Safe Security, backed by British Telecom & John Chambers invests in international markets to drive next phase of growth

Safe Security, a pioneer in Cybersecurity & Digital Business Risk Quantification today announced its entry into the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region, to build on its success in North America. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Safe Security helps organisations manage, measure and mitigate cyber risks with its breach likelihood prediction platform SAFE. Backed by marquee investors such as British Telecom Group, John Chambers and other prominent industry leaders, the company appointed Cherif Sleiman, a veteran industry leader to head the business for international markets.

Sleiman is a visionary technologist and ‘turnaround specialist’ who will focus on building Safe Security’s regional presence, go-to-market and channel strategy in the region. Over his illustrious career which spans over 26 years, he has held leadership positions at giants of the tech industry including Cisco, Nortel, Brocade and most recently Infoblox. As part of its business expansion strategy, Safe Security will significantly ramp up its investments in Europe, Middle East & Africa – regions that the company believes are key to its growth. It plans to hire more than 100 employees in the next 18 months in the region.

Reflecting on his appointment, Cherif said, “Cybersecurity is a global concern. For all of the time, money, and energy spent telling us how to protect ourselves including what to buy to do so, there’s little sense of actual progress when it comes to security. And that’s key, because safety is not about how much money we spend on products, analysts or investments, it is simply about Knowing. Safe Security is uniquely positioned to provide organisations with the knowledge necessary to better secure their organisations. The SAFE platform delivers 360 degree continuous, dynamic & intelligent quantitative cyber risk management and breach likelihood prediction by assessing People, IT Infrastructure, Cloud Presence, Saas Deployments and Third Party Partnerships. It streamlines the knowledge and language needed by all stakeholders, from the boardroom to the frontline security professionals, so accurate decisions and actions can be taken in a timely fashion. I am excited to join Safe Security and honoured by the trust they have in me. I am confident that we will grow exponentially in the next 2-3 years across international markets.”

Over the course of the last year, cyber security incidents have seen a dramatic increase globally. With the growing sophistication of cyber attacks, cybersecurity through generic red-amber-green heat maps is not enough. Safe Security is at the epicentre of this paradigm shift; they provide an enterprise-wide, objective, unified and real-time cyber risk quantification platform called SAFE. It aggregates automated signals across people, process technology and even third party entities that an organisation works with, to dynamically predict the breach likelihood (SAFE Score) & the financial risk of the breach, to an organisation. 

Saket Modi, Co-founder & CEO, Safe Security said, “With SAFE, we have created a brand new category of products within cybersecurity, and we are pioneering the shift from a project led, reactive risk management approach to one that is proactive, and enables the Board to truly understand cybersecurity in a de-jargonized manner. Our vision is to make the SAFE score the global de-facto standard for measuring and mitigating cyber risks and our expansion to international markets is central to this vision.  International markets are extremely strategic for us and I am ecstatic to have Cherif join us to lead our business in the EMEA region. Cherif is a proven business leader and I am confident that he will replicate our global success and make Safe Security the preferred partner for addressing customer’s needs in the region.” 

By: Adrian Taylor, Vice President, A10 Networks

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of digital resiliency in the modern era. With employees working from home, and a shift online for consumer activities from banking and retail and media, to entertainment and healthcare, ensuring application performance and application availability became a matter of survival for most companies. Whether people are working or going about their personal lives, they expect a high-quality user experience for the applications they use—every time, with no excuses—with cybersecurity they can count on to protect customer data and privacy. These demands have made the application delivery controller (ADC) one of the most important components of modern digital infrastructure.

At the same time, maintaining application performance and application availability for existing resources isn’t enough to guarantee survival. In today’s digital business environment, you have to stay agile and innovative to compete, grow, and thrive. In fact, even facing an uncertain economic outlook over the past year, businesses plan to invest in digital transformation spending during the pandemic. That puts DevOps front-and-centre in digital business strategy as companies seek simple, streamlined ways to develop, deploy, change, and manage applications. The results speak for themselves: companies that use DevOps achieve 46x more software deployments and 440x faster lead time for changes. Here again, the ADC has a critical role to play in enabling the full speed and agility DevOps makes possible.

