Two leading cybersecurity companies join forces to make it easier than ever for businesses to deploy seamless Zero Trust protection from the network to the device

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced it is expanding its partnership with CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWD), a leader in cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data. Cloudflare is integrating its Zero Trust platform with CrowdStrike Falcon Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA) to give joint customers simple and powerful controls to ensure employees have secure access to applications wherever they are working. Through this integration, Cloudflare and CrowdStrike are bringing together world-class technologies to provide joint customers with Zero Trust capabilities that are unmatched in the industry.

“Every business needs to protect users and teams no matter where they are or how they’re working,” said John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer at Cloudflare. “Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform delivers comprehensive protection to organizations of all sizes. Now we’re making it even easier for joint customers of Cloudflare and CrowdStrike to benefit from new combined security features for the connect-from-anywhere economy.”

According to an October 2020 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting[1], 76% of businesses are struggling to shift to a Zero Trust security posture due to complex user access needs. As employees continue to work from anywhere and businesses continue to navigate the transition to a hybrid approach to work, security teams are moving away from legacy security architecture towards a modern Zero Trust approach. Together, Cloudflare and CrowdStrike are working to simplify the adoption of Zero Trust solutions for IT teams. With this expanded partnership, joint customers can now:

• Enable secure conditional access to applications from any endpoint, regardless of the user or location: Cloudflare Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Cloudflare Secure Web Gateway (SWG) are now integrated directly with CrowdStrike’s real-time device posture assessments – Falcon ZTA – to strengthen the Zero Trust posture of joint customers.
• Identify and mitigate threats with unparalleled threat intelligence: Cloudflare is a part of CrowdStrike’s CrowdXDR Alliance, combining the insights from Cloudflare’s global network, spanning more than 250 cities and blocking an average of 86 billion cyber threats each day, with CrowdStrike’s endpoint data to help mutual customers identify and stop cyberattacks.
• Enhance visibility with logs: Cloudflare and CrowdStrike will advance their logs integration, allowing customers to correlate their Cloudflare logs with the CrowdStrike’s EDR telemetry for timely detection and mitigation of sophisticated threats.
• Get rapid support in under attack situations: CrowdStrike is an incident response partner of Cloudflare. During an incident or attack, CrowdStrike works with Cloudflare to help get customers’ web properties and networks back online.

“The CrowdStrike Falcon platform secures customers through verified access controls, helping customers reduce their attack surface and simplify, empower and accelerate their Zero Trust journey,” said Michael Sentonas, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike. “By expanding our partnership with Cloudflare, we are making it easier for joint customers to strengthen their Zero Trust security posture across all endpoints and their entire corporate network.”

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[1] Source: Forrester Opportunity Snapshot: Zero Trust, A Forrester Consulting Commissioned Study for Cloudflare, October 2020

Shereen Shabnam

The current threat landscape is constantly evolving and there is more need for organisations to have security solutions in place that best suits their business needs. We met with Ram Narayanan, Country Manager, Check Point Software Technologies, Middle East at the recent GISEC to talk to him about cybersecurity solutions and what the industry is looking for in terms of the broad range of security solutions in today’s dynamic business environment

What has been Check Point Software’s most inquired product or solution as yet during GISEC this year?

With the current work from the home scenario, customers are looking to secure their users wherever they are as remote users are connecting to corporate applications from anywhere which means that the organization’s attack surface is increasingly expanding.

Our product line of Check Point Harmony is the industry’s first unified security solution for users devices and access that has been very widely sought after. And secondly, with all the digital transformation initiatives, customers have been looking for cloud security.

Moving to a public cloud brings on a new set of challenges and responsibilities that puts ownership and burden on the user to secure their data, applications and workloads. So customers are looking to secure their clouds with Check Point CloudGuard which offers unified cloud native security across applications, workloads, and networks.

What are the current trends that you see most in the market for your industry?

First of all, there is an increase in demand as customers become more aware of the cyber threats that they are dealing with and the scale of attacks that they’re dealing with, which requires effective technologies to prevent them. So people are becoming more aware.

