Bashar Bashaireh, Managing Director – Middle East and Türkiye at Cloudflare reveals its plans for this year’s participation at GISEC Global and how Cloudflare is well positioned to offer cybersecurity that can enhance the security preparedness of enterprises in the region
What does your company specialise in and why is it important for you to be exhibiting at GISEC this year?
Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet. It is a global network designed to make everything you connect to the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. Cloudflare’s suite of products, protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
As a company that is leading innovation, we are excited to be present at GISEC, to encourage regional enterprises to embrace network transformation.
Which are the major cyber security trends influencing the Middle East?
Some of the key 2023 security trends we see at Cloudflare are:
Emergence of Chief Zero Trust Officer:
A successful digital transformation is also a question of people: the right people in the right roles. The C-Suite of large organizations will witness the introduction of a new “Chief Zero Trust Officer.” Like other digital transformation efforts, the journey to zero trust requires coordination and cooperation across the enterprise, which can be a real challenge. A zero trust “czar” empowered with a clear mandate and a singular focus may just be the key to getting zero trust across the finish line in 2023.
Death of “The Password” :
According to research by Deloitte, 91% of cyber-attacks begin with a phishing email. Last year saw a wave of sophisticated email phishing attacks that breached hundreds of companies and proved that simple alphanumeric passwords have no place in 2023. FIDO2-compliant security keys and credentials take the burden of security responsibility off of the end user, proving a passwordless (and more secure) future is within reach.
The Cloud takes on Compliance
Complying with the patchwork of recently passed global privacy and data regulations has become a nightmare for corporate IT teams. In 2023, cloud services will finally take the burden of compliance away from these teams and automatically determine where data can be legally stored and processed. We believe the majority of cloud services will soon come with compliance features built in. The burden of compliance should largely be handled by the cloud services and tools developers are building with. Networking services should route traffic efficiently and securely while complying with all data sovereignty laws. Storage services should inherently comply with data residency regulations. And processing should adhere to relevant data localization standards.
Remote Browsers Resolve Device Complaints
The debate and frustration over corporate device policies may finally end thanks to remote browser isolation. Because the technology isolates the end-user device from the enterprise’s network in the cloud, employees are free to use the technology they prefer without compromising the security or compliance needs of their workplace.
BYOD will see tighter security and more control by the IT organization. The need to consistently enforce security policies and privacy controls will begin to outweigh the sense of urgency and demand for convenience we encountered during the last few years. But because so much of our digital lives live in a web browser, this control may take a different form than in the past. This new form will mean more control for IT administrators AND a better user experience for employees: Transforming the classical “No” into a “Go” while at the same time being secure.
What products or solutions will you be exhibiting at the show?
Some of the initiatives and innovations that the company is keen to demonstrate at GISEC include:
- Zero Trust: Cloudflare’s SASE platform, Cloudflare One, is a Zero Trust network-as-a-service built on a single, unified global network. It places identity-based security controls, firewall, WAN-as-a-Service and more, close to users everywhere on Earth, helping them quickly and securely connect to any enterprise resource.
- DDoS Mitigation: Cloudflare’s 192 Tbps network blocks 136 billion daily threats on average. The company’s global network spans over 285 cities & 100 countries to stop attacks on the frontlines. It provides highly rated web, application & network DDoS protection. Recently last month in February, the company mitigated a record-breaking 71 Million request-per-second DDoS attack. This is the largest reported HTTP DDoS attack on record, more than 35% higher than the previous reported record of 46M rps in June 2022.
- Application Security: Web applications and APIs make the digital world go round. Cloudflare API Shield keeps APIs secure and productive with API discovery and innovative, layered defenses. API Shield is part of Cloudflare’s application security portfolio that also stops bots, thwarts DDoS attacks, blocks application attacks and monitors for supply chain attacks. The company’s application security products work closely with our performance suite, delivered by the world’s most-connected global cloud platform.
- Email Security: Cloudflare Area 1 is a cloud-native email security platform. It crawls the Internet to pre-emptively stop phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and email supply chain attacks at the earliest stages of the attack cycle.
- Threat Data and Tooling: Cloudforce One is athreat operations and research team that publishes research and tracks and disrupts threat actors. Access to this A class team is available via an add-on subscription, and includes threat data and briefings, security tools, and the ability to make requests for information (RFIs) to the team
How does your offerings enable organisations to enhance their security preparedness in the Middle East?
Corporate networking has become overly complicated. Network and IT teams that used to maintain “castle-and-moat” architectures are now responsible for much more: managing legacy WAN connectivity (such as MPLS), establishing secure remote access, and stringing together disparate networking hardware on-premise to satisfy security, performance, and reliability needs. With Cloudflare, enterprises can replace a patchwork of appliances and expensive legacy circuits with a single global platform that provides built-in, software-defined Zero Trust functionality, DDoS mitigation, firewall services, and traffic acceleration.
What does your company hope to achieve at the end of the show?
GISEC, with its position as one of the region’s leading IT security exhibitions and networking platform, is the perfect venue for us to showcase our technology and expose our brand. We constantly strive to build loyalty among our customers as well as channel partners and events like GISEC go a long way in helping us do that.
What message would you like to give to the show visitors and why they should visit your stand?
Over the past few years, ransomware, data breaches, and other cyber campaigns have been hugely disruptive and cost businesses and public agencies huge amounts of money, besides breaking down the trust their users and customers put in them. In response, as organisations embrace digital transformation and move their operations to the cloud, they should be looking to an integrated service – offering security, performance, reliability and privacy as the key pillars of a successful digital transformation strategy. The first and most critical part of this transformation is to build trust within an enterprise’s ecosystem – customers, partners, stakeholders. And for this an organisation needs to have a robust and integrated security solution in place.
We invite show visitors to our stand so we can educate regional enterprises and organisations about protecting, consolidating and optimising their corporate networks, their IT and internet presence, without the cost and complexity of managing legacy network hardware.
Where can visitors find you at GISEC 2023?
Trade attendees interested in a meeting, can visit Cloudflare@GISEC at booth D37. The company will also be hosting an exclusive networking event for cybersecurity professionals and IT experts on March 15 at Hotel H in Dubai, where participants will be provided a brief overview of Cloudflare and get an insight into cybersecurity trends expected in 2023.