Discuss the risk management potential of FortiCNP

FortiCNP is a cloud-native protection platform natively integrated with cloud service providers’ (CSP) security services and Fortinet’s security fabric to deliver a comprehensive, full-stack cloud security solution for securing cloud workloads.

FortiCNP delivers the following features that allow security teams to effectively manage risk in the cloud:

FortiCNP resource risk insights (RRI) leverages a patented risk score algorithm to contextualize security findings from Fortinet cloud security solutions and AWS products and services to provide teams with prioritized, context-rich, and actionable insights about resources that present the highest risk and need immediate attention.

Alain Penel, VP – Middle East and Turkey at Fortinet

Integrations with Amazon GuardDuty malware protection leverage a zero-permission, agentless approach for detecting malware throughout the data supply chain by scanning cloud data stores, disk volumes, and workload images.

For customers utilizing Fortinet cloud security solutions such as FortiGate-VM and FortiWeb, RRIs will be able to trigger stopgap remediations to block high-impact threats.

FortiCNP continuously scans and monitors changes to cloud data with industry-leading threat intelligence and content scanning powered by FortiGuard Labs.

What advice does Fortinet want to give the Middle East enterprises to safeguard their business from cyber threats?

Organizations need security operations that can function at machine speed to keep up with the volume, sophistication, and speed of today’s cyber threats. AI and ML-powered prevention, detection, and response strategies based on a cybersecurity mesh architecture allow for much tighter integration, increased automation, as well as a more rapid, coordinated, and effective response to threats across the extended network.

Cybersecurity awareness and training are also important as the threat landscape changes to keep employees and security teams up to date.

Tell us about the products you’re presenting at GITEX 2022

Our focus at GITEX this year is to showcase our cybersecurity mesh platform which gives businesses a broad, integrated, centralized management and visibility, supports, and interoperates across a vast ecosystem of solutions, and automatically adapts to dynamic changes in the network. Our portfolio of more than 50 security and networking technologies is designed from the ground up to interoperate, sharing threat intelligence, correlating data, and automatically responding to threats as a single, coordinated system.

On site, visitors will experience the key pillars of the Fortinet Security Fabric such as the Zero-trust network which securely connects applications hosted everywhere with users working from anywhere;  Security operations which enables fast, coordinated detection and enforcement across the entire attack surface; Network security which addresses digital acceleration challenges by tightly integrating network infrastructure with advanced security across all edges; and cloud security which delivers visibility and control across cloud infrastructures.

How well have you optimized your regional strategies ahead of GITEX and what are your plans for 2023?

security will become a larger share of the networking market and Fortinet is well-positioned to continue to meet the needs of organizations looking to enable digital acceleration through convergence. New advanced solutions, such as AIOps, integrated zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and identity, zero-trust, and AI-enhanced outbreak detection, are only possible because Fortinet has converged critical security and network functions into a single, expansive platform.

Speak about the nature of cloud protection Acronis offers to its enterprise customers

Acronis has a global team looking at all the threats which are out there. Whenever there is a new big vulnerability or some outbreak, we verify that we do protect enterprises against it also attempt to block it earlier in the attack chain.

We have a multi-layered approach from patch management to patch hotfix abilities. Besides analyzing vulnerabilities and carrying out behavior-based detection on applications, installed on your system, we are providing backup and disaster recovery services to enterprises so that they can restore all the data without any loss.

Candid Wüest – VP Cyber Protection Research at Acronis

What sorts of vulnerabilities are to be identified and fixed?

Software vulnerabilities are the normal mistakes that programmers make. Some of them just reveal information, which is bad for privacy but not really bad from a security standpoint. However, the fact is you are compromised and vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

How do you help enterprises align the security standards, secure work environments, and remove vulnerabilities?

The key aspect is the visibility of your infrastructure. During the pandemic, lots of companies have shifted their employees to work from home or from anywhere, and of course, moved into the cloud for data services. More private/non-office networks are involved at this stage and vulnerabilities can be hosted by smart devices that are connected to these networks.

Most companies are forced to use multiple solutions to keep their data protected. We surveyed at the beginning of this year found out that 21 percent of the enterprises are using more than 10 solutions in parallel. That creates huge complexity and chances for some mistakes to be made. Acronis offers one agent that handles the job of all these solutions and keeps the work environment seamless.

What is your take on cloud services that enterprises are subscribed to and what are your recommendations?

We are agnostic about data centers, we can work with local storage, classical services, i.e., Azure and Amazon, or your private cloud if companies run themselves but we also have a strong focus on our own data centers. Acronis has about 40 different data centers around the globe because we want to have this local approach – an inside data center in your own country or region. E.g., GCC region.

When we operate through our own data centers, we can get the data encrypted and backed up. So even if someone could access those clouds, which they cannot, they would still not be able to get the data of anyone. We also offer hybrid models – some companies do have local backups still can have one backup into our cloud.

Tell us a bit about your regional goals and the amount of competition you face in the region

The Middle East is a very important strategic region for us. Our regional interest is to have strong partners in the region; be it in the UAE or the countries around it.

We don’t see any big competition that can cover all of those aspects of our service. With classical security, antivirus, anti-ransomware together with patch management and remote access in one solution is still an unexplored area even by major solutions providers.

