Sebastien Pavie, Regional Director, META Enterprise and Cybersecurity at Gemalto, discusses the impact of biometrics and the cloud on cybersecurity.
Q: How is the Middle East’s rapid adoption of the cloud changing the IAM market?
A: The Middle East definitely managed to catch up on with cloud adoption over the past two to three years, typically in either private or hybrid mode.
Now the way this impacts the IAM market is they are looking gradually more and more at the cloud-based or as a Service type deliveries for IAM solutions. This is timely for us because this year we’ve launched the SafeNet Trusted Access which nicely complements our cloud-based authentication solution because it is an authentication service and it’s all about delivering multifactor authentication, behaviour analytics and smart cloud-based single sign-on from the cloud as a Service.
We still offer single authentication service on-premise as a server because that still, to be honest is the bulk of the demand and the market in the region but we also have this alternative which responds to this shift in the cloud adoption nicely in three ways. Enterprise organisations are looking more and more at deploying those hybrid kinds of environments and they are more open to this kind of cloud-based delivery of security distributions.
Smaller organisations typically look at this faster because for them there is an obvious cost-efficiency aspect and ease of use and deployment and management of those solutions.
And then via service providers who can give a nice relay to bring your solutions within the borders of the country and help address some constraints or reluctance from some organisations to get such security solutions delivered from the cloud outside of the region.
Q: How are biometrics changing the IAM market?
A: I think the adoption of biometrics has also gathered a lot of momentum lately thanks to the evolution of mobile devices which support biometrics now such as touch ID to unlock smartphones. This is just an example of how biometrics have managed to come back into play in the IAM world globally and in the region. Now you don’t need to go through the costly and potentially complicated effort of deploying biometric sensors or readers separately, because you can leverage those mobile devices. It’s important for those identity security solutions that we provide to support that.
Q: What are the key features of Gemalto’s SafeNet platform?
A: The SafeNet Trusted Access includes a number of key elements in the IAM world. Number one is a multifactor authentication because it actually includes or embeds the SafeNet Authentication Service. Then you also have the smart cloud single sign-on aspect, where you leverage your strong authentication in order to then only have to authenticate once to multiple applications in the cloud but also potentially on-premise. You also have another important layer which is the access control security policy where you can define in a more granular manner your access control policies. The last layer is behaviour analytics. We refer to it as a context-based authentication. That is another way to look at where your user is going to authenticate from; which device they’re going to use, what time of the day, which day of the week etc. and then build some behavioural patterns, so that if the user starts drifting away from those patterns or you have an unusual behaviour in general, you can potentially have a denial of access.
Q: What are the benefits for organisations of being able to access on-demand security platforms?
A: Obviously cost-efficiency and elasticity, you don’t have to make this big capex investment upfront which is not always easy and you can pay as you go. Pay-per-use is something we’ve brought into our SaaS platform, authentication and multifactor authentication platform and obviously the SafeNet Trusted Access as well. It really allows you in a very flexible manner to start small and grow as you go, as you really need it per the actual usage because even sometimes in the old fashion way you go per user but then you might realise further down the line that only half of users are actually using the service.
The fact that you can keep monitoring that and pay-per-use is a great flexibility and cost-efficiency for the customers.
The other platform we are launching at GITEX is Data Protection on Demand, this is the other side of our cybersecurity portfolio which is on the data protection/encryption aspect. This is same idea where you can have this delivered from the cloud or pay as you go, as per your requirements, no more no less.
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