COUNTRY FOCUS: ISRAEL
Liron Barak, CEO and Co-founder of BitDam
been laid in a national acceptance that cyberattacks evolve quickly and are highly unpredictable. This has created a culture whereby the security sector doesn’ t seek solutions for just any one attacker as you end up being one step behind.
“ Instead, the sector focuses on potential steps and organisations as the first line of defence. This strategy has three levels – robustness, resilience, and defence – aimed at cybersecurity being more proactive than reactive. With this in mind, Israeli cybersecurity companies tend to develop agile and adaptable solutions that can evolve with the threat landscape, which makes the solutions highly attractive to a global audience.”
Starr believes there are two factors responsible for the success of the cybersecurity in Israel.
“ Firstly, the government has taken a leading role in developing a cybersecurity strategy and supporting the sector. This has created an ecosystem for collaboration between the government, businesses and universities that is well-equipped to both respond and proactively prepare for cyberthreats.
“ Secondly, the country has committed to developing human skills and expertise in the sector which has seen Israel develop a highly specialised pool of talent whose primary mission has been coping with unique security challenges through rapid technological innovation. For instance, cybersecurity education starts in school and continues right through to university, while there are also several governmentsponsored programmes aimed at finding promising youth and providing them with specialised training. Recently, this talent pool has been further strengthened by a large influx of highly educated, highly skilled workers from Russia, which has in turn brought new perspectives and approaches that have further enhanced our long-term strategy.”
We also hear from Liron Barak, CEO and Cofounder of BitDam.
“ Today, there are more than 420 active cybersecurity technologies start-ups in Israel. This number has nearly tripled in the last few years and is likely to increase in the near future. According to a recent report by Start-Up Nation Central( SNC), cybersecurity Israeli start-ups raised over US $ 800 million in 2017, with an average seed investment today standing at US $ 3.6 million for companies aiming to address an issue in the security area.
The cybersecurity industry in Israel is growing rapidly, but in a stable way as most companies are innovative and have a deep technological focus within their solution. One of the reasons behind this could be the mandatory army service in Israel, where talented high school students are trained to serve in the intelligence force and deal with cyberthreats and cybersecurity. The expensive training programmes, the years of experience from the field and the enthusiasm of young individuals creates a unique combination that nourishes creativity and further develops problem-solving skills. This set of skills proves crucial for understanding today’ s cyberthreat landscape and developing extraordinary and unique ideas to tackle those issues.
Looking forward, the security solutions will have to be more robust and proactive as the attacks are becoming more sophisticated using various evasion techniques, technical manipulation and fileless approaches to bypass existing security means. In addition, the growing number of connected devices will continue to prove a challenge to security teams across the world. The complexity and diversity of these devices will increase the attack surface and fuel the capability for more sophisticated and damaging attacks.”
Finally, we hear from Eldad Chai, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Imperva, who gives his opinion.“ Israel is without a doubt one of the world’ s leading cybersecurity superpowers. With an estimated US $ 814.5 million in venture capital and private equity investments raised in Israel in 2017, which accounted for 16 % of overall cybersecurity investments worldwide, the country has well and truly cemented itself as a cybersecurity powerhouse.”
But what exactly drove this success?
There are various reasons why Israel became so successful and interestingly, they all feed into each other, creating the perfect ecosystem.
The key driver behind the growth of the cybersecurity industry globally is an increase in demand for powerful security solutions from organisations across the world. In the last few years, global-scale cyberattacks have become the norm and the theft of digital data has become a regular occurrence. As a result, the need to protect an organisation’ s digital assets has become critical and demand for solutions that provide this service has skyrocketed. Gartner estimates that the spend on security in 2018 will total US $ 96.3 billion, representing an 8 % increase from 2017.
This demand for new and more powerful solutions ultimately drives more investors to invest in the cybersecurity industry and thus encourage cybersecurity start-ups to enter the market. In 2017 alone, Israel saw cybersecurity start-up exits worth US $ 1.3 billion with acquisitions from giants including Symantec, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.
However, demand alone does not explain why Israel, of any other country, became such a powerhouse for cybersecurity technology. One of the key drivers behind Israel’ s success
56 INTELLIGENTCIO www. intelligentcio. com