When it comes to dealing with cybersecurity and building a network of partners to service its customers, Ingram Micro Inc. has been especially active over the past year. In the month of February alone, the company announced a deal with mobile software vendor Lookout Inc., sealed a new partnership with Kaspersky Lab Inc., and inked a Mideast distribution agreement with BitDefender LLC. All of that followed the company’s acquisition of cybersecurity firm Cloud Harmonics Inc. in late December.

“You think about all of these breaches that happen in the news. It’s not that [companies] didn’t have the technology, they missed an alert, or they didn’t have it all deployed,” said Eric Kohl (pictured), vice president of the advanced solutions, networking and security business solutions unit at Ingram Micro. “We want to be able to help our partners solve for that.”

Kohl visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Fortinet Accelerate event in Las Vegas, Nevada, and spoke with co-hosts Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Peter Burris (@plburris). They discussed Ingram Micro’s partnership with Fortinet and demand the company continues to see from clients looking for solutions in network security. (* Disclosure below.)

Using AI better than paying hackers

The recent announcement of security enhancement FortiGuard AI was greeted enthusiastically by Kohl. The new artificial intelligence-based solution is a self-evolving threat detection system designed to leverage machine learning for continuous training in enterprise network models and vulnerabilities.

“It all goes back to making the technology easier to use,” Kohl said. “Paying your hacker $100,000 is not the answer.”

With the new deals announced over the past several weeks, and its continued partnership with Fortinet Inc., Ingram Micro is strengthening the channel ecosystem of security products for its 200,000 customers globally.

“There’s incredible demand in security today,” Kohl said. “I like to call the security space the beautiful disaster. It’s a mess; it’s complicated; it’s scary. The threat attacks are new and different, and they’re never going to stop.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. (* Disclosure: Ingram Micro Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Ingram Micro nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE