Cybersecurity training specialist SANS Institute has announced the availability of cloud security and certification training courses for the region
The GCC region is witnessing a brisk pace of cloud adoption, owing to ongoing government and private sector work from home initiatives. Along with this public cloud adoption, there is also a need to increase skills around cloud security.
By providing training, certification, research, and community initiatives to help security professionals, SANS’ cloud security curriculum focuses its resources on growing threats to the cloud.
Ned Baltagi, managing director, Middle East and Africa at SANS Institute, said, “With the work at home and remote working initiatives across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries, we see rapid movement into mainstream adoption of the public cloud, which is being used for collaborative meetings, education, healthcare, online buying, citizen services amongst others.
“With this huge proliferation of the regional public cloud, often from unsecured connections and networks, the incidence of phishing malware and threat actor activity has also vigorously picked up. We believe the availability of online cloud security training and certification courses from SANS Institute will go a long way in helping to counter these blind spots and increase the level of suitable skills.”
Market research company IDC reported in April that more than 25% of Saudi Arabia companies are planning to deploy a mix of on-site and dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet infrastructure needs.
There are three main obstacles to cloud roll-outs in Saudi Arabia, according to these latest findings revealed by the IDC’s annual Saudi Arabia CIO survey. They are insufficient migration capabilities, multi-cloud management challenges and security concerns. Also identified as major issues were the use of legacy applications and infrastructure, lack of skills and difficulty finding the right partners.
As enforced work-from-home practises expose corporate networks and computing devices to new levels of cybersecurity risk, IDC anticipates an increase in security spending. IDC believes the COVID-19 outbreak fallout will expose new security loopholes to be exploited by cyber miscreants.
As a consequence, data breaches are expected to become wider, exacerbated by remote workers’ notoriously unsafe habits. It has become extremely important to secure the cloud workloads used to perform work-related tasks, and failure to do so poses a significant threat to the organisation – operationally, financially and reputationally.
