Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is WatchGuard Technologies?

Cybersecurity is changing fast. As businesses grapple with a workforce increasingly spread between the office and remote locations, technology companies are racing to keep pace. Mark Sinclair, the ANZ Regional Director for WatchGuard Technologies, says his company has been focused on exactly that challenge - and harnessing it as an opportunity.

"Look, we've been at this a while. We were founded in 1996, which makes us more than 20 years old now, so we've been in the industry a long time as a security provider," Sinclair said. "We've got development in five countries, with a physical presence in more than 21 countries across the world. Currently, over 700 employees - but that's still growing - over 80,000 customers, 100 distributors, and about 9,000 active partners. That's growing more."

WatchGuard's history as a network security company is well known, with its range of firewalls and unified threat management appliances found in businesses of varying sizes worldwide. More recently, the company has branched into areas such as secure Wi-Fi systems and multi-factor authentication - both of which have surged in relevance since the Covid-19 pandemic sent many employees to work from home.

Sinclair explained, "A couple of years ago, we moved into multi-factor authentication, again acquiring some very good technology and putting a WatchGuard branding on it and integrating it in with our suite. The multi-factor authentication is doing really well at the moment, especially with a lot of people working from home. It's very lightweight, very easy to deploy, price points in a really spectacular place, and is becoming very popular."

Asked what makes WatchGuard's solutions different, Sinclair summarised it with three words: simplicity, performance, and innovation.

"We take enterprise-grade products and make them easy to configure, easy to install, easy to use," he said. "That plays really nicely into mid-market organisations that might not have 100 IT and security staff. It also opens up to our partners to make it very easy for them to use and give very effective security solutions."

Price, he said, is part of the company's value proposition: "Our competitors will charge often twice as much for similar performance boxes, so we come out really, really well on the total cost of ownership aspect of our solutions."

Cloud-based management now defines WatchGuard's range. "Visibility across all of our products is done from WatchGuard Cloud or our cloud-based solution and it makes it - again - plays back into that simplicity and ease of management. Our products talk to each other so we can correlate security events... and see what's going on in the various products very easily and correlate security issues during outbreaks."

Rapid change in the business technology landscape means that security vendors must constantly update their offerings. Sinclair was quick to point out WatchGuard's track record here: "As security threats change, we keep up very quickly by putting new things into our UTM appliances and at a great rate. We've got a great history of adding more and more products as threats evolve and change."

With Australia and New Zealand's market dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises, Sinclair says WatchGuard's approach fits perfectly. But new demands are emerging, and the company has responded with a significant refresh of its hardware line-up.

"The data consumption of businesses is changing," he said. "We're getting businesses consuming more and more products, so we've gone out of our way to innovate and change our tabletop appliances very recently. In fact, just last week, we've introduced three new boxes to replace some of our older technology."

With web surfing now overwhelmingly encrypted and more staff remote, network appliances are being pushed harder than ever. "We're seeing the boxes under an excessive load from extra VPN usage that no one ever planned for," Sinclair explained. "So we've brought out a brand-new hardware refresh about tabletop appliances."

The upgrades now on the market include three new devices, tailored for everything from home offices to sites with up to 50 users, complete with artificial intelligence-based antivirus modules. Sinclair said, "This hardware refresh is really going to play into the current market and the needs, especially with a lot of the work from home that's going on."

That's not all. WatchGuard has just made a major investment in endpoint protection, acquiring the European cybersecurity firm Panda Security. "Endpoint protection's never been more important than what it is today," Sinclair said. "We acquired the company Panda Security. Those that don't know Panda, they're actually very big in Europe in particular. When we brought to market, straight away, their flagship product - Adaptive Defense 360 - is an endpoint protection platform, also an endpoint detection and response."

The system classifies all services running on an endpoint as either good or bad, drawing on both artificial intelligence and human expertise at Panda where required. "We're confident we can do 100% classification of any services running on the endpoint and then using that we can work out, is this good or bad, and shut down the bad ones and allow the good ones to run," Sinclair said.

Not only are the new appliances available in Australia and New Zealand immediately, but so is the cloud-managed Adaptive Defense 360 software.

This week, the cybersecurity company also announced a dramatic change in how customers can pay for its solutions. In response to the economic headwinds hitting many firms post-pandemic, WatchGuard is introducing a flexible subscription model.

"We've found that especially in this challenging economic time, a lot of businesses are reaching out to us saying, 'Hey, look, we can't afford a three-year subscription. We can't afford a one-year subscription to your security services,'" Sinclair said. "So, we've been working on a model that allows partners and end users to pay by the month."

Dubbed FlexPay, the model offers both three-year commitment and month-by-month options, allowing companies to pause or stop with minimal hassle. "It means at any time, not only can you pause it, if you want to shut it down, you can - you just send the box back to us and it's that simple," Sinclair said. "We think it's going to revolutionise the industry."

Reaching WatchGuard in Australia and New Zealand, Sinclair said, is simple. "We sell all our products and services via partners, so you need to find yourself a reseller... I've got across Australia and New Zealand, there's about 400 active partners, so there's plenty to choose from."

Reflecting on the pace of innovation, Sinclair concluded, "I'm looking forward to getting lots of these into the hands of both our end-users and our partners."