As the threats to cybersecurity continue to grow, so often does the number of security tools businesses use – but this is where channel partners can help, says Jessica Kingham, director, channel and alliances UK&I, Barracuda Networks Inc.
As organisations’ digital footprints grow across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, it’s inevitable that they need to continuously adapt their security to protect their employees, apps and services. For many IT teams this translates into a series of new security tools, each intended to address a specific concern or gap.
As the volume and severity of cyberattacks continues to rise, Gartner estimates that end user spending on security and risk management will reach $215 billion this year, up by 14.3% from 2023.
The good news is that there are many high quality security tools and services for organisations to choose from. Unfortunately, this is also the bad news.
The vast array of options that organisations need to evaluate, choose from and implement creates its own challenges. Not all solutions integrate easily with each other and this can lead to visibility gaps. Further, managing a multitude of disparate security tools, often from different vendors, can use up valuable resources and time for the IT team.
Channel partners have an important role to play in helping organisations to navigate through this complexity and embrace a more streamlined approach.
The challenge of disparate security tools
Organisations have different security needs, and these change over time. The associated stack of security products and services aslo tends to build up. Barracuda’s research has found that 47% of UK organisations with 100-750 employees rely on security products from between 10 and 30 different vendors.
The result is a complex, fragmented security infrastructure that obscures visibility of activity and potential threats.
Many organisations can become stuck in a counterproductive loop: the more they spend on new security tools, the more complex their stack becomes, and the more their security team struggles to manage everything, reducing the time available for security remediation and often leading to the introduction of additional tools.
Breaking out of this cycle requires security integration. An important first step is to ensure your security tools, even if they are from different vendors, can communicate and share data and intelligence with each other. This reduces operational costs as well as the need for manual intervention to monitor or aggegrate data from different sources.
Moving towards integration
Channel partners can be expert advisors, helping organisations to achieve a more integrated approach and select the security solution that’s right for them.
For many, the way forward could be to introduce a platform-based approach to security. This integrates various security domains – email, application, network and endpoint security – giving security teams centralised management and control that offers greater visibility over security operations and leads to stronger and more adaptive security responses. This approach can also bring cost benefits and enables organisations to scale and adapt quickly when new threats emerge.
Helping customers take on a platform approach can open the door to longer-term contracts and provide potential for renewal as organisations scale or their security needs change. It enables partners to build their value proposition as strategic advisors and can provide a route to new revenue streams.
Security complexity is not the inevitable outcome of an complex cyberthreat landscape. Partners can support customers in exploring platform-based security options to find the one that best helps them to build resilience, reduce costs and future-proof their protection in an ever-changing world.
