Every year, Emirati Women’s Day offers a moment to pause and reflect on just how far Emirati women have come, and how much further their ambitions are taking them. Across artificial intelligence and technology, entrepreneurship, sustainability, industry and beyond, Emirati women are no longer simply entering these spaces, they are shaping them, leading critical decisions and setting new benchmarks for what is possible.

This progress has not happened by chance. It is the result of a national vision that has consistently placed women’s empowerment at the heart of the UAE’s development, widely regarded as the driving force behind the advancement of Emirati women. Together, these efforts have built an ecosystem of mentorship, opportunity and structural support that allows Emirati women to move beyond simply having a seat at the table to actively influencing the direction of entire industries.

This Emirati Women’s Day, we spoke to three Emirati women who are doing exactly that, each carving out space in fields as varied as AI infrastructure, entrepreneurship and industrial sustainability. Their stories reflect not only how far the journey has come, but also a shared sense of responsibility: to keep the doors open, and to inspire the next generation of Emirati women to walk through them with confidence.

Amal Almaamari, Program Director at Core42, (a G42 Company)

The UAE has created an environment where women are encouraged to pursue ambitious careers, take on meaningful responsibilities and contribute to sectors that are shaping the country’s future. As an Emirati woman working in AI, I see this opportunity firsthand. At Core42, I am able to contribute to the infrastructure and capabilities helping organizations adopt AI securely, at scale and with greater control over their data and technology.

What is particularly inspiring is seeing Emirati women increasingly take on roles across engineering, product development, strategy and leadership. The opportunities available today allow us not only to participate in the technology sector, but to build expertise, influence decisions and contribute to the UAE’s ambitions in AI and advanced technology.

Emirati Women’s Day is a celebration of that progress and the confidence the UAE continues to place in its women. It also reminds us of our responsibility to build on these opportunities and inspire the next generation of Emirati women to see technology as a field where they can grow, lead and make a lasting impact.

Amreen Iqbal, Founder and Creative Director of Piece of You

What stands out to me about building a business here is how much the UAE actively invests in women being part of its growth story. From mentorship networks to platforms that put Emirati entrepreneurs in front of the right audiences, the opportunities aren’t hypothetical, they’re structural. Piece of You exists because I had the confidence and support to take an idea and turn it into something real. On Emirati Women’s Day, I think about how many doors have opened for women in my generation that weren’t open before, and how many more are opening for the next one.

Hamda Al Shamsi, Admin Assistant at Geocycle Waste Recycling UAE at Holcim UAE

The UAE has created an environment where women are empowered to pursue their ambitions, develop their skills, and contribute meaningfully across every sector. Today, Emirati women are building careers in fields ranging from technology and engineering to sustainability, manufacturing, energy, and leadership.

As an Emirati woman and the only woman currently working at Geocycle UAE, I have personally experienced the importance of having the opportunity to step into a technical and industrial field and prove that there is a place for women in every sector.

For me, Emirati Women’s Day is a celebration of how far we have come, but also a reminder of the opportunities ahead. The support and vision of the UAE leadership, together with the efforts of Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, have helped create a generation of Emirati women who are confident to pursue their goals and make a difference. I believe the next step is to continue encouraging young Emirati women to explore fields they may not traditionally consider. When women are given the opportunity to learn, lead, and contribute, they do not only build successful careers — they help build a stronger and more sustainable future for the UAE.

NETSCOUT® (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of observability, AIOps, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, today announced an extension of its Adaptive DDoS Protection (ADP) solution enabling service providers to automatically detect and mitigate outbound DDoS attack traffic. By extending protection from the attack target towards its source, NETSCOUT helps operators prevent compromised subscriber devices from disrupting their own networks, consuming costly capacity and attacking customers and organizations across the internet.

Consumer broadband routers, cameras and other IoT devices are increasingly being weaponized by Turbo-Mirai class botnets capable of generating multi-terabit attacks. These outbound attacks have already caused costly service outages, reputational damage and customer loss, and damage to peering relationships risking a large increase in transit costs at service providers around the world. By detecting and mitigating malicious traffic generated by compromised device populations before it leaves their networks, service providers can reduce abuse complaints and infrastructure costs while protecting their own networks and services and helping lower subscriber churn and regulatory risk.

