Bridging the Cybersecurity gap

While we await the official statistics from 2024, did you know that over 1,000 Australian small and medium-sized businesses faced cybersecurity incidents in 2023? The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) reported 1,100 incidents, and the total number from the past year will likely surpass this. Cyber threats are rapidly evolving, necessitating proactive cybersecurity strategies.

A survey with Tech Research Asia in 2024 revealed that only 24% of 500 CIOs seek IT partners for cybersecurity solutions, highlighting a significant opportunity for partners in 2025.  

"Cybersecurity is one of the four key pillars we've identified where we believe partners can diversify their offerings. Partners need to constantly diversify and upskill. The research indicates that organisations are keen on partner involvement and ready to invest in it. This creates a major opportunity for partners to broaden their offerings, boost their expertise, and enhance their strategic importance. Leverage our expertise to navigate the complexities of the cybersecurity market." - Yasser Elgammal, General Manager - Sales.

We spoke to our Dicker Data team and consolidated their opinions and advice on market trends, robust cybersecurity frameworks and considerations for partners.

"Dicker Data is experiencing significant growth with our security vendors. Our partners are eager to explore market opportunities, and we are aiding them in developing and deploying comprehensive security solutions for their customers. We offer presales technical support, opportunity scoping, demos, proof of concept, and MSP setup. Additionally, we provide access to a diverse range of vendors covering various security and cyber resilience needs." - Pennie Stevens, General Manager - Software.

1. Embed Cybersecurity Awareness into work culture & provide continuous education

Ask your customers this...

‘Do you think your team could spot a phishing email from a mile away?’

Cybersecurity education and awareness should be a top priority in every organisation, and a fundamental part of work culture. We’re observing a shift in hackers’ tactics, with a growing emphasis on targeting employees.  

Tony Lam, Business Innovations Manager, is stressing the importance of continuous cyber awareness education, with figures to support this.  

“It has become evident that the primary cause of all cyber breaches relates to human error and now accounts for over 80% of all security breaches. Dicker Data has teamed up with several vendors who offer complete solutions to test, train, measure and reduce human risk. Cyber Aware, an Australian based company, offers a Security Awareness Training platform and Phishing Simulations programs, which are excellent options for this.” 

2. Cloud Security & Supply Chain Risks focus 

Securing cloud configurations and maintaining compliance across platforms is vital, with many businesses operating in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Prioritise the protection of data, applications, workloads and services that are hosted in the cloud. Supply chain attacks also remain a prominent threat. Many customers rely on external suppliers and partners to operate. If these third parties have weak security practices – they can become entry points for cyberattacks. 

George Guirguis, Business Manager, Security and Presales - Cisco, believes these solutions will help keep your customer’s ahead of potential threats.  

“Utilise comprehensive cyber resilience programs. Partners should not only deploy reactive measures but also help customers develop and implement comprehensive resilience plans. This includes strategies for data recovery, regular security audits, and ensuring backup systems are distributed and secure, reducing the impact of any potential breach.” 

Our Dicker Data teams work closely with vendors who have robust portfolios to help you streamline networking and security for end-customers to provide simple, flexible solutions that scale to meet requirements.   

Veeam, ExaGrid, Cohesity and OpenText play a crucial role in this area by providing advanced backup, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection. Veeam's secure immutable backups ensure that businesses can recover quickly from attacks, while ExaGrid’s tiered backup storage offers a resilient, scalable approach to protecting critical data. Cohesity's modern data security and management platform is designed to keep your business safe in today's ransomware-infused markets. OpenText Server Backup provides a secure, all-in-one backup and recovery solution for physical, virtual, and legacy systems, with flexible local, cloud, and hybrid configurations for quick recovery of critical systems.

Citrix provides a range of cloud security solutions designed to enhance the security and accessibility of all types of applications. Citrix Secure Private Access and Citrix Workspace enable seamless remote work and multi-cloud deployments, as well as providing IT with granular access controls to cloud and non-cloud applications. 

Cloudflare handles a huge slice of the internet’s traffic, so it’s got eyes on threats most others miss. Every DDoS attempt, bot attack, or exploit hit somewhere helps them fine-tune protection for everyone. That intel feeds straight into their ZTNA and AppSec solution, meaning customers get smarter, faster security without lifting a finger. It’s like having a global early warning system baked into your stack, keeping you secure today and ready for whatever’s next.

Commvault's Cloud platform uses it’s AI-powered Cloud to proactively prevent ransomware with layered defences and early warnings. Backups simply aren’t enough. True cyber resilience involves preparation before an attack, continuous adaptation and being flexible. Commvault have the tools and features to prevent the bad actors reaching your customers crown jewels BEFORE the event of an attack. 

Offices are no longer confined to a single location, and the mobile workforce uses diverse devices and applications, heightening security risks. Securing your workforce is crucial. Check Point’s SASE solution offers secure access to any resource, from any device, anywhere, through a zero-trust hybrid network. This unified security approach lowers costs, simplifies management, ensures consistent policies, and avoids compliance issues.

When it comes to RSA and how they can help customers, RSA’s password less tech, backed by decades of MFA muscle, cuts out the biggest weak link—passwords. No passwords means nothing to phish, steal, or reuse. Add in device biometrics and risk-based checks, and attackers don’t stand a chance. It’s simple for users, brutal for bad guys. Real security, no gimmicks.

Armis is a cyber exposure management platform that addresses threats from unmanaged and IoT devices. It discovers all devices on and off networks, analyses behaviour to identify risks, and protects critical information. Armis is agentless, integrates with existing security products, and uses a vast device knowledgebase to assess risks, detect threats, and recommend remediation actions.

