Adam Philpott, Cisco, Sales Director, EMEAR Cyber Security, explains the technology trends that are impacting the regional threat landscape and the company’s focus at GISEC 2016.
How many years have you been participating at GISEC? What kind of value do you expect to gain from the show?
Cisco has been part of GISEC for the last three years and we have witnessed the event grow from strength to strength.
Attackers today are so resilient and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Since we know that breaches are now the new normal, the good news is that all businesses have started to think: how do we do security differently? Technologies must provide market-leading levels of security effectiveness to detect and block threats and this begins with visibility. At GISEC we hope to drive this message that with a threat-centric architecture, security can definitely be everywhere.
What is the primary highlight of your participation at GISEC 2016?
The recently unveiled Cisco Annual Security Report 2016 (ASR 2016) estimates cybercrime to cost businesses $2.1T globally by 2019, which is four times more than the estimated cost in 2015. The ability to recognise and respond to security threats in real time is becoming a business imperative. Today, businesses are struggling to keep pace – not only with the attacks but also the amount of technology and solutions that have to be deployed with only 45 percent of organisations worldwide confident in their security posture as today’s attackers launch more sophisticated, bold and resilient campaigns.
At GISEC 2016, Cisco plans to demonstrate how integrated threat defense can truly help businesses address their biggest security risk, advanced and zero day threats, while extending ‘security everywhere’ with new capabilities and services that deliver greater visibility, context and control from the cloud to the network to the endpoint, for organisations of all sizes. Cisco will also highlight how automation can help reduce the complexity customers are facing today in their security systems, as doing is as important as knowing. With the myriad devices and things connecting, along with an exponential growth in the data they produce, getting actionable analytics and actioning them at digital speed will be critical.
Cisco will also showcase how its products and solutions can support its customers safely and securely through digital transformation and how they can weave in the security techniques and deployment as part of it. The value of Cisco architecture is its emphasis on embedding security spanning the extended network – including routers, switches and the data center – closing gaps across the attack continuum – and significantly reducing time to detection and remediation.
What do you believe are the technology trends that will impact the security landscape regionally?
IoT, digital transformation, cloud, mobility and analytics will continue to be major trends in the next 12-18 months. The number of connected devices alone is expected to grow to 50 billion sensors, objects, and other connected ‘things’ by the year 2020. With this, the number and type of attack vectors will increase, as will the amount of data, creating a daunting challenge for companies and those responsible for defending the infrastructure.
Organisations are demanding protection of their enterprise infrastructure to the data centre, from mobile to the cloud, and through to endpoints. Hence, we will see an increased demand for network security products, technology and services over the next 12-18 months.
How can partners go the extra mile to leverage the opportunities in the dynamic security space?
It is important for customers to make the right investments and have the right approach in place to segregate valuable network resources and enable practitioners to establish policies that allow only designated users to access sensitive information for specific applications, servers, and network resources. Partners play a key role in getting their customers to make the right investments in security technologies. They need to educate and empower the customer (defender) with real-world knowledge about the expanding attack surfaces.
Our partners help our customers to maintain a secure end-to-end environment that protects critical infrastructure, data and intellectual property. Cyber security solutions need to protect not just networks and devices, but also critical applications and data. Our framework for security, divided into three phases, allows our partners and therein our customers to understand:
- The scope of WHAT technologies they can use
- WHEN to use those technologies
- WHERE to use those technologies and
- HOW those technologies address the specific problem, and eventually evolve
