Pretoria, 12 March 2020 –   BCX, one of South Africa’s leading ICT companies, has extended its Network offering to include two additional security solutions, namely Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Stealthwatch.

BCX has an established Managed Security practice offering using Cisco’s security infrastructure, including firewall services, as well as Cisco’s SD-WAN and Meraki. “The addition of Umbrella and Stealthwatch to our extensive product suite will allow BCX to provide an integrated security solution to our customers,” says Carel Booysen, Executive, Data Networks Portfolio Manager at BCX.

Disruptive trends such as public cloud adoption and digital transformation are presenting great opportunities for businesses to modernise, while improving their operational efficiencies, reducing costs and enhancing customer experiences.  “With digital transformation comes great risk”, explains Booysen, “CIOs and CTOs are under greater pressure from unscrupulous hackers to future proof their networks.”

According to the Global Cyber Security company, Kaspersky Lab, Malware attacks in South Africa have increased by 22% in the first quarter of 2019.  “That’s a significant increase,” says Booysen, “it is a global phenomenon and requires solutions that provides immediate, real-time answers.”

BCX has expanded its Managed Security offering to include Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Stealthwatch for this purpose. 

Cisco Umbrella is a cloud security platform that provides a first line of defence against any internet threat.  The solution aids businesses to automatically identify malicious activity in real-time. It uses the Domain Name System (DNS) as its main mechanism to get traffic to the cloud platform and block requests from malicious domains, IP’s and URLs before the user’s connection is established. The M2M capability allows it to analyse and automatically identify unusual activity before it reaches the network or end points.  Umbrella combines multiple security functions into a single solution, so you can enrich your incident response data and easily extend protection to devices and locations anywhere. Because Umbrella is delivered from the cloud, it is the easiest way to protect your users everywhere in minutes.

“Cisco Stealthwatch is a state-of-the-art real-time security analytics solution that provides visibility, detection and incident mitigation functionality to enable a cyber safe network,” says Booysen.

According to Garsen Naidu, Cisco South Africa Country Manager: “Stealthwatch is a Cisco product that gives the CIO or CTO a view of who is on the network and what they are doing using telemetry from the customer’s network infrastructure.  It also uses behavioural analytics to identify abnormalities in the network and alerts decision makers to these changes providing them with a quicker response time to possible threats.”

Stealthwatch is also capable of integration into automated response systems that can shut down affected devices anywhere to contain the threat, further preventing any destruction to the network.

BCX is a Cisco Gold Partner and was awarded the 2019 Cisco Global Service Provider EMEAR managed Network Service Provider of the year, as well as the 2019 MEA Cisco Managed Service Partner of the year award.