Security Advisor ME organised its annual Enterprise Security 360 Summit in Dubai last month, rallying around thought leaders from the industry to discuss some of the burning security issues today.
The event was kicked off by Ramy Ahmad, Senior Systems Engineering Consultant, LogRhytm, who spoke about modern cyber threat pandemic. “The security industry is facing serious talent and technology shortages. Threats are evolving, and modern threats take their time and leverage the holistic attack surface. This calls for a new approach to cybersecurity.”
He added that there is a need for end to end threat lifecycle management. “The ability to detect and respond to the threat early in the cyber-attack lifecycle is the key to protecting your company from large-scale impact because the earlier an attack is detected and mitigated, the less the ultimate cost to your business.”
“Identity is the new control plane, and attacks happen fast and are hard to stop. In fact, the root cause of more than 75 percent of intrusions are compromised identities.” – Mina Nagy, Microsoft
This was followed by a presentation by Mirza Asrar Baig, CEO of CTM 360, who spelled out the building blocks of a successful cyber resilience strategy for the audience. “We don’t need to do more but rather do things differently. We will have to redefine security management, adopt offensive defense and have a cyber asset register,” he said.
The burning issue of security in a mobile-first, cloud-first world was addressed by Mina Nagy, Enterprise mobility and cybersecurity business lead from Microsoft. “Identity is the new control plane, and attacks happen fast and are hard to stop. In fact, the root cause of more than 75 percent of intrusions are compromised identities. Protect, detect and respond. That is how we look at security.”
Nimesh Upadhaya, Senior Director of Regional Sales, CA Technologies, echoed a similar opinion in his presentation about enabling business growth with trusted digital relationships. “Identity is everything. You need to consolidate personas across systems into a single digital identity, build a comprehensive picture of the individual and make better decisions across legacy, cloud and services.”
With the average time taken to detect breaches pegged at months, rather than days or weeks, real-time breach prevention is a hot topic in the industry, which was tackled by Rajesh Agnihotri, Solutions Architect with Sonicwall. He shared key findings from 2017 SonicWALL annual threat report with the audience, and said 2016 was a year of advances for the cybersecurity industry. “We believe there are three critical components necessary for real time threat protection: high-speed inspection of SSL-encrypted traffic, multi-engine cloud sandboxing and the ability to block potential threats until a verdict is reached.”
“Identity is everything. You need to consolidate personas across systems into a single digital identity, build a comprehensive picture of the individual and make better decisions across legacy, cloud and services.” – Nimesh Upadhaya, CA Technologies
This was followed by a presentation from Niraj Mathur, security practice manager from GBM, who shed light on the latest trends in cybersecurity. “There are new challenges for security. Physical and cyber are blending, and data is aggregated and is available. Our annual survey found that 49 percent of gulf executives do not believe their organisation can prevent cyber-attacks.”
Jude Pereira, MD of Nanjgel Solutions, made the case for security automation and explained its key attributes. “A security automation solution must be able to determine the status of a potential threat in second by comparing with its ow threat intelligence, in addition to the one supplied by the customer, and use its own codified logic to understand that beheaviour of the entity along with what to do next.”
The event concluded with a panel discussion on aligning business objectives with security objectives featuring Husni Hammoud, GM of Barracuda, Miguel Velasco, CEO of Aiuken Solutions and Yasser Zeineldi, CEO of eHosting DataSystems.
