It can also be exceedingly difficult to track and monitor specific activities in SaaS applications, especially those leveraging plugins and open-source AI components. For example, workers may overlook the models that AI tools use to generate answers and recommendations. “You could be getting bad advice based on bad models as well,” Nelson said. “So not only is there a security risk, but there’s actual real business risk too.” Opportunities for Partners SaaS environments will become increasingly complex as companies continue to expand their portfolios and push more workloads into the cloud. For channel partners, opportunities abound to help customers get in front of shadow IT, tighten control over SaaS ecosystems and control costs. To gain a foothold in this space, channel partners can start by helping customers navigate the everchanging cybersecurity landscape and make sense of the numerous platforms and solutions that are available such as Zscaler, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope, and others. When approaching customers, it’s important to keep in mind that security perceptions and needs will vary between enterprises and SMBs, and across different industries and teams. “We see enterprise customers with a kind of defense-in-depth approach or a best-of-breed approach, where they have multiple vendors and products in their stack, sometimes even layered behind each other,” said Darktrace vice president of product and solutions marketing Mitchell Bezzina. “In the SMB space, they kind of commit to one or two vendors and then they gap-fill.” Bezzina believes that mindset is converging. “I think there’s a lot of enterprise customers who understand or realize that the multi-vendor approach and best-of-breed is great in some scenarios but largely puts a lot of the stitching of data on the SOC team,” Bezzina added. “SOC teams can’t scale, integrate and validate data sets fast enough to make the data contextual enough to perform an investigation, triage or analysis.” Bezzina explained how large enterprises with robust SOC teams tend to gravitate toward cloud access security broker (CASB) tools to secure sanctioned and non-sanctioned applications. Smaller companies typically prefer service providers that offer CASB as part of a secure access service edge (SASE) firewall offering. Apart from helping companies navigate the security landscape, channel partners also can make inroads by connecting with department leads and having conversations to better understand SaaS usage and trends. Workers today are constantly on the lookout for SaaS applications that can deliver advantages, as was apparent with the rapid onset of ChatGPT in 2023. Security teams often wind up playing catch-up, with application discovery taking place through internal investigations and audits. By collaborating with department leads, channel partners can provide targeted recommendations around user preferences and identify opportunities to sanction and secure in-demand applications such as Kanban Boards, AI chatbots, editing tools and design applications. It may take some initial effort to gain traction, but digging beneath the surface and having these conversations can help build trust, improve cybersecurity and open the door to new revenue streams. o AT YOUR SERVICE: XaaS 50 CHANNELVISION | MARCH - APRIL 2024 Complexity and friction in IT procurement present a major opportunity for technology advisors 24% 23% 33% 23% 30% 29% 30% 27% Change in the Average Number of SaaS Apps per Department Source: Productiv Engineering Operations 2022, Average Number of SaaS Apps 2023, Average Number of SaaS Apps Year Over Year Growth IT & Security Sales Product Marketing Customer Success Average 0 20 40 60 80 100 It’s increasingly difficult to maintain talent that can properly oversee acquisitions in emerging tech Technology reviews (compliance, cybersecurity, etc.) are taking more time More key stakeholders and executives now have to weigh in and/or approve IT is struggling with the sheer number of new IT system acquisitions The end-to-end process has become more complex and bereaucratic How has the IT procurement and acquisition process become more challenging for you over the last 5 years? 22.76% 23.45% 17.24% 15.86% 15.86%
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=