Monday Morning Impact – July 23

Gartner Identifies Top Six Security and Risk Management Trends

Business leaders are becoming increasingly conscious of the impact cybersecurity can have on business outcomes. That’s according to market researcher Gartner, Inc., which has released a list of six emerging trends that can be leveraged to improve organizational resilience.

Trend No. 1: Senior executives are becoming increasingly aware of the linkage between effective cybersecurity and the achievement of business goals. This, according to Gartner, has been strengthened by a number of high profile events including the Equifax data breach, a WannaCry attack that caused worldwide damage estimated at between $1.5 to $4.0 billion, and Verizon’s recent $350 million discount on its purchase of Yahoo as a result of Yahoo’s data breach.

Trend No. 2: Legal and regulatory mandates on data protection practices are impacting digital business plans and demanding increased emphasis on data liabilities. Recent breaches have underscored the extreme business risks inherent in handling data. Moreover, the regulatory and legal environment is getting ever more complex, with Europe’s GDPR as the latest example. At the same time, the potential penalties for failing to protect data properly have increased exponentially.

Trend No. 3: Security products are rapidly exploiting cloud delivery to provide more agile solutions. Gartner says new detection technologies, activities and authentication models require vast amounts of data which is driving a rapid shift toward cloud-delivered security products more able to function in near-real time.

Trend No. 4: Machine Learning is providing value in simple tasks and elevating suspicious events for human analysis. The shift to the cloud creates opportunities to exploit ML to solve multiple security issues, such as adaptive authentication, insider threats, malware and advanced attackers.

Trend No. 5: Security purchase decisions are increasingly based on geopolitical factors. Increased levels of cyber warfare, cyber political interference, and government demands for backdoor access to software and services have resulted in new geopolitical risks in software and infrastructure buying decisions.

Trend No. 6: Dangerous concentrations of digital power are driving decentralization efforts. The Internet is driving a wave of centralization, one obvious example of which is cloud computing. While there are many benefits, a good security team should be accounting for the risks too.

Channel Impact^®
The trends provide viable guideposts for evolving security and risk management strategies for both channel partners and end customers.

Dataguise Announces Channel Program to Support Partner Data Governance Solutions

Dataguise, a Fremont, California-based data privacy and compliance company, has formally rolled out its “DgSecure Partner Program.”

The program leverages a two-tier channel partner ecosystem consisting of Elite Technology Partners who either co-market or package Dataguise DgSecure as part of the sales process and integrators/VARs who sell to enterprises and manage the deployments.

Program elements include training and certification, financial rewards, incentives, demo software, qualified leads, sales enablement tools, MDF/Co-op, and a prospect management database for deal registration and marketing resources. An account management team provides help with deployments and technical, sales engineering support.

“Proper data privacy protection and compliance is most effective under a single platform as it dramatically simplifies the operations and management of data security in large-scale environments,” said JT Sison, VP, Marketing and Business Development for Dataguise. “Our new channel enhancements will be instrumental in driving partner success in this area, reducing the potential for business conflicts and encouraging greater collaboration and revenue.”

Channel Impact^®
Security and data governance are both growing in importance as well as prominence within the aggregate customer mindset. Building a solid value proposition for channel partners can go a long way towards strengthening a company’s market position.

TPx Rolls Out New Managed Services Bundle

TPx Communications has announced the availability of “TPx Complete,” a new managed services bundle that includes Unified Communications, Managed IT, Security and Managed Connectivity.
Targeting customer sites with 100 employees or less, terms include performance guarantees and discounts of up to 40% off the cost of individual products.

“The managed services marketplace has been a difficult one for customers to navigate,” said David Zahn, SVP of Marketing at TPx. “It’s a fractured environment full of niche products where a customer has to manage multiple vendors and hope that everything works smoothly between them. Before today, businesses often needed to get unified communications from one vendor, firewall and endpoint security from another one or two, assuming they were even managed, continuity from another and SD-WAN from yet a different specialist.”

Components include the company’s “UCx Unified Communications” for business phone capabilities, including call, chat, and video conference features; “MSx Managed SD-WAN for secure access; “MSx Managed Firewalls;” “Managed 4G-LTE Failover” to protect against unforeseen threats to connectivity; “MSx Managed Endpoints” to support functions such as patches and troubleshooting; and “Virtual Fax,” providing cloud-based inbound and outbound faxing.

Channel Impact^®
The bundle provides one-stop shopping for key applications and functionalities needed by a wide variety of customer segments.