Cybersecurity Roundup: Check Point, Kaspersky, Coronavirus Malware, SiteLock

That’s a wrap for Check Point Software Technologies’ CPX 360 2020 conference in New Orleans.

During the conference, Check Point unveiled Infinity Next, its latest Infinity cybersecurity architecture, and announced a new global partner program.

At last year’s CPX 360, Check Point’s Aviv Abramovich, its head of security services product management, talked to us about how partnerships are key to Check Point bringing security to SD-WAN. Check Point is working with SD-WAN vendors like Versa, Cisco, HPE and others, and is cooperating with AT&T, Verizon and other carriers around the world to bring secure SD-WAN to their customers.

This week, Abramovich gave an update on Check Point’s increasing partnerships to secure SD-WAN.

Channel Futures: So what’s the latest in terms of Check Point and SD-WAN security?

Aviv Abramovich: We’ve been busy. We’ve created SD-WAN as a focus area for some of our development groups, so they’re dedicated development groups now. We are consistent in our approach in that we promote partnerships. So we work with all the leading SD-WAN vendors and we’ve created combined offerings that you can integrate very neatly together and give our customers a secured SD-WAN solution. We launched that in late August of last year and we started to see some nice adoption and a lot of interest. Most of my meetings here at this event are all about SD-WAN and the various components that we deliver. One that was very interesting was with a partner, so our partners are observing the SD-WAN market and they’re trying to think what value they can bring.

Check Point’s Aviv Abramovich

The reason we are doing these partnerships is we realized that in the SD-WAN market, SD-WAN is driven by the network team, and the network team evaluates different SD-WAN products based on their networking capabilities. That has nothing to do with security whatsoever. It’s predominantly a network decision of what vendors they use, what are their networking capabilities, and that’s how it’s evaluated. We just want to enable our customers to not compromise on their security. If they had security for their branches provided by Check Point before, they can still have it, even if they move to SD-WAN. And now the architecture of the network looks different than what it used to be before, and they can just move that along and adapt to it and adopt it, rather than try and hold the organization back from deploying something like that.

CF: So it’s increasing opportunities for partners while also creating more security when it comes to SD-WAN?

AA: Correct. When we thought about our strategy, we thought, how can we create it so that everybody’s a winner? I think the fact that we’re doing these partnerships and we continue to expand, everybody’s a winner in this case.

CF: Can you give some examples of some of the latest partnerships that have taken place?

AA: We partner with VMware, Silver Peak, and we’ve partnered with Cisco; we just completed our certification with Cisco Cloud Fundamentals last week. We’re partnering with Versa, Aryaka, CloudGenix, Citrix and Microsoft. Each have their own strengths and differentiators that makes them unique. As a focus, we want to allow our customers to have the widest solution because some vendors will make more sense to some customers rather than others based on their capabilities and the way they …