The Gately Report: Cybercriminals with AI Daunting for TD Synnex Partners

TD Synnex partners increasingly are challenged by cybercriminals leveraging AI in their attacks to increase their chances for success.

That’s according to Ed Morales, TD Synnex’s global vice president of security and high-growth business development. We spoke with him at last week’s TD Synnex Beyond Security in Boston.

During the conference, TD Synnex outlined how the distribution giant, with its portfolio of vendors, can help partners pursue high-growth technologies like cloud, AI and security, to increase growth and profitability.

“The bad actors are leveraging AI so you've got to be able to defend against those threats,” Morales said. “We’ve also seen implementation of AI pervasively through a lot of the technologies that some of our vendors are deploying. It’s pretty impressive. It’s trying to stay one step ahead.”

Equipping TD Synnex Partners

A lot of TD Synnex partners may be well equipped on network security or more baseline security, but aren’t aware of the AI enhancements vendors have added to their products, Morales said.

“So our job is to make sure that we curate all of what the vendors are providing and then provide that information to our customers at scale,” he said. “That's why you're seeing a convergence now of our trying to take to market AI around cloud and security. We're seeing that happen, so we've got to be able to be a step ahead of what's happening in the technology market and the environment. And that's not just a North American statement, that is global. A really great thing about what we do is that it pretty much spans all regions. So that's one of the biggest changes we've seen."

Digital transformation is driving a lot of partners’ end customers to cross-pollinate security, cloud and data, and AI, Morales said.

TD Synnex's Ed Morales

“They just can't keep up with the technology,” he said. “These guys are just trying to keep their businesses open, trying to keep people on staff skilled up, and they just don't have all the resources. What we try to do is provide them access to all the resources, either from the vendor perspective or from services. If they don't currently have those skills, they can leverage what we've put together.

WWith our position in the ecosystem as a conduit for the vendors and also a conduit for the partners, we can basically diffuse all the noise and give them the information they need at a timely level and in the way they need to consume it. What I understand is partners can only really adopt one new technology a year because they can only make those kinds of investments. So whatever they select, they've got to be right. So we want to take that guesswork out of that effort and make it easy for them to make those decisions based on what we've been able to learn and see in the environment that we serve.”

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