Cyber resilience – interview with CFO Johan Stins

IPknowledge has been providing connectivity and performance-visibility solutions for international companies for almost 20 years.
Currently these solutions are delivered fully managed: ‘Network-as-a-Service’, in fact a fully managed secure SD-WAN.

 

CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) Johan Stins sees strong growth in demand for secure connectivity to the Cloud.

Increasing importance of Cyber ​​resilience

“COVID-19 has accelerated the digitization of society enormously,” says Johan Stins. “But cybercrime has also grown enormously. According to the Dutch police, the number of cases will have doubled in 2020. Think of ransomware attacks, DDOS attacks, but also the Solarwinds hack or the leak in Microsoft Exchange that was announced earlier this year. Company data is stolen or taken hostage through ransomware. Many hackers are now targeting corporate networks. ”/em>

Fully managed secure SD-WAN

Because of the above threats, Johan Stins sees that more and more companies are opting for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that are fully protected from the internet. This is what IPknowledge provides, a so-called fully-managed secure SD-WAN. ‘Many companies are still trying to avoid the internet and cloud. The philosophy of IPknowledge is exactly opposite: to embrace it, but in the right way ‘. Security by Design is thereby crucial concept.

Alignment with the Cyber ​​Security Council

The Cyber ​​Security Council for the Netherlands recently published the report Integrated Cyber ​​Resilience approach with five important spearheads. IPknowledge focuses on spearhead 4 ‘secure processes and infrastructure’: securing critical processes in order to prevent and limit the damage as much as possible of the chance and impact of a disruptive event as a result of cyber attacks.

Integrated approach by applying SASE

IPknowledge takes over the management and security of the network infrastructure completely by means of the fully managed secure SD-WAN service developed by IPknowledge. As a guiding principle, the Security Access Service Edge (SASE) concept as defined by Gartner, hereby serves as an architectural blueprint.

“The cloud is not limited in terms of compute power and is therefore extremely suitable for carrying out the correct inspections and checks”. This is the fundamental idea behind a SASE architecture, which more and more companies are embracing because it is so complete and at the same time so simple.

Take, for example, the SASE private network infrastructure of our partner CATO Networks: it currently offers 70 nodes around the world. These nodes are interconnected and together actually form the ‘Service Edge’ of your company. The only thing you have to arrange as a customer: a safe and reliable connection to this ‘Service Edge’.

The multiple physical firewalls are thus replaced by 1 worldwide firewall ‘in the cloud’. All traffic is transparent and controlled worldwide with continuous checks for external infringement. Branches and employees thus easily and securely connect to the business applications, whether it concerns On-prem, PaaS (Azure, AWS), or SaaS (O365, SAP).

By using multiple, geographically separated paths through the internet and harnessing the power of the cloud, hackers who are targeting your company are quickly sidelined, ” says Johan Stins.

Twenty years of network expertise

Thanks to 20 years of experience in the field of network -orchestration, -monitoring and -security, in-house developed tooling and the cloud-native SASE architecture concept, IPknowledge offers a fully managed secure SD-WAN solution, as-a-Service. This ties in well with the current needs of international enterprise companies that are looking for a complete internet-based network infrastructure that is highly secure and delivered at a fixed and favorable monthly price.

Interested in the expertise of IPknowledge? Then contact us and get a free consultation with one of our network and security experts, without any further obligation.