Alain Penel, Vice President for the Middle East, Türkiye, and CIS at Fortinet, highlights AI innovation, emerging threats, and the company’s drive to build collective cyber resilience.
Cybersecurity is undergoing a major transformation, driven by the rapid evolution of AI, quantum computing, and increasingly complex threat landscapes. At GISEC Global 2025, Fortinet is showcasing how its AI-powered innovations are shaping the future of secure networking and threat intelligence.
In an exclusive conversation with CPI Media Group, Alain Penel, Vice President for the Middle East, Türkiye, and CIS at Fortinet, shares insights into the company’s regional strategies, collaboration initiatives, and long-term vision for cybersecurity in 2025 and beyond.
How does your organisation’s presence at GISEC GLOBAL 2025 align with your broader cybersecurity strategy for the region?
As today’s network complexity grows, so does the need for intelligent tools that can simplify management tasks and enhance efficiency. This year’s GISEC theme is ‘Securing an AI-powered future’, and at Fortinet, we have pioneered AI innovation within cybersecurity for more than a decade, with AI serving as the backbone to the Fortinet Security Fabric and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence and security services – it’s in our DNA.
For organisations in the Middle East seeking to advance in the realm of AI, we’re here to support them in having a clear and comprehensive strategy aligned to their existing business initiatives, providing a partner that is an expert not only in cyber, but that has a solid understanding of AI’s real-world application.
What emerging cybersecurity threats or trends do you believe will most significantly impact enterprises in the Middle East and beyond in the coming year?
In 2025, cybersecurity challenges will evolve to become even more complex. Threat actors are becoming more specialized, especially in the early stages of attacks, focusing on reconnaissance and weaponisation.
Cybercrime-as-a-Service (CaaS) for example is expanding, making advanced tools like phishing kits and automated hacking solutions widely available, even to less skilled attackers. The increasing reliance on multi-cloud environments also introduces more vulnerabilities, creating a larger attack surface for cybercriminals. What’s particularly concerning is the convergence of physical and digital threats, where cyberattacks are paired with real-life intimidation tactics targeting executives and employees.
The use of AI and quantum computing will also transform the threat landscape. Cybercriminals are already using AI to automate reconnaissance and streamline phishing attacks, and this trend will only grow. On the flip side, AI offers promise for real-time threat detection and response. Quantum computing, while still in its early stages, could disrupt traditional encryption methods, making it crucial for businesses to adopt post-quantum cryptography to protect sensitive data. These technologies highlight the need for businesses to stay ahead of the curve and rethink their cybersecurity strategies.
Can you highlight any innovative technologies or solutions your company is showcasing at this year’s event?
At this year’s GISEC we’ll be showcasing our SASE and Zero Trust solutions and how they can help each organisation pave a path to a safer network. Of course, we’ll also be showcasing our leading AI-Powered Security Operations and how we are uniting intelligence with visibility, automation, and protection.
Our commitment to AI innovation is reflected in our expansion of generative AI, which now enhances seven different products across our portfolio. By integrating FortiAI in such a broad range of solutions, we’re equipping our customers with powerful, adaptive tools that transform how they manage and respond to cyberthreats, enabling IT and security teams to better secure their organisations. You can learn more from our experts at the event.
How is your company collaborating with governments or enterprises to strengthen cyber resilience across sectors?
At Fortinet, we believe our corporate responsibility is to make the world a safer place, creating a digital world you can always trust. Working across sectors and prioritizing threat intelligence sharing benefits the cybersecurity community, making us more resilient and effective collectively.
That’s why we are committed to partnership and cooperation with global law enforcement agencies, government organisations, and industry organisations. As the global cybercrime landscape evolves, these collaborations will only become more critical to halting threat actors. When we work together, we can move faster and more effectively toward our collective goal of disrupting cybercrime.
Fortinet is also proud to be part of numerous collaborative efforts to address cybercrime, such as being a founding member of the World Economic Forum Centre for Cybersecurity, a contributor to its Partnership Against Cybercrime (PAC), and a founding member of the Cybercrime Atlas, which meets weekly to profile threat actors, review open-source intelligence regarding cybercriminal activities, correlate data, and identify potential disruption points.
What message would you like to share with the global infosec community attending GISEC about your vision for cybersecurity in 2025 and beyond?
Our commitment to AI-driven security innovation in 2025 and beyond remains stronger than ever. We will continue enhancing FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services to analyse real-time threat intelligence, strengthening defenses against known, unknown, and AI-driven cyberthreats. FortiAIOps will further evolve its machine learning capabilities to provide even more predictive insights, enabling IT teams to proactively manage performance and security. FortiAI will expand its generative AI capabilities to streamline security operations, automate investigations, and improve threat response across more of our solutions. And we will advance our AI-powered DLP to better prevent data leaks and unauthorised AI access, ensuring compliance and safeguarding sensitive information.
Our focus will also remain on capturing our massive opportunities across secure networking, unified SASE, and security operations. Moving forward, we aim to drive further enterprise adoption and reinforce our leadership in these critical areas. Additionally, Fortinet was recently recognised on the Forbes Most Trusted Companies in America list, ranking seventh overall and the only cybersecurity company in the top 50. This recognition reflects our commitment to transparency, security, and customer trust.
Image Credit: Fortinet
