With a change in global working practices this year, businesses have accelerated initiatives to manage the changed environments and are embracing digital transformation concepts. Consideration of cybersecurity technologies has become paramount within this change – and at the centre of that thinking is managing individuals or identities – so security has become very identity-centric. Whereas businesses have invested their budgets in office-style technologies – the investments have turned to a have big focus on infrastructure. Historically, a reseller could sell a firewall or AV – fit and forget – and hand over the management to the customer, but now with customers implementing infrastructure security technologies which touch every moving part of a business, such as active directory account life-cycle management; privileged access management and identity governance and administration, partners are no longer cautious but embracing the wider opportunities that arise in providing consultancy services; architecture reviews; deployment services and managed services.
2020 has been an interesting year for One Identity, but we have adapted and continued to drive increased momentum for Identity-Centric Security into the channel as illustrated by this news release
The rise in managed service demand from customers prompted by a desire to reduce overhead and increase focus on core business activities is creating a shift within resellers that are reimaging themselves to embrace these new challenges. Resellers are adding depth to their offerings to extend traditional cybersecurity offerings to include solutions such as identity and access management (iam); risk management and overall cyber resilience.
To back up this rapid shift, a great partner program has to help the partners embrace change – to enable their teams to understand the new propositions both at a sales and technical presales level – but also at an in-depth technical level so the offerings can be set up and configured to solve the complex requirements emerging from their customers.
As we enter 2021, security partners have an tremendous opportunity to build on their established security foundations and extend to the security technologies that are now so much in demand. To do this, they need to consider investing more in enablement for their existing team, developing core messages that express their value propositions to their existing and target customers and prepare for increased demand as business reaps the changes that have been forced upon them in 2020.
There has been much talk about the economy in recent months, but one thing is for certain, businesses are going to make themselves run more efficiently and embracing digital transformation is part of that – and at the heart of that is cybersecurity. 2021 looks set to be a strong year for those partners that reinvent themselves in this way.
