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Cyber security is a 'business imperative'

Charl Ueckermann, CEO AVes Cyber Security

No man is an island – and the same goes for tech companies in today’s challenging environment.

AVeS Cyber Security is partnering with First Distribution to productise its services and expand its reach into Africa and beyond.

Traditional channel partners are having to adapt how they take their solutions to market to ensure that their solutions reach end-users. AveS Cyber Security’s partnership with First Distribution is a case in point.

Jason Sharp, director of cloud and hosting at First Distribution, explains the relationship with AVeS Cyber Security: “First Distribution encourages its partners to create solutions that can be offered to the broader First Distribution partner channel. Having an offering that can help businesses reduce their cyber security risk and tick the necessary governance boxes has turned out to be a great starting point for AVeS Cyber Security. First Distribution has helped AVeS Cyber Security turn that service into a marketable product, thereby reducing complexity and improving their go-to-market. Solving issues like pricing, terms and conditions of usage, etc. requires a certain skillset. This extends to marketing and scaling the solution across South Africa and into Africa and even further afield.”

Expanding on the partnership, Charl Ueckermann, CEO of AVeS Cyber Security, says: “Cloud datacentres and the provisioning of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions have created a major disruptor to traditional IT firms all over the world. The cloud provisioning platform of First Distribution is competitively priced and has a broad reach throughout Africa. We have strong competencies in architectural and governance services, and this combination of skills and provisioning services was a perfect match.”

Adoption of cloud grows by double digits on a month-to-month basis. To keep pace with this growth, First Distribution uses technology to solve scalability challenges for partners and to drive efficiency. Says Sharp: “First Distribution has developed a comprehensive set of tools for partners, including Epsidon Cloud and License Central. All partners are able to list their services and solutions on these tools. This means that, as a true MSP distributor, we also sell on our partners’ services to other partners who don’t have those capabilities. The full solution stack is, therefore, available so they can provide their customers with a full solution.”

Unique specialised competencies

The benefit of this type of arrangement frees up the vendor to do what they do well, and in this case, it’s cyber security. Says Ueckermann: “We help businesses reduce the risk of their data being breached by building layers of security around their people, data and infrastructure. Cyber security is no longer the responsibility of the head of IT; it’s now a business imperative, with decisions made at C-suite level. It’s becoming increasingly important for IT to be aligned to the business objectives in order to improve efficiencies and reduce cost concurrently. IT governance is a great vehicle to realise this in an efficient and effective way.”

In this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where more things are connected and new products and services are launched at a rapid rate, it has become imperative for organisations to create unique specialised competencies, even down to specific industry verticals. This is the only way to create value for clients on a globally competitive basis.

To be everything to everyone is not sustainable and hence the value proposition offered via the First Distribution ecosystem and powered by AVeS Cyber Security is just one of those offerings that can be monetised by the whole ICT industry without making investments in specialised resources.