The demand for comprehensive cybersecurity services is only going to keep growing as businesses face new threats on a daily basis, the head of Palo Alto Networks says.
In an interview with BNN Bloomberg that aired Thursday, Palo Alto Networks president BJ Jenkins said the massive Crowdstrike outage that wiped out networks around the world earlier this year shows the margin for error in cybersecurity is getting thinner than ever.
Jenkins says that the world has become more digital and there are “more surfaces” where companies or individuals can be attacked, adding that the evolution of technology, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, provides attackers with new ways to breach organizations.
“It has become an arms race in cybersecurity,” he said. “We have to leverage those same tools to help protect our customers, but the threats evolve at a very, very fast pace.”
Jenkins says the Palo Alto Networks team detects 1.5 million new, unique attacks on a daily basis across its network and it blocks 8.6 billion attacks a day and he expects this number to continue growing amid technological innovation.
However, the cybersecurity market is highly fragmented, with many businesses using different tools from different companies. That can make it hard to stay secure on a network-wide basis, which is why Palo Alto is trying to push its ability to offer multiple options on one platform.
“Part of the value of Palo Alto Networks is the breadth and depth of our solutions. We have solutions in network security, cloud security and security operations centres to help customers remediate breaches.”
‘Platformization’
The company is trying to streamline the process via something it calls “platformization” which is essentially a way of simplifying the process by consolidating tools where possible.
Analysts were skeptical of this plan at first, leading to multiple downgrades in the stock when it was announced earlier this year. But the company seems to be winning over customers and Wall Street. After a plunge in February, the shares are up by about 30 per cent since then.
“It’s a time in the industry where scale really matters. We are the largest player out there and we integrated these solutions to bring that value to customers,” Jenkins said.