LET'S COUNT THE WAYS A UNIFIED, CLOUD-BASED CYBERSECURITY POSTURE BENEFITS REGIONAL BUSINESSES

The Middle East region is known for its propensity to adapt.

- HADI JAAFARAWI

The past 12 years have doled out two global economic crises — 2008’s Great Recession and the economic turmoil caused by COVID-19. It was here, in our region, that some of the world’s greatest innovations occurred, as enterprises, public and private, found ways to do more with less. This was made possible because of cloud-computing ecosystems.

The latest changes have been so jarring that we have begun to casually throw around the phrase “new normal”. And not without reason. Pure on premises environments were rapidly becoming a thing of the past before the pandemic, not least because of the lure of cloud as a platform for cost efficiency and operational agility. The rising popularity of remote working now guarantees that our future workspaces will be hybrid: New. Normal.

This presents many problems for security professionals — an eclectic carnival of devices; a vast attack surface; a lack of control over all of it; and, of course, rising expectations. Under such pressure, it would be tempting to take it one day at a time, procuring different components of a security solution in separate rollouts: endpoint protection, network monitoring, cloud security, container security, and so on. This approach, unfortunately, leads to an uneven threat posture — a multi-vendor tapestry plagued by false positives and overworked human resources. In the hybrid-workplace future that is to come, we will need to do better.

The unified response