Working towards a well earned Christmas with our families, we’re excited to announce that the Murdoch Webster family continues to grow during 2020 with a key strategic appointment.

Joining us last week, Leanne brings a real flair towards business and technical problem solving as a Senior Sales Executive.

Having cut her teeth in the fires of real estate, Leanne joins us from Telstra Purple where she drove successful security-centric outcomes for her diverse range of online customers.

Leanne brings genuine warmth, friendliness and energy to the Murdoch Webster team, her attention to detail in translating your employee’s needs into practical strategic IT plans is built on 20+ years of industry experience.

Understanding our focus on Human IT, Leanne blends people and technology driven outcomes effortlessly – expect a friendly call from her in the near future!

If you’d like to reach out to Leanne for a conversation she can be contacted on ltaylor@mwtg.com.au.

Regards,

Chris Mearns
CTO & Founder

 

Delivering secure remote working and learning environments as part of the response to the pandemic has highlighted the shifting nature of socially engineered phishing, vishing and smishing attacks for many of our online customers. Leading these conversation proactively, we’re pleased to formally announce our newest strategic vendor partnership with KnowBe4, the global leader in Security Awareness & Training.

This partnership extends our security-first approach enabling client’s to educate and empower employees, users and customers to proactively protect themselves and guard their productivity from today’s complex behavioral based attacks.

Furthermore, we are pleased that Forrester Research have recognised KnowBe4 as a Leader in their most recent report: The Forrester Wave: Security Awareness and Training Solutions, Q1 2020.

KnowBe4’s enviable platform is powered by business strategy excellence. KnowBe4’s vast security content library is packed with multiple types of training, including award-winning videos like “The Inside Man.” The solution includes 1,000 training modules from 10 different content producers, 3,500 phishing templates, and a culture assessment. The vendor delivers an engaging learner experience that meets different learner preferences.

KnowBe4’s platform was recognised for it’s strong strategic focus and comprehensive market offering.

You can receive the document directly from KnowBe4’s website should you wish to review the full report.

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With 2020 throwing hefty transformation challenges across the table for businesses of all shapes and sizes; we’ve joined many of our customer’s IT teams in simply being impressed by the ‘can do’ attitude on display by staff, users and customers.

Rapid adoption of new IT platforms, tools and processes has maintained productivity whilst we’ve transitioned to a more online work / life arrangement. Let’s keep that momentum up, it’s time to start considering how businesses can further improve the employee experience beyond the challenges of 2020.

“Many companies underinvest in the employee experience and hyperautomation is one lever they can pull to improve that.”

— Siyong Liu, General Manager of CFB Bots, Hyperautomation 2020 webinar

Investing in hyperautomation leveraging UiPath’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform is the definitive opportunity to eliminate traditionally tedious, repetitive tasks performed by employees across all aspects of your online organisation.

Consider opportunities in improving HR and the contact center experience as the tip of the iceberg when it comes to developing an organisation-wide process automation plan.

Keen on assessing how RPA can continue to evolve the human experience within your online organisation? Contact us for a conversation and to schedule a consultation today.

I’m excited and pleased to welcome Michael Burt to the Leadership team at Murdoch Webster.

As an energetic veteran of the Australian IT industry, Michael brings a wealth of experience fostering highly productive sales and technical teams for businesses experiencing rapid transformational growth, always focusing on delivering exceptional client outcomes.

Having achieved significant growth milestones across 2019/2020, the Leadership team look forward to harnessing Michael’s talents as we deepen our partnerships, capabilities and alignment to our customer’s success.

Whilst 2020 has undoubtedly been a tumultuous year, I’d like to thank our customers for trusting us to deliver on their business’ unique strategic IT goals and working closely with us on some really exciting projects.

More exciting news to come shortly.

Regards,

Chris Mearns
CTO & Founder

Media coverage at CRN.

Working from home is a tricky proposition for many of us throughout this global pandemic. Fortunately there are some enterprise grade remote office and collaboration solutions being made available under some great offers (free!) for your teams to better navigate a productive day.

Without further adieu, let’s take a look at a few options worthy of exploration:

 

Palo Alto Networks – Multiple Free Offers

  • For existing NGFW customers, all of our Next-Generation Firewalls support always-on, secure access with GlobalProtect™. Customers can receive a free trial GlobalProtect subscription for 90 days, and customers who need additional NGFW hardware capacity can contact us so we can help expedite hardware shipments.

