Dubai, UAE, 17th August 2017: Infoblox Inc., the network control company that provides Actionable Network Intelligence, today announced that Ashraf Sheet has been promoted to the role of Regional Director, Middle East and Africa, responsible for leading the strategic development of the business in the region and further accelerating the high-growth rates that the company has been experiencing in recent years.

Cherif Sleiman, vice president, EMEA at Infoblox says, “Middle East and Africa is a core market for Infoblox and as we look to build our success in the region, having the right leader is critical to our growth strategy. Ashraf is an industry veteran with over 18 years of experience in the market. He has local knowledge, contacts, and the leadership skills that will allow us to build a strong team and partner community in the region.”

Ashraf is a network and security expert in the Middle East and has held various progressive roles including senior security consultant, leader for Managed Security services and head of Security Business Unit for local and multinational companies. In his last position at Infoblox he was country manager for UAE and Pakistan.

“I’m very pleased to undertake this new challenge at such a pivotal period in the company’s growth,” says Ashraf. “I am excited to help our highly talented sales, marketing and channel teams achieve more competitive advantage in the MEA region. I look forward to collaborating and engaging with our partners and customers to drive Infoblox’s cloud and security solutions as part of the digital transformation taking place in the market.”

As Infoblox looks to ramp up business in the region, the main focus for Ashraf and his team will be on creating value to customers by elevating every aspect of their network availability, agility, security, and performance – on premise, across data centres, and in the cloud. With the increasing incidents of DDoS attacks, malware and ransomware affecting regional organizations, security will be a big focal area for Infoblox. It has been investing heavily in leveraging the intelligence of the network to establish a ‘Threat Containment’ built-in capability in its solution. The company’s security ecosystem closes the gap and weaknesses of siloed solutions and its ActiveTrust threat intelligence platform enables organizations to proactively detect, investigate, prioritize, remediate, and prevent cyber threats.

Infoblox is focusing, like most of the security vendors, on the Gulf region including UAE and Saudi but is witnessing high growth levels in other regions too such as Egypt, Turkey and Africa. The technology is relevant to all verticals, but in particular to industries representing national critical infrastructure, including government, military and intelligence, banking and finance, telecom and energy, where it has had major success.

Ashraf also shares his insights on regional technology trends below: Customers will look for building digital ready networks that are more predictive which helps them respond faster and more effective to potential security incidents as well as drive business. This requires that the infrastructure is interconnected and interdependent through ecosystems integration.
IoT devices will continue to increase and will become more intelligent and connected to address the business needs. So intelligent systems will grow quickly in the coming year as more products and applications become available.
We also see CISOs investing in security solutions that support their digital business and address their challenges. This is driving more investments into the cloud and managed services.
Finally, we see that regulations are demanding more security controls and are becoming more strict and punitive about it. Consequently, customer will look to vendor solutions that provide the needed visibility and control to address the needed compliance.  Vendors will have to understand the local regulatory controls of the region and tie their solutions to it.