Gulf Air boosts security

Manama : Gulf Air yesterday revealed a cybersecurity step-change as part of an ongoing campaign to safeguard its operations and deliver industry-leading customer service.

The move, according to Gulf Air, helped reinforce its network perimeter to pre-empt and combat Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, improve data centre and application-level security and further enhance data and access protection measures.

A key component of Gulf Air’s DDoS strategy is the deployment of the F5® DDoS Hybrid Defender. This ensures high line rate capabilities without impacting legitimate traffic. Crucially, the solution is compatible with Gulf Air’s current perimeter security controls to minimise maintenance efforts.

“Combating DDoS attacks require a purpose-built system-level architecture that detects and mitigates increasingly sophisticated, complex and deceptive attacks,” said Dr. Jassim Haji, Director of Information Technology, Gulf Air.

“The solution delivers instantaneous controls and security measures against complex threats, exploits, saturation attacks, with an in-depth security mechanism that inspects application-layer events. It offers protection at all layers, protecting protocols – including those employing SSL and TLS encryption – as well as stopping DDoS bursts, randomized HTTP floods, cache bypass, and other attacks that can disrupt Gulf Air’s critical applications.”

Gulf Air’s new DDoS capabilities fits into a wider digital transformation vision that was recently underscored by becoming the world’s first airline to achieve seven IT ISO certifications. 

In 2012, it became the first business in Bahrain to introduce private cloud computing. 

Gulf Air currently runs over 200 applications online supported by F5 technology, including email services, reservation systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP)  and Electronic Flight Bag, eEnablement setup for newly introduced aircrafts. 

“We made a strategic decision to partner with F5 because they are ranked as one of the top leaders in enterprise security,” said Dr. Haji.

“F5 has successfully provisioned crucial services to users and customers in an efficient and secure manner for the past eight years. We are now proud to announce that we can protect the Gulf Air network from possible threats that are initiated from legitimate secure traffic based on behaviour, rather than relying on traditional security measures.”

Taj El Khayat, Gulf, Levant & North Africa Director, F5 Networks, said: “F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender is not simply a collection of security point products but a tightly integrated system to defend against today’s most damaging DDoS attacks.”