Yahya Kassab, Senior Director and General Manager, GCC and Pakistan outlines the importance of face-to-face networking, innovative technology trends and the capabilities of ThreatWise.
How important is it for your company to participate at GITEX Global 2022, in terms of getting to network face-to-face with your customers and partners?
GITEX, of course, is not only a big event for Commvault, but a monumental event for the technology industry in the Middle East as a whole. On a personal note, it will be a pleasure to participate as a Vaulter for the first time, as I look forward to underlining our investment in the best solutions to support our local customers in the region.
We are making continued investment in markets across the Middle East, and it is a great honour to have joined Commvault to lead the talented team as Senior Director and General Manager, GCC and Pakistan. I look forward to strengthening our go-to-market position and working with our strong partner ecosystem to continue to protect organisations’ most critical asset – their data.
One of the best elements of GITEX is being able to spend time with these key strategic partners and customers in person, and I look forward to discussing with and meeting the likes of G42 Cloud, Cell Info, ExaGrid, VAST Data, MDX and many others.
Our partnerships allow us to offer advanced SaaS models able to deliver built-in protection against cyber-attacks through air-gapped and immutable copies of data, together with hardened security controls that prevent unauthorised access to backup data.
In your opinion, what are the key technologies that will fuel new innovations in 2023?
For both our private and public sector customers, the biggest priority now is the recognition that moves made during the height of the pandemic to rapidly adjust to support a remote workforce – have left them more exposed to critical business risk – especially in the form of Ransomware
We saw many local projects that may have been planned for 18-24 months in the future brought forward and implemented in weeks as customers shifted to remote working support models and critical data management processes needing to be performed from off-prem locations.
This enforced acceleration, often driven by short term assessments of key workload and business process prioritisation has seen huge growth in multi-cloud environments to support multiple new SaaS-based applications.
As well as this, businesses need to consider new and proactive ways to secure and protect their data from ransomware and cyber criminals, as the threat landscape continues to evolve. That’s where ThreatWise comes in.
Of course, our priority is and will continue to be to deliver ransomware protection, across the increased variety of multi-cloud locations that a more remote workforce needs to operate. This is our customers’ biggest priority and through our trusted solution delivery partner ecosystem that is exactly what we are delivering to more and more organisations across the region!
Can you outline to our readers what products, solutions, or partnership agreements you’re announcing at GITEX Global 2022?
We are delighted to formally announce the general availability of our Metallic ThreatWise capabilities here at GITEX. ThreatWise is an early warning system that proactively surfaces unknown and zero-day threats to minimise compromised data and business impact, that is, an early warning signal that no other vendor on the market offers.
It is vital that businesses across the Middle East see the necessary benefits of adopting modern solutions to drive efficiency and greater cyber security for their operations. Many IT teams in the region do not have adequate tools in place to detect ransomware attacks on production environments early enough in the attack chain to neutralise stealthy cyber-attacks before they cause harm.
Ransomware has revolved around encryption for a long time, but newer extortion techniques like exfiltration go beyond rapidly spreading malware, and data recovery alone cannot help if sensitive business data is leaked to the Dark Web. Data recovery is important, but alone it’s not enough. Just a few hours with an undetected bad actor in your systems can be catastrophic. By integrating ThreatWise into the Metallic SaaS portfolio, we provide customers with a proactive, early warning system that bolsters their zero-loss strategy by intercepting a threat before it impacts your business.
If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to one of the team, either in person at GITEX or visit our website to set up a meeting!
