By Wadih Ghafary – DPS Senior Manager for UAE & Gulf
With the advent of remote work, remote learning and remote telehealth services thrust upon global workforce and their families, cyber security is a pervasive need across industries and regions. A single security weakness can leave organizations compromised, and with cyber-attacks on an exponential rise, it’s something no organization can afford to overlook. Cyber-attacks aren’t just targeted to specific outcomes anymore, recent events have shown they can affect nationwide health services or critical infrastructures such as oil & gas pipelines.
A look over the last year
2020 has been widely analyzed by IT professionals. It shifted our workforce to remote working. It drove medical organizations to roll out telemedicine. It challenged teachers to continue education without a physical classroom. All of this required digital transformation at speed, but what many overlook is the budget challenges organizations across the board faced to make this a reality. And in many cases, it was security that took the hit.
The common factor across many industries was a move to agile edge technology platforms where productive outcomes could be achieved by remote workers without having to come onsite. When your operations are on premise, it’s much easier to secure the boundaries, however when devices move outside your location it becomes more difficult. Suddenly there are many more ways a security breach could occur – from an unsecure internet connection, a compromised USB drive, a device left unattended or picked up by the wrong hands. Protection needs to be built in at every step to reduce the risk of attack.
The future has to be secure
We’re all moving swiftly into the digital future where data is the most important asset, and this makes data centers the most profitable target for attackers. The number of cyberattacks increased exponentially just last year, and this trend is expected to continue, meaning the threat to industries and economies is more pronounced than ever before. Going forward I see enterprises pushing ahead with critical investments in cyber defense solutions to protect their digital transformation journeys. IT Departments need to continue evaluating gaps and chains of failure to address what we call organization’s survival time objective.
Furthermore, we predict that the coming years a further rise in cloud adoption, with the cloud becoming more expansive for those organizations already operating within it. The cloud offers immense potential in terms of workload flexibility and innovation, but organizations also need to be aware and pro-active when it comes to protecting themselves in this space.
All these changes culminate in a daunting yet unsurprising reality: when it comes to cyber-attack it’s not a matter of if, but when.
Protection built for the challenges of tomorrow
There is good news. At Dell Technologies, we have a combination of proven and modern solution elements that are deployed with our expertise for critical business systems protection outcomes that organizations seek. Our data protection solution stack comprises technologies (hardware and software) and deployment expertise that Dell is known for worldwide. Our solution stack helps enterprises protect information assets at the Core (i.e. their data center), at the Edge (PCs and virtual desktops for example) and in the Cloud.
We have continuously enhanced our products to ensure they remain agile and adaptive to new threats and challenges, supporting all clouds and workloads, including containers-based technology such as Kubernetes. And to take this even further, we also offer an isolated recovery solution, enabling enterprises to roll back and recover quickly should a cyber-attack take place. This is based on air-gap techniques with advanced machine learning and AI based analytics to help enterprises answer the question “Do I have a golden copy of data and systems to bring my minimum viable business back to life?”.
The solutions from Dell Technologies have served multiple government entities, banks, Telecommunications service providers, manufacturers and healthcare entities in the UAE. With a proven total cost of ownership reduction, via efficient use of technologies built-in into our solution stack. Enterprises can push ahead to adopt our solution stack whether they run their workloads in the cloud or on-premise.
Are you ready to make this shift and ensure your organization is protected? Get in touch and secure your organization today.