Day: September 25, 2015

On Sept. 17, I hosted our first NextWave Huddle, a global channel partner webcast and a key component of my commitment to deliver more clear and consistent communications to you, our partners in FY16.

If you couldn’t attend, click here to listen to the replay and click here to review the presentation.

Together in FY15 we drove phenomenal results: we had nearly 500 partners double their business in FY15, we had more than 12,000 partner security professionals earn technology or sales certifications and we added a record-breaking, 2,000-plus new customers in Q4 FY15, bringing our total number of customers to more than 26,000 worldwide.

Make no mistake, we wouldn’t be the company we are today without you, our partners, and we can’t achieve our goal of becoming the largest enterprise security company in the next two years without expanding the scale and productivity of our partner ecosystem. To achieve this we will focus on three key pillars:

1. Building a channel partner ecosystem that provides the coverage, capacity and capabilities to elevate our leadership position in the enterprise security market.
2. Optimizing our channel programs, training, tools, systems & initiatives to strengthen partner differentiation & profitability.
3. Remaining committed to those partners that are investing in us.

By focusing on these pillars we have an opportunity to drive unprecedented success, as long as we keep you aware and informed. With this in mind, let me highlight a couple of key items for Q1 FY16:

• We have a new evaluation tool for you to use with customers, called the Security Lifecycle Review (SLR). Click here to download the Quick Start Guide for Partners today.
• On Sept. 15, we announced Aperture, a new SaaS security offering. Make sure youunderstand Aperture and the opportunity to expand your security business.
• We have a huge opportunity ($80B) to help transform the data center with VMware, make sure you understand the VMware NSX plus Palo Alto Networks
• If you aren’t already, start following us on Twitter @NextWavePartner for real-time updates.

I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity in front us. We are in the right market with the right strategy, philosophy, platform and partnerships. I am confident we are building a world class channels organization, which includes you, our partners, and look forward to accelerating together in FY16.

Go Palo Alto Networks.

Ron Myers

[Palo Alto Networks Blog]

In the last few years, a decades-old problem has taken on a new name: cyberattacks. This is now in the top five global risks in terms of impact and probability [1]. The reason for this is well-documented: attacks have become far more personalized, leveraging the techniques and tactics first seen in nation-state APT attacks. For cybercriminals, focusing on getting a hold of the golden nuggets that make each business uniquely profitable, such as intellectual property, businesses process, and data, has far greater impact than the traditional generic attacks.

Likewise, we are sprinting toward a hyper-connected society, and companies’ dependency on technology in order to function and be profitable is increasing. Concerns around BYOD are being overridden by concerns of the much broader Internet of Things, whether that is wearables, mobile payments or connected cars.

It’s easy to see why this has become a topic that is high on national and global risk registers. There is a growing perception that failure is inevitable, breaches will happen, and attackers will get in. My question is: are we giving in too easily?

Human nature means we make mistakes, but, more importantly, that we learn from them. One of the most significant traits we have is determination. We cannot and should not overly focus on recovery. We must find a better way to prevent the problem in the first place. While we accept that road accidents happen, we don’t focus only on emergency recovery services. Instead we continue to evolve the safety measures to prevent harm and loss of life. As such, a key motivation for my joining Palo Alto Networks was to work for a company that is resolutely focused on innovating solutions to stop cyber incidents from occurring.

So what does the next evolution of preventing successful cyberattacks look like? We can learn a lot from technology’s own evolution. Historically, technology was built with a purpose in mind, but the implementation all too often failed, as it was built by engineers for engineers. Usability has become the key to success – if we cannot intuitively use the technology today, the likelihood is that it will fail.

Over decades we have built a broad spectrum of security components that each solve parts of the problem, some of which, I would challenge, are no longer fit for this purpose, while others still have significant value. However, the major challenge is drawing these pieces of the security puzzle together to detect and block the attack. This is a requirement, as most incidents today leverage multiple components in their lifecycle, and the challenge is being able to piece together the jigsaw puzzle to see the entire picture, when so much information is being generated by so many component parts. We have effectively evolved to something so unwieldy and complex that it is unusable. Fragmented solutions, creating so much noise that we become immobile, take too long and use too much processing power to give the complete view, causing the solution to become ineffective.

If we are to be as agile and dynamic as the adversaries we face in cyberspace, we must focus on usability and automation because our most scarce resource is undoubtedly people. Time and efficacy must be key metrics, as should the ability to recognise and gather multiple indicators of modern attacks across the diverse IT ecosystem. It is also necessary to dynamically correlate these against our own and our peers’ intelligence to quickly and accurately stop an incident before harm occurs.

As cars went faster, safety had to evolve. At no point did we give up and simply get more ambulances or insurance; life is too precious. In the same way, the cyber world is becoming increasingly dynamic and precious to society. We should not accept that breaches have to occur, but should strive instead to evolve our capabilities to ensure a safe online experience.

[1] http://widgets.weforum.org/global-risks-2015-interactive/risk-explorer.html#landscape///

Greg Day

[Palo Alto Networks Blog]