  • For new Prisma™ Access customers, time is of the essence, so we’re offering free, accelerated deployment and onboarding of remote users.

  • For existing Prisma Access customers who need to onboard additional capacity, we will cover unanticipated spikes at no additional cost for 90 days.

You can find lots of great detail on Palo Alto Network’s COVID-19 Response Centre.

Cisco Webex for Virtual Environments

  • 90 days free up to 100 users

  • Cisco Webex offers enable virtual education and work from home setup using free licenses.

  • Cisco CX offers self-service onboarding resources for free and QuickStart Services to assist and accelerate your enterprise deployment.

Learn more details on the Cisco Webex offer on their COVID-19 portal.

Nutanix Xi Frame – 30-day unlimited user trial

Enable users to activate a work-from-home arrangement using a web browser. No fuss, no frills.

Take Xi Frame for a spin and or register for an unlimited user 30-day free trial.

Should you wish to discuss or rapidly deploy these options, Murdoch Webster are here to help – please contact us at your convenience.

MEDIA RELEASE

Murdoch Webster Technology Group named as Vine 2020 Partner.

The Victorian ICT Network for Education (VINE) has announced a partnership with Murdoch Webster Technology Group to become a Partner in 2020.

The partnership highlights MWTG’s drive to facilitate the use of technology in Victorian schools. MWTG help provide “Human IT” to IT decision makers in schools. It is the personal element that enables MWTG to assist in providing modern, intelligent IT environments that PROTECT, TRANSFORM and AUTOMATE schools. Technical excellence – delivered with finesse.

“Enabling our students to lead a high tech, productive life across campus requires a nimble technology partner aligned with our strategic goals. Murdoch Webster remains one of our most trusted providers” – Mark Humphries from Nossal High School articulates the value MWTG provide.

“MWTG is a partner that consistency delivers innovative technology solutions that help our member be able to provide even more value to schools they represent. I like the fact, their Founder and CTO, Chris Mearns started as an ICT Manager in a school. He understands the challenges and him and his team continues to help schools innovate. MWTG bring it all together. It is a delight to have them as part of our community” Vine President Rob Flavell

 

“As a key Dell Technologies Partner, for almost 15 years, MWTG has a deep understanding of how technology can be seamlessly integrated to improve the educational experience of students, and educational institutions, today and into the future. Their expertise spans across the Dell Technologies’ technology and solutions portfolio, which will enable them to provide state-of-the-art technology solutions to learning institutions across Victoria,” said Shant Soghomonian, General Manager, Channel, Dell Technologies Australia and New Zealand.

For more information about VINE visit www.vine.vic.edu.au

For more information on Murdoch Webster Technology group visit www.mwtg.com.au

Partnering in depth with Palo Alto Networks, we are thrilled to announce our official Certified Professional Services Provider (CPSP) accreditation.

The CPSP program serves to both recognise our elite engineering heroes and critically the best practice methodologies our customers enjoy when working with Murdoch Webster.

A fantastic strategic partner of over 10 years, Murdoch Webster recently achieved our Certified Professional Services Partner (CPSP) accreditation placing them amongst our elite partners globally. Clients should feel confident that a CPSP has gone through a rigorous assessment and review process regarding their knowledge and work with our technologies.

I’m particularly excited with Murdoch Webster, they have embraced not only our technology, but also our Best Practice Assessment approach for security.. – Bryan Stibbard, Director Channels and Alliances.

As one of few Australian owned and operated Palo Alto Networks Platinum Innovator partners, Murdoch Webster can deliver full end-to-end cybersecurity support to our customers from discovery, design, education, full transformation services and ongoing management (MSSP).

Palo Alto Networks continue to be a cornerstone partner for us across our cybersecurity practice. We’re pleased to unlock CPSP status and will keep investing our time and resources to deepen our technical knowledge and capabilities for our customers. – Chris Mearns, Founder & CTO

We pride ourselves on being pro-active here at Murdoch Webster, let’s work together to ensure your Palo Alto Networks footprint performs to your business’ needs and growth expectations.

Are you concerned about your security posture and looking for greater protection across your corporate applications? Reach out to us regarding a Palo Alto Networks Best Practice Assessment today.

As compute power becomes ever cheaper and easier to access, so is the amount of automated cyber-attacks that are utilising the power of the cloud.

According to the Office of the Australian Commissioner’s (OAIC) Report the amount of breach notifications increased in the last reporting quarter to June 2019. Malicious or criminal attacks accounts for 62% of all breach notifications in that quarter whilst 34% were a direct result of human error.

