We here at Tarsus Distribution, a South African IT distributor, continue to expand our roles in the channel with new security solutions, complementing our focus on cloud-driven delivery. We recently announced a partnership with leading vendor Micro Focus earlier this year, bringing its security solutions brand, CyberRes, on board. CyberRes offers a comprehensive range of products and services that build the resilience of hybrid enterprises. Many of its services operate through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and platform deployment, accelerating time to value. Its approach resonates with a philosophy that good security is about an ecosystem, not only point interventions. 

"CyberRes stands for Cyber Resilience," explained Ramsés Gallego, CyberRes' International Chief Technology Officer, during a recent visit to Tarsus HQ in Johannesburg. "Security is not enough - you want to offer resilience to customers, and that means a comprehensive approach that covers different aspects of their technology stack. Services and platforms are crucial parts of this strategy." 

Marianne van der Pluym CyberRes Global VP: MSSP Strategy and Sales believes that the right partner is essential for this approach, MSSP partners can deliver CyberRes solutions as outcomes-based security solutions to end customers via the channel ecosystems. This is one of the reasons why we chose to partner with Tarsus. Through a managed service offering Tarsus Managed Service Offering (TOD) in partnership with CyberRes, guides partners and end customers through the process of creating resilience suited to hybrid environments. “By providing CyberRes solutions through ToD, Tarsus enables our reseller and managed service partners to quickly scale from proofs-of-concept to robust, multi-faceted solutions that create ongoing resilience against attacks and fast recovery from potential breaches” 

CyberRes' as-a-service approach dovetails with the service-orientated journey Tarsus is on. We have established several ways for our channel customers to adopt and deploy solutions quickly to customers, including Tarsus on Demand (ToD), our cloud marketplace. ToD covers the many bases of a hybrid cloud market, from hosted functions and storage to market collaboration and business development. “The CyberRes security solutions fit very well with this vision,” said Alan Hawkins, GM of Software & Security at Tarsus: 

"Security solutions are very complex. There are not a lot of skills lying around and they're not cheap. So, how do we help partners get past that barrier? End customers don't necessarily just want to pay money upfront. By leveraging service models such as the CyberRes suite, we can break things down, make it a little bit simpler, identify problems and help generate that interest within the customer to get budget approved. We support our channel customers to help their end customers move forward." 

Leveraging Platforms and SaaS for the Hybrid Era 

Platform service models are highly effective. By leveraging platform systems, channel companies can quickly help their customers discover issues and opportunities within their complex IT environments.

Channel providers can select what they need, balancing between their internal capacities and the support they receive from Tarsus. The benefit for end customers is that they can start with focused areas and scale up as they see proof of value. 

Key to this approach is CyberRes' data discovery and identity services, including classification, audits, and other assessment tools. "The platform is essential to work with assessments," said Anna Russell, CyberRes' Worldwide Vice President of Sales & Strategy. "To support the channel's ability to assess a customer's environment quickly is crucial, and the reverse is a major barrier to entry. These are collaborative engagements. Tarsus recruits channel representatives, enables them and help drive adoption by showing quick value to customers. We invest in our trusted partners in the market to be able to do that for us." As-a-service and platform solutions are modular, quick to demonstrate and relatively painless to consume. 

"Think of a typical customer," adds Greg Clark, Director of Product Management at CyberRes. "They have an encryption solution. They have a key management solution. They have a data discovery solution. They have data access management, and data access governance all running in the enterprise. All those are point solutions. They are all scattered. Our goal at CyberRes is to converge those capabilities on a single platform. We talk about data discovery because that is the initial launch point of our platform. We bring data discovery for structured and unstructured data, data governance and data protection capabilities that customers are looking for, in a way they can consume as a service. That is how our partners reduce a lot of that complexity for end customers." 

Offerings to the channel 

“Tarsus is one of only two partners in South Africa offering Micro Focus CyberRes' platform-based SaaS security solutions to the channel. These options are designed for efficient deployment and quick realisation of value for end customers, thus driving performance for our reseller and MSSP partners” says Marianne Van der Pluym. 

Learn more: 

About CyberRes 

About Tarsus Distribution 

This guest post was written by Alan Hawkins, GM of Software & Security at Tarsus.