Muscat: An interview with Assad Arabi, Managing Director, Gulf Cluster, Trend Micro. Exceprts:
What is Trend Micro and what does it have to offer?
Trend Micro is a global cybersecurity leader helping make the world safer for exchanging digital information. Fuelled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, we protect hundreds of thousands of organisations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.
As a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, we also deliver a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, and central visibility for better, faster detection and response.
Trend Micro’s global threat research team delivers exceptional intelligence and insights that power our cybersecurity platform and help protect organizations around the world from 100s of millions of threats daily.
How important are tomorrow’s innovations and how does it relate to actualising the Oman Vision 2040?
We always strive to deliver solutions and services for organizations to help them keep up with today’s accelerated pace in the digital world. More importantly, provide tools and strategies that can not only adapt to future challenges but boost their operational capabilities while securing all their digital environments.
Organisations in the country will have to rely heavily on the future of technology in order to improve various digital procedures, government services, and the country’s digital infrastructure, and re-engineer the entire digital experience.
These enhancements will require robust cybersecurity innovations, strategies, and best practices to maintain stability and growth in every aspect of the country’s agenda.
In support of the Oman Vision 2040, we are committed to collaborating with both the public and private sectors and fortifying their growth strategies with industry-leading solutions.
Why is it essential to support Comex 2022?
Platforms like COMEX 2022 enable tech industry leaders in the region to not only showcase solutions to secure the digital transformation but exchange ideas and insights that can transform the way people work and live.
COMEX 2022 gives Trend Micro the opportunity to build on its commitment to safeguarding the digital journeys of every organization and individual in the modern-day digital world.
It is crucial that we are enabled to engage and interact with decision-makers and industry leaders to raise awareness of today’s threat landscape, and the tools and strategies that are required to face the cybersecurity challenges of the future.
Trend Micro is consistently spreading awareness on the necessities of today’s cybersecurity across the region, aiming to reach more organizations and individuals to support their digital journeys. Better access to advanced solutions gives enterprises the potential to accelerate their development in the most secure manner.
This also gives us the chance to grow our presence in areas with organizations that lack the necessary resources to protect their digital assets.
What will Trend Micro be presenting at this year’s COMEX 2022?
We aim to showcase our globally leading cybersecurity solutions that protect every angle of operations for enterprises across the country. As organisations continue to advance or embark on their digital transformation journey, Trend Micro’s Vision One, with XDR extended detection and response, provides a broader perspective and better context when it comes down to detecting, investigating, and responding to threats faster. This powerful tool enables superior cross-layered detection and investigation on a single, integrated platform.
We will also discuss and help organisations to further strengthen their cybersecurity strategies by incorporating the Zero Trust (ZT) approach. The ZT security model takes a step beyond the traditional modes of protection, treating every device, user, and connection to a network, inside and out of the organization, as a potential threat. The ZT approach focuses on authenticating resources, users, and assets individually before they can gain access to an enterprise’s network.
Q: Why do organisations need to adopt better cybersecurity strategies?
We have to consider today’s accelerated digital world and how it has provided easier ways to connect and increase productivity. The need for cybersecurity is more apparent now than ever, as more organizations and individuals are relying on digital innovations to make their lives easier. And now, protecting their digital activities has become a top priority.
Today, hybrid work and learning are a very prominent fixture in almost every organization and household across the world. These remotely located access points can create complexities within a network, which must be protected with the most highly sophisticated solutions and industry-leading strategies in cybersecurity.
Additionally, migrations to the cloud continue to pick up the pace for enterprises of all sizes. Their workloads in the cloud require safer procedures and a fortified digital infrastructure. The cloud has become a more powerful tool yet bad actors continue to find more vulnerabilities to exploit.
These are also accompanied by advancements in AI and machine learning, IoT, 5G, automation, and integration, which provide a plethora of benefits and advantages. However, adopting new technology for organizations means newer ways for cyberattacks to take place. And this is where Trend Micro’s robust and multilayered solution on a single platform, such as the recently launched Trend Micro One, comes into play.
These challenges are reflected in the latest figures highlighted in Trend Micro’s Annual Cybersecurity Report for 2021, over 4 million email threats and more than 4.6 million URL victim attacks were detected and blocked across Oman.
Additionally, 700 thousand malware attacks were identified and stopped. And as the country transitioned into remote work, Smart Home Network (SHN) solutions shielded home devices and prevented 581,000 SHN events. The recent figures indicate, that within the evolving threat landscape, organizations need to adopt multi-layered solutions to be able to protect their operations against more sophisticated attacks from cybercriminals.
Q: Can you please tell us about Trend Micro One?
Trend Micro One, is a unified cybersecurity platform with a growing list of ecosystem technology partners that enables organizations to better understand, communicate, and lower cyber risks. This unified approach delivers a continuous lifecycle of risk and threat assessment with attack surface discovery, cyber risk analysis, and threat mitigation and response. Trend Micro One is the perfect security console to counter modern threat actors and their stealthy attacks in today’s digital era. It identifies, monitors, and profiles cyber assets in customers’ environments. Furthermore, it analyzes risk exposure, the status of vulnerabilities, configuration of security controls, and types of threat activity. In addition, it also ensures preventative controls and takes swift action to mitigate risks and remediate attacks across enterprises by leveraging Trend Micro’s threat and risk intelligence.