Kenna Security Hires Industry Veteran to Drive Channel Recruitment

Cybersecurity risk averter Kenna Security has hired Symantec veteran Trevor Crompton to build a channel of UK sales partners.

Kenna Security will want Crompton to work the same magic he pulled off at his last job at RiskIQ, where he kept 60 resellers, 20 consultants and 10 systems integrators reasonably happy across EMEA. Crompton used  Obscure Technologies in Africa and Ignition Technologies in the UK. There is no word yet if Kenna will use them this time.

At RisqIQ the distributors developed business with both end users and partners. Crompton has promised  the Kenna channel will be 100 per cent channel across EMEA. At RiskIQ Crompton says he redirected all direct business through resellers.

As the GDPR deadline closes in, companies are being over alarmed by all the alerts created by vulnerability and application security scanners and penetration testers. The wealth of information means security bosses don’t know where to start to defend their businesses. Kenna’s partners can solve this problem by managing the risk. The system reads vulnerability data, compares it to exploit data and calculates the risk score before create a fix priority list.

The challenge for Kenna Security partners is to do the same for chief information security officers (CISOs), who are increasingly over-whelmed by a noisy and overhyped security market.

“A reseller with access to a prospect’s vulnerability data can demonstrate this in a one-hour meeting,” says Kenna CEO Karim Toubba, “that’s a time to value that is rare in this industry.”

Market analyst Gartner expects security spending to grow from $28.7 billion across EMEA now to $36.9 billion by 2021. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will drive 65 percent of those buying decisions as companies desperately try to plug data leaks.

Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca, warned that GDPR was a complex issues but Kenna did provide risk vulnerability assessments with a deep and meaningful score.

He added that if the firm has managed to layer the GDPR rules around itself, meaning that it can carry out an assessment of the readiness of an organisation for GDPR, then it would have some appeal.

“Is Kenna a solution, or just a small part of it? If it is just a reworking of its vulnerability assessment tool, then it still needs underlying scanners and analysers alongside it,” says Longbottom.

However, GDPR is complex. It calls for proper domain expertise in order to assess what a company needs to do, how and how it adapts its system as the rules of the GDPR problem game changes.

The big enterprises will already have large consultancies or GDPR specialists in their offices. However, they’d be far too expensive for mid-sized and small companies. This is where Kenna hopes it can plug the gap.