Ajay Dubey, Country Head, NetSec and Channels at Forcepoint, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2020
How do you see 2020 to be shaping up as an important year for the IT channel industry?
The cyber security risks have increased over the past few years and 2020 will be no different, considering organisations will continue to adopt digital technologies to stay competitive. Looking at the current global situation, digital technologies are finding their way into more and more areas of our daily lives and businesses are relying heavily on employees working remotely.
As we disrupt our traditional ways of working, hackers and nation-state adversaries are looking to take advantage of this transition to damage businesses. Whether it is stealing intellectual property, phishing for personal data, or causing maximum business disruption, the stakes have never been higher to deploy a modern cybersecurity approach to secure critical data – and our people. This is where Forcepoint and our channel community will partner with customers to help them achieve their digital business outcomes with a dynamic modern cybersecurity strategy that can proactively adapt and respond to threats in real time.
Can you point out the top three technology trends which the channel community should be betting on and why?
Human-centric cybersecurity – behavior-based security systems
By 2021, worldwide spending on cybersecurity is projected to exceed US$1 trillion. However, it hasn’t been very effective at stopping increasingly sophisticated external adversaries and inside threats. By helping organisations to move towards behavior-based cybersecurity systems, it can result in better anticipation of data loss incidents before they occur. Understanding digital identities and their related cyber behaviors, particularly as they interact with high-value data and intellectual property, is key to addressing the modern cybersecurity threat.
Converged security – SASE Vision
It’s clear that legacy point products aren’t enough to deliver what’s required in a cloud-native world where people interact with critical data anywhere, any time. We believe that converged security can address CISOs’ business-critical need today for consolidated, cloud-based security solutions in a deployment agnostic delivery model.
Forcepoint has developed an innovative security solution called Forcepoint Dynamic Edge Protection (DEP), which combines advanced network, cloud and data security. DEP is built on the principles of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). It is an emerging security and networking architecture model for the enterprise that brings together technologies like firewall protection, cloud security and DLP.
Dynamic data protection
Businesses are under enormous pressure to safeguard sensitive data against breaches which can do big monetary and reputational damage. While moving IT operations to the cloud eliminates unused or wasted computing capacity, and enabling flexible, home working arrangements for employees, such initiatives come with security challenges that are becoming too difficult to take on with traditional DLP tools.
Forcepoint’s Dynamic Data Protection (DDP) solutions leverage advanced technologies such as risk-adaptive behavioral-based analysis of user and system threat potential, as well as forensics to allow remote workforces to collaborate and share digital assets more productively, all while maintaining the highest levels of protection against external and internal security threats.
Please list out the top channel directions which your company has set for its partners and where should partners invest to be aligned to these directions?
We have significantly invested in a robust global partner programme with the resources, incentives and training support to enable our partners to be successful. Through our channel investments, Forcepoint is empowering our partners to amplify our world-class services and support to ensure customers’ business success through their digital transformation journey and beyond.
One of the focus areas for our partners this year would be Forcepoint Dynamic Edge Protection (DEP), which is an all-in-one platform to deliver advanced web, network, and application security as a service from the cloud.
