Entrust and Chillisoft partner to kick cybersecurity goals

Despite all the hype around AI, cybersecurity remains at the top of most board and C-Suite agendas. While the general public might feel somewhat jaded when it comes to major data breaches – it's a fair bet that almost every Australian adult has been impacted by a major breach over the last few years – businesses face an increasing risk level that's underpinned by threat actors that are better equipped and better organised than ever before.

Criminals work in teams to find vulnerabilities, develop exploits and deliver malicious payloads. That means defenders need to build an effective team that can identify threats, build defences and rapidly recover from an attack. That need for strong partners sits at the heart of a partnership between Entrust and Chillisoft.

Marc Airo-Farulla, Sales Director for Asia Pacific at Entrust, says, "We were looking for a partner to help us grow our business in Australia and New Zealand. We chose Chillisoft last year. They're providing genuine support and local boots on the ground to connect us with the right resellers."

While there are other software distributors, very few retain a laser-sharp focus on cybersecurity. Chillisoft's CEO, Gavin Lawless, explains.

"We know cybersecurity very well. We don't represent dozens and dozens of vendors. We focus on a smaller group of vendors to help them scale their businesses. We exist because fast-growing emerging vendors need help scaling their businesses. Invariably, those vendors don't have large teams in ANZ so we become an extension of their organisation and provide them with services to grow their businesses."

While Entrust has an established product portfolio built around hardware security modules and certificate management, Marc says they faced challenges when it came to growth and marketplace awareness in the ANZ region.. But the relationship with Chillisoft is delivering by helping Entrust find new channel partners, enabling those partners, and getting those partners to have the capability of taking the Entrust message to their customers. Gavin adds that they are helping Entrust, and other organisations scale, even when they lack large local teams.

Marc says, "The great thing is that we're working directly with the CEO of Chillisoft. It's quite rare for an organisation of our size in this market to be connected at that level. That has some great benefits for us. There's the instant awareness of what we're trying to do, but there's also the collaborative conversation that we're regularly having. It helps us to be nimble and address what may be coming up or what we need to do together. That partnership is bringing fantastic opportunities for us to grow in the market and making our presence known."

One of the shifts the market is seeing is a strong focus on identity. The Australian government sees this as a focus area. Marc says it's not surprising given some recent breaches.

"There are principles that globally we're talking about and Australia is no different," says Marc. "Whether it's zero trust or multi-factor authentication, we're seeing it in everything we do as citizens. ASD [Australian Signals Directorate] has spoken publicly on some of the challenges. Cyber criminals are relentlessly targeting to get accounts and account information."

Gavin adds that the types of attacks being executed are becoming more advanced and getting broader. That means defensive strategies are becoming more complex and that complexity is creating management challenges. That's compounded by a significant shortage of highly trained cybersecurity experts and tightening budget.

Gavin says "There are many changes coming and a significant part of our job is education and increasing awareness. With so much change happening in the area of digital certificates, many organisations don't know how these changes will impact them, what issues they might face and what their liabilities could be."

The post-quantum world is fast approaching. It's an area that is developing faster than many people realise Marc says. And he observes that despite the attention quantum computing is getting in some areas, but we are behind some of our global peers.

But some challenges are easier to see coming. The time public TLS/SSL certificates will be valid will fall from today's 398 days to just 47 days by March 2029. This will demand better management processes – something many organisations may not be ready for. And that's against the backdrop of new AI-powered threats, the arrival of quantum threats and continual improvement in the tools and methods used by criminals and nation-state attackers.