Terry Greer-King, Vice President Of Europe, Middle East And Africa (Emea) Sales

Armed with an authority on cybersecurity and with extensive experience in the technology industry, Terry Greer-King is currently SonicWall’s VP of EMEA Sales.

Terry has extensive experience providing cybersecurity solutions to partners and customers across the EMEA region with a dedication to direct touch results and business growth hence we speak to him about his current role and trends in the area of cyber security.

Which countries in the Middle East is SonicWall most active in currently?

Sonicwall has been in the region for over one and a half decades now. We therefore have vast experience and a huge customer base throughout Middle East. Since we are a fully dedicated channel company, we cover all countries in the region, supported by our distribution partners and their technical and business skills.

Our team is based in Dubai, while we attempt to grow our presence to Saudi Arabia and also in other countries. Our business focus today is on UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Oman from a Middle East perspective.

What type of threats are most common in the Middle East?

2018 was a year of high focus on the Middle East’s cyber threats. The strengthening economy, the additional wealth and an increased level of travel resulted in a malware surge mid-2018. This year, Middle Eastern governments have been working successfully on reducing the key threat vectors. Consequently, we saw a 60% decline this year of malware attacks, to 15 million malware attacks of our customers throughout the region in 2019, which we have blocked for our customers.

Dubai has been a focus target, and we expect a high interest during Dubai 2020 Expo and assume a sharp increase of attacks in 2020. Key malware variants detected were Trojans and viruses, that could be blocked with our technology, working in thousands of customer locations in Middle East.

What is driving your company’s business growth this year?

I would say there are two main drivers that are leading our growth. One, our ever-improving partner base that is armed with the technology, ability and knowledge to protect their customers by adding SonicWall services to our solutions and adopting the layered security needed.

Two, the push to the cloud. This will change the perspective of customers on their security immensely. Today, SonicWall is more than just a firewall vendor. Our solutions comply with  our customers’ need for micro-segmented networks with a mix of Hardware and virtual Firewalls, Endpoint security at the next-generation level, Cloud Application Security and Hybrid environments. Our customers also benefit from a single pane of glass management, a reporting and analytics platform for ease of use, and seamless integration into existing SIEMs and other tools. 

What challenges have you and your partners faced recently?

Legacy thinking about cyber security is probably the biggest inhibitor for every next-gen security vendor. “We don’t need security, there is no budget left to secure to current levels, we hear what you say, but we have not been hit yet”. What I like to say, if you secure your business with an old security solution, you will be protected against old threats.

Since cyber-attacks advance quickly, this is obviously not the right approach. Hence, we provide a bi-annual update of our threat report, to ensure, our partners can tell what is happening and support CISOs and IT Managers in their attempt to get the right budget. Security is not living in a silo in companies anymore. It is a matter of trust, brand, and business continuity more than ever. It has become a real matter for the board. This is not understood by some customers yet.

Can you talk about the strength of your comprehensive enterprise collaboration, vendor portfolio?

Our business exists to a major part due to the threat data gather every single day globally from our 1.1M sensors in over 215 countries and territories. This is the database of threats we use to protect our customers and advance our solutions. This is seamlessly integrated with all our products. A mix of on-premise and cloud solutions offers a variety of solutions for almost every use case.

Why is this important? Only a security solution, which is less complex, automated and can detect and prevent data breaches and other cyber-attacks, can deliver the least vulnerable security solution. Our layered security solution and platform, from the network perimeter to the cloud to the endpoint, discovers the known and unknown malware attacks, brings to light shadow IT use, protects against attacks using non-standard ports and easy deployment of encrypted traffic inspection.

All of that is managed through a single pane of glass, reducing complexity and increasingly visibility

In order to ensure right deployment, we not only have a number of skilled partners but, we also offer professional services delivered by partners. A simple starting point is the Network Health Check, which is a standardized check of current settings and deployment of the security solution. From there, a SonicWall Solution Architect can help to draft the best possible security layout.

What does the future products and services entail for SonicWall?

Being one of the most agile vendors in the security space, we have launched already 54 new products and capabilities in the past two years, with 160 Million lines of new code. This is a massive undertaking, but we will not stop. Look out for the coming announcements