people are telling you. So you have to be nimble. And finally, you have to have a confidence in the change. So you need to embrace change every month, every day sometimes. In cases like the large scale or the hyperscalers, if you want like the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Twitters, they change by the minute. And constantly you could reload the page on Facebook and you could see a little new tool that has just been added. And that's two months worth of work that has just launched this minute. And that agility and change are important in our times right now. So overall, we're hearing, I mean, we know all of this, we hear a lot about cloud. You know, can cloud help me answer all these questions? And so let's see. Let's just go through the questions one by one and we'll see whether cloud can answer. And, you know, naturally, you know that I wouldn't be doing this presentation if the answer is no, but all right, let's, you can humor me with it. So what is cloud, right? Cloud is a service, right? It's not a cloud. It's not a data center. It's not, it's a service. It's somebody selling you a service. And that service is in either public. If you look at the bottom here, you'll see, you know, public cloud is, you know, the Amazons and the Googles and the GCPs. It could be private. So you get somebody could sell you a software and you build your own cloud. It could be a combination of both public and private and connectivity between them and call that hybrid, and it could be a community cloud. So for example, the government of Qatar could be building a cloud for the government and it would be a secure cloud with its own parameters. We call that a community cloud. Also, the cloud offers multiple services. You have infrastructure. So you can host servers or, you know, you have platform like databases and things that are in the middle, middle, middle application. You have software as a service, which is, which is your typical, like your email, your CRM, your websites, your everything that is that you use, you consume as a consumer. And then there are many characteristics of cloud. You know, clouds are secure. And I know this is kind of counterintuitive right now because some people think clouds are not secure, but we'll explain that. They're on demand so you can purchase or you can lease services immediately. You have access to all networks everywhere. So you can basically, if you have a cloud here in Qatar and you expand to the UAE, you don't have to change anything. You just add a resource pool so that people can access from UAE, same thing from Singapore, same thing from the U.S. Everything is just linked together. You have resource pooling so you can increase the number of resources, meaning like more storage, more computing power on demand. You can elastically scale, meaning if there's surge in demand, you don't crash. And then finally it's a metered service so you know how much you're spending on each resource. It's no longer about buying a server or computer. It's about just use the service, pay for the time that you use. So I know a lot of many of you know this, but there's a reason why we're talking about these because we're going to get into a little more details. So the answer to question about what is the adoption of cloud? In the region, in the Middle East, cloud adoption is slowly increasing. And there's many reasons, of course, we'll talk about them, but we saw in, for example, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been the biggest adopters of cloud, but it's been a gradual shift. And so in 2021, we got to maybe around, you know, $2.5 million of spend on cloud. Sorry, I apologize for that. It's actually 2,500 instances of cloud across the Middle East, but it's rapidly increasing. And if you want, in terms of percentages, in Qatar we estimate, because there's no real count, we estimate that there's three to five percent adoption in cloud hosting. Now there's no split between which part is SMB and which part is large-scale organizations, but in general, five percent could be across the board. And so there's not a lot of people that have gotten to cloud, even though there's a lot of value. And when I say this, it's about hosting in cloud, so using full-fledged cloud for everything you do. Now there are many people that are using cloud solutions. We call them software as service. So 37% of businesses use cloud, for example, for email, for website hosting, for some sort of applications. And 76% of businesses that were surveyed actually know that there is cloud and they're just hesitant. So we expect the rise to be, as people get educated, the rise will be sharp in the next few years. But it's unfortunate now because these numbers are very different if you look in the US or in the West. The adoption numbers are way higher, way in the orders of 46% to 50% adoption of cloud. So we'll get there. So what are the most important things you need to know about cloud? We talked about elastic services, so you can actually scale automatically. It's important to understand that cloud is not just about the technology, it's about a new way of thinking. And we call it modern engineering. So I'm going to talk about that. I'll tell you a little bit so you can understand why is it that you need to change the way you work in order to use cloud and to benefit from cloud. It's also about intelligent operations. So how do I benefit from the automation in the cloud? And it's about also safety and control. So will I get more out of the security in cloud using their trusted guardrails? And we'll talk about those two. So let's answer the questions. There we are. We'll do it quickly. The first one is how do I get the market faster? So the answer to it is in modern engineering. In order for you to use cloud properly, you have to change