UAE organisations are advancing digital transformation while facing tighter data protection and residency requirements. How are you seeing enterprises balance innovation with compliance in this environment?
The United Arab Emirates is advancing its digital economy with clear objectives, including a national strategy to establish a fully digital government by 2025. This rapid digital progression introduces a complex challenge for enterprises: they must adopt new technologies while also adhering to strict data protection and residency laws.
Organisations are addressing this by integrating compliance into the initial design of their digital projects, moving beyond treating it as a secondary consideration.
As AI reshapes how businesses think about security, what new risks should enterprises keep in mind?
The integration of artificial intelligence into business operations introduces new considerations for governance and accountability. As AI systems manage more data and decision-making, the potential for new risks increases, including AI systems that could be tricked by clever attacks, leading to data leaks.
Businesses are responding by developing specific guidelines for AI use, focusing on transparency in how algorithms function and establishing clear accountability for automated outcomes. This approach helps manage the potential for unintended consequences from AI adoption.
With data visibility and movement now a board-level concern, how is this shifting the conversation between CISOs and business leaders?
Data visibility has become a priority at the board level. Chief information security officers are now involved in strategic discussions, explaining technical risks in terms of business impact, such as financial loss or reputational damage.
This shift has transformed the dialogue between security leaders and executives, focusing on how data control supports broader business objectives like customer trust and market expansion.
Every security leader faces the dilemma of trying to strike the right balance between staying secure and getting work done. Extremes on either end introduce risk. A modern platform like SASE offers controlled data flow in ways that enable the business while minimising risk.
All IT departments must transition from being the “Department of No” to the “Department of Know.” SASE provides an adaptive security architecture that gives IT what it needs to know — environmental signals and threat intelligence — so that IT can stop saying no. Matching the level of access to the context in which that access occurs offers exactly the right balance. SASE is the opposite of a security barrier; it is a business enabler.
Dozens of point products are likely to be plagued by configuration errors and misalignments, especially where functionality overlaps. SASE reduces risk by eliminating overlapping controls, maintaining consistent administrative paradigms across its various functions, and exchanging signals and context with related platforms such as identity management and endpoint protection.
From a Netskope standpoint, how does SASE help enterprises simplify that complexity — and what’s different about the way you approach it?
The main complexities are administrative and organisational, not technical. The prerequisites for an effective zero trust strategy include defining roles and assigning them to personas that carry common access requirements, identifying all applications and mapping how they exchange information among themselves and with external resources, and documenting certain aspects of every information asset, including location, sensitivity, function, and lifetime.
These are necessary to construct policies that grant the right access by the right people to the right resources at the right times for the right reasons.
What sets Netskope apart is its focus on real-time data inspection, which works well in diverse environments like those in the region. An effective zero trust strategy also involves cooperation between stakeholders.
Perhaps the main technical challenge is gathering the signals and the context for the kinds of five-rights-based policies that are essential to an effective zero trust strategy. When deployed well — after companies address the prerequisites and foster effective communications — a good SASE provides exactly the necessary signals and context, significantly reducing the likelihood that a breach might occur.
Looking ahead, what do you see as the next frontier for enterprise security in the region, and what role will Netskope play?
The next phase of enterprise security in the region will likely involve greater use of AI to predict and address threats before they cause harm. There will be a stronger emphasis on context-driven access, sovereign cloud controls, and deeper integration between security and networking.
Netskope’s continued investment in regional infrastructure supports this shift, helping enterprises adopt these capabilities without adding complexity. The company’s approach of combining security with networking functions in a unified platform is expected to remain relevant as organisations look for simpler ways to manage increasingly complex digital environments.
Discussion about this post