It is no secret, no business or organization is safe from a cyber attack. In fact, the volume of attacks targeting small-midsized organizations continues to grow at an alarming pace. The following stats are from reports focused on small to midsized businesses and organizations only.
Everyone knows there is a threat, but the real question why is nothing being done to adopt the security mechanisms to prevent costly breaches when these attacks occur?
In 2016, 65% of surveyed organizations reported a security incident, making it top of mind heading into 2017, but we all know that right – companies are getting breached and security is important. What always stuns me is the lack of action. To that point, when 2017 came around, 45% of organizations still reported lack of adequate security controls.
Why?
What is preventing organizations from implementing the technology they know they need to protect their businesses, their employees, even their customers? Understanding this is key to understanding how to bring security to those who need it most and still lack it.
Amongst those surveyed, at the top of the list was one of the things we already discussed – lack of cyber security staff. The number one reason reported by organizations in 2017 for not implementing security was lack of staff who knew how to manage the process.
Close behind was lack of budget for security,
followed by lack of time to dedicate to security. If you don’t have security staff that means someone else must pick up the security project in addition to their day job and often that time never comes.
And the final reason ties right into reason 1 and 3… if you don’t employ dedicated security or IT staff someone has to be trained to deploy and manage security and again, these people have day jobs and security training rarely becomes the priority.
This is where WatchGuard comes in. WatchGuard is dedicated to eliminating the cost and complexity of security, making it accessible to organizations of all types and sizes, regardless of budget and technical staff! Let’s look at a few examples:
https://www.netwrix.com/2017itrisksreport.html
About the report: Netwrix analyzed feedback collected between March 15 and April 15, 2017, from 723 respondents holding various positions in IT departments across all major industries worldwide. 32% large enterprise, 68% small-medium organizations.
WatchGuard is 100% channel-driven, meaning we have spent the last year recruiting, training, and delivering security through a highly educated and fiercely loyal channel community. For customers, this means buying a product and someone trusted to deploy and manage it.
Across all product lines WatchGuard consistently delivers the highest performing, enterprise-grade security at a variety of price points, eliminating budget as a gating factor to adopting security. This is proven through extensive 3rd party testing with companies like Miercom and NSS Labs but also through our own obsession with this guarantee to our customers.
The last two objections tie right into the need for simplified security solutions. Our products are architected from the ground up to be a quick and as easy to deploy as possible, featuring predefined policies and configuration profiles and award-winning visibility tools for distilling oceans of data into meaningful information that anyone can understand and action – whether you are an IT professional focused on many different tasks beyond security or the owner of a small business just trying to tick the security box.
Now that we have established the need for simplified security and demonstrated our commitment to delivering it, let’s dive into the product portfolio. When I go through the portfolio I like to highlight two things. First our philosophy and second the actual product portfolio.
WatchGuard is a security vendor. We are focused on identifying the security services that are a must-have for every organization and then adapting those services for mainstream consumption. During that process our focus is on three things:
First – Delivering the highest level of security efficacy on the market. There are some things that can be enterprise-grade but security should just be security and everyone should have access to the best.
Second - simplifying the implementation and management aspects of that security offering. As previously discussed, more often than note, accessibility is about time and resources to implement security and not necessarily about budget. We know that and that is why simplified management is a top priority across everything we do.
Finally – it is one thing to get logs of data from your security solution, it is another thing altogether to get information that is useful and actionable. With WatchGuard you get both – you get the ability to dive into the data or just browse the highlights to keep your business on track.
We started in network security 20 years ago and have taken this same philosophy and successfully applied it to the wi-fi and multi-factor authentication spaces. Let’s take a look at the portfolio…
The WatchGuard portfolio features three families of security solutions for addressing the most common threats facing businesses and organizations today.
Featuring more than 15 best-in-class security services from URL and DNS filtering to sandboxing, data loss protection, and advanced threat detection, correlation and response our network security solutions protect organizations from known and evasive malware, malicious email and web content, phishing attacks, and more.
