Palo Alto Networks is now the world’s largest cybersecurity company leading on all fronts in terms of capabilities to address organizations’ biggest challenges.

That’s according to Nikesh Arora (pictured above), Palo Alto Networks’ CEO and chairman. He gave the opening keynote Tuesday of this week’s Inspire 2022 conference in Las Vegas.

Three fundamental problems are plaguing the cybersecurity industry, Arora said. They are fragmentation, too much complexity when analyzing threats and a lack of platforms.

“Almost every customer I’ve talked to has an average of 30-50 vendors in their infrastructure,” he said. “The good news is we’ve been working hard on all of these capabilities.”

Complete Zero Trust Solution

Palo Alto Networks has been “hard at work” developing zero trust across the entire security stack, Arora said.

“The only way you can get zero trust security is through Palo Alto,” he said.

Cloud security represents a massive opportunity in the months and years ahead, Arora said. And Palo Alto Networks is well equipped to provide the best capabilities to solve customers’ challenges.

In the years ahead, one-half of business will be conducted in the public cloud, Arora said. Shifting applications to cloud will create new risk, therefore opening up a massive, trillion-dollar opportunity. And even if cloud service providers (CSPs) take half that business, that still leaves a massive opportunity for the industry.

“Customers want the consolidation,” he said. “They’re going through network security transformation, cloud transformation and are about to go through security operations center (SOC) transformation. We have the platforms. We’re seeing new partners come into the ecosystem … new players in the industry from a partnership ecosystem saying, ‘I don’t want to partner across 200 security companies.'”

They want to partner with companies that hold Gartner Magic Quadrant leadership positions, Arora said. No other cybersecurity company holds more Magic Quadrant leadership positions than Palo Alto Networks. Only IBM and Microsoft have held as many leadership positions.

Next Big Evolution

Artificial intelligence (AI), data and natural language interface will be the next big evolution, Arora said. Security outcomes created by AI and automation will help customers do more with less due to the ongoing cybersecurity talent shortage.

“The only way we can achieve that is through technology and automation, consistency in customers’ architecture,” he said.

Wendi Whitmore is senior vice president of Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42‘s threat intelligence team. She said many of the world’s largest organizations are now under attack. Cybercriminals are bombarding cyber defenders, giving nation-state attackers the ability to fly under the radar.

In addition, nation-state attackers are increasing moving toward supply chain, she said.

Chinese Nation-States Most Worrisome

Palo Alto Networks’ Wendi Whitmore

“Chinese nation-state actors are becoming even more brazen about the level of attacks and espionage going on,” Whitmore said. “As the world is focused on so many other important activities, Chinese nation-states are focused on expanding their foothold in the world.”

In October, Chinese actors appeared to have corresponding activity with infrastructure, with connections to over 80 countries in the world, she said.

And in November, they had over 9,000 connections to government infrastructure, Whitmore said. In addition, they’re increasingly setting their sights on South America, parts of Africa and parts of the Middle East.

“These threat actors are continually looking to … what areas can they run influence in, continually having their finger on pulse of what’s going on in the world,” she said.

Nation-state actors see that stealing data is one of the fastest ways to make money, Whitmore said. They’re continually optimizing. And they’re using off-the-shelf toolkits. That’s to “get the job done and more efficiently.”

“We expect to see attack groups using each other’s tools and techniques to achieve their goals,” she said.