The surge in international demand has rallied the world’s largest tech and start-up event to scale even higher and bigger in 2023, spearheading a global tech takeover across two Dubai mega venues next month. The 43^rd edition of GITEX GLOBAL will take place from 16-20 October 2023, the blockbuster tech showpiece once again reaching full capacity at the Dubai World Trade Centre as it prepares to host more than 6,000 exhibitors, while Expand North Star, the world’s largest start-up event hosted by Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, will kick-off its largest ever edition from 15-18 October 2023 at the new Dubai Harbour venue, featuring 1,800 start-ups from 100-plus countries at the Middle East’s biggest iconic superyacht hub.

GITEX GLOBAL and Expand North Star will comprise a combined 41 halls spanning 2.7 million sq. ft of exhibition space – a 35 per cent increase over the previous year – converging the best minds and most visionary companies to scrutinise, challenge, define, and empower the digital agendas of the world. GITEX GLOBAL will present the year’s largest AI showcase and summit, its record growth fuelled by the AI innovation wave currently gripping the globe’s imagination, as 3,500 AI-infused exhibitors reveal how this next big technology shift is transforming lives, governments, businesses, and society.

Trixie LohMirmand, Executive Vice President, Events Management, DWTC

The AI boom has also added another layer of complexity to protecting digital assets and critical IP infrastructure, with the elevated GITEX Cyber Valley taking the fight directly to the dark cyber-criminal underworld, gathering leading info-sec brands and global experts at the year’s biggest cyber security showcase. Amplifying this growth, the launch shows GITEX Impact and Future Urbanism Expo promise to be the epicentre of ground-shaking shifts in climate technology while advancing sustainable cities, and co-creating a net zero future ahead of the UN climate change summit, COP28.

“The intense demand for involvement in GITEX from the global tech and start-up community is an acknowledgement of the strong impetus to learn, exchange, debate and challenge the recent developments in the tech sphere,” said Trixie LohMirmand, Executive Vice President of Events Management at DWTC, the organiser of GITEX GLOBAL and Expand North Star. “From AI, and cyber to the mounting interest in clean tech, GITEX converges public and private sector leaders from more than 170 countries to explore the new unknown paradigms of the future digital economy.”

Steven Yi, President, Huawei MIddle East and Central Asia

Expand North Star hosted by the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy will scale to a record size in 2023, featuring 1,800 start-ups start-up exhibitors this year to connect, inspire, and extend engagements in one of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial ecosystems. More than 1,000 investors from 70 countries with $1 trillion under management will also converge at the new Dubai Harbour venue, as they look to ramp up the momentum in start-up investment after a year of tepid achievements.

Saeed Al Gergawi, Vice President of the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, said, “Expand North Star is set to drive the next era of digital entrepreneurship and inspire the next generation of innovators and thinkers. This landmark event will serve as a strategic catalyst to expand the future of Dubai’s digital economy, creating an unrivalled platform to gather key stakeholders from the global start-up community here in the emirate.”

GITEX GLOBAL 2023 welcomes the biggest tech names delving into the latest trends, risks, challenges, and opportunities that are redefining entire industries, spearheaded by returning titans including Dell Technologies, e&, Google, Huawei, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Tonomus. Among the debut exhibitors supercharging their international growth strategies and forging new connections are Salesforce, Broadcom, Beyon, and Deloitte.

Saeed Al Gergawi, Vice President of Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy

Steven Yi, President of Huawei Middle East & Central Asia said: “At Huawei, GITEX GLOBAL continues to hold great importance to our business year after year.  This year, our theme, ‘Accelerate Intelligence,’ demonstrates our commitment to delve into the transformative power of AI, networks, and cloud technologies. Together, we will explore how these converging forces are reshaping our world and how we can unleash the full capabilities of AI-powered solutions to reshape industries worldwide with cyber security, privacy protection and safeguarding our customer’s digital transformation journey remaining our top priorities.”

More information is available at www.gitex.com and www.expandnorthstar.com

CyberKnight has become the value-added-distributor for Traceable, which allows for discovery and security posture management, threat protection and threat management, across the entire SDLC. Traceable is a Zero Trust API Access (ZTAA) solution, which claims to actively reduce organizations’ attack surface by minimizing or eliminating implied trust for APIs.

“Besides the exponential growth of the API security market, we have observed how integral APIs have become to organizations business objectives. APIs present a fundamental challenge for legacy security tools, such as web application firewalls (WAFs) and API gateways, which cannot detect attacks against APIs. We are thrilled to partner with Jyoti, Sanjay and Traceable, the most robust API Security platform in the market, mapped to the industry’s first API Security Reference Architecture for Zero Trust.”, commented Wael Jaber, Chief Strategy Officer at CyberKnight.

“APIs are now a universal attack vector. Nowadays adversaries can simply exploit an API, obtain access to sensitive data, and not even have to exploit other areas. This is why organizations need to take API security seriously and make it an integral part of their cybersecurity strategy. Through the partnership with CyberKnight, a leading cybersecurity VAD in the Middle East, we aim to extend our regional coverage and help customers achieve comprehensive API protection,” added Jyoti Bansal, Co-Founder & CEO at Traceable.

Cisco has launched Cisco Secure Access, the company’s new SSE solution, that helps companies make decisions about how users connect to applications are handled behind the scenes, so they get to what they want more quickly. “With Cisco Secure Access, we are removing the burden from the user and providing a superior experience with frictionless access to all applications—not just some—to enable secure, hybrid work,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “Our unmatched visibility of the network gives us an advantage that no other company has—and we truly believe that where security meets the network, Cisco is the best in the world.” 

Highlights of Cisco Secure Access include:  

1. Common Access Experience: Delivers a single, easy way to access all applications and resources (not just some) by intelligently and securely steering traffic to private and public destinations without end-user intervention.
2. Single, Cloud-Managed Console: Simplifies security operations by converging multiple functions into one easy-to-use solution that protects all traffic. Instead of managing a broad set of tools, administrators, and analysts can go to one place to see all traffic, set all policies, and analyze security risks. This translates into efficiency gains, cost reductions, and a flexible IT environment.
3. Faster Detection and Response: Provides analysis to speed up investigations and is backed by Cisco Talos AI-driven threat intelligence to detect and block more threats.

“Cisco is collaborating with leading mobile device vendors to create the safest and best user experience no matter where users work. Cisco collaborated with Apple to incorporate Zero Trust Access (ZTA) capabilities powered by Cisco Secure Access into a native experience on iOS and macOS, making secure access to applications pervasive while making it simpler for IT and more secure for everyone,” the company said.

“At Apple, we believe deeply in providing privacy and security that is built in from the ground up,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s Vice President of Enterprise & Education Marketing. “Later this year, iPhone, iPad, and Mac will have native support for network relays. Together with Cisco Secure Access, enterprises will have a secure and seamless remote access solution, to do their best work from anywhere, on the best devices for business.”

Cisco Secure Access is taking a hybrid Points of Presence (POP) approach with Cisco Data Centers and public cloud providers to rapidly extend global reach for our customers. As part of the Cisco Security Cloud, it leverages capabilities from the rest of the Cisco security and networking portfolio, including embedded network visibility from Cisco ThousandEyes, and can be easily integrated with solutions from third-party vendors. Cisco Secure Access will be in limited availability starting in July 2023 and will be Generally Available in October 2023. 

“Organisations are deploying SSE for a variety of reasons, but improving security outcomes is arguably at the top of the list. Achieving this requires an emphasis on users to create a frictionless experience and simplifying security team processes to improve efficiency and ensure consistency,” said John Grady, Principal Analyst of Enterprise Strategy Group. “Security teams making plans for SSE should prioritize integrated solutions that focus on simplicity, scale, and user experience.” 

“At WWT our goal is to provide security solutions and services that help our customers achieve their business goals. As a Cisco partner, we are really excited about the direction Cisco is taking with the launch of their Cisco Secure Access solution,” said Neil Anderson, Area Vice President, Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions at WWT. “With Cisco Secure Access our customers gain a simplified way of accessing both private, cloud, and SaaS applications private and internet resources, while transparently securing against threats and boosting user productivity while reducing frustration.” 

Further delivering on its strategic vision, Cisco is previewing the first generative AI capabilities in the Security Cloud. Today, most organizations have a patchwork of security products, forcing teams to set and maintain extremely complex security policies as well as track and remediate threats across numerous solutions.  

• Reduce Policy Complexity: The Cisco Security Cloud will leverage a generative AI-powered Policy Assistant that enables Security and IT administrators to describe granular security policies and evaluate how to best implement them across different aspects of their security infrastructure. For the first implementation, customers will be able to reason with Cisco’s AI Assistant to evaluate and produce more efficient firewall policies. It will leverage customers’ existing rulesets in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center to drive unmatched efficiency without sacrificing granular control and will be available later this year.
• Quickly Detect and Remediate Threats: Cisco’s SOC Assistant will support the Security Operations Center (SOC) to detect and respond to threats faster. When an incident occurs, the assistant will contextualize events across email, the web, endpoints, and the network to tell the SOC analyst exactly what happened and the impact. Analysts can then interact and reason with the assistant to determine the best remediation approach leveraging an extensive knowledgebase of potential actions while also taking into account the analyst’s input. Cisco first shared the concept at RSA Conference 2023 and is excited to share that the event summarization feature will be available by the end of calendar 2023 with the remaining capabilities in the first half of calendar 2024.

The world is hybrid, and users require seamless connected experiences at the office and on the road. As the demands of the firewall as the foundation of the security stack continue to expand, the new Cisco Secure Firewall 4200 Series raises the bar for performance and flexibility with cryptographic acceleration, clustering and modularity.  

Running the new 7.4 version of the operating system, Secure Firewall 4200 features: 

• AI and ML-based encrypted threat blocking without decryption.
• Evolution of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) with complete threat inspection and policy for each individual application.
• Simplified branch routing that brings security, control, and visibility to traffic from remote offices to applications in hybrid data centres.

Cisco Secure Firewall 4200 Series appliance will be generally available in September 2023 supporting the 7.4 version of the operating system. The 7.4 OS will be generally available for the rest of the Secure Firewall appliance family in December 2023.  

“Cisco is also proud to announce Cisco Multicloud Defense following its recent acquisition of Valtix. Multicloud Defense extends the traditional firewall concept into a service-oriented, multi-cloud world.   SecOps teams can now manage security across AWS, GCP, Azure, and OCI with a single policy, in real-time, from a single SaaS platform. In addition, teams can rapidly spin up security for any cloud environment, leading to increased security and efficiency. Cisco Multicloud Defense is available today,” the company said.

“Cisco is delivering an integrated approach to secure cloud-native applications from code to cloud with new capabilities in Panoptica, Cisco’s cloud-native application security solution. Adding to the Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP) that Panoptica currently provides, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) will be available starting Fall 2023 to deliver continuous cloud security compliance and monitoring at scale, giving customers visibility into their entire inventory of cloud assets, including Kubernetes clusters. In addition, a new attack path engine that uses graph-based technology to deliver advanced attack path analysis will help security teams quickly identify and remediate potential risks across cloud infrastructures. Further, Panoptica’s integration with Cisco’s Full Stack Observability portfolio provides real-time visibility to prioritize business risks. These integrated capabilities will help security and developer teams alike gain the visibility, control and actionable intelligence required to protect dynamic cloud applications and infrastructure,” the company added.