Secondly, with the escalation of digital transformation, customers are looking to secure their cloud transformation journey. Even though they know that there are basic securities that the hyperscalers can provide, they want to secure their cloud assets and protect their users without affecting their productivity.

And the third aspect is Gen V of cyber-attacks such as ransomware. Looking at the statistics, the number of cyberattacks during the pandemic increased significantly. While 2020 and 2021 have been exceptional years for cyberattacks, there is little indication that things will return to “normal” in 2022, and companies can expect to face sophisticated attacks that target every part of their infrastructure, especially where they are weakest.

Achieving complete protection across the expanded attack surface requires security solutions that deliver:  complete security against Gen V, zero-day attacks; solutions that are easy to deploy and manage; and eliminate patchwork security architectures and high total cost of ownership (TCO) with integration and interoperability.

This is where Check Point Software is creating awareness. We rebranded ourselves earlier this year as part of our strategy, to bring innovation into this whole landscape along with our new tagline, ‘You Deserve the BEST Security’, which highlights the reality that only the best security can fully protect in today’s complex threat epidemic.

In GCC, Saudi Arabia is growing in terms of market size with bigger industries all moving there. What has your experience been??

Saudi Arabia is a huge market and is making new investments to become an innovation-based economy with the kingdom’s ambitious Vision 2030, we see initiatives from government and private organizations toward imaginative digital technologies which encourage major growth opportunities.

Check Point Software offers the solutions needed by organizations of all sizes to comply with the vision and regulatory framework within the kingdom and ensure the implementation of cyber security controls following international best practices. Check Point Software is engaged with key strategic accounts and senior decision-makers in the kingdom to showcase our solution portfolio and how we can partner with them to achieve their innovative goals and also share with them the Threat Intelligence report specifically for Saudi Arabia, to provide a perspective of targeted cyber-attacks as compared to the global stats and how they can secure their digital assets.

We are working towards reaching more customers in Saudi Arabia and increasing our focus to expand in the kingdom. Through our engagement with the customers, it was apparent that more customers are becoming aware of the technology options that are available and are seeking particular solutions to meet their requirements.

Nowadays, the management and the CEOs are becoming more aware of cybersecurity as they are directly affected by it. Apart from reaching out to CIOs and IT executives, are you doing any kind of outreach to decision-makers who are not technology savvy?

Certainly, we are doing two things in this regard. For our existing customers, even though the CIOs are tech-savvy, we are providing them with the threat intelligence and training model so that they can translate what is on IT and present it to their board members and CEOs so that they understand the threat that they’re dealing with and what can eventually happen if they don’t pay attention to it and the need to secure their investments.

Using the existing C-level relationship that we have, we are providing them with the business insights that they can present to the board and CEOs. Secondly, for specific verticals such as the banking industry, healthcare and automotive industry, there are different types of threats and each sector is dealing with a distinct threat landscape.

And with all of these things becoming connected, the threat is real. For that reason, we are providing the business executives with the intelligence and the knowledge that we gain from an overall industry-wide aspect, in simpler terms rather than going too much into the technical side of things to make it easier for them to understand. So the nuts and bolts are taken care of by the IT team.

But overall, if you talk to an executive today about ransomware or a misconfiguration on the cloud, things like that are something they can relate to and is not something very IT related. We have a very high-level view, of how they see it, but then we work on the details with the IT of the company.

The automotive industry is investing a lot in connectivity. Is Check Point Software taking the initiative to provide its expertise and security framework to the automotive companies as well?

Yes, we are doing it on a global scale and are already engaged with companies to collaborate and improve security by protecting vehicles’ internal networks, and their external connections. We do have what we call in technical terms ‘Nano Agents’ which is an on-device runtime protection solution for Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) devices.

