Upping the ante
At GISEC 2023, Fadi Yehia, regional director of Fortinet, explains how the security vendor is helping its clients to keep pace with the ever-evolving threat landscape
Can you tell us about your GISEC participation this year?
We are always excited to be at GISEC. This is part of our commitment to our customers, partners, and the region. The cybersecurity challenges are becoming bigger, and the security requirements for our customers and partners are increasing, so we need to adapt to them. At the same time, cloud adoption is on the rise, and we have to be in line with this trend and be able to secure workloads on the cloud. With our Security Fabric offering and integration with third parties, we can migrate our customers securely to the cloud.
Another major concern is the need for more skills when it comes to cybersecurity and the cloud. This is where we add value with our comprehensive training for cybersecurity professionals and regular end-users.
Is the cloud potentially vulnerable?
Everything is vulnerable. Our partners, such as Microsoft, Google, AWS, Oracle, and other big vendors, are designing solutions for customers to move to the cloud because this has become necessary. We are working closely with our alliance partners to ensure the cloud is as secure as possible with multiple integrated products and solutions. We even help our partners to make sure the applications are built in a secure manner.
Fortinet’s core strength is network security. How are you addressing cloud security challenges?
Yes, we started as a network security vendor and remain very efficient in that domain. However, while building cybersecurity solutions for our customers, we use our network security platform to cover more and more areas. So, for example, though network security is the core, we recognize the importance of application security, on the other hand. And once we do this on-prem and in a good way, we can extend this kind of security solution to the cloud. In the same way, we have a firewall on the network; we can have a firewall on the cloud. So, the same security architecture we use on-prem is extended to the cloud.
Are you offering this as a service?
There are multiple models – we can offer these technologies either as a service or can provide as a service or as per license. We have partnerships with many companies in the UAE and across the globe, where we are offering these services to them as an MSSP. I’ll give a couple of examples. We can provide an MDR as a service through our MSP partners here. Or SOC as a service which includes SIEM, SOAR, and MDR.
