Carbon Black is preparing to go live with a Singapore point-of-presence (PoP) offering Channel Asia understands, as the security vendor up-skills its partner ecosystem across the market.
With the vendor’s primary regional APJ office located in Singapore, the security specialist is planning to go live with an in-country point of presence in Singapore around the company’s incident response product.
Furthermore, investments continue to expand the vendor's indirect presence through the recent hiring of Derrick Ng as head regional channel growth across APJ.
Carbon Black’s channel program aids partners in building up their professional services business while upskilling partners to better handle an evolving regional security landscape.
"We are seeing increasingly more partners building up managed services,” said Matt Bennett, vice president, APJ, Carbon Black. "We have a lot of global partners that do incident response, which has morphed into compromise assessments."
The whole point for Carbon Black, as Bennett sees it, is to build up that ecosystem, both in terms of the channel in regards to system integrators, resellers, telecommunications providers etc and in terms of the integration between other vendors.
"We rolled out a new partner program recently,” said Bennett, “and again that is about rewarding people who have been investing into the cyber security space.
“Our goal within the channel is to actually help channel partners up-skill and bring up their skills in this space.”
It is understood that security vendor’s such as Carbon Black cannot do it alone, which is why to some degree the company has focused a lot of resources into up-skilling partners and developing initiatives around professional services development.
Once such program is called ‘become a threat hunter,’ which is an accredited program to teach partners and technical people within the partner community to spot threats within a customer’s organisation.
Partners can then teach their customers to do the same thing, helping to close a major security gap within the customer organisation.
"It is about training them on the toolsets,” said Bennett. “It is also about training them on the processes and the approaches that people take in regards to security.
"This is more than just for the channel community. It is something we are taking out to the end users as well."
However, as Bennett acknowledged, no one product will fix an end-user's security challenge, and whilst upskilling is a critical piece in the security challenge, having a well-integrated ecosystem is also an important piece in advancing end-user security.
"I think partners who commit to that idea in building out a full solution network as opposed to drive-by installations and products will ultimately be successful,” Bennett added.
