Enterprise, Features, Interviews

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Veronica Martin caught up with Hasanian Alkassab, Regional Cyber Security Manager at GBM, during GISEC 2023 to discuss the cybersecurity landscape in the region, the most common cyber-attacks and the solutions and services GBM offers to help organizations tackle cyber security.

How do you see the cybersecurity landscape in the region evolving?

We’ve been in the region for the last 30 years and we’ve seen a major shift in the last three years. Everybody is talking about the pandemic digital transformation, which is a reality we are living in today. All our customers and clients are shifting to cloud, so cloud is a reality and security is an enabler for the shifting to the cloud and cloud migration.

5G network has had a big expansion in this region, but we have seen security gaps and issues. We are work with different types of industries such as healthcare and oil & gas to help them become more secure.

In your opinion, what will continue to be the pain points for security leaders/decision makers over the coming year?

If you look at each and every vendor, they talk about two things: skills gap and the shortage of talent. and the gap. We, as a system integrator and vendors, are having trouble in finding the right resources, so imagine the difficulties customers are suffering and what they need to go through. In addition, complexity is the enemy number one in security. Each customer has 30, 40 vendors they work with, but this is going to change and we are going to see a lot of consolidation happening.

From the vendors’ perspective, we are going to play a major role in this consolidation and this is where an integrator like GBM and GBM Shield come to enable our customers and make them achieve their business outcome.

What are some of the solutions and services GBM offers to help organizations tackle cyber security challenges?

Last year we announced GBM Shield, which is a new cyber defence program where we offer state of art, different solutions and technology covering each practice from data security, application security, hybrid network, OT, IoMT, application security as well as advisory and consulting services. Within all of this and at the heart of it, there will also be our managed detection and response, which is a new offering we have to help our customer automate and bridge the gap they have when it comes to the skills gap and complexity.

Can you tell us more about what differentiates GBM Shield over other solutions in the market?

Our differentiation is our approach as we try to be holistic, integrated and vendor-agnostic. Holistic because we try to have a variety of vendors, top niche vendors that we work with. Integrated because we want to make sure each and every technology that we have talks to each other. We’re trying to adopt Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture as part of our initiatives for GBM Shield as it covers end to end and includes zero trust.

Vendor-agnostic because we make sure we don’t remove or change anything in the customer environment. We integrate with the customer, so they don’t need to replace any technology.

Based on your experience, what are some of the most common cyber-attacks you are hearing of?

In the last two years after COVID we’ve seen a lot of cyber-attacks. Everybody’s talking about ransomware, EDR, MDR and XDR and the reason is because everything starts from the end point on the network and the hackers are trying to manipulate this. In the last six months, on average, we have got about two to three ransomware attacks every two weeks from our customers.

 

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