Cherif Sleiman, the General Manager for Middle East and Africa at Infoblox, speaks about his company’s participation at GITEX.
What is the primary focus of your participation at this year’s GITEX?
Infoblox is an automated network control company and we are using GITEX as a platform for the regional launch of our ‘Actionable Network Intelligence Platform’ that uses it’s proven network intelligence to provide actionable control points, visibility, and context. We are also demonstrating our DNS Firewall as a service solution that extends the company’s industry-leading DNS protection to roaming devices off premise. We are also showcasing our Infoblox Threat Insight that prevents DNS based data exfiltration with built-in streaming analytics.
What is the relevance of this show to your business in the region?
Regional organizations will focus on security as the number one area of IT spend given the fact that not only is the threat landscape constantly changing, but also the political turmoil in certain countries is adding another dimension of cyber warfare. DNS Security is an area that we believe regional organizations will start paying greater attention to as they begin to understand the damaging consequences of inadequate DNS security measures including lost revenue due to downtime, diminished customer satisfaction and lost productivity.
Infoblox is using Gitex as a platform for educating regional IT decision makers about Infoblox’s credentials of being the only vendor worldwide to provide holistic end-to-end DNS security and defense against the widest range of DNS-based attacks such as volumetric, exploits, and DNS hijacking attacks.
What kind of products and solutions are you showcasing at the event?
Our focus is on Infoblox Actionable Network Intelligence Platform that helps organizations to:
- Improve operational efficiencies by automating network provisioning and centralizing management
- Ensure high availability of core network services with a hardened platform, automation and flexibility to support multiple network topologies / architectures
- Reduce risk by identifying malicious activity at network control points, provide network context to prioritize and remediate, and ensure compliance
- Unlock insights, make more meaningful decisions and produce better outcomes through holistic visibility
We are also demonstrating our Infoblox DNS Firewall as a Service solution – an upcoming cloud-based service that expands the value of customer investment in Infoblox by providing visibility, policy management, and context-aware security for devices on-premise and off-premise. Infoblox DNS Firewall as a service will offer a single pane of glass for protecting users from malware and cyberattacks while they are on the corporate network and when they are roaming outside the corporate perimeter.
This new cloud service from Infoblox will extend the capability of network and security operators by providing actionable network intelligence that strengthens their operational and security postures. In addition to providing cloud-hosted recursive DNS with firewall capabilities, the new service delivers unified reporting and single-policy configuration for Infoblox customers, capabilities not available from purely cloud-based DNS services.
We are also exhibiting the Infoblox Threat Insight solution. Theft of sensitive or regulated data and intellectual property is one of the most serious risks to an enterprise. DNS is frequently used as a pathway for data exfiltration, because it is not inspected by common security products such as firewalls, IDS and proxies.
Infoblox Threat Insight detects and automatically blocks attempts to steal sensitive data via DNS without the need for end point agents or additional network infrastructure. Threat Insight provides protection against both DNS tunnelling and sophisticated data exfiltration techniques. Infoblox is the only vendor to offer DNS infrastructure with built-in analytics for protection of data.
How does GITEX help you connect with your customers and partners?
Gitex is a great place for connecting with customers and partners. Relationships and face to face interactions play a huge role in our business and Gitex is a brilliant platform to cement our existing relationships and create new ones.
What do you think differentiates GITEX from other technology events in the market?
GITEX offers a great platform for our company to expose our brand and showcase our latest innovations in DNS security and automated network control to many IT decision makers from various segments of the market that attend the event. Because GITEX focuses on our target industry and brings so many of the key players and users in one place, it represents an ideal opportunity for interaction between all the interested parties.
We hope to expand and lead our business to success by sharing our technology and knowledge with event attendees. We are committed to the region and investments in events like GITEX are absolutely key to our growth.
What kind of IT trends do you see impacting the regional ICT industry in the next two years?
As trends such as Cloud, Big Data, Virtualization, Security and Mobility continue to take hold in the Middle East, they are creating significant pressure as well as opportunities for some of the largest enterprises in the energy, government, telecom and finance sectors. We are in the midst of a wave of IT transformation and modernization and regional organizations will focus on security as the number one area of IT spend given the fact that not only is the threat landscape constantly changing, but also the political turmoil in certain countries is adding another dimension of cyber warfare. So I think Security will be front and center of most IT discussions in the next couple of years.
