Technology Reseller v11

01732 759725 Cyber security 38 Secure to the core Cloud and data centre security company GuardiCore has unveiled a new two-tier channel strategy for the UK and EMEA. James Goulding found out more from the company’s regional director for the UK, Ireland and Nordics, Adrian Young the local market. “The other thing is focus. We asked GuardiCore initially to focus on end users, because a lot of people come off the plane and immediately start channel policies and forget all about getting end user experience. Until you start selling stuff, you don’t know how it fits in and what the real stories are. Adrian [Young] has been through that and already has quite a few live projects. On the back of that, we come in and start building the channel for them and with them.” A good pedigree Adrian Young, GuardiCore regional director for the UK, Ireland and Nordics, says that while GuardiCore may be new to the UK market, it has a mature product, a growing customer base and a strong market proposition. “Organisations are transforming very quickly – they have complicated GuardiCore is one of a huge number of IT security companies – but it is one that it is worth investigating for a number of reasons: it is a proven solution that’s enjoying rapid growth; it is expanding its approach with a new managed security services offering; it has the power of distributor Exclusive Networks behind it; and it is on the look-out for new resellers to work with. Having established a foothold in EMEA, the Israeli-US company founded in 2013 is rolling out a two-tier channel strategy in conjunction with value added distributor Exclusive Networks. Between them, the two have already appointed four value added resellers and are in the process of recruiting six more. Graham Jones, UK managing director of Exclusive Networks, told Technology Reseller that he was attracted to the GuardiCore Centra Security Platform because it has already proven itself in the end user marketplace. “We get swamped with so many cyber security start-ups – thousands, all with the best product, the best features – so last year we said let’s have a rethink about who we select for our new tech division,” he said. “Drawing on our experience of what works and what doesn’t, we decided vendors had to have a product, not a feature. That eliminates half of start-ups. Because some start-ups are creating solutions to problems that don’t exist, another consideration was is the market ready for it, and then do they understand Businesses want to introduce new services; they want to move to the cloud; they want to create competitive advantage by transforming. Unfortunately, security will often lag behind that and become an inhibitor rather than an enabler environments and this causes trouble. It is not unusual to see an organisation with its critical assets – its crown jewels – spread across a number of environments, from an old fashioned on-premise datacentre to a virtual private cloud that somebody might be hosting on its behalf, to a full-blown public cloud like Azure or Google Cloud Services or Amazon. This creates a huge problem, because traditional products don’t span those environments particularly well,” he said. Young added: “The fact that you have business transformation going on in most organisations adds another layer of complexity. Businesses want to introduce new services; they want to move to the cloud; they want to create competitive advantage by transforming. Unfortunately, security will often lag behind that and become an inhibitor rather than an enabler. Our product is written to address that complexity, to address that rate of change, to address the failings of different security models and augment them and keep up with the demands of the business.” It does this by supplementing traditional perimeter and endpoint security with four main elements: 1 Visibility – “A GuardiCore user can see all the assets in their organisation, whether they are on premise or in the cloud, on old fashioned bare metal servers or running on a virtualised platform, as a snapshot or as a historical view, with very rich contextual data around what the applications are doing and what processes they are running. That itself is a major step forward,” explained Young. 2 Micro-segmentation – “GuardiCore enables you to create policies for communication and interaction between applications regardless of whether they sit on-premise, in the cloud or in the public cloud. You can set the policy when it is in one environment and if you move it to a different location, e.g. the cloud or a virtualised environment, the policy goes with it. There’s a huge TCO and ROI benefit to that, as well as better security,” he said. 3 Breach detection – “Based on those two things elements, the tool is able to recognise when something untoward is happening, whether somebody has landed in your network and is trying to do something they shouldn’t be doing.” 4 Response – “The fourth area is that the tool is also able to recommend actions to remediate that situation and provide forensics and analysis automatically on Adrian Young