 

We’re pleased to announce that Palo Alto Networks have continued to be ‘up and to the right’ in 2019’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls.

With firewall providers embedding multiple security features in firewalls and enabling integration and automation capabilities with other security products, firewalls are evolving into network security platforms.

Positioned as a leader in the Network Firewall market for the eight time in a row, the report dives into the evolving industry trends and how Palo Alto Networks continues to tackle these challenges with best-in-class solutions.

Palo Alto Networks

Santa Clara-based Palo Alto Networks is a large security vendor with more than 5,800 global employees, shipping firewalls since 2007. In addition to enterprise firewall physical and virtual appliances, the vendor’s products include EDR software, threat intelligence, SaaS security, cloud compliance and policy management tools, and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR). The vendor has delivered integrations between its offerings as a security operating platform, managing it from its Panorama management console. Palo Alto Networks has made use of its Cortex offering to build out its third-party ecosystem, enabling partners to build applications that interact with the Palo Alto Networks platform.

Palo Alto Networks firewalls continue to lead the firewall market share, showing strong revenue growth. Its firewalls have the most visibility on firewall shortlists in Gartner client inquiries. Introduction of Prisma Access and the Prisma cloud offering show the vendor’s growing focus on cloud services.

Company news includes the acquisition of Twistlock, a container security technology, and PureSec, a serverless security solution. In addition, the vendor has recently repackaged its cloud security solutions under the name Prisma and its offering of solutions for security operations under the name Cortex.

During 1H19, Palo Alto Networks released its 9.0 version, introducing DNS Security Service. As part of this release, it also introduced a series of line cards for its PA-7000 line of appliances, in hopes of increasing throughputs with security protections enabled.

Strengths

  • Sales Strategy: Gartner has noted an increasing number of Palo Alto Networks firewalls being bought under the vendor’s ELA contract as part of a larger security platform play. Some Gartner clients express interest in using the Panorama management platform as the orchestration point for the vendor’s integrated solutions. Surveyed customers and resellers value the platform approach.

  • Offering: Palo Alto Networks is the first hardware-based firewall vendor offering direct FWaaS as a SaaS model. Its Prisma Access FWaaS offers outbound filtering capabilities. Gartner has seen some positive adoption of the product for branch offices and roaming user use cases.

  • Sales Strategy: Customers report that more of their Palo Alto Networks spend is on subscriptions rather than hardware, making security budgeting more predictable. Surveyed customers rated Palo Alto Networks’ firewall as one of the most likely firewalls they were considering renewing without conducting a competitive evaluation.

  • Product Execution: In 1H19, Gartner clients reported improved SSL decryption performance. If this improvement continues, the enhanced capability, plus the line cards introduced for the PA-7000 Series to improve performance, will make Palo Alto Networks more suitable for large-scale data center deployments.

  • Product Strategy: The Twistlock and PureSec acquisitions demonstrate a vision of anticipating customers’ mid- to long-term needs as they construct new workloads using microservices and serverless environments. Palo Alto Networks is building a very broad cloud ecosystem, announcing new public cloud support for Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, and for private cloud/SDN and hybrid use cases, with support for Cisco Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS), VMware Cloud for AWS and NSX, and Nutanix.

  • Client Feedback: Surveyed firewall respondents list Palo Alto Networks as the vendor they most often evaluate. This tracks with Gartner client inquiries, as Palo Alto Networks is the vendor most visible on client shortlists.

  • Customer Experience: Gartner clients have highly rated the vendor’s presales team making the evaluation period smoother. They cite its presales services as being highly professional in terms of offering quality of support during the evaluation period irrespective of the size of the deal — something they indicate other competitors lack.

Cautions

  • Pricing: Even with improved price/performance ratios at the branch office, price is frequently cited by Gartner clients as a reason not to select Palo Alto Networks. The chassis-based data center firewalls (PA-7050 and PA-7080) are called out as being very expensive compared to other solutions.

  • Product Strategy: As the vendor continues to expand its product portfolio by acquiring early-stage security technologies. Gartner observes that these are sometimes released to customers before reaching maturity, leading to early customer dissatisfaction. Before purchasing these new products, Gartner recommends that clients carefully evaluate the capabilities of new product acquisitions to ensure that they can fulfill their requirements.

