Kanguru Appoints PRO TECHnology as Exclusive Distributor and Partner for the Middle East: Hardware-Encrypted USB Drives, Remote Management and Drive Duplicators, with Local Support and a Technical Team in Dubai

The announcement

Kanguru published the news on 1 September 2021 under the headline “Kanguru Announces Partnership With Dubai-Based IT Solutions Provider: PRO TECHnology”. The release described PRO TECHnology as a provider of IT solutions to enterprise and corporate customers in business continuity, data protection, archiving and compliance, and said the alliance gave Kanguru a way to bring local support for its products into the Middle East: the Defender hardware-encrypted USB drives, remote management for drives that hold sensitive data, and drive duplication equipment.

Nate Cote, Executive Vice President of Kanguru, said the partnership brought “a significant improvement in local expertise and support which is critical for our customer experience.” That sentence is the whole idea. Kanguru's drives were already sold around the world, but a buyer in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi who wanted to see one, ask a question or make a warranty claim had to deal with a company on the other side of the world. From August 2021 they could deal with PRO TECHnology in Dubai instead.

PRO TECHnology took the range to GITEX Technology Week in Dubai the following month, which Kanguru reported on in October 2021; that story is further down. First, what the products are, in plain words.

Why a partner in Dubai: local support and a technical team

Kanguru's own online store sells only within the United States, and a hardware-encrypted drive is not a product most buyers want to order blind. Before an organisation puts its files on one it wants to know that the drive works with its computers, that the password rules suit its staff, what happens when a drive is lost, and who to call if something goes wrong. Those questions need a person in the same time zone, and a company that can put a drive on the table. That is what PRO TECHnology provides:

• Advice on the right model: which drive, which capacity, and whether remote management is worth it for your number of users.
• Demonstrations with sample units, in Dubai or at your office, and evaluation help before a larger order.
• Quotations for single units, departmental orders and tenders, with the certification documents public-sector buyers need to attach.
• A technical team that sets up KRMC with your IT department, trains administrators and helps with first deployments.
• Warranty claims and replacements handled through PRO TECHnology rather than by the customer directly with the factory.

Kanguru's partner directory for Europe, the Middle East and Africa lists PRO TECHnology for the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Jordan. Enquiries from any of them come to the Enterprise IT team in Dubai, the group's first division, which has supplied data protection and storage products to organisations across the Gulf since 1998. Customers in Saudi Arabia are served through PRONEXT, the group's office in Riyadh, with the same technical team behind it.

Defender drives: hardware encryption in plain words

A Kanguru Defender drive looks like an ordinary USB stick or portable drive, but it has its own encryption chip. Everything written to it is scrambled with AES 256-bit encryption inside the drive, and the drive only opens after the right password is typed. Nothing is installed on the computer and no administrator rights are needed, so a Defender works on a locked-down office PC, a home laptop or a client's machine. Lose the drive and the files on it stay unreadable; type the wrong password too many times and the drive locks or wipes itself, depending on how it was set up. Our Kanguru page compares this with software encryption such as BitLocker To Go.

Defender 3000: the flagship flash drive

The Defender 3000 is the drive most enquiries start with. In 2021 it carried FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification, the level that requires the drive to resist physical tampering as well as to encrypt correctly, and its AES 256-bit hardware encryption is FIPS 197 certified. It uses SuperSpeed USB 3.0, sits in a rugged alloy housing that is waterproof and tamper-resistant, and works natively on Windows, Mac and Linux. After seven wrong passwords it disables or deletes itself, a number the administrator can change, and a virtual keyboard defeats keyloggers when the password is typed. An optional onboard antivirus scans files as they are written, and the drive is remote-management ready for KRMC. It is TAA compliant, and Kanguru describes its Defender drives as made in the USA. For quantity orders the housing can be printed or engraved with a company name, a return address or a serial number. It carries a three-year limited warranty.