Stolen passwords top the list of vulnerabilities that lead to major breaches. WatchGuard’s AuthPoint multi-factor authentication service enables organizations to easily eliminate that threat by rendering a password alone useless.
Finally, what business can operate without Wi-Fi? The list is short (if not empty. Wi-Fi is not new, but it can leave employees, visitors, and therefore organizations vulnerable when not properly secured. With WatchGuard, customers can confidently provide trusted wireless environments, protecting their wi-fi and the people on it from prying eyes, data theft, and malware.
Beyond providing enterprise-grade security for your network, your identities, and your airspace, each of these solutions are quick and easy to deploy and just as easy to manage on a day to day basis. Today, each offering features its own cloud-based centralized management and visibility platform. Whether you want to set it and forget it or dive in and check out what is going WatchGuard Wi-Fi Cloud, Dimension, and WatchGuard Cloud provide a quick and intuitive way to manage your security. In the future all of these systems will be consolidated under WatchGuard Cloud, providing a single pane of glass for managing all security across a customer’s environment.
Simplicity: We offer simplicity without compromise. From how our services are packaged, to the ease of deployment and ongoing management, WatchGuard strives for simplicity across all aspects of our offering, it is in our DNA. We are the easiest product to resell, to buy, and to use. Our customer and partners consistently choose WatchGuard because they get the highest-end security available without any of the complexity associated with powerful security solutions. It is what we do best and what we are most proud of.
Performance: WatchGuard offers the best blend of security efficacy and performance at every single price point. Not only do we consistently out preform the competition, we deliver top performance when it matters, when security is running. For our network security appliances, this means top performance with all UTM services and HTTPS decryption enabled. For Wi-Fi this means being able to deploy full WIPS Protection without impacting user experience or shutting down neighboring networks. This reinforces the strength of our security despite the simplicity of our packaging and deployment.
Visibility: Beyond basic reporting, WatchGuard enables customers to transform data into rich visualizations of information for easy consumption. This makes full network visibility; security service efficacy and visibility; as well as reporting and compliance easier than ever before. This is constantly a deciding factor in favor of WatchGuard in competitive selling situations.
Correlation – as with anything, the more you know the more you can do. With threatsync, WatchGuard reaches beyond the network to collect security event information from endpoints and additional threat intelligence feeds. This data is then correlated to score and prioritize and take action against threats that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. ThreatSync brings another layer of intelligence to WatchGuard’s approach to network security.
Our Innovative Security Platform: WatchGuard has proven our ability to out-innovate competition by adding new security services, thus elevating the value to end-customers and partners. Whether it is bringing to market a completely new solution like AuthPoint, adding another layer of security to an existing product like when we added sandboxing via APT blocker, or upgrading an existing service like Gateway Antivirus WatchGuard makes sures our partners and customers have the quickest access to the products and services they need most.
WatchGuard was the first to develop a multi-function security appliance. What evolved from a basic Firewall, WatchGuard introduced the concept of layered security, which incorporated additional security services included on top of a Firewall within one appliance.
Over the years, WatchGuard has been a pioneer in introducing the most cutting-edge technologies into our security platform, including recently in 2017 with Threat Detection and Response and in 2014 with our advanced sandboxing technology called APT Blocker – both of which I will talk in more depth later in this presentation. We have also led the way in providing the top performance at all price points.
Whether it is protecting the network, Wi-Fi environments or endpoints, WatchGuard is constantly looking ahead of the industry to incorporate the next technology to stay far ahead of the rapidly evolving threat landscape.
WatchGuard sells its products and services 100% through the channel – and we have the most dedicated Channel in the industry with about 10,000 partners, ranging from traditional resellers, value-added resellers who provide deployment and configuration services, to full on managed security service providers who deliver end-to-end security management for our customers.
Our WatchGuardONE Channel program ensures that our partners are the experts in our products and services, as their partner level within the program is based of the trainings and certifications they complete rather than revenue volumes that are common in these types programs.
From our website, you can quickly find a WatchGuard channel partner in your location based on the services they offer and the WatchGuardONE partnership level.
