With AI-powered security and deep collaboration, the trio is helping enterprises build resilient digital defences.
Amid a rapidly evolving threat landscape, organisations are under increasing pressure to secure their digital ecosystems with speed, intelligence, and agility. Cisco, in collaboration with strategic partners like Comstor and Teksalah, is helping enterprises navigate this complexity with AI-native solutions, zero trust frameworks, and proactive threat intelligence.
Renton D’Souza, Vice President, Comstor MEA, and Binu T, Business Unit Head – Enterprise Infrastructure, Teksalah, shed light on how their long-standing partnership is delivering integrated, scalable cybersecurity outcomes that meet today’s enterprise demands while preparing for tomorrow’s risks.
Interview Excerpts:
How is Cisco ensuring that partners and customers stay ahead of the evolving IT landscape?
Renton D’Souza: As the IT landscape rapidly evolves, Cisco is ensuring that partners and customers stay ahead by driving innovations within its Security Cloud. This includes leveraging AI and machine learning to enhance security capabilities across a unified, cross-domain platform. These advancements enable businesses to better protect applications, devices, users, and data while improving incident detection, response, and recovery. By integrating AI-native security solutions, such as those developed with Splunk, Cisco helps customers adapt to sophisticated threats in multi-cloud environments.
Cyberthreat is increasing at an unprecedented pace, with over 2200 cyberattacks taking place every day. How has your partnership with Cisco enhanced your ability to meet the cybersecurity needs of your customers?
Binu T: Cyberthreats are evolving faster than ever. More so with the use of AI by threat actors and it really underscores the urgency for proactive, scalable defences. Our long-standing partnership with Cisco has been instrumental in helping us stay ahead of this curve and deliver robust cybersecurity outcomes for our enterprise customers.
With a partnership spanning over 18+ years, we have consistently delivered integrated security solutions by combining Cisco’s industry-leading security architecture with our deep domain expertise across data centre, cloud, and application security. Our collaboration with cisco has enables us to design and implement unified, policy-driven cybersecurity frameworks that scale seamlessly with our customers evolving business needs.
Cisco is a global leader in enterprise cybersecurity, and its strengths lie in offering an integrated, end-to-end security architecture that covers the full breadth of an enterprise’s digital footprint, from the network core to the cloud and the user edge. Ultimately, our partnership with Cisco empowers us to integrate controls, deliver measurable risk reduction, operational resilience, and business continuity. Outcomes that enterprise customers value in today’s threat landscape.
The past few years were marked by significant cybersecurity challenges, including major ransomware incidents and the growing availability of AI tools. As cyber threats are anticipated to become both more frequent and sophisticated, what are some of the key security trends and solutions likely to gain prominence?
Binu T: Cybersecurity landscape is undergoing rapid transformation, driven by the rise in security incidents including ransomware, the weaponization of AI, and the expanding digital attack surface. In response, several key trends and solutions are emerging as critical priorities in our view:
Zero Trust Becomes Foundational, Not Optional
With perimeter-based security becoming obsolete, Zero Trust approach has become essential. It enforces strict identity verification for every user and device, regardless of location, minimizing lateral movement within networks.
AI-Augmented Defence
Deeply Integration and active use of AI and ML security platforms finding its way into security operations to handle alert fatigue, detect anomalies, and accelerate incident response. Solutions like Cisco XDR and SecureX are leverage AI for correlation, prioritisation, and automation across the security stack.
Cloud & Cloud Native Application Security
As enterprises grow into more cloud adoption, there is this sharper focus on securing cloud native workloads, containers, and APIs. Solutions like SASE, CNAPP, CSPM, and CASB are already gaining a lot of traction, alongside DevSecOps practices to embed security earlier in the application lifecycle.
Threat Intelligence and Proactive Defence
Real-time, actionable threat intelligence is also becoming essential to outpace emerging threats. Cisco Talos, one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams globally, plays a key role here feeding insights into detection, blocking, and response.
Managed Security
Given the talent shortage and operational complexity, we see more organizations are leaning on managed and co-managed security services for 24/7 threat monitoring, compliance, and response particularly for mid-market and global enterprises.
Continuous Compliance, governance
With evolving complex regulations, industry-specific mandates, enterprises are shifting from one-time audits to continuous compliance monitoring. There is a growing need for Integrated audit trails and built-in policy enforcement solutions that embed security controls across cloud, network, endpoints and the enterprise data.
Enterprises will need to adopt an integrated, intelligence-driven approach combining Zero Trust, AI, cloud security, and managed services to stay resilient in this threat environment that is always evolving.
How has your strategic partnership with Comstor has helped you in taking the latest Cisco security solutions to the customers?
Binu T: Our collaboration with Westcon-Comstor is built over a decade now. As our preferred distribution partner and value-add player they have helped us become fast to market, and in facilitating necessary enablement’s and logistics. Through this partnership, we have benefited from their exceptional partner support provided by their expert team. Also, we have leveraged marketing growth funds to drive demand generation and end-customer enablement sessions time to time.
Image Credit: Comstor & Teksalah
