Panellists during the 3rd Annual CyberX Qatar Summit held at City Centre Rotana Hotel, in Doha recently.
Doha: Qatar’s cybersecurity market is anticipated to witness significant growth in the coming period, an increase in the era of digitalisation has imbibed many opportunities on the face of the technological upgradation and advancement adoption across various industrial applications, according to experts during an event.
Cybersecurity leaders and innovators gathered at the 7th edition of Cyberx Global Series and 3rd Annual CyberX Qatar Summit organised by Ibento Global at City Centre Rotana Hotel, recently.
Under the theme of ‘Cyber Resilience in the era of Digital Transformation’, the event featured a stellar line-up of speakers, panel discussions and presentations that provided access to a wealth of knowledge, sharing best practices and experiences, spotlighting trends, information exchange, and cutting-edge insights.
Addressing the panel discussion entitled ‘Effective cyber awareness programme, a front line defence starts with training and processes in future proofing enterprise security in the age of 5G networks, mobile devices and IoT’ Hamid Ali Raja, Senior Manager, Internal Audit, Gulf Warehousing Company (GWC), said, “Since the pandemic began remote working is the norm now and it is going to stay. As a control in GWC we have made information security project management a part of vendor assessment at the time of procuring a software.
He discussed about user awareness, data classification and how to protect mobile devices in hybrid work environment and also how to protect our environment and threats that are emerging from the mobile devices.
Jamsheed P Chithari, Manager, Infrastructure and Security at Qatar Insurance Company (QIC) shed light on cybersecurity issues, “There needs to be awareness for employees to use strong passwords and the end users should be vigilant and aware about the security trends, social engineering tricks like phishing. Also, the employees should be well trained about the best solutions,” Chithari said.
Also speaking during the panel discussion, Anuugya Sarraswat, Information Security Specialist, Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB) noted that there are controls that can be placed in an organisation to deal with password policy like the password can be split in two parts, and another affective way is the length of the password can be increased. There are tools which can cross check that the user is using the commonly used password or not.
Mohammad Saquib, Government Institution, Qatar said, “Cybersecurity awareness is not related to IT or finance department, it is mandatory for all. We should be aware of these things not only in professional lives but also in our personal lives. We need to upgrade ourselves by attending training sessions as it is a highly evolving market.”
“The training should be very frequent, not once in six months or year. As the hackers are far ahead of us who plan these sorts of frauds or scams. So, we should do these trainings, events, and online classes not only at professional level but also for personal benefit,” he added.
Annamaria Belaz, Associate Researcher on Cybersecurity Strategy and policy Obuda University moderated the event. The conference included dialogue with panel discussions, keynote presentations, fire-side chats, spotlight tracks to discuss the current initiatives including Email Security, Smart Home Network (SHN), Data Privacy & Security, Identity & access management, Cloud Security, XDR, AI Cyber Security, Cyber Security Asset Management, Hybrid Cloud Strategy, Zero Trust, Enterprise Risk & Compliance, and future trends which are affecting the organisations and business effectiveness.
The cybersecurity market size in Qatar was estimated at $1,016.7m in 2022 and is expected to grow by 12.7% annually to reach $1,642.3m in 2026.
