GISEC Global 2026: Cyber First Means Recovery First

Three days, thousands of security professionals, and one question we never tire of asking: "When did you last test a restore?"

GISEC Global 2026, the Middle East and Africa's largest cybersecurity event, ran from 16 to 18 September 2026 at Dubai Exhibition Centre, Expo City Dubai. This year it moved from its usual spring slot to September, with a new theme: "Cyber First: The New Digital Order". It was hosted by the UAE Cyber Security Council.

Virtech joined our partner Cohesity at its stand. Virgil Dobos and Abdul Razack represented Virtech, working alongside Karim Hamdy and Yamen Alahmad from Cohesity.

What we heard at GISEC 2026

The agenda covered AI-powered defence, critical infrastructure, cloud security, digital sovereignty and even post-quantum security. On the floor, conversations kept coming back to a few hard truths:

• Prevention is not enough. Attackers only need to succeed once. Organisations are planning for the day they get in, not just trying to keep them out.
• Backups are a target. Ransomware groups go after backups first. Immutable, isolated copies and multi-person approval for deletions are now the baseline, not the premium option.
• Recovery must be proven. Regulators, boards and insurers increasingly want evidence that you can recover clean data, and how fast.
• AI cuts both ways. It speeds up attacks, and it can help defenders find sensitive data and anomalies faster.

Cyber First means recovery first

Firewalls, EDR and SOCs get the headlines. When everything else has failed, though, your backup and recovery platform is what decides whether you are back in business in hours or in weeks.

That is where Virtech works. We design, deploy and support Cohesity and NetBackup for organisations across the UAE and GCC. In 2025, Cohesity named us its Best Services Partner for the Middle East. We can help you:

• Build backup and recovery with immutable, isolated copies and a tested recovery runbook
• Bring legacy archives under control with archiving and retention that stand up to an audit
• Find the gaps first with an IT health check

Thank you, GISEC

Thank you to the Cohesity team for hosting us, and to everyone who stopped by. We especially enjoyed the conversations that started with "our backups are fine" and ended with "actually, can you have a look?". We're happy to, any time.

Could you recover cleanly from a ransomware attack tomorrow?

Email sales@virtech.ae, call +971 4 580 7555 or book a health check to find out.