18 October 2016

Robert Stockford has been appointed head of the new practice.

Azlan has assembled a team of experts from across UK businesses to form a specialist security business unit.

The company, which is the enterprise value added distribution business of Tech Data, says its new division will focus on driving growth in security as customers make the transition to highly virtualised and hybrid infrastructures.

Robert Stockford, former director of channel sales at Forcepoin, has been appointed as head of the new unit. He joined Azlan in July 2016, specifically to work on the development of the company’s security value proposition.

His team includes 20 dedicated and specialist staff drawn from within Azlan, together with ten new recruits who have been  recently taken on. It’s claimed this brings “deep expertise” and experience in key vendors such as Cisco, IBM, Landesk, McAfee, Sonicwall, Symantec, Veritas, VMware and BlackBerry/Good Technology, together into a single, coherent team. 

Stockford says more customers are now looking to make the most of virtualised and hyper-converged infrastructures, software-defined solutions, and cloud-based appliances and services to enable more flexible, scalable and networks and mobile environments. 

As a result, he says the need for expert advice and professional services on security has never been greater.

“Azlan is providing the specialist support and professional services that will allow resellers to address the security challenges faced by end users and the opportunities that presents for resellers.” 

The firm adds that its aim is to work closely with expert security resellers and systems integrators and leverage its strength in other sectors of the market to accelerate security solutions and services sales as part of integrated propositions.  

As well as solutions and services, it will offer specialist support and consultancy to help converged solutions resellers and managed services providers enhance and extend their propositions.

Citing estimates by Markets and Markets, Azlan says the total cyber security market worldwide is estimated to grow from $122.45 billion in 2016 to $202.36 billion by 2021, a CAGR of 10.6 per cent.This includes all solutions and services, as well asboth on-premise and cloud delivery.