The cybersecurity landscape is fast-paced and ever-changing. As organisations move more infrastructure, data and apps to the cloud, cybersecurity is becoming ever more complex. As a consequence, security teams find themselves having to defend a much broader and more dynamic environment that features an expanded set of attack surfaces.
Today’s threat actors are taking advantage of this complexity. In addition to diversifying their tactics, they’re leveraging AI to automate activities such as code generation, vulnerability discovery and exploitation. As a result, despite upping their cybersecurity spending, the number of attacks enterprises need to counter are growing in frequency and sophistication. In addition to keeping up with the constant proliferation of new threats and malware, security teams also find they need to navigate a bewildering plethora of security tools and solutions.
In response, vendors, resellers, distributors, MSPs and hyperscalers are pooling their know-how, resources and expertise. The aim of the game being to use collective capabilities through collaborative alliances that make it easier for customers to improve their cyber resilience.
Rise of the cybersecurity ecosystem
In today’s ever-increasing threat landscape, assuring business-as-usual operations has become mission critical. However, achieving cyber resilience depends on gaining mastery of a number of cybersecurity activities – everything from threat intelligence, defence and protection through to anomaly monitoring, detection and rapid disaster recovery.
To reduce this security burden for customers, vendors are joining forces with IT consultancies and service and solution providers to combine multiple, yet complementary, best-of-breed products and services that are tailored to a customer’s unique environment and infrastructure.
Capable of handling every aspect of cybersecurity, from endpoint protection, network and cloud security through to data privacy and backup, these cybersecurity partnership ecosystems simplify life for customers in two key areas. Firstly, by addressing security gaps and ensuring that data management and security go hand-in-hand from the outset to eliminate the need to retrofit solutions at a later date.
Secondly, the advanced and co-ordinated integration of services and solutions ensures that all partners understand and can proactively deliver against their responsibilities.
This collaborative mindset marks a sea change for the cybersecurity world. Having recognised that no one solution provider can address every security issue for customers, these alliances allow partners to strategically combine resources and expertise. This enables them to both help customers tackle complex cybersecurity challenges and streamline the delivery of defence and recovery solutions that are guaranteed to work together.
The partnership ecosystem in action
The growing complexities of today’s security challenges are prompting partners to transform how cybersecurity solutions are built and delivered. By turning their back on previously fragmented approaches to addressing all aspects of security and data protection, these alliances are enabling partners to create innovative and more comprehensive solutions that reduce potential vulnerabilities for customers while eliminating unnecessary complexity or cost.
These established ecosystems often feature multiple partners who will pool their knowledge via a network of alliances. For example, independent software vendors that offer specialised security technologies and innovations will work alongside infrastructure service providers and systems integrators to ensure the appropriate technologies are integrated into an enterprise’s cloud or hybrid environments. After which, the rapid deployment of these combined solutions can be enabled using the scalable cloud platforms offered by hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Other key partners may include managed security service providers who offer security authentication, monitoring and remediation services, and consultants who can assess an enterprise’s cybersecurity posture and compliance obligations.
These collaborations are united in the pursuit of mutually beneficial goals. By working together, alliance partners are not only able to deliver greater value to their enterprise customers and strengthen their existing relationships, but they can also use each other’s technical expertise and resources to stand out in an increasingly crowded security marketplace. By doing so, they’re able to pursue new business opportunities that would have been unattainable when working independently.
New opportunities and future trends
Today’s C-suite executives view strong cyber resilience as a must-have for maintaining stakeholder trust, demonstrating regulatory compliance and achieving competitive advantage. Ecosystem partners that can demonstrate how their united offerings assure operational resilience and mitigate risk will be able to position themselves as trusted strategic advisors that are more than just technology providers.
Indeed, the combined resources, and unified expertise and services of the ecosystem will prove invaluable for enabling and accelerating other C-suite business objectives such as the adoption of AI – especially since tackling the data security threats AI poses requires a multi-faceted approach to address specific vulnerabilities at each stage of the AI lifecycle.
Looking ahead, the importance of vendor alliances appears set to increase as enterprises push ahead with the implementation of AI technologies that will require specialist security expertise and a highly resilient infrastructure. As organisations ramp up their AI investments, the volume of data they’ll need to process, store and protect is set to explode. This means senior decision-makers will also need insights and guidance around how their liabilities, in relation to total cost of ownership, are likely to stack up.
In the coming years, fully integrated partner ecosystems are set to evolve security management into a unified and agile force for active threat mitigation. With enterprises increasingly looking to use co-operative partnerships to fortify their defences against current threats and prepare for future challenges, more providers are coming together to create solution and expertise networks that will deliver measurable operational and cost efficiencies for enterprises. For these forward-thinking providers, the pursuit of a ‘better together’ strategy will result in them tap into collective strengths to better shield customers and evolve their business models.