Where is this year going? It seems like only yesterday that we were celebrating the festive period, but what a fantastic first half of 2022 it has been!
We have hosted six different events this year and attended many more, such as InfoSec in London, which went on despite the rail strikes. My personal highlight of the year thus far has to be the Brigantia Cyber Essentials Summit, which took place in May. The event was jam-packed with extremely valuable content, including presentations from key vendor partners Heimdal, CyberSmart, and Keeper, as well as two very interesting guest speakers covering topics like: the rise of cyber insurance, what makes a good cyber insurance policy, tales of an incident responder, and, on a completely different topic, how to use a "trojan horse" to win new clients! The room was packed with existing and prospective partners, many of whom have bought into the Brigantia story and are actively trading with us.
We also launched four new vendors in the first half of 2022: Action1, Awingu, eSentire, and Trillion.- Action1 is an RMM tool for MSPs.
- Awingu provides proprietary HTML5 to RDP technologies that allow users to access and use all of their business applications and files from the same workspace on any device, at any time, and from any location.
- eSentire provides a comprehensive, multi-signal Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service that provides cutting-edge protection 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep cybercriminals at bay.
- Trillion is a dark web monitoring tool that tracks, correlates, and analyses billions of stolen usernames and passwords in real time, looking for digital identities that may belong to your customers.
We are very happy with how these new vendors have seamlessly fitted into our portfolio. We have a truly unique vendor portfolio, and I want to thank them for their ongoing support as well as our partners for believing in us.
I am also extremely proud to announce that the Brigantia Team has been named "Cyber Security Distributor of the Year" at the Technology Reseller Awards, as well as "Distributor of the Year, Sub £500 Million" at the prestigious IT Europa Awards. We are honoured to be recognised in this way, and the team and I will continue to strive every day to provide the best levels of customer service possible, setting a new standard for distributors in the UK, and we will continue to innovate.
Finally, I recently completed an interview for a magazine that will be published in the coming weeks, and the final question asked to me was if I were an MSP, where I would be focusing my efforts in the next six months to further tighten and layer up end user cyber-defences? There are obviously many different points of view on this subject, but here is my response:
1. Endpoint DNS level filtering (over 91 percent of ransomware obtains its encryption key via DNS level traffic) - whether Heimdal or something else, please implement a technology here for your clients
2. Use a password manager (Brigantia has seen a 300 percent increase in sales of this technology in the last 12 months) - whether Keeper or something else, use one for your clients or someone else will! Not to mention the significant security benefits of using one.
Looking to the future we have a packed H2 schedule! We will be releasing our 2022 partner survey in the middle of July, while we will be building up towards our first Annual Partner Day since the start of COVID. As always, if I or any of the team can be of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.
