Renton D’Souza, Vice President, Comstor MEA and Sojy Oommen, Manager Cyber Security, TS Qatar discuss how their respective partnerships with Cisco are helping address their cybersecurity needs.
Answered by Renton
Q: As the IT landscape rapidly evolves, how is Cisco ensuring that the partners and customers stay ahead of the curve?
A: As cyber threats evolve, defending workloads in today’s multi-cloud environments requires more than traditional security. Attackers are no longer simply at the perimeter; they may already be inside, waiting to exploit vulnerabilities. This reality demands a shift from just keeping threats out to minimising their impact when they breach. In response to these challenges, Cisco is driving innovations within its Security Cloud to power and safeguard the AI revolution. New capabilities across Cisco’s unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform enable businesses to better protect their applications, devices, users, and data, while also enhancing their ability to detect, respond, and recover more quickly from incidents.
Q: Comstor has recently unveiled its biggest ever security enablement program for the partners. Could you tell us how partners can benefit from it?
A: As the largest Cisco-exclusive distributor, we remain dedicated to helping our partners fully capitalise on growth opportunities with Cisco. With Cisco making significant investments in security, we have launched our most extensive security enablement program to date for our partners. This program offers partners access to an unmatched and rapidly expanding team of cybersecurity experts from Comstor, along with support to help them achieve their own specialisations with Cisco.
Through this initiative, Comstor is also providing enhanced, exclusive training through Cisco Secure 360, a unique program that equips partners with the tools needed to effectively position the Cisco Security portfolio. Partners who join the program will also gain access to the Cisco Security Deal Concierge Service, which provides a dedicated resource offering strategic support for deals tailored to customer needs.
Additionally, partners will benefit from rich opportunity data gathered by Comstor’s Intelligent Demand team from multiple sources, as well as exclusive marketing assets to help drive end-user demand generation.
Answered by Sojy Oommen
Q: The cybersecurity landscape is evolving faster than ever. As per some estimates, $10.5 trillion in projected cybercrime costs globally by 2025. How has alignment with Cisco helped you in terms of addressing the Cybersecurity needs of your customers?
A: The security needs of customers are evolving in response to the increasing complexity of digital interactions, data privacy concerns, and emerging threats. There are several key areas in which the customer security needs are changing such as Data Privacy and Protection, Multi-Factor Authentication, Secure and Transparent Transactions, Threat Detection and Prevention, Convenience Without Compromising Security. Customer across different sectors have struggled to manage a complicated patchwork of ever-evolving technologies which is more prone to attacks than ever. With Cisco’s security platform, we have been able to keep Cybersecurity solutions for our customers simple yet robust. Thus, ensuring that everything connected is fully protected.
Q: The year 2024 was a whirlwind year for cybersecurity. From the fallout of high-profile ransomware attacks to the increasing commoditisation of AI tools, the challenges kept mounting. Cyber threats are not just expected to escalate in frequency but also become more sophisticated, challenging traditional security paradigms. What are some of the key security related trends and solutions that are expected to gain momentum?
A: The cybersecurity landscape is expected to become increasingly complex in 2025. This complexity will not only be driven by sophisticated cyber-attacks, but also due to increased regulation, and rapidly evolving technology. Some of the key security related trends and solutions that are expected to gain momentum in 2025 are enhancement of security solutions with Artificial Intelligence (AI), focus on avoiding Zero-day vulnerabilities, adoption of decentralised security models.
Q: Can you share how your strategic partnership with Comstor has helped you in taking the latest Cisco security solutions to the customers?
A: Comstor has helped us enhance our capabilities relating to Cisco security. Through our partnership with Comstor, we have not only benefitted from the unparalleled support offered by the technical experts at Comstor but we have also been able to conduct lead generation by receiving marketing growth funds. Our partnership has also enabled us to get easy access to Comstor’s best-in-class platforms and tools such as the Comstor Partner Portal and Comstor Bot.
Q: What are the some of the key milestones including training and certifications that your company has achieved during the year when it comes to Cisco security?
A: We ensure that our teams complete all the key certifications in order to remain up-to-date on the latest technology offering from Cisco. Our sales and pre-sales teams have recently successfully completed the Black Belt Cisco Core Security Specialisation. We remain committed to upgrading the skill set of our teams in a timely manner.
Image Credit: Comstor MEA & TS Qatar
