Networks Unlimited Africa
Insult added to Injury as DDoS Extortion Attacker Impersonates well-known Threat Actors
Extortion and robbery while wearing a disguise are not new crimes in human history, but a threat actor has recently taken this into the online arena on the global stage, using distributed denial of service (DDoS) as the weapon, while pretending to be someone else. This is as reported in a recent threat advisory released by NETSCOUT’s ASERT division (ATLAS Security Engineering & Response Team), which is tasked with providing threat intelligence trends and research. Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa, says, “We have seen DDoS ransom attacks before – for example in October last year, South African banks were hit by a wave of ransom-driven DDoS attacks, as were other targets in other countries around the same time. However, with...
ProLabs Enables Networking Upgrades for Healthcare Industry
Technology is transforming the way people shop, bank and travel, and perhaps one of its next big challenges is to make major inroads into how they receive healthcare. But reports on progress in the area of healthcare and technology uptake are conflicting. According to global consultants McKinsey, based on their healthcare research released in 2019, “The adoption of digitally enabled tools for diagnosis, treatment, and management… has been modest”. On the other hand, German-based global consultancy firm Roland Berger, in the same year, released a study entitled “Future of Health: An industry goes digital – faster than expected”. According to the 2019 Roland Berger paper, in which 400 international healthcare experts were asked to predict the medium to long-term changes in healthcare, the he...
Networks Unlimited Wins 2 Channel Awards at Fortinet Africa Virtual Security Day
Networks Unlimited Africa, a leading value-added distributor operating within sub-Saharan Africa, received two awards, namely the Technical Support Distributor of the Year: Southern Africa award and the DLB Growth Distributor of the Year: East Africa award at the recent Fortinet Africa Virtual Security Day. This was the first time that the event took place via a virtual platform, due to the current restrictions around the global COVID-19 pandemic. The online nature of the awards ceremony also ensured that this broadened its reach to other parts of Africa, and not only within South Africa. Stefan van de Giessen, General Manager: Cybersecurity at Networks Unlimited Africa, comments, “We have proudly maintained our business partnership with Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated and a...
How SMEs Should Protect Themselves from Cybersecurity Attacks
Stefan van de Giessen, General Manager: Cybersecurity at Networks Unlimited Africa Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are widely acknowledged as playing a critical role in South Africa’s economy, and yet they are also potentially more at risk in terms of their ongoing survival than larger enterprises. According to a recent McKinsey report, SMEs in South Africa employ between 50 and 60% of the country’s workforce across all sectors. At the same time, SMEs arguably face a number of challenges, which can potentially weigh on them more heavily than on larger enterprises. These particular areas of concern include attracting customers; maintaining profitability; increasing revenue; facing greater uncertainty during economic down-turns, and securing financing for expansion. Now add in the issues a...
Networks Unlimited Africa keeps Value Offering Promises despite Lockdown Challenges
Anton Jacobsz, Networks Unlimited CEO Despite challenges of constraint, Networks Unlimited Africa has managed to maintain its standards during the lockdown in order to keep its unique partner offering intact. So says Anton Jacobsz, CEO at this leading value-added distributor in the sub-Saharan Africa market. He comments, “Networks Unlimited delivers products and solutions that are affordable, better than the competition, and with faster service delivery to our partners and end-users within the converged technology, data centre, networking, and security landscapes. “We are proud to have maintained our standards during the lockdown despite the difficult environment, especially during the initial phase of the early ‘hard’ lockdown. I commend the three general managers of our divisions and the...
Silver Peak SD-WAN Capabilities Facilitate your SASE Journey
There are many acronyms in the world of IT, and SASE – the Secure Access Service Edge – is one of the latest that is gaining traction. It comes from a Gartner report published a year ago, and has been gathering strength ever since. The report is entitled ‘The Future of Network Security is in the Cloud’, and in it, the global research and advisory firm introduces the term to describe the need for the combination of wide-area network (WAN) transformation together with security transformation at the edge, to enable enterprises to realise all the benefits of moving applications and workloads to the cloud. This is according to a recent Silver Peak blog written by Derek Granath, Silver Peak VP of product marketing, who explains that SASE (pronounced ‘sassy’) involves a certain amount of ne...