the way that you work when you're developing your products. What does that mean? This is how you typically build your products. Let's say you're building a new website or a new application or whatever it is. You start by buying the hardware, you then buy or build the platform. You install everything and then you build the application and then you build the front end or the user interface or the mobile app or whatever it is. So all of this is time to market. It's actually until you reach that customer, it's taking you all of this stack in terms of work. In comparison, this is what cloud offers you. Cloud already has the infrastructure and it already has the services as a platform. Sorry, it's supposed to be PAS in the middle. And it already has the software as a service services. So those are available with ignition. You just turn them on and then you start immediately by building what we call microservices. So it's a small application that starts using existing services from the platform. So you have actually saved yourself this maybe 50% or 60% of the effort to get there by starting early, by starting with a pre-existing software. And also it forces you, I mean cloud forces you to think in agile. And I'll explain that later in the modern engineering part. So you no longer build the entire interface, what you're seeing on the left. You build or the application, you build a first version of it with some limited features. We call it a sprint or one release or several sprints. And then you release those. So your time to market, as you see on the right is now very short. You immediately adopt cloud, you configure it if you want. Sorry, you configure it. And then immediately you can get to that first release quickly. That's the value proposition of cloud. So the way it works, I'm not going to go through detail this, but it's interesting for you to think about how the world has changed. If you go from one all the way to 15 here in terms of steps, you'll find that the world has changed a lot in how we build software. So your user is onboarded, which is number one, you see on the left. And then immediately, number three, we provision an environment for them, meaning now the cloud gives you a full automated solution. And then they start immediately developing. So if you look at number five, six, and seven, they start building code immediately, this new developer that you have. And then by the time you reach number seven, which is the automation of pushing out that code to an application. So you're building, we call it continuous integration. So you build and you push out, you immediately launch. It's a very quick process. So you are now ready and you've launched your applications to the cloud. And then you start on number 11, where your quality assurance team starts to iterate on checking whether your app is doing well. And they don't do it by just testing your app. They actually do it through social sensing. So your customers can now give you feedback about the app very quickly. And then through that process, this iterative process, you can react to it. You have developers sitting waiting and then they're, as soon as somebody says, oh, I have a bug or this is not good, or I don't like this feature, then you modify it. And then you can push out another release in 24 hours. And so the cycle becomes really quick. This release management, we call it CICD, which stands for continuous integration and continuous development. This process is linked to the power of cloud. It allows your developers to just constantly push out more releases, kind of like what Facebook or Uber or all of these big companies do. So that's really modern engineering. And so you have to change the way that you think of building things. Just build them in small chunks, release, get sense the feedback and then iterate. And that's using the power of cloud. So next question. And if there are questions, please write them down. I'll pause a little bit in a second. And I'll explain more about, I mean, our answer your questions. So the next one is how do I get my next revenue stream? So the power of the cloud gives you what we call a digital playground, right? The cloud is giving you a lot of tools. So because you are a small and medium business, you don't want to go and buy 20, 30, 50, or maybe 200 different tools in order for you to start experimenting. So the cloud gives you access to all of these building blocks. They're like Legos, right? You have billing already. You have payments. You can just pay, right? You have a payment gateway that allows you to get paid from the clients. You have analytics about who's using your solution or not. You have social sensing, the ability to get feedback from your clients. And then you have all the cloud solutions with our, you know, integration, data management, so the infrastructure, all of this is there. So in reality, this is allowing you to play. And then in order for you to be creative, you need all of the building blocks to be done. And then you start from, not from scratch, but from this playground and you build really, it's really about putting things together and then building your next product. So it's easy for you to get to that artistic and maybe creative side and build new technologies and products. Also, there's something that we call data liberation. So I know this is a technical side. So I'm going to simplify it for you guys. So if you think of, see, if you see on the left side, these are your old applications. And on the right side, I'm going to show you how cloud helps you simplify things and be able to get where you need faster. So think of the bottom part, everything that is infrastructure as your cloud. So if the left side is your applications, your applications have data in them. And so what we want to do is we call it liberate