Enabling a proactive cybersecurity focus

Jose Thomas Menacherry, Managing Director of Bulwark spoke to CXO DX about cybersecurity trends and the focus of the company amidst the evolving cyberthreat landscape

Are enterprise customers in general now more aware of the need to invest in the right cybersecurity solutions? Do they need to be more proactive?

There are always concerned people within an organization who are aware of cybersecurity requirements, but they may not necessarily have the right expertise in-house. So, a consultant approach is always needed for positioning products based on the real requirements of the customer.

Do you believe there is a shortage of cybersecurity experts or talents in the market?

The market in general faces a challenge to find the right resources or domain experts and this is felt by organizations, SIs, and distributors. One of the reasons is that requirements from the customer end have gone up. With the increase in digitalization, the need for cybersecurity solutions has also gone up. However, there may not be enough cybersecurity experts available for hire who are trained in the new areas of focus.

Cybersecurity is a very dynamic domain, and you can see some new breaches and new technologies come up very frequently. It requires people in the field to be good fast learners. That’s a continuous process. If you’re missing out on something, then catching up is difficult.

As a distributor, how do you manage these challenges?

We have regular meetings with customers to understand their challenges. Events like GITEX and GISEC help us a lot in terms of customer engagement.  This helps us understand gaps if any in our offerings and address those gaps in our portfolio in terms of what additional solutions we need to bring in.  Further, we also constantly scan and review the market trends internally which has helped us always have a comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity solutions from leading vendors. These are continuous processes.

We have pre-sales resources trained on every product that we offer and can assist our partners and their customers.

Discuss the focus on cloud offerings in your portfolio?

Most solutions we offer are cloud-based now. The number of pure on-premise solutions is reducing but there are hybrid solutions as well.

Discuss your new vendor tie-ups in the year

We have onboarded some new vendors in the year. This includes a tie-up with Holm Security for network vulnerability assessment and OT security. We signed up with Appknox for mobile vulnerability assessment. We have partnered with Continuity Software which helps with finding out vulnerabilities associated with backup software.

How big is your partner network across GCC?

We have around 500 plus corporate partners across the region and among them, 100 may be quite active across the GCC. We have an office in Saudi in addition to our UAE office to help enable our partners.

What were the solutions showcased at GITEX?

We showcased solutions from several vendors including web application vulnerability assessment  solutions from Invicti, email solutions from Mimecast, secure encrypted drives from iStorage, patch management solutions from Heimdal, PKI solutions from nexus