UAE CISO Roundtable

In today's age of asymmetric cybersecurity warfare, cybersecurity criminals have the advantage of initiating threats based on their own plans while organizations play defense. This happens every day, seven days a week, in all industries. The CISO leadership role tasked with detecting and mitigating these attacks. This session highlights some strategies CISOs can use to work with the CXO leadership team and board of directors to mitigate threats and keep organizations safe.

Today, it is no longer enough to trust partners or vendors. To fully protect the organization, CISOs need to have a complete understanding of the supply chain. For most organizations, the supply chain is made up of suppliers, vendors, and other stakeholders. But what about the vulnerabilities in the code used by third parties, and which open-source resources do vendors use that could add risk? Leaving third parties to monitor your organization’s data is a recipe for disaster. CISOs need to take a more proactive approach by learning exactly who has access to data and determining how such data is being utilized.

Digital trust is now essential to future business success and has become a business imperative as organizations accelerate their digital transformation strategies to meet the new reality. Identity, privacy, and data security are the foundational pillars to building the trusted enterprise. Going forward, trust programs will need to evolve and incorporate values-based goals such as business ethics and corporate social responsibility, as well as supporting business outcomes: transparency, brand reputation, customer loyalty, supply chain integrity and operational efficiency.

Proactive security projects should focus on reducing risks, improving processes, or helping employees be more effective and efficient while remaining cybersafe. Patching systems, updating software, or adding new firewalls are simple projects that maintain the status quo and require minimum effort. However, proactive security projects designed to reduce the time needed to access applications or data (such as IAM solutions paired with privileged access management) can help employees be more effective and reduce the risks from cyberthreats.

The issue of trust is now everywhere, with the pace of digital transformation increasing across all sectors, hybrid working practices accelerating in response to the pandemic, and supply chain disruptions and geopolitical threats on the rise. Digital trust represents a new era of business agility, powered by digital, cloud, and security transformation. Today, the issue of trust is increasingly being incorporated into new technologies, reshaping how vendors and organizations define it.

With the pace of change in the threat landscape showing no signs of slowing down and new threats continuing to emerge, organizations require models that reliably ensure the security and resilience of core systems and infrastructure while remaining sufficiently agile to meet future-ready service expectations. This panel will discuss the biggest threats security professionals should be on the lookout for and explain how to stay one step ahead of the attackers by strengthening security through the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

As more and more organizations embrace hybrid and remote work, not only did the potential attack surface expand, but it also moved outside of conventional perimeter defences. Intrusion detection systems and firewalls for example were built mainly to stop and neutralize traditional cybercrime such as ransomware and data breaches. Today, IT security professionals face a myriad of new cybersecurity risks associated with remote work. Whether it’s the shortage in security talent, vulnerable network configurations, insider threats or cloud-based infrastructures, IT security experts are facing an unprecedented spike in attacks that are increasing in both sophistication and scale.