the data, just get the data out of jail, because your applications are locking the data. So we find ways using what we call data pipelines to pull out the data from your applications into a layer on the cloud called a data management layer. So it's kind of like you're freeing your data right now. And it's no longer locked in the application. You now have all of the data in one place and they're sitting on the cloud. And the cloud provides you with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning out of the box. You don't have to pay anything. You just pay for use. I mean, you don't have to purchase the software. So what this does is gives you a layer of raw and analyzed data. Now you have all your data in one place. For example, you have your sales data and you have your product pipeline of development of product. When you put them together, you know what your clients want. You know what you're building. You can change what you're building based on what your client wants or modify based on the feedback you're getting, because this toy or this product is, for example, has a defect or does not have the features that people are looking for. So the cloud gives you that power to aggregate and put the data together and has all the tools for it. So what it really does, it's giving you another playground. Through data liberation, you are able to create your external channels and your use cases around this central data. What that gives you is the power to create applications. For example, if you have an autonomous vehicle, think of how much data is needed for you to drive a car autonomously, which is coming, right? In the next five years, you can see it on the streets. So these are only possible with the power of cloud because there's so much data comes from, you know, maybe traffic management, from roads, from sensing of the cameras, from your mobile phone, your location, you as a driver, what kind of driver you are. All of this is actually going through this layer, getting into advanced analytics, and then being provided as an application to the car so the car can drive itself. Same thing with artificial, sorry, augmented reality and virtual reality. You can create games by aggregating your data. The same thing with dashboards, with mobile apps, all of those things harness the power of cloud. And so it's important to think of data liberation as a next step for you. Let me pause here, see if there's any questions that are written. There isn't, okay, we'll move on. If there are anything, please ping them on. The third thing is the question is, what if I get a million users? What will happen in this case, right? And here's how the cloud reacts to it. This is your typical computer, right? Or your typical data center. You have already purchased everything and you've put them in a data center and they're, and this is this line here in white is the demand. This is how people are using your system. So there's a website and it's being used or mobile app and it's being used, but it's served by a server. And so your cost is, you've paid for all of these four areas. You paid for the network, for storage, for memory, for compute. And then your search comes in, your computer or your server cannot handle the load. It reaches the speak that you see here at the top and it can't do anything anymore. And so there's failure, which you see on the left. Here's how cloud does it. So cloud gives you a lot of benefits. This is the same load if you were running it on the cloud. Before the search happens, you were running on the left if you see at the bottom was very minimal, sometimes even zero, zero cost. And then when the search happens and you see more people are coming during the day, for example, or at noon time or on the weekend when people log into your app more or whatever it is, the cloud automatically scales the resources for you. And so it goes all the way up. It elastically scales. And then it then also removes the resources as the demand goes down. So in reality, you are just paying this average cost because you're paying for the usage of the cloud. And also you never see that failure. So the failure that is in red, the cloud can scale virtually unlimited. So no matter how much power you or demand you put on it, you will have additional capacity. So that's a way to address these surges. And also the cloud gives you models for serving your clients, which would scale. So, you know, you understand probably what virtualization is. Like just typically running something on the server. But then there's something called containerization where you have these compartments, we call them con1, con2, con3 that you see here. These run on the cloud and they are portable. So your application runs in one place. And if you decide that you want to move it to another server or to another even cloud completely, you can transport it. You can take it from Amazon, put it on Google, from Google, put it on Azure. So that's containerization. And this scales too. So the number of containers can go grow. There's also serverless, which is a new paradigm where people now are using functions on the cloud and no longer using servers anymore. And that's a little more advanced. You guys can read about it more. And then there's clustering, which means you can put multiple applications, which is what most cloud providers do right now. Like for example, when you use Google Maps, you can use Google Maps in Qatar. Then you can go to the UAE or you can go to France. You can go to the US. Each country, each city actually has a copy of Google Maps. And you're using the nearest copy through clustering. And they're all the same application, but they're distributed worldwide on multiple clouds. If you want instances, we call it tenants. And that clustering gives you scalability and it gives