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Cyberoam targets SA as growth market

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 15 Sept 2009

Unified threat management (UTM) company Cyberoam is expanding its local channel partner base after hailing SA as the region with the highest security spend in Africa.

Cyberoam country manager for Africa, Alkesh Soneji, is visiting SA in a series of road shows in Johannesburg and Cape Town to interact with channel partners and resellers. The company will roll out a channel partner certification programme next month, which will see all its partners undergoing training in Cyberoam technology.

Owned by Elitecore Technologies, Cyberoam is based in India with US offices in Massachusetts, and is present in over 72 countries spanning regions in the US, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia and Australia.

“SA is our top priority in the African region and we see it as a promising economy,” says Soneji. “In the first and second quarter of this year, we experienced slow product sales in SA because of the credit crunch, but we're starting to see it go up again.”

Soneji adds that Cyberoam is looking to target small-to-medium enterprises (SME), noting that SMEs are increasingly becoming targets for cyber crime.

In addition, the company is driving its identity-based UTM solution to the local market. Soneji claims traditional security solutions which focus on IP addresses are inadequate, especially when one machine is shared between multiple users.

“Without identity-based security, trying to have an Internet usage policy is almost impossible in a company because you treat individuals as IP addresses,” says Soneji. “With identity-based, it helps from a management perspective, which gives the IT administrator more control over Internet users and what's coming into and out of the network.

“The identity-based security works across through all the modules, firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering, IPS, bandwidth management and reporting.”

Soneji points out that phishing scams are on the increase, with more than 18 million spam messages being sent out every day. He attributes this growth to the recession and the fact that cyber criminals are looking to obtain credit card details from unsuspecting victims.

Related story:
Cyberoam looks to Africa

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