Creative Solutions for Partners to Fill the Cybersecurity Skills Gap

The cybersecurity skills gap continues to be a challenge for your customers. Protecting digital assets is now higher on the business agenda than ever before, but there is simply not enough talent available for your customers to outfit their teams. This challenge is compounded by a growing barrage of threats.

With this in mind, a lack of leadership surrounding your defenses is a bad place to be. However, sought-after cybersecurity professionals often choose to work for large companies that can offer them highly competitive pay, benefits and an opportunity to grow. This locks many organizations out of the race for talent. As a result, more than half of companies report a problematic shortage of cybersecurity skills within their organization.

Reduce the Strain of the Skills Gap for Your Customers

Partners can help mitigate the challenges facing their customers with creative solutions to the skills gap. Here are three avenues to pursue to assist organizations that find themselves unable to hire or retain cybersecurity professionals, and grow your business.

Business leaders can’t wait for the talent pipeline to produce the employees they need at prices they can afford. Partners can offer a better option: managed security services.

As a managed security service provider (MSSP), partners can offer guidance on top cybersecurity questions and concerns, and can actively take on the management of tool deployment and the security operations center (SOC). This removes strain from IT teams, enabling your customers to take a more strategic approach to security.

As an MSSP, partners can offer guidance and hands-on participation in:

MSSP partners enable their customers to evolve from a tactical threat prevention plan to strategic detection and response, in addition to reducing upfront CapEx that would be required to build a team in house.

As your customers digitally transform, creating distributed environments, Fortinet MSSPs have the flexibility to evolve alongside them with integrated solutions for varied architectural requirements, custom portals, centralized analytics and more. MSSP partners are empowered with regular support and training to allow MSSPs to keep pace with modern attacks.

 In a world of constant threats, business leaders like to know they have the best advisory team they can get. In the area of cybersecurity, they want to know they’re working with experts who have outstanding ability, experience and training at every level of expertise. This is why it’s essential that partners understand the current threat landscape, and are trained to deploy, configure and troubleshoot the advanced security solutions that can remediate attacks.

This is why Fortinet offers Partners hands-on training through our Network Security Experts program. By becoming a Network Security Expert, our partners are equipped to act as high-level advisors to help their customers stay threat-aware, remediate vulnerabilities and mitigate the effects of cyberattacks on their networks. Fortinet’s NSE training and certifications help partners build trust with their customers, transforming a vendor relationship into a business partnership.

NSE certification also signifies to prospective customers that a partner has the level of network security expertise needed to be effective today. By learning more about how they can leverage the vast resources of Fortinet’s top-level security solutions, partners have more opportunity to grow their business as customer networks evolve and require additional controls.

Customers feeling the pinch of the cybersecurity skills gap may be falling behind in deploying advanced solutions to remediate its effects and protect their networks. Partners can offer guidance on where legacy or disparate security controls can be updated to enhance response times and visibility. One area partners should focus on is ensuring their customers are making use of automated detection and response systems that match the volume and speed of today’s cyber criminal attacks.

Cyber criminals are already making use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in their attacks to more strategically locate network vulnerabilities and evade security detection. Therefore, organizations that attempt to keep pace with manual response times are at immense risk.

Partners can work with their customers to employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to rapidly assess, monitor, analyze and respond to anomalous network activity. Effectively deploying these solutions returns time to internal security staff to focus on more strategic initiatives, rather than tactical network monitoring and response to security alerts.

Final Thoughts

While academic programs aim to fill the pipeline for trained, knowledgeable cybersecurity professionals in the future, your customers need a solution to the skills gap now. By employing these creative solutions, partners assist in keeping customers a step ahead of cyber criminals without exhausting their resources.

Fortinet’s partners can use the considerable resources at their fingertips, including MSSP partnerships, NSE training, and cutting-edge security solutions employing AI and ML to smooth the road ahead for customers.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.