Of course, simply deploying ADCs isn’t a solution in and of itself; meeting these requirements depends on having the right application delivery controller capabilities and deploying them in the right way. Here are a few things to consider, to ensure that your application delivery infrastructure is meeting the digital transformation needs of your business and customers.

Using ADCs to Ensure Application Performance, Application Availability, and Cybersecurity

Whether it’s customers or employees who are using your applications, the experience you provide has a direct effect on digital business performance. If customers become frustrated or are unable to use your applications or services effectively, they can take their cash—and their loyalty—to a competitor. Without reliable application performance and application availability, your workforce can grind to a halt, sending waves of disruption throughout your business. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute which equates to more than $300,000 an hour.

Your application delivery controller solution can help you maintain a high-quality user experience by enabling a unified approach to managing performance, troubleshooting problems, and optimising traffic across complex environments with holistic visibility into devices, applications, policies, users, and more across data centres and clouds. By gathering and analysing data from across your hybrid infrastructure, you can work proactively to detect anomalies sooner, diagnose problems more accurately, and resolve issues more quickly. Global server load balancing functionality can intelligently guide application traffic to the best available site for each user to ensure the best possible service.

Ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and rapid failover across cloud providers is essential to keeping employees productive and customers satisfied. As part of its global web traffic management capability, your ADCs can assess the health and response time of each site in your environment, then make intelligent adjustments to application traffic to prevent a failed server from affecting users. Similarly, an ADC solution can help you use a public cloud as a backup for your on-premises data centre using global server load balancing to determine when and how to tap into that capacity, then reroute traffic accordingly.

While application performance and application availability are the foundation of user satisfaction and loyalty, a cybersecurity breach can destroy that trust in a flash. As ransomware attacks, DDoS, and other threats grow in sophistication, and enterprise environments become more distributed and dynamic, cybersecurity and compliance become critical challenges. Your ADC solution can provide a unified policy infrastructure across every platform you use, making it easier to provide the same, consistent protection for applications and services wherever they are deployed. By managing authentication consistently across cloud and on-premises platforms, you can support a Zero Trust security model while providing employees with the right level of access for their needs. Protective measures such as security analytics, DDoS protection, web application firewalls (WAF), authentication, modern SSL/TLS encryption standards, and threat intelligence enable a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity for defence in-depth.

Supporting DevOps—While Simplifying Management at Digital Speed

DevOps isn’t just a core methodology for digital transformation—it’s also a set of technical requirements. To enable development and operations teams to collaborate effectively across the software development lifecycle, you need to provide simple, streamlined ways to develop, deploy, change, and manage applications. A standard set of automation tools across platforms can help teams work efficiently, bring new staff up to speed more quickly, and ensure consistent best practices. Real-time continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) visualisation can help teams catch costly errors before applications enter production.

The rapid pace of digital transformation can increase both cost and management complexity. By providing a single point of management across your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environment, with comprehensive visibility and analytics for actionable intelligence, your ADC solution can help your staff use resources more efficiently, make better decisions, avoid errors, and simplify operations.

Coursera, Inc. (NYSE: COUR), one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, today released a new study that examines the pandemic’s impact on skills and learning trends among women. The Women and Skills Report compares pre-pandemic enrollment and performance data with trends observed on the Coursera platform since the onset of the pandemic through June 2021. The new study found that women in the UAE are learning online at higher rates compared to pre-pandemic, with the share of STEM course enrollments from women increasing from 32% in 2019 to 37% in 2021. 

One of the key objectives of the Dubai Plan 2021 is to create an ‘inclusive and cohesive society’. The country as a whole has closed 71.6% of its gender gaps to date according to the 2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, advancing 48 ranks in the gender gap index in just one year, from #120 rank to #72 globally. The UAE is also identified as the most-improved country in the world for women in parliament.

This aligns with Coursera’s findings in the report. The overall share of Coursera for Government learners in the country is nearing parity with 45% of government learners in the UAE being women. The Abu Dhabi School of Government (ADSG), which partners with Coursera to upskill its entire government workforce, for example, is championing online learning among women. In 2020, women accounted for 43% of overall course enrollments in ADSG’s learning initiative, up from 39% in 2019.

“It’s promising to see how the gender gap in online learning has narrowed since the pandemic”, said Anthony Tattersall, Coursera VP of EMEA. “We are particularly encouraged by how women in the UAE are embracing online learning in the field of STEM. This can help accelerate their return to work, bolster economic growth, and foster gender pay parity.”

