A Multi-Engine Approach is Required to Achieve a Better Protection Level

Arabian Reseller speaks to Shahnawaz Sheikh, the Sales Director for SonicWall Middle East and Turkey, about the threat landscape in the region and how SonicWall works with its partners to make sure their customers stay protected

What has been your focus this year in terms of your partner engagements?
Our message to many of our customers this year have revolved around all our new products that were launched this year. These products have been on the wishlist of many of our partners and customers. So we are very strongly encouraging our partners to invest in the complete portfolio of SonicWall and not limit themselves to specific products such as firewalls.

We also focused on our SentinelOne collaboration and our web application firewalls. There have been some enhancements on the email security front, too, which have always been one of our best selling products. Virtual firewalls, enhancements on wireless, and so on, have been our key focus areas. If I look at our partner landscape, many of them are focusing on firewalls. We are reaching out to all our partners and talking to them about the additional value our products can offer.

How is the threat landscape evolving in this region?
The landscape is evolving a lot in this region. Last year we had ransomware and this year, it is all about crypto jacking. In addition, customers are also facing many unknown threats. That is where we strongly believe that our capture sandboxing technology will come into play. It is a sandboxing solution with multiple engines. This means that any unknown or zero-day threats are analysed by multiple vectors of scanning.

So we have two third-party engines – one is Lastline and the other is VMRay. Lastline does the system emulation scanning, while VMRay does the hypervisor level scanning. And then we have two other proprietary engines, wherein, one does virtualisation scanning and the other which we added recently is the key differentiator in the market today. This is called RTDMI – Real Time Deep Memory Inspection.

The module has identified unique unknown threats to the tune of more than 13000, which nobody else in the industry has managed to identify. What is required today is a multi-engine approach to keep security threats at bay.

How do you drive this value proposition to your channel community and your customer?
So, for the multi-engine solution, we have been educating every channel partner and customer. So every customer that comes for renewal, we don’t sell the conventional legacy system for renewal. We instead advise the customer to see the advanced gateway security suite which includes this multi-engine sandboxing technology. We also provide information on the key differentiators on why they should look at the new technology to keep their data and infrastructure safe.

In terms of the deployment of such solutions, how do you work with your channel partners?
We have always had this channel partner program called Secure First. It comprises of multiple tiers of partnership. As part of this, we have made a huge investment in enabling our partners. So, we have now made it mandatory for many of the partner tiers that revenue alone is not enough to maintain their specific tier.

We need their commitment to complete the online certification in sales and technical, and this has been made mandatory. This is a platform which is sort of a learn on demand. We have given this tool to our partners to certify themselves to stand out of the crowd. We also run lots of road shows, seminars, and workshops, updating and enabling them from time to time. We also use a lot of tools such as lead generation tool, deal registration tool and so on to help our partners make to best of their relationship with SonicWall.