Meet the company bringing cybersecurity solutions under one umbrella

2023 has been packed with cybersecurity breaches.

Several months back, a Covid-19 vaccination portal in India was breached, leading to the leak of millions of medical and personal information. Japan’s biggest port in Nagoya was also hit by a crippling ransomware attack, causing severe disruption to the circulation of goods to and from the country. It’s evident that cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly common.

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Not only are cybersecurity threats becoming common, they’re also becoming more aggressive and widespread. Asia Pacific saw 1,835 cyberattacks per organization in the first quarter of 2023, in contrast to the global average of 1,248 per week.

But for all the grievances and money lost, some good has come out of it: more awareness and education on the importance of cybersecurity.

“There’s been so many high-profile cyberattacks being reported that people start thinking, ‘You know what, I need to think of cybersecurity as a necessity, not only as a cost center,’” says Sylvain Lejeune. He is the vice president of sales for Asia Pacific and Japan at cybersecurity company WatchGuard Technologies. “It’s like buying insurance. No one likes to buy insurance, but everyone needs it.”

Data shows that while 78% of organizations across APAC have seen an increase in disruptive attacks, only 38% feel their defenses are strong enough to handle the modern cybercrime environment.

That’s where companies like WatchGuard come in.

Making cybersecurity simple again

The Seattle-based firm, which has offices throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific, was founded in 1996 with just one product: firewall protection.

It later expanded its offerings to include network security, advanced endpoint protection, multifactor authentication, and secure Wi-Fi solutions. For non-experts, these might sound like a lot of products, which is why WatchGuard focuses on simplicity as its key proposition.

Sylvain Lejeune, vice president of sales for Asia Pacific and Japan at WatchGuard Technologies / Photo credit: WatchGuard Technologies

In 2021, it launched the Unified Security Platform, an integrated plug-and-play solution that provides a complete suite of security services in a single and practical package and interface. The idea, Lejeune explains, is to make the mainstream adoption of advanced cybersecurity as easy as possible, rather than having to deploy specialized solutions from several vendors.

“It’s a simple-to-buy package that’s easy to install and maintain,” he says.

It’s also this innovation that enables scale and velocity for the business. Rather than selling directly to end users, WatchGuard partners with a network of managed service providers (MSPs) and security resellers. This allows end users, digital environments, and the networks of various businesses across different industries worldwide to benefit from its solutions.

These channel partners are also empowered to engage more closely with customers and help businesses save on the cost of building out dedicated IT security teams.

“We cannot be everywhere, but our partners are everywhere. And they allow us to expand our reach globally,” the executive adds.

One successful case study for Watchguard is JustCo, which runs more than 40 co-working spaces in Asia Pacific. JustCo required an all-encompassing security provider to protect and strengthen its networks and provide VPN access for its offices as it prepared for further expansion. WatchGuard was able to provide this through its comprehensive solution. As a result, all 40 of JustCo’s locations have VPN access, and the company’s IT team was able to standardize services and streamline processes to work more effectively.

Proactive innovation, not reactive

The constantly evolving and ever-looming nature of cybercrime means that WatchGuard has to ramp up its product engineering and innovation efforts – and fast.

According to Lejeune, cyber threats have accelerated dramatically throughout the past few years largely due to the pandemic.

“With all of us moving into a hybrid world, the attack vectors have expanded. Because we work from home, coffee shops, hotels, and other public locations, now malicious actors don’t have to target an office to get into corporate data systems. They can target these other locations. And when you go back to the office, you’re bringing the malware into the system,” he says.

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While the fact that malware and phishing make up the majority of cyber threats has not changed. Lejeune says cyberattacks are also getting increasingly sophisticated.

“Attacks are getting much more personalized,” he explains. “A bad actor can follow a CEO’s communications for weeks before sending an email to his finance director asking for an urgent US$50,000 payment to a ‘vendor,’ and it works. That is ‘spear phishing’ at its worst.”

To stay ahead of these evolving threats, WatchGuard launched ThreatSync in January 2020. The product is a SaaS tool based on a concept called extended detection and response. Its aim is to unify threat intelligence, correlation, and scoring across the WatchGuard security stack from network to user.

By adopting a centralized system as opposed to a siloed approach, security teams can see an overarching view of cyber threats in a single interface, making defense simpler for incident responders across any kind of potential issue or danger.

Expansion in APAC at scale

For its next steps, WatchGuard aims to grow its MSP and reseller community even more in the coming years and bolster the number of end customers that use its security solutions.

In particular, Lejeune has his eyes set on the Asia Pacific and Japan market, which is expected to have the most significant growth in global cybersecurity due to the technological “leapfrogging” in the region.

On the road ahead, WatchGuard plans to continue and expand on its innovations and cybersecurity portfolio while providing highly manageable technology solutions.

“The bad actors are constantly changing their tactics and always coming up with new ways to infiltrate and attack,” Lejeune reiterates. “Our plan is to keep innovating and going back to this core idea of simplicity.”

For over 27 years, WatchGuard has pioneered cutting-edge cybersecurity technology and delivered it as easy-to-deploy and easy-to-manage solutions. With industry-leading network and endpoint security, secure Wi-Fi, multifactor authentication, and network intelligence products and services, it enables more than 250,000 SMEs from around the globe to protect their most important assets – including over 10 million endpoints.

To learn more about WatchGuard and its Unified Security Platform, visit its website.

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This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.