Key UAE insights from the Women and Skills Report include:

• Women are turning to online education at higher rates than pre-pandemic. The UAE has 220,000 registered women learners on Coursera. In 2020, a peak of 47% new registered UAE learners were women. While this share is at 44% in 2021, it still represents an increase from 42% in 2019. Forty-five percent of female learners in the country also use mobile to learn.

• More women in the UAE are enrolling in STEM courses and entry-level Professional Certificates. The share of overall course enrollments from women increased from 38% in 2019 to 42% in 2021. For STEM courses, the gender gap narrowed from a share of 32% of enrollments from women in 2019 to 37% in 2021. Women’s enrollments in entry-level Professional Certificates have also gone up in the country from 26% in 2019 to 32% in 2021. These certificates, from industry leaders such as Google, IBM, and Facebook, are designed to prepare learners without a college degree or technology experience for a wide range of high-demand digital jobs.

• Top skills among UAE women show a strong inclination towards business leadership. Top skills UAE women have developed over the past year include communication (110,000 enrollments from UAE women), leadership and management (100,000), and entrepreneurship (80,000). Women are also investing in STEM skills, like probability and statistics (70,000), data analysis (60,000), and machine learning (50,000). The most popular courses among women in the UAE teach job-relevant and personal development skills, including The Science of Wellbeing from Yale University and English for Career Development from the University of Pennsylvania.

• Businesses, governments, and campuses can play a key role in reducing gender gaps in learning. In 2021, programmes where Coursera is used by various governments and campuses in the UAE saw the share of women registered learners was nearing parity, standing at 45% and 48% respectively. Better gender share is likely to contribute to more diverse talent pipelines for employers. Among businesses, women now constitute 36% of UAE learners.

Key global insights from the Women and Skills Report include:

• Women learners enroll more than men in courses taught by women instructors. Instructor representation is one of the most important factors contributing to increases in women’s enrollments. Forty-nine percent of enrollments from women learners are in courses with women instructors, compared to 38% for men learners. The most popular women instructors on Coursera include Laurie Santos (The Science of Wellbeing, Yale University), Seung Hae Kang (First Step Korean, Yonsei University), and Dr. Rosa I. Arriaga (Introduction to User Experience, Georgia Institute of Technology).

• Product innovations help grow women’s participation in online learning. Factors contributing to enrollment increases from women include adding practice quizzes before challenging assessments (+12% increase in share of lifetime enrollments from women), listing most common mistakes for peer-reviewed assignments (+16%), and distributing assessments throughout a course (+8%).

“I earned my computer science degree with only a handful of women alongside me, and while a great deal has changed since then, we still have important work to do to increase women’s representation in technology and leadership,” said Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer at Coursera. “Access to flexible, job-relevant education can help women learn the new skills they need to enter high-demand roles and achieve better gender balance in the workforce.”

With over 87 million learners and 5,000 courses on the platform, Coursera has one of the largest data sets for identifying and measuring skill trends. The Women and Skills Report includes data from 40 million new learners who registered during the pandemic between January 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.

By Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Vice President, Global Field CISO at Fortinet

Industry Perspectives

Of all the changes brought on by the pandemic, remote working as a standard business model is probably the most transformative. The result for some was improved work-life balance, as 90-minute commutes were replaced by more exercise and breakfast with the kids. But this massive shift, including the shift from trusted computing to untrusted networks, also introduced new cybersecurity threats. With many employees no longer protected by company firewalls and security protocols, new risks were introduced, especially around cloud migration and endpoint proliferation. 

Protection encompasses the entire cyber-physical environment of your data, data centers, carriers, users, critical infrastructure, and ecosystem, including partners, manufacturing plants, research and development centers, offices, and, most recently, remote workers. The pharmaceutical industry is not immune to these new challenges, with both large and small pharmaceutical companies being targeted by threat actors. Pharma also faces significant cybersecurity challenges brought on by the increased enablement of remote and distributed work within the pharmaceutical industry.

