Cybersecurity Channel Pain Points: Talent Shortage, Market Shifts, More
Partners are like deer in headlights as it pertains to the technology, what's required and how the technology works.
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Cybereason‘s Abigail Maines said the biggest partner pain point is attracting and retaining talent. And negative unemployment is “everywhere.”
“We are trying to enable our partners from a sales and technical certification perspective that is compelling to individuals and to increase the ramp of some of their folks,” she said. “But I think about some of my closest channel partners and their ability to differentiate themselves in an environment where there’s all this research online, and if I were going to make a decision on a product, I would call all my friends, and I do with anything I buy. So I think attracting and retaining talent is mission-critical to them. And so we work the network to help them with that. But I think there are probably a lot of efforts that each of them is doing individually to make sure they can differentiate themselves that way.”
Check Point‘s Frank Rauch said his company is “kind of lucky being Israeli” as its talent pool is “extraordinarily rich.”
“But it’s problematic,” he said. “It’s not that we’re losing people to MSPs necessarily, but we are losing them to startups. But I think the other challenge is really how do you navigate the market right now. So RSA is calling the number of security companies at 4,600 right now. How do you even think about what’s on your line card? I don’t care whether you’re CDW or some small security boutique type of vendor, I wouldn’t even know how to begin to navigate it. So we’re just trying to be able to provide not necessarily that single pane, but just a single program that basically encompasses from one end of security to the other end of security. And we’re not saying we’re the best at every single point of security. But we’re just saying we’re a security vendor and it’s probably a little easier to manage that way.”
Lumen‘s Bryn Norton said the big thing for his company is “just trying to simplify it all.”
“I think from a security perspective, as an industry we do have a tendency to overrotate around risk and to overrotate around the next shiny flash of light,” he said. “And I remember the first sale I ever made, I genuinely sold someone a FortiGate firewall because it was red, only because it color-coordinated with his rack. That’s the only reason he bought that security.”
The cyberseccurity industry too often falls into the trap of “just making stuff too complicated and it becomes overwhelming,” Norton said.
“So to me, it’s not just that 4,600 (cybersecurity companies), but complicated value propositions,” he said. “So what we’re trying to do is get to very simple basics, very simple outcomes, a very simple narrative and very simple conversations. We’re trying to demystify it a little bit.”
Secureworks’ Maureen Perelli said in addition to talent, a major pain point is all of the different vendors, or all the different endpoints that resellers and partners are trying to manage.
“So for us at Secureworks, we very much want our partners to be able to grow as the market changes, and we have a similar type of philosophy where we go out and work with partners,” she said. “You can be a referral partner, a reseller, distributor or MSP, whatever is your business model, and we try to make it as easy as possible. Going back to partners I have known from 30 years of doing this and chatting with them, they’re saying, ‘Please make this simple; do not give me 5,000 tiers.’ So we’re very simple about it and it’s very easy to do.”
The more rigorous part is MSPs that wants to be an MSSP, Perrelli said.
“That’s where we take that intellectual knowledge we’ve had for 20-plus years and we leverage all of the things that we’ve had and been known for … and then teach those partners to be MSSPs,” she said. “And then also there are MSPs that are interested in converting what they do or augmenting what they’ve done … and we’re helping those partners look at all of the different endpoint devices and being able to see that in a controlled environment and in one frame. They have to go through some pretty rigorous training, but it’s their choice to do that, to move with the technology.”
ThreatProtector’s Carl Katz said most partners are like “deer in headlights” as it pertains to the technology, what’s required and how the technology works.
“They don’t understand there are new terminologies all of a sudden, endpoint protection and response (EDR), managed detection and response (MDR) and now extended detection and response (XDR),” he said. “The way I look at it and I always have is there’s opportunity in chaos. So in my opinion, what differentiates ThreatProtector is that we have agreements with providers who have, in our opinion, one of the best-in-class services out there. And we take a more consultative approach to cut through the noise and say, ‘OK, let’s talk about security awareness training, let’s talk about password manager, let’s talk about MDR, security information and event management (SIEM) and security operations center (SOC) solutions, endpoint protection and email encryption.’ You need to create a layered approach, really a holistic approach.”
