Toni El Inati, the RVP Sales for META and CEE at Barracuda Networks, says that there is a real shift underway, moving from volumetric to targeted attacks

Are you participating in GISEC 2022?
As GISEC is one of the region’s most important cybersecurity events of the year, top executives from our leadership, sales and channel teams will be present at the show this year. Just this year, we announced our partnership with Finesse, and we now are participating together with them to showcase to customers how Finesse’s expertise in digital transformation, complemented by the power and simplicity of Barracuda’s cybersecurity solutions portfolio, can enable them to reduce cybersecurity risk on their digital journeys.

What is your theme of participation at the event?
Recent Barracuda research has shown that 72% of organisations have been breached through web applications. With applications becoming a primary interface between consumers and the businesses they engage with, securing these critical interfaces is paramount.

At the same time, businesses have been plagued by ransomware and other email-driven exploits, with our latest data showing that nearly one in every ten social engineering attacks is a Business Email Compromise. There is a real shift underway, moving from volumetric to targeted attacks, from malware to social engineering, from single hackers to organized criminal enterprises profiting from attacks that begin with a single phishing email.

For these reasons, the theme of our participation at GISEC 2022 will centre around demonstrating to attendees how we can enable them in effectively ‘Securing Applications and Email’.

What is the general agenda / planned list of activities at the event?
We will be collaborating with our new partner Finesse to raise awareness of our partnership through our participation at GISEC. Given that we have new cybersecurity professionals who have recently joined our regional team, we will utilise the show as an opportunity to introduce them to existing customers and partners.

Large trade shows such as GISEC centre around creating awareness and reinforcing collaboration between members of the cybersecurity ecosystem. We are eager to engage with all stakeholders to get a deeper understanding of the latest market requirements and developments. In the end, what we hope to accomplish is meaningful engagements that enable us to collaborate with a wider number of customers and partners.

What according to you are the challenges faced by CISOs and Cybersecurity experts today?
The key challenges CISOs face with security solutions – complexity, cost, management overheads, and the negative impact they could potentially have on end-user experience and productivity – are all avoidable. This was the premise on which Barracuda was started as our mission was to make robust email security available to all businesses.

We have since expanded on this and today, our mission is to protect and support our customers for life. In line with this, Barracuda provides over 200,000 customers with easy, comprehensive, and affordable solutions for email protection, application, cloud security, network security, and data protection.

Will you be running any offline/online engagements alongside the event?
We recently announced the regional availability of our Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup solution from Microsoft’s local cloud data centres. This solution delivers a fast search and restore experience for Office 365 data, including Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

Compared with traditional backup and recovery solutions, it is a cloud-first solution that provides scale and resiliency, fast performance, and wide global coverage to protect Office 365 data born in the cloud. As this is one of the solutions we will be showcasing at GISEC, in the run-up to the event, we have been running digital campaigns together with Microsoft to promote the same.