Radware Exchange Live: Business Continuity in the face of crisis, Roy Zisapel opening

It's clear that the coronavirus has greatly impacted our lives, our personal life, our work life, in all aspects. New terms like work from home, social distancing, and home isolation have stormed into our lives and changed our behaviors. We don't meet people anymore, we don't go out, we mainly avoid meetings and stay at home. That change in behavior is obviously impacting our online behavior as well. As we stay more at home, the consumption of video streaming and of video sites like YouTube and Netflix is rising significantly. We're using more our desktops and TVs to surf the internet and less our mobile phones. Unlike previous periods, actually, the increasing traffic is mainly attributed to desktop traffic. Internet traffic across the world is rising significantly. In the U.S., 40% up since the start of Corona. In European countries like the UK and Italy, traffic has roughly doubled. In addition, the use of technology is not limited to streaming and video. More and more governments are using new mobile applications in order to track the spread of the coronavirus, to track locations of confirmed cases and people who they meet, where are they going, to try to avoid continuous spread. That is challenging the fine line between public health and individual privacy. Regarding our work, companies across the world have mandated work from home policies. That means that millions of workers are no longer coming to the offices and are staying at home. As a result, the use of collaboration tools like videoconferencing is rising significantly. The use of SSL VPN, of remote desktop protocol, has gone up by 30 to 40%, signaling the scale of the work from home usage. That means that remote access has become the most significant IT resource out there, and we must ensure its availability. Otherwise, we're risking the productivity of the organization and all our employees. Coronavirus has also accelerated digital transformation. We are launching more and more applications, and we need to do it in fast times. We need scale. We are using more and more cloud infrastructure to answer those needs. So we're seeing many of our customers accelerating their transition to public cloud. The public cloud is perfect for this environment. It's built to manage applications remotely, to scale them, and scale is almost indefinite, really addressing the challenges of this period. While organizations are moving more and more workloads to the cloud, one should not forget the security. We must deploy the right security controls to protect our cloud application environment. Not only are we changing our behavior, also hackers are adapting to this new environment. We're seeing more and more attacks during this period. For example, if we're tracking the cloud security services that we provide to our customers, for example, the cloud DDoS protection, in the month of March we've seen twice more attacks than in February, and the scale of these attacks have quadrupled over February levels that were already very high. So a significant increase in denial of service attacks. In addition, when we're looking on bot traffic, especially around e-commerce sites, retail, financial services, we're seeing significant increase in the usage of sophisticated bots that simulate human traffic, up to 60% of the total bot traffic. A month ago it would have been at 30%. So again, much more sophisticated attacks targeting the business layers and utilizing the content and context of the coronavirus to improve phishing attempts and improve the success of the attacks. When I'm trying to summarize all of those changes and provide our best advice to our enterprise customers what to focus on in their IT environments in this period, I think there are four main takeaways. First, you need to ensure you have enough capacity for your remote access. So you need to scale that infrastructure. Second, this became the most important IT infrastructure out there, controlling the whole productivity. So absolutely, this infrastructure must be available at all times. So redundant connections, redundant firewalls, SSL VPN, we have to ensure that this infrastructure stays up at all times. Third, as it became the most critical asset, it's also the most critical target for our hackers. And as a result, securing this infrastructure is of very high importance, especially against denial of service attacks, but against any attack that targets the availability of this resource. And last but not least, as we move more and more applications to the public cloud, putting the right security controls in place and securing this environment is key. So thank you very much, and now back to Shiva.