Candid Wüest is the VP of Cyber Protection Research at Acronis, where he researches on new threat trends and comprehensive protection methods.

The event has engaged cybersecurity and industry experts from around the world and observed how companies can enhance their IT infrastructure capabilities – with a particular focus on MSPs, which are coming under increased attention from cybercriminals. The hybrid event hosted over 400 in-person attendees and hundreds more participants joined the summit virtually as well.

“The Acronis CyberFit Summit World Tour 2021 is where our partners come together to learn, grow their business and network,” said Patrick Pulvermueller, Chief Executive Officer at Acronis. “Dubai was a fantastic stop for our tour and it was great to see our very active local partners in person. The region has so much to offer and I look forward to being back soon in 2022.”

At the event, attendees heard from renowned speakers and experts including Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator, Lt.Colonel. Dr.Hamad Khalifa Al Nueimi, the Head of Telecom Division at the Infrastructure Dept (ICT Center) of Abu Dhabi Police GHQ, and Dr. Humaid Alshamsi, AI expert.

With more than 30 years of cybersecurity innovation, ESET protects over 110 million users in 200 countries and territories globally. Almost 40 percent of ESET’s employees work in research and development, keeping both ESET customers and the world at large safe from the latest and most advanced cyberthreats. ESET’s threat intelligence data blocks targeted attacks, protects against phishing, stops botnets and detects advanced persistent threats.

“Our partnership with Chronicle will lead to simpler, faster and more streamlined remediation of advanced persistent cyber threats,” said Tony Anscombe, global security evangelist and industry ambassador, ESET. “Together, customers will be able to quickly understand incidents in more detail, take the appropriate actions and stay one step ahead of bad actors. This truly will make the world a safer place,” added Anscombe.

“We are thrilled to bring onboard ESET as an Insight Partner,” said Ansh Patnaik, Chief Product Officer, Chronicle. “As a global platform designed to analyze enterprise security telemetry, Backstory provides more value to customers when it’s integrated with other key technologies within the customers’ networks. We believe our collaboration with ESET gives customers a broader, more accurate view of threats within their networks.”

As a result of automation and cloud services integration advancements, effective next-generation security measures can now be easily applied, without causing administrative friction; and the notion that security is a bottleneck to embracing any cloud model is a thing of the past.

UAE-based CIOs agree that cloud security is a top priority. On a scale of 0-10, with 10 being “very important”, cloud security ranked as an 8 or higher by the majority of UAE CIOs (56 percent), according to the Palo Alto Networks survey. Market figures back this up, with research firm IDC forecasting information security spend across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa to reach a record high of US$2 billion in 2017.

Organizations are rapidly adopting cloud technologies, and moving applications and data into a diverse set of cloud offerings, spanning public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and SaaS. In the UAE, a shift towards digitalization, Internet of Things and cloud computing is boosted by ambitious mega-projects and initiatives, such as UAE Vision 2021, that are expected to have positive impact on the country’s IT services market.

The Palo Alto Networks survey found that more than two-thirds of respondents (70 percent) in the UAE indicated that they have 1 to 10 cloud-based applications, with 15 percent and 9 percent stating that they had 11 to 20 and more than 21 applications, respectively. Private cloud is the most popular cloud computing solution amongst enterprises in the UAE, with 26 percent of respondents stating their company has adopted this. Fifteen percent of respondents preferred the public cloud, and a further 16 percent stated that they did not have any cloud computing solutions deployed, but they planned to make the shift to the cloud in the near future.

“As more organizations move to the cloud to take advantage of increased operational efficiencies and lower costs, security needs to keep pace with the new dynamic environments in which businesses operate. Customers need a holistic, integrated and automated approach across their entire architecture from the network and data center to the cloud,” comments Ercan Aydin, regional vice president of Emerging Markets at Palo Alto Networks.

With 46 percent of respondents admitting to having experienced a security incident, or being unsure if an incident has taken place, security vigilance needs be a top priority when it comes to the cloud. Of those surveyed, more than 50 percent stipulated that firewall (60 percent) and password protection (63 percent) were among the top security systems that their companies deploy to protect themselves against security breaches, indicating that there is a lack of understanding when it comes to securing applications and data in the cloud. Regardless of the size of the organization, a prevention-focused, natively engineered security platform that is simple to deploy and scalable to meet future growth demands is ideal.

“Security breaches and vulnerabilities make the headlines too often these days, and this could threaten trust in the digital age. With workloads and data increasingly distributed across physical and cloud computing environments, organizations need to have security in place that provides visibility, control and prevention of known and unknown threats, and which protects data, regardless of where it resides,” concludes Aydin.

Log management plays an integral role in an enterprise’s security strategy. However, logging in the public cloud is a challenge as access and controls are limited by the cloud providers. The complexity increases as organizations choose different providers for their IaaS and PaaS needs.

“The native cloud log management tools do not support multiple public cloud platforms. With these tools, extracting information for specific security needs is highly difficult,” said Manikandan Thangaraj, director of product management, ManageEngine. “Cloud Security Plus eases this task. It allows enterprises to centralize multi-cloud log data, provides exhaustive reports that present key insights, and offers the option to build custom reports and alert profiles.”

Cloud Security Plus gathers log information from both the Microsoft Azure and AWS platforms and enables security administrators to easily keep track of activities happening at different layers.