Timely action to prevent Cyberattacks

Karim Abillama, Pre- Sales director, International Business, NetWitness has a chat with Nitya Ravi about the current cybersecurity landscape in the region.

What is your take on the current cybersecurity scenario and how does the NetWitness offer fit into the same?

The pandemic has created a new world where everyone is working from not just one location but from wherever they prefer. Everything is remote, even security operations. Even security operation teams and analysts are operating and collaborating remotely. That obviously expands the potential points of attack on enterprise networks.

Prior to the pandemic and even now, we are finding large enterprises enabling remote access to their entire work force, whereas before they may have only allowed remote work to a small percentage of their workforce. The result of this trend is that the threat landscape is larger and enterprises are at a higher risk of cyber-attacks.

Cybersecurity is evolving and pushing enterprises to place increased focus on their cybersecurity postures. They now require the ability to monitor and analyse what is happening in their network, and whether an outside threat actor is trying to access their systems. These organisations must employ the right measures and monitoring tools in place to detect threats and respond immediately.

The NetWitness Platform provides enterprises with the visibility needed to detect sophisticated threats across all capture points – including logs, packets, netflow, endpoint and IoT – and physical, virtual and cloud computing platforms, and take quick action to investigate, analyse and mitigate those threats.

How is NetWitness helping larger organisations to move forward in their digital transformation process, in safety?

Many larger organisations with critical infrastructures, like defense organisations, already have a security operations centre (SOC) in place. For these organisations, they turn to us for help for a robust platform that detects threats quickly. We reduce the time to detect the threat and investigate it. Security analysts traditionally suffer from alert fatigue – after all, they are being inundated with information and notifications about potential security issues. The NetWitness Platform helps organisations make sense of all that data and then take timely action. Our tools help to prioritise threats that matter most to the organisation, and which can cause damage to the business.

Even companies without a SOC can use the NetWitness Platform, as well as some of our professional services, to protect their infrastructures.

What is your opinion about the security landscape in the UAE and the mindset towards adoption of new technology?

The UAE is one of the world’s fastest-paced technology adopters. The government here is currently encouraging digital transformation, and that is wonderful. That focus makes this region unique and means that technology adoption is much quicker here than in other parts of the world.

In the GCC, the UAE and Saudi Arabia is at the forefront of technology adoption. The willingness of enterprises to adopt different technologies in their business plans also means there is an increased need for visibility into their critical systems. The challenges that enterprises face with digital transformation here are similar to the ones faced by other companies undergoing rapid change: they need to ensure that no matter what technologies are implemented, no matter where their employees are based, no matter how they are serving their customers, they are doing so from a position of cybersecurity readiness.