Defender encrypted hard drives and SSDs

For larger files the same idea comes as a portable hard drive or SSD: AES 256-bit hardware encryption, a password to open, no software, a tamper-resistant aluminium case and USB 3.0. In 2021 these were the Defender HDD300 and SSD300. Today they are the Defender HDD350 (2 TB or 5 TB, the right choice for offline backup copies) and the Defender SSD350 (1 TB to 8 TB, for carrying and working on large confidential files), both FIPS 140-2 certified, both usable on Windows and Mac, and both with a three-year warranty on Kanguru's datasheets.

Remote management: what happens after the drives are handed out

A drive that encrypts itself solves the lost-drive problem. It does not tell IT which drives exist, who has them, or let IT act when someone leaves. That is what the Kanguru Remote Management Console does. From one web console, hosted by Kanguru or run on the organisation's own server, an administrator sets password rules, sees which drives are registered, and can disable or wipe a lost or stolen drive: the command waits until the drive is next plugged into a computer that can reach the console, and then takes effect. The console never holds the files on the drive. KRMC is a subscription sold separately from the drives, and our guide to managing encrypted USB drives with KRMC covers the day-to-day: lost drives, password resets, leavers and offline use.

KanguruClone duplicators: copying and wiping drives without a computer

The third part of the range has nothing to do with encryption. A drive duplicator is a box with one slot for a master drive and several for blank drives. Press start and it copies the master, boot sector, operating system, programs and files, to every blank at the same time, and checks the copies. No computer, no cloning software, no licences. IT teams use them for three jobs: setting up many new PCs with the same image, upgrading old drives to bigger or faster ones, and wiping drives before a computer is sold, returned or scrapped.

KanguruClone 4 M.2 NVMe SSD Duplicator

Launched in January 2021, the KanguruClone 4 (part number KCLONE-4NVMe) copies one master M.2 NVMe SSD to up to four targets at up to 12 GB per minute, controlled from a 4.3-inch colour touchscreen. It is about the size of a hardback book, weighs a little over a kilogram, and suits an IT team that images a few dozen laptops at a time. It has copy and compare modes (Brief, Full, Resize, Ratio and Image), wipe and erase functions, exports its logs over USB, and takes an optional network connection. It handles NVMe drives only; a SATA drive needs the larger model or one of the SATA duplicators.

KanguruClone 11 M.2 NVMe SSD Pro Duplicator

For bigger rollouts the KanguruClone 11 (KCLONE-11NVMe) has twelve M.2 sockets, one master and eleven targets, a 7-inch touchscreen and, in its 2021 form, copy speeds of up to 18 GB per minute. A SATA adapter in the box lets a SATA hard drive or SSD be used as the master. Our guide to the KanguruClone 11 for PC rollouts goes through the modes, the capacity rules, Sysprep and BitLocker before deployment, and what decides a batch time.

SATA hard drive duplicators: 7, 15 or 23 drives at a time

Most office PCs and servers in 2021 still ran on SATA hard drives and SATA SSDs, and Kanguru's hard drive duplicators are built for them. The KanguruClone 7HD, 15HD and 23HD SATA Pro copy one master to 7, 15 or 23 target drives at once from a simple LCD panel; the 23HD SATA Pro runs at up to 12 GB per minute. The KanguruClone 11HD-SATA tower does the same job in a floor-standing case with drive trays, and the Kanguru Mobile Clone HD is a hand-held one-to-one duplicator for a technician's bag. All of them can copy a smaller drive onto a larger replacement with everything intact, and all of them can wipe drives completely before disposal or re-use; our secure data erasure guide explains which wipe method counts for which type of drive.

Who buys this, and for what: the everyday problems behind the enquiries

Most people who contact us do not start with a product name. They start with a problem. These are the ones we hear most, in the words people use, and what answers them.

