Corero Network Security PLC (LON:CNS) Chief Executive Officer Andrew Lloyd caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the significance of their two new contract wins
Q1: This morning we saw the announcement for two significant contract wins, were these wins from existing or new customers?
A1: Actually, both of these were from existing customers. One of the things I very often talk about is the importance of our customer base and making sure that we do retain delighted customers, delighted customers tend to renew their subscriptions, they tend to buy more and, probably most importantly of all, they tend to tell their friends. So, this is further evidence of two existing Corero customers who are both delighted and are both buying more.
Q2: The move to 100 Gbps technology has been forecast for some time now, what is driving this move now?
A2: Probably two things, one is basic economics, the big service providers have clearly invested in having these 100 Gbps links installed and they now need to make some use of them.
What we tend to find is when our customers start to switch on to 100 GB, they are finding that the cost of buying a 100 Gbps link is somewhere between 4-6 times the price of 10 Gbps links so, if you like, half the price on a per gigabit per second basis. So, we’re finding that as they switch across to these larger connections they’re needing to do a technology refresh of their networking equipment to take advantage of it which is obviously driving the market for us.
The other thing in terms of 100 Gbps technology adoption is also the move to 5G technology on the mobile front, particularly in the US, and people who had traditionally deployed DDoS scrubbing centers are finding that their scrubbing capacity is insufficient and find the 100 Gbps technology to be very economic for them to deploy in scrubbing mode.
Q3: Corero’s specialty is realtime DDoS mitigation, can you share with me how these customers deploy SmartWall to deliver realtime mitigation?
A3: So, the key there is that our technology is always on and what that means is we can mitigate an attack very often in less than a second and certainly no more than a few seconds.
In order to do that ‘always on’, there are two ways to deploy, and in fact these two customers are good illustrations of that, one is physically in-line where the Corero’s SmartWall appliance is deployed at the customers edge. The other one, which is perhaps more interesting, is what we call virtually in-line where the SmartWall appliance is deployed behind an edge router and premium traffic, traffic that is suspected as including attacked traffic, is either permanently routed or is redirected through those virtual in-line or virtual scrubbing centre.
The key is always that important traffic is always attached to a SmartWall device, either physically in-line or virtually in-line so two perfect illustrations of our customers using the realtime DDoS mitigation capabilities with SmartWall to maximum effect.
