In the last two years, there have been organised security breaches across the Middle East, which have caused data losses worth millions of dollars. Organisations have begun to realise that these sophisticated attacks not only affect business continuity and agility, but also tarnish their brand image. Malware is a multibillion dollar industry where hacktivists are well-funded and indulge in focussed attacks driven by geopolitical motives. As a result, these attacks are much more sophisticated and therefore the challenge to manage the overall IT environment is even more complicated. Traditional network security products today cannot keep up with the ever-evolving dynamic networks and rapidly changing complexities of access. Firewalls and intrusion prevention systems have been defending the networks for years; however, these do not add much value in the current scenario of network security, as they do not have any provision for analysing or capturing contextual data. This creates a gap between defending and adapting to changes in the dynamic environment of networks and their threats. With the recent innovations within next generation firewall (NGFV) capabilities, several vendors have moved towards providing partial context-based and adaptive security solutions. As virtualisation and cloud technologies start to gain traction in the Middle East market, security remains the biggest hurdle to adopt this new dynamic, automated and service oriented architecture. It has to be understood that achieving 100 per cent security in any organisation is nearly impossible. It is for the simple reason that security policies cannot be enforced at every distinct point between something that is defined within and outside networks. With IT security budgets being constricted every year, security vendors need to think out-of-the-box to minimise compromised networks.