technologyreseller.co.uk 37 example, if we saw incidents of concern on an endpoint machine, we could isolate the machine from the network. That NDR portion is going to massive for us. We're really excited about that.” Identity security Whitley added that another big focus for WatchGuard is its Total Identity Security business, which provides multi-factor authentication (MFA), a password manager and dark web monitoring. “One of our mantras at WatchGuard is to make what we provide very affordable for our core customers. As a result, we allow technology that would normally run on dedicated hardware on your network, for example network detection and response, to run from the cloud. Similarly, our multi-factor authentication runs on your phone, which ensures your costs are manageable and deployment is easy. “Multi-factor authentication is continuing to grow for several reasons: Cyber Essentials is impossible to achieve without some sort of multi factor authentication; WatchGuard provides a very easy to deploy and very affordable solution for it; and we’ve bolted other bits of technology onto that capability, things like a password vault and Dark Web scanning.” Partner growth In the UK and Ireland, WatchGuard currently deals with around 1,000 partners on an annual basis including two Platinum partners and a few hundred Gold and Silver partners that are most committed to the WatchGuard platform. “The partners that get the maximum amount of value from us, not just financially but also in their ability to add the most secure solutions, are those that use more of our products. With our ThreatSync architecture, the more products you use, the more data it sees and the better it is. So, partners who have invested most with us are the ones we want to invest the most in as well. We want to recruit more of those, but we’re also very happy to do business with resellers who just want to look at us for single solutions that solve an immediate problem.” Seizing the opportunity Whitley said that WatchGuard is looking forward to strong growth in the second half of 2024, driven by rising demand for WatchGuard MDR and its Total Identity Security business as well as the launch of new products like ThreatSync+ NDR that together enable partners to address customers’ changing security needs. “Previously, what you needed to do was secure your corporate network and that made you safe. What you now need to do is secure your corporate network, provide access to your corporate network from a hybrid workforce, and then secure that hybrid workforce, all of which presents very different challenges. Partners that grasp that opportunity will be the ones that succeed in 2024 and our partners, by and large, understand this. That’s one of the big things that we're going to see in 2024.” www.watchguard.com a lot of business already.” Whitley said that, as with subscription billing, WatchGuard MDR has proved effective at increasing the amount of business WatchGuard does with partners – and not just those focused on endpoints. “Customers that are focused more on network security have said that the benefits of this MDR service have made them look at our endpoint solutions more carefully, so we've managed to recruit partners to sell a bigger part of the product portfolio that we have.” At the same time, WatchGuard has been enhancing its network security solutions. “We made a technology acquisition last year, a company called CyGlass, and have been working behind the scenes to put that into the WatchGuard ecosystem, so that it can be managed from the cloud, provisioned from the cloud and have all the same flexibility around billing, because we don't want to launch products that are disjointed from each other. We want everything to fit under a very neat management architecture and ecosystems that we provide, all coming from WatchGuard Cloud. Network detection response allows us to pull information off other parts of the network, so we can look at switches, for example, to detect anomalous traffic or other incidents of concern that we need to respond to. It allows customers to get a much better view of what's happening on their network. “Historically, we have provided an excellent service by looking at the endpoint, the access points and the network perimeter with the firewalls. We’re now integrating the visibility aspects of that with what's happening in the network. We're going to be extracting information in the first place from places like switches, and then in future iterations from places like Microsoft 365 to give a much fuller picture of network traffic. Then, as we start to see more and more data from customers’ networks, we can correlate this information in a bit of technology we call ThreatSync. “ThreatSync uses a number of techniques, including AI, to get a very good picture of anything we should be concerned about and what action we should take. For SECURITY What you now need to do is secure your corporate network, provide access to your corporate network from a hybrid workforce, and then secure that hybrid workforce, all of which presents very different challenges
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=