• “Our staff carry client files on USB sticks and we can't control what happens to them.” Defender 3000 or Defender Elite drives issued by the company, with KRMC if you want to see and control them afterwards. Law firms, auditors, consultants and estate agents ask this most.
• “Patient records and lab results move between our branches on a drive.” A Defender drive keeps them unreadable if the drive is left in a taxi; the clinic sets the password rules and the lockout.
• “Our engineers bring survey data and drawings back from sites, and drives go missing.” A waterproof Defender 3000 for the small files, a Defender SSD350 for the large ones.
• “A tender asks for FIPS-certified encryption on removable media.” The Defender 3000, with the certificate number to attach. Government and defence buyers have their own guide.
• “We have 40 new laptops to set up with the same Windows image before Monday.” A KanguruClone 4 for small batches, a KanguruClone 11 for larger ones. Schools, universities, retail chains with many tills and IT service companies do this every term or every rollout.
• “We are replacing the old hard drives in the office with bigger ones.” A SATA duplicator copies each old drive onto its larger replacement with Windows and the files intact.
• “We are disposing of 200 old PCs and need proof the drives are clean.” The same duplicators wipe drives in batches, and the erasure guide explains the record to keep.
• “We just need one drive for the boss.” That is fine too. A single Defender drive can be bought through PRO TECHnology like any other product.

GITEX Technology Week 2021: the first outing

PRO TECHnology took the new range to GITEX Technology Week 2021 at the Dubai World Trade Centre in October, six weeks after the announcement. Kanguru supported the stand with sample products, marketing material, video and training, and reported afterwards that the team had shown Defender FIPS 140-2 certified hardware-encrypted drives, demonstrated the Kanguru Remote Management Console to executives, resellers, retailers and clients, and displayed KanguruClone duplicators.

“We are happy to inform you that our participation in GITEX this year was of great success,” Anthony Allan Alipio, then Marketing Manager at PRO TECHnology, told Kanguru, “and Kanguru products were among the top attractions at our stand.”

PRO TECHnology exhibited Kanguru hardware-encrypted storage again at GISEC Global 2024, the region's cybersecurity show, at the same venue.

The 2021 range at a glance

About Kanguru and PRO TECHnology

Kanguru Solutions is based at 1360 Main Street, Millis, Massachusetts, and has made storage products since the early 1990s: Defender hardware-encrypted USB flash drives, hard drives and SSDs, the KRMC management console, and duplicators for hard drives, SSDs, NVMe drives and USB sticks. Its markets are government, defence, healthcare, finance and energy. Kanguru's current datasheets describe it as an iStorage Group company, iStorage being the British maker of PIN-protected encrypted drives, and Kanguru keeps its own products, part numbers and Millis base.

PRO TECHnology was founded in Dubai in 1998. Its Enterprise IT division, the group's first, supplies data protection, storage and security products to organisations across the Gulf from its office and showroom in Business Bay. The Kanguru partnership is now in its sixth year: the same team demonstrates, sells and supports the range, and the group's other divisions cover digital printing, distribution and retail, indoor air quality and AI.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Kanguru's own announcements, partner directory and product sheets, with PRO TECHnology's pages for the range as it is sold today. The 2021 product figures come from Kanguru's January and September 2021 product sheets; the 2026 figures from Kanguru's current product pages.

• Kanguru: Kanguru announces partnership with Dubai-based IT solutions provider PRO TECHnology (1 September 2021)
• Business Wire: the same announcement (31 August 2021, US time)
• Kanguru: PRO TECHnology GITEX 2021 trade show in Dubai a great success (26 October 2021)
• Kanguru: where to buy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa
• Kanguru Defender 3000 product page
• KanguruClone 4 M.2 NVMe SSD Duplicator product page
• KanguruClone 11 M.2 NVMe SSD Pro Duplicator product page
• Kanguru: about remote management (KRMC)
• PRO TECHnology: Kanguru in the UAE and GCC
• PRO TECHnology: FIPS 140-3, FIPS 140-2 and FIPS 197 explained