Palo Alto Networks VP: "Investing in holistic defense solutions reduces the chance of a cyber breach by 99%"

"Investment in holistic defense solutions reduces the likelihood of a cyber breach by 99%,” said Elad Koren, Vice President of Product Management of the Cloud Security Division at Palo Alto Networks, at Calcalist’s Tech TLV conference in Tel Aviv, during a presentation entitled, “The cyber arena - who protects our private information and secures cloud environments."

Elad Koren.

According to Koren, in recent years, the cloud domain has evolved significantly, but the development of necessary cyber defenses has lagged behind. "The amount of cloud innovation in recent years surpasses all imagination, and there are amazing opportunities in the field. But ultimately, along with the innovation that encourages growth, there is also risk; the faster you advance, the more risks and hacks there are."

Koren warned against significant investment in new developments over investment in cloud security, saying: "Information security, even in today's world, is a kind of afterthought. It shouldn't be that way but that's the situation." Koren gave an example of a company that was hacked, which eventually turned out to be part of a state-wide breach into the company's computers. "The breach occurred because employees clicked on an email link from their spam folder. In fact, 88% of breaches are caused by human error."

Regarding the damage caused by a computer system breach, Koren says, "We live in a world where it takes about six months to detect a breach and another four months to solve it. Imagine how much damage can be done in that time. This includes significant economic damage when the average economic impact of a cyber breach is around $4.5 million, and double that in the United States." Despite this, "about 20-30% of the organizations here, on average, have people poking around their computer networks."

Therefore, Koren says that cyber protection must be taken into account from the coding stage. "You can get the whole picture through consolidating all solutions from one place – from code writing to product sales. For this, you need an entire system that can connect the dots."

The importance of doing this earlier on in the process is also economic. "Fixing a problem in the production stage may cost more than 20 times what it would in the development stage. Tens of thousands of dollars become millions."