It monitors these devices and identifies potential cyber-attacks in any deployment situation. Traditionally, an IT environment will consist of many devices, appliances and similar other technical elements. But when it comes to driving and cars connected through 5G and IoT kinds of scenarios, you can’t have such numerous elements to sit, rather it should be like a small piece of code or software that is installed, but still fully secures the automobile from cyber threats as it eventually is connected to the internet and therefore exposed to the threats that we deal with on a traditional IT landscape.

We already have a few use cases where we have started and our R&D team is always on the lookout to foresee such threats and work towards creating and designing solutions with which we can approach automotive manufacturers to tell them about the need and practicality and why it is important because today with IoT, its life or death kind of scenario.

While in-vehicle connectivity continues to advance, and new technologies become available, we must address the advanced cybersecurity risks they pose. Security for the connected car is no longer optional, it’s a lifesaver – for drivers, other road users and pedestrians too.

Keyston’s operations will go from the UAE to the wider GCC and Iraq

Mahdi Amjad: We contribute to advancing digital transformation and technological prosperity

Keyston IT Distribution has announced the full acquisition of Al Masa, a renowned regional and global provider of the latest technology products, solutions, and services. The acquisition includes Al Masa’s offices, its teams and its existing deals with local and international manufacturers. The deal confirms Dubai’s position as a magnet for innovation-based investments and a ground for those seeking to launch their ambitions, projects, and businesses across the global horizons.

As a result of the new deal, Keyston’s mandate seeks to contribute to the growth of technology companies, drive digital transformation, and technological prosperity, as well as help customers implement their strategies as per the needs of the digital economy.

The acquisition was announced at a ceremony attended by representatives of the top technology companies in the hardware and technology industry. Keyston’s operations will commence from Dubai and expand across the GCC region and Iraq with future plans to expand to most international markets.

Mahdi Amjad, Founder and CEO of Keyston, said, “We are launching from Dubai a new era in the distribution of various information technology products, and we are fully confident in the ability of our team to strive and innovate modern solutions to achieve an unprecedented qualitative leap in this growing sector, which we have pioneered and excelled at.”

“The IT sector has a lot of potential as a result of the growth and increasing demand from customers. The IT spending was reported to have reached $77.5 billion across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa, before the pandemic, with a growth rate of 2.8 per cent. The current challenges that the sector faces are due to the increased competition between international manufacturers, the pressures imposed by the supply chains, and the high prices of raw materials, which Keyston is capable of dealing with to maximise the available opportunities. Product quality is not alone, whereas a professional distributor is required to enhance its presence and opens up prospects for local and international expansions,” added Mahdi.

Amjad also stressed that Keyston, with its expertise in international and local supply chains, specialised retail markets, and partnerships in the technology sector, is positioning itself strongly as a leading distribution company in the region to become the trusted partner and authorised distributor for traders who want to obtain the best information technology devices and network solutions for individual dealers, companies, departments, and institutions in the private and government sectors.

Keyston’s aim is to provide unparalleled distribution services for the best and latest information technology solutions to its customers, including retailers and integrated system providers. Moreover, the company will offer its expertise and technical services to ensure the prosperity of markets and meet needs through customised solutions and services.

It is worth noting that a number of reputable global names in the IT sector use Keyston as their authorised distributor, which include Avaya, Asus, Canon, and LG, as well as other strategic partners whose relationship with the company has strengthened over the past 25 years.

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By: Amr Alashaal, Regional Vice President – Middle East at A10 Networks

For digital business, transformation, and resiliency, success depends on application performance. Organizations must deliver the best possible experiences for employees and customers while driving innovation and ensuring security. To meet these interrelated objectives, many enterprises are migrating application delivery to hybrid/multi-cloud environments and related techniques to achieve the kind of agility and resiliency formerly only found in public cloud providers.

In a recent survey, The State of Cloud Application Delivery, A10 Networks and Gatepoint Research asked senior technology decision-makers about their experiences delivering applications in the cloud, and what today’s organizations need to achieve the digital resiliency on which their businesses depend.

Given the critical role of application delivery performance in digital business success, the fact that only 34 percent of companies are highly satisfied with their application delivery controller (ADC) solution should raise eyebrows.

