Danielle Kinsella, Senior Director – Sales Engineering, Gigamon, explains how Saudi enterprises are leapfrogging global markets through ground-up architectures, multi-cloud resilience and traffic intelligence.
Black Hat MEA 2025 has emerged as a real-time proving ground for Saudi Arabia’s rapidly advancing technology landscape. Enterprises across Saudi Arabia are shifting from traditional on-premise models to highly distributed, multi-cloud architectures, creating new demands for visibility, encrypted traffic insights and performance-centric observability.
Danielle Kinsella, Senior Director for Sales Engineering at Gigamon, spoke to Daniel Sheperd, Online Editor, on how regional organisations are designing resilient platforms from the ground up, preparing for post-quantum security, and using traffic intelligence to accelerate digital transformation.
Interview Excerpts:
Black Hat MEA has evolved into a proving ground for the region’s fast-moving tech landscape. What conversations are emerging today with Saudi enterprises that weren’t happening two or three years ago?
Enterprises in Saudi Arabia today are asking for real-time visibility across hybrid environments. Previously, the focus was mostly on on-premise data centre visibility. Now, as organisations transition into virtualised and cloud environments—and increasingly into multiple cloud vendors—they need consistent and unified visibility across all these platforms. According to this year’s Gigamon Hybrid Cloud Survey, 91% of global Security and IT leaders say they are “recalibrating” how they assess hybrid cloud risk in light of growing AI-driven threats and increased complexity. The conversations are surely shifting from isolated monitoring to comprehensive hybrid cloud visibility.
The region has moved rapidly from adopting cloud to managing several clouds at once. Which architecture patterns or design approaches are you seeing here that other markets are still evaluating?
We’re seeing organisations in the region build far more resilient platforms. A key difference is that many Middle Eastern enterprises are designing their architectures from the ground up. In other markets, companies often rely heavily on legacy workloads and then try to shift them to the cloud, which introduces delays and complexity. The ability to start fresh is giving the region a significant advantage.
Looking ahead to 2026, how do you see observability evolving inside organisations? Is it still viewed mainly as part of security, or is it becoming essential for performance, AI workloads, and digital experience?
Visibility is becoming the backbone of organisational infrastructure and as an example 89% of Security and IT leaders now cite deep observability as fundamental to securing hybrid cloud infrastructure. It was traditionally used for troubleshooting performance issues and addressing security threats. Now, enterprises are using visibility to understand and secure AI workloads, both in terms of what users are doing with AI and whether those AI workloads are themselves secure.
“Observability is expanding well beyond security into performance optimisation and digital experience assurance.“
Many organisations here are building platforms from scratch rather than upgrading legacy systems. Does this give Middle Eastern enterprises an advantage in building secure, encrypted, future-focused environments?
Beginning with clean, modern architecture is a huge advantage. In many global markets, enterprises are trying to maintain legacy environments while moving to the cloud, which slows them down. Organisations in the Middle East can design secure, encrypted, future-ready platforms from day one, and that really sets them apart.
Post-quantum computing is becoming a major topic. How can Gigamon help organisations maintain visibility in encrypted environments today and prepare for new post-quantum standards?
As quantum computing advances, current public key encryption methods will soon be at risk. Leading analysts forecast traditional cryptography will be unsafe as early as 2030. Many organisations already have post-quantum strategies because threat actors are harvesting data now to decrypt later. Visibility plays a key role in identifying outdated TLS versions—like TLS 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2—across workloads. If attackers obtain that data today, they may be able to decrypt it easily once post-quantum capabilities mature. Knowing exactly where those outdated encryption versions reside allows organisations to remediate and upgrade proactively.
As we move into 2026, more leaders are saying that security should support momentum rather than limit it. How are customers using traffic intelligence to speed up transformation and innovation?
Traffic intelligence is helping organisations transform faster by enabling smooth shifts from data centres to cloud environments. With AI workloads, network traffic is increasing dramatically, and visibility allows enterprises to extract the exact data they need without overwhelming their tools. By enriching packets and outputting metadata, organisations can optimise tool performance, improve efficiency, and accelerate innovation without compromising security.