What’s Valuable is a Target within the Pharmaceutical Industry

Cybercriminals are capitalizing on the expanded attack surface and “reversed” networks, caused, in part, by the increased number of remote workers within the pharmaceutical industry. With everyone distracted by remote work, cybercriminals see opportunities to attack and steal valuable research and intellectual property. One of their most well-known tactics involves distributing ransomware designed to freeze organizations and interrupt or steal research and developments. 

The Pharmaceutical Industry Faces the Challenges of Maintaining Security for Remote Working

Recent data breaches within the pharmaceutical industry have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost proprietary information and pharmaceutical research. The increasing array of endpoints that come with remote working opens doors to potential security breaches especially with increased cloud migration and device proliferation. Additionally, expanding partnerships, including R&D partners, represent a potential critical point of entry to malicious actors as they target bigger pharmaceutical businesses through weaker access points within their wider ecosystem. Without a holistic, end-to-end security solution, it is likely only a matter of time before becoming a target. 

Despite the reality of this risk-filled environment, there are many challenges for pharmaceuticals looking to implement advanced security measures. Perhaps the greatest challenge and threat is the enablement of distributed remote working, globally and at speed, as it adds risk and makes huge demands on security systems. Mass remote working may have become obligatory for many pharmaceutical workforces, but the need to integrate vulnerable legacy operational technology and the rising value of pharmaceutical intellectual property has seen the industry identified as a vulnerable and lucrative target. 

Last, but not least, of the operational challenges are the inconsistent attitudes and perceptions of risk and how those two factors can influence leadership’s appetite to protect vulnerable legacy operational technology. An increasingly digital pharmaceutical value chain demands a broader security framework to protect valuable data as it moves between a complex network of remote workforces and partners using disparate network, cloud, application, and mobile environments.

“Workforce mobilization has expanded the threat landscape dramatically, requiring organizations to evaluate and implement Zero Trust to protect all users and devices across the entire healthcare life science cyber edge.”  Troy Ament, Fortinet Field CISO Healthcare Life Science

Solutions for Remote Security in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Digital transformation and the rise of software-defined enterprises has created a persistent and growing cyber risk across a widening cyber-physical landscape. Pharmaceutical companies are focused on maintaining integrity across increasingly remote-based working environments. The key to integrity for remote workers is securing endpoints and access to distributed computing resources. Protecting this increasingly virtual and collaborative ecosystem, regardless of device or network, through the visibility of data and control of credentials is critical. Multi-Factor Authentication alongside actionable intelligence is a necessity for remote work security. Next-generation endpoint security provides real-time automated endpoint protection, detection, and response, while platform and firewall capacity enable safe throughput and processing of IP publicly identifiable information.

Beyond offering encryption of data in transit, via a VPN, a number of other features can help pharmaceuticals secure their cloud migrated remote workforce. Utilizing Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is essential for teleworking executives with frequent access to important and sensitive customer and operational data.¹ Additional advanced threat protection involves analyzing malware and other suspicious content within a sandboxed environment before it reaches its destination to help prevent breaches.² It’s critical for pharmaceuticals to provide secure wireless connectivity and access at remote work locations with full integration and configuration management.³

Convergence

“The pandemic has created higher demand for additional internet-based connectivity into the sensitive supply chain, R&D, and OT networks, creating a need for IT and OT infrastructures to collaborate. OT cybersecurity has started to depend on more traditional IT facilities like patching, cloud-based threat intelligence, protection mechanisms, VPN and remote access; a clear sign that organizations need to start integrating OT cybersecurity into everyday cybersecurity considerations.” Zhanwei Chan, Global Head of OT/IoT Practice, NTT Ltd.

Looking Back and Ahead in Pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical industries can only succeed and grow through the secure flow of data across connected IT and OT environments within complex, evolving ecosystems. Cybercriminals are targeting pharmaceuticals due to the increased focus on cloud migration and a recent increase in remote workers. These knowledge workers are indeed lucrative targets, often handling intellectual property worth billions of dollars. With global brand reputations and groundbreaking R&D on the line, speed and the pressures of non-disruption cannot come at the expense of security. These are challenges that should not sit solely on the shoulders of IT. 

