Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, today announced the appointment of Ahmed ElSayed as Regional Channel Manager for Middle East and South Africa (MESA). In this new role, Ahmed will drive the company’s growth and expansion in the region by assuming overall responsibility for the channel partner ecosystem, including distributors and managed service partners. He will spearhead strategic and tactical sales planning, partner recruitment and training and enablement.

Commenting on the appointment, Sherifa Hady, VP, Channel Sales, at HPE Aruba says, “Enterprises today are accelerating their digital transformation plans in the light of remote working which has become a business imperative brought on by the pandemic. Against this scenario, Aruba’s AI-powered cloud-native solutions that transform the network to support innovation and the future of work, is seeing a huge amount of interest from regional customers. With the high growth potential that we see in the market, we decided to appoint a result-oriented channel leader like Ahmed. We believe that through his inspiring vision and strategy, partners will be able to deliver Aruba’s value proposition in line with customer’s business priorities.”

Ahmed has worked at Aruba since 2012 and has a wealth of knowledge, skills and experience.  He has successfully held a number of positions within the company, ranging from Channel SMB Account Manager in GCC, Pakistan and Iraq to Middle East Distribution Manager which expanded to the larger MEMA/ MESA region. Prior to joining Aruba, he was the Partner Account Manager for Saudi Enterprise and SMB market at Cisco.   

Over the years at Aruba, Ahmed and his team have managed to drive consistent double-digit growth on Aruba Instant On (AIO) portfolio business, building Aruba’s Application Acceleration Service (AAS) foundation in multiple countries, accelerating SMB channel-led business by a double digit YoY growth, driving transactional revenue growth and developing and executing strategies for Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), a key solution in the company’s portfolio.

“I am excited to officially take over as channel manager for MESA. Our partners are a big part of our success as an organization and I look forward to deepening our engagement with them and taking our channel ecosystem to the next level,” concludes Ahmed.

The global leader in hands-free wearable computing for industry, RealWear, today announced that strong customer demand has accelerated its number one position, reporting triple (3X) year-over-year growth.  The company also announced a broad global expansion to support customers, including opening a new Customer Experience Centre in Dubai Internet City to meet growing demand for its products and services in the Middle East, and new offices in other major markets. The company has also achieved a milestone of shipping wearable devices to more than 3,000 unique enterprise customers worldwide in a wide range of industries.

The pandemic meant engineers were no longer able to travel to factories and facilities to support onsite technicians in person, RealWear quickly became the wearable device of choice for virtual, remote collaboration for troubleshooting equipment and performing quality checks, audits, inspections, plant tours, and product and factory acceptance tests (FAT). Leading collaboration companies — including Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom — have custom-tailored their software to fully leverage RealWear’s assisted reality wearable solution that is the choice of frontline workers at some of the world’s prominent industrial brands. 

“RealWear’s momentum is real and accelerating, with encouraging feedback from our customers about the transformative nature of our remote collaboration offerings for industry,” said Andrew Chrostowski, RealWear Chairman and CEO.  “As a result, we’ve seen 3X our 2019 sales in 2020, with that momentum carrying into 2021.  Our customers view us as the ‘gold standard’ solution to meet the daily needs of frontline workers and their management teams in key industry sectors such as Energy, Manufacturing, Food and Beverage, Automotive and Telecommunications. RealWear’s unique, fully ruggedized form factor, full-shift battery life, and unmatched relationships with Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom and a host of other leading ISV partners is driving our market leadership.”

New Demonstration Centre in Dubai

RealWear has opened its initial physical presence in the Middle East including an onsite demonstration facility in Dubai’s Internet City, which will provide customers and partners in the region the opportunity to get ‘hands on’ with RealWear’s flagship head-mounted wearable, the HMT-1. This initial physical presence is timely, not only to meet increased customer demand, but also as Middle East businesses adapted to new ways of working to drive worker safety and productivity.

RealWear already has a thriving business in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), with diverse customers spanning aerospace, insurance and oil and gas. Its growing list of clients in the region includes Marsh, and Saudi Arabian public petroleum and natural gas company, Saudi Aramco. When Saudi Aramco began using RealWear’s intrinsically safe product, HMT-1Z1, it recorded a 70% increase in safety compliance on top of a 10% improvement in workforce productivity.

