2023 to witness major transformation in partner ecosystem

Partners will work increasingly with vendors that offer a unified security platform as budget restraints tighten. Organizations will be forced to optimize security and IT costs as a result of the global macroeconomic shift. This will lead to increased customer demand for vendor consolidation, resulting in an increased shift to the adoption of platform vendors offering solutions under a single umbrella. Partners will fuel this vendor consolidation.”

Jon Fox, Senior Channel Director, APJ, CrowdStrike

With the most advanced cloud-native platform, CrowdStrike is redefining security while protecting and enabling the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise. CrowdStrike secures the most critical areas of enterprise risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity, and data – to keep customers ahead of today’s adversaries and stop breaches. CrowdStrike incident response and advisory services help to stop breaches. CrowdStrike Services offers a range of fully managed services for detection and response (MDR), threat hunting, and digital risk protection.

Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence on evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities – all through a single, lightweight agent. With CrowdStrike, customers benefit from superior protection, better performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value. In a chat with VARINDIA, Jon Fox, Senior Channel Director, APJ, CrowdStrike shares his point of view about the coming year ahead, predictions for the partners, their relationship with the vendors etc.

Predictions for the coming year
As Jon is hopeful about the coming year, he points out, “As 2022 is coming to an end, we will focus on the issues that we are likely to see on the horizon in 2023 for the partner ecosystem.  As we welcome the new year, partners will need to work increasingly with vendors, make their solutions available in multiple locations with flexible buying options and partner with identity providers to help protect user credentials. Organizations will also look to MSSPs and GSIs to address the ongoing global cybersecurity skills shortage.”

Partner-Vendor relationship
Talking about the relationship between partners and vendors Jon speaks about the optimization of IT costs and increased customer demand. Increased customer demand will result in an increased shift to the adoption of platform vendors offering solutions under a single umbrella. He says, “Partners will work increasingly with vendors that offer a unified security platform as budget restraints tighten. Organizations will be forced to optimize security and IT costs as a result of the global macroeconomic shift. This will lead to increased customer demand for vendor consolidation, resulting in an increased shift to the adoption of platform vendors offering solutions under a single umbrella. Partners will fuel this vendor consolidation.” 

Boosting flexible buying options
On the changing buying behaviour of the customers Jon says,” Consumption of security resources will change and partners will adapt. Customers are evolving.  Customers are shifting away from traditional purchase orders (via solution providers) toward buying and consuming services and products online through various marketplaces, including online SaaS stores, public cloud marketplaces and even direct to vendors. Due to this shift, partners will make their solutions available in multiple locations with flexible buying options.”

Top threat vector
Discussing the top threat vectors Jon prioritizes identity as the major player. Identity protect solution is to help the industry for further growth. He comments, “Partnering with identity providers will have increased importance. Identity will be the top threat vector in 2023 and identity providers will play a critical role in helping to protect user credentials. Threat actors know that they can take advantage of the growing remote workforce to steal credentials and infiltrate organizations. The ability to protect these identity-based attacks will require an identity protection solution that integrates with identity providers, so that organizations can handle the complexities of storing and authenticating identities.”

To conclude
In his concluding words Jon sums up about the global cybersecurity skills shortage. In his view managed security service providers and global system integrators will serve a critical role in this point. He explains how they are going to help the industry to fill the gap. “Managed security service providers and global system integrators will serve a critical role in addressing the ongoing global cybersecurity skills shortage. According to the (ISC) 2022 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, there’s a global cybersecurity workforce gap of 3.4 million people. As a result, organizations will look to MSSPs and GSIs to fill this gap. The benefit for organizations leveraging MSSPs is that they provide 24/7/365 expert monitoring without the need for additional staffing. As for GSIs, they can help organizations manage the complexity inherent with cybersecurity and solve business challenges through implementation services,” concludes Jon.