Mark Baker (Check Point Software)
Check Point’s New Zealand country manager Mark Baker is "invigorated" by his dive into the world of cyber security as the two-year mark approaches.
Having joined Check Point in October 2021, the channel veteran and Reseller News Hall of Fame inductee shared with Reseller News that his foray into cyber security has been “a really nice decision”.
“it’s been a great team to join,” he said. “It’s a really stable team of people with some great expertise and a lot of the tenures within the team are quite impressive.
“It’s invigorating and challenging to be part of building and helping organisations build the right capabilities to protect their organizations and users to navigate a very fast paced changing landscape.”
Prior to Check Point, Baker was with IBM New Zealand for nearly five years, where he was general manager systems and software and general manager digital and channel.
Before that Baker worked for Westcon-Comstor for over a decade, finishing that stint in December 2016 as country manager.
With15 local staff, the Check Point team have a “strong sales capability”, which Baker said points to its solutions expertise. The small but stable team means Baker is not currently looking to hire.
“We’re really happy with our levels of resource in New Zealand,” he said.
Baker pointed specifically to two recent hires that have bolstered the team.
Regan Burke joined the company in February as channel account manager. Joining from his previous role as alliance director at NTT, Baker said that Burke brings a “different level of perspective” to Check Point’s partnership operations.
Meanwhile, Steve Wotten joined the local team as major account manager. He also joined in February from NTT, where he was chief technology officer and has a history of senior roles in “making and executing strategic technology decisions,” according to Baker.
Despite the strong internal team, Baker said the skills shortage is a challenge that is being felt by the industry as a whole.
“There’s a lot of pressure around skill sets and people moving around the industry … it has become a real challenge for a lot of organisations to maintain their skill sets,” he said.
Baker sees this as an opportunity for Check Point to support the industry and position itself as a leader in skills development and retention through partnerships.
“For us, the approach has always been an investment in our partnerships, whether it be an end customer or the business partner community,” he said.
“The only thing that we can really do is ensure we’re supporting the industry and their challenges the best we can around skill set building and certifications and complementing that with our levels of expertise including things like security assessment and consultation.”
Access to Check Point’s expertise has been streamlined through its refreshed managed security service provider (MSSP) programme, which launched in October.
The programme was touted to increase partner profitability and security through empowering a partner service-led approach.
Alongside training courses, enablement services and business planning metrics, Check Point claimed that the new programme would strengthen partners’ ability to manage sophisticated cyber defence requirements for customers.
Baker said the uptake of the programme has been “strong”.
“The partners absolutely endorse what we do on that front. From my background in the channel, it’s been really nice to part of a vendor that has that very well sorted … we’ve got a loyal base of business partners,” he said.
With the ever-widening attack vector complicating cyber security operations, Check Point is doubling down on its ‘three c’s’ approach to attack prevention – taking a comprehensive, consolidated and collaborative approach to keeping pace with cyber threats.
“We’ve always had a really strong prevention-first strategy. We don’t want to identify the issue and works backwards from there – our policy has always been that we’ve got to prevent it,” he said.
He also said the complexity level in the cyber security market is "incredibly big now, the speed at which things are moving has changed a lot”.
“We’ve got to make sure we keep pace with making sure our customers have got a comprehensive solution across all of those attack vectors,” he added.
Aiding customers to keep track of their investment with Check Point is the Infinity Total Protection security consumption model, recently upgraded to be offered through a per-user, per-year subscription.
The model allows customers to access their current level of protection as well as gain a longer-term vision of how they will grow in a “cost-effective way”.
“It enables them to be way more flexible in their engagement and allows them to be way more flexible around the technology they have,” Baker said.
“It protects their existing investment but allows them flexibility to grow and change as they move into their cloud environment. A big part of that has been the addition of email security and endpoint security.”
He said that email security in particular is a key area of focus for the local market due to the challenge that organisations are facing with "sub optimal solutions" creating "significant" exposure.
Check Point's solution aims to easily deploy a non-invasive assessment/trial to demonstrate where the exposure exists, which Baker said is proving popular with clients.