Modern Business runs on Hybrid Cloud and Multi-cloud Application Delivery

It’s important to state the key role of application reliability and performance for today’s organizations. To compete effectively and grow in modern digital markets, businesses must meet high customer expectations for a great experience. Hybrid workplace strategies and work-from-home policies make it all the more critical to deliver a consistent high-quality experience wherever people work. Rising cyberthreats and an expanding attack surface call for a heightened focus on security. And agility is a must to support innovation and keep pace with fast-moving markets.

To address these needs, organizations increasingly host their applications in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. According to the survey, while most respondents continue to host applications on-premises, 85 percent use public cloud platforms—usually more than one—and 43 percent use private clouds.

This approach offers several potential benefits. A more diverse application infrastructure allows greater flexibility to host each application on the optimal platform, in the optimal location, to ensure availability and responsiveness. By tapping into scalable resources on-demand, companies can adapt more quickly to changing business needs and IT strategies and shifting customer demand. Moving to more economical and flexible licensing and pay-as-you-go models can free up funds for innovation. And with the right tools, organizations can achieve better visibility into end-to-end application security and performance than they could in a traditional on-premises data center.

Nonetheless, as seen in the low rate of satisfaction reported in the survey, many organizations are hampered by application delivery technologies that fail to meet their requirements.

How Underperforming ADCs Undermine the Promise of the Cloud

Ensuring application delivery performance in a hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environment hinges on several key ADC functions. Global server load balancing (GSLB) is essential, as organizations need to go beyond traditional disaster recovery requirements to optimize traffic and ensure availability across multiple data centers and clouds. With the vast majority of internet traffic now encrypted, TLS/SSL offload makes it possible to perform TLS/SSL encryption and decryption without straining server resources or creating bottlenecks. Application acceleration and optimization capabilities, including application analytics, fast root-cause analysis, and performance feedback for developers, are invaluable for delivering an outstanding, and consistent, customer experience while keeping employees fully productive and engaged.

However, application delivery solutions currently in place often fall short of these requirements. Fully half of survey respondents reported ongoing struggles with legacy application delivery technology. Nearly a third face challenges addressing application security threats. Over one in four experience application downtime and slow performance, and more than 20 percent face visibility and reporting challenges. To overcome these challenges and realize the full business benefits of their hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, these organizations will need to modernize their application delivery infrastructure.

The Agenda for Hybrid Cloud and Multi-cloud App Delivery

The gap between outdated application delivery solutions and modern requirements only continues to grow. With hybrid cloud and multi-cloud complexity rising, organizations need to be able to deploy and deliver applications more flexibly and efficiently, avoid being bogged down in manual tasks, and gain greater insight to ensure that fast-changing environments maintain performance and availability. These needs are reflected in the key objectives for the coming year cited by survey respondents. Forty-eight percent reported plans to increase agility with software/scale-out solutions for a faster response to shifting needs, while 47 percent intend to drive operational efficiency through the deployment of hybrid cloud automation, management, and analytics capabilities.

Survey respondents understood that modernizing the ADC will be essential to achieving these goals. Asked about the most important capabilities to ensure successful business objectives, 69 percent named faster troubleshooting and root-cause analysis, which depend on centralized management, analytics, and reporting to better understand their environment and its performance. More than half cited automation as a need to overcome challenges in IT skills development in a fast-changing technology environment, and a similar number saw a need for data analytics and application insights to guide performance optimization, troubleshooting, security, and more.

Ensuring Digital Resiliency for Better Business Performance

As companies evaluate their existing ADCs and consider future investments, their priorities are closely tied to bottom-line performance. To maximize ROI, they will need to be able to both increase revenue and control expenses. On the revenue side, better application performance will help them deliver outstanding experiences to win and retain customers in competitive markets, as well as keep their workforce engaged, productive, and satisfied.

