Cisco’s Security chief has highlighted the success of its global security partners.
Cisco’s UK security chief has highlighted the success of partners that are able to wrap services around its technology. The firm has seen a growth in managed security service providers (MSSPs) and is hunting for more as it responds to evolving threats.
Scott Manson, director of cyber security UK&I at Cisco, said that it has found that those channel players capable of adding more services depth and covering end-to-end security needs were generating more business. It’s easier to work with high-skill partners and the ones that really understand the full end-to-end lifecycle of cyber security.
“As Cisco, we have great intellectual property, technology and a huge amount of innovation going…We’ve never been doing so much integration work of our own technology [as now], because we’ve just grown exponentially over the past two years in terms of acquisition and really pushing in this market. We are only as good as that channel partner, because we are fulfilled directly through channel discussions. The best of our engagements are always with channel partners that have built a service wrapper around what we offer. They are able to create margin for themselves, profitability that they can reinvest back into their services,” Scott said.
“Cyber security is a little bit like salt. Of course, you can have too little, but you can also have too much, so it’s a fine balance between the two. Either way, it’s detrimental or harmful to the organisation. If it’s too obtrusive for the users, then you get apathy, productivity issues, and being able to progress and innovate in the market becomes very difficult. But if you release the brakes of security completely, then you’ll end up crashing into the wall because you’re going too fast,” Scott further added.
We do work in an ecosystem, and many of our customers with supply chain connection. You are really only as strong as your weakest link. If your supply chain is not up to a certain standard, then you may as well not be investing millions of dollars in services and products.
Manson said the firm had a strong channel, decent portfolio and was operating a growth market, so the company is looking forward to the rest of 2024. “We make sure that everything we put into our customers can be onboarded, adopted and drives cyber maturity. Quite often, we will go back with the partner and do an assessment of a project, widget, managed service, and so on, and questioning how it increased the customer cyber efficacy and maturity.”
“If you can’t turn around after three to six months, and say the fidelity of your security roll-out has increased by a quantum quantifiable amount, then you are just selling dreams…We’re really big on that – and, again, that’s where channel partners come in,” Manson concluded.
