The timing is appropriate for the governments and organizations across the Middle East market to adopt forensics-based cyber security solutions, says Dr. Parag Pruthi, Chairman and CEO of Niksun, a recognized world leader which develops highly scalable real-time forensics- based cyber security and network performance management solutions. Cyber attacks have been taking place in the region for more than a decade, but they have not really been observed and the implications have not yet been dealt with except after attacks like Stuxnet, Flame and Shamoon.

“When those incidents started to happen, it significantly raised awareness levels, and it became clear that the region is venerable to cyber attacks too. Earlier, we may have been talking about it but no one actually believed that such things were possible. The type of infiltration that is happening in this region is mainly financially motivated and therefore the people or organizations who are conducting these operations are not interested in letting anyone know that they have succeeded because they can continue to reap benefits. State sponsored back door activity is not something to be disclosed because it’s being done to be exploited at the right time,” he says.

The region’s IT security market has exploded following an increase in cyber threats. It has created an increase in sales of other IT equipment which is not just considered to be IT, but modernization as well. Latest cybercrime related incidents have helped bring about awareness which caused organizations to examine their infrastructure and conduct appropriate upgrades, put in the right policies and procedures, and personnel to administer, maintain, and continue to operate the security systems in a proactive way. The IT market has grown significantly but the actual potential is much larger than what it is now, according to Dr. Pruthi.

The consumerization of IT and trends such as BYOD and has made the role of a CIO and CISO more complex. “Consumerization of IT is here because of cost competitiveness of operating and making people satisfied with the device they have. The flip side is that you cannot control this ecosystem and therefore there can be, in terms of security, vulnerabilities can be a lot greater,” adds Dr. Pruthi. “When employees bring their own devices, they also bring their own vulnerabilities into the network. This can also lead to performance issues and applications may not work very well across devices. This creates greater costs for the CIO and CISO that they had not previously accounted for because now they need to be securing their network and moving to a more robust one that it needed to be before it was standardized with the end clients. So now CIOs & CISOs need more efficient tools.”