Roland Daccache, Systems Engineer Manager MEA, CrowdStrike, speaks to Security MEA highlighting the evolving threat landscape in the Middle East and how CrowdStrike’s security solutions address these modern-day threats.
With digitization surging, how has the threat landscape evolved in the Middle East?
The Middle East was traditionally targeted by nation-states and initial sponsored APK groups. However, during the pandemic, we’ve seen an uptick in eCrime. eCrime accounts for more than a third of the total number of attacks in this region, which means that the Middle East is no longer different from any other part of the world. They’re also banking on the fact that organizations in the Middle East have forcibly taken to cloud adoption, they haven’t really yet secured them well enough. So, these are juicy targets. That’s the major change we have seen to the threat landscape in the Middle East.
How does CrowdStrike’s security solutions address the modern-day threats?
We understand the pain of the customer and the pain of enterprises today is that they have been securing a campus and data center for so long. And now, with the pandemic, everything has changed. They are having to secure remote desktops, remote workloads, remote workers, in addition to securing the cloud assets, SaaS applications, etc. We being a cloud-native company, view ourselves as the best fit for organizations who want to secure a distributed work model. And we want to move away from the traditional architecture model.
What is the future of cloud security solutions?
Before answering about the future of cloud security in general, the cloud itself has a very bright future ahead, we see all the new innovations, all the new features being built on the cloud. And the old data center architecture is giving its way to secure cloud-native applications. The only option you have is adopting cloud-native technology. You cannot retrofit an on-prem security solution into a cloud security solution.
CrowdStrike being cloud-native since 2011, understands the threat landscape in the cloud and how to secure it better than any other. So, if I have to sum up the future of cloud security solutions, I believe, not only will we see more vendors joining the cloud security solution ecosystem, but legacy vendors who have resisted the change for many years, starting to move their business model into a cloud-first.
How has CrowdStrike worked with its partner ecosystem in providing appropriate solutions to its customers?
We are a channel-first organization. We support our channel partners and distributors in enabling them to understand our technology to install it and configure it in our customer environments. This has been essential for us to be able to go into markets where we didn’t have a presence before. Second, on the partnership side, we also work a lot on tech alliances for solutions in email security, web proxies and network detection and we have further strengthened our CyberSecurity Alliances ecosystem and this enables us to provide advanced security use cases for the customer without leaving the Falcon ecosystem.
How are CrowdStrike’s solutions different from those of its competitors?
Key elements to consider in a modern cybersecurity solution are, how flexible it is, how scalable it is, and Is it cloud-native. In order to protect a cloud-first world, you need to look at the special breed of vendors that CrowdStrike belongs to. We are cloud-native. We are very scalable, and we are born to protect the modern workforce. We rely heavily on our threat intelligence, as well as our understanding of threat actor behaviour. So instead of focusing on malware and malware analysis, we focus on threat actor analysis, which almost none of our competitors are doing. And that’s what puts us in a unique position.
We are a NASDAQ 100 Company, which is a huge one for a company, our age and our size. And you see the market analysis from Gartner, Forrester, IDC always rate CrowdStrike in top spots, and that speaks about how we deliver on what we promised our customers.
How do you foresee the role of CrowdStrike in the Middle East?
When I joined more than three years ago, we were less than 10 people. Today we have more than 35 in the Middle East and we are expanding. We see great potential in the Middle East, that’s why we’re investing in varied avenues from seeds to systems engineering, to other functions, to cater for the huge demand for services and products in this region.