U.K. based security specialist Sophos have entered into a strategic alliance with Tech Data to boost their presence across ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) countries. As per the terms of the deal, Sophos will gain access to major markets like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand to provide a suite of network, endpoint and firewall protection solutions.
According to Sophos, South East Asia is a huge market for cyber security products since cloud as a technology has been adopted on a massive scale. They say that enterprises in this market depend on the cloud for business-critical workloads and protecting the cloud environment is a primary concern for everyone.
By entering into a strategic partnership with Tech Data, Sophos claim that they will be able to leverage the former’s wide network across the market to facilitate network, endpoint, data, identity and firewall protection solutions. They say that this wide array of products will secure mission-critical workloads and allow enterprises to deploy variants of cloud products at ease.
Sophos believe that they have reached a stage of maturity when it comes to manpower, resources and technical capabilities. Hence, they say, partnering with a distributor like Tech Data seemed like a timely event.
Sumit Bansal, Senior Director of ASEAN and Korea at Sophos, commented:
Sophos has reached a growth stage where we need a strong regional player that can bring good financial backing, scalability and access to services that can be provided to our partners to reach the next level of our growth.
As we grow, our partners need all the help they can get in terms of understanding the security market, and the additional services a distributor like Tech Data can provide. We found that Tech Data was the best complement to our business.
Tech Data claim that this deal will strengthen the next generation offerings of enterprises in ASEAN markets. Naresh Desai, Vice President of Specialist Business Unit across Asia Pacific at Tech Data, commented:
Tech Data believes that the strength of next-generation security solutions lies in a proactive approach to security threats, and we arm our partners with the technology and knowledge they need to protect their customers.
It seems like security providers are entering the South East Asian market with an aim to expand, following VMware’s move to leverage AWS cloud infrastructure a few weeks ago.