Providing true enterprise-grade security is all about layered security. There is never going to be one defense that can stop all attacks. Threats change and evolve all the time. There are many different stages of an attack. There is the network layer where they might be trying gain access to a computer, or there might be an exploit where they take over the computer based on a vulnerability – malware has all these different stages.
The benefit to the WatchGuard approach is that we can block all of the stages in the kill chain with a layered security approach to truly prevent, detect, and respond to threats.
As explained earlier in this training, management and visibility are key elements of a Unified Security Platform. Fireboxes can be managed directly using the WebUI or Command line interface, or for centralized management, our network security offering comes with a feature rich management platform called WatchGuard System Manager or WSM. This software makes it easy to manage a large number of security appliances and services with centralized policy enforcement, inherited configurations, time-saving drag and drop VPN configuration and so much more.
The power and value of the Total Security Suite is a true differentiator for WatchGuard. We offer more best-in-class services that protect more layers of your IT infrastructure than any else on the market. As a customer with Total Security Suite, you can rest assured that you are always getting the most advanced security technologies while always being a step ahead of the cyber criminals. As new security services are introduced, you automatically get them as a Total Security Suite owner, and we make them easy for you to deploy them into existing deployments.
Through WatchGuard, you get one platform that provides total security – both for today and tomorrow across the network, Wi-Fi, and endpoints. We make it easier to purchase through one package that continually provides the latest we have to offer, while making it easy to upgrade both the software and hardware.
And we make our security easier to deploy and manage with centralized management tools and simple interfaces. You choose the level of granularity at which you manage your security, and you set policies to automate processes across all of our security services.
We also partner with a wide range of industry-leading technology companies to develop product integrations that for stronger security and better interoperability in your IT environments. We know that WatchGuard is one of many technologies you are using, and we want to make sure all the technologies are working well together to provide the smartest security.
Every integration we have includes an step-by-step integration guide available to everyone through on our corporate website, and we continually partner with new companies to build this ecosystem of integrations. Our customers’ feedback drives many of these partnerships, so as a customer we look to you for feedback and recommendations.
WatchGuard not only provides enterprise-grade protection for your wired networks, we extend it to your wireless networks, providing the same security services through wireless connections. We also take it several steps further. Our access points lead in all of the performance areas that you have come to expect with Wi-Fi, and when paired with our Wi-Fi Cloud, you get enhanced security through the industry’s best Wireless Intrusion Prevention System, along with a host tools that provide customer engagement services, customer analytics, reporting, and ease of management that scales with no infrastructure required.
WatchGuard’s WIPS uses patented Marker Packet technology that continuously defends your airspace from unauthorized devices, rogue APs, and malicious attacks – and with close to zero false positives. This is a true differentiator among the competition – whereas competing technologies act as a detection method rather than true prevention with immediate response.
Using the cloud-management features of Wi-Fi Cloud, you can quickly scale from one AP to an unlimited without any infrastructure. Gone are the days of requiring a controller to manage your Wi-Fi. You can also group APs per location for ease of management.
Analytics tools enable you to learn more about your customers. Wi-Fi Cloud tracks repeated visitors, footfall, and dwell time. You can also generate reports that demonstrate compliance adherence straight form the management interface – and schedule them to be delivered by email automatically.
Use a WYSIWYG editor to quickly create splash pages with integrated social media authentication, videos, polling questions and more - whether you are looking to learn more about your customers or use Wi-Fi as a means of marketing with highlighted promotions on your splash page. They easy create and keep updated.
We also partner with a wide range of industry-leading technology companies to develop product integrations that for stronger security and better interoperability in your IT environments. We know that WatchGuard is one of many technologies you are using, and we want to make sure all the technologies are working well together to provide the smartest security.
Every integration we have includes an step-by-step integration guide available to everyone through on our corporate website, and we continually partner with new companies to build this ecosystem of integrations. Our customers’ feedback drives many of these partnerships, so as a customer we look to you for feedback and recommendations.