you the ability to just react more and more. So each country or each region or each type of user can use a different instance of the same application on the cloud through clustering. So it's just a quick maybe dive into that. So one more question, which is how do I reduce my costs? Now I have cloud. Is it really cheaper to go on cloud or not? And what can I do as an SMB? So cloud gives you a lot of ways for you to manage your finances. So it does look, it can do budgeting. It could do right sizing, meaning you start with a bigger amount of services, but you can reduce them based on metrics. And so there's a lot of tools and there's chargeback too. So you can charge some of your costs to your clients. So and it does the calculation for you, how much should you sell your application to your clients or your product to your clients in order for you to charge back what you're paying in cloud. So there's a lot of tools for you, but the reality is it's a journey. So you will start on the left where you are just traditional and you're on-prem. And then as you move, you'll see that, for example, at the bottom, you'll see that 20% in your first year, 20% of your spend will be in the cloud. You're going to gradually start going up. And then 20 to 70% in the next year, when you get to the adoption phase, you start using more cloud, you start migrating more things now 20 to 70%. And eventually when you're all in and you get to cloud as a big determining factor for your company, then you're spending around 70%. But you have a reduction of your total cost of ownership of around 30% from where you were when you were at the beginning. So there is a reduction long-term in the cloud. At the beginning, there may not be immediate reduction, but think of this. If you're small and medium business, sometimes you don't have either. You don't have a traditional or a cloud. And so you're starting from scratch. Going to cloud is a guaranteed way to get the 30% reduction from the start because you're not migrating anything. You're just beginning from the start. So it's a great proposition for SMBs. But in general, there's many ways you can reduce your costs too. You can ask people to, for example, use spot instances. Spot instances mean don't turn on your computer. That's what it is. It's like when our parents used to tell us, turn off the lights in the house when you leave the room. Same thing. You turn off your instance when you're done and then you only use it for the time that you're using it. For example, choosing the correct storage. A lot of people and probably many of you do this, you just put everything on Dropbox, right? And you spend $10 or $20 a month. And then it's things that you've never touched. And there's only maybe 50 files that you actually use and 5,000 different files and videos and pictures that you never touched. So you can choose, on the cloud, you can choose multiple options. You can say we can put cold storage versus hot storage. You can use even things that they call ice storage. So you put them in places where you can access them, but at much slower speeds and they're much cheaper. So you have ways also to reduce your cost by choosing your tier of storage and many other ways. I don't want to go through all of the details. And then there are ways to use hygiene if you want or processes in order to monitor what's happening with your cost. So if you look on the cloud, everything that happens on the cloud is tagged or you can tag it. You can tag it by the user who did it, by the application that used it, by which browser it came, which country it came from. So in reality, you can split and splice your data about your finances. You can, at the end of the month, you can look and say, here's all my finances, but why am I spending this much money? And then you'll find that, oh, there are 15 users that are doing things and they're overspending. Or maybe this country is giving me a lot of bandwidth or demand on me, so I need to probably put an instance of my application there so it becomes less bandwidth. And so you have ways for you to tag your spend. And then there's a lot of other ways. You can turn off VMs automatically to your virtual machines on the cloud, automatically on the weekends or if you only use the applications on the cloud. Finally, the last thing is, how do I protect my assets? There's a lot of people, and I wanted to put a survey about this, but I'm sorry, I did not. So a lot of people think that cloud is not secure and it's less secure than if I had my data with me, they're in my laptop or on my server, they're in my premise or in my country sometimes. That question is there. I believe that it's a misconception. And so when you ask the question to cybersecurity, well, to people about cybersecurity, and you ask people, this is a survey that was done. And when you ask them, how much do you think you are going to lose security if you go on cloud versus gain security? So strength is security. So do you think cloud is more secure or less secure? 