Monday Morning Impact – January 9

IDC: Gen Z and Younger Driving Major Shift in Consumers

A recent IDC survey shows stark differences between Gen Z/Younger Millennials and older consumers when it comes to using technology for earning and spending money.

According to the report, a staggering 48% of all households had at least one source of tech-enabled income generation in 2022. Top sectors included content creation, peer-to-peer commerce, and rideshare driving. This trend is driven by Gen Z- and Millennial-led households, where 60% of Consumer Pulse respondents said they derived such income in the last year.

“It’s important to remember that this includes selling things on eBay or Facebook Marketplace, picking up the occasional shift on Lyft or Uber, and posting content on sites such as YouTube,” said David Myhrer, research vice president, Consumer Strategies at IDC. “There is now a diverse set of opportunities for consumers to generate new sources of income, and they’re embracing them.”

Combined worldwide spending on independently created content, items purchased via peer-to-peer commerce, and ridesharing services will grow to a total of $294 billion by 2026, according to IDC’s Consumer Market Model (CMM), which forecasts strong and continued growth of spending on consumer-derived content, goods, and services. For example, the CMM forecasts that by 2026 consumers will add $15 billion worldwide in new spending in support of their fellow consumers’ independent content creation. Peer-to-peer marketplaces will also see strong growth, accelerating from $33 billion to $117 billion from 2021 to 2026. Finally, rideshare driving will drive $85 billion in new spending worldwide between now and 2026.

“Gen Z and younger Millennials will dominate future spending in a wide range of CMM categories,” said Kelly Brown, senior research analyst for IDC’s Consumer Market Model. “These groups are not following the same playbook as their predecessors, and they are actively seeking new alternatives to both earning and spending income.”

How consumers spend that extra income is rapidly changing, too. The Consumer Pulse shows that online transactions (50%) overtook in-person purchases (43%) in 2022, inverting the pre-COVID mix.

Channel Impact^®
Younger consumers are likely to transform the tech landscape over the next decade.

Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks Forge New Security Alliance

Palo Alto Networks has announced an expanded partnership that brings together BeyondCorp Enterprise from Google Cloud and Prisma Access from Palo Alto Networks to boost security for hybrid workers.

The combination provides Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) 2.0 delivered over the Google Cloud network. Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Access supports ZTNA 2.0 security for all devices, branch offices and applications. BeyondCorp Enterprise Essentials enables secure access to applications and resources for unmanaged devices. Combined threat intelligence and machine learning (ML) automatically detects and remediates threats to users, applications, or enterprise data.

“Legacy VPN and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) 1.0 solutions provide access to users that is too broad and lacks continuous security inspection, putting cloud-first and hybrid organizations at risk,” said Kumar Ramchandran, SVP, Products for Palo Alto Networks. “ZTNA 2.0 by Palo Alto Networks secures the modern hybrid enterprise. This partnership will allow organizations to benefit from the performance, scale, and reliability offered by Google Cloud’s global network, coupled with the security expertise of Palo Alto Networks”

The Prisma Access platform promises deep and ongoing inspection of all application traffic to prevent a wide variety of attacks, including zero-day threats, for data centers, branch offices and mobile users. Prisma Access is purpose-built on Google’s global backbone to secure enterprises at cloud scale.

Channel Impact^®
The alliance provides channel partner with a new option to support clients with distributed workforces.

LogRhythm and SentinelOne Team up on Enterprise Security Offering

LogRhythm and SentinelOne have rolled out an integrated enterprise security solution to prevent, detect, and respond to threats.

The solution combines LogRhythm’s security analytics and other features with endpoint telemetry from SentinelOne, enabling real-time threat protection against malicious activities, such as automatically blacklisting hash values, or disconnecting affected machines from the network, as well as providing capabilities to collect additional information during an investigation.

“We are thrilled to formally announce our integration with SentinelOne. This partnership brings together two remarkable platforms that will provide our customers with incomparable visibility for analysts, allowing them to cut through the noise, and recognize and respond to incidents more quickly and effectively,” said Andrew Hollister, Chief Information Security Officer at LogRhythm. “LogRhythm is committed to helping customers defend themselves against cyberattacks and we will continue to do so by partnering with leading and innovative cybersecurity companies to expand our offerings.”

Key benefits include expanded visibility, enhanced automation, and reduced complexity through prebuilt integrations.

Channel Impact^®
The new integration is intended to help security teams identify behavioral anomalies, internal and external threats, and to prioritize their responses based on accurate enterprise security intelligence.