siliconindia | | April 20178GREAT CYBER SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES NEED GREAT PEOPLEBy Michael Xie, Founder, President & CTO, FortinetAs Chief Technology Officer, my primary mandate is to develop technologies to help our enterprise customers improve their securi-ty postures. As we cross our 300-patent mile-stone after 16 years in the business, I am en-couraged by the good progress we have made.In recent times however, it has dawned on me that powerful as they are, our solutions are not reaching their full potential in all the organizations where they are deployed no thanks to a dire shortage of cyber security professionals to harness them. This is a glob-al phenomenon, and we have reached a stage where cyber security manpower development cannot be put off any longer.One may assume that with greater auto-mation and the advancement of technology in general, the dependency of cyber securi-ty on human beings has fallen. The truth is quite the opposite. According to Frost & Sullivan, more manpower is needed for the following reasons:· More Sophisticated & Persistent Cyber Threats ­ The rising sophistication of cyber threats is not just to accomplish a singular goal (e.g., steal sensitive information), but to be persistent and effective over an extended pe-riod of time. To achieve these goals, evading detection and, if detected, silently adapting to either continue or reappear later are part of the hacker's operating principles. Consequently, identifying compromises and qualifying their severity requires constant diligence and deep pockets of expertise. A high degree of talent, knowledge and time is also needed to thor-oughly root out discovered compromises.· Larger IT Footprints ­ The growing ubiquity of mobile devices used for business, both corporate-issued and personally owned, and the increasing adoption of cloud services, contribute to a larger IT footprint to protect. The raft of mobile devices (manufacturers, operating systems and models) and cloud en-vironments (service models and providers) add to the challenge.· More Security Technologies ­ Evasive-ness of threats and a growing IT footprint re-quire next-generation security technologies to replace and supplement in-place technologies. IN MY OPINIONFortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) provides security appliances such as firewalls, security gateways and subscription services that deliver high level of network, content and application security for telecommunication providers, managed service providers and many others.To successfully groom cyber security talent, all stakeholders in the industry must come together to set concrete security education agenda, curriculum development and knowledge transfer programs
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