A conference on Thales solutions was held in Almaty
October 16, 2023
On September 29, the first Thales Day Almaty conference was held in Almaty, organized by Thales, a major global developer of information security solutions, and Ak Kamal Security, a Kazakhstani company that is a platinum partner of the vendor.
"We are proud to be Thales' partner for 25 years. For a quarter of a century we have been providing security and functionality of one of the most important banking systems - payments and everything related to payment card issuance and cryptography," said Alexey Mikhailovsky, CEO of Ak Kamal Security, in his welcoming remarks.
Thales is a leading global manufacturer of data protection solutions with more than 40 years of experience in securing the most sensitive information. The key areas of the company's work are Hardware Security Modules (HSM), solutions for data protection during storage and transmission, as well as for authentication and access control.
Natalia Lebedeva, Thales representative in Kazakhstan, announced that organizations that purchase three or more payShield 10K devices by the end of the year will have the opportunity to train their technician at free certified Thales courses. "The approach to data protection has changed and it's important that the market keeps up. How does one keep up? Directly from the vendor to receive information on how to work with new hardware and software in a quality and correct way," said the Thales representative.
"Security is a trend for the next 15-20 years. We see how things are changing in the approach to working with information. If initially companies focused on how to structure data and automate work with it, now everything is moving towards protecting that data. Threats are really a problem, not only at the company level, but also at the state level. For example, Uzbekistan, where digital payments are now being actively developed, is facing a lot of fraud and frod. Therefore, protection of financial information is a fundamental basis", - Vladimir Dyagterev, representative of Thales distribution company in Central Asia, noted in his address.
During the first part of Thales Day Almaty Alexey Kuksenko, commercial director of Ak Kamal Security, presented the line of HSMs of Thales. These devices are the most demanded in the world among solutions of this kind, they are integrated with a huge variety of third-party equipment. HSMs provide a protected environment for secure key storage and cryptographic operations. This allows them to be used as a "root of trust" in the case of general-purpose HSMs such as Thales Luna HSM 7 or Thales ProtectServer 3, or as solutions for protecting payments and issuing payment cards - for this purpose, the Thales HSM range includes a specialized payment module called payShield 10K.
Alexey Kuksenko spoke in detail about the features, purpose, technical characteristics, management and licensing of these products, focusing on additional solutions that simplify administration and allow to organize remote monitoring and management of Thales security modules, in particular - on payShield Manager and payShield Monitor.
In addition, the HSM session presented a compact, intuitive, stand-alone secure cryptographic device called the payShield Trusted Management Device (TMD), which enables the secure management of symmetric cryptographic keys, enabling their secure exchange between customer subsystems as well as with partners.
The topic was continued by Vladimir Zdor, Thales representative in Eastern Europe, Transcaucasia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan. He told how this solution is applied and also gave examples of implementations. "Colleagues have already mentioned that from next year PCI DSS 4.0 will be introduced. And most of the requirements of this regulation can be met with CipherTrust. This is data classification, data encryption, encryption key encryption in the hardware platform, which is quite important," emphasized Vladimir Zdor.
At the end of Thales Day Almaty, representatives of the vendor and Ak Kamal Security expressed hope that the event will become an annual event and will cover not only specialists and managers of IT and IS of banks, but also other market segments, where security is taken as seriously and interested in the most modern and convenient solutions for their tasks.