Emile Abou Saleh, Regional Director, Middle East, and Africa at Proofpoint, speaks about his company’s plans for GITEX Global 2022

Are you participating in GITEX Global 2022? If yes, which products and solutions will you be showcasing at the event?
Proofpoint will showcase its portfolio of people-centric cybersecurity solutions at GITEX.  With an integrated suite of cloud-based solutions, Proofpoint provides unique visibility into organisation’s most targeted employees and how and where they are accessing critical data. At GITEX Technology Week 2022, Proofpoint will be showcasing its portfolio of solutions that help protect organizations’ people and defend their data, including:

1. Proofpoint Information Protection: Information Protection applies security solutions and other technologies, as well as processes and policies, to secure your information. You get data protection against accidental mistakes, attacks, and insider risk across your cloud services, email, endpoint, cloud apps, web, on-premises, and shared cloud repositories. It brings together content, threat, and behaviour insights and gives you a people-centric approach to data loss prevention (DLP).
2. Proofpoint Cloud Security: Get secure access to the web and cloud services with access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable-use control.
3. Proofpoint Email Protection: Proofpoint Email Protection is the industry-leading email gateway, which can be deployed as a cloud service or on-premises. It catches both known and unknown threats that others miss. Powered by NexusAI, our advanced machine learning technology, Email Protection accurately classifies various types of email. And it detects and blocks threats that don’t involve malicious payload, such as impostor email—also known as business email compromise (BEC)—using our Advanced BEC Defence.
4. Proofpoint Security Awareness Training: Attackers target people more directly than ever, and 95% of all cybersecurity issues can be traced back to human error. Ensure your users know what to do when faced with a real threat by providing them with targeted, threat-guided education. Proofpoint Security Awareness Training empowers your people to defend your organisation with a holistic solution resulting in fewer clicks on real-world malicious links.

What are your expectations from the event this year?
We continue to invest in the Middle East and are excited about our participation at GITEX. The week represents a cornerstone in the Middle East cybersecurity events calendar, and a fantastic opportunity to educate partners, customers, and prospects on the cyber-risks facing employees today.

What will be your theme of participation at GITEX?
During this year’s event, we aim to educate organizations on how to better protect their critical information in the world of hybrid work.

We have seen a huge shift in the way people work since the last in-person show, which has in turn driven cybercriminals to continue to target people rather than infrastructure.  With employees now forming the defensive perimeter wherever they work, our recent research shows that 32% of Emirati CISOs agree that they have seen an increase in targeted attacks in the last 12 months.

Organizations must deploy a cybersecurity strategy that combines people, process, and technology. Data doesn’t lose itself. People lose data – it doesn’t walk out of the door on its own. It’s either stolen by an external attacker via compromised credentials, lost due to a careless user, or taken by a malicious employee, often to a competitor. This is why it’s critical that organizations have robust technological controls in place to monitor and protect their data, while also focusing on educating their people on how to identify and take action against such threats.

Do you plan to run any online engagements such as webinars and offline engagements such as tech talks, demos, keynotes, and so on, alongside GITEX?
Proofpoint will be showcasing its people-centric cybersecurity solutions through ongoing demos on its stand: D20, Hall 2. Our cybersecurity experts including Haifa Ketiti, Senior Systems Engineer, the Middle East for Proofpoint, and Alistair Mills, Director, Engineering, EMEA at Proofpoint will also be presenting on the XLABs stage during the event, discussing the latest information protection challenges for Middle Eastern organizations. We will also be hosting an interactive game on the stand – with prizes for the winner! Visit the stand to take your turn.

How have your regional strategies changed in recent months?
Proofpoint continues to invest in innovation to secure organizations in the Middle East and beyond. We are focused on developing security innovations that protect people—wherever they may work—and defend their data from today’s most harmful risks. To stay ahead of the threat actors, we invest hundreds of millions annually into our products and rely on the most advanced AI/ML technologies to defend our customers.

Driven by the accelerated adoption of work-from-anywhere practices, we have made several innovations to our Information Protection, Email Security, Threat Protection, and Cloud Security solutions.