A modern application delivery approach is clearly needed to help organizations right-size investments by enabling more efficient management, reducing calls to customer support, averting costly and disruptive security breaches, providing agile software options, and leveraging new advanced observability.

Acquisition Will Bring Management, Monitoring and Optimization for Storage, Compute and Data Together with Fully Managed Application Services to Provide Customers a Platform for Cloud Applications from the Datacenter to the Public Cloud

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Instaclustr, a leading platform provider of fully managed open-source database, pipeline and workflow applications delivered as a service. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions.

Modern cloud applications rely on a growing set of foundational services including multiple open-source databases, data pipelines, and workflow solutions. Efficiently managing the growing complexity and operational requirements of these applications and services adds new challenges for already overstretched infrastructure, database and operations teams, increasing application integration and delivery costs, slowing application delivery and limiting application innovation.

“NetApp has long been a leader in solutions enabling customers to run applications,” said George Kurian, CEO at NetApp. “The acquisition of Instaclustr will combine NetApp’s established leadership in continuous storage and compute optimization with Instaclustr’s fully-managed database and data pipeline services to give customers a Cloud Operations platform that provides the best and most optimized foundation for their applications in the public clouds and on premises.”

The acquisition of Instaclustr builds on a series of strategic acquisitions made by NetApp to deliver a leading best-of-suite platform for CloudOps. NetApp’s strategic acquisitions including Spot, CloudCheckr, Data Mechanics, Fylamynt and now Instaclustr have made Spot by NetApp a compelling platform for applications on one cloud and across multiple clouds–continuous optimization, automation, monitoring, and security combined with expertise deploying and operating open-source applications, all delivered as a service, on public and private clouds to give customers more cloud with less cost and less time.

“Data management technology platforms are an increasingly essential priority for today’s modern enterprise as companies look for new ways to accelerate application development for competitive advantage. Instaclustr delivers fully managed open-source solutions that give companies increased productivity and reduced cost,” said Peter Lilley, CEO and Co-founder at Instaclustr. “Instaclustr’s growth has been driven by the fact that companies want to leverage open-source databases, pipelines, and workflow applications without overwhelming themselves with the complexity and cost of managing and operating them. We are excited for organizations building applications for their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reality to benefit directly from Instaclustr’s data PaaS solutions along with NetApp and Spot by NetApp’s infrastructure solutions, while minimizing operations burdens.”

“As companies race to modernize and digitally transform in the cloud, they must implement solutions that enable them to focus more on building and releasing cutting-edge applications at speed, spending less on infrastructure management and operations,” said Anthony Lye, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Public Cloud Services at NetApp. “Instaclustr does just that and will be a significant addition to our Spot by NetApp portfolio, solving common challenges of cloud complexity, cost overruns, single vendor lock-in, and customers’ lack of internal technical resources. The acquisition marks a critical advancement in our strategy to run application driven platforms and infrastructures.”

“From a technology and product perspective, NetApp’s powerful infrastructure solutions pair perfectly with Instaclustr’s data-layer-as-a-service solutions and services,” said Ben Bromhead, CTO and Co-founder at Instaclustr. “For enterprise customers operating applications in the public cloud or on-prem, NetApp and Instaclustr’s combined platform will offer an unparalleled solution for overcoming cloud complexities while eliminating vendor lock-in risks and the high costs of building and maintaining that same expertise internally.”

By: Claude Schuck, Regional Director, Middle East at Veeam Software

Kubernetes is still in its early educational phase as a technology. On Gartner’s Hype Cycle, container management currently sits on top of the peak of inflated expectations. If Kubernetes and other technologies within this category follow the expected trajectory, they will enter the Trough of Disillusionment in the next 12 months – before climbing the Slope of Enlightenment.

This aligns fairly well with where Kubernetes currently is in terms of business deployment. In the Middle East, organizations are waking up to its potential and developing an understanding of where it can deliver real competitive advantage, in the light of the increasing rate of adoption of containers. According to Veeam’s Data Protection Report 2022 69% of organizations in the UAE and 76% of organizations in Saudi are already running containers in production, while 29% and 22% respectively plan to do so in the next 12 months. However, there is a lot of education to be done before IT teams have fully got to grips with how best to deploy Kubernetes.

