FEATURE
non-profit organisations and veterans programs. Training for faculty is free of charge for these organisations, arming the professors with the skills required to teach the program to students who will learn how to protect global organisations from cyber threats.
What do you think are the top threats facing IT decision makers in Saudi? ZeroDay attacks, DDos attacks, Web Application attacks, and data theft are among the top threats facing organisations in Saudi Arabia. That difficulty is readily seen from the number of high profile data breaches over the past several years. However, while the headlines of each new data breach grab our attention, particularly the number of identities or credit cards compromised, what is frequently overlooked in the long term impact to the organisation, both from a reputational and financial point of view. But securing an enterprise network is more than just looking at yesterday’s or today’s issues. Looking ahead at different trends and their potential impact on the network’s security is also part of the ongoing challenge. To avoid becoming obsolete with the next wave of new trends that will hit the market, Fortinet’s technology vision, the Fortinet Security Fabric has to have certain characteristics that will it allow to adapt as necessary.
Can you name of some of your biggest customers in the country? Our customers span various verticals and include leading telcos, universities, banks, enterprises, oil & gas, healthcare as well as a number of SMBs. Do you think the traditional security methods can prevent the new breed of attacks? Enterprises today are still relying on the same old strategies. Just look at the news: it seems that almost daily we’re reading about another attack, another breach, another massive loss of data. Why aren’t these strategies working anymore? It could be a number of reasons but there are three key areas that we can point to. The first is being too focused on compliance: just checking all the boxes on a list isn’t enough. How many massive retail breaches have we seen where the company was recently audited and found to be fully PCI-compliant? Attackers don’t care that you passed your last audit. They’re also too risk based and reactive. While yes, it is important to protect against the low-hanging, alreadyseen fruit, it’s the new unknowns that are critical to detect. An annual risk assessment is obsolete the moment it’s done in today’s threat landscape. Finally, they’re far too focused on ‘best of breed’ solutions. A firewall from one vendor, a sandbox from another,
Fortinet introduced this year a worldwide network security academy, designed to develop and train actionoriented cybersecurity experts to manage new and advanced threats on the horizon.
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a spam solution from a third. None of these tools were ever designed to work together, leaving your network with potential protection gaps. What should an organisation do to avoid becoming the next headline? The solution starts with changing the way the enterprise looks at security. Security must be comprehensive and intelligent with zero trade-offs in network performance. Legacy security approaches have gotten too complex and network traffic has become unmanageable, resulting in too many alerts and not enough clarity on what is important. At Fortinet, we’ve come up with three maxims defining our approach to security today. Rule number one is to Keep It Simple: the more complex your network is, the harder it is to secure it. The second rule is that the definition of a network has changed and the number of potential attack vectors has multiplied. What was the boundary of your network yesterday no longer exists today. And finally, rule number 3. Slowing down the network to implement security is not, never has been nor will it ever be a satisfactory strategy. Fortinet has recently broadened its Secure Access Architecture solutions. Can you tell us what is new? Today’s network surface has changed and there are more ways to access networks through wireless networks, mobile, and the cloud. Fortinet’s Secure Access Architecture of wired and wireless networking solutions merges advanced security with enterprise access layers to provide seamless protection across the expanding attack surface - from IoT (Internet of Things) to the Cloud. It offers universal management and policy controls that simplify administration across wired and wireless infrastructures, enabling sophisticated segmentation of devices from critical data. 06.2016
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