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O&G. Many companies don’t want to implement ILM because they think the cost is prohibitive. What do you say to this?
MA. In a recent study conducted by IDC about digital universe and sponsored by EMC, analysts projected that with a compound annual growth rate of almost 60 percent, the digital universe is growing faster and is projected to be nearly 1.8 zettabytes in 2011, a 10-fold increase over the next five years. With this in mind and with the concerns of oil and gas organizations about regulatory compliance and facilities management, organizations have to think of long term, solid and scalable information infrastructure implementations. This will help them manage their growing information stores whilst minimizing downtime and enabling collaboration. These implementations should have a focus on streamlining the flow of key information and safeguarding data such as exploration maps, production stores, and other key processes and how to capture, manage, and share all upstream and downstream content in a secure repository to support business and IT processes and adhere to regulatory and compliance measures. Organizations need to allow the proper time to understand the business requirements and have these requirements drive the technology to make the right investment upfront which will surely save them costs on the long run.

O&G. What are the most important factors in keeping organisations secure today?
MA. Information is the organizations’ most valuable asset. It is imperative for organizations to protect those assets against data loss and minimize downtime. To build a solid information infrastructure, organization need to have a back up, recovery and archiving plan that proactively manage their information to meet more stringent data recovery requirements and strengthen information protection. They need to think of business continuity plans to ensure continuous availability of key information from critical oil and gas applications. They need to have access to speed search and retrieval of e-records and establish audit trails in order to protect their organization, streamline litigation processing. They need to apply security systems to provide identification, authentication, and access protection to safeguard sensitive information. They need to have the ability to manage large numbers of users while enforcing a centralized security policy that ensures compliance, protects enterprise resources from unauthorized access and makes it easier for the right users to securely gain access to the right. In order to apply those measure, organizations need to understand what data is most sensitive to their business, where does it resides, understand their risk model, select the appropriate controls based on policy and risk, manage security centrally and last but not least audit processes to constantly improve.

O&G. How can your solutions help companies achieve their goals?

MA. EMC as the world leader in information infrastructure solutions has industry credibility with its oil and gas solutions being deployed in 49 of the top 50 oil and gas companies on the Forbes Global 2000. With the amount of important information in the Oil and Gas organizations, which is usually distributed around a number of different sites or offices, EMC solutions for oil and gas offers IT staff the capability to store data both securely and cost-effectively, back it up, archive it and ensure that it can be restored promptly and fully should a system outage occur at the same time those solutions will provide business executives the tools for fast decision making, effectiveness and efficiency and operational cost reduction. Some of those solutions are, but not limited to, EMC Oil Field Reactivation solution that enables knowledge workers to make faster, more informed decisions that increase oil field yield by leveraging collaborative tools, workflow, and content and records management, while EMC Active Archiving Solution provides a safe, secure place for companies’ valuable information assets and allows faster searches and better security, EMC File System Assessment for oil and gas offers a snapshot of file server utilization and identifies files that could be more cost-effectively managed, in addition to another solution that links unstructured content with map-based information and a solution that is qualified to run the exploration application suites of both Schlumberger and Landmark, while EMC high performance computing for seismic processing can reduce cycle times for compute-intensive jobs like depth migration by 50 percent and many more solutions that address content lifecycle and security.

Mohammed Amin, Regional Manager, EMC Middle East North West Africa

Mohammed Amin is the Regional Manager of EMC Middle East and North West Africa, a position he has held since November 2002. He is based at EMC’s regional headquarters in Dubai Internet City. During this time, Amin’s managed to develop regional awareness and demand for EMC’s comprehensive information infrastructure solutions and increase EMC’s regional customers’ base.