Exclusive Networks Africa has secured an agreement with HCLSoftware, the software business division of HCLTech, which will see the global trusted cybersecurity specialist for digital infrastructure add the HCLBigFix endpoint management platform to its existing cybersecurity offering.
According to Anton Jacobsz, Managing Director of Exclusive Networks Africa, the agreement came about due to HCLSoftware’s requirement for a distribution partner with extensive reach into the African continent.
“Exclusive Networks Africa’s local footprint, which spans South Africa, the Southern African Development Community(SADC) and Indian Ocean Islands, as well as both West and East Africa, was especially attractive to HCLSoftware due to the company’s focus on local market penetration.”
Says Pravesh Gosain, Associate Product Management Director – HCLSoftware Intelligent Automation Cloud: “In today’s complex, hyper-connected and dynamic technology landscape, it’s important for companies to harness the power of digital transformation, data, security and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver excellence at scale and speed.
“With its rapid adoption of digital transformation projects, HCLSoftware has identified Africa as one of the focal areas for growth across many of its solution verticals, including Digital Workplace and Enterprise Security, prioritising digital experience, cybersecurity and ensuring personal data protection.”
HCL BigFix: a centralised approach to manage and secure diverse endpoints
“The addition of intelligence-driven automation and cyberfocus security to remote endpoints has become necessary in our digital world,” Gosain continues, “as has governing your entire enterprise infrastructure with automated workflows, connectors, data sources and end-to-end monitoring, to align with the digital transformation strategy of an organisation.“
HCL BigFix provides a unified architecture leveraging AI technology to effectively manage and ensure compliance of all servers, desktops and mobile devices, whether in the office, at home or in the cloud. It streamlines management processes, reduces operating costs and enhances endpoint security across nearly 100 operating system versions. For this reason, BigFix is used across all industries globally.
“Aligning with Exclusive Networks Africa is critical to HCL BigFix’s growth on the continent,” Gosain comments. “With dedicated regional resources across the continent, Exclusive Networks Africa is able to stay connected to market demands via its vast local partner networks, continually helping customers to accelerate toward a trusted, more secure digital world. Particular focus will be given to the financial, manufacturing, retail, telecommunication and government sectors within the region.
“Exclusive Networks Africa is also a distribution partner of exposure management company Tenable. This is important, as HCL BigFix is fully integrated with Tenable out of the box, meaning that our customers have the added benefit of a single touchpoint for two market-leading, complementary solutions. The HCL BigFix and Tenable integration helps organisations see everything, predict what matters, and act confidently to reduce risk quickly.”
Enhancing Exclusive Networks Africa’s portfolio
“From an Exclusive Networks Africa standpoint, the addition of HCLBigFix helps to round out our current portfolio,” explains Jacobsz. “In line with our strategic focus on bringing the industry’s top cybersecurity products to African businesses, HCLBigFix is able to offer the world’s fastest vulnerability remediation, which helps IT operations teams to discover, prioritise and patch critical vulnerabilities, reducing cybersecurity risk in real time. This is of particular importance to today’s CISO in terms of providing cost efficiencies and removing the risk of human error.
“In addition, the solution ensures continuous configuration compliance aligned with industry-standard security benchmarks, and is able to manage every workstation, server and mobile device during its entire lifecycle – from provisioning through retirement,” Jacobsz adds. “These benefits also support the Exclusive Networks global mission of building a totally trusted digital world for all individuals and organisations.”
HCL BigFix secures over 100 million endpoints globally because of its unprecedented vulnerability remediation, maintaining continuous endpoint compliance and managing endpoints of all types, operating systems and locations. “With the assistance of Exclusive Networks Africa, we plan to increase local awareness and knowledge of HCL BigFix, aiming to participate in more industry events, as well as holding our own partner and customer events across the continent,” says Gosain.
“Furthermore, through our currently free online instructor-led training, combined with our certification programmes, we also plan to upskill as many customer and partner resources as possible, while replicating learnings from global success stories to ensure expedited adoption and assured results.”
