EDITOR’S COMMENT
A
cross the ICT industry, with the
convergence of multiple enabling
technologies, it is becoming
increasingly visible that no one single industry
vendor can become a one-stop solution.
No single vendor has the complete
breadth and depth of horizontal and vertical
solutions to meet the business requirements
of medium and large enterprises. With
businesses increasingly looking at
becoming agile, especially through digital
technologies including the cloud, the number
of applications being used by businesses
has increased from a handful to tens and
in some cases hundreds of applications.
Interoperability and open APIs have become
the norm across business applications.
The same basic tenets now apply to
cybersecurity as well. Select cybersecurity
vendors have been active in building a
common operating system platform for
other vendors to interoperate with.
Other cybersecurity vendors have
built industry scale alliances to assure
end customers of future interoperability
between solutions from multiple vendors.
And yet other cybersecurity vendors have
tried to integrate threat intelligence feeds to
reduce complexity and cost for end users.
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alarm signals for
IT departments in
medium and large enterprises.
Partnerships, alliances and common framework platforms across
the cybersecurity industry – to enable smooth IT operations – are
now a pressing requirement.
Collaboration across global peers through the open source
movement is an important channel to tackle the growing costs of
cybersecurity threats. The open source movement drives innovation
by enhancing data security and opening up commercial restrictions,
wherever they are a barrier to progress. The open source movement
builds trust in application development and delivery, a key source of
cybersecurity threats.
Any announcement within the open source movement carries
value since it brings diversification and is carried forward by speed
and flexibility and raises organisational standards. Interrogation
of application code within the open source community can raise
detect and raise awareness of backdoor loopholes in applications.
This is particularly important for critical infrastructure and mission
critical applications. Complexity within the cybersecurity industry
is also driven by varying levels of rigorous compliance structures
within multiple industries that tend to perpetuate silos and lack
of interoperability. Strong commercial interests also tend to build
continuity to such rigid frameworks.
Having visibility across multiple applications and multiple cloud
platforms is critical for innovation in the digital enterprises of today.
Kubernetes and OpenStack are key buzzwords that are helping to
build secure, strong and robust platforms in the open source arena.
Adoption of Artificial Intelligence solutions within cybersecurity
threat intelligence has huge benefits for end users. Intuitive and
self-learning tools built on threat intelligence feeds and network
monitoring, can bring down the response times to cybersecurity
threats for end users.
At this stage, most of the innovative developments that are
happening in Artificial Intelligence solutions continue to be centred in
non-profit and open source centric, global groups.
PAUL POTGIETER, MANAGING DIRECTOR – UAE, DIMENSION DATA
THE IMPORTANCE
OF PARTNERSHIPS
AND CONTINUED
COLLABORATION IN THE
CYBERSECURITY SECTOR
Repeated
global and regional
cybersecurity
surveys have
indicated that
complexity, silos,
proprietary and
cumbersome