Best Wishes from Ben

Hacker attempts to sell data of 500 million WhatsApp users on dark web.

Twitter confirms data from 5.4 million accounts was stolen.

Cyber attack on a hospital in Belgium

Ransomware at a game retailer in Belgium

Cyber attack launched on City of Antwerp’s IT system.

…

These are just a few of the more than 4100 publicly disclosed data breaches in the last year, equating to approximately 22 billion records being exposed. And the actual figures for 2022 are expected to massively exceed this number.

It is clear that security still is, and will remain, an area of focus globally. For all organizations. Within all segments.  Consequently, the cybersecurity infrastructure market will keep evolving and, moving forward, we will continue to see intriguing trends.

As in previous years, there have been several mergers and acquisitions throughout the year.  Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Vectra,  Thales, Tenable, Proofpoint, Netskope, all vendors in our portfolio, have made one or multiple acquisitions over the last 12 months. The hyperscalers also continue to make investments in the cybersecurity market with Google Cloud incorporating Mandiant, the market leader in threat intelligence and expertise.

A number of our vendors received investment funds for a combined value of more than 1.5B$. Among our emerging vendors, Axonius received 200M$ Series E funding, Wasabi 265M$, Salt Security 140M$ and Silverfort 65M$ Series C funding. Moreover, we also saw a few established vendors like Nutanix and Thales securing new capital.

As a key differentiator of Exclusive Networks Belgium is our expertise, added value and quality, we are continuously investing in these areas. In 2022, we have extended our pre-sales technical team with three new security technophiles. We also bolstered our GSI team. So we now have three dedicated managers focusing solely on GSI partners.  And to top things off we welcomed Bart Homblé in October as our new Business Development Manager for Fortinet.

To help reinforce Belgium’s cyber security resilience at national level, Exclusive Networks Belgium joined the Cyber Security Coalition. This unique coalition brings together the academic world, the public authorities and the private sector in Belgium to fight cybercrime.

According to our tradition, we added new and exciting vendors to our portfolio. We are happy to welcome CYMULATE, a provider of automated continuous security testing, and TENABLE, focusing on IT vulnerability and exposure management.

Concerning 2023 much is being said about an inevitable recession.  But will there actually be one?  The National Bank of Belgium hasn’t detected any signs of it yet.  However, recession or not: security will remain a major point of concern and interest for companies.

We as Exclusive Networks BeLux have been able to arrive where we are today thanks to all of you: our reseller partners, vendors and end customers. I want to “THANK YOU” for your continued commitment, support and above all, trust and confidence in doing business with us.

My very best wishes for a fruitful, successful and secure 2023,

Ben Aelbrecht

Regional Director BeNeLux at Exclusive Networks