54% of the, so there's 24% of people that says they're almost the same, right? So we'll ignore those. But of the rest, 54% said, I think that cloud is more liable to breaches. So it's less secure. And 22% said, no, cloud security is better, right? So this is a misconception. People like vast majority think that cloud is not secure, but the reality is this, the real cloud concerns are not about the security in the cloud. When you ask people one more level down of questions, why is it that you say the cloud is not secure? They'll tell you, oh, I don't trust, what will be the vendor, the CSP, which is the cloud service provider? What will they do with my data, right? Risks, for example. What happens if the internet goes down? So they confuse things like risk mitigation and trust. They confuse it with security. And then they say data sovereignty. They'll say, all right, if I put my data with Microsoft, it's an American company. Can the US government access my data if there's a investigation? And in some cases the answer is yes, but those are questions that are not related to the security of the cloud. They're related to perimeter of governance. These are governance questions. So in general, if you look at the actual technology, cloud is far more secure than your on-prem, far more. And here's why. There are many reasons, but these are the top reasons why cloud is more secure than having your data in your own data center. First of all, there's physical access. People can go and unplug or put a USB stick in your server, right? This doesn't exist in cloud. You've maintenance issues, right? There's a new virus that came out. Until you know that there's a new virus or a new vulnerability, you are vulnerable for all that period until you patch your own service. While Microsoft or Amazon or Google or others are constantly by the minute and automate the way you patch it. So they're more secure than that. They have the security expertise. You can never afford what Amazon cloud can do, right? They're a trillion dollar company. And so they have a lot of security experts and you cannot afford that. Resilience is very high. So what you can fail, and that's part of security, you can fail and because of a, for example, somebody attacking you as a hacker, attacking you to make your servers fail, but they will never be able to fail, for example, the Google Cloud. And so the redundancy failover and disaster recovery are built into cloud. So you get that out of the box. You don't have to worry about it. Monitoring, for example, you know what's happening at every level in the cloud. You don't know what's happening in your servers. You know only about the servers, the parts that you have configured to monitor, but there's a lot of monitoring that doesn't happen on-prem and it happens in the cloud. granularity is important. You know, you can tell who accessed each row or each file on the cloud because there's logs at that level of granularity. You will never get that on your, unless you spend a lot of money on software, on your cloud. And finally, the standards, you know, clouds are compliant with most standards, international standards for, you know, the ISOs, the ITELs, the NIST standards, every standard that is available. And so they comply and which means they put a lot of controls on their security. So there's a big difference. Of course, the technology itself is far more advanced than you will ever be because you cannot afford their technology. So all of these are reasons why cloud is far more secure So, you know, you are highly likely to be hacked when you are on-prem much more than you are if your data is on cloud. Now, is there an issue of sovereignty or like trust? Yes, of course. You know, you don't feel like you trust the cloud. You feel like if my data is next to me, it's better. Fine, but that's more of an emotional decision and not a business decision about cloud. So, you know, cloud has a lot of instrumentation. I don't want to go through this right now, but it basically gives you so many tools from application to infrastructure to threat and vulnerability management. They do, you know, red teaming, which is a cybersecurity testing method. You know, there's so much that they do that you probably will cost you a lot for you to do as a small and medium business. So, now you're ready. And you say, sure, okay, I'm convinced you're asked. Tell me how we need to get to the cloud. Okay, well, first of all, you need to call me and we'll help you get to the cloud. But we'll tell you what's next. What's next is now you have to think about your application. So this is a very typical way of thinking about going to the cloud. What you see on the left is this is all the applications that you currently have, or maybe you have nothing, in which case it's not a journey. But if you have applications already, you know, you need to start thinking of four steps to get them to cloud. First, you need to match them or we call it rationalize them. So you need to check which ones of your applications are ready to go to cloud because of the way that they're built. They're more modern. They allow you to move. They're containerized. Some things are very old and then you need to think of what's my strategy for those. So you put them in different colors. Usually, you know, red, amber, black, green, whatever you want. And then you then think of what am I going to do for each one of them? So do I repurchase a software solution to replace my apps? Do I replatform, meaning I move the app and I change the technology? Or do I refactor or rehost the entire app? So move it as is. Just create a server on the cloud and just move it as is. You'll make those decisions. And then, you know, you'll put a sequencing. So it's a journey. And then you start implementing basically as the fourth step. And so it's usually there's planning required to go to the cloud. And there's an investment in there. If you already have applications, of course. But it's not the end of the world. It's feasible. And we do it all the time for our clients. And once they are on the cloud, they get rid of the headaches of all of their IT and what they can do locally. And it becomes a much better solution for them. So generally, if you ask people, what are your perceived barriers to cloud adoption? They'll give you these answers. So what you see on the left are the answers that people gave. What you see on the right is our analysis of those answers on whether this is a real answer, meaning it is really validated with data or is it just a perceived answer and our opinion is different. So for example, most people