By: Chris Martin, Channel Leader for EMEA and APAC, A10 Networks

2020 was an extraordinary year and, if nothing else, the last 18 months have certainly accentuated the importance of digital resiliency. Now, as we move into a recovery phase post pandemic, our own research, undertaken earlier this year, highlighted that the workforce won’t return to pre-COVID working practices, and that we should expect a hybrid approach to the office environment. The research analysed how senior IT professionals in communication service provider organisations will adapt to a post-COVID-19 world, and the challenges they face with a more distributed workplace. It found that 67% believe their customers will continue to operate with employees working from home even post-pandemic.

Certainly, the consumer shift online is here to stay, whether that be for public services, retail, entertainment, or healthcare. Again, while some will return to shopping on the high street or going into the civic centre to pay their council tax, others will continue to enjoy the convenience that online delivers.

Technology Trends Fuelling Demand

Despite the disruption of the last year and a half, business has continued to evolve, and our channel has continued to grow as a result of five key trends.

The first is the acceleration and proliferation of IoT. In 2020, there was a noticeable shift in the types of businesses adopting IoT, which is now becoming mainstream as enterprises move from experimentation to deployment across global operations.

The second and probably most notable trend is the shift to the cloud as organisations continue their digital transformation journeys. In fact, cloud services spend was already growing much faster than on-premises IT spend at the beginning of 2020, and this momentum has only increased during the pandemic.

Thirdly, 5G deployment and the associated security issues is very much front-of-mind, which was also reflected in our research. When it comes to 5G, just under one-third of respondents (31%) we surveyed stated that maintaining a quality service and avoiding service outages were top security challenges. While 21% said unpredictable subscriber usage with changing patterns on the network was a top challenge. And certainly, we see channel partners helping customers with cloud migration and the adoption of 5G as they address concerns around network security and the current lack of agility and visibility throughout the IT infrastructure.

Overcoming Operational Complexity

 This brings me to the fourth trend which is around operational complexity. As organisations, regions and countries go in and out of lockdown and need to scale up or scale back certain initiatives, it has created significant IT challenges. In today’s digital business environment, you’ve got to stay agile and innovative to compete, grow, and thrive. In fact, even facing an uncertain economic outlook over the past year, 70% of businesses planned to maintain or increase digital transformation spending during the pandemic. As a result, we have seen high demand for solutions like A10 Thunder ADC and Harmony Controller, which empowers businesses to deliver secure application services across traditional data centres, and private, public and hybrid cloud environments. This solution underpins our vision to help businesses become more secure, responsive and agile as they bridge traditional and cloud-based application environments.

Finally, as ransomware attacks, DDoS, and other threats grow in sophistication, and enterprise environments become more distributed and dynamic, cyber security and compliance become critical challenges. Again, our research showed how important it is for organisations to protect against such threats. Forty-three percent stated that DDoS protection service for enterprise customers was a top security priority in 2021, while 39% of respondents said ransomware protection services for enterprise customers was their highest priority.

Focused Programmes that Support the Channel

All these trends have created demand for our products and services and have remained focus areas for both A10 Networks and our channel partners. To address these trends, we introduced five key channel initiatives at the start of 2021 in order to focus support and resources in these key areas:

• Deal registration is paramount; we have had deal registration incentives running since the beginning of the year to ensure partners register leads in line with our areas of focus and business growth.
• Distribution underpins our channel strategy and we have continued to recruit new partners across the region to ensure that we are well represented in all territories.
• Building our ecosystem and partner network is key to our ongoing success. Our focus here is on partnering with players who are strong in key verticals and can bring talent and expertise to our customers.
• Partner enablement: we launched a new technical ambassador programme, through which our technical team are mentoring our partner’s technical teams.
• Finally, the Lead the Way initiative, which utilises our partner network to develop leads and marketing initiatives via our partner portal.

With channel front and centre to all our programme activities, we renamed our partner tiering model to: Member, Advanced and Elite, and we launched our Elevate to Elite programme designed to help accelerate our partners’ growth and enable them to fast track through the various partner levels.

Building a Bigger Footprint

Our channel strategy encompasses APAC, EMEA and South Asia and provides us a unique perspective across a large segment. This allows us to consolidate and coordinate our channel strategy to an ever-greater degree while also allowing for flexibility to manage customer and channel needs across individual countries and regions. But, above all, we appreciate that some countries will be emerging at a different pace to others, as lockdowns and restrictions are enforced and relaxed. Therefore, our overriding priority is the security and safety of our partners and customers around the world; we’re committed to working with them to achieve this.