Werno Gevers, regional manager at Mimecast Middle East, explains how they expect to continue creating brand awareness and build new relationships in the region by participating in the weeklong trade show.
What does your company do and why is it important for you to be exhibiting at GITEX 2021?
Mimecast helps protect organisations from malicious activity, human error and technology failure. We help customers tackle their biggest security challenges with a managed security solution engineered to secure the number one cyberattack vector – email. By integrating brand protection, security awareness training, web security, compliance and other essential capabilities into our offering, we are able to ensure customers have the right security measures in place to prevent email compromise and improve their cyber resilience.
Attendees at GITEX will want to speak to technology partners who can assist in their digital transformation journeys and cybersecurity needs to be central to these discussions. Organisations in the region are undergoing rapid digital transformation, fuelled by local trends and accelerated by the pandemic. This is great news but it’s also providing opportunities for a growing array of savvy and opportunistic threat actors. We therefore want to work with organisations in the region to improve their defences and help protect them from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.
What products or solutions will you be exhibiting throughout the weeklong technology show?
We will be showcasing all our security services during the show – advanced email and web security solutions, brand protection capabilities and awareness training. But we are excited to introduce attendees to our new artificial intelligence offering, Mimecast CyberGraph. CyberGraph is a new add-on for Mimecast Secure Email Gateway (SEG) that is engineered to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help detect sophisticated phishing and impersonation attacks. CyberGraph creates an identity graph which is built to store information about relationships between all senders and recipients. The graph is designed to detect anomalies and leverages machine learning technology to help organisations stay one step ahead of threat actors by alerting employees to potential cyber threats.
Which are the major cybersecurity trends influencing the Middle East?
After the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020 and countries across the region went into lockdown, organisations embarked on rapid digital transformation at an unprecedented scale. Roughly 18 months after the first lockdowns, most organisations follow a hybrid work model that sees some employees working from the office some of the time, in between periods of remote work.
Unfortunately, a new picture is emerging. The global cybercrime industry – already experiencing a period of unrestrained growth and expansion thanks to new attack tools and the growing digitisation of our everyday lives – is pouncing on the opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities in hybrid work models.
Businesses need to ensure that cybersecurity is at foundation of their digital transformation initiatives. This means working closely with the rest of the business to understand and anticipate their cybersecurity needs. Cybersecurity leaders in the region are tapping into a variety of solutions and tools available on the cybersecurity market to help them secure these initiatives.
How does your offerings enable organisations to enhance their cybersecurity preparedness in the new normal?
A layered security approach that protects an organisation’s data and systems, while empowering every employee with skills and knowledge to avoid risky online behaviour is proven to reduce cyber security related risks.
Email, still a favoured attack vector for cyber criminals, needs to be secured with a third-party security tool like Mimecast, that can block highly targeted, sophisticated attacks. And by integrating with other best-of-breed security solutions through our API, you can speed up detection and response.
Critically, business leaders need to develop a culture of cyber security awareness and safe online conduct that limits the organisation’s exposure to risky individual action by employees. Mimecast’s Awareness Training is constant and impactful, helping organisations equip employees with the ability to spot — and avoid — behaviour that could put them and their organisations at risk.
Finally, our brand impersonation tools help organisations prevent exploitation of their domains. Brands need to look beyond their own perimeters to protect customers and partners from attack. Tools such as Mimecast DMARC Analyzer are essential in protecting their own domains from compromise.
Machine learning powered web scanning and analysis of key indicators – such as new domain registrations and the issuing of security certificates – could help organisations stop cybercriminals before they can take their impersonation attacks live. Mimecast’s Brand Exploit Protect will help organisations achieve this.
What does your company hope to achieve at the end of the show?
We hope to continue to grow the brand awareness of Mimecast in the region and to build new relationships. Most importantly we hope to educate organisations about our offering and demonstrate how we can help them in their cybersecurity journeys, with advanced security solutions that can protect them from growing cyberattacks.
Where can we find you at GITEX?
Bulwark stand – Stand H2-A2, Hall 2