Unpacking Intelligent Infrastructure in the Modern Data Centre
As the world’s largest IT companies realise the importance of ‘intelligent infrastructure’ in the modern data centre, the race is on between storage competitors to provide products and solutions that are actually truly intelligent, and not merely standard infrastructure. So says Marcel Fouché, Networking and Storage General Manager at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa, which partners in South Africa with Tintri, a provider of intelligent infrastructure for virtualised and non-virtualised enterprise IT environments. He clarifies, “In order to get to grips with this challenging issue, Tintri recently held a free webcast to unpack the differences between intelligent and standard infrastructure, looking at the topic from the perspectives of the customer, the vendor and th...
NZ Stock Exchange DDoS Attacks Remind Enterprises to Check Defence Security
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa At the end of August, a series of cyberattacks on the New Zealand Stock Exchange over five consecutive days forced it to halt trading for a number of hours for four out of those five days. The attacks raised questions about the stock exchange’s security, as well as the threat actors’ underlying motives. “This was a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) incidents, in which threat actors disrupted the normal traffic to the enterprise by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic at volumes that the system just couldn’t handle,” explains Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa. “In financial services terms, the New Zealand Stock Exchange is a re...
Altaro Endpoint Backup Brings MSPs Relief during Pandemic
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa Managed service providers (MSPs) know that even though they may try to enforce group policies to store data only on their network or in the cloud, end users often store some files locally on their laptops and PCs. Wherever it may reside, the fact is that data can also be lost or damaged due to physical disasters, loss, theft or cyberattacks. And so, with more employees than ever working remotely, there has never been a greater need to make sure that offsite resources are regularly backed up. Altaro, a leader in backup solutions for MSPs, IT resellers and IT departments, has designed a solution to simplify backup for an organisation’s on-premises and roaming Windows desktops and laptops. Its solutions are distribute...
ProLabs Enables Campus Network Upgrades to Facilitate Online Learning
A number of key South African universities have reported good progress with online learning for their students since the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the country’s lockdown situation. This is encouraging, as it means the wheels of learning are able to continue turning, but it also brings serious issues around data and bandwidth provision. So says Marcel Fouché, networking and storage general manager at value-added distributor, Networks Unlimited Africa. He explains, “Before the pandemic, growing data consumption meant that the demand for bandwidth had already resulted in a race between consumers’ appetites and providers’ best efforts to supply it. Today, as the world moves ever more swiftly into remote working and learning, the implications for bandwidth are more critical than ever.” “Uni...
NETSCOUT Proves it’s Ready to Take on Threat Actors
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa Midway through June, American citizens thought the country was experiencing the world’s biggest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which seemed to be taking down internet service providers, social media platforms, and online services from gaming to banking. It very quickly turned out that no such attack was underway at all, as reported by Forbes, but the most interesting point was that so many citizens in the world’s most technology-enabled Western country believed the story so quickly. “A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic,” explains Ris...
Thinking Beyond the Pandemic with Silver Peak SD-WAN
Organizations will have to look at re-engaging with their customers and business prospects in an entirely new way in a post-COVID-19 economy. This will most likely force an assessment of business model design and delivery, in which the wide-area network (WAN) will play an important role in defining success. So says Kristian Thyregod, vice president for Europe, Middle East, and Africa at SD-WAN solution provider, Silver Peak. Writing in a blog entry, Thyregod explains, “Forward-thinking companies continuously plan and execute their enterprise architectures to not only accommodate current requirements, but also foresee developments of future requirements – e.g. a temporary, or even permanent, shift in business model design and execution. “…The WAN is the connecting tissue across the enterpri...
