Security News

WATCH: Ingram Micro’s Eric Kohl Talks Top Cyberthreats And Opportunities

Ingram Micro unveiled a handful of cybersecurity investments at its Ingram Micro One conference in Washington, D.C., this week. It comes as Ingram Micro Vice President of Security Eric Kohl points out that one of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity has to do with the end user. He shares how Ingram Micro is tackling that and other threats in an interview with CRNtv.

Describe the biggest threats facing the channel and Ingram Micro’s approach in helping partners tackle them.

It’s coming from everywhere. It’s coming at all angles. These threats are crazy. These hackers, nation-states, it’s a full-time job. They’re going 24/7 and don’t stop. At Ingram, we’ve got an amazing portfolio of security solutions from Cisco to Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks to McAfee. It’s a solid portfolio but some of the things we are seeing are user-driven. What I mean by that is that our security awareness posture isn’t as high as it should be, so while we have great technologies, we can make those technologies even stronger by wrapping security awareness training anti-phishing threats with that. So, we really bolstered our portfolio with companies like Cofence, formerly known as PhishMe, ProofPoint and also Mimecast that offer awareness training. So those are the kind of things that educate user, so they don’t fall victim to the threats that are out there.

What investments is Ingram Micro making in the managed security services space?

The bad guys are going to get in and it’s our job to help detect and remediate faster. There’s a lot going on in the space; it’s kind of crazy right now. There’s Security Operations Center [SOC], SOC-as-a-Service, SIEM, managed SIEM, managed protection and response. All these things, as I said, are to find the bad guys and get them out quicker. Now, not everybody has the competency to build that on their own and it’s expensive to build, so we’re taking a partner-first strategy to go after that market. We just announced new relationships with Artic Wolf Networks and Binary Defense and both of these companies offer managed protection and response and SOC-as-a-Service so that these folks who are MSPs and don’t have that capability, well now they have it.