Channel Post caught up with Shahnawaz Sheikh, the Regional Director for Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey at Dell Sonicwall, to discuss the key security issues companies face in the Middle East and Africa region.
As Dell Sonicwall what are your focus areas for the months ahead?
Our primary focus areas include next-gen firewalls, secure remote access, and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). These are today’s need for most organisations – small to medium to large companies are looking at providing secured access to employees’ mobile devices.
BYOD as a concept is gaining prominence and it is proving to be a business need for many companies. That’s why we step up and tell such companies that we have solutions that can allow you to offer secured access to mobile devices, managing the devices, and so on.
According to major market research companies, as of today, only 10% to 15% of networks are using next generation security devices. This presents us with a huge potential to reach out to customers who are using obsolete technologies, and explain the major benefits of using next generation firewalls and secured remote access solutions.
What sort of challenges are CXOs facing today and how can they be addressed?
When companies plan to deploy a BYOD strategy, they look at the benefits and business needs. These are mostly driven by the trends CXOs have seen in the regional market and the decision to adopt such solutions depends on the business needs. Most of the times, security part of the need comes only secondary.
This is a major challenge for CXOs, since there are many unknown threats out there. CXOs need to check what sort of security threats they might face, so that they can stay prepared for it. They also need to check whether they are giving access to company controlled devices or non-company controlled devices.
Companies in general should setup security policies before they go ahead and deploy a new technology such as remote access and BYOD. These security policies should be set up in such a way that before each connection is established, an endpoint query is conducted automatically on such devices seeking access.
Companies should make sure that a device connecting to the corporate network remotely, has firewall running, antivirus running and so on, so that after the connection is made through VPN, the security of such connection isn’t compromised.
Do you think companies in the Middle East are aware of newer security threats?
Many companies believe that using an antivirus on the endpoint is more than enough. Well, an antivirus itself is not your comprehensive security solution. While today’s customer is well informed as to what is needed to protect the perimeter of his corporate network, choosing the right solution that fits into their security policies is becoming a task.
Using Dell-Sonicwall’s devices, companies can setup such policies depending on their business needs. Some companies may be OK with allowing any kind of mobile device on their network provided they are registered with the IT department of the organisation. Some companies may insist that only a particular make or model of device can be connected to the corporate network. Our devices can handle the security demand from both these kinds of needs.
How does Dell-Sonicwall work with its channel partners to ensure they are addressing their customers’ needs?
We are a channel-driven company. We do not sell directly to the customer. Having said that, whenever there is a requirement for “educate and sell approach” we take the initiative to consult at the customer level in order to make them aware of the advanced threats they might be facing today.
We follow the same approach with our channel partners. We also offers various certification programs such as Certified Sonicwall Security Administrator (CSSA). Today, we have hundreds of CSSAs in this region and the validity of these program is two years. In addition to this, we have specialised certifications such as secured remote access certification, email security certification, and so on, for our channel partners depending on the level of their partnership with Dell-Sonicwall.