3. Adopting proactive threat detection and AI-driven solutions 

AI has elevated the cybersecurity battleground to dizzying heights. But just as hackers are using AI to their advantage, organisations across the world have created solutions driven by AI to elevate their systems. AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions are quickly becoming the number one choice for customers due to the vast benefits, including automation, early identification of anomalies, faster responses and preventing small incidents from escalating.  

In 2024, 50% of the 500 CIOs we surveyed are ‘actively looking’ for a partner to help with AI, and more than half indicated they have a dedicated AI budget. Reflecting on the past 12-18 months, George Guirguis believes adopting proactive threat detection and AI-driven solutions is imperative. 

“With AI increasingly being used by attackers for advanced phishing and malware creation, partners need to help their customers implement AI-powered threat detection tools that can adapt and respond in real-time. This allows for early identification of anomalies and faster responses, preventing small incidents from escalating. Cisco has made numerous advancements and contributions in this area.”  

Cisco XDR, Splunk Integration and Hypershield are solutions that utilise AI to detect threats across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments, automating responses and reducing alert fatigue. Similarly, Citrix solutions like Netscaler Intelligent App Analytics use machine learning algorithms to analyse large volumes of data and proactively identify and mitigate security threats to ensure uninterrupted access to critical business applications. These features help organisations maintain seamless operations while proactively addressing emerging threats. 

Adam Thurtell, Dicker Data’s Technical Pre-Sales Specialist says Nutanix's platform provides a strong option for AI-driven solutions.

“Nutanix is a multi-hybrid cloud platform, we have products in our portfolio that have AI-driven approach to threat detection, compliance auditing, and real-time security analytics across hybrid multi-cloud environments. As an example with Nutanix Security Central, we can monitor compliance against security frameworks, like NIST, offering automated remediation recommendations. With Nutanix Flow we monitor and analyse east/west network traffic between workloads and then make AI-driven decisions to restrict unauthorized lateral movement through micro-segmentation.”  

Cohesity's Rapid Recovery allows organisations to restore clean, threat-scanned data quickly and confidently. It can instantly recover virtual machines, databases, and NAS data to any point in time and location, reducing downtime. 

Unstructured data is a large part of a company’s data. Poor management of folders and files increases attack risks. Businesses struggle to differentiate between necessary data, personal information, sensitive data, and outdated data, known as Dark Data. Arctera Data Insights provides visibility into Dark Data, enabling classification, actionable insights, and real-time file monitoring to detect risky behaviour. 

Trend Micro's Vision One Platform with Cyber Risk Exposure Management offers enhanced, proactive security. It provides visibility across environments, evaluates organizational risk, and leverages AI and ML for remediation recommendations. This platform integrates advanced threat feeds, scans dark web content, and aligns with the Mitre Att@ck framework.

One of our newest vendors, CrowdStrike protects critical areas like endpoints, cloud workloads, identity, and data to prevent breaches. CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security integrates all aspects of cloud security into a unified console, offering deep visibility, detection, and real-time response across the cloud-native stack. It provides unified agent and agentless protection to stop cloud breaches, real-time detection and protection against identity-based attacks, and full visibility to uncover threats before they impact your business.

Trustwave specialise in Cybersecurity Assessments and Pen Testing. Their AppDetectivePRO database security scanner identifies vulnerabilities, configuration mistakes, and access control issues to protect against data breaches. Additionally, Trustwave’s SpiderLabs team, composed of certified experts in vulnerability, penetration, and scenario testing, collaborates with your security team to identify vulnerabilities.

We have dedicated experts attached to each of our vendors who can help design, build and deploy solutions to fit your customer's needs.

Nationwide Effort  

Australia has declared its plans to become a world leader in cybersecurity by 2030. From 2022-23 cybersecurity incidents surged by 23% - with more than 94,000 reported cases, equating to one attack every six minutes. The Albanese government has recently introduced legislation to parliament that has signified Australia’s first standalone cybersecurity act, aimed at protecting businesses and consumers from cyber-attacks. Under the Cyber Security Act 2024 organisations in critical infrastructure - such as energy, transport, communications, health and finance - will be required to strengthen programs used to secure individuals' private data. If you have customers in these areas, you should be assessing their cybersecurity infrastructure and developing strategies on how to elevate their current measures to meet the new industry standards. 

We recommend you leverage a Cybersecurity framework  

Implementing a cybersecurity framework is an excellent starting point to help guide the building of a more secure and resilient IT infrastructure for your customers. The model must fit each IT business, it should be simple, easy to communicate, and executable. Start with an audit of your customer’s environment.  

How to build success in Cybersecurity – Checklist   

• Develop diverse and thorough cybersecurity offerings  

• Design solutions that are simple to implement   

• Build flexible pricing models to meet customer budget requirements  

• Invest in leveraging your base to fuel your growth  

• Embed solutions with AI   

• Offer comprehensive training   

• Safeguard your investments by building a trusted ecosystem  

Our Dicker Data team can help you successfully navigate the current market opportunities, here’s how:  

• Access to a comprehensive range of technology solutions  

• Assess current technology offerings & address gaps with new technologies  

• Presales & Solution Architects for every technology  

• Knowledgeable and accessible sales support  

• Tailored training and certification for your staff  

• Enabling you to enter new markets & reach new customers  

• Deploy secure and compliant solutions with ease  

As a value-added distributor, we provide the tools and expertise to help you design and deliver top-notch cybersecurity solutions. Customers want seamless integration, employee training, and comprehensive security measures. Use our experts and resources to create effective, customised solutions. We'll support you every step of the way to succeed in the cybersecurity market.