will say, I don't want to go to cloud because of security. And then our analysis is, no, this is just a perceived threat or perceived if you want barrier. In reality, this is very low risk. Your security is far better in the cloud. Same thing with IT management. Can I manage the cloud? I don't know how to do it. People don't know that this is about, it is a high risk but it's really only about skilling. It's about training or learning. So there's a way for you to get to that or to cross that barrier. It is a real, the complexity of the cloud is real but you can cross it. Vendor lock-in, will I be locked into Microsoft? If I use Azure, I mean right now and then eventually if I want to move to somewhere else I will be locked. Or will I have to be forced to use some applications? There is a high risk there. But there are ways like you're using containers and creating a proper architecture that you can lock yourself out and be free. And then there's many others like compliance. Can I be compliant? Yes, the answer is yes. People think that they cannot be, but we find this is low risk cost, the kind of neutral people worry about cost but there's not a lot of cost. It's actually almost the same, if not better to be in the cloud. And on the long run, you get maybe around 30% of reduction anyway. So that's a good proposition and many other things. So one last thing, actually two very quick ideas and then I'll open the questions. One is about how will your financial model change once you go in cloud? Cloud gives you many, many new ways and many new things that you have to pay for. It's no longer just, oh, I have a server, just go install whatever you want on it. You have to pay for everything. So you have to think about it, but it's not rocket science. There's a science behind it, but it's not rocket science. So there are operating costs for storage now is separate, network is separate, maintenance is your own. You have to break down things a little more. And then there's transition costs. How do I go from where I am to the cloud? Yes, there are, but these are one-time fees. But if you compared, this is what you'll find. You're in capital costs. So things that you have to pay one time, they are on-prem or higher because you and cloud, you really don't have to pay anything one time. There are no one-time fees. You just start using the cloud immediately. You're not buying anything, right? I mean, this is aside from transition costs. Then you have your operating costs. It's better if you just take like right now the instance, how much it will cost me to operate. It is better for you to stay in your data center because it's low to medium in your data center. You may buy some server and you keep using it for 10 years, right? But you are obsolete. So you're not benefiting from innovation and other things. And in cloud, you'll have to keep paying. So across the 10 years, you're still paying, but you are getting innovation. You're getting new servers. You're getting upgrades, you're getting a lot for what you're paying. So it's kind of like taxes anyway, right? Not in every country, but taxes, you know, people pay taxes, but do you get some benefit there? And then you've cost agility in the cloud. So in cloud, you can meter and check everything that you're paying in your local data center. It's very difficult. And then your cash impact, you know, your local data center is, you pay once and you use forever, not really forever, but you have to upgrade every couple of years while the cloud is ongoing. So these are considerations to think of. And promise this is the last one. There are more concerns. There are a lot of questions. I'm not going to read those for you, but you do have to think of security. We talked about performance and reliability. How do you create an ecosystem that is highly performance between your office because you're sitting in your office and you have a cloud sitting elsewhere. So how do you work with high performance? There are considerations and architectures for it. You need to think of integration. How do you integrate your cloud with, for example, if you have an email system or you have, if you have your own database here or I mean locally. So that integration becomes a little more of an architectural bridge to cross, but you have to think about it. How do you customize cloud? Some of these applications exist in cloud and they're certain ways. So it may be a little more, less more, less flexible. And then transparency. You have to check who is accessing what and so your contracts are important to look at and then your security. So those are kind of final considerations, but if these organizations are using cloud, the most valuable companies in the world, your Twitters, your TikToks, your Lyfts, your Ubers and Amazon, then why shouldn't you? So this is my case for cloud. Hopefully you enjoyed it. And I will rest here and open up for questions. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Faraz. Now you have 10 minutes also to write your questions in the chat. And Mr. Faraz will be happy to answer your questions. Please, if you have any questions for the cloud session, please write it down in order to answer the questions, please. All right. I guess it's either good that everybody has no questions or they understood everything or bad because nobody understood anything and they didn't want to ask questions. The presentation, Mr. Faraz, actually in our program, DTSME program, a lot of SMEs ask about the clouds and the main concern is the security. And you clearly explain it in this presentation, which is very helpful. I believe it's very helpful for them to show them that it's not a high risk for them to go with the cloud because everyone, as you said, they are worried about their data. So I don't see it like as a high risk, as you