Check Point: Partners Crucial to 2020 Momentum

CHECK POINT CPX360 — Check Point Software Technologies on Tuesday unveiled its new Infinity Next cybersecurity platform and said it’s depending on partners to deliver it to customers globally.

The platform was announced during Check Point’s CPX 360 2020 conference in New Orleans, which has drawn more than 3,500 partners and other attendees. The theme of the conference is “Secure Your Everything.”

Also this week, Check Point announced the launch of its new global partner program featuring a new elite tier. The program was developed in close consultation with hundreds of partners, and it encourages closer alignment with the company’s channel teams while implementing “best practices, speed, agility, time to market and customer value,” it said.

Gil Shwed, Check Point’s founder and CEO, said the venue where the conference is taking place, the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, was hit by a cyberattack last week, threatening its ability to host the event. And this attack followed a much larger one on the entire city, he said.

Check Point assisted in mitigating the attack, but there’s still lingering threats from the attack, he said.

Check Point’s Gil Shwed

“So cybersecurity is a top concern, it’s a top concern for everybody,” Shwed said.

Five cybersecurity phenomenons that have taken place include: Cybercrime has become organized, cloud security risks are evolving, ransomware is on the rise, mobile malware is increasing, and new attack vectors include 5G and IoT, he said.

It’s not that the technology isn’t available, and it’s that not enough people are embracing it, Shwed said. For example, less than 1% of people globally are using mobile antimalware while mobile phones are a massive cyberattack target, and what starts out as a mobile phone attack can quickly become a network, server and/or cloud attack, he said.

Infinity Next is the latest version of Check Point’s Infinity cybersecurity architecture. It provides support for multicloud, IoT and mobile devices, and all types of networks. It secures more than 50 types of assets and includes more than 60 security services. Workloads and IoT have been added to the new version.

“We need to have that entire set of technologies to secure assets,” Shwed said. “That’s the principal behind the new Infinity Next.”

Peter Alexander, Check Point’s chief marketing officer, said the conference is drawing higher-level executives due to the increasing role of CEOs in cybersecurity. For the third year running, cyberattacks and data theft are two of the top threats to society, he said.

“Most companies are not adequately protected and attacks are becoming more prevalent even as spending increases,” he said.

A big problem is organizations are spending on detection rather than prevention technology, Alexander said. Also, organizations now face the fifth generation of cyberattacks, but their cybersecurity is at Gen 3, he said.

“In addition, there’s so much complexity, it’s very complicated and time consuming,” he said. “Here, we’re talking about how organizations can address that.”

Check Point’s research is focused on getting into the minds of the hackers and what they’re working on, and “executives are really taking an interest in that,” Alexander said.

The new partner program’s tiered levels incentivize channel partners with competitive deal-registration management, enabling them to take full advantage of new opportunities available in the growing network and data security market, Check Point said. The program also rewards partners for supporting its solutions with their value-add professional services and MSSP initiatives, helping them to “reap further benefits from innovating and optimizing the overall customer experience,” it said.

Frank Rauch, Check Point’s head of worldwide channels, said partner mood and momentum is …

… “really exciting, and it’s like 90 degrees different from what I saw last year when I started.”

The new program intersects corporate strategy and partner needs, he said.

“Corporate strategy is clearly how do we sell more emerging technologies, specifically cloud security,” he said. “How do we mechanize the channel to be able to sell something like Infinity and how do we acquire new customers. Partners were asking for a little bit more profitability, and for predictability and clarity in the program. What we were asking for is to be able to find new ways to grow and grow primarily in the areas of new customers, Infinity and emerging technologies.”

At CPX 360, Check Point always features the new technology that “we can look forward to that will have the greatest impact on the security landscape,” said Tim Gleeson, a senior account executive with ePlus Technology. The company works with large customers that are “certainly under attack every single day.”

“I see it here first, and that’s the real value of coming here,” he said. “I’ve never seen this amount of vendors here before; every year we get more and more strategic vendors, and Check Point’s plan to bring it all together under one pane of glass is phenomenal — that’s what customers need. When there’s a leader like Check Point that can bring so much of this under one roof, so to speak, that alone is worth more than you can say to a customer.”

Jeff Cox, a sales engineer with World Wide Technology (WWT), said he’s impressed by what he’s seen at the conference, “getting closer to zero trust and everything’s moving to the endpoint.”