In a cybersecurity distribution market crowded with logos and line cards, CyberKnight is charting a different course. At the helm, Avinash Advani is focused not just on growth, but on delivering a unified, Zero Trust-led advisory narrative.
How’s the year shaping up for you business-wise?
It’s good that you’re asking me this now, at the beginning of July, because we just closed out our first half of the year.
It’s been a good year—actually, a very interesting one. This is another big investment year for CyberKnight. Last year was also significant; we grew from 60 people to around 100. This year, we’ve already grown from 100 to 155, and that investment has already been made. We’ve also got a few more people coming onboard in July and August.
So, yes, the push for exponential growth is still very much there. Our ambition has been to maintain the same level of growth across 2024 and 2025. That was—and still is—the plan.
Now, coming into 2025, we had a conservative outlook for Q1 due to Ramadan. But we actually blew past those expectations. Q1 ended up being extremely strong.
Then came Q2. Again, we had a cautious view due to the Eid holidays. It turned out to be a very tough quarter, but I’m proud and humbled to say that overall—collectively for H1—we’ve overachieved our target by 2%, hitting 102% year-to-date.
So am I happy? Yes. But I’m not complacent. The real challenge lies ahead in H2. Q3 and Q4 will carry the real weight of the year.
So how many vendors do you have in your portfolio now?
The number currently sits at approximately 40 vendors. We’re aiming to be within the 35 range ideally.
Again, let me repeat—there’s ongoing consolidation happening continuously. And as we grow as a company, I believe that number will continue to scale down. In my opinion, the magic number lies somewhere between 30 and 40.
Now, is there a fixed number? No. There’s no rule of thumb that says it has to be exactly X vendors. But you do need enough critical mass to effectively tell your story.
Cybersecurity distribution space is getting more crowded every day. What would you say is your differentiation?
In cybersecurity and value-added distribution, it’s critical to have a clear, differentiated story—not just a long product line card.
There are many distributors out there with 60, 70 vendors on their line card. But when you ask, “How do you bring these vendors together into a unified narrative?”—the answers are often vague.
They’ll say things like, “We have a value division, a volume division,” or “We organize around cloud, data center, and networking.” But those are just segmentations—not actual strategic alignment.
At CyberKnight, we don’t do that.
Every vendor and every offering is mapped to a story—our Zero Trust framework, and we follow the eight micro-perimeters of Zero Trust:
- Identity
- Device security (IT, OT, IoT)
- Networks
- Applications
- Data
- Visibility
- Analytics
- Automation & Governance
The key here is: We go to market with an advisory-led message, not just products. We’re not here to sell tools—we’re here to educate enterprise and government customers by creating awareness around best practices and industry trends.
You mentioned another layer beyond Zero Trust—can you expand on that?
Starting this year, we accelerated our advisory practice in a major way.
Think about it—today’s cybersecurity landscape is influenced by two powerful forces. On one hand, global analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC provide deep insights into evolving cybersecurity trends and the factors driving enterprise security investments. These insights shape how organizations around the world prioritize their security strategies. On the other hand, organizations must also adhere to increasingly complex local compliance mandates. These include directives from entities like the UAE Cybersecurity Council, Saudi Arabia’s NCA, SAMA, and Qatar’s NIA, among others. These frameworks play a critical role in defining what security excellence and operational readiness look like at a national level.
To address this dual reality, we’ve built a second layer into our approach. Beyond simply aligning with a Zero Trust framework, we help customers navigate and integrate both local compliance requirements and global cybersecurity trends into their strategy. This means ensuring they have the right security controls in place to satisfy regulatory expectations, while also building toward a modern and resilient security posture aligned with what the most respected industry analysts see as the future.
Our advisory practice is at the core of this effort. Rather than just pushing products, we help customers develop long-term roadmaps that are tied to both compliance and innovation. We guide them in making informed, strategic decisions that go far beyond transactional purchases. For example, a customer might start out thinking they need a firewall, but through our engagement, they begin to focus instead on achieving a mature security operations framework, strengthening compliance, and building cyber resilience that aligns with both local mandates and international best practices.
We’re not just selling tools—we’re guiding customers through their cybersecurity evolution with strategy-first conversations.
But do you provide Zero Trust as a service?
One of the things we’re doing very aggressively now is reshaping what it means to be a value-added distributor, especially as the industry itself is evolving. As you know, vendors are increasingly shifting toward SaaS offerings, managed services (MSS), and similar models.
But it’s important to remember—at our core, we remain true to our DNA. We are a 100% channel-focused, value-added distributor. We will never sell directly to a customer; we are not a reseller. We are, and will always remain, a tier-two player. So, any evolution we undertake must support that position without exception.
That said, we are constantly exploring how to innovate around services that we can offer through our reseller channel only, never directly to end customers. We’re now working on a new wave of unique, channel-enabled services under what we call our CyberKnight 2.0 journey—a strategic evolution of our business. One of the first two offerings in that journey is Zero Trust as a Service.
This is being powered by one of our strategic vendors, ON2IT. In fact, the founder of ON2IT, John Kindervag, is widely credited with creating the concept of Zero Trust itself. While he is no longer with Ontinue, the company remains a pioneer in Zero Trust as a Service offerings. We’ve partnered with them to bring this innovative service to market through our partners, not directly. We will manage the service locally, building the infrastructure and instance within the Middle East—potentially in multiple countries. This is still in progress, but the blueprint is taking shape, and you’ll start seeing more of this in the coming months.
The second initiative under our Solutions as a Service umbrella is Automation as a Service. This isn’t your traditional SOAR-as-a-service model. Rather, it’s an agentic AI-powered automation offering. We’re not building the AI ourselves; instead, we’re leveraging the capabilities of one of our existing vendors who is already a leader in automation and AI-driven security operations.
Now, some might think of it as just a validation platform, but it’s much more than that. Vulnerability validation is just one use case—there are many others. We’ve decided to begin with three specific use cases. But again, this offering is about packaging powerful automation use cases powered by agentic AI, and delivering them through the channel, helping partners provide high-value services to their customers.