said, also as well. Sure, sure. Well, there are a few questions, so I'll take them. There's a question by Vineet, which is with privacy becoming a key parameter in every country coming up with its own regulations, what is your thought on it? So I'll answer this live. So there are, yes, there are lots of countries, country-specific policies and laws and regulations around privacy. Qatar has its own as well. They should buy them what they see. It's called the Qatar Data Privacy Law. And the GDPR is in the Europe. The U.S. has many frameworks and many standards for data protection. So and privacy in general privacy is people and privacy of data. Generally, what these cloud vendors will do is they'll ring fence. They create guardrails if you want around every country. So they will comply with the country's laws in the way that they implement security. And so, for example, with now the investments that are happening in Qatar between Microsoft and Google, they will be discussing the data privacy and what the implications are on the installation and the services that are provided by Microsoft and by Google here, and then they would have to comply to these laws. So generally, you're safe that the cloud service providers are usually taking care of data privacy from their side. Now, there's another flip side to that question, which is a great question beneath, which is what should you worry about even if the cloud service provider is compliant to privacy laws, but should you worry more by putting your data on the cloud? I think the answer is it comes down to what kind of data you're putting, right? If you are putting privately, sorry, PII data, which is personally identifiable data, there are many countries or many rules that prohibit you from putting them on clouds in general. And so GDPR is very careful about what you can put on cloud. It's not because the cloud is less secure, it's just because cloud has different jurisdictions and cloud can distribute data. So you can take the data of a person, you create, for example, a healthcare application and it takes the real health record of the person. You put it on a cloud here in Qatar and then you say, all right, scale, and then you press a button and that data just, you know, transports to data centers across the world. And you may be inadvertently violating some privacy laws or maybe even regulations like GDPR and other. So there are guardrails around it and there are ways, the cloud vendors provide you a lot of ways for you to check where's your data, what's happening to it, is it still compliant? And generally the GRC part, which is governance risk and the compliance part of clouds are very advanced. So you can, you have a lot of control, but yes, you have to be very careful and you have to make sure that you don't put data that could be compromising for you on clouds. So, yeah, think of security very carefully when you're thinking of privacy. So next question by Modesan, what are the most demanding certifications in the next 10 years for cloud computing and cybersecurity career? That's a great question too. So I think for cloud computing, I mean, I led the cloud practice for my firm, for the last 20, it's 15 years, since the beginning of cloud, if you want. And we could never find a one course or one certification that is truly kind of, if you want, across everything. There's several of them that have attempted to put a training around cloud where you could just go across any vendor. But the reality is you are vendor locked by your training somehow. And so what I would invest in is what your company is looking for. And what your comfort level is. So if you're a Java developer and you fancy being in the world of Google, then you should get certified with GCP. And if you're a more of a .NET or maybe even Java, but you prefer the word of Microsoft and then Azure certification is good for you. And so I think it depends what you want to do and what your company wants and what you'd like to, I mean, what you're comfortable with. That's for a cloud. For cyber, it's much easier, right? I mean, there's certified white hacker, there's CISSP, there's many certifications. I would say I've seen and I hire often a lot of people that have CISSP and those are, that's a good certification. There are many things. In fact, we, PWC offer a, we have a academy in Dubai and we're bringing a version of it. They have to cut our very soon. Actually, we're in the discussions on it for cybersecurity certification and not just cybersecurity. Actually, we do everything including cloud technology and everything. So I would advise you to go to our academy, pwc.com and check the academy and see what certifications we offer. But that's a shameless plug. But I think that in cybersecurity, it's easier to find a standard that will lend you a job all the time. In cloud computing, it's more vendor-specific. And François, thank you. Appreciate your message. Hopefully it was interesting to everybody. Thank you, Mr. Farras. Any other questions? If anybody is interested in more information or if you're interested in a career in cloud, a career in cyber, please reach out to us. We are always open and our arms are wide open for you. And thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Farras. At the end, we thank the distinguished audience and all those who contributed to the success of this event. Thank you again, Mr. Farras and see you in other forums. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. No, there is no. Thank you. No, there is no. There is no question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think there is no more questions. You can visit also godigital.com, dodigital.com. If you have questions or DTSME, I think we're done. Thank you, Mr. Farras. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody.