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Five Recommendations to Enterprises in the Middle East for

Improving Network Security

Cherif Sleiman, General Manager, Middle East and Africa at Infoblox

In May this year, we posted results of our ‘network protection survey’, which looked – among
other things – at best practices in companies that were highly successful at network security. I
will drill down into these best practices, and how to achieve them.

Some of the recommended actions have the added benefit of positively influencing multiple
outcomes, so organizations in the Middle East can benefit by prioritizing these actions first.

Recommendation #1: Get rid of departmental silos.
Among survey respondents, there was a high correlation between those who reported best
results with those who enjoyed a high level of cooperation between network, security, and
application teams. You may need to retain data silos to ensure privacy and security, but
colleagues should be made aware of those limitations.

Technology can be a great facilitator to enforce essential policy and remove artificial boundaries
or silos that limit data sharing across groups.

Recommendation #2: Pay attention to operational realities.
In network security and network operations (and probably most areas of the enterprise),
technology alone will not alleviate certain realities about doing business. Technology must be
part of a strategy to optimize processes and help people make intelligent, intuitive decisions
based on information (not data) and enriched with the right context.

Recommendation #3: Prioritize based on risk analysis.
Actions should balance risk and reward. That requires laying the foundation for intuitive
decisions with information and context derived not from all data, but from data required to
provide a perspective on risk and impact on the business.

Human beings should not have to correlate data themselves or use guess work to determine
impact.

To prioritize properly, they must have as much aggregated context as possible (that’s why
getting rid of silos is so important).

73 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – August 2016 Edition
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