According to ABI Research, from 2020-2025 smart glasses hardware unit shipments in the industrial and healthcare sectors is expected to grow globally by a factor of 12.8.  Additionally, between 2020-2025, unit shipments to the top three verticals, representing key segments for RealWear – manufacturing, logistics, and energy & utilities – are projected to grow by a factor of 10.8.

Threat actors weaponizing cloud storage, advanced cloud-based tools to create record ransomware attack effectiveness, volume

The pandemic’s work-from-home reality resulted in an unprecedented change for organizations as they fought to defend exponentially greater attack surfaces from cybercriminals armed with powerful cloud-based tools, cloud storage and endless targets. As working environments evolved, so did the methods of threat actors and other motivated perpetrators, as detailed in the latest 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report. 

“2020 offered a perfect storm for cybercriminals and a critical tipping point for the cyber arms race,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “The pandemic — along with remote work, a charged political climate, record prices of cryptocurrency, and threat actors weaponizing cloud storage and tools — drove the effectiveness and volume of cyberattacks to new highs. This latest threat intelligence offers a look at how cybercriminals shifted and refined their tactics, painting a picture of what they are doing amid the uncertain future that lies ahead.”

The 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report highlights how COVID-19 provided threat actors with ample opportunity for more powerful, aggressive and numerous attacks, thriving on the fear and uncertainty of remote and mobile workforces navigating corporate networks from home.

“There is no code of conduct when it comes to cybercriminals, their methods of attacks and the selection of their targets,” said Conner. “Technology is moving at an unprecedented rate. Threats that were once thought to be two or three years away are now a reality, with do-it-yourself, cloud-based tools creating an army of cybercriminals armed with the same devastating force and impact of a nation-state or larger criminal enterprise. Organizations must remain vigilant and proactive in hardening their cybersecurity posture.”

The 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report goes inside the stories that headlined 2020, and takes a closer look at new and disruptive cyber threats to provide insight into the evolving cyber threat landscape. Major findings of the new in-depth SonicWall report include:

• Ransomware reaches new heights with increasingly targeted attacks: A 62% increase in ransomware globally, and 158% spike in North America, points to cybercriminals using more sophisticated tactics and more dangerous variants, like Ryuk, to earn an easy payday.
  
  
• Ryuk ransomware rises from obscurity, sees astronomical increase: First identified in August 2018, Ryuk did not appear outside of North America, Europe or Asia as late as January 2020. The following month, Ryuk began climbing the charts, eventually overtaking top-ranking Cerber ransomware. With 109.9 million cases detected worldwide, Ryuk was logged nearly every eight seconds in September alone.
  
  
• More ‘never-before-seen’ malware variants identified: SonicWall’s newly patented Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection™ (RTDMI), a component of the company’s Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service, discovered 268,362 ‘never-before-seen’ malware variants in 2020, a 74% year-over-year increase. RTDMI™ is proven to proactively detect and block unknown mass-market malware, including malicious Office, and PDF file types.

• Malicious Office files surpass last year’s preferred PDFs: SonicWall research shows the shift to employees working from home full-time could be directly linked to the increased utilization of Office files and PDFs as malicious vehicles armed with phishing URLs, embedded malicious files and other dangerous exploits.New SonicWall data indicates a 67% increase in malicious Office files in 2020, while malicious PDFs dropped 22%.

• Cryptojacking returns as cryptocurrency breaks records: Once thought to be a dying attack vector after the industry’s major mining operation boarded its online service, cryptojacking is back thanks to rising cryptocurrency values and its appeal of concealed payouts. Total cryptojacking for 2020 set records with 81.9 million hits, a 28% increase from last year’s 64.1 million total.

• IoT malware increases as pandemic creates potential network of disruption: In March 2020, masses of employees packed their personal office belongings and equipment to work from home for months on end, simultaneously creating an explosion of new attack vectors. In 2020, SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers recorded 56.9 million IoT malware attempts, a 66% increase that showed shifting tactics for lurking cybercriminals.
  
  
• Intrusion attempts up as attack patterns change: The distribution of intrusion attacks took on an entirely new character as a result of the changes brought on by the pandemic. In 2020, Directory Traversal tactics (34%) took over the top spot after a tie with remote code execution (21% for both) in 2019.

