Information security executive Doros Hadjizenonos, formerly with Check Point South Africa, joined cyber security firm Fortinet as regional sales director, effective 1 July 2018.

Fortinet stated that the appointment "bolsters" its Southern Africa team which the company says is seeing an increase in local demand for next-generation network and content security solutions "uniquely synchronised through the Fortinet Security Fabric".

Hadjizenonos told ITWeb Africa that the decision to join Fortinet was because the company "had a breadth of solutions that covers all areas of security" and he wanted to work for "an international security vendor that is highly rated by independent 3rd party organisations like Gartner and NSS."

He believes there is huge potential to have a more holistic security discussion with customers, discussion that he says ties into Fortinet's Security Fabric architecture.

According to Hadjizenonos, this is an architectural approach that unifies security technologies deployed across the network, including multi-cloud, endpoints, e-mail and web applications, and network access points, into a single security system.

"(the system) is integrated out of the box and allows the technologies to share threat intelligence and automatically adapt to contain the threat and provide dynamic, automated security. These solutions are then enhanced with a unified correlation, management, orchestration, and analysis system," he continues.

Hadjizenonos says the plan is to grow Fortinet in the region and "solicit additional support for the channel and strengthening pre-and-post sales support"

"The immediate strategy is to look at how to grow our already established business with SMB and to expand into the larger Enterprise accounts. Fortinet has a breadth of solutions that protects the smallest business all the way to the largest enterprise. We will also be looking at expanding further into our neighbouring countries where the security demand is high. We have already invested this year into making sure our channel is supported both from a sales and pre-sales perspective and we will continue to work with our strategic partners to ensure they have all the necessary tools and support to grow our mutual business together."

The biggest challenge going forward, according to Hadjizenonos, is to ensure the right level of knowledge (both sales and technical) is transferred to channel partners.

"With the shortage of skilled security engineers in South Africa this makes it slightly more difficult to maintain the skills in an organisation, but I am encouraged with our training system and the level of knowledge that exists in our resellers."

In the company's announcement, Perry Hutton, Regional Vice President – Africa at Fortinet, said, "Doros brings with him a wealth of experience in this sector, and we're delighted to welcome him to the team."