“The combination of higher-speed broadband connectivity and vulnerable IoT devices has been weaponized by a new class of massive DDoS botnets,” said Patrick Donegan, founder and principal analyst, HardenStance. “Source-side mitigation, or attack suppression as it’s sometimes known, is a critical part of the equation. NETSCOUT’s approach, backed by its ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) and ASERT analysts, gives service providers the tools they need to detect and stop attacks before they have an impact, protecting their customers and the broader internet from the large-scale DDoS attacks we have seen.”

Using AI-powered threat intelligence and automated detection and mitigation, NETSCOUT’s ADP solution, an addition to its Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System:

• Automatically detects and mitigates ever evolving attacks through dynamic detection, intelligent redirection and adaptive mitigation.
• Extends these capabilities to outbound traffic, combining enhanced, customized detection with comprehensive threat intelligence tailored for each ISP.
• Uses NETSCOUT’s proprietary AI/ML-powered DDoS detection to analyze massive volumes of outbound internet traffic to uncover attacks designed to hide within legitimate flows.
• Draws on unique global real-time intelligence of DDoS activity covering approximately half of all internet traffic to rapidly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and pinpoint the responsible, compromised devices.

“We are extending DDoS defense from the target to the source,” stated Darren Anstee, CTO, Security, NETSCOUT. “By using our internet-scale visibility to derive localized threat intelligence for our customers, NETSCOUT can identify and precisely suppress attacks at their origin, before they cause problems locally or at their target. This capability gives our customers a new level of comprehensive defense across their peering, transit, cloud and customer edges.”

This expansion of capabilities demonstrates how NETSCOUT is applying its global threat visibility and proven ADP solution to meet emerging service provider challenges. By extending an established inbound DDoS workflow to outbound and cross-bound threats, NETSCOUT enables operators to improve network-resilience, cost-controls and revenue protection through its proven Arbor Sightline and Arbor TMS solutions.

Illumio Inc., the breach containment company, today announced it has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026  report. Illumio received the highest scores among all evaluated vendors in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories and was named a “Customer Favorite” for its outstanding customer feedback among evaluated vendors. According to the report, “Repeat customers indicate their satisfaction with the consistently high quality of technical support, regardless of the personnel assigned to their account.”  

The report evaluated 10 microsegmentation providers against a comprehensive set of criteria covering product capabilities, strategy, innovation, and customer experience. Illumio received the highest scores possible in 10 evaluation criteria, including areas related to visualization, host-based enforcement, product security, vision, and innovation. According to the report, “Illumio excels at essential microsegmentation functions.”

“Illumio was founded on a simple belief: breaches are inevitable, but cyber disasters are not. We have been singularly focused on one objective — reducing lateral movement and attack surface, and increasing resilience in every organization,” said Andrew Rubin, CEO and Founder of Illumio. “Being named both a Leader and a Customer Favorite reflects to us the strength of our technology, vision, and even more importantly our ability to deliver real outcomes and risk reduction, which is the foundation of the trust our customers place in us every day. In the model threat world we are all now entering, defense must be coupled with resilience. Recovery is the new defense — and the new cyber.”

According to the Forrester Research report, “Organizations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio.”  The report also recognized Illumio for:

• “Illumio has articulated a vision for microsegmentation as a core element of security operations.”
• “Illumio is bridging the gap between its traditional users and other parts of the security organization by delivering agents mapped to personas from other teams.”
• “Its UI provides easy access to information that supports both access control and incident response use cases.”

The recognition follows continued innovation across the Illumio Platform, including Network Posture, which helps organizations understand security posture based on real-world traffic and prioritize risk reduction efforts. These capabilities support the growing need for visibility, cyber resilience, and regulatory readiness across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Designed for operational simplicity, the Illumio Platform combines Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation to help organizations identify, assess, and contain cyber risk across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Security teams can uncover high-risk exposures, visualize potential attack paths, and implement segmentation policies from a single platform to contain threats and improve cyber resilience.

The platform is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations, including BNP Paribas, eBay, and Microsoft, the latter of which has deployed Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation across its entire corporate IT environment. Igor Tsyganskiy, Global CISO of Microsoft, said: “When we needed to bring these capabilities into Microsoft, Illumio was the only segmentation solution that would work at the scale of Microsoft and deliver in our environment.”