ChannelVision Magazine

CYBER PATROL In addition to costs, Pau - net added, many clients still don’t understand where the “data is” on the cloud. “The idea that customer data lives in an open, un - protected environment in - timidates customers,” Pau - net said. “As more devices and connections open to the internet at large, customers believe that these create more holes for cyber crimi - nals to take advantage of.” Paunet believes that cloud trust may continue to worsen moving forward. “Over time, as data breaches continue to be - come more prevalent and newsworthy, the trust in cloud-based applications may continue to erode,” she said. “It will be the responsibility of business leaders in conjunction with channel partners to create a sense of security about new technology and reinforce security pa - rameters for full employee adoption.” VARs Embrace MSP Models The report also confirmed that VARS are increasingly moving toward an MSP model, with 77 percent of respondents now offering managed services for their clients – and 10 per - cent actively considering adding the service in 2020. “This transition type, for business owners, helps keep costs down, only paying for the services as they need, scaling up or down as needed,” Paunet explained. “Business owners are now looking for other vendors and service providers to follow this same model to help keep costs low.” VARs, Paunet said, also are able to extend the life of their initial sale with additional monthly income that’s capa - ble of scaling efficiently as the client’s needs grow. “This additional source of income allows VARs to reinvest into their own business, add services to their portfo - lio, specialize in the product offerings they give to customers and expand their own business specialties to differ - entiate themselves within the market,” Paunet said. Cybersecurity Shortage Worsens Of course, there’s another benefit to embracing an MSP model: channel partners can capitalize on widespread cybersecurity shortage, which has sur - passed four million. According to (ISC)2, the cybersecurity workforce needs to expand at a rate of 145 percent each year to meet the demand for talent. “Companies have always struggled to keep up with security staffing, and new trends with DevOps and faster application roll out are only exacer - bating the challenge,” said Michelle McLean, vice president of product marketing at StackRox. McLean maintained that channel partners who take the time to under- stand cloud-native technologies driving business innovation today – and how to secure those technologies – have an opportunity to shine. “Companies realize they need to make massive changes in how security gets done – the need to shift left, to apply se - curity across the full applica - tion development life cycle, the need to span on-premises and cloud deployments – and they need guidance on how to achieve those new capabili - ties,” McLean said. McLean also provided some thoughts on how the cybersecu - rity landscape is evolving. “Security channel partners that continue to rehash old ways of doing security and ‘selling more boxes’ will continue to decline,” McLean said. “Partners that develop the internal expertise on DevOps best practices, cloud-native development, how to create security champions within DevOps teams – these are the partners who will become strategic ad - visors to businesses in 2020.” McLean believes that as more vital applications get delivered over contain - ers and Kubernetes infrastructure, at - tackers will look to capitalize on holes in these environments. “With a charter to move fast, and with a lot of complicated configuration supported in this infrastructure, de - velopers have to continually balance ‘build it fast’ against ‘build it right,’” McLean said. “To protect against this evolv - ing landscape, companies need to adopt processes and next-gen se - curity tooling that provides guardrails for developers, so they can move fast but get the criti - cal feedback early in the dev cycle that some part of their build is non-compliant. Applying these controls early in the app dev life cycle is crucial to reducing the attack surface in 2020.” o Top 5 Cyberattacks Channel Partners Customers Were Victims of in 2019 Source: Untangle IT Channel Reasons to Improve Their CX Source: CompTIA nce? 53% 50% 39% 7% 0% 50% 60% & Phishing Attack #1 (Tied) Malware/Virus #1 (Tied) Ransomware #3 Cryptojacking #4 DDoS #5 Tools have evolved that require new customer interactions Improve customer retention Competitive advantage Boost p ofits/drive revenue Younger clients have different preferences Customer pref rences for sales/support have changed Customers have a great price transparency 51% 47% 46% 45% 38% 31% 25% 60 CHANNEL VISION | March - April, 2020 Top Job Concerns Among Cybersecurity Professionals Lack of skilled/experienced cybersecurity personnel 36% Lack of standard terminology for effective communications 28% Lack of resources to do my job effectively 27% Lack of work-life balance 24% Inadequate budget for ley security initiatives Source: (ICS)2