Top tech companies focus on fight against cyber crime in UAE

Leading technology companies said protecting UAE customers from the threat of cyber criminals remained their “number one priority”.

Speaking on the second day of Gitex Technology Week, Hewlett Packard and Amazon chiefs said they were stepping up security to combat an always-evolving danger. Networks can even be attacked by people hacking into printers, meaning companies can never afford to let their guard down in the fight against cyber crime.

Amazon announced it was opening two centres in Dubai and Fujairah to improve its cloud services in the region – and further bolster security.

“It will mean that you will not have to make multiple hops any more to get to the Amazon network and it will make it easier to stop attacks closer to the customers,” said Zubin Chagpar, head of the Middle East and Africa region for Amazon Web Services. He said AWS is a subsidiary of the shopping website, with a number of well-known companies using its cloud services. These include taxi app Careem, AirBnB, Dubizzle and Netflix, who all use AWS’s cloud services to store data.

“Usually, if you wanted to access data you would have to use one of our data centres in Europe, Singapore or the US,” he said. “Now it gets cached locally. We spent a lot of time working with customers looking at where we could add layers of protection. Security is job zero – it is our number one priority.”

While the level of security has never been more advanced, the threats have become more sophisticated than ever – which has forced companies to think outside the box.

“The landscape of cyber threats is evolving so much, so we have to focus on protecting our customers from that,” said Peter Oganesean, Hewlett Packard’s managing director for the UAE and Middle East.