• Retail, healthcare and government face mounting ransomware volume: Industry-specific ransomware data reflects the impact cybercriminals had on retail (365%), healthcare (123%) and government (21%) sectors over the course of the pandemic.

The annual 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report arms enterprises, small- and medium-sized business, government agencies and other organizations with actionable threat intelligence
collected by the SonicWall Capture Labs threat research team. In-house researchers work collectively with other industry experts, over 50 industry collaboration groups, research teams and freelance security researchers.

Data for the report is gathered from over 1.1 million sensors strategically placed in over 215 countries and territories around the world as well as cross-vector, threat related information shared among SonicWall security systems, including firewalls, email security devices, endpoint security solutions, honeypots, content filtering systems and the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) multi-engine sandbox.

To download the complete 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, please visit www.sonicwall.com/ThreatReport.

Remote work will catalyze a shift from the corporate perimeter concept to micro-office security certification. Outsourcing of IT and cybersecurity functions will be crucial to solve expertise shortages and save budgets. To coordinate managed service providers along with using multiple cloud services, cloud security and management skills will become a ‘must have’. These and other cybersecurity challenges and trends will be among those that businesses will have to manage this year, according to a new Kaspersky report.

A shift to remote work, financial constraints due to economic recession and the growth of cyber threats due to the global pandemic will affect the day to day role of cybersecurity professionals in 2021. Understanding the challenges but also perceiving opportunities in IT and IT security management is key for companies to maintain their protection. The recent Kaspersky report, “Plugging the gaps: 2021 corporate IT security predictions” suggests advice for each role related to cybersecurity, including CEOs or business owners, CISOs, SOC team leads and IT managers. Here are some of the main trends to monitor:

• Protecting the perimeter is no longer enough – home office assessment and certification will be needed. There should be tools to scan the level of security in a workplace – from the presence of software vulnerabilities to connecting to an unreliable or unprotected Wi-Fi hotspot. It will also require wider adoption of VPN, privileged access management, multifactor authentication systems, the implementation of stricter monitoring, and the updating of existing contingency and emergency plans.
• Transition to a service model will enable required levels of IT and IT security with lower investments. According to Kaspersky’s survey, seven-in-10 72% businesses in the META region said they already plan to use a managed service provider (MSP) or managed security service provider (MSSP) in the next 12 months^[1]. This is for good reason as the service model helps to minimize capital investments and transition business costs from CapEx to OpEx.
• Training for internal IT security specialists should incorporate management skills. Cybersecurity professions split into very narrow specializations, meaning that hiring staff for each specific role may be too expensive. This is where outsourcing can help plug the gap. However, businesses that outsource key cybersecurity components still need to focus on developing management skills for their in-house teams to handle those outsourced functions.
• There will be an increased reliance on cloud services, making dedicated management and protection measures necessary. The survey showed thatin 2020, employees in 91% of enterprises and 95% of SMBs in the META region used non-corporate software and cloud services such as social networks, messengers or other applications. This is unlikely to change when staff return to the office. To ensure that any corporate data is kept under control, better visibility over cloud access will be necessary. IT security managers will need to align themselves with this cloud paradigm and develop skills for cloud management and protection.

Along with the introduction of new cybersecurity practices, the quality of tools that enable these changes will be equally important. Quality of protection and seamless manageability are key when choosing cybersecurity solutions. “We have seen two important changes in what customers expect from corporate cybersecurity offerings. Firstly, the quality of protection is no longer up for discussion – now it’s a ‘must have’. Another major trend is that deep integration between various components of corporate security, ideally from a single vendor, now plays a bigger role. For instance, there was a long-held belief in the industry that various specialized solutions from various vendors can help create the best combination for protection. Now, organizations are looking for a more unified approach with maximum integration between different security technologies,” says Alexander Moiseev, Chief Business Officer at Kaspersky.

Check the full report ‘Plugging the gaps: 2021 corporate IT security predictions’ for more predictions.

[1] According to Kaspersky Global Corporate IT Security Risks Survey (ITSRS), conducted across 31 countries in June 2020. Throughout the report, a total of 5,266 IT business decision-makers were interviewed.