Wrapping Up GITEX – A Short Summary of 5 Exciting and Exhausting Days

It’s Thursday the 21^st of October and we are wrapping up our amazing booth here at GITEX. And what an event it has been – the buzz and the energy have been fantastic!

The last 5 days have been very exciting and have kept us busy and on our toes – not having attended large live events for almost 2 years required our feet to adjust rather quickly.

GITEX Technology Week in Dubai ran from October 17^th to 21^st this year, with 100s of exhibitors attending in person attracting huge crowds of visitors.

The exhibitors and themes covered a wide area from consumer electronics, enterprise solutions, services, country specific exhibits and many more.

However, some of the repeating themes which came up during the trade show and throughout the communications with attendees and old friends (yes, it has been nice to see friends and colleagues after years):

• Everybody was keen to get out and meet in person (observing the hygiene guidelines, obviously)
• Asset inventory is the foundation (should not be a surprise)
• Cloud acceptance and adoption is raising in the region (private/public/hybrid)
• Zero Trust Concepts – definitely a hot topic

Long Live Meeting in Person

We had attended GISEC in Dubai earlier this year as well, and one could already see that more people are open to meet in person again – video calls have been a great tool to stay in touch over the last year and will remain an important tool, but they cannot replace human interactions.

Now, at GITEX we reached another level (more than pre-pandemic)! People seem to enjoy walking through the corridors, stopping for a coffee and a casual chat, showing lots of interest in technical discussions.

Built a Strong Foundation – Inventory Data

It should not come as a surprise, but sometimes the basic foundational best practices seem to get less attention amongst all of the blinking and shining lights of the latest gadgets and silver-bullet solutions out there on the security market. We had many discussions with attendees around ongoing and planned security projects within their environments – may that be industrial / OT environments, Medical environments or general enterprise networks – and all of them mentioned that they have to first get a good understanding what their current surface and asset list looks like – an up-to-date inventory, not an XLS sheet, version 834, which has been updated 3 month ago.

It’s Just Someone Else’s Computer…

Cloud adoption has risen continuously over the last years – with different models and providers available to choose from in order to adopt new technology driving the business outcomes.

Whilst many countries, verticals and sectors have different requirements and regulations, the general openness and interest in upgrading legacy solutions to a cloud solution has increased within the region. Certain technologies used in daily tasks such as email and office products have been leading the awareness and acceptance of cloud technologies already – and cloud providers are responding to increased demands by extending their offerings into the GCC market.

I Just Don’t Trust You!

Micro-segmentation and Zero Trust strategies have been on the mind of decision makers for a while now. In a report about Zero Trust adoption published by Microsoft, 96% of the interviewed security decision makers state that it is deemed critical for the organization’s success in the future.

So it comes as no surprise that this hot topic was one of the big ones discussed and presented during GITEX 2021. Assuming breach which leads to verifying identities and device status prior granting access to critical resources are some of the core concepts of the Zero Trust model – which also requires a strong foundation of understanding device inventory and communication path’s.

To summarize – meeting people mask-to-mask and discuss exciting and upcoming technologies has been amazing. Looking forward to seeing you all at GISEC next March in Dubai!

Interested to learn more, book a walkthrough our award-winning agentless device security platform, and start getting answers about your assets and IoT, IoMT, OT devices in your environment.