14 01732 759725 TR: What attracts you to the UK market now, and why is this a good time for Stormshield to expand its presence in the UK and Ireland? JP: In the UK as well as in the rest of Europe, there is great concern about relinquishing control, not having sovereignty and being subject to decisions that powerful foreign countries may make to suit their own agendas, which might be inimical to UK or European interests. Today, there is a more pressing need to have a European sovereign solution accessible to UK government bodies, the public sector and private organisations. TR: You mention sovereignty as a growing trend. Please, could you explain in what ways Stormshield firewalls assist with that. JP: We assist with that on different levels. First, our own code, embedded in our products, is developed by our R&D, which is based 100% in France. The external code that we also include in the product is mostly open source. So, we have very good control over the code we put inside the product and the external code that we bring in through technology partnerships, mostly with European vendors. We have a very, very small dependency on non-European organisations and vendors. This is very important because with the American Cloud Security Act even if you use something on European soil someone I’m not saying we have never had a vulnerability or that we never will, but we have a strong continuous process of hardening the firewall through security by design, at the conception level, in the general infrastructure of the code and the different modules within the product, and in how the product is coded. The fact that the code is audited by third-party national agencies as part of our products’ certification and qualification process is quite a differentiator for us. Regarding the OT sector, we are not just a firewall doing some network segmentation between the different zones of the network. We are able to perform deep packet inspection, what we call DPI, allowing us to analyse network messages in depth and choose which to accept or reject. Lastly, I would say we are not just another firewall vendor because we don’t only provide firewalls. We also have a Stormshield client to protect users and assets wherever they are, especially when they are not behind a firewall but in a home office or mobile, or where devices are spread over a large area, like IoTs. We have another product range, Stormshield Data Security, which is all about protecting data with encryption anywhere – within emails, on user devices, on file servers, in the cloud, especially in cloud collaboration platforms like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. In May, Hammer Distribution and Stormshield formed a strategic partnership to distribute the European cybersecurity leader’s range of Next Generation Firewalls in the UK and Ireland. In this conversation with Technology Reseller Editor James Goulding, Dominic Ryles, Director of Cyber and Cloud at Hammer, and Julien Paffumi, Head of Product Management at Stormshield, explain why the company’s firewalls are such an interesting proposition for MSPs and resellers at a time of escalating cyber threats and greater focus on IT sovereignty. Technology Reseller (TR): Julien, please could you give a quick introduction to Stormshield for those who don’t know the company. Julien Paffumi (JP): Stormshield is a European trusted cyber security products provider. We are a wholly owned subsidiary of the cyber division of Airbus Defence and Space Cyber Programmes (formerly Airbus CyberSecurity) and for more than 20 years our mission has been to ensure cyber serenity for our customers. We protect traditional IT infrastructure for diverse organisations, public and private, large and small. In addition, we have a dedicated product line to protect OT (operational technology) in industrial environments, hospitals, utilities and the like. We protect nationwide public infrastructure, like communications for the emergency services, and do projects in the defence sector. For example, we have an extra ruggedised firewall product with very specific connectivity designed to be put into helicopters and planes. TR: In what ways are you not just another firewall vendor? JP: The first thing that differentiates us is European sovereignty. We are the largest and the most experienced European firewall vendor, which makes us a great alternative to technologies that come from, say, the US or Israel. Then, there is the matter of trust. More and more cyber-attacks are getting into organisations through the firewall because of a vulnerability in the firewall at the conception level or at the implementation level. Not just another firewall vendor CYBER SECURITY Dominic Ryles Julien Paffumi
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