GITEX has always been an important arena for technology and cybersecurity, bringing together industry professionals, policymakers and leading organizations to transform the way we leverage today’s innovations. Rasheed Alodah, Country Manager for Trend Micro KSA, said in a recent Q&A session that it gives us a glimpse into what’s going to happen and how we’ll live, work and operate in the future. Here is an excerpt:
ask: What does a platform like GITEX mean for Trend Micro and the cybersecurity industry?
A: GITEX has always been an important arena for technology and cybersecurity, bringing together industry professionals, policymakers and leading organizations to transform the way we leverage today’s innovations. It gives us a glimpse into what the future holds and how we live, work and operate in the future.
A platform of this status provides us with the opportunity to exchange best practices, insights, innovations, and allows us to significantly increase awareness of cybersecurity and the strategies organizations can use to achieve their digital ambitions.
Across the Kingdom and the region, businesses must consistently protect their digital assets, networks and overall infrastructure from increasing attacks from ransomware and advanced persistent threats, and continuously monitor as the attack surface continues to expand today ever-increasing vulnerabilities.
This makes GITEX an opportunity for businesses to acquire the fundamentals and prepare for future technological advancement and adoption with Trend Micro’s leading, powerful and cutting-edge cybersecurity technology.
Organizations can accelerate their digital ambitions by building cybersecurity awareness, reassessing strategies, and adopting solutions that enhance their security posture.
ask: GITEX 2022 is about to enter the next digital world. Beyond protecting digital experiences, how is cybersecurity affecting business growth in Saudi Arabia?
A: Over the past few years, organizations in the country have faced numerous cybersecurity challenges that have had a huge impact on business expansion and created barriers to growth.
Unfortunately, new technologies that help people stay productive and productive through remote and hybrid work have created several vulnerabilities that open the door to a growing number of cyber threats.
Fortunately, the current threat landscape confronts savvy ways to strengthen your cybersecurity strategy.
Having actionable insights and adopting multi-layered solutions that can dramatically improve protection and business processes is key to getting your business back on track.
Additionally, these improvements enable businesses to successfully implement new digital transformation projects. In fact, global spending on digital transformation projects will reach $2.8 trillion by 2025.
As previously mentioned, organizations continue to create a safe environment for remote and hybrid workplaces, which will require further investment and protection to facilitate the way businesses operate in the modern digital age.
By leveraging advanced security innovations, companies can also safely adopt practices that provide agility through cloud-based systems and the online exchange of critical information and transactions.
Today’s risks and threats are affecting large and small businesses across the country. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy and their priority is to maintain steady growth through the best strategy and protection.
Small businesses will struggle to expand their business without proper cybersecurity procedures in place. Sensitive corporate data as well as financial and customer information will continue to be targeted by cybercriminals using older or newer attack methods.
As highlighted in the 2022 Trend Micro mid-year report, new ransomware groups are primarily targeting small businesses with 200 or fewer employees and mid-sized businesses with 1,000 or fewer employees.
Today’s cybersecurity resource standards are critical for organizations to grow, as they enable businesses to scale, protect digital operations from sophisticated cybercrime, and encourage the use of more IoT devices and other advanced technologies that simplify supply chains.
ask: How has the threat landscape in Saudi Arabia evolved?
A: As described in the latest 2022 Mid-Year Cybersecurity Report, Trend Micro’s solutions protect against attacks by detecting and blocking more than 28 million email threats, nearly 14 million malware attacks, and nearly 6 million URL victims. organization of the kingdom.
If you compare it with the global figures, it is clear that the country has been building resilience by protecting its infrastructure, due to aggressive planning to strengthen its digital capabilities.
Globally, our solutions have protected organizations from more than 63 billion threats in 2022—a 52 percent increase from 2021.
It’s great to see organizations in the kingdom continue to build resilience and overcome modern, sophisticated cyberattacks with Trend Micro’s latest and greatest cybersecurity solutions.
ask: What types of cyber threats do organizations need to be aware of in today’s digital age?
A: In Saudi Arabia, security teams must remain vigilant against ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) and malware-as-a-service (MaaS) threats.
These threats have increased over the past few months, with the ongoing battle with cryptocurrency mining and potential threats to new digital experiences like the Metaverse.
Businesses across the country will have to adopt robust security solutions that are critical to maintaining productivity levels and creating a clear path for accelerated growth.
Additionally, cyber warfare has been making headlines around the world, reaching unexpected levels of prominence in today’s hyperconnected world of critical infrastructure.
From inflation to supply chain issues, preparedness is critical as the attack surface continues to expand and mitigating risk becomes more difficult due to the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
ask: As national enterprises rapidly adopt advanced technologies, what are the major security challenges they will need to overcome in the future?
A: Cloud-intensive SMBs are becoming easier to target throughout 2022, with cloud threats, more sophisticated ransomware threats, bad actors repurposing old vulnerabilities and exploiting new ones, IoT threats, supply chain attacks, and commodity attacks.
As businesses across all industries continue to move to the cloud across the board, the cloud remains their main priority.
This creates opportunities for malicious actors to exploit growing vulnerabilities and requires security teams to constantly monitor activity in the cloud, while bad actors wait for the right moment in the digital business phase.
According to Trend Micro’s 2022 Security Forecast, spending on cloud services will reach $482 billion by the end of the year, up 54 percent from $313 billion in 2020.
As IoT applications increase and a hybrid workforce develops, these key areas will require solutions that provide intrusion prevention and detection systems, network forensics tools, and other enhanced detection and response (XDR) capabilities.
Challenges always arise with the introduction of new digital experiences, such as Metaverse, NFT risks, financial fraud, privacy breaches, and more.
The key to realizing the full potential of new technologies will depend on how businesses and communities prioritize cybersecurity practices and scrutinize every experience in the digital world at every step.