Channel Post spoke to Stephane de Saint Albin, the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at DenyAll about the companies activities at GITEX Technology Week and the plans post-GITEX
Please tell us about your participation at GITEX Technology Week 2014.
We are exhibiting at GITEX for the very first time. We however have been coming to GITEX for many years as visitors. This year, we are hosted by our partner EMT Distribution at their booth. GITEX is a great opportunity to meet our channel partners and get some momentum for our brand, which is a bit new in this region.
As a company, what are your prime focus areas?
DenyAll is into the application security space. This means we protect web applications and web services from attacks, which represent around 80% of attacks nowadays. It is a core component of the IT strategy for any organisation today. However, this area is very little known and hence needs a lot of effort in evangelizing about the product to local and regional organisations.
What trends have you seen in the regional threat landscape?
Majority of organisations in this region use some form or the other of web applications. Everything is web based today, which is certainly unavoidable, even if you try to. Email, SharePoint, social media, accounting, ecommerce websites, telecom, e-government, ERP, CRM and so on, are all either web-based or have a web-based front end.
If a company uses the internet to exchange data between members of the ecosystem, they are very much using web applications. The threat landscape here in the Middle East, does not only include external attackers wanting to come into the network, but there are insider threats. Companies need to have the ability to know who is doing what with the data that they are being served.
What is the level of security threats in the Middle East region, when compared to developed economies such as Europe?
While the level of threats is almost the same, the awareness is probably a bit lower here from what I have seen. It is very easy for attackers to attack an organisation from the web through the application layer.
Once the attackers manage to go through the security perimeter, their level of further attacks tend to be more on the destructive side of things. I think it will not take a lot of time for people here to realise that there is a consistent security threat from everywhere. It’s only a matter of time when companies start investing in security solutions to safeguard the company and its data.
What will your activities be post-GITEX?
Post-GITEX, we have plans to come to the Middle East with a full range of training sessions for our partners in this region. We are coming back on 23rd of November, 2014, for five days for training sessions for all of EMT Distribution’s partners.
These are free training sessions and are part of our overall channel strategy. This is one of the first investments we are going to make in this region, in partnership with EMT Distribution. We will also work with our channel partners to create proof of concepts and start lead generation activities during the first quarter of 2015.
