Technology Reseller v44

01732 759725 34 CYBER SECURITY Tony Roberts Visibility, control and configuration How the WatchGuard Unified Security Platform is enabling security partners to transform their day-to-day operations and develop more engaging sales propositions overhead and infrastructure costs and brings real operational benefits. “Having a unified platform, a single pane of glass, that our end users and partners can log into and gain complete visibility over product, status, reporting and configuration saves time, effort and money. With everything in one place, you don’t need to bounce around different consoles, which becomes complex when you have to juggle multiple different types of system. “Having everything in one place is paramount for ease of operations. It also gives you visibility, which is where the ‘always on’ WatchGuard Cloud comes into its own. WatchGuard Cloud helps solution providers that have struggled to work across various management systems to deploy and manage security for customers. With your products reporting back to a single place, you can see everything that is going on, you can get notification of detections or issues that arise, or proactively react to threats that require intervention. You are informed and clients can see that you are informed.” In the main, this is all autonomous. Because detection, remediation, alerting and reporting can happen automatically, you don’t have to watch and monitor a client’s products constantly, but can simply react to those alerts that may require input. A third benefit of having everything in one place, is control – being able to log-in to a single console and make changes to how a product is configured, on the fly. “With WatchGuard Cloud, it doesn’t matter where devices are located. If I need to make a configuration change to the protection on an endpoint on the other side of the world, I can. We are geo-agnostic; we don’t care where devices are – we’ve got visibility and control and it is instant. I make a change, click save and, bang, it is done,” he says. “The other key thing is understanding that nothing stands still, and we need to evolve in line with the threat landscape along with product feature enhancement requests from customers and partners. We always have a roadmap for our products, and they are constantly being improved, ensuring we are providing the best level of protection, more functionality and services, all without impacting the efficiency of our clients. “That, again, is the beauty of the cloud. Users don’t need to do anything; it just happens. They log into the console and ‘Oh look, I have all these new features and functions available to me’. This industry is a very fluid environment and things change quite rapidly, but we are there to help with that enablement and to ensure that functionality is there for users to adopt.” As an example, Roberts cites modules available within WatchGuard Endpoint on the WatchGuard Cloud. These include Data Control, which helps with GDPR compliance by identifying the location and activity around personally identifiable information (PII) on endpoints; Patch Management, with Windows and third- party patching through the same console; It goes without saying that organisations today face a growing number of security risks and, with the rise of remote working, an extended network that is harder to monitor and control and more vulnerable to exploitation and attack by bad actors. Not surprisingly, in almost every survey of business leaders, security is cited as the number one challenge they face. For technology providers and MSPs, this clearly represents a major opportunity – just consider how many channel partners are now positioning themselves as MSSPs. But there are challenges too. How do you meet the growing security needs of customers in a way that they can understand and trust? And how do you do so while optimising your own resources to deliver a positive experience to your customers? WatchGuard Technologies believes in building a security platform for partners. It has even trade-marked the term WatchGuard Unified Security Platform and, as part of this, is giving partners (and end users) the ability to control and manage tools and devices via a single pane of glass. Ease of use, visibility and control Tony Roberts, Technical Pre-Sales at WatchGuard Technologies, points out that unifying the company’s four technology pillars (network security, multi-factor authentication, secure Wi-Fi and endpoint security – and the different solutions within each one) onto a single platform frees partners from the complexity of managing disconnected security tools, reduces IT