Cybersecurity services will continue to see soaring demand as companies face new threats daily, said BJ Jenkins, the CEO of Palo Alto Networks. Speaking in a recent interview, Jenkins illustrated just how small the margin for error is in cybersecurity with the significant outage by Crowdstrike earlier this year that took down networks worldwide.
The world becomes more digitized, the more vulnerable it becomes, according to Jenkins. In addition, as fast as these technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to advance, so will the attackers with innovative means of penetrating security systems. “It’s really an arms race in cybersecurity,” he said. “We need to use these same tools to protect our customers, but we’ve seen the threats evolve at a rate that’s just incredible.”
The company detects more than 1.5 million new cyberattacks daily across the network and blocka 8.6billion attacks everyday. Jenkins estimates that these attacks are bound to rise higher with the technological developments.
The cybersecurity market remains highly fragmented as businesses use assorted tools for service provision from different providers, making network-wide security very complicated. In this regard, Palo Alto is emphasizing its capability to deliver multiples solutions on a single platform: “Our value lies in the breadth and depth of our offerings, which include network security, cloud security, and security operations centers to help customers mitigate breaches,” he explained.
Another approach taken by the company is “platformization,” designed to operationalize operations by combining resources whenever possible. Analysts were skeptical at first and, as a result, downgraded shares when this was announced, but Palo Alto Networks later earned endorsement both from customers and Wall Street. The company’s shares have rebounded by about 30% since stumbling in February.
Jenkins further opened that in this critical period where scale actually matters, being the largest company, Palo Alto has consolidated the solutions to deliver high value to the customers.
