AHEAD OF THE CYBERSECURITY GAME

AHMED BAHER, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER AT INFOBLOX, ON HOW THE COMPANY IS HELPING ITS CUSTOMERS IN EGYPT OVERCOME CYBERSECURITY CHALLENGES.

Can you elaborate on the three biggest cyber threats enterprises face in the Egyptian market as they rapidly embrace the new business reality and move workloads to the cloud?

It has been stated in the press that customer data is more valuable in today’s economy than oil. If this is true, then protecting customer data must be a top priority for all businesses. This means all pathways to customer data must be secured, no matter where that data is stored. Let us look at some of the things that may be making your life more difficult. From a network perspective and from an environmental perspective, there are all these shifts happening today. In fact, a customer recently said, “Right now in IT, it is like the industrial revolution of years past. There’s that much change going on.” You have got more people on the Internet, more technologies moving to the Internet like software-defined networking, more devices from BYOD or Internet of Things. You have seen attacks driven by things as random as security cameras. Then moreover, you have got businesses really pushing on digital transformation for cost reasons, better service to customers, that frankly is, from an IT perspective making your world a lot more complex. What does that lead to? That is leading to more hacks and everevolving threats.

What are the challenges customers have when attempting to address these growing threats?

Network landscapes are rapidly evolving, driven by trends in security, virtualisation, cloud, IPv6 adoption, the Internet of Things, and Bring Your Own Device. These modern demands require advanced solutions for managing critical network services in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. However, when many of the processes for provisioning network services are still managed manually, or across disparate sites and systems, these solutions can be a challenge to deliver and visibility into networks can be limited. This rapid growth can also make it difficult for an organisation’s infrastructure to scale quickly enough to keep up, risking unplanned downtime and business disruptions. Security risks are increased as well, as items such as mobile devices from inside and outside an organisation’s network are continuously crossing mixed physical and cloud infrastructure whose security may not always be under that organisation’s control. As a result, networks are being constantly exposed to threats.

How can companies design effective strategies to ensure their digital businesses are secure?

From an infrastructure perspective, the first thing you need is to be able to see what is out there, make sure that everything is within your policy, and then protect that infrastructure. Visibility becomes an important aspect because you cannot troubleshoot or protect what you cannot see.

Number two for protecting your infrastructure - you have got policies around infrastructure and whatnot as they get spun up on the network. You would want to know that they are there and that they are within policy. You would want to find non-compliant devices because they could be hiding vulnerabilities.

Third is making sure your critical network services is up and running even when your network is hit with an attack. And doing it intelligently is the elegant approach that Infoblox offers.

Finally, you can also send information about what is happening on the network to other security solutions in your environment, like a Firewall, NAC, SIEM, Vulnerability management etc.

How has Infoblox armed customers with robust cloud-first security solutions to combat evolving threats?

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is a DNS-based security tool that covers security blind spots left behind by next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, while protecting the enterprise network and those working remotely regardless of device or location. BloxOne finds anomalies earlier in the threat life cycle and empowers organisations to detect and remediate with higher efficacy using automation and security orchestration and response while requiring fewer people resources.