Palo Alto Networks is relishing its move to GITEX Technology Week’s Cloud Hall, with the security firm’s emphasis shifting towards delivering services for a variety of IT environments.
The firm was traditionally housed in halls with network and security vendors, and is now participating in GITEX for the third straight year.
Tareq Abbas, the firm’s regional systems engineering director, believes the region’s increasing fascination with cloud meant that shifting Palo Alto Networks’ focus to this area was somewhat inevitable. “We’ve moved to the Cloud Hall because we’ve seen a major pick-up in cloud adoption in the Middle East,” Abbas said. “The discussion around cloud security has also been ongoing for some time.”
Palo Alto Networks has recently released research that targeted more than 1,000 CIO’s across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and “other GCC countries”. This explored CIOs’ cloud security strategies around their applications, as well as their top cloud concerns.
It revealed that almost 50 percent of CIOs have either a public, private or hybrid cloud within their network. Fifteen percent used public cloud, 26 percent private cloud, and 7 percent hybrid cloud. It also showed that two thirds of CIOs rated cloud security as a “very important” issue they had to address, while a third were unsure how their cloud infrastructure was secured or how secure their cloud applications are.
“The discussion around cloud security is similar to that of Internet security in the early 2000s,” Abbas says. “Our research recommends that customers embrace a cloud security model, and the right technologies that address cloud infrastructure to help the development of their applications. They should focus on security automation to prevent human error.”