  • Execution: Palo Alto Networks came to market with a tightly engineered firewall, which was also evident in early product acquisitions such as Cyvera (endpoint traps) and Morta Security (integrated into WildFire). However, the increasing pace of acquisitions over the past few years has resulted in loosely federated components without the same level of integration seen previously. This is evident in recent acquisitions such as Evident.io, RedLock, CirroSecure (now Prisma SaaS), Demisto, Secdo and LightCyber which were branded as stand-alone product lines and recently repackaged under the Prisma and Cortex offerings .

  • Product Strategy: Gartner clients and surveyed customers and partners continue to note that early versions after a major software release have bugs and are not production-ready. Very large releases require more time to stabilize.

  • Product Execution: Gartner clients note performance issues within public cloud environments. Some cite the necessity of deploying high-availability (HA) pairs of virtual firewalls in IaaS cloud, thus increasing costs and the solution’s operational footprint, and adding to a less-than-smooth deployment experience on the public cloud.

  • Feature: Palo Alto Networks firewalls lack an integrated SD-WAN feature and offer it through partnerships with third-party vendors. The vendor also lacks a cloud-based management portal offered as a SaaS model.

  • Customer Feedback: Surveyed clients have indicated a decline in the quality of technical support, with the growing number of customers in the vendor’s installed base.

A cornerstone partner within our cybersecurity practice, we enjoy a deep understanding of their technologies and deploy high-performance security platforms that adapt to each client’s evolving security posture.

You can download the document directly from Palo Alto Network’s website should you wish to review the full report.

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As a technology driven provider of security, infrastructure and automation solutions for our customers, we are very selective with our key strategic partners.

We are pleased to announce that our newest strategic partner, UiPath have been recognised by Gartner in the most recent (July) 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation Software.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a digital enablement technology that predominantly leverages a combination of user interface (UI) and surface-level features to create scripts that automate routine, predictable data transcription work.

UiPath’s platform was noted as highest in both completeness of vision and ability to execute. In short, this means Gartner believes they have the best technical solution in the marketplace.

UiPath

UiPath is positioned in the Leaders quadrant. It has a strong partner ecosystem, active investor backing, focused brand building and a loyal customer base. The company is headquartered in New York City, with approximately 1,900 employees distributed worldwide. This evaluation is based on UiPath v2018.3.1 and UiPath Go!

Strengths

  • Marketing Strategy: UiPath’s well-structured partner ecosystem includes more than 100 technology partners that offer complementary technology and tools. This enables it to support integrations with major products and applications covering BPM, process mining and AI. The company has penetrated a wide variety of industries and has representation in 19 countries. In our customer reference survey, almost all customers cited UiPath’s product performance, financial viability and strong product roadmap as the top factors influencing their purchasing decisions.

  • Product: UiPath’s RPA platform provides an intuitive user experience across a range of RPA personas, including business users, citizen developers and seasoned IT developers. It has relatively strong security, resilience and integration options.

  • Customer Experience: In our customer reference survey, users gave UiPath mostly above-average scores across almost all dimensions of customer satisfaction. Customer references cited strong integration features, security and resilience capabilities. UiPath also looks to drive customer success by encouraging users to collaborate and solve problems through its UiPath RPA Academy, its Community Forum and Slack Community channel. Across these engagement mechanisms, more than 30,000 active users have developed more than 200 reusable components.

Cautions

  • Product: Although UiPath has a goal of creating a user-friendly tool for business and tech-savvy developers, some of Gartner’s reference customers had challenges with its orchestrator and dashboard experience. Customers cited that the dashboard features are not purely low-code/no-code. In many cases, even though the product collected the data, customers had to develop their own representations of that information.

  • Product Offering Strategy: UiPath lags on its cloud strategy. As of the 2018.3 release, UiPath’s Cloud Enterprise RPA offering had not rolled out, although UiPath operates a hosted cloud for its community users and enterprises conducting POCs and pilots. UiPath plans to roll out its RPA cloud version in 2019, and it had existing customers deployed at the time of this research. It is still unproven, compared with other vendors with established cloud offerings.

  • Customer Experience: Despite UiPath’s narrative around AI/machine learning, NLP and chatbot integration, customers cite the product’s lack of maturity in the AI space. In many cases, customers expected an easy-to-consume, plug-and-play machine learning feature. However, they found they had to build/enhance their machine learning models more than they expected. Many customers cited lack of direct API connectors when integrating with major ERP and CRM platforms.

You can download the document directly from UiPath’s website should you wish to review the full report.

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