When asked what cybersecurity products or services partners and their customers demanding, Rauch said mobile and cloud security are big ones.
“It tends to follow the market and what’s happening around the world right now,” he said. “The pandemic caused two things. One, it caused people to work outside of offices so you have you have those security trends. And the second thing is cloud migration. With the growth of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and even Google, you have cloud security that’s dominating the market, and you’re securing a remote workforce and all the elements about that.”
Perrelli said partners need help with becoming more embedded in the market. They want help with market trends and where the money is going.
“Those services are key to our partners,” she said. “That’s really where they have those rich margins and that opportunity to be able to be more for their customers and get stickier.”
Norton said partners are trying to understand the impact of the change in workforce behavior. That leads to multiple questions.
“The first one is your security policy that you had in 2019 is no longer relevant,” he said. “Have you actually looked at that? And the talent conversation is really important right now because you can go off and get a new career at Etsy. So it’s about how do I make more of a people-centric workforce? How do I do more with diversity? How do I create more of a people-centric workplace? How do I make that more location diverse? How do I enable that for you to move around? So we’re seeing great opportunity from a productivity perspective.”
Katz said education and enablement from a sales perspective are important to partners.
“They need assistance in creating the opportunities,” he said. “So partner enablement is big, and then educating the partner on hearing the buying signs, for example, about compliance. So you have to listen to the key salient points, educating the partner to listen to these key points and listening for buying opportunities.”
When asked what cybersecurity products or services partners and their customers demanding, Rauch said mobile and cloud security are big ones.
“It tends to follow the market and what’s happening around the world right now,” he said. “The pandemic caused two things. One, it caused people to work outside of offices so you have you have those security trends. And the second thing is cloud migration. With the growth of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and even Google, you have cloud security that’s dominating the market, and you’re securing a remote workforce and all the elements about that.”
Perrelli said partners need help with becoming more embedded in the market. They want help with market trends and where the money is going.
“Those services are key to our partners,” she said. “That’s really where they have those rich margins and that opportunity to be able to be more for their customers and get stickier.”
Norton said partners are trying to understand the impact of the change in workforce behavior. That leads to multiple questions.
“The first one is your security policy that you had in 2019 is no longer relevant,” he said. “Have you actually looked at that? And the talent conversation is really important right now because you can go off and get a new career at Etsy. So it’s about how do I make more of a people-centric workforce? How do I do more with diversity? How do I create more of a people-centric workplace? How do I make that more location diverse? How do I enable that for you to move around? So we’re seeing great opportunity from a productivity perspective.”
Katz said education and enablement from a sales perspective are important to partners.
“They need assistance in creating the opportunities,” he said. “So partner enablement is big, and then educating the partner on hearing the buying signs, for example, about compliance. So you have to listen to the key salient points, educating the partner to listen to these key points and listening for buying opportunities.”
The ongoing talent shortage, and navigating a crowded and noisy market are among the top pain points in the cybersecurity channel.
At this fall’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo, we conducted roundtables with channel experts addressing hot topics in areas such as cybersecurity, cloud and MSPs.
During our cybersecurity roundtable, we asked panelists about their partners’ major pain points and most pressing needs. They also talked about how they’re addressing those issues.
Panelists included:
Maureen Perelli, Secureworks‘ senior vice president and chief channel officer.
Carl Katz, ThreatProtector Cybersecurity Advisors‘ senior vice president of worldwide partner sales.
Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies‘ head of worldwide channel sales.
Abigail Maines, Cybereason‘s vice president of commercial and channel sales for North America.
Bryn Norton, Lumen Technologies‘ vice president of platform and IT solutions.
Rauch said partners are struggling with navigating the crowded cybersecurity market and deciding what to should be included in their line card. Katz said partners are like “deer in headlights” as it pertains to the technology, what’s required and how the technology works.
Scroll through our slideshow above for more on cybersecurity partner pain points from this roundtable.
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