Yahya Kassab, Senior Director and General Manager, KSA and Gulf, at Commvault discusses their plans, solutions portfolio and security recommendations for GISEC 2024 in this exclusive interview with tahawultech.
Please tell us about the products and solutions you are showcasing at the event and how can CISOs benefit from these?
We are delighted to be showcasing Commvault Cloud, powered by Metallic AI, at GISEC. This is a new, unique platform that is truly changing the game in how IT and security teams can improve cyber resilience in an era of non-stop ransomware and malicious cyberattacks. This is incredibly relevant and beneficial for CISOs considering that the widespread demand for modern cyber resilience has never been higher. And with Commvault Cloud, not only do we offer the lowest possible TCO, but this platform unifies all of the company’s SaaS and software offerings which can be managed holistically through a single pane of glass.
Moreover, we recently acquired the cloud cyber resilience company, Appranix. Appranix’s automated technologies rebuild critical cloud applications. With this acquisition, we aim to bolster our support for customers by reducing downtime and enhancing our comprehensive cyber resilience capabilities over the coming months.
What are some of the threats that organisations must watch out for in 2024? How is your company approaching these threats?
In 2024 so far and for the remainder of the year, we expect to see focus put on the usual issues that continue to effect how organisations protect and backup their data and how they will plan for digital transformation. These issues include an increasing risk of ransomware and cyber attacks, the adoption and integration of AI into business operations and more focus on enhancing cloud security frameworks.
Our daily interactions with customers highlight a growing awareness of the importance of comprehensive cyber resilience strategies. This concern has escalated to a C-level and board-level priority, especially in the Middle East, where digital transformation is more advanced than in other regions. Our commitment is to empower organisations with risk management, readiness, and recovery capabilities, putting them in an optimal position to respond to and recover from any threats. This includes using AI to proactively detect and alert users to unauthorised access and simplifying management through a centralised dashboard.
We continue to empower organisations through our comprehensive risk, readiness and recovery capabilities – in order to put them in the best place to respond and recover from any threats. Whether this is proactively tackling AI with AI to alert users when bad actors have entered their systems through decoys, or by offering simplicity through a single pane of glass management of our solutions, we can protect your data wherever it lives.
What are some of the leading cybersecurity approaches / postures that are gaining traction this year?
Possibly the single biggest leading cybersecurity approach that we are seeing is the adoption and integration of AI.
As the Middle East and the organisations that are based here are very technologically advanced, bad actors and cyber threats are becoming more and more advanced, and we must keep up with the latest trends in order to ensure our backups and recovery capabilities are in keeping with this. As a result of the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence, we understand that cyber criminals may use this to bolster their attacks and increase their chances of infiltrating into our systems.
A way that Commvault is tackling this proactively is through our Metallic ThreatWise solution. Through this solution we have integrated early warning systems and cyber deception ‘decoys’ into our data security and cyber recovery services, allowing us to detect threats faster than industry norms. This means that we are able to identify, isolate and alert teams of impending breaches so that your data remains safe.
Image Credit: Commvault