Over the next 12 months we will see two things happen that will shift perceptions around Kubernetes. The first is that those deploying the technology will start to understand it more, gain confidence in building the business case, and start to demonstrate real ROI. The second is that cloud providers will find simpler ways to serve Kubernetes to organizations, reducing the need for deep technical understanding to deploy it effectively.

Education and enlightenment

Much of the appetite for learning about how to successfully deploy Kubernetes and the benefits of doing so comes from within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community. The technical barriers to entry are still relatively high, which is why one of the top challenges identified by organizations looking to deploy Kubernetes is that they lack the necessary in-house skills.

It is often the case that relatively new technologies which experience unprecedented spurts of adoption outpace the market in terms of the skills and infrastructure required to support growth. However, when it comes to Kubernetes, we’re talking about one of the fastest-growing open source technologies of all time in terms of early adoption. It’s important, therefore, that this process of educating the technical community gathers pace.

Over the next 12 months, we will see the number of learning opportunities increase as the industry looks to address the emerging skills gap. An example of such an initiative is Learning.kasten.io, a Kubernetes learning platform from Kasten by Veeam. The programme aims to equip technical professionals looking to upskill and the next generation of tech talent with at least a basic understanding of Kubernetes. This will shorten the learning curve for both experienced and entry-level technologists – burnishing enterprises with a pool of talent that understands Kubernetes and how to get the best out of it.

Making Kubernetes easy

As well as building a solid pipeline of people who understand and can capably consult businesses on Kubernetes, cloud providers are working on ways to make it easier for IT teams to consume and deploy them without in-house technical proficiency. This will ultimately be one of the major driving forces that takes Kubernetes from being an emerging technology in its experimental stages to established enterprise technology. The success of Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) proves that organizations are demanding simpler ways to consume and deploy IT through the cloud. Kubernetes will be no exception to this rule.

Currently, Kubernetes is acting as a management platform for containers and among the earliest adopters are established and regulated industries such as banking and financial services. Businesses from other industries are currently evaluating the pros and cons of Kubernetes, looking at whether they can incorporate it into their networks. To accelerate the growing interest of the broader market, major cloud service providers are beginning to offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) – making it possible to operate Kubernetes as a managed service. KaaS is commonly provided via the public cloud, but as its penetration grows organizations will be able to consume similar services through local managed service providers (MSPs) or deploy them on-premises.

The move towards KaaS will significantly drive-up Kubernetes adoption, taking away some of the initial pain and investment required to deploy Kubernetes and enjoy the benefits of delivering applications faster, at a greater scale, and with greater accuracy. No matter how Kubernetes is consumed, organizations looking to take advantage of the opportunity it offers must be aware of the data protection requirements which accompany it. Kubernetes does not significantly change the threat landscape or bridge any cybersecurity gaps. It requires the same Modern Data Protection capabilities as any other type of data on any other type of platform.

Fundamentally, the infrastructure is now closer to the applications with the help of containers, and data backup must be carried out differently to align with this. The number of workloads using stateful data in container environments is increasing alongside data services being deployed within the Kubernetes cluster. Other public cloud tools can be connected to applications running within Kubernetes, which changes the way data is protected. Simply put, backup works differently for Kubernetes than virtualized environments. This is where specialized data protection solutions for backup and recovery of Kubernetes environments such as Kasten by Veeam come into play.

Over the next 12 months, more businesses will get to grips with the many benefits of deploying Kubernetes, while cloud providers find more consumable ways of serving up Kubernetes including KaaS. As well as investing in the skills required to maximize ROI, businesses must seek the advice of data protection experts when deploying Kubernetes to ensure that they are not becoming exposed to new risks. Organisations in the Middle East must be equipped with Modern Data Protection solutions to ensure their data is protected across physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS and Kubernetes environments at all times.