Creating a trustworthy digital world

Khalid Fawzy, Country Manager at Fortinet for Egypt, Libya and Sudan, defines the company’s mission as to provide organizations with a digital world that they can trust.

TECHx: You recently participated at Cairo ICT & @Hack, how were the shows for you, can you please share some highlights?

Khaled: We have been excited to participate in the leading tech event Cairo ICT which helps visitors and exhibitors explore the latest technology trends. 2021 is a very special year for this well-established event across MEA, as it celebrates its Silver Jubilee, a quarter of a century driving technology forward.

Fortinet’s mission is to make possible a digital world that organizations can always trust by protecting people, devices, and data everywhere fits with “The Digital Challenge” theme for this new edition. Already strongly established in Egypt, we will continue to differentiate ourselves by accelerating the convergence of networking and security in order to support organizations’ digital innovation initiatives. 

TECHx: The Ministry of CIT in Egypt is investing heavily in technology and making Egypt digital, how can Fortinet contribute to this transformation journey?

Khaled: The need to adapt to the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation for many organizations even faster and further. The need to support remote workers has also accelerated the need for network operations teams to adopt agile strategies. As organizations go through their hybrid journey, Fortinet is able to support them by delivering consistent security everywhere.

TECHx: What trends are you seeing in Africa in the cybersecurity space post-pandemic, and what are absolute necessities for large enterprises and SMB’s in strengthening their security infrastructure?

Khaled: In Africa as for the rest of the world, Covid-19 affected every organization, from the family-owned business to the large enterprise. Remote work became the norm as organizations were forced to rapidly shift their operational models.  Indeed, “work” is increasingly viewed as something we do as opposed to a place we commute to and from. With this in mind, security and IT teams must adjust their strategies to manage this new hybrid workforce at scale effectively.

To embrace the future of work, it’s essential to evaluate the technology adopted during the initial rush to remote work to ensure compliance and proper data security measures are in place. It’s also a good idea to:

• Remind employees of cybersecurity hygiene best practices, both in the office and at home.
• Employ technologies like ZTNA, SD-WAN, SASE, and EDR to ensure employees working at home are as secure as those working in the office. Additional tools, like Network Access Control (NAC), segmentation, and a zero-trust architecture can take those protections a step further.
• Back up employee data, store it off-network and test it regularly to get ahead of potential cyberattacks, including ransomware.
• Establish and test incident response plans.

TEChx: We will be stepping into 2022 soon, how has 2021 been for Fortinet in the region and what is the roadmap for 2022?

Khaled: According to the predictions from the FortiGuard Labs global threat intelligence and research team about the cyberthreat landscape for 2022 and beyond, cyber adversaries are evolving and expanding their attack methods to target new areas for exploit spanning the entire attack surface especially as work-from-anywhere continues. With this in mind, enterprises must now take a “work-from-anywhere” approach to their security by deploying solutions capable of following, enabling, and protecting users no matter where they are located.

By unifying Fortinet’s broad portfolio of zero trust, endpoint, and network security solutions within the Fortinet Security Fabric, Fortinet already delivers security, services, and threat intelligence that seamlessly follow users whether on the road, at home, or in the office to provide enterprise-grade protection and productivity. To further accelerate secure work-from-anywhere, Fortinet is committed to expanding its FortiTrust security as a service portfolio, which offers simplified consumption and unified licensing models designed for the way companies do business in the Work-from-Anywhere Era.