Evolving threat landscape drives the market

Channel Post speaks with Mohammad Jamal Tabbara, Senior Systems Engineer – UAE & Channel at Infoblox on the state of network security, opportunities and challenges the market offers and how the company adds value to their partner ecosystem.

Mohammad Jamal Tabbara, Senior Systems Engineer – UAE & Channel at Infoblox

What are the main factors driving network security market in the region?

The persistence of the cyber-security threat landscape and its evolution is the main driver for the network security market in the region. During the last few years, there were numerous and diverse types of unprecedented attacks such as ransomware, destructive malware, DDoS attacks, data breaches & leakage, data theft via DNS, account hijacking, malicious insiders, services misuse and many other cyber-attacks. It is also believed that some of these cyber-attacks were triggered for political reasons. Consequently, both enterprises and service providers have been driven to provide the latest and greatest network security solutions along with optimal security operations.

As more businesses adopt IoT, BYOD etc. what challenges does this present to enterprise network security?

The enterprise market in the region has been adopting the BYOD trend since few years back, and many other organizations are going to adopt BYOD soon. Yet depending on the IoT project size and complexity, challenges will vary where it might require complex and sophisticated systems and applications that analyze the collected data, make sense and decisions out of it, and then trigger another systems or applications to provide the necessary action.

Besides these complexities, the ‘Internet of Things’ brings with it many of the existing internet security threats such as DDoS, data theft, malware, and so on. In other words, security should be a major aspect for the enterprise network when adopting IoT technologies where organizations need to have a comprehensive and integrated network security solution in place.

With the emergence of security threats and challenges, what changes must enterprises make to their approach to network security?

Enterprises need to protect areas that they have taken for granted for the last decade or so. One perfect example is DNS. When DNS was invented few decades ago, its security aspect was not considered to protect us against today’s unprecedented threats. Today most enterprises are using legacy and traditional DNS systems that lack the security intelligence we need today, believing that this is a protocol that simply runs on its own.

Because of this fact, hackers went after this low hanging fruit and started misusing DNS in the last few years. Enterprises should consider DNS security in multiple network security aspects, such as Infrastructure Protection, Data Protection and Malware Mitigation, Threat Containment and Operations.

What are the opportunities for channel partners in this space?

Evolving threats mean evolving market, evolving opportunities, evolving revenues and new margins for the channel partners. This is where channel partners need to step–in and seize the opportunity by first educating their customers and prospects about the newly evolving network and IoT security threats, and then offering an innovative solution in order to mitigate, contain and remediate both existing and evolving threats.

What go-to-market strategy should partners adopt to get better margins in such a competitive market?

Due to the evolving threat landscape channel partners need to continuously provide updated solutions to get new revenues and new margins. Both enterprise and service provider customers are always looking for multi-vendor yet integrated cyber-security solutions. This is where channel partners need to offer integrated security solutions that form an orchestrated cyber-security ecosystem. By selling multi-vendor solutions, partners can make more margins from multiple technologies simultaneously.

On top of that, adoption of new trends such as IoT is creating a greenfield market that partners should be chasing by offering an IoT ready network and security solutions that can support IPv6, Secure DNSv6, Secure DHCPv6 and so on.

How do you enable your partners to tackle the competition?

At Infoblox, we offer unprecedented security solutions that none of our competition can offer which when combined with proper channel cadence balanced around enablement, engagement and support helps our partners to comprehend the value added by Infoblox.

To achieve this we have put in place a very aggressive training and certification program tailored to the type of partners we want to work with. We have already experienced great success in creating ‘Centers of Excellence’ for some partners who have exceptional Infoblox capabilities and we carry almost the entire commercial burden to make this happen. This enables our partners to focus on ramping up on the technology rather than on finding the money to do so.

We have also invested in local spare parts depots and professional services expertise to help partners with many of the local implementations and support them early on as they gear up their knowledge and capabilities.

What do you expect from your partners in this space? In turn, what should partners expect from you?

We expect our partners to strengthen their abilities in pitching the Infoblox message to prospects and emphasize on the unique features that only Infoblox offers in the market, drive more opportunities into deal closing, and support our customers with high level of professionalism and satisfaction.

In return, Infoblox continues to be committed to our distributors and partners to fully support them with the best-in-class technical and sales skills, attractive margins, transparency and knowledge transfer.

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